Lane deMoll - Bio Page

I am a community organizer, artist and writer, among other things. You can find out about all of these aspects of myself on this website.

My partner, Tom Bender, and I have lived in a house we built overlooking the ocean in a small community on the north Oregon Coast since 1977. He’s an architect and writer here. See tombender.org. We’ve been together since 1971, but for some reason we actually got married in 1995 when our two sons were teenagers. As of Spring 2007, Skye (28) does data visualization software design in San Francisco where he plays in the Brass Liberation Orchestra, an activist marching band. Morgan (25) is an Americorps Volunteer teaching in an Outdoor High School in Eugene, Oregon.

Tom and I share a passion for bringing alive our longtime vision of sustainable community, first developed when we were part of a group editing an appropriate technology magazine called Rain in Portland in the 70’s. Thinking globally and acting locally, in 1982, with a group of parents, we helped start Fire Mountain School for our kids. I taught there for 12 years. It’s virtually a one-room school house (which we all built) and is still going strong, now with some second generation kids. Then after a year off, I helped take over and run the town dump (how’s that for glamour?!), turning it into Cartm Recycling, an innovative recycling/reuse/trash art center. Next Tom and I helped set up a local conservancy land trust called Lower Nehalem Community Trust. For the past two years we have been involved in setting up NeahCasa, a community housing trust (or CLT) and Fulcrum Community Resources, an organization to foster other sustainability projects here locally.

I enjoy the starting up/fundraising process but tend to move on when it gets time for personnel policies and the like. Life is never dull.

We also have been part of a Full Moon drumming circle and various spiritual ritual and healing groups over the years. We’re an active part of the yoga and meditation community here locally. And I am a tarot reader and a budding herbalist, my current interest being making flower essences.

In 1995 – on the verge of menopause – I took up painting as a self-discovery process. Sometimes I call my paintings “inner landscapes.” I’ve since had several shows – mostly self-produced. Getting that work out is what inspired this website.