Fairfield is amazing because of the people who live here. If there were a creativity per capita index, our town in rural Iowa would be close to the top. Best of all, creatives lure more creatives and, while the town seems to be stuck at around 10,000 population, there is never a shortage of new faces.

Many of the newcomers are students at Maharishi University of Management. After taking over the campus of defunct Parsons College in 1973, MUM became a draw for individuals practicing and teaching Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation program. That included Lin and I who landed here in 1983 from upstate New York. All five of our children graduated from the K-12 school affliated with the University and I received an MA in the Science of Creative Intelligence. In recent years MUM has been transitioning from a campus of TMer’s to a truly diverse student body drawn by majors like Sustainable Living.

One of our favorite haunts in Fairfield is Cafe Paradiso serving up two of life necessities, live music and good coffee.

Food in Fairfield would require a whole blog to itself, but I give special mention to Revelations restaurant and used book store because it hosts our friend Freddie Fonseca as resident poet and book master.

Another Fairfield business that is near and dear to us is Francis and Susan Thicke’s Radiance Diary, source of our favorite plaster ingredient.

According to the Visitor’s Bureau,”Fairfield currently has more homes with solar energy or other green building features than any other town in Iowa”. This is largely from the work of our great solar installers, Ideal Energy.
Right next to our homestead, Abundance Eco-Village is one of the only sub-divisions I know of that is self-sufficient in water, waste and energy. That’s the Eco-Village in the picture although even the residents may not recognize it because the picture was taken through a water bottle. For sharper images just click here.