Zen priest and Great Oak cohousing resident Marta Dabis with board member Greg Wilson. She calls the community in the Haisley elementary district “a piece of nirvana.” | Photo by Mark Bialek
When Marta Dabis first visited Great Oak Cohousing, she says, “I immediately knew that I had arrived home.” A Hungarian native and Zen Buddhist priest, Dabis says her neighborhood, where she’s lived since 2017, “feels like Europe inside,” with its colorful buildings clustered close together, community gardens, walking paths, and residents who know each other by name.
As Dabis sits under a pergola on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by lush native plants and birdsong, neighbors stop to say hello. Later, many will meet in the common house for this evening’s optional community meal of grilled chicken and couscous salad, prepared by fellow residents. Cohousing is a place where “community matters,” Dabis says, and activities like movie and board game nights, tie-dye parties, bonfires, and outdoor games create lifelong friendships.
“When you are a child here growing up you think, ‘This is the world: lots of friendly faces,’” says Dabis, fifty-two. “Everyone is looking out for you and you can roam around free.”
Great Oak, built in 2001, is one of three cohousing communities with condo-like units nestled along Little Lake Dr. off Jackson Rd. The original, Sunward, opened in 1998, and the latest, Touchstone, in 2005. All combine private home ownership with shared resources, a concept that originated in Denmark in the 1960s.
Zen and cohousing are “a very good match,” Dabis says. “Cohousing is very community oriented, and Zen as we practice it is very community oriented. With Zen practice we emphasize there is meditation in activity.” Whether she’s cooking dinner for the community or washing windows at the common house for a semiannual work day, it’s about “how you take what you learn on the [meditation] cushion into your everyday life.”
Dabis, who’s married to Oakland University math professor Laszlo Liptak, has an MBA and a long career as a management consultant. In 2007, she says she’d “basically climbed up the [career] mountain, and I realized when I looked around that I’m not going to be happy.” A short visit to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California led to yearslong study to become a priest and hospital chaplain. She worked at Yale New Haven Hospital and Trinity Health in Ann Arbor before she founded JissoJi Zen Ann Arbor in 2016.
Every Sunday, JissoJi hosts “open door” in-person and Zoom meditation at the Center for Sacred Living nearby on Little Lake Dr. Afterward, members often visit favorite hangouts Dozer, Base Camp, Panda House, or 19 Drips Coffee and Tea. JissoJi members also host retreats and guest speakers at the Great Oak common house. Residents “love us because we are quiet,” Dabis laughs, and “we do some community work—some labor.”
The residents have also shown up to help Dabis. When she was recuperating from spinal fusion surgery a few years ago, her cohousing neighbors delivered meals, laundered her clothes, and kept vigil at her bedside. Even her neighbor’s cat, Kit Kat, found her way into Dabis’s house to offer emotional support. The experiences underscored her decision to live in cohousing “the rest of my life!”
“In a big and very isolated and very individualistic country,” she says, “it is a piece of nirvana.”
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