April 26, 2005

Asparagus! 

The first crop to come in after a long winter of frozen and canned vegetables, the arrival of asparagus on the steamtable for dinner marks the real beginning of a new season.  I’ve truly loved the spinach and kale and salad greens from the greenhouse all winter, and now the fresh asparagus shooting up out in the field reminds me of all of the delicious variety and abundance that will come from the garden for the next 5 months.  The strawberry plants have had flowers blooming for a few days now, and the apple trees just burst into bloom yesterday.  On the garden shifts, we’ve been prepping the beds for transplanting, and the carrot seeds have already been sewn.  My last garden shift actually got rained out in a dramatic thunderstorm (imagine the 5 of us scrambling to finish covering the rows of strawberry plants as dark clouds took over the sky, giant raindrops pelting us harder and faster.  We eventually had enough and ran inside to hang out in the kitchen drinking tea and coffee, listening to the rain pound on the roof.  A few of us stripped off our wet clothes and ran outside to take a shower in the rainspout, and then promtly ran back inside for warm beverages). 

I sat in on a planner meeting yesterday, to get a sense of what it might be like if I decide I want to do the job.  It seems like the kind of work I want to be doing, looking at community issues from a "big picture" perspective and asking all of the hard questions of legal responsibilities, ethics, niceness, egalitarianism, etc.  It also seems like dealing with a lot of people’s pettiness and passive agressiveness.   The issues that were covered yesterday included the creation of a new economic oversight team, some tax ethics questions, and the future of elder care in the community (we had a big community meeting last week — a third of our population is over 50, and many of them are likely to be here for the rest of their lives.  Our oldest member right now is 81, and she’s needing increasing care and attention).  It was wild to be sitting in the room with my friends (the current planners are all people I like and know well), hanging out and talking about these big issues, and then making a community-wide decision!  Anything that the planners decide can be overridden by a simple majority of  the members, and that actually rarely happens.

and now I’m off to another speaking gig, to a private boarding school in New Jersey.  I ‘m not really up for travelling; I’ve been enjoying being surrounded by spring on the farm so much…  I’ll be home again tomorrow night.

April 18, 2005

 Finally, for your viewing pleasure, a couple of pictures from Cabaret.  The actual performance was over a month ago, and I’ve been going through the digital video we took of the show to find some adequate photos.  Ahh, technology!   There are a number of photos also displayed on the Twin Oaks website, in the Photo Gallery.  I hope to post more there as time goes on.  For now, here are three shots I particularly enjoy:

This is just a taste… more photos coming soon to the commune website.  I just wanted to show off here, really, because I can.  So there I am, there we are… 

April 16, 2005

 I just had my first garden shift of the season.  I had forgotten how much I loved working in the garden!  I hadn’t remembered it as horrible, I just had forgotten the feel of sitting in the dirt with my friends, talking quietly about the nature of life and analyzing relationships and gossiping about other people while working with plants and the earth.

We spent the whole garden shift this afternoon weeding, first the spinach and then the strawberries.  Kassia and I sat across from each other and worked down the rows together.  We became fast friends early on in her time here, and then slowly drifted apart because of busy schedules that didn’t keep us in each other’s orbits.  It was fantastic to spend three hours weeding together, talking about our complicated lives and our experiences of last night’s party and our reflections on shared friends and intimates.  We reaffirmed our appreciation and affection for each other and made an intention to spend some time together at least once a week.  At the end of the garden shift we looked at our schedules for the upcoming week and made a date for an early morning walk.

We talked a lot about last night’s party, a "women’s only" event where everyone dressed in costume and came as a character.  This was the second in a series of women’s parties on the commune, and it was fantastic.  The two women who organized it had crafted individual invitations for each woman in the community, designating a character and specific personality traits for each person.  I was "Eloise Petunia Feingold", and I dressed in a flowery white dress with a big white lacy collar and white stockings.  I pulled my hair back conservatively and spoke with a southern accent.  When I got to the party, I refused alcohol (but accepted the hot cocoa with "bananna flavoring", i.e. bananna schnapps) and talked about Jesus and feigned dismay at all the other wild characters.  There was the wayward Catholic schoolgirl, two Spice girls, a sultry and fiery Flamenco dancer  (who was played by a woman who can spout off passionate monologues in fluent Spanish), a creature known as "Crystal Meph-estopheles" (devilish and feisty, saran-wrapped, with horns), a sparkly and new agey woman from the future, a flowery pagan calling herself the "force of nature", a tap dancer, a harem dancer, a "raver", and a botanist, amongst others.  Everyone was suprisingly "in character" for most of the night, and we played different party games to draw out crazy interactions and weird connections between people.   I loved playing with all these women who I’ve known for years, some of whom I’ve been really frustrated with lately.  It was fantastic to see different aspects of folks, watching people bloom under the threat/invitation of possibility.  One woman in particular delighted me with her improvisation capabilities, when usually I cringe whenever I talk with her.  Other women who I haven’t had much of a connection with suddenly were my playmates and co-conspirators in silly party games.

There was only one woman there with whom I experienced a deeper distance than usual.  She’s a new member, and it felt like she was pushing too hard to be "in" the party.  She monopolized one of the games and carried jokes too far to a level of discomfort and weirdness.  I was talking with Kassia about this on the garden shift, and I reflected that I think she’s just trying to find a way to create a space for herself here.  I think it’s a process that every new member has to go through, and people do it in different ways.  I commented that I’d love to see a videotape of myself during my first few weeks of membership, to see how I worked to create a space for myself.  After saying that, it came to my awareness in full force that I created a space for myself here by getting into a romantic relationship right off the bat.  That’s how I found my place here, how I originally defined myself in the context of Twin Oaks.  I’ve certainly defined myself in more complexity since then, and it’s an important insight about what is perhaps a personal pattern: defining myself in terms of my relationships (how very Confucian!).

And now it’s dinner time.

April 15, 2005

 a quick snapshot:

I’m sitting in the office in front of a computer for hours, catching up on correspondence and wading through email task lists.  The window behind the computer looks out into the courtyard, where I’ve watched kids and communards play all afternoon in the sun and shadows.  I hear unintelligible wafts of noise and music through the open window; somewhere, someone is playing a radio. 

I leave the computer to get a postage stamp from the main office in a nearby building.  As I open the door, I’m hit with sunlight and sound, and see two of my friends sitting 50 feet away, playing guitar and accordion to a scattered group of people listening.  I go inside to get my stamp, and return outside, smiling about my life as I head back to the computer, listening now with more awareness to the strains of music from my friends.

April 15, 2005

After many weeks of traveling, coming home, and then traveling again, I’m staying home for awhile. I thought about going to a campaign strategy party for Brad Blanton, a radical congressional candidate in my district (with whom I was arrested in DC 5 years ago at a march for campaign finance reform! Small world…), but I decided to stay home, soak up the springtime sun, and catch up on work and life and friendships.

The big news for me here is that I’m being courted to be a planner, which is the "big picture" decision-making role in the community. The planners are a group of 3-4 people who meet for 3 hours, twice a week, to address the major questions and concerns that don’t fall under anyone else’s area of responsibility. They deal with overall budget stuff, big interpersonal concerns that are affecting the community, community conflicts that don’t get worked out on a smaller scale (kind of like the Supreme Court), and other "nuts and bolts" (lots of nuts)…

One of the people on the team is seducing me into thinking about it as a possibility for me, and I feel pretty flattered. It’s a position of a lot of responsibility, and I like that he thinks I’d be good at it and that he specifically wants to work with me. Planners typically serve for 18 months in rotating terms, so every 6 months (theoretically) one planner steps down and another one joins the team. It usually doesn’t work out so smoothly, because sometimes it takes a while to find a new planner. There’s a community process of applying, receiving input, responding to input, and then going through a final "veto" process. Often, people have to be convinced/begged to apply. It’s a major commitment, because so much work and thought happens outside of those 2 planner meetings, and many folks in the community consider the planners to be at their beck and call (at mealtimes, at parties, swimming in the pond… ah, the world of living and working together!). I’m curious, and I’m not sure if I want to skew my current world to fit a plannership into it. I’d have to let go of some of the jobs I currently do, just for the sake of time and energy, and I’d have to make a commitment to be on the farm more than I currently am. And yet, I’m interested in it because I want to be more aware of and involved in the inner workings of the community. A current planner (the one who’s encouraging me to give it a try) told me that it’s the most in-depth look at human nature I could ever get on the commune. Planners deal with a lot of shit, a lot of people complaining and lobbying and being absolutely convinced that their way is the right way. Do I really want that for 18 months? I don’t know. I’m going to sit in on a few planner meetings this week to get more perspective on what’s involved. We’ll see… I’m nervous about the input process and I’m not sure if I really want to deal with so much of people’s shit. But someone has to do it, it’s just the nature of living together and it’s the way we’re currently set up to govern ourselves. I actually have a critique of the planner/manager system we have in place, and I wonder if becoming a planner would just frustrate me more with it, or give me deeper perspective about how it works, or (likely) both.

So, wish me luck, or bettter yet, clarity of thought. Ask me questions to help me think it through! (if I become a planner, I’ll have ample fodder for brilliant blog entries…)

April 8, 2005

Happy Birthday to my dear brother!  23 cycles around the sun.  When I worked as a Montessori teacher’s aide during college, we had a whole birthday ritual where we all sat in a circle with an orange spherical candle in the middle. The birthday kid got to light the candle (a special opportunity to play with matches), and then co carried a globe, skipping in a wide circle around the candle while we sang: "the Earth goes around the Sun, tra la, the Earth goes around the Sun, tra la, the Earth goes around the Sun, tra la, tra la, tra la, tra la."

Happy Day, David, dear brother.  If I were at home I’d post a picture of you in celebration.  But I"m not at home.  No, on the road again.  This time in DC, giving a workshop on Awareness, Communication, and Sensuality for a group of folks from Network for New Culture.  Yum!  I’m a bit nervous, and so I’ve excused myself from the group to "check my email", but I notice that I’m enjoying the solitary activity away from all these strangers who know each other already.  It’s always a challenge for me to enter into situations like this, where I feel like I have to prove myself before the workhsop in order for people to take me seriously when I"m presenting.  I tend to slip into "actress mode", smiling and charming and fascinating… but it’s exhausting and inauthentic and it perpetuates an image of female power and beauty that I don’ t want to play into.  So I’m working on being more real, more balanced, more focused…   

This isn’t a time I really want to be away from the commune anyway, with all of the flowers blooming and leaves budding on the trees and children running around and adults running around and the pond just warm enough to be jump-in-able, and still cold enough to be thrilling.  I’ll jump in first thing when I get back.  Leap out of the car and strip off my clothes as I’m running down to the water…  mmm… that’s the image I’ll hold in my mind as I’m sitting in DC traffic!

April 5, 2005

 Spring has arrived in full force on the hippie commune.  Folks are lying in hammocks in the sun reading books, chatting in groups sprawled in the grass, weaving hammocks on outdoor jigs, and having meetings about important community business sitting topless around a picnic table, soaking up the sun.  Daffodils are everywhere, summer dresses have been pulled out of storage (for both women and men), and the toddlers are learning to hula hoop (or at least run around with a hoop around their waists, sometimes the same hoop around all three of them!)

I had a fantastic day of doing what I love: presenting workshops.  Yes, yet again.  This time close to home.  After a weekend talking about intentional communities and polyamory up in Philadelphia (sleeping next to that eel), today I went to VCU, just an hour away from Twin Oaks.  I gave a presentation about the community with another Oaker, a relatively new member from California with a huge smile, sarcastic stories, and a radical analysis of mainstream culture.  We had a fun time together — this was her first time doing this kind of talking about Twin Oaks.  The class was great — a class on "People and Groups" in the school of Social Work.  They asked insightful questions and even clapped for us at the end.  Then she and I went outside and sat on the grass and watched  college kids play frisbee and golf (not frisbee golf, no, two separate groups playing frisbee and golf, with real golf clubs.   On the grassy quad of the campus.  Weird.).

I got home half an hour before dinner, and napped in my room with that Lanky Magician (remember him, long-time readers?).  After dinner, I got to give another workshop, this time here at home.   There’s a man here who used to work with the More Institute, and we facilitated a 3-hour workshop on awareness, communication, and  intimacy.  Beautiful and powerful, and then I walked back to my room in the dark, in awe of the stars and the warm night.

Funniest News from the Commune, Perhaps Ever:
We recently recieved a postcard in the mail that informed us that we’ve been chosen as a Nielsen Household, and that we’ll soon be getting a long distance phone call to confirm our participation.  Funny, considering we don’t have television here…

April 3, 2005

another weekend of workshops — in Philly right now typing from a laptop next to the tiny bed next to the eel.

March 23, 2005

Quick update on what I’ve been doing, since I’ve been incommunicado for a bit.  I’ve been travelling north, stopping in Rhode Island for a fantastic wedding of some amazing people I’d never met (a friend of the friend I’m traveling with), and then up to New Hampshire to stand naked on the edge of an icy mountain, then to Vermont to meet more great friends of my travel partner, and now Maine.  I visited the family I lived with 5 years ago as an apprentice on their farm, and got to watch the whole maple sugaring process (the sap has just started flowing — perfect timing for a visit to New Englad.)  Last night I taught a class about Twin Oaks at the Maine College of Art (MECA), and today I’m teaching at the University of New England.

The presentations have been going well.  I’m more prepared than I’ve been for the last many presentations I’ve given, and the preparation is really paying off.  I’m happy and brilliant and passionately ranting and chatting with students for 20 minutes after class ends.  Ahhh… this is the life.  Last night I stayed in a fancy Bed & Breakfast and took a long bath and read The Fifth Sacred Thing (which I’ve nver read before — I’m loving it), and this morning I had strawberries and ice cream for breakfast!  The berries and cream, though, can’t compare to the glorious feeling I have when I’m standing in front of a room of 30 college students describing the freedom I feel when I’m walking down the path at Twin Oaks without a shirt on, and they’re staring back at me with alternating smiles and bewilderment and horror.

I’ve actually been having a bit of a challenging time, personally.  Self-judgement stuff, recognizing how stuck I am on figuring out whether I’m essentially, universally, spiritually Right or Wrong.  Yuck.  I’m feeling a lot better today after having such a great time with this last class.  One more talk over lunchtime, meeting up with my travel partner, and then we’ll begin the journey south this afternoon.    What a life.

March 15, 2005

I’m nearly too tired to write tonight, and yet I feel some mixture of desire and obligation to write about this weekend’s show.  In a word: extraordinary.  We exploded onto the stage, which most people usually just experience as a crowded and noisy dining room.  We danced out from behind the curtains (which just weeks before had been scraps of fabric sitting in Commie Clothes) in quantities of lacy lingerie never known to exist in one place on this commune ever before.  Cabaret came to life in our dining room this weekend as broccoli-growers and hammock -weavers and tofu-makers metamorphed into (mostly) polished actors and dancers and singers.  We blew away an audience accustomed to communized versions of cheesy musicals and sloppy scene changes.  People who rarely talk to me have been stopping me on the path to tell me how much they enjoyed the show.

A special thing about doing theater on the commune, or any art really, is that our labor system is designed to incorporate projects like this almost seamlessly.  I spent nearly everyday last week working on the show.  I just blocked off time during the days and evenings so I didn’t get scheduled for any work.  Earlier in the year, folks voted to give a slew of "labor credits" to putting the show together, so I got to claim work hours for the time I spent working on the show.  It became my major contribution to the commune, on par with the folks working in the garden, cooking meals, fixing toilets, and making hammocks.    We credit work on a basis of time, rather than by job.  Any job that is "labor creditable" (and most are, everything from taking care of children to cooking dinner to decorating for parties) is given one labor credit for an hour of work, regardless of the job.  So, once the community voted to make Cabaret labor creditable (we got about 500 hours for the whole show), we got to claim labor credits for rehearsals and set building and costume meetings and choreographing fantastic dance numbers.  I suddenly became a "professional" actress and director and choreographer again… living in the middle of the woods!

I’ve been enjoying the experience of an "artists’ collective", where we all work to create and support the fulfillment of our basic needs like food and shelter, and then intentionally use our collective energy beyond that to create art, sometimes seperately and often together.  I think of Sean, who recently had an art opening at a gallery in Charlottesville, and the Vulgar Bulgars, the klezmer band that plays regular gigs all over Central Virginia.  There’s something about living here that makes the creation of collaborative art a natural mode of expression and engagement.  I think it’s one of the ways that we process our experience together.  We share so much, it makes sense that we find additional richness in sharing the self-reflective process of art.

Pictures of the show coming soon, I promise.  I didn’t take any on my camera (except at the cast party, which might be too racy for viewing here), so I’ll have to get the best from friends who were in the audience.