Cooperation for the Masses April 2, 2012

When I left Twin Oaks, my partner and I were clear about our mutual desire to live in community.  I imagined he and I would quickly gather a group of people and start the process of forming a new community together.  A week or two after I left, I asked him when we should organize the first meeting and see who was interested.  ”Meeting?  It’s gotta happen organically…”

A prime example of our different styles, and beyond that, a source of vital frustration for me as I struggled to align my yearning for community with our isolated nuclear family life.  I resented his lack of focus on creating a life we both said we wanted.  He thought I was impatient and unsatisfiable.   We’ve grown, though, and over the last 6 years something has indeed unfolded as we merged organic and intentional…  we’ve welcomed friends to live in our home for months, sharing tiny spaces with multiple adults, toddlers, and teenagers.  We’ve deepened connections with friends from around the country who gather for festivals a few times a year.  We’ve found ourselves as part of a “tribe” of freaky circus performers who get together several times a week to either practice or socialize (or both) — while our kids of all ages play together.

(Edited after a night of sleeping on it: It’s not just that we now have friends and deeper connections — it’s what we do together, and how we do it.  We cook group meals, help each other move, watch each others’ kids, celebrate birthdays and holidays, share the often chaotic waves of our lives… not just as friends one-on-one, but as a group, as a collective.)

Even though it doesn’t look like I thought it would, it’s working… in a different way than the systems and Bylaws of Twin Oaks does.  There’s a lot about those systems that I miss (like income-sharing… especially when our rent is due!), but I’m being challenged to translate the lessons from the commune into life in the larger world… and it’s working in beautiful ways.

This, I think, is the new direction this blog is finally taking — reporting to you live from Bohemia with my adventures in and reflection on cooperation for the masses.

figuring it out...

letting go, stepping forward: revisited February 5, 2012

I’m pretty excited to be stepping back into blogging.  Integrating the old “Over the Edge” commune blog into “Passion and Patience” is fulfilling work… turning my seemingly-fragmented life into a cohesive body of work.  Tonight I’ve been re-reading posts from the last several years  – seeing what feelings, intentions, and pursuits have persisted or changed, especially since leaving the commune in January 2006… almost exactly 6 years ago!  In honor of that anniversary, I’m re-posting part of my entry from January 23, 2006, just a few days after I left:

I’ve left Twin Oaks. In most moments, it doesn’t feel particularly extraordinary. I’m here at my partner Free’s house, hanging out with him and his kids. This is familiar to me; this has been a part of my life for nearly a year… this house, these people. I’ve been slowly integrating myself into this place (and this place into myself), and it doesn’t feel significantly different to be here without Twin Oaks to return “home” to… yet.

Right now, from the comfort of a house where I feel supported and loved, on a cozy Monday morning of tea and NPR, it’s hard to dive into the grief and fear of two days ago. Where to start? I spent my last day at Twin Oaks in a strange limbo. I had high expectations… I wanted intensity and meaningfulness, symbolic releases and powerful goodbyes. Instead, the whole day was fairly mellow. I had a morning date with Hawina, who has been a giant force in my life since early in my membership. She’s Paxus’ life partner and co-parent, and throughout my time at Twin Oaks we had several intense rounds of polyamory-induced emotional and logistical processing. We started to develop our own independent relationship through working together on the Mental Health Team over the last year, and our friendship now is deeper than I would have expected, given our history.

We chatted for awhile, then walked around the community and told each other stories of our experiences in different places. We ended up at the dining hall, and went inside for lunch. I got a plate of food and sat down with a group of friends in a small lounge area. Taking in the scene around me, friends laughing and entertaining the new baby, I felt an immediate emptiness, noting the joy and comfort and deep friendship I would be leaving in just a few hours. A friend across the room made eye contact with me, and the tears that had been building in my eyes suddenly released down my cheeks. She came over and wrapped her arms around me while I sobbed. I don’t mind crying in public; in fact, I like it. I want it to be natural to see people expressing sadness. I want to embrace sadness as an acceptable emotion, and so when I’m sad I don’t go hide out somewhere to cry unseen.

Other friends came over and sat with me, holding me and stroking my head. I calmed down and talked about how weird it felt to be there with them, and be on completely different trajectories. They were engaged in the continuing functioning of the community — I wasn’t. I was engaged in extracting myself from the fabric of their lives, while their lives continued on.

After lunch I spent a few hours getting ready for my goodbye party with another woman, Alexis, who was also leaving in a few days. We decided to have party together, sharing the experience of letting go and moving on. We decorated a large living room with all of our clothes and other items we were getting rid of, for other people to take. We hung clotheslines around the room to display our clothing, and laid out candles, earrings, condoms, and posters for our friends to choose from.

Once the room was ready for the evening’s festivities, I left to say my final goodbyes to the community. I walked around with my journal and took a few moments in different places around the commune to write memories and reflections on my experiences in those places. I wrote in the dining hall about rehearsals for musicals, meals with friends, wild dance parties, and hackey sack circles outside on sunny days. In the dairy barn, I wrote about the smell of the cows, the playfulness of the calves, the intuitive skill of herding, and the silence of solitary winter mornings. In a high field near the graveyard, I remembered moments of retreat and reflection, rituals for full moons and other pagan holidays, and running in the rain for sanctuary when my grandmother died.

In that same pasture, I engaged myself in a ritual of release. I had brought a piece of wood that I found in Maine before I moved to Twin Oaks, a bouquet of lavender from the herb garden that had been hanging in my room, and a rock I had found during a full moon mediation in that very field. I released the wood and set it softly on the earth, symbolizing that which I brought to Twin Oaks with me, and was leaving there: hesitance, passivity, deference to authority, fear of being wrong, naive independence. I then scattered the lavender beside it, symbolic of that which I acquired and experienced at Twin Oaks, and was also leaving behind: the cows, the land, daily responsibility to community members, full benefit of the collective resources of the community, safety, sanctuary. Finally, I held the rock against my chest, envisioning the confident, powerful, compassionate Self that I’ve found at Twin Oaks. Awareness and empathy, clear and honest communication, an active sense of responsibility… I want to carry this persona with me as I move on, and so I brought the rock, infused with that vision, with me. I looked at the wood and lavender on the ground, and felt the weight of the rock in my hand, and I realized that I didn’t have anything to symbolize that which I brought with me and am also carrying on with me. I looked through my bag and couldn’t find anything that fit the description, so I used my body, my eyes and lungs and nose and skin and heart. I thanked my body for carrying me to Twin Oaks, and thanked it for staying healthy enough to carry me away.

I came down from the pasture, and had enough time before dinner to hang out a bit with Paxus. It felt important to spend some time together on my last day, rooting ourselves in our continuing connection despite our many changes. We will certainly have a different relationship now that I’ve left Twin Oaks; what it looks like is up to us.

After dinner, I headed down to the courtyard to finish preparations for the party. Alexis and I had decided to have a “feed your friends” party, where no one fed themselves from their own hands. Instead, we had finger food (pineapple, grapes, chocolate, popcorn, and cake) that people could feed to each other. Once it got rolling, people walked around with platefulls of food and offered to feed each person they interacted with (I did it a lot, and loved it!). The whole party was great — folks grabbed the clothes we had on display and wore them as party outfits. We had a coffeehouse where people performed (juggling, singing, and spoken word tributes to Alexis and me), and we all danced until late in the evening. I returned to my room around 1am to finish packing. I went to sleep at 4:45 and woke up again at 6:15 to get ready to leave with the 8am trip into town.

I spent my last hour and a half at Twin Oaks running around doing final details, cleaning out my message slot, returning things I’d borrowed, and emptying my trashcan. I found Paxus one last time for our final goodbye, and then picked up my bags to load into the minivan. A friend had posted a note on the office door for me, saying simply “You will be missed” in big bold letters. I took it down as my tears started, and held it in my hand as I climbed into the van with the other folks going into town that day. We drove around to the dairy barn to pick up the milk that was to be delivered to cowshare customers (though raw, unpasturized milk can’t be sold, people can buy a share in a specific cow and receive milk from the cow that they partly own). On top of that day’s milk was another note for me, from a friend who was that morning’s milker and knew I was going in with the town trip.

Her note kept my tears flowing as we drove away from Twin Oaks, my home of three and a half years. Folks in the van asked me about my plans, and assured me that I could always come back if I wanted to. The driver offered jokingly to turn around. I cried, and felt comfortable with my tears. I chatted with a friend who I hadn’t spent much time with lately, a man named Thomas who joined the community just before I did.

The 45 minute drive passed quickly. We dropped one woman off at an early dentist appointment, and then everyone else unloaded at the downtown library. Before we headed off in our own directions, Thomas hugged me tightly and offered to help me carry my bags into the library. “No thanks,” I said. “I want to know I can do it all by myself.” It wasn’t a feminist political statement — more, it was a symbolic act of independence and my capacity to take care of myself.

As I write it now, I realize that’s only part of it. The truth is, we are all interdependent, whether we recognize it or not. The very nature of life on Earth is interdependence. Living in community just makes it more tangible. I don’t want to forget that truth simply because it’s more obscured in the mainstream culture. And yet, it felt important to me to feel my independence as I walked away from the van and my life at Twin Oaks.

Friday was hard for me, more than I expected. Sitting in the library, I felt aimless, no roots, no direction, just floating in limbo. I spent the day in deep grief and sadness about leaving my home and my friends of over 3 years, wondering what I’m heading towards and being fearful about not knowing. I cried with Free and he held me. I blamed him for picking me up late at the library and dragging me around town to run errands, and he held me. I cried and talked about my fears and he just gave me the space to be scared, giving me his love and reminding me about hope and faith.

Then on Saturday, I borrowed the car and ran some errands around town. I started a bank account. I stopped by the library to check my email. I sang in the car about how the earth is my home. I’m not rootless, I’m rooted in the earth and the global community.

As I walked down the street towards the library, this time unencumbered with bags, I felt my independence and my interdependence merging. I smiled at people I passed on the street, and they smiled back. This is my mandate for myself on this piece of the journey. Trust myself, and trust other people. Remember my independence, my capacity to create what I want, and my strength, and at the same time remember my connection with others, my responsibility to the people around me, and my commitment to honoring each person for who they are, even when I don’t understand them. We’re all in this together.

teaching and learning November 12, 2007

I felt a little under the weather last night, so I went to bed before coming up with my lesson plan for teaching today.  When I woke up, I felt better and quickly came up with an activity that meant that I wouldn’t have to talk very much, leaving more up to my students to assimilate ideas and explain them to their peers.  After leading 2 of my 4 classes so far, I remember that this is really the way I want to teach!  I want to facilitate their own thought process instead of telling them mine — they learn more when they’re the ones thinking, instead of just writing down the brilliant things I say.  Any good leader or teacher is really just a facilitator, providing a context in which people can explore their own experience and ideas, be challenged to go deeper, and listen to the ideas and reflections of others.

Why has it taken me so long to remember this?  (I now live in a culture that promotes and rewards individualism, rather than collaboration… mainstream culture has been brainwashing me since I left the commune almost 2 years ago!)  It’s no surprise to me that I came up with this activity after spending the weekend at Twin Oaks…

irony… December 5, 2006

A disturbing trend: I’ve been getting alot of comments recently about how “good” I look.  “Wow, have you lost a little weight?  You look great!”
I’ve lost weight because I’m not eating heathly and I’m miserable.  I feel worse than I have since the teenage angst of high school.  And yet, because I’ve lost weight, I look “good.”  I don’t know how to respond to people when they tell me that.  I don’t want to reinforce that message to myself, or to them.  I don’t want to take on the belief that skinny is good, despite the context.  I loved my body at Twin Oaks, surrounded by appreciation for the human body in all its forms.  I loved my curves and my strong arms and my hands rough from working in the garden.  Now my skin is smooth and my belly is flat, and I feel weak and lifeless.  THIS is what I’m getting appreciated for?

November 22, 2006

A friend just wrote in response to a depressed and distressed message I sent her. In her short note, she asked:

> tell me what’s in your heart right now that you
> don’t want to see or know! and what is keeping you
> going and sustaining you?

I replied:

Thanks for asking the great questions. What’s true for me that I don’t want to see? I’m changing… my identity as communard, radical lifestyle activist, and polyamorous multi-lovered independent spirit has diffused away, and I feel mainstream and uninteresting, unchallenging to a crazy system. I feel ineffective and unimportant, like my life is just becoming a part of the Machine. I’ve lost a sense of what I offer the world… I’ve lost a sense of purpose and passion. I don’t have a driving motivation behind what I do everyday… I just do it because I’m “supposed” to. This is the life I judged in other people from my lofty seat at Twin Oaks, where my life was grand and important and fulfilling a larger purpose. Now I’m judging my own life from that perspective, and I hate it. AND, the hardest part is that I don’t see a path towards something different, except back to TO, which isn’t a possibility as long as I’m with Free.

These are the thoughts that drag me down. What sustains me? Coming back to the belief that my purpose in the world is to share love and offer the experience of love to whoever I come in contact with. Remembering that I have the capacity to be open and loving whenever I choose it. Writing in my journal and working with tarot helps me remember, and dancing, and sitting in meditation. Crying to Free helps sometimes, when he just listens, and when I feel his love I remember my own capacity to love.

thanks for asking… it helps to acknowledge both pieces.

love,
tickledspirit

November 21, 2006

blog recommendation: a newly-started account of another just-left-the-commune journey. Kassia is a vivacious, passionate, wise fiddler exploring polyamory, travelling, and life after community (and a close friend of mine!) Find her HERE.

November 14, 2006

I’m having a hard day, acknowledging the ways that my life isn’t what I want it to be right now.  I feel like I’ve lost my passion — at least, I don’t know where it is right now.  My days are lazy compared to my days at Twin Oaks, so much routine, so much unimportant bullshit.  I haven’t created a meaningful life for myself out here.  I guess I should say, I haven’t done it YET.  A lot of what’s hard for me is getting stuck in despair and hopelessness.  My life isn’t what I want it to be and I don’t see the path towards it… (but really, that’s because I don’t have a clear vision of what I want!)

 I visited Twin Oaks this weekend for a birthday party for Jonah, a six year-old who turned 2 just months after I moved to the community.  I’ve watched him learn how to talk, count, and argue, and seen his personality develop through mirroring the many adults close to him.  It felt like home to be at his birthday party.  It was a Harry Potter party (yup, even on the commune, people are obsessed with Hogwarts!), and everyone dressed up as a character from the stories.  Jonah was Harry, and his 3 yr old sister was Hermione (as was my 6 yr old stepson Ruis, Jonah’s best friend).  An older man in the community (Jake, for those who know) was Dumbledore (using a green graduation robe from Commie Clothes, and his own gray beard!).  There was a Prof McGonagall (Madge) and a Prof Snape (Thomas).  A couple who just had a baby last year (Mala and Ezra) were Harry’s dead parents, and Zadek (their son) was baby Harry.  A red-haired boy was Ron (Rowan), and a redhead Canadian woman was a distant Weasly relative from Canada (Valerie).  I ran up to Commie Clothes (the collective free “thrift store”) before the party to find a costume, and settled on Moaning Myrtle.  It turned out that I wasn’t as original as I thought, because Hawina showed up crying with pigtails, too!  (There were also several muggles, who hadn’t found anything to wear as a costume)

 I loved being at the party, celebrating and playing dress-up with my (still) closest friends.  Jonah’s mom had arranged a treasure hunt as part of the party, and asked me and two other women to canoe around the pond and place lighted tea-lights in the water for the finale.  In the light of dusk, we rowed across the water and talked about our lives, lighting candles until we looked behind us and realized that the wind had blown almost all of them out.  Alas! When the kids came down to the pond they were still excited to be rowed across to the sauna, which was really Hagrid’s cabin, where they all received wands.  When the kids were safely across (life jackets and all), I curled up on the bank of the pond with my two friends.  We snuggled and talked about our lives until the sun went down and it was time for dinner.

Earlier in the day, before the party, I facilitated a meeting between two of my friends.  They work together as part of a team at Twin Oaks, and had been struggling some with personal dynamics, old issues for both of them.  We had all worked together as part of the same team, and they had asked me to come out and help them talk through some of the issues with each other.  I was honored to be asked, that they trusted me to hold the space for them to talk about hard things.  This is another thing that I miss out here… people who want to work through their issues and who take steps forward together.  There’s a deeper incentive to do it at Twin Oaks, because people are interwoven into each other’s lives.  Though not everyone at Twin Oaks does it, there’s an assumption that it’s at least a possibility, and many (if not most) pursue mediation together when there’s a conflict.

By dinnertime, I was feeling the power of life at Twin Oaks, a rich mixture of work and play.  I felt fulfilled in the work I had done to mediate the dialogue for my friends, and assist Thea with Jonah’s party (and take responsibility for childcare for Ruis all day!).  The whole time I was “working”, I was also engaged in deep connections with my close friends.  Everything I did was working towards strengthening relationships, and thus strengthening the community.  I miss that clarity of purpose, present through all kinds of different actions and experiences.  How can I find that out here, beyond the commune?  Can everything I do be a part of strengthening relationships when I don’t know the people around me?  When there are cultural expectations that foster isolation and superficial relationships?  How do I catapult beyond those?  And, how do I immunize myself against their influence… how do I keep myself from getting sucked in by the pervasive culture of isolation when I’m surrounded by people not making eye contact, ignoring the other people standing at the bus stop, sitting in a whole roomful of people and not interacting with a single one because they’re all staring straight forward at their computer screen?  How can I foster community here, when no one feels connected to people except who they’ve “chosen” as friends?  The KEY of community is recognizing our interdependence beyond our small sphere of experience.

 After dinner I hung out with two close friends while Ruis, Jonah, and Willow played down the hall.  Ah, the power of a communal residence.  We were in my friend Sky’s room, which is just up the stairs from Jonah and Gwen’s room (right next to their dad’s room), which is just down the hall from Willow and his mom’s rooms.  The kids bounced back and forth between Willow and Jonah’s rooms, and I didn’t have to worry at all about Ruis because he could easily come get me if he needed to.

 Sky and Kassia and I talked about our lives, relationships, fears, and possibilities… these are the kinds of conversations I miss.  Sharing deep reflections, laughing and snuggling, taking turns being in the middle… Is it just that I haven’t developed new relationships in my life out here, or is there something intrinsic to the communal experience?  I think it’s a little bit of both.  The depth to which we’re able to share with each other is rooted in our shared experience and our intense interdependence.

 I’m working on being patient, remembering that I left the community in part because I wanted to do the work of building community in the larger world.  I need to remember that it will take time and work, and I need to find other ways of nurturing myself while I’m doing this work.  Going back to Twin Oaks feels healthy, reminding me of what’s possible.  Instead of feeling hopeless because of how much of my life out here isn’t what I want it to be, I want to focus on the work that I want to do to offer something different.  What does that look like?  That’s the question I want to focus on… it’s all about believing that it’s possible.

the real world? November 9, 2006

It’s been so long… what to say?  How can I summarize the past few months in the 30 minutes I have until teaching my next class?

Life away from the commune is hard for me.  When I told that to my boss at the summer camp, he said, “Welcome to the real world.”  That’s the thing — after living at Twin Oaks, I KNOW that this isn’t the “real world.”  Now I know that more is possible, this out here isn’t as satisfying to me.  The “real world” includes so much more than what people in this culture generally accept as possible.  Twin Oaks is just as “real” as my everyday life right now… sometimes, it feels like it’s MORE real.  I had real connections with people, not just passing “howareyou?finehowareyou?”s.  I engaged in real decisionmaking processes instead of voting for white men to represent my ideas and beliefs and values.  I did real, tangible work of growing food, nurturing children, fixing broken fences, and creating works of art.  What’s really real?

I struggle with how luxurious grad school feels sometimes.  There’s work to be done, in my house, in my neighborhood, in this city, country, and world… and I sit inside and read social theory.  When there’s work that needs to be done, why am I not doing something?  Ah, right, I’m teaching.  One day a week, I get to talk with students about the world that they’re likely to recreate, and suggest the possibility that something else is possible, and even necessary.  This one day a week, I feel effective and fulfilled in how I use my time and energy (isn’t this the same thing I wrote two months ago?  I just have to keep reminding myself…)

I’m also doing research that fascinates me, and seems like it might lead to something… When I’m actually working on my reaserach, crunching numbers and working to synthesize ideas, I’m excited about what I’m doing.  I took my idea from the last post (in which I sadly misspelled “deodorant”!), and have been researching the social construction of the taboo against body odor in American culture.  There’s been only a very little research done on odor in general, and almost none on body odor specifically.  In my class on Race and Ethnicity, I decided to write my paper on how body odor has been used as a tool to justify racist beliefs and practices.  There’s no dearth of information there!  In most books on the history of race relations in the US, there’s at least one mention of white people’s perception that black people smell not only different, but bad.  This is used to justify the belief that they are biologically different (and inferior).  I’m also writing a more general paper about body odor for another class.  I’m hoping to talk with people about their experience of learning that they “needed” to wear deodorant.  Who did they learn it from?  What was the reason given?

From all of this, I’m hoping to develop a workshop about the BODY, and the ways American culture teaches us to repress, modify, and deny basic human functions (and how advertisers play into this idea in order to get people to buy products!)

Off to class now — time to teach about social stratification and how the class system reproduces itself…

uh oh… August 30, 2006

Reporting from grad school, one week in:

I’m frustrated by how theoretical everything is.  I miss the concrete tangibility of the garden, the cows, and even community politics.  All of that debating had meaning and eventually ended up with some kind of decision and action.  Here we’re just dealing with thought and ideas that haven’t any direction towards expression in the physical world (except in research papers, which perhaps get published and read by a few academics who digest it in their brains and move on to another article).  We aren’t exploring the nature of society so we can make intelligent and healthy choices for how to participate in creating it — we’re exercising our brains, which can be fun, but not fulfilling.  This feels too luxurious for a world in which so much work needs to be done.  All this thinking isn’t getting us anywhere!  All these great thoughts that I’m having or that my professors have written in books — who’s listening?  What’s the point of all these thoughts if they aren’t communicated and used towards change?

Do I just want my life to be important?  I just don’t want to waste my time.  I’d rather be growing good food or facilitating a collaborative meeting or providing healing to a friend.  Spending hours writing a paper just doesn’t take priority to developing deep and healthy relationships with my family and community.  I don’t have the tolerance for hoop-jumping that I used to.

where can I find a nice pond to jump into?

bridge building August 11, 2006

I just finished my second-to-last day of being a camp counselor. It’s been a long and exhausting journey, and I’m relieved to be at the end of it. I’m satisfied now, feeling like I’m on the road to accomplishing what I wanted: having a healthy and opening influence in the people’s lives… and today was the culmination of all of that work with the kids at camp.

Every Friday we have an event called “All Camp” that involves all of the campers and counselors in the entire camp. Each week, a team of 3-5 counselors are responsible for planning it, making it loosely related to the theme for the week. Past themes have been things like “Into the Wild,” “Musical Mayhem,” “Stars and Stripes” (for the 4th of July week), and “Disco Fever.” This week’s theme was “Express Yourself,” and I was on the committee for planning it. I arranged for several of my friends from Twin Oaks and Shannon Farm (another nearby community) to come out and teach juggling, poi, and “advanced hula hooping” to the older kids, and then perform for the entire camp. They came, they taught, they performed, and the camp was enthralled.

What I love about today’s event is that the kids got to experience “alternative” type people in their own comfortable environment. It was a mixture of the new and the normal, which I think helps folks open themselves more to new experiences. The kids got to work with and learn from talented, beautiful, powerful women who didn’t wear makeup or shave their armpits. No one made a big deal about it, it was just a subtle exposure to people doing things differently, and it so happens that these different people are also very very cool and taught the kids some very cool things.

The metaphor in my mind is that all summer I’ve been building a bridge between the camp culture and the culture of places like Twin Oaks where collaboration, personal responsibility, communication, and creativity are of primary importance. At camp, hierarchy and the need for control seem to take precedence over most other things. Today the kids got a chance to choose their own activities, take responsibility for themselves (they left their assigned groups and counselors that they’ve been with all week), and challenge themselves in new creative endeavors.

The camp directors were worried about there not being enough control of the groups, worried about the potential for chaos. I was so frustrated yesterday when we turned in our All Camp plan, and one of the directors started telling me all of her concerns. I wanted to tell her, “Just trust the kids — give them the opportunity to be resonsible and they will be! When you expect them to act up, they will, because you don’t give them the chance to take responsibility for themselves.” Instead, I said “I understand your concerns… I’ll do what I can.” After All Camp ended today, I felt totally validated (though of course, my boss didn’t say any kind of congratulations — I hate having a boss! It’s such a weird power dynamic…)

Ah, back to the bridge metaphor. l feel like I’ve been building this bridge all summer, sharing myself and my ideas with the other counselors and the kids. Not being overtly “different”, just authentic in who I am. (Except for last night at the end-of-summer staff dinner, when the three progressive women counselors ended up sitting with the most conservative male counselor on staff — I was more overt and passionate about my beliefs than I’ve been in awhile!). So, the bridge — building slowly, step by step, and today I opened the bridge, and the kids and staff got to take a peek into this other culture by experiencing more than me as an individual… by experiencing and observing some of the culture itself. Multiple people communicating deeply, loving openly (lots of hugs), and having confidence in their natural bodies. Seeds have now been planted…

And next week, some of the high school campers are going on a field trip to Twin Oaks… crossing the bridge.