Someone asked me recently to share with them how I got to where I am. I just wrote them an email, and I wanted to share it here. Enjoy…
(updates about the holidays here — especially the New Year’s Party — coming soon!)
Asking me how I got to where I am is a great way to get me to talk. My journey is still fascinating to me (especially since I’m still on it!). The root of it was a deep belief that there was more to life than what I was experiencing, and I wanted to seek it. I graduated from college with degrees in Sociology and Religion, and a passion for social justice. I was involved in social activism at different levels, and I got a job doing residents’ advocacy in an economically (and otherwise) oppressed neighborhood in Cincinnati (the city where I grew up). In all that I was doing at that job, I felt like I wasn’t really being effective towards making anything better. I was doing band-aid work, trying to heal the wounds created by an exploitative system, without doing anything to change the system itself.
I had already accepted a job as an actress with a children’s theater company before I took on the residents’ advocacy work. When it was time for me to go into rehearsals for the show, I was ready to leave the first job. I felt totally ineffective and I was ready to be doing something that I was good at! I toured with the theater company for 8 months and loved it. We performed in elementary schools around the country, teaching about science and simple machines, and entertaining them with stories about the Pied Piper. I loved the work I was doing, and yet I still wasn’t feeling satisfied with my life. The actress job was a way of me making my life great and enjoyable in the moment, but I couldn’t see myself living like that for the next 40 years. I was convinced that something more was possible. I wanted to be working towards a deeper, richer way of living AND making it accessible for anyone, long-term. So at the end of the tour I left the company, packed up my apartment, and got in my car. My plan was to travel around the country and find other people who were seeking a different way of living. Before I left, I did some research, looking for apprenticeships and internships and other experiential opportunities I could plug into, and I found the website of the Fellowship for Intentional Communities. I had read about communes when I was in school, and for a while I had gobbled up any book I could find about people’s experiences from communities of the 60s and 70s. I had no idea that any were still around, or that communal living was something that actually worked (I thought they all crashed and burned because of some flaw in human nature). There were hundreds(!) of communes listed on the FIC website, and I started an extensive exploration of communes’ websites. There were lots that were in the early, formative stages, and I wanted to visit a community that had been around for awhile, so I could get a sense of people doing something that actually worked! I found Twin Oaks, which at that time had been around for 35 years (now nearly 38). There was a structured visitor program that I could come to for 3 weeks, and I liked the idea of visiting a community with a group of other people who also had no idea what they were doing (for an anarchist, I really appreciate structure sometimes!).
The rest is history. I visited, loved it, traveled for a little while but felt so clear about wanting to be at Twin Oaks. I’ve been here for two and a half years now, and I’m still learning so much about myself and how I want to engage with the world. I’m realizing how much of what we experience as “reality” is actually human creation — I’ve really been getting into History as a way of understanding the present, specifically how things got to be the way they are; it’s not just fate or “this is the way it’s always been”. So much of the world is the way it is because someone or some group of people made a decision to make it that way, or made a decision that had an unintentional effect of making things happen that way. That awareness empowers me to make choices towards things being different. That’s a big piece of the “anarchist” mindset for me. I’m also learning how to live collaboratively, creating “power with” people rather than “power over” them, and this feels like a key understanding that I want to share with other people in the larger. I travel around the country and share my experience of communal life at conferences and in college classes, and I feel more effective in creating social change than in any of the other work I’ve done in my life. And I’m HAPPY doing it! My life at Twin Oaks is rich and full of delight (and struggle and conflict and friction and confusion, too — that’s all a part of the richness).
in joy,
TickledSpirit
Rev Kate Adamson 
one of the best books that i have read in the past few years was a collection of emma goldman essays. my favorite was on property and how it translates into human relationships… as a recovering overachiever, i’m still grappling with, but loving “the right to be lazy.” through reading a bit of her work, i understood that some anarchists certainly may oppose all structure but that the big enemy (for ms goldman) was oppression and exploitation of the powerless by the powerful and greedy. this is relevant in light of your comment on structure.
thanks for sharing this. i know that you graduated from wittenberg two yrs after i did, yet i feel so young myself. it is truly amazing the wealth of experiences that we can create in such a short time.
blessings to you.
hmmm… unlogged visitor, I’m curious about who you are! yes, Emma is one of my inspirations — I’m reading a collection of her essays, “Red Emma Speaks”, right now
unlogged visitor = me.
The URL used to show. was not trying to hide. 🙂
I am very much planning on coming to see you this summer. When will you be at the commune? Also, I love the way you explain your choices. It sounds so natural and clear. Call me soon.
Social justice? Emma Goldman? Come on, gimmie a break. What are individual rights and why is one person’s need a mortgage on the life of another?I’d bet 5 bucks worth of soap and a bucket of cold water that your answer is that you haven’t a clue.
I don’t have the right answer — all I have is my experience and my awareness of the experiences of those around me. I’m working to create a richer experience of life for myself and others, and I’m pursuing what seems to be working.
I think your claim that you don’t have the “right answer” is disingenuous. If you don’t have the answers, then why do you claim to be a social activist? Do you promote the ideals of the Twin Oaks community to others? Then you think radical egalitarianism and the subordination of the individual to the will of the group is preferable to the principle of individual rights and private property. Did you protest the war (and perhaps by extension, all war)? Then you think the United States can live side by side with dictatorships and suffer no ill. Each of these positions claim an answer. You may hide behind relativism, but that does not cover that you and your friends are chock full of answers.
Hey unlogged visitor, you’re all over the place. Apart from just picking a fight, if you have a point, you’ve yet to make it. Your so-called definition of ‘radical
egalitarianism’ includes ‘the subordination of the individual to the will of
the group’ which sounds a lot like what happens in a majority rule society after an election.Having an opinion, expressing it and choosing to live by it is not the same thing as preaching to others that it is the only answer.Anonymous sniping may seem like fun to you, but it only goes so far before becoming boring. If you want a debate, start by respecting the right of other people to disagree with you, refrain from name calling and discuss the issues — for starters.
The subordination of the individual to the will of the majority happens in a democracy, not in an individual rights republic. I define a moral government as the principle of individual rights animated by the will of the majority. A democracy puts a man like Socrates to death—an individual rights republic does not.
If the United States has become excessively “populist” or “democratic” it is in no small part due to your intellectual forbearers. After all, don’t you stand for the radical redistribution of wealth from those who produce (or own the means of production) for the sake of those who do not? How would one achieve that, but though democracy and violent class revolution? You are a hypocrite if you claim otherwise, because every mass movement operating upon your moral premise has used those means in action.
Additionally, you can not weep for a system that you would exploit to redistribute wealth when that same mechanism is sized by your opponents and used to foist evangelical Christianity: both are simply different sides of the same corrupt coin.
You claim you are an advocate for peace? Prove it by acknowledging that material values are created by those who have a moral right to their creations and renounce your claim that the undeserving have a right to the unearned.
It’s pretty comfy for you to debate when you put words in the mouth of your adversary, but it’s not too interesting for anyone else.
Take a look at the Twin Oaks website, “unlogged visitor”, and check out the systems we have in place here. We share the workload, and share the abundace we create. I’m not an advocate for laziness, I’m an advocate for people working together.
To be quite honest, I’m tired of blind attacks on my life and ideas. I’m happy to engage in discussion – – it’s one of the reasons I started this blog. I’m interested in understanding and exploring other ways of looking at the world, and I can only do that if they aren’t hurled at me with venom.