Back to Normal Time

A while ago I decided that the old year ended at the Winter Solstice and the new year didn’t begin until January 1st.  The period in between was, for me, a time out of time.  A special, magical time.  Not quite accidentally, this is the period of all the Christmas lights and holiday decorations.  This year it’s also my time away from Staten Island, NYC, Ganas, and Point A and my time back in the Boston area with my family and friends:  I left NYC on December 21st and I’m returning on January 2nd.

Interestingly enough, last year I left Massachusetts on January 1st, 2015, for Virginia and to join Point A, so this also marks the end of my first year working with Point A.  It’s been quite a year, including three months staying on the Virginia communes, hanging out with my Virginia cousins, and making Point A trips to Washington, DC, and Baltimore, as well as NYC--followed by nine months now living in NYC and organizing there for Point A.

The new year will bring a good many things and many of them, I’m sure, will be unexpected.  I’ve just started on my organizing in NYC and I’m hoping that some of that will come to fruition this year.

As a beginning to the new year and as a refresher for folks who haven’t read this blog from the beginning and might be wondering what Social Alchemy is and why I write so much about intentional communities (not to mention chemistry, systems theory, personal growth, spirituality, agriculture, survival stuff, ecology, and many other random things), I plan to spend my next few posts covering my take on social change theory and how it fits together with a lot of the other things that I cover.

In the meantime, I’ve had a wonderful time out of time and it’s time to plunge back into whatever passes for normal time for me.

Quote of the Day:  "This is a new year. A new beginning. And things will change." ― Taylor Swift

A Tale of Another Two Cities

I’m currently staying in Somerville, MA, my old stomping ground, instead of Staten Island, NY, where I currently live.  And I’m thinking about my life shuttling back and forth between two major cities on the east coast of the US.

I’ve talked a bit about my strange feelings about being a New Yorker now.  (See my post, The New New Yorker, 4/21/15.)  It’s a bit weird for me to go back and forth between the Boston area and New York City, but I still do it.  And each place is different.

Boston is what I call a colonial town with reminders everywhere about pre-revolutionary days.  NYC is skyscraper city.  I mean Boston has skyscrapers and New York has early Americana but history is much more predominant in Boston and gigantic new buildings are what dominate in New York.

Boston is The Hub, the ‘Athens of America’, filled with universities, and hospitals, and high technology.  NYC is the Big Apple, the largest city in the country, home of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, high finance and advertising and the fashion industry.  Personally, parts of New York really scare me--especially midtown Manhattan which seems to vibrate, where things are constantly flashing at you (especially, especially Times Square).  

Both cities are walkable and bikeable and have fairly good public transportation.  (Although the T in Boston shuts down at 1am.)  But Boston seems more human sized and New York can seem overwhelming.  There’s a lot to explore in both places and a lot to recommend both places and some pretty wonderful people in both places.

I like taking the Red Line across the Charles between Boston and Cambridge (or biking across the Mass Ave Bridge) and I like taking the Ferry at night and seeing Manhattan and Jersey City lit up--and, of course, the Statue of Liberty--and looking down the hill from Staten Island across the bay to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn.  Both places feel a little like home right now.

Even though I’m living in NYC now, I grew up around Boston and lived much of my adult life here and I imagine (although I can’t know) that someday I’ll come back and start a community here.  Meanwhile, I’m enjoying what both places offer.  I might as well take advantage of the situation.  It’s just what I have to deal with now.

Quote of the Day:  “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” ― Jane Jacobs

Population Explosion

I’m currently temporarily staying at the Acorn Community, having just attended the Community Conference (my fourth in a row--see Update 1: The Twin Oaks Community Conference, 9/9/12, Circling Around to the Communities Conference,  9/5/13, and Where's Weirdo?, 9/22/14 for my previous adventures).  The big discussion here at Acorn is about children and families.  Acorn just got two new kids living here and there are a couple of other families applying.  Twin Oaks has had children and families for a while but there haven’t been a lot of children or families at Acorn up until now.  So this is a very alive issue at Acorn at the moment.

But the real population explosion that I want to blog about is about all the new communities starting up recently, many of which want to be income-sharing egalitarian communities.  There’s one in Vermont, one right on Staten Island (where I’m now living), one in Baltimore, one in DC, one in Richmond, one in Louisa (which would make Cambia the fifth egalitarian community in Louisa County--after Twin Oaks, Acorn, Living Energy Farm, and Sapling), and one folks are trying to start in southern Virginia near the Appalachian Trail (not even mentioned in the article Pax wrote).  Most of these communities had folks at the conference.

This is great news for the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (see Egalitarian Communities, 10/22/08), which according to their current website,  only has six member communities and three Communities-in-Dialogue.  (Two of them, Sapling and The Mothership, also had representatives at the conference.  Last year they were brand-new--now they’ve been upstaged by all these new forming communities.)

So this is an exciting time for the egalitarian communities movement  I’ll be interested to see where all of this new community building energy goes.  Even if only a little over half of the newly starting communities make it, that would still be four new communities for the FEC.  And I still want to work on growing another one in New York, and maybe some in other places (like the Boston area) as well.  Maybe I’ll be part of one of the new ones next year.

Quote of the Day:  “If a community is seeking FEC membership …  that community may apply for Community-in-Dialogue (CID) status. For a community to be accepted as a CID, the Assembly need only be convinced that the community is actively working toward meeting the membership criteria, and that there exists a mutual desire for cooperation between the community and the FEC.

“...by becoming a member of the FEC, your community joins a group of like minded yet diverse communities that work together to try to make a better world.” - from the FEC website

The New New Yorker

Well, I’ve settled down.  In New York City, of all places.

I was talking with my brother on the phone and he was wishing me the best with my new community life at Ganas in Staten Island.

“Just promise me one thing,” he said.  “You won’t start rooting for the Yankees.”  (I think he was kidding.  I think. It wasn’t hard to promise though--I can’t imagine rooting for a team that wears pinstripes.)

I’m having trouble believing that I’m now a permanent resident of the Big Apple--the city that never sleeps, the largest city in North America.  It wasn’t where I planned to be and a big part of me is still wondering what I’m doing here.

I was involved several years back with someone who grew up in Brooklyn and I listened to her stories which to me seemed a mixture of the exotic and the familiar all at once.  Familiar because so much literature, so many movies, so many TV shows reference New York geography.  Now many of those places are part of my life.

I’ve been traveling all over the city. A few weeks ago we were doing stuff in Long Island City (sometimes abbreviated LIC--and LIC is part of Queens).  Then a couple of weeks ago, I met with a woman in East Harlem that wanted to buy property in the South Bronx.  Last week I met with another woman over in Bushwick, which I now know is part of Brooklyn.  After that I visited a food co-op in the East Village in Manhattan.  And this week I’m planning to visit a co-op house in Bed Stuy, which is also part of Brooklyn.

Daily I walk up the hill here  on Staten Island and look down on St George/Tompkinsville and across the Upper New York Bay over to Brooklyn.  The night sky of Virginia has been replaced with the lovely lights of Staten Island, Brooklyn, and once in a while, Manhattan.

And I get to take the marvelous Staten Island Ferry, passing the Statue of Liberty and with views of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Governors Island, Jersey City, Bayonne, and Staten Island.  The few times I’ve taken it at night is when I’ve gotten to see the the lights of all of these place reflected in the dark waters.

I’ve learned or figured out all sorts of strange things.  There are five boroughs here--most people know that--but only one of them, the Bronx, is part of the mainland.  Manhattan is an island, Brooklyn and Queens are part of an island, and, of course, Staten Island is an island.

One morning we were talking about a part of the Bronx even many folks here hadn’t heard of: Spuyten Duyvil, the place where the Hudson River meets the Harlem River.  Someone said it meant “Spitting Devil” in Dutch. (Wikipedia says, “Spouting Devil” or “Spewing Devil”.)  It’s strange things like that that make living in New York so interesting.

And now, one of the things I’m doing is that I’m busy figuring out how to establish a New York City residency.  It turns out I live here.  I really do.  Go figure.

Quote of the Day: “Other places may give you a sweet and soothing sense of level; but in New York there is always the feeling of ‘Something's going to happen.’ It isn't peace. But, you know, you do get used to peace, and so quickly. And you never get used to New York.” - Dorothy Parker

Becoming MoonRaven, Sleeping Submarine Style, and Other Tales from the Communes

I’ve been living down in Virginia since the beginning of this year, mostly at Twin Oaks and Acorn.  (And taking side trips with the Point A crew up to Baltimore and New York.)  As of the end of this month, I will be moving into the Ganas Community on Staten Island.  But I’ll miss living at the Virginia communes.  They are, in many ways, the flagships of the income sharing communities movement in the US.  Here are some stories and reflections from my nearly three months here.

As many readers may have guessed, my real name isn’t MoonRaven (or Moon--first name--Raven--last name, as I’m listed on gmail).  I used the name, beginning over ten years ago, because I wanted to remain anonymous on the internet.  It’s the name Paxus at Twin Oaks first knew me as, because I would comment on his blog using it.  When I finally met him in person, I told him my real name and he said he preferred to think of me as MoonRaven because it was more poetic.  

When I moved down to the Virginia communities in January to help him with his Point A project, Pax asked if I’d go by that name.  My real first name is quite common and people at the communes often take new, exotic names--partly to avoid confusion with other people who have the same mundane names.

So I agreed to go by MoonRaven down here and that’s what people know me as at Twin Oaks and Acorn these days. I’m even considering keeping it when I move to Ganas in a few weeks.  Ironically the name I’m using on this blog and elsewhere on the internet to cloak my identity, has now become the name I’m using day to day--I’m getting getting used to people saying “Hey MoonRaven”.  In a way, now I’ve become MoonRaven and left the name I was born with behind.

When I came down to Virginia in January, Pax and I decided I’d stay at Twin Oaks for a while.  There was no visitor program until the end of the month and so I stayed in Aurora, the lovely visitors cabin that I stayed in during my two previous visitor periods.  However, ‘visitor’ has a particular meaning at TO.  It means you are part of the visitor program.  Since I wasn’t part of the program this time, I was a ‘guest’, which means a TO member hosts you, and I was welcome to stay at Aurora until the next visitor program started.  When it did, I moved over to Acorn, which does not have a visitors cabin.  

When I stayed at Acorn the first time, it was September and I stayed in a tent.  Last time I was here I got lucky and was able to stay in the new seed building.  This time I’ve been staying in a small building that Acorn has been using to house visitors, guests, and interns.  

I didn’t get my own room this time.  The building I’m staying in is one big room where someone has built a wall of bunks for people to sleep in.  I imagine it being the way that sailors sleep in bunks in a submarine.  There can be as many as five other folks sleeping around me--and one night I think we might have had six since there was also one person sleeping on a couch that someone moved into the place.  For a few nights recently, I was the only one sleeping in the building, but last night I think there were three other folks sleeping there besides me.

Both Twin Oaks and Acorn are farming communities and both communities grow food.  They also both have animals.  Twin Oaks has chickens and a herd of dairy cows.  Acorn has chickens, and goats, and pigs, and some rabbits, and a stray cow that wandered over and looks silly amidst the goats, and two dogs named Horus and Odin, and an indeterminate number of little cats (one of which regularly tries to sneak into the bunkhouse I’m sleeping in).

Aside from farming, Acorn’s one business and concern is the seed business.  Twin Oaks, on the other hand, is very diverse.  Besides hammocks and tofu (their main businesses) they also doing indexing for books (something that dates back to their early days) and sell ornamental flowers.   One of their more interesting sources of income comes from a nearby college that got a fancy arena that can have several different kinds of flooring, depending on the type of event they want to host.  They’ve hired a team from TO to change the flooring regularly.  

And besides tofu, Twin Oaks also makes tempeh, something I’ve participated in on occasion.  They steam soybeans and then sprinkle a culture on the beans.  Then someone (and I’ve done this) needs to spend several minutes working (nearly kneading) the mold spores into the beans (inoculating them).  The beans are then put in little bags which will be kept warm until the mycelium grow and the beans ferment.

At Acorn, mostly what I’ve done is pack seeds and pick seeds.  Packing seeds involves weighing out a measured amount and putting it in a packet which is then sealed.  I’m given instructions to do this for some number of packets ranging from six to four hundred.  It’s a fairly repetitive task.  When I’m done the seeds are put in the seed room.  Picking seeds involves looking at orders people have sent or called in and going into the seed room and walking around finding the seeds and rubber banding together all packets of seeds that make up an order.

Ironically, the work that I’ve been doing most often the last few days is washing dishes.  Like any community Acorn provides meals and people dirty dishes.  This week there have been a lot of people away and the usual dishwashers were gone--and no one signed up to do dishes.  I volunteered a few times.  Dishwashing is particularly daunting here because, unlike Twin Oaks or Ganas, it’s pretty much a solo task.  One meal can be eaten by twenty to forty people, plus cooking equipment and miscellaneous dishes and cups from people snacking.  

If no one does the dishes after a meal (which is what was happening), it means the dishes begin piling up in the dish room.  I was ending up cleaning a good twenty-four or more hours worth of people’s dishes on a couple of occasions.

And, of course, my main focus has been working on Point A projects with my comrades Paxus and Triple Threat Tony.  We’ve been having breakfast meetings where we lovingly grump at each other and divide up the tasks.  One of my latest task lists begins with my first task (sent by TTT): do “not do any more dish shifts”.

I will miss working face to face with these two folks.  I’ll continue working with them by email after I move to NYC, but it won’t be the same.  And I know I’ll need to come down here again, since I think of this place as the heart of a movement towards working cooperatively, collectively, together.

Quote of the Day:  “It amazes me how difficult it is for people to think in terms of collective phenomenon.” - Evelyn Fox Keller

A Community Grew on Staten Island

I'm currently on Staten Island, a borough of New York City, visiting the community of Ganas.  (I mentioned this was going to happen in my last post, Building Urban Communities.) I got here last on Tuesday and quickly settled in. I've been attending the planning meetings  that they have most mornings.  My name is on a waiting list to get into Ganas, but I have no idea how long that will be. 

Ganas has been around for 35 years.  It was formed around the idea of 'Feedback Learning', a process that they pioneered, which sometimes happens in the planning meetings.  As far as I can tell, the idea is that they don't hold back on their feedback to you with the idea that feedback can make a difference--with feedback you can change your behavior.  Ganas claims to have only four rules: 1) No violence to people or things, 2) No free rides (everyone is required to work and/or pay their way), 3) Nothing illegal (including drugs), and 4) All criticisms are supposed to be brought up in public meetings where they can be addressed.  This last rule (sometimes called 'no non-negotiable negativity') is intended to prevent people from private griping, talk that can be damaging to the community--especially if the community can't deal with it.  Anyone breaking any of these rules can be asked to leave.

There are about 75 people living here.  Similar to Twin Oaks, there are a bunch of different buildings (I think it might be seven but maybe six or eight) and most people have their own rooms (although some couples share a room).  Some people have been here since the beginning--and some people have just arrived recently.  There's a lot of diversity here.

There is also a core group of ten people who 'run' things, although they do it with a lot of input from others who come to the planning meetings and offer feedback.  Ganas describes itself as being several 'populations': the core group, an 'extended core' (the people who come to the meetings and are otherwise more involved) of perhaps 25 folks, and another maybe 35 people who live here but are not very involved with the community as such.  And that's fine with everyone as long as everybody abides by the four rules

Ganas is located in a rather urban area of Staten Island.  From the street the Ganas houses don't look that different from the other houses, but in the back the yards of a bunch of the houses that are next to each other (and one on the next street that's in back of them) are all interconnected.  The community tries to keep a low profile and not appear different from their neighbors.

The community owns three businesses in St. George/Tompkinsville, the area of Staten Island that the ferry from Manhattan lands at.  All three businesses are called Everything Goes, but one is a vintage/used clothing store, another sells furniture, and the third is a bookstore/cafe.  Unlike Twin Oaks or Acorn, there is no requirement that visitors work while here (and I suspect that most don't) but someone found out how much I like books and so I've been volunteering at the bookstore (giving me something to do while I'm here), cleaning, pricing, and shelving books.  I'm enjoying the work.

The businesses support the community in several ways.  One way is that most people here are required to pay a fee, which includes rent, food, utilities, toiletries, etc.  The workers at the businesses are almost all Ganas members and their 'pay' is usually a deduction from the fee (plus a small stipend, I think).  At a recent planning meeting, the group went over how well each of the businesses is doing.  I think that the community is supported by a combination of the income from the businesses, the fees from those who don't work in the businesses, the income from visitors (like me), and people in the core group who work outside the community and use their income to support the community.

Right now, Ganas is at a point where things aren't working as well as they had and the community is pondering 'restructuring' itself.  One of the goals is to have the structures of the community better match the current reality.  A number of options have been proposed and the core group is debating what to do next, sometimes in open meetings.  It's an interesting time to be here.

It's also an interesting time to be in this area of Staten Island for a completely different reason.  If you've been watching the news, you've probably heard about the death of Eric Garner and the decision not to indict the cop who choked him.  His death occurred a couple of doors down from the bookstore that I've been working at and there have been a lot of protests and rallies happening near the store.

I'm here until this Thursday.   Then I'll be back in Boston until New Years.  After that, I hope to be off to Virginia to see if I can be part of the Point A project. (Again see my last post.)  I may be there until there's an opening in Ganas.  And one of my biggest reasons for wanting to be at Ganas is that it would give me a base in New York City to use in building a community here.


Quote of the Day: "Ganas people dream of developing open minds with which to talk together and understand each other better. We want to learn how to cooperate, care, share resources, and welcome those who want to join us. ... Most of us think of ourselves as a bonded, caring, hard working, fun loving, extended family." - from the Ganas website 

Where's Weirdo?

I just sent out an email to friends and family with the title "Where's Waldo?"  One of my cousins misheard me briefly and thought I said "Where's Weirdo?"  I liked that enough to use it for the title of the post.  It's fitting enough.

I'm currently in Hanover County, Virginia, in an extended stay with cousins.  I had a good time at the Communities Conference on Labor Day weekend and then came over here where I am helping my cousins set up a small business.  It's been fun and I'm planning on staying here until the middle of October.

My current plan is to return (very briefly) to Boston and then turn around and leave for New York City.  I'll be in NYC until the next week.  After that I'm hoping to be in Boston for a little while.

What's going on?  At the moment I'm in a situation that some of you will recognize from job hunting.  I'm pursuing several community leads and right now I'm focusing on two of them.  Like someone pursuing job leads, I'm going after both of them, in the hopes that one of them will end up as community for me.

The first is with some of the folks from the group that I was involved with this past year, trying to build community in upstate New York.  There are some people that I liked that are still trying get something together up there and I'm in dialogue with them.  We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, at the Communities Conference I met a woman who is trying to start an urban community in NYC and that's where I'll be going mid-October.  Again, I want to see how realistic this is.

So my two prospects at the moment are in NY state--one in urban NYC and the other in the more rural upstate.  Of course, neither of these may work out--and I may well end up pursuing something completely different.  I'll just have to wait and see.

All this leads to my current thinking on community. I now believe strongly that it needs both a clear mission and vision and strong, positive connections among the members.

The group I was part of in upstate NY had a very compelling vision and a direction I really believed in, but the organizer wasn't good with interpersonal skills and ended up discouraging and alienating folks.  My cousins, who I'm currently staying with, are wonderful people and the energy here is very positive and encouraging.  This house is a lovely, loving environment.  I really hope I can bring the kind of positive energy they have here to whatever community I end up with. However, this is suburban America (far from simple and sustainable) and while I'm enjoying being here for now, this isn't anywhere I'd want to live long term.

What I wish is that I could take the kind of strong vision of the NY group and merge it with the loving positive energy my cousins have here.  I think a bold clear vision and a very supportive atmosphere are what a community needs in order to have a good chance of success.

Of course, having that loving positive atmosphere depends on having a core of people with those attitudes and a strong determination to remain positive no matter what is happening.  The vision is incredibly important but it can be developed and even borrowed from other sources in a way that basic attitudes can't.  How to find people who have those attitudes and can sustain a clear vision, that's the question.

I can see several things supporting all this from a more theoretical viewpoint.  First of all, Donella Meadows in her book Thinking in Systems (which I've written a bit about in my posts Leverage Points and Graphs of the Future, 2/15/12 and Thinking in Circles, 1/6/13) says that "...a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose."  Also, in my post on Equality and Leadership (10/2/08), I talked about Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey arguing that leadership functions could be broken down into two major catagories: 'Task Functions' and 'Morale Functions' and that in order to survive any group needs to pay attention to both.

Now I have some visceral examples of all this.  The elements of a community are the people, but it's not a community without the interconnections and these need to be paid attention to.  This is Kokopeli and Lakey' Morale Functions, and it's what my cousins excel at.  But it's not enough.  A group, a system, a community needs a function or purpose.  This is what the Task Functions address.  The NY group was a clear example of focusing on the task and purpose and neglecting the connections, the relationships, the morale.  My cousins have the interconnections down pat, but I'm not on board with their purpose.  Now for something where we do both and we do them well.

So.  Knowing all this and doing it are two different things.  We'll see what's next.


Quote of the Day:  "The path is uncharted.  It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time drops away behind us.  It's like riding a train sitting backwards.  We can't see where we're headed, only where we've been.
"...Now is the only time.  How we relate to it creates the future. ... What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now." - Pema Chödrön

Acorn, Again

I just got back from spending three weeks at the Acorn Community in Virginia.   Faithful readers (if I have any left) might remember that I began my community-seeking travels there back in September of 2012, a year and a half ago.  (See my posts entitled Update 2: The Acorn Community, 9/14/12, and Update 3: Life on the Farm, 9/23/12.)  At that time I went exploring the possibility of joining Acorn as a member.  This time I went for completely different reasons.

I'm currently involved with a group exploring building a community in the Hudson Valley of New York (at some point I will blog about this--hopefully when it's clearer what we are doing), and went to Acorn for several reasons.

The first is that I'd like to see our community become part of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities.  (I wrote a little bit about the FEC in my post on Egalitarian Communities, 10/22/08--basically these are secular income-sharing communities.)  The FEC was having its Assembly (a gathering of member communities) at Acorn this year and I came as an unofficial representative of our group.  (Unofficial because, although I'm not the only one in our group that hopes we can eventually be part of the FEC, we haven't come to any agreement about what kind of community we will be.)

Full FEC members  prior to this meeting, were Acorn, Twin Oaks (I've written a bunch about TO, including  Real Models 1:Twin Oaks, 9/30/10, Update 6: Life at Twin Oaks, 12/4/12, and Snow, Darkness, and Fire, 3/13/13), East Wind (in southern Missouri--I've never visited there but I hear interesting stories about them), Sandhill (in northern Missouri, I posted on them as Sandhill Farm, 6/8/13), The Midden (an urban community in Columbus, Ohio that I've never visited but would like to someday), and the Emma Goldman Finishing School (in Seattle, Washington).  All of these communities sent delegates except Emma Goldman.

There were also delegates from a bunch of other communities that were either Communities in Dialogue (and wanting to be full members) or communities wanting to be Communities in Dialogue.  These included Living Energy Farm (Which I wrote about as Update 7: Living Energy Farm, 12/8/12), the Possibility Alliance (I wrote about them in The Possibility Alliance, 6/11/13), Sapling (a new community--an offshoot from Acorn--just starting in Louisa county, and located halfway between Acorn and Twin Oaks), and CRIChouse (a community in California).  There were also some presentations from a project that a couple of folks at Acorn are doing to create urban communes along the East Coast, a project that they're calling 'Point A'.  (I briefly alluded to this in my last post, A Long Pause, where I mentioned getting into dialog with someone wanting "to create urban activist communities."  This was second reason I was at Acorn.)

Some highlights from the few sessions that I attended is that Living Energy Farm is now a full member, and Sapling, CRIChouse, and the Possibility Alliance are all now Communities in Dialogue.  Unfortunately, the FEC has not (as of this writing) updated their website to reflect all these changes. Hopefully this will change soon.  I'm personally excited that the FEC is growing--hopefully, in a few years, it may include the community I'm part of starting, and maybe a few urban communes coming out of Point A as well. (Point A folks are hoping to have their first communities up in running some time in 2015.)

Some of my other reasons for being at Acorn were to catch up with some of what was going on down in Louisa county (I got to find out more about Sapling and the current state of Living Energy Farm, for example),  to see how things were going at Acorn itself (after two major fires in the last year--see my posts on Snow, Darkness, and Fire, 3/13/13, and Issues in Community: Recruitment, 11/11/13, for a bit about these--and some major new construction, I wanted to see how they were doing), getting a hit of community living in a well functioning community, and learning some skills about rural living from living in a rural community.

I'm pleased that Acorn is doing well.  The building I stayed in and worked in didn't exist the last time last time I was there.  It's called the Seed Palace and, although it isn't finished, it's in pretty good shape.  Heartwood, site of the arson attempt, was in pretty good shape as well.  It, too, is still a construction zone, but they were finishing rebuilding the kitchen and were just starting to use it while I was there.  (The steel building, site of the first fire, was apparently only cleaned out and reused, even though it's not in very good shape.  It's mostly used for storage and what I heard is that it leaks but they have simply thrown tarps over stuff stored in the leaky areas.)

As for my plans to do things, I had been sick before I arrived and discovered that the more I did, the sicker I got.  Although I was able to help briefly with the goats there and got to feed a baby calf, mostly I worked with the seeds.  Acorn runs a major seed business (Southern Exposure Seed Exchange) and I ended up doing a lot seed work--packing seeds, picking seeds, counting seeds, etc.  It wasn't very strenuous work, so that's how I ended up spending lots of my time there.

Overall, I'm glad I went.  I talked with a bunch of folks there about our community endeavor and got some good feedback.  I was also able to do some outreach, posting a flyer at Acorn, and sending flyers to be posted at Twin Oaks, Sandhill, East Wind, and the Possibility Alliance.  And it was good to get another taste of well functioning community.


Quote of the Day: "Being a thriving anarchist community (and consequently not having any bosses or supervisors) we are necessarily committed to a culture of personal responsibility; effective and healthy communication; and being serious about getting done what needs to get done on our farm. We are fairly hard-working ... We enjoy the hard work because it is our livelihood (that which provides us with direct connection to the healthy, cruelty & exploitation free food that we grow and nurture; as well as our shelter which we build), rather than a job which has no meaningful connection to that which we truly value in life and only provides money to buy things which we have no insight into or connection to.  Its the difference between making a life and making a living."  - from the Acorn website

Circling Around to the Communities Conference

Folks following my journeys over the past year may remember that I started my travels when I left the group house I started the year before and went to the Twin Oaks Communities Conference (see my post entitled Update 1: The Twin Oaks Community Conference, 9/9/12).  I spent the last couple of weeks in Virginia, spending a week with cousins that I love, then a couple of days at Twin Oaks proper (working on gardening, food prep, kitchen help, and, naturally, some of the preparations for the conference), before spending the weekend at the conference.  I thought attending the conference again was a fitting way to finish the year long cycle.

This year, three of the people from the group in NY that I'm currently exploring building community with joined me.  Friday night began with dinner, an award ceremony for Ira Wallace (a long time communitarian and one of the pillars of the Acorn community), an exercise on exploring the reasons for joining community, and an introduction to Transparency Tools.  I found the Transparency Tools to be a particularly useful set of exercises.

On Saturday, our community presented during the 'Meet the Communities' and I got to network with folks from other communities.  I took workshops on 'Permaculture in Community' (which focused on applying permaculture principles like 'Design from Patterns to Details' and 'Use Small and Slow Solutions' to community building and living--one point the presenter put out was that "Human communities are a great example of renewable and regenerative resources") and 'Zones of Intimacy' (which applied the permaculture concept of building in 'zones' to human relationships, with zone 0 being the self, zone 1 described as 'marriage'--not only to people but to whatever or whoever is of primary importance to you, zone 2 as 'Strong Allies'--those folks that you can count on and who can count on you, zone 3 as your 'Affinity Group'--your real friends, zone 4 as aquaintances or--as the presenter said--'semi-strangers', and zone 5 being absolute strangers).  Both workshops were facilitated by self-described activists from Earthaven Ecovillage.

On Sunday I took a morning workshop on 'Embodied Intimacy', which was great, but left me wanting to do less brief workshops on intimacy and more time building real long-term intimacy.  In the afternoon I went to an 'Open Space' workshop on 'Polyamory 301' with Paxus Calta where he and I ended up rehashing the dialogue we had on his blog about 'egalitarian relationships'.  Our group stayed for the 'Closing Circle' on Sunday and then left to head north.  The circle ended with a powerful chant that I later found out was from the Rainbow Gatherings:

We are circling
Circling together
We are singing
Singing our heart song
This is family
This is unity
This is celebration
This is sacred

Quote of the Day:  "I think that there are two extreme philosophies of community building. The first is the Field of Dreams Model: if you build it (buildings, infrastructure, gardens) they (community members) will come. The second is the Take Care of the Relationships Model. The relationships between the people building the community are the most important thing, and the strength of the community depends on the strength of these relationships and their ability to successfully work through conflicts. If the relationships are strong, any other problem is manageable by the group. ... I think that the elements of the Relationships Model tends to get overlooked more frequently than the elements of the Field of Dreams Model. People get excited about a shared vision and shared values, and in all the excitement this vital piece can get overlooked; often with detrimental results down the line." - Paxus Calta

Nine Communities, Many Thoughts

As of the moment, I feel like I'm done my community touring for a while.  I started off, as you might remember, at the Communities Conference at the beginning of last September.  I went right to the Acorn community after the conference, to begin a three week visit.

Now, ten months later, while I still intend to end the year with another Communities Conference, I feel like I'm done otherwise.  At this point, I've checked out nine different communities, two of which are barely up and running (the community I visited in Pennsylvania and Living Energy Farm), one of which had just ended before I got there (Skyhouse), and six up and functioning communities (from the six year old Still Waters Sanctuary/Possibility Alliance to the forty-six year old Twin Oaks--not to mention Acorn, Dancing Rabbit, Red Earth Farms, and Sandhill).

I did three-week visits at Acorn and Dancing Rabbit and two three-week visits at Twin Oaks. I spent nearly five weeks in Pennsylvania with the couple trying to build a community there and I've done three work days at Living Energy Farm.  I've done tours of Sandhill, Red Earth Farms, and the Still Waters Sanctuary, and I talked with three different people involved with Skyhouse about it (and ate several meals in the building, which is still around).

What have I learned from all this?  First, that community comes in all sizes and flavors--from the hundred folks at Twin Oaks and the seventy at Dancing Rabbit, to midsized communities like thirty-person Acorn, to smaller communities like Red Earth Farms, the Still Waters Sanctuary, and Sandhill.  However, small communities can have it rough--the community in Pennsylvania hasn't really started because it's just the couple that are starting it and Living Energy Farm hasn't really got going because it was also mostly two people (with a bunch of interns).  Similarly, a good part of why Skyhouse fell apart was because it shrank away.

Most of the communities that I visited were rural communities but I have a soft place in my heart for urban communities like the one in Pennsylvania.  (In the nineties I started an urban community that lasted five years.  It also fell apart partly because of the small number of people involved.)  Twin Oaks, Acorn, and Sandhill are all income-sharing communities, as was Skyhouse and hopefully Living Energy Farm will be.  The Still Waters Sanctuary runs on a 'gift economy', Dancing Rabbit has various forms of entrepreneurship (or, as I put it, reinvented capitalism), and Red Earth Farms is homesteads that all run individually.  The folks I visited in Pennsylvania were also trying to do things on the gift economy.

Each community had it's own tale to tell and lessons to be learned from it.  From Twin Oaks I learned if you grow a community large enough, it can last fifty years or more. (At this point I'm sure it will be going strong for its fiftieth anniversary.  It could fall apart--as could anything--but I think it would take a while if it did.)  I also learned that over that time systems will evolve in their own way and may not turn out as anyone would have intended--but may work very well anyway.  From Acorn I learned the importance of persistence (they were down to a couple of folks at one point, but one of them--Ira Wallace--wasn't willing to give up) and the importance of community support (the other thing that got them through was having Twin Oaks nearby).  From Sandhill I learned that persistence can pay off unexpectedly.  After hanging in as a very small community for over twenty years, they persuaded Dancing Rabbit to build an ecovillage near them--and eventually they had a community of communities grow around them.  Likewise, from Dancing Rabbit I learned the importance of building where there was already a community, and Red Earth Farms is even stronger for having two communities nearby. Living Energy Farm is also benefitting (as they struggle to build) from having two large, well functioning communities nearby.  (In spite of their problems, I'd be surprised if they didn't succeed with Twin Oaks and Acorn supporting them.)  The location far from any other communities is one of the difficulties that the crew in Pennsylvania is struggling with, and I'm not clear whether the Still Waters Sanctuary is close enough to the Rutledge communities to really benefit from them.  On the other hand, Skyhouse had Dancing Rabbit all around it, but without the internal connections that wasn't enough.  (In fact, Dancing Rabbit ended up taking energy away from Skyhouse.)

The biggest lesson I've learned is that there's many different kinds of communities out there and communities can be quite different and still function very well.  There's also many wonderful people in those communities and I'm glad that I got to know some of them.  (These were in the communities that I did three week visits at--Acorn, TO, and DR--and obviously not the ones I had just had brief tours of.)

I'm glad I visited these nine communities.  Now I want to live in a community.


Quote of the Day:  "...as long as I can remember I've had a desire to make some difference in the world.  But the world is one great, big, hard place to make a difference.  Community is a small enough chunk that you can make a difference.  And it also is a good place from which you can, from time to time, try to make a difference in some bigger subset of the world." - Ira Wallace

Thoughts as I Leave Dancing Rabbit

I'm pretty glad I came here.  I've gotten numerous tick bites and had to share my tent with ants, spiders, and pill bugs, but overall the experience was positive.  In addition to workshops on DR's ecological agreements, consensus decision making, deepening communication, alternative construction, alternative energy, and, of course, land use planning, we've also had workshops on permaculture, humanure, their co-op fee structure, and their alternative currency.  We had a session devoted to 'inner sustainability', which is their term for various techniques to keep yourself going--including NonViolent Communication, ReEvaluation CoCounseling, and Restorative Circles.  We later learned more about Restorative Circles in a discussion group about conflict resolution at Dancing Rabbit.  There was a useful session on the whole communities movement (with a tool that I liked to compare communities as well as figure out what you're looking for) and discussion session about 'community economics' which tied together a bunch of the earlier workshops (like co-op fees and alternative currency) and provided a good framework for looking at how people manage at DR.  I liked the blend of focus on technical stuff (construction, energy, land use, and economics) with ways of connecting and taking care of yourself (communication, conflict resolution, and inner sustainability).  Obviously some people here are aware that there's more to community than building houses and growing food.

We also had a bunch of work parties--some of which were cancelled due to the wet weather and other problems, but we did get to help finish a living roof, help build a straw bale wall, help mulch pathways in a vineyard, help stake out pasture land, and help work on the foundation to someone's house.  The hands on work was a nice supplement to all the lectures and workshops.  I also attended a men's group, several Quaker meetings (which, for some reason, they hold here on Saturdays), and a Five Rhythms night of dance and music.

The people at DR were very welcoming and helpful.  We were hosted at different people's houses for dinner and lunch and so got a chance to talk with many of the folks here.

I did get to talk with Tony Sirna about what happened to Skyhouse, the income sharing community that was part of Dancing Rabbit until last January.  He told me that there were three other people he'd been doing it with for years.  At one point, one of them (another founder who Tony was close with) left to go on to other things, and when the couple that was left decided they wanted to raise a child outside DR, it left Tony to start a new group.  He told me that he really likes income sharing communities but didn't have the energy to keep Skyhouse going because his focus right now is on building DR and guiding it through the next stage in its process.  So, right now, he is renting rooms in Skyhouse and there is no income sharing community at DR.

Which brings me to my biggest difficulty with DR.  Dancing Rabbit is not an income sharing community.  As I wrote in my post on Red Earth Farms (6/4/13), "at DR there's a strong sense of 'this is mine' and 'I need to make sure I'm being paid for what I do'".  It can be a bit much at times.  The alternative currency discussion focused on their electronic currency and made me feel like they were trying to reinvent capitalism.  Still, I do believe there is a need for many different types of community--I don't believe that income sharing is the only way to go.  The problem, as it became clear in the discussion on community economics is that it makes it easy for some people (especially those with jobs where they can 'telecommute') to live here because they have worked hard to make the place affordable, but for others, they are barely making a living trying to work from the land here.  Unfortunately, they seem to have reinvented economic classes as well.  I heard from some people who talked about who had power here and who didn't--and made me aware that those who were barely scraping by did not have time to be involved in decision making groups, even if those groups are open to anyone (at least in theory), let alone take any leadership. 

Please, don't let that last paragraph turn you off of Dancing Rabbit.  Like any other community, DR is a work in progress.  None of the communities I've visited has been even near perfect and I'm very glad they all exist.  In fact, because DR is still growing and early on in their community building, I think I've learned more (at least from the point of view of someone who wants to build community) here than at any of the other communities I've visited.

Which leads me to my last insight.  I have made some nice connections here and it feels really weird to be leaving never to return.  I had thought of visiting other communities (like Earthaven in North Carolina and Heathcote in Maryland) and now I'm rethinking that.  Twin Oaks and Acorn were fine, because I intend to keep returning there, but I don't want to just hop all over the communities circuit--perpetually visiting places and leaving.  Besides, I hope I will be actually building community with others soon.  (More on this in the future.)  It's good I got to see DR, Red Earth, Sandhill, and the PA, but I've had enough of traveling.  I'm headed home.  I will be going to the Communities Conference again at the end of the summer but aside from that, I hope to settle down for a while.


Quote of the Day: "In addition to being a wonderful home for us, DR is a model for social change. Outreach and education are integral to our mission. Rather than isolating ourselves completely from the mainstream, we promote DR as a viable alternative. We enjoy sharing discoveries and ideas of sustainable living with people who have a wide variety of lifestyles." - from the Dancing Rabbit website

First Week at Dancing Rabbit

This is the beginning of my second week at Dancing Rabbit.  DR is an
'ecovillage' in the small town of Rutledge, Missouri--deep in the
northeast part of the state.  As I've written before, it's one of three intentional communities in Rutledge.

And it's by far the biggest--there's over seventy people here, and that
includes a good number of children.  (Not as many older folks as Twin Oaks
but I'm sure there's a few in their sixties and one of the newest members
is seventy, I believe.)

I'm here with a visitor's group that started off with nine adults (and a
one year old), but we just lost someone who had only signed up for a one
week visit. I'm living in a tent, which has been challenging--especially
during some really rainy weather--but it hasn't leaked much, so I'm happy.

I feel like I'm learning so much being here.  We've had an orientation
tour of DR, and later a longer walk exploring their land, and we've done
workshops on their ecological agreements, consensus decision making, and deepening communication.  On Thursday we did back to back workshops on alternative construction and alternative energy complete with being able to look at examples of different ways that construction and energy is being done at DR.  DR has dozens of amazing buildings, no clothes dryers or flush
toilets, four communal cars for everyone, and lots of very friendly people.


Quote of the Day:  "At Dancing Rabbit we strive to be ecologically and
socially conscientious--to put our ideals into practice, and to have the
strength and patience to work hard for their achievement."  - from Dancing
Rabbit's 'Building Sustainable Community' brochure

Off to Missouri

As I said a couple of posts ago, I won't remain settled in Boston for long.  (See Life Erupts, 5/1/13)   I've gotten into the visiting program that I applied for at Dancing Rabbit and I'll be leaving Boston Sunday, May 19th (less than two weeks from now) and getting to Missouri the next night.

While I've talked about this before (see my post on Communities of Communities, 6/9/12), I'm going to recap my community info so you don't have to look so hard.  If you do want more info on this, you should look up that old post. Dancing Rabbit (DR) is one of three intentional communities in the small town of Rutledge, MO--Sandhill (a small income sharing community that's been in Rutledge since the 1970s) and Red Earth Farms (a homesteading community that split off from DR and is located right across the road) are located nearby.  But DR, with 70 or so members, is by far the largest.

I'm going to DR, first of all, because I want to learn how it works. Along with Earthaven in North Carolina, it's one of the best known rural ecovillages.  I also want to see and understand the connections and cooperation between the three Rutledge communities.  What I've seen makes me think of the way that Twin Oaks, Acorn, and Living Energy Farm work together.  I've seen that first-hand, now I'm going to get to check out how they do it in the 'Show-Me' state.

While I'm out there, I may also visit the Possibility Alliance, a community forty miles away in La Plata (which is also where the train station is).  I haven't arranged that yet so we'll see if that happens.

Meanwhile, I'm learning to take life as it comes and not plan too much, because I'm never quite sure what comes next.  And so the journey continues...


Quote of the Day: "...it seems to me that knowing where we are going encourages us to stop seeing and hearing and allows us to fall asleep....
"Not knowing where you are going creates more than uncertainty; it fosters a sense of aliveness, an appreciation of the particulars around you....
"The truth is that we are always moving toward mystery and so we are far closer to what is real when we do not see our destination clearly." - Rachel Naomi Remen

Lessons from Pennsylvania

Sorry about the long delay in posting.  (over a month, I know.) I'm back in the Boston area after many adventures. (Quite a few of them involving travel--my most recent was trying to return to Boston last Friday when the city and the public transit system were shut down.  If you've been following the news you know why.)

I just spent a month in Pennsylvania.  I learned a lot of things in my time there.  I worked on projects involving hugelkultur and sheet mulching.  One of the people there has a very different method of doing humanure (see my post on Humanure, 1/10/13) involving newspaper.  It was a bit tricky but it was useful to learn.  I took a field trip to Lancaster to learn about the Amish and Mennonites.  I didn't actually go to any Amish locations but I did have an interesting conversation with a Mennonite man who had some insights into why the plain clothes (this was what the common people wore when the Amish were starting out--as opposed to the dress of the aristocracy) and why the Anabaptists (the ancestors of the Amish and Mennonites) and early Quakers were persecuted (the imperialists are always interested in getting rid of those who threaten their way of life).

I also gave a few presentations--one on sprouting (see my post on Sprouts!, 2/26/10) and another (of course) on intentional community.

A bigger learning was from watching these folks and how they were trying to set up something. It turned out not to be what I wanted and I'm not sure that they're actually going to get what they want (I'm not even sure they know what they want) but it makes some of the things that get in the way of building community much more apparent to me.

Probably the most important learning I had was about the ways I don't communicate clearly.  There was a bit of misunderstanding that happened and I could see how I contributed to much of it.   I did try to leave there well but I'm very clear that I need to work on some of my stuff if I'm going to build community (feedback that I got from others as well).  As one of my friends puts it, "Wherever you go, there you are."



Quote of the Day: "The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Snow, Darkness, and Fire

I am in the midst of my final week at Twin Oaks.  Much of the last few days has been spent recovering from the events of last week.

Last Wednesday it snowed here.  I had been wondering if I'd see any snow while I was in Virginia.  Well, we got six inches.  In the Boston area, that wouldn't mean much.  But here there aren't sidewalks or even paved roads.  (At least not within Twin Oaks.)  Everything is dirt roads and paths.  So the experience was quite different from six inches in the city.  To make things worse, it was a wet snow that brought down a lot of power lines.  We were without power for four days.

At first it was fun.  The first night without power, I walked to the far end of Twin Oaks--a place they call Emerald City.  But unlike the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, the road there wasn't paved with yellow bricks.  That night the road was a muddy, slushy mess.

But the stars here are beautiful at night--and the stars and snow kept things from getting too dark.  Four days later, though, the charm was wearing off.  Fortunately, there is a nice woodstove in the visitor's cottage, so we kept warm at night.  And there were lots of candlelight dinners.  And even with all the inconveniences we were very lucky.

Acorn, the community that I stayed at last September and seven miles down the road from here, was not so lucky.  They got their power back much sooner.  However, when the power went out, someone ran into one building to rescue some baby chicks that were being kept warm by an electric heater and apparently moved the heater to the wrong place. When the power came back on it started a fire that turned into an inferno that destroyed the whole building.  Very fortunately, this wasn't a building anyone lived in and no one was hurt--but there was thousands of dollars of damage, including their communal clothes supply and there was at least one automobile nearby that the heat of the fire literally melted the bumper.

Last Saturday, I did what I'm calling a communal trifecta.  A small group of us went over to Acorn briefly (so I got to see the damage firsthand and talk with some of the folks there) before we went on to Living Energy Farm for a work day there.  By Saturday much of the snow had melted, but Living Energy Farm (most of which isn't built yet) was a mud pit.  I was able to help with putting up a fence for an orchard there, but I returned a muddy mess.  Still, it was good to see some of what's going on in the other communities around here.

This Friday, I'll be leaving Twin Oaks and going to stay with a couple of my cousins (and their large and loving family) who live near Richmond.  Then next Monday I'll be off to Pennsylvania, for my next community adventures.


Quote of the Day: "To enter the courtyard at Twin Oaks is--sooner or later--to come face-to-face with the profundity of the utopian question.  Although that same question is everywhere, including wherever you are now, it is perhaps clearer on this commune in Virginia only because in our time several hundred of our contemporaries have totally committed a portion of their lives to wrestling with it in the context of these four-hundred and eighty-three acres." - Ingrid Komar

On the Road Again

Once again I'm setting off. 

My first stop on this next voyage will be another three week visit to Twin Oaks.  I'm going back for three reasons: 1) I like it there and want to soak in a well functioning, ongoing community, 2) While I'm there, I'll get a chance to catch up with stuff in the nearby communities of Acorn and--more importantly--Living Energy Farm, as well as checking in with someone at Twin Oaks who is trying to set up yet another community in the area, and 3) The visitors group attracts people who are interested in community.  Reasons 2 & 3 touch on my current goal and the reason I'm journeying again: I want to be part of building new communities.  (Living Energy Farm is a new and struggling community.  And as I'm trying to find people to build community with, the visitors group in one way to meet folks interested in community.)

I'm currently at Twin Oaks and will be hanging around here (working my 42 hour a week quota) until March 15th.  From there I will be going to visit relatives for the weekend and then off to Pennsylvania where I will explore the likelihood of building community there with the two people I had visited with last November.

My time in Pennsylvania is basically an indefinite stay.  I don't want to commit to anything at this stage because it's unclear what's going to happen there.  All I can say beyond this, is that I have backup plans, and have been joking about having backup plans for my backup plans.  Among other things I've been thinking about are returning to the Virginia communities and visiting another hub of communities that has developed in Missouri.  I've also got the next Communities Conference (at the end of the summer) in the back of my mind, whether I stay in Pennsylvania (as a way to find people for what might be developing there) or not (in which case I'd go there to network again).  As you might remember, that's where my voyages started last fall.

So, I'm traveling once again.  I have one more book review that I wrote while I was in Boston that I will post soon, and I hope to keep posting in my 'Issues in Community' thread because I have a bunch more that I want to cover--and I may have yet more from what I learn in this round at Twin Oaks and with the struggling folks in Pennsylvania.  Community isn't easy, but it's definitely worthwhile.


Quote of the Day: "A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving." - Lao Tzu

Beginning a New Year

With the first of January, the rest of the world catches up to me (see my post on #Beginning Again, 12/21/12, for more on this).  This is the beginning of a new year--and a year without much certainty.

At this point the only thing I have scheduled for myself is a return to Pennsylvania in March, to continue exploring community with the people there.  Hopefully, after a month or two, I'll have a clearer idea about whether I think this has the potential to build into long term community or not. Meanwhile, I'm trying to schedule another visit to Twin Oaks (see Update 6: Life at Twin Oaks, 12/4/12, for more on TO) in late February, which would also give me a chance to check up on the emerging communities down there.  (I should have a couple of chances to help out at Living Energy Farm--see Update 7: Living Energy Farm, 12/4/12--as well as being able to check on the progress of Chubby Squirrels--see Communities of Communities, 6/9/12, and Update 1: The Twin Oaks Community Conference, 9/9/12, for a bit about Chubby Squirrels.)

Beyond that, and especially the next month and a half, 2013 is wide open.  I do have a bunch of posts that I want to write and I'm hoping that my too much free time will give me the time to write them.  Hopefully my next post will be on Thinking In Circles, something I've been thinking a bunch about lately.  I've been reading some interesting books and hope to do a few book reviews.  Finally, I've got a series in mind I'm calling Issues in Community that will incorporate things that I've read, things I've learned through life, and new learnings from my travels this fall.

May the new year bring good things to you--and especially may it bring hope to a world sadly in need of it.


Quote of the Day:  "We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day." – Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Beginning Again

I never wrote my usual 'Samhain' post--I was too busy getting ready to go to Twin Oaks.  (Once we were there, ironically, we were immediately invited to a late Halloween party.)

Every year, also, I've written a post for the 'Yule', the Winter Solstice.  I think of this as the end of the year, the beginning of a 'time out of time', and the prelude to the new year (which I sort of celebrate with everyone on Jan 1st).  But this is the time, as the darkness reaches its deepest point and begins the turn back toward the light, that I celebrate.  A time for summing up the old year and thinking about the new.

This past year brought major changes to my life.  I abandoned my latest attempt at community and have become (by choice) homeless and jobless, a drifter, a nomad, and a couch surfer--as well as a community... well, some people have said, consultant, but I think that both glorifies and marginalizes what I'm trying to do.  I intend to be a real participant, a helper and supporter, of new and starting communities.  I'm looking at (as I explained in my last post) a time of traveling up and down (and back up and down) the east coast of the US, from MA to PA to VA and back.  A circuit-riding preacher of community, trying to live and learn what I'm also trying to teach.

Not what I was expecting at all, but in a way something that all my work on starting communities has prepared me for.  I'm hardly an expert on building community, but I've certainly learned a few things on the way and I really want to see more community arising.

And what does all this community stuff have to do with social change, social alchemy, the subject of this blog?

I see community as step one.  It's not the final goal, it's the foundation for creating social change, a little laboratory to try living differently.  I still believe strongly in simplicity, equality, and sustainability, I still think that the SLoBIND (starting Small and LOcal, and building the changes in a way that's Bioregional, Interconnected, Networked, and Decentralized) is the way to go, I still think the most important goal is to meet people's real needs.  I just think that community, for me, is the clearest way of beginning this.

So, here I am at the dark of the year, the beginning of winter, dreaming and scheming and getting ready for what might happen next.  My only definite plan at this point is returning to PA in March to see what I could be part of there, but there are several other things I'm playing with, that might or might not emerge.  At this point I also have a bunch of new resources I want to review and a small series that I hope to write for this blog on issues in community--things I've learned from my travels this fall and my experiences and learnings from others, that I think would be worth looking at.

Beyond that, who knows.  I certainly didn't expect to be where I am now and I certainly don't really know what the new year will bring.

Welcome Winter. Happy Yule everyone.


Quote of the Day: "Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance." - Yoko Ono

Update 8: Building New Communities

This will be the final post in my update series; I'm going to try to tie together much of what I learned and talk about my directions from here. 

When I was visiting at Acorn I began to realize that I didn't really want to settle down there and just be part of an established community.  I really enjoyed Acorn, and Twin Oaks even more, but by the time I visited TO I was sure that what I wanted was to be part of helping to build new communities.  (Which is why I didn't apply for membership there.) Acorn and Twin Oaks are wonderful, but I wanted to see more of them.  Both communities have population caps (Acorn doesn't want to grow beyond 30 members, TO beyond ninety-something) and both now have long waiting lists.

On the other hand, I have learned from my experiences.  I don't want to try to start another community.  Instead, I want to help others who are trying to start communities.

I am well aware that the majority of community start-ups fail.  I'm not sure what the numbers are, but let's pretend (for the sake of my argument) that ninety percent of new communities don't make it for more than a few years.  You can look at this two ways.  One is to say, 'Why bother? It's not likely to last very long.'  The other is to think, if we want to have more communities we're going to need to build a lot of them.  If nine out of ten of them don't succeed, then if we get a hundred new communities going, chances are ten of them are going to work and that's ten more new communities.

Someone at Twin Oaks confronted me with the arrogance and egotism of starting new communities (as opposed to just joining one).  Yet if no one started TO, she wouldn't be able to be there enjoying the place.  In fact, one of the founders, Kat Kinkade, helped start three successful communities: Twin Oaks, Acorn, and East Wind.

I'm trying to learn from people like Kat and from communities that are going strong about what works and what doesn't.  One person at Acorn told me that Kat's recipe for community was to grow it fast--get lots of people in and see what evolves.  Another person there suggested that, in order for a community to last, it needs at least five dedicated communitarians (and maybe more like ten).

Living Energy Farm (see my post of 12/8/12 about them) is an example of a community that I suspect will make it--mostly because it has the support of Twin Oaks and Acorn.  As I said in that post, it's rather desolate looking--but it makes me imagine what TO looked like when it started.  I'm also interested in Chubby Squirrels (which I've mentioned in my posts on Communities of Communities, 6/9/12, and The Twin Oaks Community Conference, 9/9/12) and I was able to be part of at least one discussion on it, but currently Paxus (who is the person wanting to build this) is in Europe and won't be back until January.

However, at the Communities Conference I also found out about a community in Pennsylvania that a couple of folks are trying to build, focusing on radical simplicity and eco-sustainability.  After my visit to TO, I went to the small city that they're living in and hung out with them for a week.  I really liked what they're trying to do, but I'm a bit skeptical that they can make it work.  Still,  it's intriguing enough that I'm planning to go back there in March and stay for at least a month or two to see if this could be a place I could help build.

In addition,  Vera (who runs the blog 'Leaving Babylon' and has been visiting the northern Missouri communities--Dancing Rabbit, Sandhill, Red Earth Farm, and the Possibility Alliance--again, see my post on Communities of Communities for more on them) has connected me with someone who wants to build an ecovillage in New England.  I'm planning on meeting with him next week and learning details.

When I told my brother-in-law that I might be spending my next little while traveling between New England, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, helping out with communities here and there, he said that I sounded like one of the old circuit-riding preachers.  I sort of feel like that, too.  It's not what I planned on, and I'd still like to settle down in an FEC style community in New England (if I can help one emerge), but meanwhile, I'm facing a life on the road for the foreseeable future.  I just think that if I can add my energy to some of these endeavors, it might make a difference.  I can only try.  Hopefully, I'll report here how things turn out.


Quote of the Day: "Living or working with people does not guarantee community; it takes intentionality and developed skills to build and maintain ongoing community." - Harvey Baker, Barbara Lee, and Jeanne Quinn

Update 7: Living Energy Farm

I've now been to Living Energy Farm (LEF) twice.  Once for a few hours on a Saturday when I was at Acorn and again for a few hours on a Saturday when I was at Twin Oaks.  It's a fairly desolate place.  The land had been clearcut a couple of years ago just before they bought the property and things are slowly growing back.  There wasn't much on it to speak of so they are building the place from scratch.  When I went there in September I pulled nails out of old boards they were hoping to reuse.  When I went in November, I helped shovel mulch into a pickup truck so they could use it for fruit trees on another part of the property.  They are trying to use as much cheap and recycled material as possible.

The goal at LEF is to be fossil fuel free and they have given themselves three years to build the infrastructure (using fossil fuels as necessary) before they plan to completely give them up.  Meanwhile, things there are sparce and spare; it's quite the contrast with Twin Oaks, for example, that's so organized and developed.  Then I think about how Twin Oaks probably looked forty years ago when they were just starting up.  The people working at LEF have a long way to go but they are pretty committed.

Living Energy Farm is one of the places that I'm thinking about putting some energy into.  It's a community with a good mission that's in a very early stage.  After working with Alexis (one of the principle organizers of the community) who was explaining that he appreciated all their interns and the help he was getting from them but also concerned that most of them were pretty unskilled, I asked him how he'd feel about having someone for an intern that was not only unskilled but old.  He looked right at me and said, "I'd take *you* as an intern."  I thought that was a really sweet thing to say--and I do hope to do an internship with them at some point and be part of building this fledgling community.  It will be really interesting to see what this place looks like in a couple of years.


Quote of the Day: "The Living Energy Farm is a project to build a community, education center, and farm that demonstrates that a fulfilling life is possible without the use of any fossil fuel. Our mission is to serve as an example and actively promote lifestyles and technologies that are truly sustainable, and to make these sustainable technologies accessible to all persons regardless of their income or social position." - Living Energy Farm's Mission Statement