LEF goes to AZ, Part Two

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post chronicling Living Energy Farm’s adventures as they went out to Arizona to install their solar systems on Navajo and Hopi reservations. Yesterday focused on the trip there–which was trickier than they expected. Today’s post focuses on the actual installations, which went very well.

On the Commune Life Facebook page, I wrote: “LEF finally is able to get to work. Here’s the first report with pictures:”

And here it is:

“In between installations, the LEF crew has time to post a Navajo joke:”

“And on to the second installation:”

“LEF goes on an installation binge–five installations in one day. Here’s some pictures and a story:”

“And here’s the story behind installation number five:”

“And here is the final post in Living Energy Farm’s saga of their road trip to Arizona to bring solar power to native folks there:”

Tomorrow, another question: “Art in Community–Is it a luxury or a necessity?”

LEF goes to AZ, Part One

Today begins the chronicling of an adventure. Living Energy Farm, a Virginia community that I have called ‘the environmental experimental station for the Louisa communes’, decided to take their solar-panel-and-nickel-iron-battery-system, which makes real off-the-grid living possible to the Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona. This was a long planned trip that turned into more of an adventure than even they could have expected.

We reposted their Facebook posts on our site–now I want to post them here with my (Raven’s) comments. The first post was February 28th, where I said: “Living Energy Farm has faced a bunch of challenges in their journey to install solar on Hopi and Navajo reservations, but they are now on the road:”

Here is their first post, right from their Facebook page:

Followed by my post “And here’s the Living Energy Farm crew after a night in Tennesee:”

And their:

But “In the next leg of their journey to Arizona and bringing solar to the Hopis and Navajo, the folks from Living Energy Farm run into an unexpected adventure:”

Then, they are almost there. “Meanwhile, the Living Energy Farm road trip adventure continues, with them almost making it to the reservation when a tire blows out with them in the middle of nowhere:”

Then, somehow, I missed this one. From the LEF Facebook page but not ours:

And then, “The LEF crew finally makes it to “the Rez”, but not without a casualty:”

I will end this segment here. Tomorrow, the installations!

Twin Oaks on Reddit

At the end of February, something interesting and unusual happened. Keenan Dakota, who lives at Twin Oaks, got on Reddit, which has an “Ask Me Anything” (abbreviated AMA) track, and said that he lived in an “…egalitarian, income-sharing community…” and was open to questions–and boy, did he get comments–well over nine thousand! This was the best educational opportunity that I have ever seen for the communes.

I did a post on here about it focusing on all the questions that he got that asked if the communes were cults, but I realize that I never posted anything directly about it here–although there were a couple of Facebook posts. So here are some bits from the FB posts, which give a little of the flavor of Keenan’s Reddit comments. First of all, the original FB post, which doesn’t say much:

It’s interesting to note that although this post reached 950 people (!) and got 290 ‘engagements’, there was only one comment.

I decided that it was so interesting that I published a second post with a few bits from Keenan’s actual Reddit comments:

Of course, this is only a very few of the comments, but at least it gives a flavor of this ground breaking bit of social media.

A Question of Cleanliness

So here is the next in my series of Facebook questions. Having lived in several types of communities (communes, co-ops, ecovillages, and at least one hybrid community) I noticed a re-occurring problem in all of them was caused by the fact that different people have different standards of cleanliness. Given that, how does a community set a standard. Here is what I wrote at the end of February:

While there weren’t a lot of responses to the question, I thought that what there was displayed the spectrum of where different people in the communes fall.

I realized that I never added my own comment–I will just say that at this point, I have decided that I am willing to clean up after people.

One of the differences between co-ops and communes that I often point out to folks is that co-ops have chores and communes have work. I believe that in a co-op living situation, everyone puts in a fee which they take from whatever they get from working outside the home. Since most people (and everyone in many co-ops) have outside work, the only way to get things like cleaning done is to make them chores.

In a commune, since all money is equal, the currency is the work you do, and all work is valued, money earning or not. So cleaning is just another type of work. I happily clean up after people because I view this as my job, just as other people are working hard doing other things to keep the commune going. If I start feeling resentful, I simply think of all the things that they are doing that benefit me, and I see all that I am doing as just another piece of that work. And I happily take on cleaning up the messes as the work that I have chosen to do.

Twin Oaks Wastewater

Meanwhile, at Twin Oaks, the treatment of the wastewater from their tofu factory was (and to some degree, even now, is) an ongoing saga.

All I wrote on our Facebook page was: ‘Here’s the latest on the Twin Oaks wastewater system:’

Here’s what they put on the Twin Oaks Facebook page: ‘TOFU WASTEWATER PROJECT. In this development there are 3 ponds, 2 big tanks, a storage building made from a shipping container, etc. Work on the project is nearing completion.

‘Tofu whey and wastewater will be processed here before land application. The whey is mostly liquid. Treatment here will involve raising the pH and reducing the organic content using aeration. The treated end-product will then be land applied when conditions are right for that or will be dispersed in an underground high-performance leach field when land conditions require.’

East Wind Nutbutters

And back to East Wind

They had a Facebook post about their nutbutter production. Here’s what I wrote on our Facebook page: ‘East Wind community’s main industry is manufacturing nut butters. Here’s a look inside at where they roast and mill the almond and cashew butter:’

And here’s what East Wind said:

Twin Oaks Roof Repair

Meanwhile, moving over to Twin Oaks.

Here’s what I wrote on the Commune Life Facebook page:  ‘At Twin Oaks, the work is repairing the roofs. Here’s three Oakers doing the work:’

And here’s what Twin Oaks put on the original Facebook post:

East Wind Installs a Grey Water System

This is another post from back in February (in a sense, it is a repost of a repost). While there has been a lot of focus on Twin Oaks problems with waste water, East Wind has been dealing with waste water as well.

When I posted it on Facebook in February, here is what I wrote:  ‘Big communities like East Wind and Twin Oaks are like little towns. Important things like grey water systems need to be overhauled from time to time. Here’s a picture from the new leech field that East Wind just put in:’

And here is their original Facebook post:

A Question of Couples

For the last Facebook question that I posted on the regular Friday posts, I chose to skip ahead and do the one on communes as family. I decided to skip the one that I wrote for Valentine’s Day about couples in community. (Wow. Doesn’t February seem so long ago now? It really was a different world back then.)

So, as I return to reposting things from Facebook on this blog, I thought that I would start with that question, romantic roses and all:

I didn’t get a lot of responses, but here are a four of them:

I did wonder why I got so few responses, whether people were burning out on the questions (a format that I recently abandoned) or this was a subject that folks weren’t interested in, or maybe just didn’t want to touch. I think that it’s interesting that there were two positive responses, one that I would see as neutral, and then, only the last one, looked at how coupling can fracture a community.

You are also invited to respond. I am still curious about the pros and cons of couples in communes.

We’re baaack… for a month…

by Raven Glomus

For those of you who might have been missing this blog, we will be back and very active for the month of June.  How active?  I intend to have something every day this month.

How can that be?  Wasn’t I complaining about burning out from having to put stuff out three times a week?  Well, yes, but this is completely different.  I have been making sure (with a lot of help from Theresa) that there is content every day on Facebook.  This will continue.  What I am doing on this blog will be just (mostly) reposting stuff that is on Facebook (going back to February) that seems interesting and hasn’t been on this blog.  In a sense, this is a continuation of what I had been doing with the Friday posts (the Facebook question reprints).

So this is a labor of love almost totally for all of you who follow this blog and are not (and very probably don’t want to be) on Facebook.  I am totally sympathetic with this.  I hate Facebook.  I am only on it because it offers a platform that has a much higher viewing rate than this blog.  So it is my pleasure to feed back the work that we have been doing there to this blog so anti-Facebook folks can read it, enjoy it, and learn from it.

I am only promising this for the month of June.  We will see where this blog goes from there, but, hey, enjoy this month–as well as the warmer weather (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere).

(PS I will not be signing all these posts, but when I say, “I”, I mean me, Raven.)