Communard Interview #8: Rowan Dakota

Rowan was born and raised at Twin Oaks Community.  His father is Keenan Dakota who I also interviewed–hopefully I will publish that interview later.  The two of them are  traveling around the country.  They visited Glomus Commune in June while I was still there, which is when I interviewed both of them.  I was excited to interview Rowan because it’s good to see how being raised in a commune affects folks.

Raven:  My first question usually is how did you find a community, but you found community by being born there. So what was it like growing up in community?

Rowan:  Well, that’s a hard question. But it’s one I get a lot, so I’ll give it a shot at it, but you know, I don’t really have anything to compare it to.

When I was growing up, I was given a lot of responsibility. Like when I was like eight, I was the person in charge of buying sodas for Emerald City, which wasn’t a huge job, but I thought it was fun. I think a little bit before that was when I started doing construction work with Keenan.  I have memories of trying to swing a hammer and really just not having enough strength for it. People treat you with a lot more respect than I see other children being treated with, outside the community. When I was younger, there was a whole group of kids that I grew up with, but then as I got older, almost all of them moved away.  It reached the point where it was just Arlo and Elijah and me. Those were the only people who were around my age. So starting in my early teens or so, basically all my friends were adults. I’d go to parties and hang out with older people and those were my peers. I think that gave me a sense of maturity. When I was in my early to mid teens, I started mixing drinks at parties. People just trusted me to do that.  I didn’t even drink. I didn’t drink, really, until I went to UVA when I was 24.

Rowan

Raven:  My next question was how do you think that your experience going up compares with folks that you know, that grew up in the mainstream?

Rowan:  That feels like a similar question.  I think the maturity of being treated with respect has  a flip side which is having older adults as my peers growing up.. Really I didn’t have my first girlfriend until two years ago. There was just no one around my age as I was growing up. When I was younger, I was unschooled or homeschooled and they gave me a lot of freedom. But then also I noticed myself falling behind in a lot of subjects as compared to where I thought I shouldn’t be.  I still feel self conscious if I’m reading something aloud or something like that. I just feel like I’m tripping over the words. 

Raven:  Again, I feel like you’re sort of anticipating some of the questions. So, what was the best thing about growing up in community and what was the most difficult?

Rowan:  I think the best thing might have been all of the people. There’s a bunch of amazing people at Twin Oaks. Just talking to people and learning from them and meeting all these people with very different world experiences and different views and getting close to them and making all these great friends. Eventually, they all leave, which is sad, but just knowing all these great people and learning from them, I think was maybe the best thing. The most difficult thing at Twin Oaks is that there’s a heavy bureaucratic system. When I was going to school, I was living at Twin Oaks and going to community college and my last semester at community college was particularly hard, I had a lot of difficult material and at Twin Oaks there was a lot of very difficult, bureaucratic stuff. It was really hard and it got to the point where I thought that when I transferred to UVA I was just never going to come back to Twin Oaks, again, after all that. Fortunately, those particular things got better.

Rowan with Keenan

Raven:  What do you plan to do now?

Rowan:. Well, I’m traveling across the country currently with my father, Keenan. and so that’s going to be the next couple of months. I just graduated from the University of Virginia. But I plan on going back to university and getting a degree in nursing and hoping to be a psychiatric nurse  practitioner. 

Raven:  What learnings from being in community do you think you will take with you as you go on to other stuff?

Rowan:. At Twin Oaks there’s a big emphasis put on communication and active listening skills and being able to communicate in a helpful and good way. That’s something that I didn’t even know I had until I went to university and some people didn’t have it. Talking to them was really hard.  I think that’s a big thing that I’m gonna carry with me. 

Rowan helping to construct garden shed at Glomus Commune

Raven: Cool. So the last thing I almost always ask is this open ended question: What would you like to say to Commune Life readers?

Rowan: Community is great. It’s not all perfect. It’s definitely not utopia yet. But it’s trying to get there. I don’t know if it was Aristotle or someone who said the pursuit of the good life is the good life. And so maybe that’s good enough. Community is good. Come join us! That’s it. That’s all I got.