Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (Acorn Communities business) has been putting out seed catalogs for a long time–with colorful covers filled with plants and often gnomes doing fun activities. The office building for SESE has framed covers on the wall for many of the catalog years. Here’s a sample.
by Raven
This is from our Facebook feed the week after the Twin Oaks fire. Some of these posts were originally scheduled for the previous week but delayed to fit in all the posts about the fire and one of these is from Twin Oaks talking about the aftermath of the fire.
This first post is a link to what I think is a very interesting analysis of how communities deal with the realities of capitalism, an essay by Sky Blue which I knew we had to repost here as soon as I saw it. It was already posted on the Federation of Egalitarian Communities Facebook page, which is where I got Sky’s quote about the effect of their life at Twin Oaks and with the FEC.
Here’s a link to the original article.
Unfortunately, it didn’t do that well on our Facebook feed, with six likes, one share, and only eighty-four views.
Acorn Community and their business, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, are all about the seeds–and the planting of them.
Here’s a link to the Southern Exposure website.
This post did okay with seven likes, a share, and a hundred and twenty-four views.
One of the posts that got bumped was from Twin Oaks talking about getting new members. I assume that as they are rebuilding from the fire, they will still be looking for new members.
This did pretty well, with six likes, one love, one care, and a hundred and sixty views.
Although the main business at East Wind is nut butters, they also make sandals, using the same rope that Twin Oaks used for their hammocks (now only a memory in the wake of the fire).
Here’s the website for Utopian Rope Sandals.
Maybe people didn’t know that East Wind made sandals. This post did very well, with seven likes, a love, a share, and just over two hundred views.
Finally, a post fire post from Twin Oaks about support, care, and gratitude in the wake of this disaster.
This post did very, very well (best of the week) with six likes, six cares, one love, and two hundred and eighteen views.
by Raven
In my last post I wrote a little about individualism and how it’s rampant in American culture. It’s a hard habit to break out of–but I suspect that many people fear the opposite happens in communal living, that all individual freedom will be gone.
I have sometimes thought about community as existing in the “dynamic tension” between the individual and the group. And by “dynamic tension” I mean an ever changing midpoint or community point. Too far in the direction of the individual and you are back to individualism and the community falls apart. Too far in the direction of the group and you’re talking about a cult and group think, and believe it or not, the communes are very, very far from this.
In her book,Is It Utopia Yet?, Kat Kinkade wrote this about ideological and lifestyle diversity at Twin Oaks: “All it really expects is conformity to decent behavioral standards. We don’t (officially) demand ideological adherence to much of anything, not even the Community’s basic principles…” She talks about the New Age tendencies at Twin Oaks: “…we eat a lot of beans, rice, and tofu… We subscribe to ten or fifteen radical leftist magazines. We wear used clothing made of natural fibers, and we don’t throw it out when it becomes stained… We have built geodesic domes, enjoy a rustic cabin and a tipi, and one of these days will probably get around to making a yurt… We go in for underwater births, mud pits, nude swimming, sweat huts, and pagan rituals. We think seriously about animal rights. Some people won’t even kill flies.” But then she adds: “More than half of us do several of the following: eat meat, drink coffee, read Newsweek, go to regular AMA physicians, wear clean neat clothing, ignore the tipi, take rituals with a grain of salt, and kill flies with a clear conscience.”
Having spent time around Twin Oaks, I know that there are pagans and Christians and Jewish folk and atheists and agnostics and probably a lot of other ways of believing; that there are lots of queer folk, and a lot of gender fluid folks and several trans folks and many poly people, but there are also quite a few monogamous, heterosexual, cis-gendered folk there too; and while I’m pretty sure that there aren’t a lot of right-wingers at Twin Oaks, the political spectrum runs from vaguely conservative/libertarian, through classic liberals and pretty progressive, to rather radical. It’s the old adage of having sixty folks and probably seventy-five opinions.
And it may be even more diverse at anarchist leaning Acorn and individualist/libertarian leaning East Wind. If you’ve spent any time at the communes, you will soon realize that they are far from a conforming group-think cult. In fact, I would say that there is probably a lot more individual freedom in the communes than in American society at large. Many, many communards delight in being weird in many different ways–but there is probably more acceptance of “normal” behavior in the communes than there is of weird individuality outside of them.
It’s interesting but I think that places devoted to communal living probably have more real individual freedom of expression than in “individualistic” mainstream America. (And then there’s the economic freedom of not having to worry about a job and where your food and next paycheck will come from. But that’s for another post.)
by Raven
This post will overlap a couple of weeks of Facebook posts. The first of the weeks had only three posts suitable for reposting here. I often repost as many as five of the seven weekly Facebook posts since two are either posted here first (our Monday think pieces that are reposted to FB on Tuesday) or posted similtaneously (our Wednesday videos or photoessays). I also don’t repost stuff from Facebook that are actually reposts from earlier blog post here, or that gotten the original content from whoever posted it originally deleted or blocked for some reason.
The week of Facebook I was going to repost here had one of each exception, so I would have had only three posts–however, the following week was the week of the Twin Oaks fire when I dumped all the usual Facebook content and replaced it with a bunch of TO posts about the fire, and then reprinted them here that Friday. However, there was one post that week that happened before the fire, ironically from Twin Oaks, and I am reposting that here with the three posts from the previous week.
The first post was another Twin Oaks post (TO is a prolific poster) about a kid that grew up there, left, and now lives nearby and comes by sometimes just to help out.
This did extremely well on Facebook, with nine likes, five loves, one comment, one share, and two hundred and twenty-five views.
Curt was an older man who lived at Acorn and died suddenly of a heart attack a few years ago. He was a musician and an artist and left a lot of art behind. I don’t know who did this picture that Acorn posted.
This got two likes, two cares, one love, and a hundred and twenty-four views.
I think that turning fifty is pretty good for any community. Twin Oaks hit fifty a few years back. Now it’s East Wind’s turn.
This was an event post from East Wind, and event posts on Facebook generally don’t do well. This was no exception. It did get three loves (including one from East Wind Nut Butters!), two likes, and a care, but it only got seventy-one views.
Finally, Twin Oaks posted about an art event there that featured the Beehive Collective, an artist group from Maine known for their posters. The blurb here is a direct quote from the original Twin Oaks post (which I usually say, but somehow forgot this time).
The link is in a picture so you can’t click on it. Here’s a real link to the Beehive Collective. And here’s the pictures TO posted.
This did pretty well. It got six likes and a hundred and eighty-one views.
by Raven
We’re running over a month behind on reprinting our Facebook posts at this point, but we may catch up a little once we get past the week of the Twin Oaks fire that we dropped our schedule for.
Our statistics were pretty good, although the post that did the best on Facebook was a reposting of an old blog post.
We started with radishes at Acorn.
This did pretty well on FB, with six Likes, two Loves, and a hundred and eleven views.
Twin Oaks posted a pic of their cute little doorstop.
This also did pretty well, although it only got two Likes and a Care, it got a hundred and thirty views.
Then Acorn posted this cute photo:
This did okay as well, with two Likes, two Loves, a Haha, and a hundred and eighteen views.
Finally, East Wind Nutbutters wrote this about their glass jars:
You can read the whole article here.
We had a couple of interesting comments on it.
This post did very, very well, with twelve likes, three loves, and two hundred and thirty-one views.
But even this was left in the dust by an old Commune Life Blog post on Kat Kinkade that I reposted when I ran out of other stuff to post and it got twenty-four Likes, five Loves, five comments, one share, and full three hundred and eighty-four views.
by Raven
I postponed this update last week for a recap on the Twin Oaks fire, so now we are well over a month behind on what was posted on Facebook.
And things can change significantly in a month. The first post was about the Twin Oaks Communities Conference, what I think of as one of the most important community networking events that happens all year. Of course, when this was posted, no one had any idea that the Conference site would soon be destroyed. Hopefully the Conference is still happening, but we will see. Here’s what we posted:
Usually, I’m bummed when a post gets less than a hundred views, but Facebook has been awful when we post events so this time I was pleased that this post almost got a hundred views. It also got eight likes.
At Acorn, it was a post about a couple of cats, one of which is named Fight Club.
Well, I was wrong that Fight Club was named when cats weren’t allowed in Acorn and a reader wrote to correct me:
This got seven likes, four loves, and a ha ha, not to mention an impressive 226 views. I guess that’s the benefit of showing cute cat pictures.
Twin Oaks has a large dining hall, a busy kitchen, and usually serves dinner on time. Here a picture from the process one day.
This got three likes, two loves, two wows, and a care, as well as over a hundred and sixty views.
The Twin Oaks Conference site also hosts the Queer Gathering (and the Women’s Gathering). The same week that the Communities Conference announced registration, so did the Queer Gathering. They might even be more affected by the fire because the Queer Gathering is held several weeks before the Communities Conference.
Maybe because of the way I worded the Facebook intro, FB didn’t recognize it as an event. Or maybe some other reason, but this post did the best we’ve done for an event, with well over a hundred views, as well as five likes and two loves.
Of course, as I’ve said many times, if you really want high viewer numbers, post a provocative question on Facebook from time to time. This time it was about families, and children, and communities.
Of course, there were a bunch of comments–but not that many (six) considering. Here’s what folks thought.
But, in spite of the small number of comments, and only seven likes and a love, we certainly got views. Over four hundred of them. I guess maybe people are more interested in the question than the answers.
Ira Wallace, founder and key member of the Acorn Community, has also been a leader in farming and seed saving. In 2023, she won the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. In this video she talks about seed saving, young farmers, and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Acorn’s business. Much of this video was shot at Acorn and you can see many of the community’s members at work in the background.
by Raven
As usual, we are running about a month behind our Facebook postings. Nothing in the week we’re posting did super great on Facebook but nothing did really terrible either. Only one of these posts failed to get the hundred viewers I think of as a minimum okay, but that only missed it by five.
Serenity Solidarity built a box as a replica of the box that Henry Brown used to escape from being a slave. A VIrginia library decided to display it.
This did fairly well on Facebook, with six likes, three loves (one of which was from Serenity Solidarity), and a hundred and twelve views.
Ira Wallace is one of the founders of Acorn and an amazing person who gets things done–in the world of communities, in the world of gardening, in the world of seeds, and in the world of local (Southeast US) agriculture. She’s gotten lots of awards. Here’s yet another.
Ira is truly beloved of a lot of people and we usually get a large amount of views, so a hundred and seven, which I usually see as okay, was pretty disappointing. She did get six loves and two likes–and the larger amount of loves was not surprising to me.
The seed business is booming in Louisa County. Not only Acorn’s Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, but Commonwealth Seeds, which was started by someone affiliated with Twin Oaks.
This did pretty well on Facebook. While a hundred and seventeen isn’t that high as far as our stats go, this post did the best of this batch. It also got three likes and two loves.
Finally, East Brook Farm was advertising fresh greens–in a February post.
Unfortunately, this one did the least well of these, with only ninety-five views and five likes.
by Raven
It’s another weeks worth of last month’s Facebook posts.
I’ll start off with an unhappy one. The FEC (Federation of Egalitarian Communities) is in trouble. Not the member communities, the organization itself. There are a couple of communities disatisfied with it for one reason or another, and there aren’t that many communities left in it. I haven’t been posting about this, hoping that it would resolve itself, but then someone at East Wind did, and I reposted it on our Facebook feed, with commentary.
This post got two ‘Wow’s, three comments, and a share, as well as a hundred and thirty-seven views.
The comments (and one was from me, responding):
Communards don’t just work all the time. They often like to play and a game that’s popular in the communes is called corn hole. It involves tossing a bag filled with corn through a hole in a board. The boards are often quite decorated.
This didn’t do as well. It got five likes and only ninety-five views. I guess there aren’t a lot of corn hole fans outside of the communities.
They grow a lot of food at Living Energy Farm, including carrots.
This got six likes, two loves, and a hundred and seven views.
Finally, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange’s 2024 Catalog is out. Acorn wanted folks to know.
This didn’t do that well, either. While it got three likes and three loves, it got a disappointing eighty-five views. Not an exciting week on our Facebook feed.
by Raven
February may be over on the calendar, but I’m just getting started on our February Facebook posts.
And I’ll start with a little treat made with East Wind peanut butter.
This one did fine on Facebook, with six likes and a love (and the love was actually from East Wind Nut Butters–I guess they appreciated the publicity), and a hundred and twelve views.
Twin Oaks reposted Paxus’s post on their New Year party, so I re-reposted it.
Maybe because it was more than a month out of date, but this didn’t do as well, with only one like, and a little less than a hundred views.
When I was visiting Acorn in January, I noticed something I thought readers might find amusing. I think they did.
Well, I guess folks did find it amusing, because it got thirty-one likes and loves and three ‘haha’s, not to mention almost three hundred and ninety views.
It also got a comment which I think is worth printing here, because it gives the origin of the slide.
Nearly four hundred views is a lot, but if you really want a lot of views, I found that posting the occasional question on Facebook gets an enormous number of views, not to mention some pretty interesting comments. Here’s what I posted that early February Monday morning:
And, yes, I got responses:
This did incredibly well, but I was surprised that in spite of the fifteen comments and over five hundred and fifty views, it only got six likes and a ‘care’.
commune life 