Another week on Facebook, moving toward the end of January.
And Acorn and Southern Exposure were posting once again about what Ira was up to.
Once upon a time on Commune Life, just mentioning Ira guaranteed a high viewing share. That doesn’t seem true anymore. This post got just four likes and a disappointing sixty-three views.
At East Wind, it was all about the cows.
This did pretty well with four likes, three loves, and a hundred and fourteen views.
Twin Oaks was talking about getting a new account on Bluesky. So I asked what seemed to me to be the obvious question.
This got thirteen likes, two loves, four comments (two of which were “Yes” and “yes !”), and an impressive two hundred and twelve views. I’m hoping that we will have a Bluesky account soon.
The deportations are happening, and they are happening to a lot of good folks. Serenity Solidarity wrote about one.
Unfortunately, this didn’t do very well on Facebook with just two likes and sixty-eight views.
Finally, East Wind posted about their chefs, cheffing it up.
This did pretty well with five likes, two loves, and a hundred and thirty-four views.
This week in mid-January on Facebook really did have a diversity of stuff.
It started with a proclamation from Acorn Community that they are now forty percent folks of color.
This got an amazing response: twenty-one likes, eight loves, and a care, four comments, and a full three hundred and forty-eight views.
East Wind talked about one of their winter holidays:
This post just did okay on Facebook, with four likes, two loves, and a hundred and nine views.
Twin Oaks Hammocks posted about one use of their product.
This did the least well of the week’s posts, with five likes and two loves, but only eighty-nine views.
What really got people’s attention was homemade pizza.
This did incredibly well on Facebook, with twenty-one likes, nine loves (including one from East Wind Community!), two comments, one share, and a whopping four hundred and eleven views. (Who likes pizza? Apparently a lot of folks.)
Finally, on the day that Trump was inaugurated, I asked how folks thought he would affect the communes.
Disappointingly, we only got six comments, but they were interesting.
Even with only six comments, this still did well, with four likes and a sad, and a good two hundred and forty-six posts.
In March of last year, Twin Oaks had a catastrophic fire which destroyed one of our largest businesses and over a million dollars worth of inventory and equipment. Adversity was a teacher, but much of what we learned was surprising. What we did not learn was about the utility of outsiders commenting on our decision-making process on social media. We already knew that was going to be wildly off, from years of experience and this belief was again robustly confirmed after the fire.
When Hawina and i came to Twin Oaks in 1997, the quota was 42 hours per week. Six hours of work everyday of the week. It had been that way for quite some time. Most people when they hear this compare this to their own work week, which is often around 40 hours a week. What most don’t realize is these numbers are not based on the same assumptions. I get labor credits for all manner of things most workers get nothing for – commuting, child care, voting, talking with students about communities, going to the doctor or dentist, political actions, working in the garden, doing dishes, teaching home school and on and on. And i can switch jobs on short notice. Comparing an Oaker’s work week to a mainstream person is an apples to wombats kind of thing.
But one of the things we learned from the fire was that even with all these non-classical work options, 42 hours was too much for many members, especially folks who had not been here very long. We learned this because immediately after the fire the planners decided to drop quota to zero hours a week for about a week and a half and then reduce quota to 35 hours a week for some months as we re-oriented and started to clean up.
While the instant “vacation” was nice, it was the on-going reduced quota that really shook us up and made us rethink our labor situation. A few months into this period of reduced quota we had a community meeting to discuss how we were going to move forward. We did a go-round of the perhaps 40 members attending and what we discovered was there were basically two types of people in the community. Most of the older members present said that the level of quota did not influence their work decisions that much and they did their jobs and the jobs dictated how much they needed to work and this was often over quota. Almost all the older members had significant vacation balances (over 500 hours) which they get from working over quota in a week and which they can use whenever they like to take time off.
The newer members, almost to a person, said that the post fire quota of 35, instead of 42 hours, was a huge relief. That they were able to do more personal stuff, did not have to scramble at the end of the labor week to finish their quota and generally speaking commune life was much more sustainable for them. There was a call to permanently reduce quota.
From an internal accounting perspective, reducing quota is a nightmare. We have a large complex budgeting system which is designed around a 42 hour week, we have hundreds of jobs to fill to keep the place running and we have carefully balanced all these budgets around our population working on average 42 hours a week, cut that by 1/6th and the math collapses.
But the reduction of quota was a double windfall for pensioners. Twin Oaks calculates pension in an unusual way. When you reach age 50 you get one hour of pension, which is reduced from your quota. At 51 you get two hours and so on every year. This elegant system was designed before anyone in the community had reached this age and has been the source of many discussions about its fairness. What the reduction of quota did was basically give a huge benefit to pensioners, because quota was being calculated from the new reduced quota. For example, i was 66 when the fire hit, my quota was 42 – 17 (for my years over 50) which was 25 hours a week. When our quota dropped by 7 hours, my work obligation dropped to 18 hours a week after taking out my pension.
This reduction started a heated discussion about reforming pension as well, which was generally seen as too generous (elegant is not the same as fair). Combined with the fact that it was overwhelmingly older members who had large vacation balances, there was political traction to reduce pension. In the end, the planners dropped the quota to 38.5 hours per week and reduced pension slightly, which was a reasonable compromise. Had we not had the fire, i am sure quota would still be 42 hours a week. The fire helped us become a bit fairer and a bit easier on new members.
Some years back, we cancelled our insurance on our inventory at the warehouse. We had been self insured for years. Putting money instead into the “Fire and Aging Fund” was designed to take on large expenses, especially those related to fires and the medical costs of aging members. We agonized over the decision to drop insurance, but the annual rates had become too high. So we stopped paying it and increased the amount we put into our self-insurance fund. When the fire hit, everyone on reddit, facebook and other social media said we were foolish for not having insurance. They were wrong.
They apparently had not noticed that generally speaking, insurance is a scam. Every insurance company has to price insurance so they make money. Every insurance company is re-insured in case they make a mistake and get a claim they can not cover. And the existing insurance companies get to decide if any type of new insurance is something they want to offer, before anyone else can offer it. Or as the insurance executive who was sitting next to me on a flight once said to me “It is like organized crime, only better because it is legal”.
The trick with self insurance is you need to get through the first few years without an incident, so you can build your own pool to draw from. The communes figured this out decades ago. We have our own funds to cover catastrophic health costs, and with crazy low monthly per member premiums we have been self insuring very successfully for decades. Saving ourselves literally millions of conventional insurance.
Reading through the comments on social media when people find out we were not insured they simply stopped their critical thinking and bought into idea that this nearly criminal solution is the only one available. We made the right choice to stop paying insurance companies. Everyone who has any capacity to self insure should figure out how to establish this.
Naomi Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine about how predatory capitalism uses catastrophes to displace local disadvantaged people to benefit the rich. What are fire proved is that the opposite situation can also arise. Where a catastrophe focuses attention, forces self reflection and permits a group to rebuild better than before. We are certainly not happy to have had the fire, but i am very glad what we learned from it and how we both dropped quota and made pension slightly fairer.
We’re now well into January Facebook posts and this was an okay week on FB: somethings did okay and some didn’t quite. Nothing did phenomenal.
Twin Oaks posted not one, but two posts about finally being able to do cleanup in Emerald City, their industrial area devastated by fire last spring. The first one focused on getting a local contractor to help.
This post did well enough with ten likes, one love, and a hundred and thirty-three views.
The second one focused on folks who were helping out.
Unfortunately, this didn’t do as well on Facebook (maybe because of the same subject, two days in a row) with five likes and a care, but only ninety views.
East Wind posted about a piece of their history.
This one did okay as well with ten likes and a love and a hundred and forty views.
Southern Exposure was recognized recently by Mother Earth News.
Rob Jones passed quietly at his home on Jan 11 at 2:30 AM. His brother, Donna X and wife Jade had been helping ease his final days. Rob had stopped eating and drinking on Dec 28th, and was in hospice care and was supported by his family in his choice to pass. Below is the informant i wrote to Twin Oaks about Rob’s choice and after it the redacted version of a letter i wrote to him after he started his fast.
Rob Jones lived at Twin Oaks in the 1980’s where he met his partner Jade. Rob and Jade live 3 miles down W. Old Mountain Rd. Rob has stage 4 cancer and stopped eating and drinking on Dec 28th. I’ve visited him most days since he stopped eating and drinking.
Rob is too weak to play pool and too fuzzy to play chess, and not especially conversational. If you don’t already have a strong relationship with him, it likely does not make sense to try to visit.
Rob in his element
What many Oakers don’t know is that long after Rob left the commune he was still supporting us, in a myriad of way. There was an endless stream of Oakers who Rob hired for construction work. Hale and White (the general contracting company Rob ran) also jumped in to pick up workers from Acorn when Pier 1 dropped us and they had not really started the seed business. Similarly at Cambia, Rob’s hiring of our hippies supported us through several lean seasons. Most Oakers don’t know that it was Rob’s recommendation which got us the JPJ basketball floor job, which has been a great gig for us for decades now.
Rob is an oversized character who had a larger than usual influence on Twin Oaks and on me personally.
Dearest Rob:
I wanted to write to you while you were still in good enough shape to understand it.
You confessed at one point that you were surprised by our friendship, that you were not at first trusting of my motivations. And this is understandable in a way, because for the first many years of our relationship, I worked mostly as a fixer for you.
“Can I get a couple of low skill guys to dig some ditches for me today and tomorrow?” was often my first call of the day. You and John Shepard were regularly looking to supplement your crews and often I was able to draw folks from the commune who could help on short notice. But being someone’s fixer, or paid troubleshooter is not the same as being someone’s friend.
What I failed to explain was the nature of my appreciation and attraction to you, which centers around the combination your power and your generosity. Power defined as manifesting your ideas, creating new things or changing old ones dramatically. My introduction to this with you was as a general contractor. Where this is basically the job – regardless of the staffing, supply, bureaucracy or weather – you needed to pull it off. And you did, pretty reliably, for decades.
I remember when I first met you in Kana’s room (a space which was especially difficult for you to maneuver around in because it was cramped and small). You blurted out “Oh you are the guy who fucked Sharron” both embarrassing me and winning my heart.
Then there was your unofficial job title of the “Mayor of the Downtown Mall”. From Millers to the Blue Light Grill – Where you showed up in your normal “larger than life” size and the town (mostly) loved you and the performance you brought with you. For the right client, this was at least a highly memorable evening, but it was never for the clients really – it was more like inviting them to your village celebration – where you just happened to be what the village was celebrating.
We did some amount of you going crazy together, I have all the phone numbers on UVA 5 east (the psych ward) in my cell phone, so I could find you wherever you were on the floor – or tell that it was you calling out As your fixer and friend I smuggled all manner of things onto that floor – like the bucket of fried chicken you then released onto the other patients much to the nursing staffs surprise. And at your request I parked your truck on the top floor of the UVA hospital parking garage, so you could look down on it and plan your escape.
There has always been an adventure with you be it at the casino, or at the building site or or car crash or on the dance floor or at the commune. I know enough of your friends to know that the times they call “the good old days” are the days they spent with you. For many of these days you were the architect of the action or perhaps more precisely the instigator.
Ever stylish, rarely politically correct
You were never politically correct, you infuriated and scared away several of my comrades and lovers. But for those clever enough to not take you too seriously, there was a generous heart, that struggled to get the pronouns right, even when it was not clear to you why it mattered so much. I saw you train two generations of dominantly women on everything from how to use shop equipment safely and effectively and how to run construction sites. You were your own kind of affirmative action plan.
I’ve always valued your approval, i am annoyed that you are skipping out faster than i can pitch you on solar for your house. I think i could convince you that it was going to save you a bunch of money, and it would make me happy to have you as one of my first clients. And it meant a lot, yesterday when you were happy for me to be taking this new challenge on. I am sad to miss out on consulting with you on headachy clients and vexing change orders.
And i watched you build coffins, including your own. When Denny Ray was dying i watched you pitch in and mobilize others and thought to myself if i don’t die in the commune, i hope i will have this kind of support. In my version of your story, you learned the importance of passing well in community, but you could have learned it anywhere.
You lent me money, often over the many years, permitting me to have a slightly more reckless lifestyle, while i have not mentioned it much, i did and do really appreciate it.
Years ago now Rob had DNR tattooed for “Do Not Resuscitate”
It was our shared friend Coyote, who said of our shared friend Kana, when he died. “This large kind of person passing from your life is ultimately a self reflective gift, the you can only fill the hole they leave is with yourself.”
And in that sense you are irreplaceable to me, you played life full and well my friend, and now after a great run you can rest.
Sky Blue is a former Twin Oaker and a long time community activist. Here they talk about how economics interfaces with communities and what kind of economic models are possible for communities–including income sharing.
Yes, it’s January and pumpkins, Halloween, harvests, and planting garlic is long behind us. (Lumber seems to never go out of season.) But I’m reposting from November Commune Life Facebook posts which were reposts of earlier posts from the communities which often referred to even earlier events–which is why this January post sounds so much like October.
The pumpkin post was from Twin Oaks talking about pumpkin picking.
This did okay on Facebook with five loves, two likes, and a hundred and four views.
Also in November, East Wind wanted to show off their Halloween.
Maybe because Halloween was over (or folks were over Halloween by midNovember) but this got only one like and just eighty-one views.
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (Acorn Community’s business) posted about a Harvest festival.
Normally I expect anything featuring Ira to do very well, but this didn’t. SESE liked it as did one other person, but it only got sixty-seven views.
Keenan at Twin Oaks enjoys building stuff, but taking houses apart can be satisfying too.
This did very well on Facebook with five loves, ten likes, and a hundred and fifty-three views.
Louisa County, Virginia is home to perhaps a dozen intentional communities. (And it’s not a very large county!) I’m not sure of the exact number because I’m not down in Virginia. I heard of another one recently, the Bay Branch, mentioned in the October newsletter from Living Energy Farm. I’m also very aware that communities fall apart or are discontinued and I often don’t hear about it until long after the fact.
But working with the communities that I knew of, at least a while ago, I created another Match Game, with eleven of the communities in the county. The clues were tricky and unless you were in one of the communities or were paying very close attention to what we’ve been publishing on Commune Life, it would be hard to get them all correct. So I thought that, beyond publishing the answers, I’d write a post explaining them–and putting out a little more (and sometimes obscure) information about these communities.
So, here, again, are the clues and the communities and where this information came from and a little more about some of them.
A loose association of ex-Oakers and other former communards: Bakers Branch. Bakers Branch is a road about halfway between Twin Oaks and Acorn where, as it says, a lot of former folks from Twin Oaks and other communities live. It’s not really a community but they do view themselves as somewhat connected.
A monastic community of song and prayer: Community of Peace. On their website they describe themselves as “a monastic Christian community” and they mention that they hold “Sung Prayer” three times a day.
Community of Peace (from their website)
Heritage and heirloom seeds are now their largest source of income: Twin Oaks. This was one of the tricky ones. People who know a little about the Virginia communes hear “seeds” and think Acorn, but when Twin Oaks published about creating a new office for their Seed Racks business they specifically said that. The clues are in the words “now” and “largest”–seeds have been Acorn’s only business for a long while.
Twin Oaks new Seed Racks office
It was founded by an anarchist from Richmond: Cuckoo Compound. Mo Karnage, an anarchist who had been part of the Wingnut anarchist house in Richmond founded this and owns the property.
the Cuckoo Compound (from their website)
Living sustainably in downtown Louisa: Magnolia Collective. A spinoff from Living Energy Farm, they try to demonstrate that you can live ecologically and they are located “just a few short blocks from Main Street.”
Making a building sustainable at the Magnolia Collective
Perhaps the newest community in the county, they want to be “weird in the woods”: Bramble Collective. That’s how they open their website: “Let’s be weird in the woods together.” And, given what I wrote about the Bay Branch, it seems like they are no longer the newest community in Louisa County. It’s tough to keep up.
A building(?) from the Bramble Collective webpage
Their main members are an artist and an ex-priest: Little Flower. Little Flower is a Catholic Worker Community run by a couple. Sue is very artistic and has decorated their community. Bill is an ex-priest and they are both long-time peace activists.
Art on a building at Little Flower
They have a very visible boat that doesn’t float: Cambia. Cambia went looking for a boat that didn’t float figuring that it would make a cheap and interesting place for housing. The boat is in their front yard and very visible from the street.
The boat at Cambia
They only have one community business but they are the most prosperous community in the county: Acorn–of course. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange had been doing incredibly well before the pandemic but it really took off when people were isolating and started thinking about buying seeds. It’s still doing very well and Acorn has been generous in employing folks from the other local communities and involving the other communities in their business. As it says above, the wholesale part of the business has become Twin Oaks’ biggest money maker, a case of a very successful offspring now supporting the parent.
The Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog
They’d rather do Easy Reaper than Easy Rider: Living Energy Farm. LEF (which I’ve heard them pronounce as ‘leaf’) has developed a simple combine that they call ‘Easy Reaper’. (I will bet it’s a play on Easy Rider.) It was recently displayed at a conference in Iowa.
Living Energy Farm’s Easy Reaper
Working to build a BIPOC focused community in Louisa County: Moonseed Collective. With Serenity Solidarity having moved to New York State, Moonseed is the primary community in Louisa County focused on “the needs of Black Americans”.
A picture from the Moonseed Collective’s Facebook page
Again, this is not completely up to date. I’m not there so I’m not certain about the current situation. Some of these communities may no longer exist or have changed and, as in the case of Bay Branch, new communities may have emerged in the county. It certainly makes Louisa County an interesting place to live.
commune life 