What is it like to live in an off-the-grid community? Living Energy Farm recently posted this video of their day.
Children
Shiitake, Limbo, Peach, Solar, and Leather
by Raven
Here’s the wrap up on another week for Commune Life on Facebook.
East Wind posted a lot of pictures about ltheir shiitake mushroom harvest.
This did pretty well on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Living Energy Farm posted a video of the birthday party at the Magnolia Collective–or more specifically of a game of limbo.
This is, of course, a still from the video, which is pretty funny and worth watching.
Sadly, it didn’t do that well.
On the other hand, Glomus published a picture of one of their seasonal interns, Peach, standing at the farmer’s market.
This did very well. (Could it have been the pumpkins?)
Twin Oaks has solar panels and cows out in their fields, so they published a picture of both.
This did okay.
And there was a leather making workshop at Cambia Community which the Magnolia Collective posted about.
Unfortunately, this didn’t do that well either.
Maybe we have a vegan Facebook audience–pumpkins, yes, leather, no.
Kitchen, Garlic, Seeds, Sushi, Visitors
by Raven
This week’s Facebook wrap up features a variety of posts from several different communities–but they all did pretty well.
Twin Oaks posted this picture of a panel in their kitchen.
For a simple picture of kitchen equipment, this did very, very well.
Glomus Commune makes most of its money through East Brook Community Farm which makes most of its money selling food–especially garlic–at Farmers Markets.
This also did very well.
Although Acorn Community makes their money selling seeds, they also encourage folks to save seeds.
Here’s the complete article.
This post did pretty well.
At the Magnolia Collective, a kid’s birthday party features sushi.
This did very well.
Serenity Solidarity (an important starting commune in Virginia) used the comment feature to send even more pictures from the party.
And Twin Oaks, again (it’s been posting a lot of content), put out this picture.
And it did pretty good.
No Sound!
Those clever kids at Twin Oaks Community are at it again. This time they are trying to figure out who stole the sound from the video.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Communard Interview #6: Jules Amanita
Jules has been a member of Twin Oaks for four years. They started off as a conference intern in 2016 and came around Twin Oaks as much as they could before they joined in May of 2018. We talked when Jules was visiting Glomus Commune in early June.
Raven: My first question is how did you find out about community in the first place?
Jules: Paxus from Twin Oaks came to my high school. There was utopian literature class taught by Mr. Levy. He had been at the school for at least 30 years and could do whatever he wanted to, and what he wanted to do was to bring people in from a real life utopian project. So he brought Twin Oakers in on what we call the TOAST tour (Twin Oaks Academic Speaking Tour) to talk to us. Paxus and Janel (a former Twin Oaks member) talked to the utopian literature class and the whole school at an assembly. There was a group of us who were part of the school’s diversity club, and the Gay Straight Alliance, who were curious and interested and met with him. I remember at first I was super skeptical. I totally thought it was a cult. I was a newly out queer kid. I asked if gay people were allowed at Twin Oaks, and Paxus told us that there was a lesbian couple trying to have a baby there. That sounded pretty utopian to me coming from a conservative school in Maryland. So I found out about it, then, and then I kind of kept it in the back of my mind for a while.
Raven: My next question is, what do you like about community living and what are some of the challenges?
Jules: The best part? People! The thing that I most appreciate is living with my friends– I’m basically never lonely and if I am lonely, I just have to walk over to the next door on my hall or to the next building and go talk to a friend. That’s pretty amazing. One of the things I love about Twin Oaks in particular, is living in a truly intergenerational community. There’s something that’s really special in this modern era, about living with people from the ages of one to 80. That’s pretty impressive. There’s not a lot of spaces for 27 year olds, in which you’re interacting as equals with people from the ages of 18 to 80 and get to be a caretaker for small children unless they’re your children and that’s your full time job. I also love getting to do different kinds of work all the time and access to skills that I would never have, like carpentry and industrial cooking. One of the things that is most important to me about living in community is having refuge from the sharpest edge of capitalism. It’s not to say that our communities are actually counter capitalist. I mean, most of us would like to be counter capitalist, but unfortunately, we’re kind of stuck living within this system, especially if we want access to things like health care, and we can’t necessarily grow all of our own wheat for bread or all of our own beans and things like that. I’m paying property taxes and kind of stuck within the system is incredible to me..
Raven: So, what are the worst challenges about communal living?
Jules: Again, people. People are both the best and the worst part about living in community. I think that sharing is an amazing thing. It’s one of the things that I value most. And it’s also really hard. When someone takes all of the sieves from the industrial-size community kitchen, and then you don’t have a way to sift your flour, or when people leave messes, or when there’s interpersonal tension or drama. It’s little things that get under your skin a little bit, but it doesn’t make me appreciate community any less. I only fantasize about living in a studio apartment, like sometimes.
Raven: In a similar way, what are the joys and challenges of income sharing?
Jules: I don’t stress out about money, period. And that is not an experience that is familiar to me. I’m unconcerned about my food. I’m unconcerned about my rent. I’m unconcerned about having to deal with medical bills. Oh my God, that’s been huge. That’s one of the greatest things, and also being able to afford things that I could never afford. Because of income sharing, we get delicious vegetables that we grow for ourselves and I have access to an industrial kitchen and two different great wood shops to play in. And that’s pretty cool.
I think the biggest challenge of income sharing is simply not having autonomy over how you spend your money. We get a small stipend every month, $100 a month, and that’s all of my disposable income. If I want to do things I only have $100 a month to throw around. I’ve heard other Twin Oakers describe it as like being very wealthy in a poor country. Where when we’re at home, we have everything we could really want. Maybe I want a little bit more chocolate or something but on the whole we live an incredibly wealthy life on $6,000 per member per year. But on the other hand, if I want to go out into Richmond or Charlottesville, or right now I’m visiting Glomus, and if I go into Walton or Oneonta, I suddenly don’t have much money to throw around and I can’t buy things for myself. I can’t afford to go out to dinner unless I want to spend a third of my month’s money. Things like that. I think the other hard part at Twin Oaks is that the community doesn’t pay for cars. We pay for car costs for personal trips from our own stipends. And so it makes it hard. It makes it especially hard to travel. So even going to a one trip to Richmond would cost about $40 for us and that’s 40% of our monthly allowance not including any money that I might want to spend when I’m at Richmond. So that’s hard, but for me it’s overall worth it.
Raven: What kind of work do you do at Twin Oaks?
Jules: Oh my God, so many kinds of work! I think one of my biggest roles is food stuff. I cook dinner and lunch; I make sourdough bread. I’m also the food processing manager and so I’m responsible for figuring out how to preserve all of the abundance of our garden and of food that we get, dumpster food, and the produce we get when the food bank has too much of something (they call us). I’m responsible for preserving all of that for future eating. I also do a lot of dumpster diving. Also, I am the lead teacher of Forest School for the preschool aged children at Twin Oaks. I take them out into the woods every Tuesday morning, and I teach them about plants and mushrooms and we get to eat things and we get to touch things and walk in the woods. There’s nothing more rewarding than hearing a small child say “It’s sassafras!” or “A chanterelle!”
I also work in the woodshop specifically making hanging chairs. We sell hammock hanging chairs, and I do work on building the wooden bodies of the chairs. And that’s been really fun. I work in the garden sometimes; I work in the tofu factory. And I also do some amount of facilitation and mediation work. And then there’s probably just a bunch of other random jobs smashed together.
Raven: Here’s the last question I always finish off with. Is there anything else you want to tell Commune Life readers?
Jules: Honestly, I want to say that living in community is the best choice I’ve made in my entire life. Community can be an incredible space to come out of survival mode, and to work towards self-actualization. It’s definitely not always easy, but living in community has taught me about people in a way that nothing else ever has. It’s also given me the opportunity to spend hours and hours in incredible 50 year old oak forests or even older Hemlock forests here at Glomus. The opportunity to hunt for mushrooms and to learn as much as I possibly can. It gives me space to dive into passions without having the weight of survival as something that I’m carrying alone. That’s a beautiful thing!
East Wind Member Interview: Cara
Sumner is publishing interviews with former East Wind Community members again. Here’s one about Cara, a member in the 1990s.
Second catch up
by Raven
Here’s more of what has been posted on Facebook over the past few weeks. For once, I’m going to take these a bit out of order, instead grouping them by subject.
First, Glomus Commune (and it’s business, East Brook Community Farm) have been posting more on the internet and I’ve been passing it through Commune Life. One thing that they posted was about going to the Franklin Farmer’s Market and what they were selling.
Here’s what I wrote about that post: “East Brook Community Farm, Glomus Commune’s main business, was recently at the Franklin (NY) Farmer’s Market offering all this good stuff.”
This did fairly well on Facebook:
Glomus has also been posting pictures of their buildings on their East Brook Community Farm Facebook page and I have been posting them to Facebook. Here’s what I wrote about their post about one of their buildings: “The building at Glomus Commune called Skyfish looks very plain from the front but it’s very colorful from the back–some folks have said it has a ‘mullet’: business in the front, party in the back…” What was on the East Brook site was: “Folks who come for potlucks, farm tours, and sap boils get to see our Skyfish building with its bright bright back wall! What a joy to see it in the winter!” Here’s a picture of the back of the building:
This did very well:
The Magnolia Collective is doing a bunch of construction on their house and getting help from the other communities. I put a couple of posts about this up on Commune Life. Here’s the first. I said, “Yet more communal cooperation as the Magnolia Collective gets construction help from Twin Oaks and Living Energy Farm.” What the Magnolia Collective wrote was: “Thank you to Nina from @twinoakscommunity for coming to do construction on the foyer at magnolia! We got our first drywall piece installed today! As well as figured how to use a drywall Jack together. To be honest, the house has been a work in progress for quite some time, but we are excited by the near completion of this shed (thanks @livingenergyfarm !) and the beginning of this foyer project!” Here’s the picture they posted:
This also did very well:
More recently, they put up another post which I reposted, saying: “The work continues on the Magnolia Collective’s house. Here’s the latest:” What Magnolia wrote was: “Here is Chenchira feeling so devilishly proud of her and Nina’s work on the ceiling. Goodbye, mold! Hello, fresh insulation and drywall!” And here’s the pic they posted:
Again, this did very well:
The hammock business at Twin Oaks has their own Facebook page and recently had a lovely picture that I reposted, saying: “One of Twin Oaks Community’s main businesses is making hammocks. Here’s a picture of two Oakers working together to weave a rainbow hammock.” They said: “Here’s another peek inside the Hammock shop! Check out the finished product on our website 
” And the Oakers and hammock:
This was yet another post that did very well:
Having been at Acorn, I took a bunch of pictures to publish. As I was leaving I took photos of all the buildings and recently put them up, saying: “For a somewhat small community, Acorn has a lot of buildings. Pictured: Heartwood, the Pole Barn (in the distance), the Tiny House, the Farmhouse, the Seed Palace, the Rec Collective, the Smoke Shack, and the New Steel Building.”
Surprisingly (to me, at least) for just a bunch of pictures of buildings, this did very, very well on Facebook:
Finally, I’ve been putting up a bunch of what I think of as ‘provocative’ questions up on Facebook. I put two different ones up about the pandemic and they did dismally. (I guess Facebook is tired of the pandemic and doesn’t like showing pandemic related things to folks.) On the other hand, when I posted this deliberately provocative question, it got a lot of views and a lot of responses:
Here’s how well it did:
And here are some of the comments (and to my surprise, some people really had fun with this):
My response, and one more:
Anya’s Birthday
At Twin Oaks, as in many communities, birthdays are a special occasion to celebrate individuals–both members and children. Here’s what Jules and several other Oakers made to celebrate Anya’s 13th birthday.
Mind Over Matter
Those creative kids at Twin Oaks Community explore the possibilities and limits of psychic powers.
commune life 