A Twin Oaks Review

A couple of weeks ago we published a video review of most of the Louisa communities by someone who visited them. This is their review of Twin Oaks. It’s not particularly positive and I think they get some of the details (especially about assets and income) wrong, but it’s useful to see another perspective on the place. It’s also unfortunate that their visitor period coincided with the beginning of the pandemic, which I’m sure colored some of this.

Louisa communities review

I found this on the web–it’s a bit out of date (Mimosa is now the Moonseed Collective, for example) and it was taken as the pandemic was starting. Now, as the pandemic seems to be receding, I know that at least Twin Oaks and Acorn are looking for folks. Still, it’s always good to have an outsiders perspective on the communes. – Raven

Five Years at East Wind

Sumner recounts and reflects (in detail) on his time living at the East Wind Community.

Communes in Space!

by Raven

I will confess.  I’m a Trekkie.  I love watching the various Star Trek shows.  I’m old enough to have watched the original series as a kid, but I really got into it with The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.  But when folks want to talk with me about the space program, I’m really not interested.  I think that we have enough problems to solve here on earth before we worry about sending folks out into space.

So why am I interested in shows about people living together on starships and space stations, having to work closely together and figure out things with one another and build relationships in close quarters?  When I thought about it, I realized that I see these programs as metaphors for community living.

Recently I discovered Becky Chambers, an author who writes science fiction stories, but although there are lots of aliens and AIs, a few space pirates and the occasional explosion, her Wayfarers series focuses on relationships and, I think, community.  Here is the last sentence in the blurb for the first book in the series: “To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.”  That seems like a good description of communal living to me.

As far as I’m concerned, each of the books in the Wayfarers series illustrates a different aspect of community living.  

The first book, which has the strange and wonderful title of The Long Way to A Small, Angry Planet, I see as an examination of what it’s like to join a community.  Rosemary isn’t sure what she’s getting into when she joins the ship and there’s at least one not particularly likable member but, over time, they do become family.  The ship is also a very small community and reminds me of other small communities that I’ve been a part of (like Glomus, for example).

The second book in the series, with the enigmatic title of A Closed and Common Orbit, at first seems to have no semblance of community.  The AI from the first book is reborn and needs to find her way on the planet she is sent to, slowly making friends (and mistakes).  It isn’t until the very end that she is able to gather all her new friends together and create a space where they all live and work together.  If The Long Way… was about finding community, I think A Closed and Common Orbit is about creating community.  I see these two books as the fictional counterparts to Diana Leafe Christian’s Finding Community and Creating a Life Together.

The third Wayfarers book, Record of a Spaceborn Few, is about life on a space station.  Where her first book reminded me of life in a small community like Glomus, this book, to me, is about life in a big community, like Twin Oaks or East Wind.  Instead of close intimacy, you have a large group of folks, with a lot of variety and options, united in working together to make it all exist and continue.  I think there are pluses and minuses to both small and large communities and this book explores life in a large community where there are multiple interconnections between lots of folks, and also has bits featuring the perennial problem of how to deal with curious visitors.

The final book in the series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, again might not strike folks as having much to do with community.  Certainly, this story doesn’t end with many of the participants living together.  What I think this story is about is temporary ephemeral community–the kind folks find at festivals and gatherings–or in crisis situations.  I think that this is also a kind of community. In this book it comes out of an unplanned crisis situation where everyone was thrown together longer than they wanted and had to get to know each other.  The story lets you see how it affected all those who were involved for the short time they needed to depend on one another, and how this created relationships that looked like they might last beyond the crisis. These things happen in real life as well and the community that is created is real if short-lived.  I always hope that if people get a taste of community through something temporary, it might awaken the longing for something more permanent.

I also want to mention one more similar if unrelated book.  Open Earth is a graphic novel (and, warning, it is very graphic in parts, erotica so to speak, and you may not want to look at it if naked cartoon bodies and sexual situations bother you).  This is a story about life on a space station and focuses on relationships and, more particularly, how the next generation there views life in the community that they are born into.  This is a challenge that real communities that last a while find themselves facing–for example Twin Oaks, which has raised many kids who have moved on and more recently had folks who were raised there decide to stay and become adult members.  In the book there are discussions about how the younger folks can create change to make this space community more the way that they would like it to be.  (Again, this is something I see happening in the older communities when younger, newer members join. Older members then have to decide whether to accept these changes or resist them.)

However, one thing that I didn’t like in this book (and it was also in the background of the Wayfarers series but it is more directly discussed here) is the reason that they were all on the space station was that Earth had been trashed and needed to be abandoned.  This is a common theme in a lot of science fiction and has been proposed as a reason to support the space program.  This is also why I am so supportive of communities like Living Energy Farm that want to find ways to live that support the planet.  I like reading about fictional space communities but I am a lot more interested in creating communities that will make Earth more livable.  I’m interested in building communities right here on this wonderful world–not way out in space. 

Creating Communal Culture

by Raven

In June of 2020, as the pandemic was raging away, I wrote a long post on Facebook which got over five hundred views and had 31 comments (admittedly, several were from me) about “Communes and Tribal Society”.  I reprinted the post and most of the comments on this blog in August.

It’s a question that I’ve struggled with for a while.  If humans are a tribal species, why do so many of us live (and feel we want to or need to) individually?  In my post last week (which did horribly on Facebook, by the way), I began by mentioning I know several former community folks that now live by themselves.

My belief is that the reason for the paradox of humans being tribal and many current folks wanting or needing to live individually is that we have inherited a culture that glorifies individualism.  I think that Theresa said it the best in her comment on my “Tribal” post: “It’s easy to think about individualism like it’s an individuals [sic] problem to fix,” she wrote,  “like some personality defect, when actually it’s a defect of history.”  Our society, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, have all worked to break those tribal bonds.  Our history has gone slowly from tribes to extended families to nuclear families.  Many, many folks I know have been raised as only children and love the idea of living collectively but have trouble dealing with the unfamiliar realities of close day to day living with people.

This makes the reality of creating communal living situations quite difficult.  It has almost always been easy for me, but I was raised with four siblings all of which I mostly got along with (and, yes, sibling rivalry and having to learn to live and share with one another are real and difficult).  I still enjoy my time with my siblings and we all get along pretty well.  But I know that I’m an exception.  Folks I know who did grow up with siblings often were hurt by them and may want nothing to do with them now. Abuse and trauma further alienates people from living together.

So how do we create a culture that supports community and sharing and connection?  I’m watching folks crying out for this while I’m also watching communities collapsing.  (I love this video that someone shared with me about how community can dismantle patriarchy/capitalism/the system.)

As I pointed out in my last post, this is not going to be easy.  We are fighting an upstream battle.  This culture encourages individualism and discourages sharing.  We were taught we needed to make it on our own, and so were our parents, and their parents.

This society does not want communalism to succeed.  The only way that we are going to be able to create a communal culture is to build community after community and when they collapse do it again.  And again. And again.  To reach out and join with those who crave community and work through all the hard stuff and create models for how we can live together and share more.

It’s what I am currently doing and it’s difficult much of the time to keep going when person after person expresses interest and then wanders off, partly, I suspect, because they begin to realize how difficult it’s going to be and partly because they get distracted by some other interesting thing that they decide to pursue.

Given how much is stacked against creating community, I’m not sure at all I will succeed, but I know that if I don’t try, it seems obvious to me that  it won’t happen.  

In the meantime, I would just like to ask  everyone who is reading this to think about how you could share even a little more and create a little more community in your life.  The only way we are going to create a communal culture is if lots of people keep moving in that direction.  So while I know that many people want connection and community,  it really isn’t going to happen unless we reach out and work together.

La Finca de la Tierra Nueva

La Finca de la Tierra Nueva is a new income-sharing community that is forming in Costa Rica.

(From their website)

Our vision: Our aim is to build a gathering place for global citizens to network together with other people from around the world. We aim to be specifically focused on offering workshops to youth as future seeds to have them gain skills to take back to their home countries and spread their newly-gained knowledge. To help people become more effective global citizens we work to develop a wide range of skills: communication, sustainability, alternative building, as well as higher level skills like leadership, goal setting, and project management. Inclusivity is a core value such as LGBTQ+. The inspiration for our vision and for our practices comes from many sources: International Association for Transformation (IAT), Auroville in India, Findhorn in Scotland, Twin Oaks in the United States and Vipassana from Goenka tradition.

The History: In 1997 the property was purchased by two individuals who have worked for many years in international development. They have been running educational projects all around the globe. Originally, the plan for the purchase of this property was to develop the land as an educational center and eco-village and, once up and running, the foundation would purchase the property. But other priorities in other countries consumed the resources, so after some years of significant infrastructure development, the project was never completely finished. Here, eleven years later, the foundation still wants this property to be an eco-village focused on global education, so they are partnering with different foundations to help realize that initial vision.

Location:  Finca De La Tierra Nueva is on 200 acres (80 hectares) in the mountains in southwest Costa Rica. The finca (farm) is a 45 minute drive from the city of San Isidro. It is also a 40 minute drive to the beach town of Uvita. The views are beautiful in all directions. In the rainforest here there is a long cascading waterfall and a few not-too-deep swimming holes.

What exists now:

• 200 acres (80 hectares) in the mountains of Costa Rica.
• An enclosed, but not completed two-story pentagon-shaped conference center. Each side of the pentagon is 24 feet (8 meters).
• A three-bedroom shack-like house. Several tent platforms.
• Grid electricity, hot showers, high-speed internet, clean abundant and fresh water.
• Permaculture zones, tropical fruit trees, organic coffee cultivation and sustainable fish (tilapia) farming.
• A lovely climate and many tremendous views all around the finca.

The Intern Experience:  We schedule groups of interns to arrive and depart at roughly the same time. This helps create a sense of group cohesion and connection. Our practice among interns will be to build connection and community among each group of interns. The inspiration for our intern protocol is Twin Oaks community’s visitor program and Sustainable Bolivia’s volunteer orientation program.

Work Contribution:  4 hours a day of self-chosen work from a list of needed tasks and projects. For example, cook for the group, if you want; clean the facilities or work outside.  The people we are looking for are people who can help develop the infrastructure by doing outdoor physical work, fixing broken things, building bed frames, decks, cabins, and/or garden work.

Financial Contribution:  A minimum contribution of $20 a day (Twin Oaks Community residents’ contribution per diem is $10) to cover basic procurements, electricity, internet and other basic expenses.  You are responsible for your groceries and transportations expenses. If you want to bring a gift to the finca, tools would be great (tools are subpar quality here so do not last long).  Rain gear is important to purchase either here or before traveling so do outdoor work gloves. We have spare old tents and tarps but feel free to bring your own for more comfort.  For indoor sleeping quarters, some people feel more comfortable under a mosquito net, bring yours, if you’re one of them.

Acorn Community 2022

(I like the current Acorn Community webpage. Acorn is a great place to visit and they are looking for new members. I am reprinting their front webpage here. – Raven)

Acorn Community Farm is an egalitarian community in central Virginia founded in 1993.  We are committed to non-coercive, non-hierarchical, voluntary associations both within our community as well as within the larger community in which we find ourselves. We are also committed to income-sharing, sustainable living, and creating a vibrant, eclectic culture.

We are members of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, which means that we hold in common our land, labor, resources, and income, and that we use this for the good of our community as a whole and our members as individuals.  While all members must be enthusiastic about a culture of radical sharing and working with one another, we do not share religious, political, or philosophical beliefs.  We use consensus decision-marking in our weekly meetings in order to make decisions about use of collective money, land, and resources.

Acorn is non-hierarchical.  There are no bosses, owners, investors, or supervisors.  Although structured in areas such as membership, we intentionally keep policies to a minimum, preferring a calm anarchy to prevail. Of the few policies that are in place, our culture encourages personal responsibility rather than supervision, as well as taking issues on a case-by-case basis keeping in mind that needs of individuals vary.

Our community strives to create a stimulating social, political, feminist and intellectual environment.  Acorn strongly desires to support developing egalitarian and like-minded communities through participation in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. Our collectively owned business has been active in protesting GMO seed contamination by Monsanto.  We desire to support queer and alternative lifestyles and gender expression.

Our thriving seed business – Southern Exposure Seed Exchange – is part of an exciting movement and growing network of farmers, gardeners and seed savers dedicated to organic, heritage agriculture and independence from the processed, genetically modified, corporately delivered “food” paradigm.

If you are interested in visiting us, interning in our seed business and garden or in other areas of our farm-based livelihood, check out our page on How to Visit Acorn Community Farm.

We are looking for folks to live and grow with us.  Folks who share our vision of a vibrant, non-coercive, supportive, environmentally appropriate, self-sufficient community and have skills that are helpful in getting us to where we want to get to.  Skills such as: vehicle & farm implement  maintenance, repair & construction of our infrastructure, farming, livestock care, business management, customer service, healthy cooking, seed saving, organic gardening. Or if you lack specific skills but just like to work hard, get things done, and are willing to learn and take on responsibility, we would like to talk to you, so call us and schedule a visit.

Remember, this stuff is hard!  Living and working together, trying to have fun while at the same time running a business, making decisions together and sharing income, are all challenging every day.  These challenges give us many opportunities for personal growth.  So in addition to the above mentioned skills, we are interested in meeting people experienced in community-building, communication and facilitation, who interested in building a healthy, dynamic, supportive social culture.

* We are accepting new applicants for membership.  See our Membership Process page for more information.

Starting from Scratch 2

by Raven

2: Founding vs Joining

(Note: this is the second in a series I am writing about my attempts to start a new commune. Here’s a link to my first essay.)

Here I am, sitting in Boston, thinking about creating a new community, and wondering how crazy I am.

I know that there are many folks who have ideas about wanting to start a community–there are all sorts of attempts listed on ic.org and my post on How to Start a Commune is by far the most popular thing on this site.   Creating communities is something I believe in and something that I want to encourage folks to do (since I think the world needs more communities), but I often discourage folks from doing it as well (because it’s a lot harder to do than it might seem).

I should point out that founding a community is quite different from joining a community.  I think that at least Diana Leafe Christian must understand this, since she has written two separate books on communities, one about starting communities (Creating a Life Together) and a different one about how to join a community (Finding Community).  

The skill set for founding a community is quite different from joining one.  I often say that long running communities are WYSIWYG (pronounced “Wizzy Wig”), a computer term that literally means “What You See Is What You Get”.  If you visit an established community, you can get a pretty good sense of what’s involved in a short period of time.  But when you are creating a community, it’s not always clear what is going to evolve.

People sometimes talk about Founder’s Syndrome.  This is because often community founders can become unhappy with the resulting community–especially if it begins to evolve in ways the founders didn’t expect.  Sometimes, in these cases, the founders take charge and keep trying to push it back to what they wanted.  This often either kills the community or greatly stunts it.  Other founders just decide that it’s time to move on as the community changes.  This was true of Kat Kinkade (one of the main founders of the Twin Oaks Community) and Mildred Gordon (one of the founders of the Ganas Community).  Both of them left their communities when they didn’t like the way it changed and, ironically, both came back to their communities to die.

Kat

In many ways, Kat Kinkade is one of my idols.  She helped found three different communities (Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn) and they are all still around–after fifty-five, forty-nine, and twenty-nine years respectively.  As someone who has tried to help start many communities, none of which are now around, I often wonder what Kat Kinkade knew.

I do know a few things that she knew.  One was to grow communities fast–because small communities are fragile.  Another is to leave and let go, when the community isn’t going the way you want.  (See above.  Kat left Twin Oaks to start East Wind, left East Wind to live in Boston, returned to Twin Oaks, helped start Acorn–I don’t know that she ever lived there, left Twin Oaks to live on her own, and came back to Twin Oaks to die.)

So what do I know about starting communities?  I often joke that I know more about what not to do than what to do–much of this learned through hard lessons.  Two things that I do know are that small communities are vulnerable and can fall apart simply by having three or four folks leave, and that what holds small communities (and even some large communities) together are relationships.   

All of this is important, but it’s not enough to build a community with. And quite frankly, I’m not sure that I have the skill set for community building.  I have done very well in already formed communities and I have a fairly poor track record for starting them.  At this point, I have helped start at least ten different group living attempts.  I’ve counted.  And none of them are still around (although a few of them lasted over ten years–even though they didn’t become what I wanted).  

Honestly, if there was an income-sharing community somewhere that was easily reachable to Boston, where family and friends who are important to me live, I would be there. I would certainly rather join a community than start one.  Starting a new community is a lot of work.

I’ve heard it said that you might think you are not the person to do something because you don’t have the skills to do it but, if you are the only person willing to do it, then you are the one that needs to do it.  That seems to be where I am now.  If an income sharing community pops up in New England, believe me, I will try to join it, but if nothing emerges, like it or not, it looks like I will need to create it.

The Collaborative Living Conference

by Raven

This was probably the most exciting post we put on Facebook over the past week:

Here’s a few more that I didn’t put up on the Facebook post: Care (one of the organizers) just outside the space; Thumbs doing the intro to the whole event; and folks dancing in the evening.

Unsurprisingly, given there was a lot of pictures in this post featuring people, it did very well on Facebook:

Communard Interview #4: Amanda

Amanda is a young visitor to the Acorn Community who is going through the process to become a provisional member.  She is an artist, a first time gardener, and a newcomer to community life.

Raven:  What got you interested in living in community and how did you find Acorn?

Amanda: I didn’t know about communities until I learned about them through my partner who learned of them through his friends. We were interested in homesteading and learning how to grow our own crops. We actually wanted to do something like WWOOFing or something to teach us farming and community just kind of fell in line with those same aspects. We were just going to try it out.  We weren’t really thinking of becoming members. We just wanted to learn for ourselves but once we got here and saw how everyone works together, we realized it would be a lot harder to do that on our own. We decided that we wanted to utilize people working together and just become part of the community instead of pulling back and being by ourselves on a big piece of property.

Raven: Can you tell me about the process of becoming a member at Acorn?

Amanda: Once you express interest in becoming a member, you become a “member candidate”. You have to sit down with each member and have a one-on-one talk with them where they get to express any concerns they may have.  This is called doing clearnesses.  They get to know you a little bit better. They get to share their side of community life so you also get to know them better.  They try to show you what community looks like to them and how they feel this place runs to see if you can fit into the groove. I am still in the membership candidate process but once you finish all your clearnesses with each member, you become a provisional member. Then you have another few sets of clearnesses and they vote on whether they would like you to stay or they would rather you not stay.  After about a year, you can become a full member, once your final round of clearnesses is complete.

Raven: What do you like best about communal living and what do you find most challenging?

Amanda:  I really enjoy getting to make my own schedule and getting to work in the areas that I want to work on the hours that I want to work.  If I decide I don’t want to be awake in the daytime anymore, I can work all night, if that’s what I want. I like that we have big community dinners where people work to make huge meals to feed everyone and then we all sit down and talk about our day and laugh and joke.  After that we may have our night on our own or we may have a movie night.  I just like the family aspect of it.  It feels very familiar, like home, and getting a whole new set of friends is really fun. 

What I find most challenging is figuring out who I am once all the stressors of life have been taken away. I don’t have to worry about my job, I don’t have to worry about my house or my car. So now it’s nothing but the bare bones of who I am. I’ve never had to face that before so I’m kind of lost a little bit and trying to figure out who I am for the first time at 30 years old and it’s really interesting. It’s really scary but I know in the end the result is going to be amazing.

Raven: What advice would you give to folks looking to live in community?  What things didn’t you know when you started looking?

Amanda:  I think places like intentional communities can seem like an easy way out.  If you don’t like working nine-to-five or don’t like, you know X Y and Z, you might think, I’m just going to run away from the society and enjoy living in one of these communes, but it’s not as easy as that. I feel like it could be worth it but it’s definitely not easy.  

Like I said before, there’s a lot of things you face for the first time when you come to community.  There’s a lot of internal things you have to kind of figure out and realign and that process can be confusing and painful. There can be a whole list of issues and you have to kind of figure out how to express yourself in a healthy way without taking your anger and confusion and projecting it. 

You have to be ready to live with a lot of people.  It seems like an easy concept on the surface but everyone has their own little personalities and everyone’s different. Getting to know how each person works individually is a fun and long process. 

In addition, it’s a business and you have to make yourself accountable to show up every day and say I’m going to work my hours and I’m going to be a part of the business and I’m going to help my fellow members of the community because everything you do affects everyone else.  You may not realize that but if you slack off or decide you don’t really want to do this, it falls onto someone else.   So it’s about doing your part and fitting into the puzzle.  It’s about lifting everyone else up with you and taking some of the weight off other people. 

It’s really about relationships and how we can build each other up and help each other. It’s all so tightly tied together.  You can’t have the business without the garden and you can’t have the garden without the people and you can’t have the people without the business. Everything in community life is important.  It’s not just what you want to get out of it  but you have to hold yourself emotionally accountable. 

It’s easy to be selfish in a place like this because everyone here wants you to express yourself and do the things that you want.  You can have huge art night parties and learn hobbies and stuff. It’s easy to get swept away with all the encouragement and just be selfish and focus on yourself. But you need to share your time. You have to be on top of that because you don’t have someone telling you that you have to go to work today and you have to do this or else you’re going to lose your house.  You have to be the one who’s doing those things and you have to be in charge of your own accountability.

Raven: Thank you.  This has been a great interview.   Is there anything else you’d like to share with Commune Life readers?

Amanda:  I think when you’re first looking into community life, you have a set of goals that you want to accomplish in mind. I think the best thing to do is just jump into the cold water and take the chance.  You never really know what these places are actually like until you get here.  There’s no way of knowing cuz it’s individual. Everyone takes something away differently. You just have to put yourself out there.  If this is something that you’re really interested in doing, take the chance to do it.  If this community isn’t right for you then maybe another community will be right for you. Explore and look around and try different things before deciding maybe this isn’t for you. If there’s anything holding you back or making you scared, just try and let it go. Even if it isn’t for you, you will probably learn a lot about yourself and about your hobbies and your goals. So even if you don’t end up staying at a community, I feel like it’s still worth it to go there and try and grow yourself.