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.
Over the course of nearly six years, Anthony Beck has lived at four income sharing communities–Twin Oaks, Cambia, Compersia, and Glomus–and prior to that spent two years in housing co-ops in California. He is primarily a farmer, but also an artist and Buddhist practitioner. In his spare time, he can be found reading nonfiction, playing board games, or spending unhurried time in nature.
Raven: You have now lived in four different income-sharing communities. What are some of the challenges and insights that you have encountered at these different communities?
Anthony: Obviously different communities are different. Some of the communities I’ve lived in have been very different. I’ve lived in large communities and very small communities and rural communities and an urban one.
One thing I’ve learned along the way is that for young communities, it really seems that founder energy matters a lot. As one person I lived with put it, you can’t unbake a cake. Once a community has been founded with a certain energy or a certain set of values, those aren’t easily rewritten. It really seems that what sort of energy you found a community with matters a lot. For example, if a community is founded by a really tight-knit group of people, like a couple or, regardless of romantic relationship, a really small and tight knit group of people, those people need to be very proactive about bringing in more people and sharing power with them. If you founded a project with a small group of people, that will be the energy that you start with, and if you want a larger group later, it’s going to take extra work to overcome that initial energy versus if you start with more people in the first place.
The same thing is true with the racial makeup of a community. All the communities I’ve been in are predominantly or completely white. I’ve been in situations where we’d like to diversify our community, but if you “bake the cake” by starting with a predominantly white community, it’s going to be difficult to overcome that energy. If you want a diverse community, it is going to be a lot less energy overall to start with a diverse founding group.
I’ve found urban communities particularly challenging. It’s a different economic reality than rural communities. If you’re in an urban environment and you don’t own your land, you have this kind of constant pressure of rent, and unless you have a very favorable and affordable rent, that’s going to be a few thousand dollars each month that just evaporates for you. There has to be a lot more hustle in order to maintain that sort of situation.
Also, in an urban community, there’s frequently a lot more spreading of people’s energies outside of the community – and I think that’s good. I think it is really important for communes to be engaged with the communities outside of their household, but it can also be a challenge, particularly in urban communities. When some people are working full-time jobs in order to drive the economic engine of the community, it makes them a lot less available for other things that might be important in the community like interpersonal labor.
If someone is really invested in their job outside the community or really invested in their organizing outside the community, that can be great, but it also needs to be balanced with the internal needs of the community, which need to be met as well. There’s just really so many hours in the day and, if there’s a wealth of places to put your energy outside of your home, you need to be extra intentional in budgeting where you put your energy. It’s tricky balancing external engagement with the internal work that maintains a community.
I’ve also found urban communes to be uniquely challenging in the diversity of labor. At Twin Oaks, people do different things, but they tend to do most of their work on the farm. In an urban community, you might have people working outside for money a lot more, as well as people who don’t do that as much and are more focused on maintaining the home, or who have income-producing work but do so from home. It can be easy for the people who work outside the community and put a lot of effort into doing so to perceive that others are not facing the same challenges that they do, or working the same way (and in a real sense, they don’t). At the same time, the people who may be doing more work maintaining the home may not feel seen for that, because the other people who are working out of house aren’t there to witness the labor they do.
I find urban communities trickier in a lot of ways. I think there are still a lot of challenges to be worked out about them. I don’t think that at Compersia we were ultimately as successful in working out these challenges that are unique to urban communes as we needed to be.
Anthony in the Glomus garden
Raven: With almost six years in income sharing communities, what insights or thoughts do you have about the movement as a whole?
Anthony: I’ve lived in income-sharing communities for a fair amount of time and I think they have really important things to offer to the world. I’ve also come away from that time with some pretty clear critiques of the intentional communities movement as a whole. It’s really clear that income-sharing communities provide an engine to accomplish more with fewer resources. For example, looking at Twin Oaks, here at Glomus, or just about any income sharing community, you see that the amount of money per person required to live a good life is a lot less than if people are living separately.
I think this ability to do more with less is powerful, and I think that soon, as things get more difficult in the world – and I unfortunately think they are likely to – what intentional communities teach will become more relevant. In difficult times, Intentional communities will continue to gain attractiveness, and they will offer blueprints that allow people to live a good life together. We’re in a pandemic right now, and we’re already encountering increased inflation and supply chain issues. If these and other issues continue to intensify, then I think the collective economy seen in communes will become more widely adopted as a matter of necessity. I also think the collective nature of communes is valuable as an antidote to some of the ills in our society caused by individualism and greed. I see many of the issues that we face in this time as stemming from the extreme sense of individualism that exists in our society, and the difficulty many people have with feeling united with and responsible for a circle larger than humans, or even just their immediate friends and family members. We need to be able to change these mindsets, and living in intentional community is one on-the-ground way to practice that.
My biggest critique of the intentional communities movement as a whole is that it seems rather focused on itself rather than on the world that it exists in. To an extent that’s understandable – you have to maintain your own home and safety to be able to contribute to the world – but I have found intentional communities on the whole to be overly focused on intentional community as the end in and of itself, rather than a means to an end. In short, they can be rather self-absorbed, overly interested in anything that falls inside the border of “intentional community” and by comparison unconcerned with those things that fall outside that border.
An analogy I have used recently is that if the intentional communities movement were a car, I want to see us focusing on where this car can take us and what resources we can move around from point A to point B with this car. However, I have seen the tendency of intentional communities to become rather obsessive about overdesigning the car and keeping it in good repair, and overly fixated on who’s inside the car and who’s not – and whether we can pile more people in this particular clown car that is intentional community – with relatively little interest in what is happening “outside the car.” Again, to an extent, this makes sense – a car in poor repair cannot do much for us – but I think we need to shift our main focus to what we can accomplish with a car in good repair. Who will we show up to support in this car? How can we ultimately build new cars that can take different sets of people where they want to go, instead of stuffing them into ours and taking them where we want to go? How can we make sure that different models of cars are accessible to everybody whose lives can be improved by them?
I would like to see more intentional communities asking what being together and pooling resources allows them to achieve in the world, rather than treating intentional community as the end itself. This is my biggest critique of the movement as a whole.
In this vein, I think the movement can learn a lot from people who are doing social justice and mutual aid organizing. These are the people who have their finger on the pulse of what people need, and are building networks and webs of support to meet those needs. By connecting to and placing themselves in service of these networks, intentional communities have the potential to benefit a lot of people – by offering tools, acting as safe places for people who need them, functioning as conduits for resources to pass through, etc. When asking questions about how to make intentional communities accessible for more people, or how to allow more people to employ the sharing technologies that communes demonstrate, I think we would do well to humbly show up and make ourselves available to folks doing grassroots organizing – oftentimes organizers have firsthand experience with what it is to be marginalized in our society (as themselves or through the communities they work with), and they can potentially show us how to connect what intentional communities have to offer with the folks that can benefit the most from those tools and resources.
I was initially attracted to the intentional communities movement by what I see as its revolutionary potential – the potential to give more people the ability to meet their own needs and their community’s needs in-house, and to live a life of sufficiency, autonomy and purpose. I think this potential is still there, and would love to find ways myself and with others to fully employ that potential. I think a great place to start is by strengthening our connections with the communities already organizing in this way, to be generous with our resources, and curious about how we can offer them.
Raven: How does being in a commune interact with your being a farmer? In what ways does living and working in a communal context support or impact your work farming?
Anthony: I think one of the biggest ways in which being in a commune supports my work as a farmer is that it allows us to farm differently here than if we were not living collectively. For example, on a typical production farm, you have to be very efficient with your time and might not, for example, be able to waste time messing with recycled materials. Because farming is a very, very thin margin business, you can’t necessarily afford that sort of thing. I do believe as a farmer in using time well and tapping into efficiencies. However, living in an intentional community allows us here to work with recycled materials more, repair things rather than replacing them, and generally get longer use out of some of our materials rather than just throwing them away. I like that living together allows us to go a little further to farm in ways that are consistent with our values than if we were a business that had to achieve higher margins that support people living individually (in a sense, less efficiently).
It’s also nice to not have to commute to work. I’m able to give more energy directly to farming because I wake up where I farm.
It is challenging on the other hand to have relatively little work/home life separation. If I get frustrated with someone that I live with, it immediately bleeds into my work life. If I’m having a hard day at work, it immediately affects my ability to show up well at home. Having more separation between those things sometimes seems like it could be healthy but I’m also frequently grateful to have such intimate relationships with the people I work with. When we’re working together well, I think we can reach a very high level of coordination, because we are so familiar with one another.
I’m also personally at a point in my arc where I’m primarily interested in in the craft of farming, perhaps more so than living in community, so there is this tension that comes up – am I a farmer who happens to live in a commune and accomplishes his farming through living communally, or am I a communitarian who happens to farm? I know this tension also comes up in the community at large sometimes – are we a farm first, or a commune first? I personally feel these days like I’m a farmer first, but not everyone around me necessarily approaches it the same way and I don’t know if we have consensus about that, which can be challenging at times.
The East Brook Community Farm crew: Rachael, Cicada, Andie, and Anthony
Raven: What are your favorite aspects of communal living, and what do you find most difficult?
Anthony: I live well with other people generally speaking. I like to be surrounded by a lot of people and have a lot of casual opportunities for social interaction. I feel like that need is very well met for me by living communally, especially while living in a pandemic. I like the fact that I’m “podded” with such a large group of people. It means that I’m much more able to get certain social needs met in the context of this pandemic than if I were living alone. It would be a lot more work if I was living on my own or with one or two other people to get my social needs met. I would have to consider how serious the case count is right now, or consider if the people I’m seeing are vaccinated and have to mask up. I’m willing to put in that effort and I currently want to make more friends that I don’t live with, but it also is really relieving to be able to have a lot of my social needs met without going through all that.
One of the most challenging aspects is that it’s just hard to live with people. More specifically, you have to learn to live with people even when you really don’t agree with them or if you really just don’t want to live with them right now – you have to figure out how to do it anyway. There are a lot of contexts in which, if I don’t like that person or if I don’t have good synergy with that person, I just don’t have to interact with them. You can even do that at a commune that is sufficiently large, but in a small one, that’s not really an option. As someone I live with once said, you don’t always have to like one another to love one another. That’s the practice. How can we be committed to loving one another, to meet one another’s needs, to be good to one another, even when we’re really not seen eye-to-eye?
In many contexts it’s very easy to just write someone off and decide you don’t want anything to do with that person but in a small commune, you don’t have that option. That can be a challenge because sometimes you really do need space from someone to be safe, and that’s legitimate, but also I think it’s good for us to learn to set boundaries and move toward reconciliation without necessarily just removing a relationship from the picture entirely.
Raven: Are there any other things you would like to share from your communal experiences?
Anthony: I probably already talked too much, so no.
Robert Dove-McClellan (also known as Brother Robert Julian, nOC) has been an activist, an administrator, and a cook. He lived in a communal house in Philadelphia as part of Movement for a New Society before moving to the Boston area where he and I built three communities together–including Common Threads which became a community in dialogue with the FEC. He is currently involved with the Fresh Pond Friends Meeting and the Ecumenical Order of Charity and writes poetry. He is also a singer and a religious historian.
Raven: When did you first hear of income sharing and when did you first practice it?
Robert: Actually, the practice came first; we didn’t have a name for it at the time. This was with a small community of people in West Philadelphia, a fairly dense and multi-racial neighborhood in the 70’s. Some of the people in our fledgling community had shared expenses with others for particular items or events, but this was on an entirely different level. And it was motivated by simple justice. One of the adults in our community had three children, ages, 14, 11 and 7. She worked a full time job as a public health nurse, and gave over rent money for 4 people. The rest of us were single and didn’t need to work full time. The sharing started out by simply sharing responsibility for the children, just in very practical ways – lunches for school, being there when the kids came home, homework, bed time – stuff like that. Then we moved to sharing the expenses of the rent. From there we just took a big leap and pooled our income and treated our income and expenses as one unit. We had meetings to decide about budgets and unexpected expenses like any family would. The thing is, this was in late 70’s; we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have credit cards or ATM cards or any of the mechanics we have today to make it easy to track income and expenses. The Petty Cash box was very active and a total bear to balance out at the end of the month. But we did it and it worked.
Robert Dove
Raven: When I first met you, you were looking for folks to build community with. Can you tell me about that?
Robert: I had moved to New England and was hoping to help create something akin to what I had experienced in Philadelphia. I was living at the Friends Meeting in Cambridge and you and I got together because we had both been told that the other was interested in community and we should definitely meet and talk. I remember being in the living room of the apartment I was sharing with others; it was a Sunday afternoon and we had the place to ourselves. In no time at all, we had covered the walls with flip chart paper, outlining the things we felt were most important, the quality of life we hoped for and even a time line of sorts. The one thing we were certain of was that we would have to “risk it” in order to find out what worked and what didn’t.
Raven: What did you learn from our three attempts at community building?
Robert: Each time it lasted longer, but the first two didn’t have children and it felt like it was more an economic thing and didn’t, from the start, feel long term. I think it matters that the first two were rented properties. In the third community, income sharing was one of the most radical things we did and one of the easiest parts of living together. Our disagreements about money when we had any were easily negotiated and solved. It didn’t hurt that we had a joint bank account, a credit cards we all used, and many ways to track what we were doing. What was hard was combining raising children, with income paying jobs, with care of a house we actually owned, while engaged in social change activities and finding the time for personal growth as well. Maybe if we had lived a bit more rurally, it might have been easier, but I’m not sure of that. I think finally what became clear over time was that each of us had somewhat different ideas of what living in community would be like. Despite having talked a lot, it turned out our definitions of or at least our feelings about community were different.
Common Threads ~ 1995
Raven: What were the best things about communal living and what were the hardest?
Robert: The best things for me were the interaction with the children, the communal meals, the celebratory events to which we invited many of our friends and the discoveries of group and even one on one dynamics which happened over time. We involved our children in almost every aspect of our lives to the extent they were able. And I think they really grew emotionally because of it. They loved participating in activities and decision-making with the adults.
I guess I’ve named the hardest already, except to add that personalities seemed to have changed in the environment of community. We didn’t know how to deal with anxiety or depression very well and the constant attention needed to live and work in an urban environment with all our interests, took its toll sometimes in ways of which we were unaware. We had people who were struggling with finding meaningful income, people who had long commutes, people with aging parents ─ there was a lot going on. But that was who we were; I’m not sure how we could have managed it better.
Common Threads ~ 1998
Raven: What do you see as the role of spirituality in secular communities?
Robert: Well, we didn’t have a single-track version of spirituality and I think that to the extent a group of people can support the spiritual quest of each of its members, in all the variety of their expressions, a community can find itself enriched. I remember the first Christmas time we spent together and the discussion of Christmas trees. It turned out that the people who had been raised Christian had the biggest problems with the Tree. Other people saw it as a lovely winter holiday and enjoyed decorating the house. Of course, in our community, we celebrated Hanukkah, the Solstice, Christmas and Kwanzaa. So candles and calendars were everywhere. And we made sure to have a working fire extinguisher. Lots of small take-aways: I still remember a chant that one person, who was Jewish and had been raised in South Africa, taught us.
Brother Robert Julian
Raven: Anything else that you’d like to share with the Commune Life readers?
Robert: People venturing into community often have had difficult lives dealing with our so-called modern world. We arrive somewhat wounded, even if we’re not aware of it. Face it, our Western culture is a set up for loneliness and pessimism. So, just like a large, extended family, people in community have to be prepared to be flexible and discern the difference between what they want and what they need, because they won’t get everything they want. But in the process, sometimes you find out something which is really wonderful and fulfilling which you never thought of before and it turns out better than you imagined it would. The other thing is, don’t let stuff fester; if you can’t talk to someone you’re having a problem with, get another person to join in to help the process. Do everything you can to nip resentment in the bud. And don’t exaggerate. And don’t catastrophize.
Rachael is a long time member of Glomus Commune in Walton, New York. We talked in December.
Raven: My first question is, what is your relationship with Glomus? What do you do here?
Rachael: Okay, well, I’ve lived here for almost five years, and have been an income-sharing member for most of that time. I am a worker-owner of East Brook Community Farm, which is the farm business run at the community. That’s the main work that I do in terms of hours per week, but I also do other community-specific things like figuring out various legal and financial stuff for the community and business, since we’re still getting those systems in place. And then there’s work associated with running a household. I don’t do as much domestic work some other folks do, but I do make yogurt and other ferments and that sort of stuff. I do more domestic work in the winter when I’m not farming as much.
Raven: What do you like about living here?
Rachael: I originally moved here because I was looking for a place that was both a community and a farm. I had lived in cooperative living situations and I had worked on farms, but I hadn’t lived in a place that was supposed to be both at once, so that was what brought me here and that is one of the reasons that I’m still here. The land is beautiful, the location is beautiful, and the people are good. It’s a big enough community for me in certain ways, but it’s also small enough in that we rely on relationships to do work rather than rely on bureaucracies or more impersonal types of policies. I like that.
Raven: Is there stuff you don’t like about living in a communal setting?
Rachael: Yeah, sometimes I might just want to be alone and that’s only possible in certain spaces. You can’t expect to wake up in the morning and come downstairs and have solo time in the kitchen. It’s not really a big problem, though. Also, when you live in community, a lot of things become conversations that just wouldn’t be as complex if you lived with, like, one other person or if you lived alone. Integrating the opinions, feelings, wants, and needs of several people takes a lot of time and energy. Sometimes it’s amazing and wonderful, and sometimes it’s super hard and frustrating, but I think that is what it is to live in community. Overall, the positives outweigh any downsides for me.
Raven: Is there anything in particular you like or don’t like about the income sharing aspect?
Rachael: Even though income sharing on the outside might seem like an objective thing, I still think that people have their own ideas and attitudes about it. That’s not really a thing that I like or don’t like, it’s just a thing that I’ve observed. I see people feel more or less empowered to spend money, or to advocate around financial decisions. It’s something we’re learning to be more upfront about in our financial discussions. I really like the income sharing because it allows us to do more with less. We don’t have a lot of superfluous expenses because we pool our resources. We have a high standard of living given our income. It just makes a lot of sense to me. I appreciate Glomus’ budgeting process. I think it ultimately serves our members really well. There may be more that we could do to help members, especially new members, understand Glomus’ financial systems more quickly and easily. But at the same time, at least for me, shifting from an individual to a collective mindset around money really does take personal time and effort. Before I lived here, and I first started thinking about income sharing, I was concerned that I might feel limited – that my ability to make financial decisions would be encumbered by community process, or my own feelings about spending community money. But I really feel the opposite. I feel supported and encouraged. I like dealing with money on a collective scale. In some ways it’s more complicated – did you know that most institutions here find it really strange that a bunch of unrelated individuals want to share their income and own stuff in common? But I’m also mostly enjoying the challenge of figuring things out.
Raven: Are there any other things you’d like to share about communal living? Final thoughts?
Rachael: Don’t underestimate the human relationships aspect of community. Lots of people who aspire to start or join a community overlook how difficult it can be to share your life so intimately with multiple people. It’s also incredibly beautiful and rewarding, but man it’s tough sometimes. Still, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. For me, a great thing about living in community is that it normalizes conflict. I was more conflict avoidant before coming to community, and less comfortable with the level of realness that is necessary for community to work. Conflict at its best is growthful and deepens connection. So lean into that stuff when you can, while also taking care of yourself and others.
Here’s someone who lived at East Wind in the mid-eighties and talks about life in community back then: the kitchen, the start of the nut butter business, and problems with the dairy, among other things. Some real communal history!
Sumner, who usually does these interviews, is himself interviewed by a grad student. He comments that it’s a “Confused, unfocused interview for the most part. Gets better in the second half.” It was done when he was living at East Wind and he comments about East Wind and other communities.
Here’s a chance to hang out with Susan at a picnic table, after dinner, outside East Wind’s dining hall, RB. (Which stands for Rock Bottom.) Sumner took this footage.
Sumner continues his interviews with ex-East Wind members–in this case, Tara and Reishi, who lived in the community around 2013-2016. This is the eighth in a series of his interviews. The others are: Macie, Warren, Zan, Jim Adams, Joston, Cayli, and two interviews of Boone.
What’s it like to visit a commune like East Wind? Sumner’s latest interview is with a couple of visitors from Canada who gave their impressions of East Wind, including advice for new folks coming to East Wind.
Last week I posted a short interview with Boone without noticing this longer interview. Maybe it was for the best, since we can post the longer piece this week. – Raven
commune life 