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Reblogged from Running in ZK:

I can't remember a time that I didn't love to dance. I was one of those little girls whose mothers carted them to weekly ballet and tap lessons. My friends and I choreographed dances after school and fawned over the cheerleaders at high school football games. My dreams were shaped by the Star Search dancers and some quintessential 80s dance movies: Dirty Dancing, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, and Footloose.

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Kathryn was a dancing fool, took a break to have a baby, and now that family life has settled and shifted she is back with some fancy steps and some personal thoughts.

I can’t remember a time that I didn’t love to dance. I was one of those little girls whose mothers carted them to weekly ballet and tap lessons. My friends and I choreographed dances after school and fawned over the cheerleaders at high school football games. My dreams were shaped by the Star Search dancers and some quintessential 80s dance movies: Dirty Dancing, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, and Footloose.

By the time I was starting high school, I realized I was a Smart Girl and not a Cheerleader, and I started to deliberately dance silly in order to avoid the possibility of being mocked for trying to dance well and failing. In college, I chose the goth club because people actually went there to dance, and didn’t mind if you danced a little differently. After college, clubs in the city were expensive (for me on my grad student stipend) and filled with cigarette smoke and guys who thought I should want to grind with them. Ugh. I stopped dancing entirely.

I didn’t realize that I missed it. Yeah, yeah, so I watched Save the Last Dance like 10 times… My life was full. I did yoga. I discovered contra dancing, which was a blast – in a structured sort of way.

And then I moved to Twin Oaks. My first Twin Oaks dance party was when I was a visitor at Halloween, and it was a revelation. The people filling the dance floor ranged in age from 2 to 78 or so, and I got to watch as many dancing styles as there were people dancing. Everyone was out to have a good time, no matter whether they danced well or awkwardly, hip hop or hippie, boisterously or demurely. It was safe to make eye contact while dancing, and share the joy of moving my body to music, without worrying that I’d have to defend my boundaries later. I was quickly hooked.

For my first 6 or 7 years of membership, I made a point of going to every dance party I possibly could.

This post was written by Paxus and originally appeared at www.communitiesconference.org Sections in italics are additions to the original post.

1. Reconsider your living situation.  If you let it, the Communities Conference can really shake you up.  Daring people who are trying new or untested lifestyles are presenting or in attendance.  Step outside your comfort zone a bit and start from the assumption that you could live somewhere else, or with other people and see what this event has to offer and demonstrate.  Let go of the assumption that your next year has to look like your last year and go back to your own personal values.  What do you really care about?  How could this be better experienced in your daily living situation?

This is a call to be daring, which i think is the most under nurtured revolutionary trait.

2. Chat with a rock star.  There are a bunch of inspiring personalities at the Communities Conference and they are more accessible in this relaxed 3 day event than they are at most times in their busy lives.  Seek out the people who say something that excited you and ask to have lunch or a more private chat with them.  If this is your first time attending, read the entire set of workshop descriptions upon arrival and find out which presenters sound like they are doing stuff you are excited about and then get any of the event organizers to point that person out to you.  This conversation might just change your life.

I just wrapped up a five-day visit with my daughter (Jo) and son-in-law (Peter) in Las Vegas. I was lucky to hit a "cool spell"; the daytime temperatures never got above 105 degrees. I'm telling you, they know how to do sunshine there. Because it's June and we're within a week of summer solstice, it starts getting light well before 6 am and lingers well past 8 pm. For this past week at least, it was Sun City every bit as much as Sin City.

Besides digging out from under a backlog of email, the most timely thing I did was help Peter scrape the lime scale off the housing of their swamp cooler so that we could use it to cool off the back porch and help take some of the burden off the whole house air conditioning. (I benefited directly from that repair, as I relied on the back porch table as the bivouac for my laptop for the duration of my visit.)

While I mostly hung out at Jo & Peter's house (near the intersection of Rainbow and Charleston, in the northwest quadrant of the city), occasionally we'd drive somewhere and I'd get inundated by billboard messaging, which is all the more striking when you're visiting a city of almost two million and live in a rural county with a population under 5000.

Within the genre of billboard advertising, there's considerable variety, and I want to hghlight a few that are not that prevalent elsewhere in mainstream America. Being Vegas, no small number of the displays—especially the ones nearer the Strip and the airport—promote shows and entertainment opportunities geared to pique your interest (there's a reason they call it "titillation"). 

There are a few billboards that inform readers (at 55 mph) of the chance to pull the trigger on semi-automatic weapons at a local firing range (which, invariably, is depicted by a buxom blonde in a black sports bra gleefully banging away with a machine gun). Who knew this was even a marketing niche?

by Paxus

1. Reconsider your living situation.  If you let it, the Communities Conference can really shake you up.  Daring people who are trying new or untested lifestyles are presenting or in attendance.  Step outside your comfort zone a bit and start from the assumption that you could live somewhere else, or with other people and see what this event has to offer and demonstrate.  Let go of the assumption that your next year has to look like your last year and go back to your own personal values.  What do you really care about?  How could this be better experienced in your daily living situation?

2. Chat with a rock star.  There are a bunch of inspiring personalities at the Communities Conference and they are more accessible in this relaxed 3 day event than they are at most times in their busy lives.  Seek out the people who say something that excited you and ask to have lunch or a more private chat with them.  If this is your first time attending, read the entire set of workshop descriptions upon arrival and find out which presenters sound like they are doing stuff you are excited about and then get any of the event organizers to point that person out to you.  This conversation might just change your life.

Several people have said the most useful piece of the Loud Love event was the transparency tools workshop.   i was powerfully reminded that while the tools are useful, what appears to be really happening is that people are longing to be asked these revealing questions.  With the smallest opportunity most people will share deep feelings and vulnerable information about themselves, even with people they dont know very well.

We have re-started the transparency group at Acorn.  There were a few people excited about it and a number of people who showed up when it happened who seemed to like it.  My original thought was that we should try to fuse Acorns more festive culture with this tool set and instead of having the classical, slightly formal transparency discussions.  We should have transparency parties, where the format is more relaxed, less full group oriented and more smaller conversations.  Distracting food and drink could be part of it as well.

Picasso’s girl before a mirror

Instead, at the first Acorn transparency event this year, we stuck to a more conventional format, with the group in a circle and a single person revealing themselves to everyone using several different tool sets.  And i was blown away again.

Scabies sucks, but it was fun when people got excited about applying each other’s permethrin and the subsequent “prolonged skin-to-skin contact” parties we’re now green lighted to have.

And having strep is not fun, but it’s nice that I don’t worry about losing my job/money/childcare/house because I’ve gotten sick and need to stay in bed for a couple days.  And people will bring me food.

So maybe intentional community breaks even.  We infect each other with every transmissible ailment, but then we take care of each other while people get back to normal.

Cue inspirational music.

i am not much of a fashion person.  i can go long periods without looking in a mirror.  One of the advantages of living in the commune is no one seems to care (except perhaps Bochie) that i almost never comb my hair.  Last Wednesday i agreed to go to  Charlottesville to do a filming of a couple of TV shows for the All Things Green on reactors and North Anna specifically.  So i went up to Commie Clothes and grabbed a respectable looking button down shirt.  Which Willow laughed at just moments after i took it “you look weird in a real shirt”.  They said the shows will be aired in July.

Willow Circa Beltane 2013

Ali was handling the NBC TV 29 visit to Twin Oaks for a 90 second piece they were doing on our 46th Anniversary.  Since i already had a TV ready shirt, i jumped in and did part of the interview.

NBC 29 TV show on Twin Oaks

A week back, my amazing artist friend Amylin in Istanbul asked me to write about the Turkish protests in Gezi.  I have worked on this post off and on, struggling with it.   The problem is the unfortunate but unavoidable comparison between the inspirational revolution in Egypt which was focused on Tahrir Square and the Turkish protest unfolding in Taskin Square which houses Gezi Park.  Central to this comparison was my belief, that the Turkish protests were extremely unlikely to spark a revolution, because popular uprisings rarely disassemble democracies.

Leaders can certainly lose their jobs, but even this seemed unlikely with the relatively high approval ratings Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan was holding.  Yesterday, Erdogam issues his “final warning” that protesters had to leave the park within 24 hours.  There will be a fight in the next few hours, and in the short terms the police will likely win and the park will be cleared.  It is a relatively small space, the police have superior hardware, including tear gas and they have already demonstrated a capacity for violence, that the protester are unwilling to mimic.  The police will likely win today’s battle, but unlike a week ago, it seems like the protester might just win the war.

About two years ago a member here discovered co had some distinctive looking red bites in a suspect location on cos body.  A couple other members came forth with the same testimony, and voila – a tri-community crisis was born.

Last time around, a member commemorated the ordeal with buttons

Scabies! Supposedly the little bastards can live on any fabric or upholstery or carpet for up to a week, laying eggs and waiting for a poor innocent human to jump on.  They’ll die if you don’t use the fabric or upholstery or carpet for more than a week; they need a human host.  But if any human has unknowingly gotten some scabies jumping on them, and then goes and sits on a couch or whatever, the bugs can go around and around that way.  Forever.

When the health team made the decision to view the situation as an all out emergency, there was a lot of grumbling, but in the end almost everyone cooperated with Operation: Scabies Eradication.  The holdouts included two pregnant women who didn’t want to smear toxic medicine all over themselves and one other member who opted to live in isolation for two weeks.  The pregnant women sat on wooden chairs for two weeks (or maybe it was six?).  I mean, they got up and walked around and stuff.  But in public places they did not sully the upholstery with their uncleanliness.

The protocol was something like this:

-Choose your outfits for the week, then quarantine the rest of your clothes by taping your drawers or closet shut

Dearest Stephanie:

i can host you at Twin Oaks when i come back from NJ sometime after Tuesday June 18, if you are available.

i want to set your expectations correctly, because many candidates see Twin Oaks and think “if i can make a good presentation there i can land 100 votes.”  Twin Oaks is an embrace diversity community, which means in practice we barely agree on the “sun coming up in the east” thing.

Somewhere in here is proof that the sun doe snot rise in the east

I just completed the eighth and final weekend of a two-year facilitation training in northern California. The host group was Kingfisher, a retrofit cohousing community in the upper Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland.

The community jokingly refers to itself as KFC (as in KingFisher Cohousing). Of course, "KFC" is more commonly understood as a reference to Kentucky Fired Chicken, an icon in the fast food industry, and the community has been anything but fast moving (they've been trying to buy a suitable East Bay property since 2006) and because intentional communities are efforts to create a let's-slow-down-and-smell-the-roses values-based authentic life that is the very antithesis of mass marketed squat and gobble all-you-can-overeat buckets of cage-raised deep fried artificially hormone-plumped chicken breasts.

Kingfisher bought their property last December: two rows of modest bungalows that face each other across a driveway—four on one side and five on the other. Because of Oakland rental law, the community inherited nine renters who have the right to remain there as long as they're law abiding and continue to pay rent. That is, the community can only convert units into residences for community members as the current renters voluntarily leave. To date, two units have been converted and there are decent prospects for one or two more becoming available in the coming months. 

Since the community is small, this delay in the availability of the housing stock is working out fine (that is, the demand for community-occupied units is pretty well matching the pace of availability). However, buying a multi-unit rental property has had the unintended consequence of Kingfisher being in the business of property management until the inherited renters leave all nine units, and that could take a while.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.  We would run a contest in which we got people to submit essays or short video about a “deserving dad” and we would crowd source the voting and selection process, so the people could choose the most popular ones. Some of the first entries we got were heartwarming, including this video from the near by town somewhat unfortunately called Bumpass.

Then came the vultures.  There is apparently a significant collection of people who spend a lot of their time on online contest, which i dont have a problem with.  But there is a subsection of this group which cheats.  The easiest way to cheat is to buy votes, they start at $10 per hundred.  The top vote getting winning entrant got fewer than 350 votes.  Which means you could have secured a $150 hammock for $35, if you did not get caught.

Hawina and i late at Corbs sleuthing thru the internet

Reblogged from This is a Blog About Twin Oaks:

Some people do some of their best thinking in the shower. Some people like thinking in bed. I once read a strange college essay about this kid who liked thinking on the toilet. But I do some of my best thinking in the car, which I guess could get dangerous if I'm driving, which I was. But I never let my eyes wander too far off the road.

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Zoe's farewall post, her senior project away time is complete now she needs to finish her writing. Cute picture of Willow

Reblogged from This is a Blog About Twin Oaks:

Click on the link below...

Running in ZK

... if you would like to read a collaborative blog between some of the members of Twin Oaks. ZK is the main building and I guess people are often running in it.

Keegan's plans for a quiet evening are crashed by run away crowds. And he shares advice on how not to deal with this problem, from his own experience of making poor choices.

I guess I’m just always going to post about cows.

I wanted lots of sleep before anniversary, so when I got back to my room after dinner last night, I knocked back three sudafed, kicked off my shoes, and started watching Game of Thrones.  Right about when the medicine kicked in, a fellow communard came by to inform me that a neighbor was outside and that one of our cows was on his land.

Sorry, I used to hang out on Reddit all day in a past life

In shock, unable to visualize what had happened, I braced myself for the crappiest evening ever and ran down to the barn to get a herding whip.

One of our “preggies” escaped.  This herd includes actually-pregnant cows as well as some not-pregnant heifers who haven’t been barn trained yet.  They’re in a pasture with pretty-good fencing, but it’s not one of the ones I’ve upgraded this year.  It was already on my list for next year, but now I’m pissed and want to work on it this summer.

When I got there, it took me a while to find the problem.  Four of our cows were staring off into the neighbor’s woods, and one was missing.  But I didn’t see any obvious break in the line.  The neighbor was on the other side of the fence, and I think I communicated OH SHIT — SORRY — PANIC, but I can’t be sure.  We also had a typical Twin Oaks exchange:

Neighbor: “What’s the best way to reach you if I find her?  I tried calling, but nobody answered.”
Me: “Uh. There is no best way.  Sorry.”
Neighbor: *mildly aggravated laugh/groan*

We split ways, and I had the following plan in mind:

1) Get not-escaped cows into a safer pasture
2) Find the break
3) Go onto neighbor’s land, find missing cow, bring her back through break to safer pasture
4) Sleep

In February of this year Duke announced it was closing the Crystal River reactor in Florida.

In May, Dominion Resources closed the Kewaunee reactor in Wisconsin.

Yesterday, Southern California Edison announced they were closing troubled two reactors at San Onofre outside San Diego, CA.

New Dawn without nuclear?

Before 2013, the last time a reactor was permanently closed in the US was the late 1990?s.  There is a reason it has been almost a decade and a half for any other reactors to close in the US.  It has been the policy of US utilities and the NRC to do everything they can to keep reactors open for as long as possible.  This is just starting to change, but not because they want it to.

Reblogged from Running in ZK:

Yesterday was one of those "commune-perfect" days that makes up for any number of the inevitable crummy ones.  Let me tell you all about it...

My day started when my ever-lovely partner had to awaken early for an 8:00 AM garden shift.  I sent her off with a goodbye kiss, rolled over, and had another hour of glorious sleep before my boys woke up and came in.  

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Ezra shares a rich full commune day on the new unofficial blog "Running in ZK" The only thing which is missing is pictures.

[caption id="attachment_13820" align="aligncenter" width="519"] Mala, Ezra, Zadek and Sami - who says they see the world thru rosy glasses?[/caption]

My mission to seek out interesting examples of innovative community building recently brought me to Boston where I was fortunate to be given a tour of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. Wow!

By 1984 over 20% of properties in the Dudley Neighborhood triangle were abandoned.   Many had been burned by their owners for insurance money, and many had become trash dumps.  The neighborhood had also suffered from divestment, and redlining. DSNI was created to empower the diverse residents of the neighborhood to take control of redevelopment so that it served the people and not the interests of developers.

Yesterday was one of those “commune-perfect” days that makes up for any number of the inevitable crummy ones.  Let me tell you all about it…

My day started when my ever-lovely partner had to awaken early for an 8:00 AM garden shift.  I sent her off with a goodbye kiss, rolled over, and had another hour of glorious sleep before my boys woke up and came in.  We all snuggled in bed for a little while, then it was breakfast time, with farm-fresh eggs and coffee all ’round.  Once we were all nicely fed and caffeinated, I walked the boys to Unicorns (our group daycare/elementary school for the younger kids), and “commuted” along forest paths to the garden, starting my shift at the downright civilized hour of 9:15 AM.