Blogs

Amanda and i were dating during my 5th year of college when she went to the game store to get me a birthday present.  After talking with people at the store about it, she decided not to give it to me til after i graduated, which was clearly a wise choice.  The game was Dungeons and Dragons and i have been playing one form or another of it, with huge breaks, for 30 years.  I have an addictive personality and it has definitely been one of my vices.

The current form the game takes is the “Heroes” fantasy role playing home school game.  This is very different from most role playing games, as i have described before, in that the players have amazing control over the variables in the game.  “I want to role for chaotic weather!” cries Luuk in today’s adventure and he rolled a 5 and the subbasement he was in was flooded with rotting fish falling from the upper floors.

a twenty sided die, affectionately “1D20?

But almost always what happens when my players roll less than a 12 on a 20 sided die (the most commonly used in this game) is they yell at me “Question!” and if i ask a question and they get it right, then they can roll again.  Thus the game is wild cross between Dungeons and Dragons and Trivial Pursuits.  Except the content would better be called Significa.

Reblogged from Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History:

I recently had an experience that reminded me why I started giving workshops on Honest Seduction, and now I feel an irresistible urge to write about it, so here we go. Shameless plug- the next Honest Seduction workshop will be in Philly on July 7 from 5-7 pm.

This week I sent an email to C & M, a really awesome couple who I am friends with, confessing that I have a huge crush on them (together and separately). 

Read more… 517 more words

Angie is doing the Honest Seduction w/s on July 7th in Philly. Below is the story of some of her personal journey to get there.

Paxus at Twin Oaks
19 Red 2012

Back when i gave the Friday night orientation to new visitors, i used to say “i want to tell you how you can get rejected for membership during your visit to Twin Oaks.” Since some wanted to join and the others were curious this tended to catch their attention.

The easiest way to blow your chance and actually get a free ride to the bus station in Charlottesville is to haul off and punch someone, anyone actually.  We are a non-violent community and pretty much any physical violence from a visitor or guest will be met with instant expulsion from the community (we are not as good with psychological violence between members).

The most subtle and difficult to detect way to get rejected is to have a poor sense of boundaries.  While not exclusively a male problem, perhaps 80% of the time it is males who are rejected for this reason.  This manifests in interrupting and dominating conversations, moving into social or personal spaces where you have not check to be sure you are welcome, ignoring requests made by others for space or quiet or privacy.

One of my favorite things about living at Twin Oaks is that all manner of interesting folks come to us to look for clever solutions they are chronicling to share with the world.  Sometimes that is exotic mega media like Russia Today or the mainstream press like CNN.  But more often it is cool micro media like the fine couple from the Within Reach Video project.

The Within Reach model was simple.  Give up everything which would not fit on two bicycles and ride across the country visiting 100 communities, looking for best practices, video and write about them.  They really liked Twin Oaks.  This post is about another short video they did on the Muffin Man from Madison Wisconsin.

In case you are at Twin Oaks, or some other place which does not have great YouTube access, i will explain the brief version of this video.  This charming guy bakes vegan muffins, hops on his bike with a trailer, rides around town and finds people who want to play, offers them a muffin IF they will agree to do one thing from this list:

10. Give hugs or high 5 to 10 people tomorrow who seem unhappy.

Reblogged from FeministPlus:

Having seen some more conversations around ally behaviour, and done some more ally-ing and been allied-to some more, I’ve had a few more thoughts on how to navigate this area.  I’ve realised that my original thoughts missed and crucial dimension of what it means to act as an ally:

Power

Power is one of the pervading dynamics that we’re grappling with when we do anti-oppression work.

Read more… 2,034 more words

Thanks for this piece. As someone from many privileged positions who is trying to learn how to be a better ally, the advice which felt most important to me was about better behavior when being called out and responsibility for self education. I am rebloging this.

Hawina and i do 3 or 4 craft fairs a year where we sell hammocks for the commune.  We do all these fairs with Willow and Corb and Feonix or Sara.  Except for Nashville, we do this one just with the two of us.

We buy food at Piggily Wiggily, instead of eating out.

Nashville is hot this time of year and the craft fair is busy.  We had sold over $400 before the fair started officially.

Hawina is a master of logistics, the pillows are shipped, the hotel is booked, we know the options for places to stay en route because Hawina has already scoped out them out, sandwiches are packed, pillows are shipped in advance, she even forecasted that i did not have enuf clean short sleeve shirts and she grabbed some from Commie Clothes for me.

This is also the fair where we know the organizers better than any other.  Or i should say Hawina does, i dont pay that much attention.  But Hawina writes down their names, learns about them and the following year knows what to try to sell them.

We have a food allowance of $27/day/person.  So we go to the local supermarket (which was just bought out by Piggily Wiggily) and buy mostly healthy food we like to replace meals that we might have both at a restaurant.

It was a near perfect day today, despite the heat and the rain that shut down the fair 20 minutes before closing time.

Driving on Interstate 81 perhaps an hour before the Tennessee line at perhaps 60 mph i hit and killed a black  bear.

There were no pictures, it all happened very fast

i did not feel guilty.  The traffic was dense, there was no possibility to swerve out of the way.  My reflexive and futile effort to slow down nearly resulted in me being rear ended.

i did feel lucky.  Had the bear been standing, as it was as it crossed the neighboring lane of traffic, i could have easily lost control of the van and Hawina and i could have been hurt or worse.

i also felt terrible.  Shaken, of course, but also bad that i had participated, however unintentionally  in killing such a majestic creature.  i’ve hit a few snakes and once a dog which also ran onto the highway.   But a bear is different, it feels closer to human somehow.

Kaya’s epic face paint

One of the whacky group shots – i am lower left

big ultimate game, including players in their 60s

Claire X-viz and Jake ham it up for the camera

Rayne’s wonderful multi hooping

Hey folks!

Our friendly registration booth from the 2011 Conference

Want to attend the 2012 Communities Conference at rock-bottom prices? You’d better register this week! Our Early Bird registration deals end this Friday!

Sign up now for $85 registration with camping accommodations or $115 registration with indoor accommodations. Come Saturday, prices will be jumping up.

Missing out on Early Bird specials? Sign up ASAP anyway — prices jump again July 21st and August 24th!

See you this Labor Day Weekend!

Another idea i am quite excited about is the Mockupy fantasy role playing game we are developing for the final day of the communities conference.  This will be a multi-player (perhaps as many as 40 people) live action theater role playing game.  And if we do it well, it will be comic, enlightening, infuriating, sad and powerful.  And most important inspiring.

self mockery

As Joanna and i were brainstorm sense/scenarios for the Mockupy role players, it was clear that one aspect of this global viral movement was maddening to Joanna.  “The whole “no message” tactic drives me nuts.”  Joanna comes from the activist school where messaging is central and campaigning without clear msgs is like driving with no steering wheel.  You can go fast, but you cant get anywhere predictable.

“You would be so much more effective if you had an issue.”

By Janel
I happened to be at the Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. last week, passing through an exhibit on human evolution, when the bold words “sharing resources” caught my eye. I wandered over to the display, where I learned–to my amusement, as the 2012 conference theme is resource-sharing–that humans have been sharing food and tools to build “stronger social bonds” and increase their chances of survival for 2.6 million years.

 
Sure, our ancestors shared resources because their lives depended on it. But why should now be any different? With peak oil and environmental devastation come real threats to the survival of our species. Living communally and sharing stuff such as cars and land are the best gift we can give to our children’s children–not only because of the resource preservation that sharing entails, but also because of the model of cooperation it preserves!

One of the several things that i am excited these days is the tiny Mutual Aid grant to fund the creation of a transparency group fingerbook*. This would cover how to start a group and what are some useful tools to work with.  Fingerbooks are typically less than 40 pages and 1/3 graphics and cartoons.  I am guessing this collection of tools has the potential to do as much for improving emotional communication between individuals in groups as the consensus model has done for collective decision making.

There are a pair of sister tools for voicing under expressed discordant emotions or judgements toward someone in your group.  The first tool is for when the unexpressed topic is hard to say and you might be fearful of the other persons immediate response to hearing it.

Withholds: If there is someone you are not communicating smoothly in your group you may have a withhold – a story you need to tell to this person to let you start communicating with them more openly and honestly.  There is a format to withholds which runs like this:

Hawina: Paxus, i have a withhold for you

Paxus: Okay, i am up to hear it

We have different types of holidays in terms of inviting the outside world.  New Years and anniversary are more public ones, Validation Day tends to be more just us and our closest friends.  An ex-member suggested i invite a couple, the wife of whom had been a member here many years ago and lived in the area.  The husband showed up without her, and very nearly got himself thrown out of the party for acting inappropriately.  Ultimately, the ex-member wife showed up and whisked him away.  But with this smallish exception this largish event went off without a hitch.

Kayde, Marta, Elspeth and Kele belly danced for us

I was asked to MC the coffeehouse portion of the program, which happened in the early afternoon.  This turned out to be a relatively easy job since many of the acts felt like they were so famous (in our little local circle) that they needed no introduction.  i only had to yank one act off the stage before they were willing to go.  And there was a sweet mix of our talent with ex-members and locals.

Turnip X, Ezra, Sky, Nina and Kassia are the Vulgar Bulgars

Japanese PM Noda just announced that he is restarting the Oi reactors in that country, as what is likely part of a plan to restart more “undamaged” reactors in his country.  Noda claims this is necessary to protect jobs, the economy, and the “survival of society,”  Despite 30% of his own party calling for him to wait and only 29% of the public wanting reactor restarts.

Street protests were quite rare in Japan before Fukushima

Let’s investigate these claims for a moment.  With almost all of the countries potentially functioning 50 reactors shut down the Japanese economy grew over at over 4% annualized in the first 4 months of this year, over twice the first quarter GDP growth in the US.

“What does logistics mean?”  My son asks earnestly while we are at the playground between Morningstar (where he lives) and Degania.  The Star family has some guidelines about questions, when ever Willow asks you take it seriously and you dont talk down to him in your answer – you respond as you would to an adult.

I describe the content versus logistics dichotomy as it is found in event organizing.  That the workshops topics are the content and logistics is the infrastructure of how people get there and where they sleep and what they eat.  Willow understands quickly and cuts off my answer.

Is this infrastructure or content?

I am working with this great team on the communities conference.   We hove logistics people, we have people working on outreach and workshop threads.  And we have a blog, it is not uncommon for larger events to have blogs these days.  What is tricky, is the content is often weak in them.

I am blogging for the communities conference and i want to produce quality content.  The article i just wrote on community living not being running away from politics i feel pretty good about.  This conference is hopping on the Occupy bandwagon and looking at how this amorphous political movement can synergistically operate with amorphous residential living movement.  So there is all manner of things i can hit on as this events rogue content engine.

I'm in northern California this weekend, conducting a facilitation training, and the teaching theme is consensus. Two weeks ago students were asked what aspects of consensus were most challenging for them to understand or deal with well, and I got lots of replies. Today I'm launching a blog series in which I'll attempt to address a number of the issues that the students identified:

I. When do you know enough to act?
II. Closing the deal
III. Wordsmithing in plenary
IV. Redirecting competition
V. Bridging disparate views
VI. Harvesting partial product
VII. When to be formal
VIII. Harnessing brainstorms
IX. Coping with blocking energy
X. Defining respect
XI. Balancing voices
XII. Knowing when to accelerate and when to brake
XIII. Knowing when to labor and when to let go

• • •
While it's easy to agree on the goal of gathering as much relevant information on an issue as possible before making a decision, it turns out to be surprisingly nuanced knowing when you have enough information to act. That is, at what point does the perceived cost of delay (in order to gather additional data) outweigh the risk of making a mistake in acting without it?

I figure you never know everything, so the question becomes when do you know enough? This is about risk assessment (the consequences of making a mistake because you acted precipitously) and also about where the group stands on the spectrum of risk averse (the world is a dangerous place) versus risk tolerant (the world is full of opportunity). What looks like a prudent action to the latter can appear as recklessness to the former; what appears as prudence to the former comes across as overprotective to the latter. There is no right answer or single best approach. The group will simply have to discern the balance point case by case.

There is a popular illusion, that living in community is running away from the problems of the “real world”. I completely get this. Rural intentional communities in particular can build insular cultures which view “the mainstream” as oddly out of touch with reality.

But for every person in community who skips out on activism and wide world awareness, there is someone else in the community who starts going to protests, or helping to get out the vote, or working in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, or organizing a workshop or public presentation.

The question, in my mind, is, “How do we show the Occupy movement why and how the communities movement is relevant to the big-vision political change that is being sought– with increasing visibility– around the world?”

And the answer to this is that we are already working on a wealth distribution model which is fair, rather than market or crime driven. This feels like a core Occupy belief. In fact, we are experts in sharing things. And while it often feels frustrating, we are progressive thinking pioneers with lively internal communication and decision making systems.

There are some good articles on the robust collective clothes sharing system we have here at Twin Oaks written by Ethan and myself, so I won’t focus on that here.  But what I do want to mention is the idea of robust vs brittle agreements that surround sharing.

My life has followed a significantly different trajectory than most people would have guessed in times passed.  And if you had said “He will grommet hammocks for a living.”  Most people who knew me would have just laughed.

laser guided grommeting machine at Emerald City – circa 2012

This is actually my second stint at grommeting.  I did it perhaps 10 years ago, but that was before we had the guide and laser.  The guide puts marks on the bed at about the right places and the laser (when properly aligned) hits the marks when the grommet machine is positioned correctly.  A job that i was poor at because it required estimation and was mistake expensive, has become much easier.  And i have yet to spend a dozen hours at this new occupation and i might well be replaced by a more dedicated operator.  And it is curious and desirable to be part of an assembly line process for a small part of my work week.

As much as Facebook is deeply troublesome and problematic, it does distribute and perhaps inspire some extremely clever pieces of propaganda.  These are my favorites from the last coupe of months.

It’s not warfare if we dont fight back

Many couples fight about money, fidelity and bathroom norms.  Sara and i seem to be struggling over the concept of beauty.  While the topic is slightly abstract, the conflict is real and edgy.

At the center of this fight is oppression.  If i find someone beautiful, then am i oppressing, disrespecting or dismissing someone which i dont find beautiful?  Are my beauty standards influenced by the $100 billion/year advertising industry? [This one is an obvious yes] Is beauty inherently unfair?

i bristle at the idea of having to give up my experience of beauty for someone else’s notion of political correctness.  Sara bristles at the notion that this issue is about political correctness.  “It is about being an ally.” She says.