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i’ve written a couple of papers begging and/or threatening communards to make hammocks.  Sabrina recommended that hammocks management lead the way and make more hammocks themselves.   This is what tofu management does, with a handful of managers doing a large numbers of production shifts.

So who is hammocks management?  General management consists of Shal and myself.   Shal runs the hx shop and teaches people to make hammocks and makes the work flow and is in there many times most days.  i, on the other hand, am a pocket bureaucrat who does precious little hands on work.  Till this week.

I checked Sabrina’s labor sheets from this cool database we have that tracks labor and saw that she does around 10 plus hours of tofu production most weeks.  She is also the youngest labor manager the community has had and is as charming as she is industrious.

So i thought 10 hours was a good target for me per week.  I will make it easy this week, which ends tomorrow.

And unlike tofu production (now our biggest business), hammocks making is pleasant relaxed work.  It is on this work that we built this community.  It has all kinds of advantages over most production work.  You can do as little or as much of it as you like.  The person after you needs no communication from you to pick up where you left off and keep going.  You can do it with someone else or solo listening to music.  You can breeze in when the conversation is good and breeze out when that person who makes you slightly uncomfortable starts working.  There are no bosses, no shifts and few deadlines and an all volunteer workforce (so there is less grumbling about work).  It is not physically demanding and it is relatively easy to learn (tho Shal has to keep teaching me some stuff).

Well probably make our goal this week of 175 hammocks.  And i will have done my part.  Thanks Sabrina.

Last weekend Ma'ikwe and I started a two-year Integrative Facilitation training at Dancing Rabbit. It's simultaneously one of the most exhilarating and one of the most challenging things I do.

The program consists of eight 3-day weekends, each spaced about three months apart (allowing for recovery, digestion, and practical application of what happens in one training weekend before being immersed in the next). To describe the weekends as "intense" is akin to labeling the interior of the sun as "hot." Last weekend was especially so.

There are lots of ways to teach and there is a wide variety of preferred learning styles. While we attempt to offer a range of ways to access the material and the skills, the bulk of the course is built on experiential learning—by having the students facilitate actual meetings, rather than relying heavily on lectures, role plays, and practice sessions. I have found over the years (at this point I'm a veteran of 36 training weekends, and have a lot of data points on this) that this generally produces the fastest learning and integration (student "get" in the lessons in their bones, not just in their heads), and it tends to make a night-and-day difference in helping the students understand the energy of the moment, providing context for how to do a certain thing at a certain time, and why.

That said, the live approach is more digestible for some than others. Here's a overview of some of the variables in play:

o Prior Facilitation Experience
The students come into the training with a wide disparity in experience levels, both with the principles and with performing in front of a group. The participants who are newer to facilitation are facing a larger chunk of unfamiliar information—sometimes to the point of overwhelm.

o Intensity of the Feedback

Most people who know me are surprised to hear that i dont get a cell phone when i travel in Europe.  Even when i have visited for months, i dropped this technology which you typically see me use several times in an hour when i am in the Untied Snakes.  It certainly is not that Europe has a superior public access phone system, in fact these systems are not especially handy in many west European countries and even more frustrating in the east (outside of transit hubs and other dense places).

I have been pondering what a more complete digital holiday would look like.  A week or perhaps a month without phone or internet or computer.  How would my experience of reality change. I am in the somewhat luxurious place of being able to design my life this way, that i could with some months of planning, drop out for a month and fast off the information super highway flood.  Will my dreams be richer?  My conversation more intentional?  My presence more focused?  Who knows, but in an increasingly technophilic age it seems wise to step back from the network spectacle and just be with yourself for a bit.

unplug and be

There is a new group. They started work in earnest yesterday at 8 PM. The idea is that you solicit lines and ideas from the audience (in this case the community at large) and then in 24 hours write the script, build the sets, learn the music, rehearse and then perform.

When Willow and i went into brunch today, the amusement and exhaustion was thick in the performers, who i believe were mostly operating on 2 and 3 hours sleep. And the script – a precautionary tale of “Dont eat the green meat” – is likely to be a run away hit.

—-

The show was wonderful and very funny.  They got over 70 submissions for lines and included many of them (but sadly left out my suggestions of “Who did you sleep with the get this job anyway?” from Saturday Night Live, exactly 1 million years ago today).  They also got this long page of inspiring but dry anarchist quotes.  So Ethan got cast as the main character, the rope shop manager (played by Ezra) who thru sexy dry political rhetoric enchants the CIA operative who has been sent to destroy the commune in service of Hatteras Hammocks (nominally our biggest competitor).   MolePlant (the operative played by Summer) belted out her confessional mail box letter which saves her from being lynched by the communards who had had a food poisoning induced spiritual hallucination of the dumpster god DumpRa, that sent them to Berkeley for an architectural encounter with … You kind of had to be there.

The actors were exhausted, the ad libing was amazing, the script quite strange and scattered and overall it was an impressive feet.  I hope the do it again, it looked like great fun (and exhausting work) to do it.

Willow was explaining to me about how cleats work.

“They have spikes that are really sharp, so they are good for holding the grass when you are running.  But if they hit you in the leg they really hurt.  And they can tear up the grass.”  He explains

“They hold even better on plastic grass.” i say offhandedly

“They make plastic grass?” Willow is clearly disturbed by this idea.  He grumbles under his breath.

“Quite a bit of it i am afraid.”  i feel bad  for my entire industrial culture.

Completely seriously Willow asks “Is nothing sacred?”

Prague 2008

Despite the Obama administrations plan to force more money to rich companies to build new reactors in the US.  Increasingly, the prospects for the much touted “nuclear Renaissance” are fading.

Yesterday, Progress Energy announced that they would delay construction of any new reactors in Florida and North Carolina until after 2020.

The decision to build a new reactor here near Twin Oaks has been pushed off until 2013 at least.

Even my old nemesis Temelin in the Czech Republic is being delayed by 5 years

Controlled demolition of reactor tower in Oregon

But the most interesting news world wide comes from sources which have not yet made the papers in the west.  Lucifer reports that the Russians have just delayed construction of both new reactors and new large hydro plants because of budget problems.

Honza reports that the Chinese, while charging forward with 27 reactors under construction, are reducing the number of 3rd generation plants they are building and focusing on the 2nd gen reactors which they know how to complete.  So much for the Chinese miracle.

“If Osama Bin Laden, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama were all stranded on the same desert island who would survive?”

Pause for dramatic effect.

“We would” i quip

Of the dozen people in the room, only Janel laughs in this McDonogh HS history class room.  Not a lot of anarchists here apparently.

Janel and i  have been invited to talk about the community and the questions are mostly fairly standard.  “Where do the kids go to school?” “How do you throw people out?”  ” Are their religious people there ?”  But one student breaks the mold, “How do you deal with break ups since you have to see each other every day?”  A questions so important we actually ask it in our membership interview.

John McDonogh was once the largest land holder in the county.  Like Alfred Nobel, McDonogh was concerned his legacy would not be favorable.   Having lost in love and lost in politics, he became a reclusive workaholic.  His last will and testament surprised many by giving all his money for the creation of schools.  One current incarnation of this is the McDonogh school outside Baltimore where we are speaking today. It is a college prep school with 1300 students from K thru 12, who slightly mysteriously partially embrace the idea of wearing uniforms.

The entire TOAST program was the result of a disagreement between Kate and i when she lived at Twin Oaks.  She contended that she could get sociology and other college professors to pay us to come and give presentations at their schools.  I thought she was out of he mind and said so.  Today, i live with the legacy of being wrong.

In the mainstream, you have pretty much two choices with holidays: you can observe them as is, or your can ignore them.  “Should we go to the fireworks?” “Are you going trick or treating?” “What did Santa get you?” “Will you be my valentine?” In the relatively insular commune culture, we can (and oft do) deconstruct holidays and make something different and better or if they are unsalvageable (like the 4th of July and Memorial Day) we just also skip them.

One of Tobias' Love Photos - stolen from the evil FB

My favorite holiday is validation day.  It is the twisted sister to Valentines Day, in a switch reminiscent of how The Mists of Avalon mirrors the Knights of King Arthur’s Court.  Valentines Day celebrates the love between romantic partners, how could anyone be opposed to this?  Well, what if you dont have a romantic partner?  Or what if you have several?  Or what if your partner recently broke up with you in a messy way.  Well, then Valentines Day maybe confusing or a drag for you this year.

Think of the task you hate most in your life- maybe it’s cooking, maybe it’s cleaning the toilet, maybe it’s dealing with customers, maybe it’s calling your supplies to figure out why the latest shipment of widgets hasn’t arrive yet.  Now imagine that you never have to do this task again- someone else will do it (possibly after you train them), and you can relax in a hammock instead.  The work still gets done, your job is secure, you get paid the same amount, but you are likely much happier!  Not only that, but your co-workers and family actively encourage you to give up these jobs and tasks you hate.  Sounds impossible, right?  Not really- this is what it’s like to live and work at Twin Oaks.

If you have not been here it’s difficult to imagine; the whole place is run on volunteers.  There are literally hundreds of jobs (there are over 100 managerships) here and every one is filled by someone who has in essence said “of all the many things to do here i prefer this one”.  This is quite liberating, and because there are so many jobs to do most members spread their work among several areas .  My work typical 42 hour work week might consist of 7 hours of home school and caring for my son (i do more, but this is what i take credit for), 12 hours of marketing and managing for our hammocks business, 4 hours of making Tofu, 5 hours of giving tours of doing speaking gigs about Twin Oaks, 2 hours of cleaning my house or dishes, 3 hours of labor creditable activism and 9 hours of running errands for the community (room assigning, tofu delivery, Outside Work management and more). But the key is if i did not like this mix, i could change it.

Historians oft credit Poland with starting the revolutions of 1989 and over throwing their government first.  But when i talked with revolutionaries in eastern Europe in the summer of 1990, the credit was given to Hungary.  For it was Hungary that cut the fence, it was Hungary that said to East Germany and the Soviet Union, we will no longer patrol your border.  And with this risky move started the flow of especially east Germans into the west.

But Hungary is a strange island in eastern Europe.  It is linguistically and culturally different from it’s neighbors.  It is small geographically (the size of Maine) and in population (only 10 million people, many dislocated ethnic Romanians).  And Hungary had been fringish in the Eastern Block from the beginning.

The cascading revolutions of 1989 and 1991, might well not have happened if only Hungary had broken away.  Poland was the anvil that tipped the balance.  With nearly 40 million people, deeply Slavic and heavily industrial, Poland was at the center of the Soviet European satellite system, it started a fire under or threw fuel on embers through out the region.

Tunisa (who’s government fell in January of this year) , like Hungary, is small (around 10 million), affluent compared to its neighbors and not in itself a big domino.  But Egypt just might be.

This morning Hosni Mubarak stepped down.  It’s not a magic bullet- Egypt’s high unemployment, lack of opportunities for young people, and systemic poverty won’t disappear with a new government.    But the promise of a new government is certainly something to celebrate.

We just had Hawina’s b-day.  The number does not matter much.  We did a bunch of things Hawina loves to do, like playing Taboo (including cards made about Twin Oaks, like the phrase is ‘steam table’, but you can say ZK, food, eat, dining, etc).  This was followed by two games of Werewolves and Farmers (an elimination game sometimes called Mafia or Assassin).  Willow wanted to play god (who is the narrator  of the game) in the first one and had a different special role in the second one.

There is something cool about Willow and Rowan playing the game with the adults as peers.  That they feel completely normal and at ease – or more precisely manic and excited, in this context.  Corb was a werewolf twice and got killed both times.  Claire played the curious girl role (who gets to peak and try to disclose the werewolves) and just ran rough shot over the rules, in her charming and disarming way.  Shal (one of the most non-violent people i’ve ever met) was chosen randomly as a werewolf and since it was so out of peoples perception of him, he managed to kill everyone and win solo.

Beyond the party games there were stories and appreciations.

Corb had a cute little video on his iphone of a co-worker testifying on Hawina jumping out from behind a tree and scaring him.  Valerie described how she saw Hawina like a date tree.  I told the story of how she repaired the relationship between two folks in a date rape.  It will be just a year or two before Willow steps up this peer notch and starts telling stories about his mom.  Then look out.

This is where it all comes together – right? Nope, it’ a work in progress – or I could say that my spiritual practice is constantly evolving. Some concluding thoughts:

I am as eclectic as ever. I am in awe of all the life forms and spirits that contribute to agriculture (& life) on our farm. I wish I could more actively communicate with the plants and spirits – mostly, I try to listen. When the weather feels unfriendly, it is challenging. I find it difficult to feel in synch with spirit when instead of experiencing abundance from nature, we have to fight for what we get.

Spirituality: when I came to the communities movement in the late 1970s, the word “spiritual” was not a welcome word. We were still rebelling against religion and to us, spiritual described groups that had an exalted or charismatic leader (eg ashrams). We were egalitarian and distrusted leaders of any kind; however, I have always been drawn to spiritual experiences – I gradually reclaimed that word for myself and declared myself to be spiritual – but not religious.

Wu-wu – a word/concept some folks use to refer to some of the ideas I am expressing here. In my experience, people use it to refer to: the spirit/non physical world, issues they feel uncomfortable with and/or can’t be proved. It is often used dismissively as in “that’s too wuwu for me”. I am actually proud of my wuwu-ness. Simply put, I’d rather not limit myself to the physical realm – some of my greatest experiences are in the wuwu field. I welcome more wuwu in my life.

With reference to where I started this topic: re spirit in agriculture or spirits out there –  I note that currently most of my activity relates to spirit/energy in farming – I am less active in trying to contact nature spirits.

One of the many things i learned from interns who i nominally supervised while working in eastern Europe was about rough English translation of the Czech month names.  Erikk Piper taught me that unlike most of the world which is stuck in greek gods names for the months, the Slavs were influenced by the seasons and cultural happenings.  The calendar went something like this:

• January: Icy
• February: Early Flowers
• March: Pregnant Animals
• April:
• May:
• June: Red
• July: Redder
• August: Harvest
• September: Animals in Heat
• October: Spirits
• November: Falling Leaves
• December: Begging

So following in Erikk’s lead i used to date letters with thins like

3 Falling Leaves 95 (for Nov 3, 1995)

21 Pregnant Animals 2K1 (for March 21st, 2001)

What was interesting to me, is that i regularly sign my name to the bottom of my emails with where i am and this odd date format.  And i could be corresponding with someone for months until i got to March or September, before they would ask what these strange words mean.  But when it got to be pregnant animals or animals in heat, i needed to explain myself.

And then as most funologists do, we took a good thing and went too far and started making up our own month names.  April 2010 was called “Ipad” for this new products release (and then when Bochie ordered one the month name changed for where it was in transit like “Ipad in Hong Kong”.  March of 2002 was called “Battle for Baghdad”  Months are named after friends kids who are born then.

At Sandhill, I keep searching for my path. I yearn to create my own way of interacting with spirit – but the models I know about are from traditional societies, they are not from my culture. People in my circle here are in tune with there being spirit/energies in agriculture – often expressed as: please have good thoughts and vibes when working in the garden and no tobacco smoking around our food. We put positive energy into growing our food, preserving it, cooking & eating it. We hold hands in a circle before dinner to appreciate/celebrate the energy that went into the food that we are about to eat.

I work mostly with field crops – using a tractor and equipment – on a very small scale; we grow our own grains, beans, and some crops to sell – eg sorghum. I take to heart the old adage: “the best fertilizer is the footprint of the farmer” which I take to mean being in touch with the soil and plants. It is easy to relate to putting good energy into growing crops – but what about nature spirits taking care of plants? I believe they are there – but how to communicate?

My searching leads me to an Acres conference, where non physical energies in farming are generally acknowledged – but how do they work? How to augment/increase the positive energy? I recall one presenter at the conference describing his experience of communicating via non physical channels – it inspires me to try something similar. While planting that year’s sorghum crop, I concentrate really hard on sending my positive vibes into the seeds as they go into the ground. When I finish the field, I realize that the mechanism on one of the two row planter was plugged – no seeds were actually planted in that row. I ended up replanting most of the field; the lesson I take from this is that good vibes (no matter how strong) do not replace common sense and keeping machinery functioning properly.

The tragically written yet fantastic best seller The Celestine Prophecy posits that there are no such things as coincidences.  That deeper investigation into life’s coincidences will reveal a synchronicity in events and you may begin to realize that some underlying process is operating on your life.  I thought this was compelling when i first read it.  But of course the story is fiction, so it can prove anything in this context.  And it is so poorly written it is a bit hard for me to recommend.  Especially annoying is the “Main character as idiot” plot mechanism used for rephrasing ideas repeatedly.

What i do know is that sometimes things work out for reasons which can not be explained rationally but none-the-less feel compellingly destined.  So it is with this last weekend’s trip to Norfolk.  Natal’ja had said she wanted to visit Sapphyre before she left the country and i tried to make it happen.  Then a collection of logistical and personal obstacles seemed to block the trip, and then we redesigned it to make it possible again and ultimately it was clear it was the right thing to do.   The predictable part is that we had a grand time with Susan and Milo and Orion.  The unpredictable part, and from some new agey/cosmological perspective the reason the trip happened was so Natal’ja could work with Angela.

I know very little about Angela.  She practices a healing art called Body Talk and Susan thinks she is amazing and she is almost never available on short notice.  Except of course this time she was – less than a days notice actually.  Natal’ja went and had an amazing session.  She came back feeling like something important had shifted inside her and she had a much better understanding of how to move forward with her own healing.

I had breakfast this morning with my friend, Rowena Conahan, and while I sipped my coffee we did some Monday morning quarterbacking—not about Ben Roethlisberger's weak performance on Pittsburgh's final drive in yesterday's Super Bowl, but about the choices I had made while facilitating a Living Well with Children weekend for her community, Sunward Cohousing. (Luckily, the retreat ended Sunday afternoon and there was plenty of time to eat, grab a beer, and still catch the opening kickoff in Dallas.)

While my conversation with Rowena was free flowing and speculated on a wide range of potential impacts of my work (on the community, on deeply conflicted dyads, on dealing with challenging dynamics) nothing touched my heart more than a story Rowena shared about an impromptu experiment she did last night before dinner.

Rowena is a gentle person who is very relational. While she's not afraid to tackle issues, she tries very hard to not be provocative and to not be demanding. She cares a lot about others and identifies strongly as a "feeling" person on the Myers Briggs scale (as opposed to a "thinking" person). In a nutshell, this is a measure of whether a person focuses first on logic (thinking) or social impact (feeling) when making decisions. Rowena has an eight-year-old daughter, Noe, whom Rowena perceives to be much more thinking oriented, and this has created some special challenges in relating to how Noe navigates the world.

I spend the next 9 years in academia and left wing politics; gradually, I grow tired of all the head/mental stuff – not enough physical, heart, and/or spirit. I’m also in a small radical action group: again, it’s all head. Two of us in the group decide to experiment with trying to live our politics/values in daily life – we leave academia to establish a commune – in Guatemala.  There I read The Magic of Findhorn and it blows my paradigm apart: what? nature spirits taking care of trees, plants, etc? My African memories come back – I remember how folks communed with spirits constantly.

Here in the rainforest of Guatemala, I live in the midst of trees: I talk to them and hug them. I try to feel the presence of nature spirits and sometimes I do – how to describe it? a sense of an other, a sacredness. Then I realize that I’m going through a paradigm shift:  I feel fundamentally different about the natural world – it is so much more complex than I ever imagined. There are all these physical life forms: bacteria & fungi, earthworms, mammals, etc. and then the spirits. How do they interact? What is my place in all this?

I read about paganism: how we humans have interacted with the spirit world through the ages and in various cultures. I now see fairies in a new light – perhaps they are real after all; and I remember the shamans in Africa – the intermediaries between humans and spirits. And I remember that FEELING – that in some way I was connecting to my primal roots.

So how do I manifest this new way of seeing the world? I now believe in spirits – so what? What has changed? I want some physical manifestation of how I am different. I vacillate: some days I feel it’s all in my head; at other times, I’m blissed out by my new understanding of reality.

There are things which happen at my house that just don’t happen most places.  i woke up yesterday morning to find a full fledge New Jersey diner had appeared in my living room and kitchen.  Couches and coffee tables had disappeared and been replaced by dining tables and straight backed chairs.  But more dramatic was the appearance of a handful of cooks and waitresses decked out in aprons in lipstick and thick Jersey accents.

Sadly no pictures were taken of this event - that i saw

Coffee and bacon were dispensed (which does not normally happen here at all).  Biddy’s killer coffeecake was on hand.   The service was highly in character.  When i went into the kitchen to get Angie a cup of coffee, i was told repeatedly “Get out of the kitchen!”.  When one of the waitresses asked me “You need anything? Sugar” i quipped “How about your phone number?” she jutted her hip to one side, smiled and said “You got it honey” and was gone.

By noon the lipstick and tables had vanished.  Only the stories remained.

There are things we dont control in life.  For me the list is somewhat longer and more robust than most people.  For example about 3/4 of the time my hair gets trimmed is in response to an intimate of mine saying “You look awful, i am going to cut your hair” and then taking direct action.

Angie has returned from Europe and is stopping at the commune on her way to Texas.  She has been camped out in my room for the last week.  My room is an entropy trap.  It contains an unusually large number of guests (as much without me as with me in it) and often some of their stuff lingers after their departure.  On top of this i am not what most people would call a tidy and well organized person.  Nominally inspired by the heater being blocked by the dresser, Angie decided to declutter my room.  As with most of my hair cuts, this happened to me, rather than it being some carefully considered option on my part.

Angie and Willow in Barcelona circa 2009

What started as an effort to liberate the blocked heating duct became a full frontal assault on the chaos demons who were long term tenants in my room.  Angie’s considerable organizing skills were deployed in task of decoding which of the thousands of papers were actually important and what was recycling, which box of perhaps precious object are treasure and which are trash.

Group decisions are rarely nimble.  Especially many progressive and radical groups slightly ironically choose conservative (and oft slow) decision methods like consensus and sociocracy.

Bolo did not want to be this way.  [Or at least i did not want the labor collective Bolo to be this way.]  For individuals in the community if you want someone to do something for you – say build you a bookshelf or drive you to the train station you can offer them labor credits.  These are called Personal Service Credits or PSCs for short.

But in the labor collective we are sharing all these credits and one might reasonably expect we would talk about these things before just offering credits to someone outside the collective for doing something.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to being reasonable.

I initiated and after some discussion we were able to agree to a “shoot first” policy.  Where instead of needing to take a proposal back to the group before you could offer someone labor credits, you could simply offer them, in good faith, and come back to the group and say what you had done and why.  The presumption being your reasoning would be roughly similar to the groups.  And if you are wrong, the group will figure something out and know itself better for the exercise.