It's been an active last few months here in our communal village (besides being practically on top of the epicentre of the largest earthquake the east coast has seen in 100 years):

Linus

Two babies were born this summer, Linus Rainer Thoreson (to Kathryn and Casey) and Rosseyanka Louise Zeigler (Rosa for short, to Debbie and Alexis-X). Everyone is enjoying watching them wriggle and smile and we are all getting good doses of baby therapy.

Rosa

Other summer sightings included our neighbour's emu wandering through our yards, as it got loose and came to visit a few times. Our Anniversary celebration in June was low-key, but highlights from the Sharing Stage included Beatles songs sung in Yiddish (thanks to new member Nina), intern Ben from nearby Living Energy Farm with an awe-inspiring demonstration of circular breathing on a couple of different instruments, and the Twin Oaks belly-dancing troupe performing their usual amazing hip-gyrating, abs-rippling, Middle-Eastern magic.

In addition to growing babies, we grew and harvested 94 pounds of home-grown ginger from our hoop-house this year! Whether candied with sugar, pickled with vinegar or grated into stir-fries for supper, we are happy to bring a taste of pan-Asian cuisine to the Twin Oaks kitchen.

Other artistic pursuits included a series of ballet classes, taught by a Russian ballet dancer who was participating in our Three Week Visitor Program. The dining room was filled with a rotating cast of Oakers moving through plies, arabesques and our attempts at grand jetes. We've had two bands rehearsing and performing recently. One was the newly-formed "Cover Crop" which had a show at the Mother Earth News Festival in Pennsylvania. (and yes, their entire set consisted of cover songs). On Halloween we rocked out to a performance by our very own All Request Dance Band, with up to 8 musicians on stage, 3 singers, and an expanded brass section including trumpet, cornet, alto sax and euphonium.

Politics are never far from the minds of many Oakers, and these last few months have been no exception. Internally, we had a couple of instances of "capitalism meets the commune". One of our hammock distributors began to feature our hammocks on the Wal-Mart website, which raised the ire of a number of members who don't agree with their policies. After a discussion on the O&I board (one of our community decision-making forums), our hammocks management team arranged to have them removed from the site. And within the same two-week period, it came to light that our "candy-cane" hammocks (red and white striped) were being sold along with a navy blue pillow as an "American Flag" hammock set. This raised a similar response from some members, and again following a community-wide input period, we declined to make these for the company that was wanting them. Some members felt that in these difficult economic times, it made more sense to diversify our hammocks line and accept the account, and that since we are already making petrochemical-based fibre hammocks, these new venues and products weren't a much farther stretch away from our values, but in the end, the will of the group was that the slope is already slippery enough...

Outside of Twin Oaks, we've had several members participate in the "Occupy" movement, in New York City, Washington DC, Richmond and Charlottesville. In particular, Sabrina put herself forward as part of the 99% in an online photo essay in which she described her life at an income-sharing intentional community in Virginia and went on to describe the benefits of this style of living.

Sabrina

And a group of Twin Oakers are part of the "Not On Our Fault Line" anti-nuclear activist watch-dog group in Louisa, in response to the effects on the nuclear power plant near Twin Oaks as a result of the August 23rd Earthquake (with the charming acronym NOOFL).

August 23, 1:51pm
I was in the backyard of my residence when the unthinkable happened: the North Anna nuclear power plant, less than a dozen miles from Twin Oaks, exploded. At least, that's what I thought was happening when a roar as deep and fierce as an angry god's voice suddenly ripped through the forest. My jaw dropped as the building and surrounding trees began to shudder, nervously chattering like a mouth full of teeth. Seconds flew by and still the explosion continued. The sounds of smashing glass and distant screams began to pierce the monotonous boom, and a terrifying thought shot through my mind: Is this the end?

Moments later, the end did come. The end of what I'd learn was a 5.8-magnitude earthquake, that is!

To many of us, a prediction of a coming mid-Atlantic earthquake (and a sizable one--a 5.8-magnitude quake releases about half the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima) would have seemed preposterous just a day before. Even as a native Californian, I myself was clueless; the ominous sound of hundreds of miles of cold, hard East Coast crust rattling was like nothing I'd ever heard.

Yet despite some of our momentary lapses of logic, our collective response to the calamity was immediate and strong. As Oakers flooded the courtyard, our obvious outdoor meeting space, someone ticked off names from a member list. Groups formed to scour every Twin Oaks building for anyone who may have been injured. People with cell phones offered them to those without. Following a call to an Internet-equipped relative, someone would announce, "The earthquake was felt in New York-JFK is closed!" or "The epicenter was 1.5 MILES FROM HERE!" and people within earshot would gasp. A message board with pertinent information was set up against a tree. Even member I.P., typically absent from group situations, was sitting in the center of the crowd, bouncing baby Linus on his knee. The feeling of togetherness present in the courtyard that afternoon was profoundly comforting.

The Damage
In just under thirty minutes, we had confirmed that no one was missing or seriously hurt. There were some close calls-Austin was pummeled but miraculously unharmed by falling 5-gallon buckets in the warehouse; Kristen received a black eye when smacked in the face by the dining hall swinging doors-but, as many of us realized, the bodily harm experienced was nothing compared to what could have been had the earthquake occurred at night. Shattered glass from picture frames and the contents of overhead shelves rained down on many a bed.

I was drifting around the courtyard, taking in the scene and listening nervously to thunderous sounds of aftershocks, when I looked inside one of the residences, TaChai. Dozens of books and toppled bookcases cluttered the floor, making entering the building almost impossible. A 50-gallon fish tank had crashed to the floor, leaving shards of glass, puddles of water and dead fish in its wake. Knickknacks that had once defined TaChai's adorably kitschy ambiance now lay broken on the barely-visible rug.

More nerve-wracking still was the fear that our old buildings' foundations had been compromised. After all, Virginians don't usually construct with earthquakes in mind! In the main dining hall, the shattered remains of fallen spice jars that had nearly knocked out the dinner cook littered the tile floor, the milk dispenser had face-planted, and bloody tomato pulps from the interrupted food processing shift were strewn about. I groaned when I noticed the huge gash in the floor that ran from the silverware counter to the wall behind the steam table…

What Now?
Three months later, that gash is still there and MT's walls are still cracked. But we got lucky compared to some of our neighbors, whose broken chimneys and burst pipes demanded immediate attention they simply could not afford to give. (Red, one of our fix-it folks, has kindly done volunteer plumbing work for a neighbor or two since the quake.) Thanks to our pooled resources, we were able to instantaneously create new labor and money budgets-in this case, humorously named, "What the Quake?!"-to make sure that much of the damage could get taken care of right away.

A week after the earthquake I put up a paper asking people to jot down a little paragraph about what they were up to when the quake hit. Here's what some folks remembered:

MT with cracked cinderblock walls

Upstairs Oneida hallways

ZK snack kitchen area