The Leaves of the Oaks

Leaves of Twin Oaks #112

2012-04-10T09:33:30Z

Leaves of Twin Oaks #112 Back

The Leaves of Twin Oaks Table of Contents:
News of the Oaks	by Valerie
Truth and Fiction Can Both Be Strange: A Cultural Reality Check	by Valerie
More Than A Place To Sit	by Brittany
The Longest Dirt Road	by Tony
Other Community Connections

News of the Oaks Issue #112
by Valerie

What's a commune to do when a number of their musical instruments are stolen from the music room? Our answer: use the remaining instruments to hold a Benefit Concert to raise funds to replace the ones gone missing! Six different acts performed to a packed house at a local live-music venue (owned by an ex-member), and donations totaled just over $1,000. The acts included Oakers performing klezmer music, covers of the Grateful Dead, our all-women's barbershop quartet, belly-dancing and more. We're grateful to everyone who chipped in to help keep the music flowing into the future.

Despite an unseasonally warm winter, we've found various cozy activities to keep us occupied. We currently have a Philosophy Study Group, a Latin-language Study Group, and a Sunday afternoon "Young Adult Fantasy Read-Aloud and Knitting (And Other Crafts)" group. So far they've gone through all 3 books in the Philip Pullman "His Dark Materials" trilogy, and are working on Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series.

Young Adult Fantasy Read-Aloud and Knitting Group

We've also revived Dungeons and Dragons, which hasn't been seen here since the 90's. Our new DM has been hosting a game, and every other Saturday night finds various Oakers out on adventures, gaining experience points, and helping build our "geek-chic" reputation.

One of our members has been keeping busy in a more solo pursuit. Pam, our long-time Garden Manager, has been hard at work in the final stages of editing her book, "Sustainable Market Farming: Intensive Vegetable Production on a Few Acres". The focus is educating people about how to grow food for a large number of people, using only a few acres of land, which is exactly what Pam and our intrepid Garden Crew do each year for the approximately 100 people who live here. The book draws on the work Pam has done writing articles for "Growing for Market", a national magazine about market gardening, and will be published by New Society Publishers this autumn.

The cover of Pam's book

Another way in which we are revamping the past is that we have brought back "satellite shops" for our hammocks business. We did so well at the annual Casual Furniture Trade Show last fall, and garnered so many new accounts, that we now have more hammocks to make that we had planned for! And so we have engaged two of the other communities in Louisa County, and they have begun to make some of those hammocks for us, so that the hammocks will be ready to go by the required ship-date.

Other Random News of the Commune: Our group home-schooling project aka "Unicorns" (featured in a previous issue of the Leaves), just celebrated it's one year anniversary and is ramping up to 5 days a week. Earthquake repairs continue slowly but surely. The 10 kilo-watt array of solar panels we installed in 2010 is performing well-it provides power for 3 buildings and our community wellhouse, and additional energy is channeled into the mainstream / corporate grid. We save over $2000 each year in offset energy costs, and also we earn about $1500 each year in solar energy credits.

And finally-Save These Dates! You are cordially invited to participate in our annual events:

August 17 - 19: Twin Oaks Women's Gathering:

Celebrating Ourselves and Our Strength in Community: Workshops, Yoga, Song, Dance, DIY, Sweats, Empowerment, Creativity, Drumming, Sharing and Laughter! www.womensgathering.org

August 31 - September 3: Twin Oaks Communities Conference:

This Labor Day weekend, join us for workshops, community-building and culture creation. We'll explore topics such as group decision-making, intentional relationships and sustainable living. We welcome community seekers and members alike. Register now for early bird savings! www.communitiesconference.org

Truth and Fiction Can Both Be Strange: A Cultural Reality Check
by Valerie

It's said that it's a sign of a well-developed sense of Self when you can laugh at your own quirks and foibles. Perhaps this is as true for a community as it is for an individual. Here, as with any sub-culture, stereotypes abound, and sometimes they're actually or at least partially based in reality. Even we roll our eyes at times....

Some of the statements below are true at Twin Oaks, and some are made up-see if you can distinguish fact from fiction: Answers below (no cheating!)

A) We've had members named Bucket, Bok Choy and Free Radical-Twin Oaks is a social experiment, and as part of that, members are free to experiment with any name they like.

B) We have a publicly-posted menstrual calendar--all menstruating women can write their name in each month and track their cycle.

C) We have a Tree Sanctuary-a portion of our 450 mostly-wooded acres that is purposefully set aside and no trees can be cut for firewood from that section of forest.

D) We have no cats or dogs as pets--our value of egalitarianism doesn't allow for one living being to own another living being.

E) We have a Nudity Policy that allows members to be naked, anywhere outdoors, during a thunderstorm.

F) We have a Saturday Tour Policy that requires men wearing a dress to explain themselves to the people on the tour.

G) We have a Housing Policy that requires every member to change bedrooms once a year, to overcome attachment to materialism.

H) We don't use diapers on our babies - instead we toilet train them with methods based on ones used by indigenous people.

Click HERE for the answers!

More Than A Place To Sit
by Brittany

In kitchens and living rooms across the community, the rickety store-bought chairs of earlier decades are disappearing, and original creations, from rough log bench to delicate Windsor, are taking their places. Ten-year member Purl is behind this change. His first experience with the craft of chair-making came from repairing a commercial chair. The experience was satisfying-until the chair broke again. Factory made. Purl thought he could do better.

"How hard could it be to make a chair? It's just four legs and a back and a seat. That ignorance and a willingness to make crap kept me going."

And he has kept going. He spends a great deal of his free time in the woodshop cutting, shaving, chiseling, and weaving. And while he has attended two out-of-state chair schools to refine his craft, he is mostly self-taught. "Real woodworkers would think that what I am doing is just silly," he remembers thinking at first. "I've gotten over that." Now he teaches his craft to other community members and gives public demonstrations on and off the farm, including at Monticello.

The craft itself reinforces the community's values. One is sustainability: Often the wood itself comes from our forestry program, or it is scrap from our hammocks business. Purl uses mostly hand tools rather than power tools, reducing his dependence on nuclear energy. Another value at Twin Oaks is community. With the quiet and clean precision of hand tools, Purl can carry on a conversation while working or attend the Read Aloud and Knitting group with his project; no cloud of sawdust or scream of an electric motor interfere. He speaks often of his admiration for the Shakers, an American Christian sect founded in the eighteenth century. Perhaps best known for their work ethic and communal living, the Shakers' resourcefulness and tendency to craft material goods to last demonstrated their devotion to each other. So Purl adds understated details to his work-a hand carved scroll, or a horseshoe-to show the unknown future occupant that this work was done by a person, here, in this community.

"Human hands made this, which I think appeals to people. It appeals to me. We have so little of that now." Keeping these crafts alive, insists Purl, "preserves pieces of our culture, craft, history-all different pieces of our humanity."

One of Purl's Chairs

The Longest Dirt Road
by Tony

I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2009 and then joined Twin Oaks. Even while on the A.T., a 2000 miler is relatively rare and often enjoys a sort of celebrity status. Off the trail, most people don't know that the term "thru-hiker" means someone who is hiking the whole trail--Maine to Georgia.

Day One - Maine

But here at Twin Oaks, three of us have hiked the whole trail. Twin Oakers are therefore 1,000 times more likely to have hiked the A.T. than the average American! Additionally, we have three others on the farm who have hiked over half of the trail, and dozens more who have hiked portions of it. Why does this connection exist?

A fun, anecdotal similarity is the fact that both Oakers and hikers sometimes acquire new and often colorful names. Here on the farm, we have Sunshine, Firefly, Summer, etc. A notable difference is that on the trail, one usually does not choose a name but is assigned one. For example, my name was bestowed upon me after I missed a fork in the trail and walked an unnecessary two miles over miserable terrain, then angrily constructed what was deemed by my cohorts an impressive six foot rock cairn--no one will ever miss that turn again. I was therefore dubbed "Mason." You might use your imagination to divine how the other five Oakers who contributed to this article got their names: Ezra became Staggerin' Willie; Aubby, Cayenne; Edmund, Cherokee Tears; Elsa, Black Eyed E; and the always-serene Brittany, Bar Fight.

But why are we all living on a commune? When we talked about it, these were some of the notable thoughts: The A.T. is also a community of equals, "We all hike the same miles." The trail is a "linear community" with wonderful people, hikers and also hundreds of trail maintainers and bunkhouse operators. Most hikers walk alone, but eat meals together at the shelters along the trail.

Mostly, I believe, the A.T. and Twin Oaks both offer an alternative to commercialism. My moment of clarity came when I stood at a New Hampshire overlook, happier and healthier than I'd ever been. I smiled and became conscious of just how close I felt to nirvana, and also that all I had, materially, was my gear and the clothes on my back, yet I wanted nothing.

I suspect that the biggest reason for the overlap of my two favorite communities is that we are the lucky few who recognize that the meaning of life is not for sale.

Icy Beard - First Day in the Smokies

Other Community Connections

We are connected to a few other communities who are currently seeking new members. We encourage you take a look at any of these if they are potentially of interest to you:

The Midden (Columbus, Ohio)
We are building a life together around the principles of egalitarianism, sustainability, accountability, justice, and cooperation. We're a group of six, experiencing the rewards and roadblocks of a young egalitarian community - property ownership, building cultural norms, etc.
themidden.wordpress.com

Camphill Soltane (near Philadelphia)
We have openings for community members (particularly male volunteers) who wish to live and work with individuals with developmental disabilities. We have an emphasis on sustainable living, and foster an active cultural and spiritual life for community members.
www.camphillsoltane.org

Ganas (Staten Island, NY)
We are an urban community that has been going for over 30 years. We focus on problem solving and sharing resources as foundations for a strong and sustainable community. We are looking for people interested in working in our second hand furniture store (someone strong) or our thrift and vintage clothing store.
www.ganas.org

Answers to the Truth or Fiction Quiz

A) True. We've also had Winter, Summer and Autumn; Bubble Fiddle, Ghost, and Sunshine Chap (1 person, 3 different names over time), Lotus Vortex, Delicious, Lady Stardust, and a member named "Name".

B) True. Each year, a member hand-makes a beautifully-decorated Collective Menstrual Calendar, correlated with the moon phases, with space for women to write in their name on the day their period starts. The calendar is posted in the bathroom in the dining hall.

C) False. Each year, we selectively cut storm-damaged or over-crowded trees from different sections of our forest, rotating sections over the years. We do have about 10 acres that are difficult to access, so we generally don't harvest from there, but that section is not formally designated as a Sanctuary.

D) False. Our Pet Policy allows for a limited number of cats and dogs to live here as pets.

E) False, sort of. This was true in our former Nudity Policy, but was left out when we updated the policy a few years ago.

F) True. "Addressing The Dress", as we call it, is an effort to educate people about our alternative gender norms while at the same time acknowledging what might be an unusual sight for new people visiting us for the first time.

G) False. Members live in their room as long as they want. It's not uncommon for people to change rooms a few times, looking for a different size of room, or a change in social scene by moving to a different building.

H) False, somewhat. While babies at Twin Oaks wear (generally cloth) diapers, some parents use Elimination Communication. This is a practice of "natural" toilet training which uses observation, sound cues and intuition to train the child to eliminate when encouraged (ie. when they're not wearing diapers), and is based on the methods of some earlier cultures.

Back to the Quiz

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Leaves of Twin Oaks: Earthquake Edition

2011-12-15T15:17:14Z

Leaves of Twin Oaks #111 Back

The Leaves of Twin Oaks Table of Contents:
News of the Oaks	by Valerie
What the Quake!?	by Janel
Where Were You When the Quake Hit?	compiled by Summer
Gifts From the Commune

News of the Oaks Issue #111
by Valerie

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).

What the Quake!?
by Janel

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.

We wish we could say that the memory of the quake is behind us, but as recently as December, aftershocks have continued to send jolts of adrenaline through our veins. Plus, fears that the earthquake may have adversely affected the North Anna Power Station resulted in the birth of "Not On Our Fault Line" (NOOFL) to demand that the reactors be retrofitted to new seismic standards. (Sadly, the un-retrofitted reactors recently restarted after nearly three months of being offline. NOOFL is still in action, however; they will host a debate on the safety of the North Anna plant.) All we can say at this point is that we hope the media forecasts are correct-that this quake was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence!

Where Were You When the Quake Hit?
compiled by Summer

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:

"I was with Shua in his room in Kaweah. I had taken the day off because I had a bad headache all night and morning and was just starting to feel better. Suddenly there was a loud boom, like something had smashed into the building. My mind went blank, and I thought it would stop, but the sound continued, and the walls were shaking back and forth. Shua's shelf fell over and his mirror fell on me. We were holding each other and I was yelling and cursing. I was scared for my life. When it stopped we opened the door, and McCune yelled 'Get out of the building!' and we ran out."
- WREN

"I knew right away it was an earthquake. The French press pot (full) smashed onto the computer and the flat screen monitor topped forward. Lots of stuff was falling everywhere and it was super loud. When it stopped, I tried to save my work, but the network was down, of course. While I was trying to figure out what to do next, an aftershock hit so I shut down the computer and ran to the doorway."
- SUMMER

"I was in Llano office, and had just downloaded the PDF of a book that I was going to start indexing. I sent it to the printer and went to the bathroom, and then the building starts a'shakin' and a'quakin'. My first thought was that someone had backed a semi truck into the side of the building. My second thought was that the tofu hut construction crew had hit a gas line and the whole place had blown up. The thing that I will never forget was the sounds the earth made just after the the quake, standing in the courtyard listening to booming subterranean explosions all around, like an out-of-sight artillery barrage."
- EZRA

"I was in the living room in the women's SLG, planning the winter crops for the hoophouse. I remember the sensation of being violently shaken and the sight of about 7 shelves of books pouring off the wall. Subjectively, time slowed down. After what I thought was at least a minute I said, 'It's an earthquake, isn't it? We need to get out of here.' I grabbed my shoes and we ran out, over a 2 foot jumble of books on the floor. Louisa public library had to reshelve 3,000 books. We had 11,000."
- PAM

"Mere minutes leading up to...I was on Llano roof. I had just prepped the next section of painting, and was coming down to get paint, brush, and knee pads. As soon as I stepped off the ladder...Boom."
- ZANE

"I don't trust my memory, because I was hit on the head and got a black eye and a mild concussion. Later I discovered large bruises on myself that I don't know how they got there. I was inside the dining hall and ran outside. I panicked, and remember being truck twice. I thought there'd been a gas explosion and was concerned about my children. Losing bits of my memory makes it difficult to write about. I think it was a door that hit me twice, and when I was outside the building, Bmann picked me up and walked me away. I would get dizzy off and on all that day. I'm very lucky."
- KRISTEN

MT with cracked cinderblock walls

Upstairs Oneida hallways

ZK snack kitchen area

For more earthquake photos, check them out her e.

Gifts From the Commune

An opportunity to give your family and friends special holiday gifts while supporting an egalitarian, income-sharing lifestyle at the same time! The following three communities from the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (thefec.org) offer various products that provide a variety of gift-giving options:

Twin Oaks
Always fun to find under the tree (before being put up in one). Twin Oaks has been making hammocks for over 40 years. We have two general styles - our many colored Olefin rope hammock (including our premium Silkspun softer line) and our fabric bed hammocks which come in single layer and quilted models. Check us out online at twinoakshammocks.com and see the different styles and then place your order with our talented and charming desk staff at 800-688-8496. Plus, Leaves readers get free shipping!

Twin Oaks hammock

Acorn
This holiday season, give the gift of garden seeds to your loved ones. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is the community business of Acorn Community. We specialize in organic heirlooms and varieties adapted to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast region. We offer over 700 varieties, including garden vegetables, medicinal and culinary herbs, flowers, seed potatoes, heirloom garlic, perennial onions, and woodland medicinals. We also have a variety of gardening supplies and resources available, including books and DVDs. For the beginner gardener, you might want to try our book Grow Your Own Food - Made Easy, and a seed sampling kit such as our Appalachian Mix or our Three Sisters Garden Package. For the more experienced gardener, we offer hard-to-find varieties and advanced gardening resources. To access our catalog or place an order, you can visit our website at southernexposure.com, or contact us through phone or fax.

We wish you a happy holiday and a fruitful growing season.

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Phone: (540) 894-9480
Fax: (540) 894-9481

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

East Wind
Delicious and good for you! East Wind Nutbutters makes natural Cashew Butter, Almond Butter, Tahini and good-old-fashioned Peanut Butter to please your palate (and stick to it) this holiday season. To see the full selection and to place your order, visit their website at eastwindcrafts.com.

Also available are their Utopian Rope Sandals, made by East Winders in Missouri. These are offered in solid and two-toned colour styles.

For more information call 417-679-4682 or email eastwindcrafts@gmail.com

nutbutters

rope sandals

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Leaves of Twin Oaks #110

2011-05-17T15:28:08Z

Back

The Leaves of Twin Oaks Table of Contents:
News of the Oaks	by Valerie
The Unicorn School: Children's Education at Twin Oaks	by Rick
We've Got Your Book Indexes	by Janel
Twin Oaks Communities Conference - August 19-21, 2011	by Janel
Twin Oaks Women's Gathering - August 12-14, 2011	by Clementine

News of the Oaks Issue #110
by Valerie

At our heart, Twin Oaks is ultimately about sharing—sharing our land, our houses and vehicles, our businesses and income, and the delights and difficulties of our lives. Apparently we are not the only ones to notice this, as in March we were contacted by a consulting firm wanting to talk to us about the concept of radical sharing. After a 3 hour in-depth interview, it was revealed that the firm was working with Hershey's Kisses, who are considering an ad campaign focused on sharing. As part of their research, they are investigating groups that practice intense sharing—besides Twin Oaks, they are looking at people living together in a submarine, and visiting a zoo to observe meerkats.

In late April we shared a celebration of family and friends, as Debbie and Alexis-X joined their lives together in a wedding. Family and friends from as far away as Georgia and New Jersey came to help wish them many blessings and much joy. There was plenty of music-making, including a live Twin Oaks dance band, an open mic sharing stage, and a couple of European operatic arias thrown in for good measure.

Alexis-X and Debbie

It could have been Mercury in retrograde (so claim some members, perhaps only somewhat tongue-in-cheek), but within a 4 week period, we had multiple members with joint injuries. As of this writing, 8 members had suffered from a litany of ailments, including sprained ankles, a wrenched knee, torn ligaments, and a broken elbow. Four of these members were on crutches, one in a partial cast. We also heard reports that in 2 other FEC communities, one person had a sprained ankle, and another a broken elbow, in the same time period.

In the last few years, Twin Oaks has been expanding the amount of sustainable agricultural-oriented work that we do here. Mostly recently, this spring we have taken on a new business area, called Garden Medicinals. “G-Med”, as it's affectionately known, sells a variety of products but focuses on providing somewhat more rare medicinal and culinary plants that may not be widely available elsewhere. We just renovated an existing space in one of our buildings to house the office space, which is now appropriately painted “Spout Green”. For more information or to order, please visit: https://www.gardenmedicinals.com/

In other business news, as is reported in almost every Leaves these days it seems, the tofu business has a lot going on. The fun news is that Twin Oaks Community Foods hosted a Team-Building Day for our local Whole Foods. A group of their employees came out, toured the tofu hut and the community, did some team-building activities on their own, and then we finished the day with a party open to the whole community, which included cake (provided by them) and a live band (provided by us). Less fun was the accident our new white refrigerated Isuzu tofu truck had; unfortunately on one of it's first delivery trips, it was rear-ended by a tractor-trailer carrying – wait for it – a load of new white Isuzu trucks. It's now repaired and back in service. Also unfortunate was the fact that the FDA informed us that our tofu packaging nutritional information needed to be re-vamped—the label did not say that our product has 0% transfat (a new law requires this labeling). We amended our labeling temporarily, and expedited ordering our newly re-designed labels.

New Tofu Packaging

The hammocks business seems to have re-bounded to some extent from the effects of the poor economy—sales are up from the past couple of years. This has meant getting people back into the hammock shop, and to encourage this, we have linked regular hammock-production goals to our weekly work quota. If we make enough hammocks for the week, our work quota stays the same. If we are short, quota goes up by a couple of hours the following week. Good old-fashioned behaviourism at work.....

The Unicorn School: Children's Education at Twin Oaks
by Rick

At 8 am, these spring mornings, the classroom is still chilly enough for a fire in the woodstove. By 10:30 the room will be filled with enough sunlight to drive out any last chill. The classroom is in the circa-1974 building named Degania, where in the early years of the community, Twin Oaks' kids would sleep, eat, play, learn and live together, apart from their parents. This was called the Meta system and lasted until the mid-1980s. Since then, parents have largely done informal home-schooling in the building. This spring we’ve come back to Degania to form the “free classroom” called the Unicorn School.

This morning I roll out the carpet and set up a few small tables and chairs. Link is the first to arrive—fifteen minute early, as usual—and sits down with a workbook to build vocabulary. As the other children trickle in we set up a puzzle to settle in and start the morning. When Luuk puts in the last piece, we mark the box whether all the pieces were there and then move into our first endeavor. Until 10 or so we usually do a group art project. Recently we made shadow boxes out of found materials to tell stories. Zadek’s story was about a boiled egg running through the woods, so it involved a little kitchen time as well.

Our ten kids range in age from 18 months to eleven years. Activities that involve the whole group are geared with different abilities in mind or sometimes the older kids team up with younger ones. Kaya was the big mentor for Anya on a recent tempura paint collaboration—in the end they couldn’t remember who painted what.

After recess, outside at the swings and sandbox, we are ready to tackle an academic activity led by a community member. Alex is here today with an exploration of the properties of salt water versus sugar water versus just plain H2O. The older kids separate out and get down to serious hands-on experimentation while the young ones do tactile play with sugar, salt and water. Another day we might be doing wordplay with Lisa or Math with Scott or something more skill-based like our recent knot-tying lesson with Cameron. When the kids were studying earthquakes and tsunamis, Tim taught Willow and the others to see the difference in movement of soil compressed in firm and loose ways—and boy did Willow shake the earth.

Most looked forward to, perhaps, is snacktime, when we get down on the ground around a plate of apples and read poems to each other—from a book or from our own pages. Poems just seem to taste far more delicious when they are swallowed with a big bite of apple.

Rick and snacktime! (l to r, Link V., Anya, Zadek, Luuk, Samir)

The last hour is usually taken up with a music or movement activity. We have Janel for some singing and rhythm, or Caroline with yoga. Recently I.P. came and sat on the rug in the middle of the children and led us in a jam session, with even the littlest Ridgeley picking up a drum stick and pounding away while blowing on a recorder.

School is great. The big and little kids are learning and growing. The very big kids—as Sami told me I was this week—are learning and growing as well to leave some of our assumptions and ingrained modalities of learning behind and to not take ourselves too seriously. The structure is new and the leaders fresh but what goes on at the Unicorn School is the oldest kind of learning there is—passing on a love of knowledge from one heart to another.

We've got your hammocks, your tofu, your seeds... and Your Book Indexes
by Janel

Unbeknownst to some, among Twin Oaks’ mishmash of income-producing endeavors is book indexing. You know those lists of recurring words, phrases and concepts in the backs of textbooks? Yeah, we create those.

Alphabetically re-arranging words that are already in a book may seem like a straight-forward task. So, when I cornered indexing team members Kathryn and Casey the other day and asked, “I don’t get indexing—why can’t a computer just do it?”, Kathryn looked alarmed. “There’s so much judgment that goes into indexing,” she explained. “It scares me to think of a computer doing it.”

I grinned sheepishly, feeling like the technology-trusting child of the computer era I am. Kathryn’s right. Wouldn’t you be vexed if you turned to the index of a book looking to learn more about, say, protozoa, and found 60 page numbers listed? What indexers Kathryn, Casey, Summer, Ezra and Elspeth do is decide which references to protozoa, John C. Calhoun, or computational fluid dynamics are worthy of a curious reader’s time.

If you’re grimacing at the thought of painstakingly picking through a book about computational fluid dynamics—whatever that is—I’m right there with you. But Kathryn says she usually ends up liking a book even when she thinks she won’t. “Half the time I hear the name of the next book I have to read, I roll my eyes,” she laughed. “But even though they can be scholarly and dense, they’re not actually that boring. I sometimes end up enjoying them!”

Kathryn isn’t the only one who gets a kick out of esoteric texts. Our indexing business tends to attract Oakers with academic backgrounds or an affinity for intellectually challenging work. At the very least, indexing is a nice, quiet ‘sit-down’ job—for some, a welcome change from weaving hammocks, pressing tofu curds in a noisy factory & the manual labor that comes with life on a farm. Plus, a number of ex-Oakers have supported themselves as freelance book indexers, so it’s fair to say that indexing is a valuable skill to acquire.

For indexers Ezra and Casey, history books are where it’s at—and, luckily for them, the nearby University of Virginia is frequently sending ’em over. As most major universities have presses that specialize in local history and topics pertaining to their region, UVA publishes innumerable Civil War texts. Ezra has actually gotten so into the subject that he once tried to convince his partner Mala to start going to battle reenactments with him. She politely refused.

Summer, manager of Twin Oaks Indexing, is responsible for doling out the various indexing projects that come in. Sometimes, however, she can’t resist keeping certain projects for herself. A major Harry Potter fan, Summer was thrilled when a book about using the sensational series as a teaching tool in inner-city classrooms recently landed on her desk. “I’m excited to index it,” she admits.

As it turns out, indexing can be even more than an intellectually stimulating, high dollar-per-hour ‘sit-down’ job. For Casey, it’s a chance to be a part of something bigger. “I indexed a book on the Ottoman Empire,” he told me back in the hammock shop, “and then I heard an interview with the writer on the radio. I also saw the author of a book I indexed about alternative medicine referenced in the New York Times.” “Did you feel proud?” I asked. Casey paused for a moment as a thoughtful look passed over his face. Then, he gave me a satisfied smile. “Yeah,” he answered. “Yeah, I did.”

Twin Oaks Communities Conference - You are Invited! August 19-21, 2011
By Janel

Twin Oakers are prancing about in sundresses, my back is burned and daffodils are old news. With the warm weather begins a flurry of planning our Communities Conference. This annual event is a weekend of workshops, networking and culture creation for anyone interested in or part of the Intentional Communities movement. From cohousing and co-ops to eco-villages and communes, we’ll be exploring what it means to live intentionally in this consumptive, isolating world.

This year, our theme is Diversity in Community. There are many different kinds of communities across the globe, and each one is united for a different reason—service to
others, ecological concerns or spiritual beliefs, to name a few. But there’s one thing that all communities have in common. Instead of sitting back and complaining about the systems and social norms already in place, these groups have actively chosen to create a new way of life for themselves. They've transcended the negative in favor of the positive—in favor of empowerment. For this reason, we want to encourage intentional communities of all kinds to band together with the single goal of creating a better planet.

Of course, Diversity in Community can also mean diversity within an individual community, which has its benefits and drawbacks. It can be balancing to have a wide array of opinions, backgrounds and life experiences within a community, but it can also be a source of disagreement and strife if this diversity causes a communal identity
crisis. How should a group navigate such a dilemma? If you have the answer, please let us know—we’re looking for people who are interested in leading workshops inspired by this year’s theme. But if you’d rather just come to learn and play, that’s great, too! In addition to structured workshops and sharing circles, there will be plenty of time
to swap stories, dance, lounge in Twin Oaks hammocks, wrestle in the mud pit and enjoy our beautiful land.

The conference will be held August 19th through the 21st—the third weekend of the month—and the participant fee is $85 (sliding scale; includes food and camping). For more information: www.communitiesconference.org or conference@twinoaks.org. You can register for the conference on our site or let us know of your interest the old-fashioned way—write to:

Janel – Communities Conference
138 Twin Oaks Rd
Louisa VA 23093

We sincerely hope to see you there. �Viva la Revoluci�n!

Twin Oaks Women's Gathering - You are Invited!
August 12-14, 2011
by Clementine

Come join us for the 28th annual Twin Oaks Women's Gathering, August 12-14th, 2011! The Gathering is a three day conference and celebration where more than a hundred women gather to learn, explore and play together at beautiful Twin Oaks Community. Workshop themes will range from sex and sexuality to gender justice to positive relationship building to DIY music, art, movement and more. In addition to scheduled performance spaces and workshops, there will also be lots of free time to network, drum, dance, meditate, strategize, roll around in the mud-pit and generally live it up with new and old friends at the Gathering.

But don't just come to the Gathering....be part of making it happen! One of the best things about the Women's Gathering is how each woman has a role in making the event as wonderful as it is. Have a special talent? Come share it in a workshop! Want to sing at the Sharing Stage? Belt it out! Have a ritual you'd like to lead? We're there! The Twin Oaks Women's Gathering is a cooperative event through and through, and the incredible sense of community created in just three days—and over years and years of Gatherings—is truly extraordinary!

To register for the Gathering, or for more information, check out our website at www.womensgathering.org or, to let us know about the rockin' workshop you'd like to lead or any special requests/questions, e-mail gathering@twinoaks.org. The Twin Oaks Women's Gathering is open to all female and non-male identified folks.

Looking forward to seeing you in August!

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Leaves of the Oaks Winter 2010

2010-12-24T09:12:30Z

LEAVES OF THE OAKS #109
WINTER 2010

Below is the plain-text version of this newsletter. For the fancy version, including photographs, please go to:

http://www.twinoaks.org/community/leaves/leaves-109.pdf

TABLE OF CONTENTS

News of the Oaks -- Valerie

Singing for Exposure: Auditioning for Reality TV in the Name of Community -- Janel

Circles of Cooperation: Twin Oaks and the FEC -- Sabine

Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider's View of Twin Oaks Community

***********************************

NEWS OF THE OAKS
by Valerie

This past summer was busy with our everyday activities, yet fairly quiet overall. As usual, mid-August brought our two annual events:The Women's Gathering and The Communities Conference. Each year we welcome up to 200 people to spend time here, participating in organized workshops, touring the community, and just generally engaging with each other during these two consecutive weekends.

One change that autumn has brought is the return of our Waiting List. Over the summer, enough members had left the community that we were able to accept new members immediately. However, now enough of us have settled in that we once again have a Waiting List. Over the winter, each time a current member decides to leave the community, that will open up a space for whoever is at the top of the Waiting List to move here.

One group in the community that's been kept busy is the Dairy Crew. There were 5 calves born in a 4 week period, which is very unusual for our dairy program. Each year we select a theme for naming our calves:this year the theme is musical instruments. So our 5 new calves are: Lojki (a Russian percussion instrument), Fiddle, Mandolin, Euphonium, and Pennywhistle. Two of these calves are being trained as oxen for farming, non-fossil-fuel-style, at the nearby newly-forming Living Energy Farm community.

When capitalism meets the commune: Our hammocks management has had an active Autumn as well. We attended the national Casual Furniture Trade Show that takes place in Chicago each September. Retailers and wholesalers of casual furniture, including hammocks, come from all over the US to look at what different suppliers have to offer, and make orders for the coming year. This year we sent 4 Twin Oakers to represent our hammocks business, and we had one of our best years ever, netting several sizable new accounts. One new company purchasing from us stated that they chose us due to the fact that we offer repairs to hammocks that have been damaged, and that was the value they were looking for in what they called "this throw-away world".

In other community business news, our tofu business Twin Oaks Community Foods formally purchased Sunergia Tofu from Jon Kessler, an ex-member of the community. Sunergia is a line of specialty tofu made with pesto, shiitake mushrooms and other select ingredients that we had been producing for Jon, but he owned the business. Twin Oaks now owns the business, with the exception of the soycheese line that Jon will hold onto. The Tofu Management Team and Jon held a celebratory dinner at Jon's in Charlottesville to mark the occasion.

Members of Twin Oaks and our sister community Acorn spent a weekend at the Mother Earth News Fair in Pennsylvania, both sharing and learning about sustainable living. They were there helping to promote Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which is Acorn's collectively-owned-and-operated heirloom organic seed business.

Also in the seed realm, one of our members, Ira Wallace, who is on the board of the Organic Seed Alliance, recently had some good news. The OSA won a ruling against Monsanto that put a hold on the planting of GMO sugar beets in the Pacific Northwest (where the vast majority of US sugar beets are grown) until more environmental impact can be assessed.

And in purely recreational news, the latest craze to sweep the commune is "Dominion", a designer, deck-building card game, similar to Carcassonne or Settlers of Catan. Pretty much every day several Oakers gather to play their Action cards, earn Treasure, and purchase Provinces. Plans are in the making for a Twin Oaks-themed Dominion, with Labour Credits replacing Copper and Gold, SLG's (ie. Small Living Groups, our residences) replacing Provinces and Estates, and Action Cards relating to activities around the community.

SINGING FOR EXPOSURE: AUDITIONING FOR REALITY TV IN THE NAME OF COMMUNITY
by Janel

Just days before moving to Twin Oaks, I auditioned for a reality TV show. My brief foray into the world of reality TV actually began on a trip to East Wind, Twin Oaks' sister community in Missouri. A bunch of folks were sitting around a campfire one night when someone who knew I was a singer asked me to serenade the group, and I obliged. When I'd finished, the person said to me, "Janel, have you ever thought about auditioning for [popular show that aims to find the next singing superstar]? Because you have heart, and that's what they're looking for!" "I don't know," I replied tentatively. "They're looking for someone with a story..." The person laughed. "Look around you!" With a sweep of her arm, she motioned toward the group, the fire, and the dark mountains around us. "Look where you are. I'd say you have a story to tell!" That night, a thought was planted in my mind: "If I auditioned for the show and actually got airtime, I could expose the idea of intentional community to
30 million viewers..."

So, five months later, I was in line behind 10,000 fellow hopefuls. After hours of waiting, I found myself standing before the two assistant producers who would decide my fate. "Hi. My name's Janel," I said, "and I live on a commune." I then sang my song, and waited for a reaction. They just stared at me. Finally, the man asked, "You really live on a commune?" I nodded enthusiastically. "How did you find out about this community in the first place?" "I typed in 'commune' on Google!" After a few more hilarious questions (i.e. "How do you listen to music on these communes? Are there radios?!"), they motioned me forward. "You're in," the woman said to me with a wink.

Two days later, I stood in front of the show's executive producers--lights, cameras and microphones in my face--and they seemed very interested in intentional communities. After fielding questions about installing wind turbines and slaughtering animals (neither of which I know anything about, but hey, I tried), I sang my heart out. But the executive producers dismissively told me that my voice "wasn't special enough." "Sorry, it's a 'no.'" Perhaps they thought I needed a more "folk-y" sound to go with my "hippie" persona. Or perhaps they simply thought I was the kind of person who, upon being rejected, would deliver a dramatic show of emotion for the camera (which I didn't). Either way, I'm hoping that a sound bite about "the auditionee who lives on a commune" will appear on primetime TV this winter, cluing more Americans in on the fact that there are alternative ways to live one's life in this country. But if it doesn't happen, it's all right. I'll just have to figure out o
ther ways to spread the good news!

CIRCLES OF COOPERATION: TWIN OAKS AND THE FEC
By Sabine, one of Twin Oaks' delegates to the FEC

With any community, an insightful question to ask is "What is the 'values glue' that holds the community together?" For Twin Oaks, the answer is income-sharing, egalitarianism, non-violence and cooperation. We are not alone in this. The Federation of Egalitarian Communities is a network of communal groups that share these values. FEC communities range in size and emphasis from small agricultural homesteads to village-like communities similar to the Israeli kibbutzim. Because we share so much, and because we are committed to a vision of community which transcends our individual groups, we have joined together to cooperate with each other.

For example, as much as someone might love living in their home community, sometimes a change can be beneficial, and the FEC's Labour Exchange system allows a member to spend a period of time, basically a working vacation, in another FEC community. Or a member can split their time between two FEC communities throughout the year as part of our Dual Member program. Some people like the variety so much that over the years, they live full-time in one FEC community, then later move to another, and sometimes even another.

Another important program the FEC offers is it's mutual aid health care program. Each participating community pays a certain amount of money per person per year, and when a catastrophic health care incident occurs, this fund covers the bulk of the cost. And when it is not being used to cover those health costs, the money serves as a Loan Fund to support new communities who need support for purchasing land, building residences, etc. And so this fund serves not only the individual members of FEC communities but also the larger communities movement.

At the moment six intentional communities are full FEC members: Acorn Community and Twin Oaks Community are both in Virginia; Sandhill Farm, East Wind Community and Skyhouse are all in Missouri and Emma Goldman Finishing School is in Seattle. There are also several associated communities, who share at least some of our values, and some of which are moving towards full membership in the FEC.

Formally, each of the Federation communities: 1) holds its land, labor, income and other resources in common 2) assumes responsibility for the needs of its members, receiving the products of their labor and distributing these and all other goods equally, or according to need 3) practices non-violence 4) uses a form of decision-making in which members have an equal opportunity to participate, either through consensus, direct vote or right of appeal or overrule 5) works to establish the equality of all people and does not permit discrimination on the basis of race, class, creed, ethnic origin, age, sex or sexual orientation 6) acts to conserve natural resources for present and future generations while striving to continually improve ecological awareness and practice 7) creates processes for group communication and participation and provides an environment which supports people's development.

If you'd like to find out more about the FEC, check out www.thefec.org

IS IT UTOPIA YET? AN INSIDER'S VIEW OF TWIN OAKS COMMUNITY

What is it really like to live in a "Utopian" community? What happens to the high ideals of equality and social justice under the pressures of daily living with a continually-changing population of nearly a hundred people? Creating a new society presents many challenges:making a living, inventing a government, sharing the labor, raising children collectively, and reaching agreement about such things as diet, standard of living, and commitment to caring for the environment. Does full economic equality really work? How far can a group compromise its ideals for the sake of holding its members? How much social conformity is necessary for peaceful cooperative living? Just how simple should the simple life be?

Some answers to these questions are revealed in "Is It Utopia Yet?", a book written by Kat Kinkade, who was a founding member of Twin Oaks. Kat tells how these fundamental issues have been worked on over the years of communal living at Twin Oaks. Some excerpts:

Movements and Causes

For some, developing Twin Oaks as a viable lifestyle and modeling it for others is a major contribution to society already. People with this point of view do not feel obliged to be personally involved with outside movements and organizations. Just living here, conscientiously practicing conservation and nonviolence and pursuing peaceful happiness for themselves and their friends seems sufficient.
For others this is not enough. It does not matter that we earn very little cash money, wear thrift-store clothing, and share one toilet among five or ten people. It is obvious that in real values we are rich. They feel we need to be doing as much as we can to relieve the world's misery and improve its institutions. Twin Oaks can be a base for a wide-ranging effort to help the oppressed and fight oppression.

Grow a Tomato, Eat a Tomato

By and large, the Community does not care how much it costs to raise our own food. The value the group places on freshness and organic growing methods is not measured in dollars and cents.
Twin Oaks menus offer great variety, and most visitors comment favorably on the fresh vegetables, home-baked bread, and so forth. Our cooks stretch their energies to provide enough variety at every meal so that everybody may find something acceptable. Frequently they serve several varieties of the same main dish--with and without onions, or with and without dairy products. There are usually about five different dishes at every meal--except on pizza night, when there are five different varieties of pizza instead!

Housing

Our housing standards vary somewhat from person to person, partly by personal desire and partly by circumstance. Everyone has a private room, the smallest about six feet by twelve feel and the largest ten feet by sixteen feet. In the older buildings, people have modified their rooms by adding extra windows and lofts and even one skylight. At a guess, 70 percent of the members enjoy their private rooms and the rest are waiting for something better.

Managers

The theory behind the design of our managerial system is that it is desirable to spread authority as broadly as possible. We tend to attract people who distrust hierarchies and want to cooperate with, rather than report to, other Community members.
Taking on a new managership is one of the most stimulating things a member can do. New managers usually have ideas and energy for their areas, and managerial turnover is frequently healthy for the Community. Members sometimes change jobs when they become bored or frustrated and feel the need for a new challenge.

For more information, or to order Is It Utopia Yet? go to http://bit.ly/UtopiaYet
or contact order@ic.org or 800 462 8240.

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Twin Oaks Newsletter: The Leaves of Twin Oaks - Issue 108

2010-08-01T19:42:29Z

The Leaves of Twin Oaks Table of Contents:
News of the Oaks	by Valerie
A Day in the Life of a Communard	by Mushroom
The Seeds Business	by Cloud
Jessica Marie Quintet	by Summer
Greasel	by Kelsey
Politics in Community	by Valerie
Join Us for the Conferences at Twin Oaks!	by Bucket

News of the Oaks Issue #108
by Valerie

Since the last edition of the Leaves, we've gone from the frigid cold of Winter to the sweltering heat of mid-Summer. We're taking advantage of the sun these days with our latest solar energy project. We've just completed the installation of a 10 KiloWatt array of 48 photo-voltaic solar panels in the central field of the community. The electricity generated will be used to power three of our buildings and one of our well pumps, with any excess electricity being fed back into the main power grid (via our local electic co-op), and we will be compensated for that power.

installing one of the 48 panels
for our new solar energy array.

Earlier in the year, we found out that there's nothing like being snowed in for days and weeks on end to bring out people's creativity. In January, Twin Oaks took advantage of the avalanche of snow we received (and the 30-hour power outage) and members' inventiveness was bustin' out all over! Our very own 'outsider-artist-in-residence', aka our member Purl, used the time to construct a chair out of hickory saplings and hemp rope for his daughter Anya, aged 15 months. And when our pond froze, Noah decided a game of ice-hockey was in order, but we only had 2 sticks. Undaunted, he used some scrap wooden stretcher bars from our hammocks business to construct 6 very realistic hockey sticks, 5 of which lasted until the end of the game! And on a more cultured artistic note, Kayde organized a Variety Show in which members could showcase their talents, including poetry, singing, piano, dancing and a puppet show featuring Marshall Rosenberg of NVC (Non-Violent Communication) notoriety as the main character.

Anya sits in her new chair.

Another big January event was the arrival of our newest Oaker, a healthy baby boy born to Elsa and Scott. Elsa delivered him into the world at home, with the help of a midwife, her assistant, a doula, Scott and big brother Luuk. We welcome Ridgeley Ember Jennings Linden to our lives!

Ridgeley Ember Jennings Linden

In February, as an alternative to Valentine's Day, Twin Oaks celebrates Validation Day, a day in which everybody, not just people in intimate relationships, receives a handmade, individually designed card, inside of which other members have written validating messages. On Validation Day, we hand the cards out after dinner, and then break out into a dance party. This year, we also had a 'Songs of Love' performance, which was graced with the presence of the KITCH Army, sharing their version of KISS's new song 'Stand'.

Memory, Calliope, Claire and Keith transformed in to the KITSCH ARMY

Some people might say Twin Oaks has hit the big time, when we were featured in an Earth Day special on CNN news in April. In two of our fifteen minutes of fame, the piece focused on Twin Oaks as an example of how to live a sustainable lifestyle in contemporary America. We were pleased that information about our alternative culture was able to reach the masses.

There's also good news for our two largest community businesses. We've launched a new and improved website for Twin Oaks Hammocks. We sell hammocks both to wholesalers and to retail customers, and the new site makes it easier for our retail customers to make a purchase. Please go to www.twinoakshammocks.com if you'd like to take a look. And with our newest tofu account, we've increased our workweek to 5 tofu production days. This enables us to make the additional 5000 (yes, five thousand) pounds each week for the new account.

And several members have been busy working on creating new community. We've been having meetings of a group of former and current members who are working towards creating the Living Energy Farm. Now in the process of finding land, the project will ultimately encompass an intentional community with an environmental education center, which will focus on sustainable ways of living, free of fossil-fuel. It has been informally dubbed neo-amish (ie. Amish-style, minus the patriarchy). For more information: http://www.livingenergyfarm.org

A Day in the Life of a Communard
by Mushroom

6 a.m. My alarm wakes me up and I roll out of bed, ready to start my day. The sun hasn't quite come up yet, but there's some soft light coming through my east-facing window. I don't have to get up this early--we each set our own schedule--but I like being up before the hustle and bustle of the day really begins. Plus, since nine of us live in my building, I probably won't have any competition for the shower.

6:15 a.m. I make myself breakfast (toast with homemade bread and an egg from one of our chickens) in the kitchen in the Courtyard, where I live. Lunch and dinner are served buffet-style at Zhankoye (ZK), our main dining facility and community center, but we also have a handful of smaller kitchens for breakfast, snacking, and preparing meals for small groups of people. As I eat, I read a novel I pulled from our public collection of several thousand books--no library card needed.

6:55 a.m. Since I like being up early, I signed up for a 7 o'clock tofu-making shift last week when all of our labor was being scheduled. I head to the Tofu Hut, a mere two-minute walk through the woods from my room--not a bad commute. It's chilly out, but the Hut is warm and steamy. I put on boots, gloves, a hairnet, and an apron, and start pressing curds into big slabs of tofu.

10 a.m. My shift is over, and I head back to the Courtyard. I check my email on one of the public computers in the office. In addition to actually making tofu, I also do a lot of customer service for our soyfoods business. Someone has contacted us to find out where they can buy Twin Oaks' tofu in their area; I respond, and also check out the orders that have come in locally from stores and restaurants in Charlottesville and Richmond.

10:45 a.m. I see my friend Sabrina outside with one-year-old Anya in a carrier on her back. She's doing a "primary," labor-creditable child care. We make tea and go for a walk together, Anya making cute faces at me the whole time.

12:05 p.m. It's lunch time, so we walk up to ZK. Lunch is mostly leftovers, supplemented with a fresh salad and baked potatoes. We grow greens throughout the winter in our huge greenhouse, and we harvested enough potatoes in the summer and fall to last us through the winter.

12:50 p.m. I walk back to my room to put on work boots for my forestry shift, then ride a public bike up to Modern Times (MT), where Carrol, River, Purl and I will meet for the shift. MT is our main shop building, with space and tools to fix our cars, bikes, tractors, and vacuums.

1 p.m. We head out into the woods, where we'll selectively cut trees and haul them in to be processed into firewood. All the wood we harvest is done so sustainably, and all of our buildings are heated with wood all winter long. It's too hot to do forestry work in the summer, so during the off-season, I'll switch some of my work scene indoors to do data entry and accounting work to monitor our communal money budgets.

5:15 p.m. I hang out in my room a bit before dinner, finishing up a letter to my family and listening to music. I find it's important to carve out alone time for myself--it's very easy to get sucked into the social scene 24/7 here. There's always something going on, someone to talk to.

6:00 p.m. Dinner is served! Tonight it's my favorite--veggie burgers. (And, OK, hamburgers too. But I'm a vegetarian.) There are plenty of side dishes, like steamed spinach and sweet potato fries. A large percentage of the meal, both veggies and meat, is homegrown. I sit in the Lounge with about ten people and chat with McCune about his latest plumbing adventure. Sometimes at dinner there's one main conversation but tonight several smaller discussions have sprung up. Besides copper-vs-plastic waterlines, people are talking about the new fruit orchard we're planting, the latest news from our sister community 8 miles up the road, and trying to work out if people's schedules will allow our belly-dance troupe to meet on the same night as the queer-theory discussion group.

7:30 p.m. Mala has invited me to her residence (named Beechside) to hang out--there's a really cozy kitchen/living room there that's highly conducive to fun social gatherings. A bunch of people come over, and we sit draped on the couches and on the floor. Debbie and Trout play fiddle and guitar, Casey is knitting a pair of socks and Ezra makes a large amount of popcorn. Zadek, age 4, and Samir, age ten months, provide a lot of the entertainment. It's a festive atmosphere, though there's no particular occasion; we just like to enjoy each other's company.

10:00 p.m. I head home to my room. I record the work I did today on my labor sheet and write in my journal a bit to unwind before bed. I'm very tired, but happy. It's been a good day.

Jessica Marie Quintet
by Summer

Debbie (above), Elsa, Jessie and Summer, 4/5 of the Quintet

I'm standing downtown in Charlottesville with my 6-month old daughter strapped to my front, singing with four other women. We run through our repertoire as a small but steady crowd of people gathers to listen. We are appreciative of the donations they leave, and afterwards we go to soothe our voices at the gelatto place down the street. I am part of the The Jessica Marie Quintet, nee Oakapella or FEC-Sharp, which started in 2008 with eight original members singing a broader range of a cappella music, and has gradually narrowed to a focus on barbershop. When the idea first arose, I squealed with irrepressible dorkiness my delight at the thought of being in one of these groups again--in high school I was head of our 8-member a capella group. Characterized by close harmonies and four distinct voices that often sing the same lyrics (as opposed to doo-wop, which usually features a lead singer and several backup vocals), barbershop feels more egalitarian, more cooperative.

After a few months we were down to 5 people, and renamed the group the Jessie Marie Quintet, in honor of the two members who share that name (Jess, our bass; and Jessie, our tenor). Free online sheet music eventually gave way to specific arrangements ordered off the internet; one practice grew to two 2-hour rehearsals a week; and we began to perform as much as we could, including at homespun coffeehouses, busking in Charlottesville, at the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello, Christmas/Solstice caroling, at a nursing home, at Acorn's Land Day, and for Twin Oakers in full-on JMQ concerts. Twice we've taken an educational trip to town to rehearse with the Skyline Chorus, Charlottesville's Sweet Adeline 30-member women's barbershop chorus. Their director has come out to Twin Oaks with two members of the chorus to help us through a rehearsal. We finished the practice with new warm-up exercises, help with posture, breathing, mouth shape, diphthongs, and lots of other informati on that has helped us advance our singing together. Last summer we used Twin Oaks' recording equipment and squeezed ourselves into the young adult library on hot evenings to put out our first CD.

Recording together was another learning experience: how far away do we each have to stand from the mic? Which room captures the best sound? We feel proud of the result and hope to make another album once we've added enough new songs to our repertoire. Right now the group is working on our theater debut singing and dancing for the community's performance of Greasel. After that, a belated two-year anniversary concert is in order. And after that, who knows? [The Jessica Marie Quintet is comprised of Jessica Marie (Jess) on bass, Summer on lead/baritone, Debbie on lead/tenor, Elsa on lead/tenor, and Jessica Marie (Jessie) on lead/tenor. Our CD, *In the Good Old Summertime and Other Modern Hits* is available for $8 (sliding scale).]

From Seed to Seeds
By Cloud Supernova

Edmund processing seeds.

As Winter comes to an end, and warmer seasons slowly unfurl, I look forward to working again in the Seeds gardens. I remember last year, three days after harvesting a van full of over-ripe (as they must be to ensure proper seed maturity) Suyo Cucumbers, the experience of slimy, smelly, fermented cucumber pulp on my arms, which I admittedly enjoyed, as I plunged through phase II of the project. After fermenting the seeds in buckets of water for three days to help disengage them from the gooey cucumber innards, as well as kill off potential pathogens, I disturbed the viscous liquid and waited the minute or two it took for the viable seeds of our bounty to sink to the bottom of the bucket. Once the floaters were poured out, and the process repeated 2 or 3 more times, good seeds were set onto screens and placed into fan powered drying racks. Germination tests were administered and met the standards of our biggest buyer, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which are often much loftier than the national average.

Twin Oaks Seeds business is contracted by seed companies, such as Southern Exposure Seeds and FedCo, to grow and then process our own organic seed yields. And like our seeds, we've grown. The business started out as a solo project in 2006 by ex-member River with an income of approximately $5,000. Under the managership of Edmund Frost, along with a dedicated crew and expanded growing area, Seeds generated an income of $27,600 in 2009.

We project doubling our profits, which means doubling our output for the 2010 growing year. Why? We have demonstrated to the Community that the Seeds business is a viable business and one worth investing time and money in. It's an income area we feel really good about; it's organic, our methods of cultivation rely heavily on our own sweat, and the products couldn't be Greener. Our seeds inspire backyard garden sanctuaries, help provide nourishing food for many, and promote the genetic diversity necessary in preserving our food sources for the future.

Twin Oaks Theatre: 'Greasel'
by Kelsey

To most of American society, 'community theatre' means a group of theatre people, who happen to live in general proximity of each other, bound together by the act of putting on a professional-looking show. Here, it seems we take the word order of 'community theatre' more literally. It's more community, with a 'Hey! Since we're all here, let's do a ridiculous Twin Oaks-based spoof on Grease this winter!'

Talent? That, we have in buckets here. It started with the unbelievably hilarious team of writers (or re-writers, rather) creating songs and a script for the fantastic band and actors that then assembled. From within our ranks also came choreographers, set designers, props and costumes managers, publicity, lights, and no fewer than three directors. Not to mention those that pick up the slack within the community for this motley and brilliant team to have time to put a show up.

We knew we wanted to spoof the plot of the original show, placing it in a Twin Oaks setting, with lots of references to our alternative culture. Just the name alone-- 'Greasel' -immediately presented itself as a tip of the hat to the alternative energy practice of using vegetable oil for fuel, so-called 'greasel' instead of 'diesel'.

The 'cool kids' in this show were we communards. Members Michael and Summer starred as a hippie, dread-locked Danny paired with Sandra V, the mainstream commodities trader plopped into the middle of our commune for a visit. Musical highlights included 'Oberlin Dropout' as Crunchy (aka Frenchy) ponders returning to grad school, and 'You're The Ones That I Want' as an homage to polyamory. And what would Grease be without 'Hopelessly Devoted to Tofu' (performed, of course, by some of our most committed tofu workers)?

Really, though, there is more to what makes theatre here so interesting: while we do happen to have a lot of talent residing on these 450 acres, talent is also not exactly the point. In community, art is everywhere, and everyone can have a role-not just the 'artsy' people in society to whom we delegate the task of moving our culture forward. Anyone that wants a way to contribute here can probably find one, and while we don't aspire to Broadway with our work, we do aspire to enrich all of our lives through a collective creative process. So, we do. We shape our time together as we wish, and it is certainly never boring. Besides, what makes life worth living if not some Twin Oakers singing about how unexpected romance can blossom over pickling the beets?

Politics at Twin Oaks
by Valerie

Here at Twin Oaks, we generally consider ourselves beyond conventional conversation restraints; this becomes immediately obvious by listening to a mealtime discussion of the lurid details of gruesome symptoms related to the latest sickness going around.

When it comes to talking about politics, it becomes a little more complicated. There are certain topics that we can all discuss with ease and generally agree upon. However, somehow there are others that are more like opening a can of worms while walking through a field of landmines...

Acceptable: global warming and polar icecap melt

More delicate: what temperature to set the communal hot-water heater, and the ecological implications of using ice-cubes

Acceptable: Obama versus Hillary

A bit trickier: Organic versus Local

Acceptable: increasing water shortages and the evils of the bottled-water industry

Tread carefully: the fact that a certain communard-who-shall-remain-nameless replaced the low-flow shower head with one that delivers the approximate force and volume-per-minute of Niagara Falls, without any process.

Acceptable: the discriminatory aspects of impending US immigration policy

Walking on eggshells : our membership process about whether to accept that controversial visitor from the last visitor period.

Acceptable: gay marriage

Call in the Process Team: your lover announces their desire to form a polyamorous triad with that statuesque blonde who arrived as a new member last week.....

Copyright 2008, Valerie Renwick-Porter and Communities magazine. This article first appeared in Communities: Life in Cooperative Culture, Autumn 2008; for further information on Communities: communities.ic.org.

Twin Oaks Conferences!

You are invited to come to Twin Oaks and participate in our two summer events:

Join us for a weekend of sharing and celebration at the 2010 Communities Conference, August 13-15th.

With workshops and events focused on:

Intentional relationships

Group process

Collective child raising

Creating culture

Forming communities

Sustainability

Appropriate technology

The Communities Conference is a networking and learning opportunity for anyone interested or involved in co-operative or communal lifestyles.

Friday August 13 through
Sunday August 15, 2010
$85 (sliding scale) includes
meals and camping.

http://communitiesconference.org

Come join us for the annual Twin Oaks Women's Gathering on August 20-22nd.

Our 27th gathering to celebrate the strength, diversity and power of women in community! All female and non-male ID folks are welcome to this event, which is a three day conference on themes ranging from sex and sexuality to positive relationship building to DIY music, art and movement. There will be scheduled workshops and performance spaces, as well as lots of free time to network, drum, dance and play at beautiful Twin Oaks Community. Registration fee (sliding scale from $60-$160) includes meals and tent space.

Learn more and register online at http://womensgathering.org

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2010-01-18T19:25:08Z

Issue 107 - Winter 2010

E-Leaves Issue #107

In this issue:
News of the Oaks
Garden News
Communities Conference
Womyn's Gathering
Natural Building Workshop
Mourning at Twin Oaks
Twin Oaks in the Media

News of the Oaks
by Gordon and Valerie

Welcome to the second online issue of the Leaves of Twin Oaks!

A wintery view of the sauna

As reported in our last issue, we've been upgrading our tofu/soy foods business AKA Twin Oaks Community Foods, and those efforts have continued. We've been to trade shows in Chicago and Boston and for the first time ever we've hired outside sales representatives to promote our products, bring in new accounts, and hopefully teach us some new sales tricks. We've also been sending our Tofu Management Team out to offer tempting tofu tastings at local natural food stores. In one afternoon at Whole Foods, shoppers cleared the shelves of our products after sampling a dish that Benji and Drea offered.

Also from our last issue, when our Tobacco Barn burned down, we lost the plumbing and electrical connection to one of our wells. McCune and Mushroom are now almost done constructing a cute new well house. McCune particularly enjoyed the chance to lay block again, but not too much of it, after a few years off from that work.

Another important function of the Tobacco Barn was being our slaughter house for the beef our cows provide. We're in the very beginning stages of building a new structure for that purpose.

Speaking of slaughtering things, in late October we shot the first deer in recent memory at Twin Oaks. Or rather, Alexis ex-member shot it, with a crossbow, from the upstairs Storage Barn. Large groups of deer have plagued the garden all year - much more than ever before. It's not hard to imagine that as a non-violent community, it was a Big Decision for us to even consider killing deer. Many members are vegetarian (as is Alexis, in fact). Folks worried that a person might be shot by mistake. (There are lots of people around the gardens, at all hours of the day and night.) Another concern was that bow hunting might result in injured animals escaping only to die in agony somewhere. After much discussion and many weeks of formal community process, the Planners eventually decided to allow hunting under carefully limited conditions.

Backyard of Morningstar,
one of our residences

In other community process news, one part of our shared economy here at Twin Oaks is what we call the OTRA Game. This happens at times when we have a surplus of either work hours or money, over and above our on-going budgets. With the community continuing to be at our population maximum, we have lots of hands for work. And so we played an OTRA Game. OTRA stands for "One Time Resource Allocation" (and nicely ties in by also translating to "other" in Spanish). Any member can propose a special one-time project that we would not normally have enough work hours to cover. Everyone gives input, and the projects with the most support each receive a portion of the extra work hours avail able. This year some of the projects that became OTRAS include workshops on Non-Violent Communication and diversity, sending some members to protest at the "School of the Americas/Assassins" (a military training facility associated with human rights violations), creating an illustrated map of the community, giving hours to our Garden Manager who is writing a book on organic gardening methods, supporting solar clothes drying, and putting on a live theater performance that would be a Twin Oaks' spoof of the movie and stageshow Grease. ("Three-week visit, had me a blast, Three-week visit, happened so fast....")

We're continuing to slowly but surely develop several new agriculturally-based businesses. We've grown shiitake mushrooms for ourselves for some years, and are now looking at growing enough to sell as a business, and adding other varieties such as maitake. We've also just completed our second full season of growing vegetables for seed for our sister community Acorn's heirloom-variety organic seed business. (This is in addition to our own huge vegetable garden that provides food for us). Manager Edmund's walking tour of the three seed fields proved so popular he ended up offering a second tour the next week to accommodate everyone who wanted to come along!

And our own internal agricultural scene has received a huge boost with the fantastic fruit tree planting extravaganza that has been happening. Last winter, in an effort to bring more naturally-provided light and heat into two of our buildings, we created a solar clearing by felling an area of trees on the south sides of Tupelo and Morningstar, two of our residences that house a total of almost 40 people. In order to prevent the trees from growing back and once more blocking the sun, and to take advantage of the newly-sun-filled yards, we planted somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 fruit trees, including peach, pear, persimmon, apple, cherry, mulberry, paw paw, fig, elderberry, and the list goes on. They are all dwarf trees, so will never grow high enough to interfere with the sunlight reaching the building.

Zadek having some
fun in the snow

We've been busy having fun as well. In late summer, while the evenings were still pleasantly warm, our Video Manager hosted an outdoor movie night. Using an old reel-to-reel machine, we viewed vintage footage of Twin Oaks in the 1970's, projected onto the wall of one of our buildings, as we sat in picnic chairs munching popcorn with nutritional yeast (a Twin Oaks standard snack)....... Another summer event included a Space Walk by new member Biddy. Different sized spheres were used to represent planets, in appropriate scale, ranging from a peppercorn to a basketball. We started out in the center of the community, with a ball for the sun, and the group walked along and we'd place each "planet" along the path, in an appropriate ratio for how far each is from the sun. All laid out, the "planets" were spread out over half a mile along the central path of the community...... Although our ultimate frisbee games don't end with the warm weather, one of our more enthusiastic players realized it was time for her to take a hiatus from the game when she reached the later stages of her pregnancy. She hosted a Pregnant Ultimate Frisbee game, in which each player had a large pillow stuffed under their shirt, to simulate Elsa's experience. Apparently many players had shed their encumbrance before the game was over.....Our women's a capella music group, The Jessica Maries, performed a range of barbershop-style songs at the local Heritage Harvest Festival at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and they cut their first (home-produced) CD, "In the Good Old Summertime and Other Hits."

Deer, Water, and Blight, Oh my
By Kathryn

No gardener can resist bemoaning the adversities of the season, no matter how successful. And, despite our overall success this season, it didn't all come easy. With our barn (and the water tank inside it) destroyed by fire this spring, our access to irrigation water was cut in half. Since our intense periods of rain this season were separated by weeks without rain, some of our crops suffered. On top of that, the relatively cool temperatures, along with ill-timed deluges, left us vulnerable to downy mildew in our watermelons and other cucurbits, and early blight in our tomatoes. And, finally, the deer pressure in our garden has grown to a level that we can no longer overlook. Deer consumed nearly all of our edamame, and have wreaked havoc in our carrot patch, while eating other crops - strawberries, peas and beans - to a less devastating, but still demoralizing, degree. As a result, we are experimenting with hunting deer on our property, and we will probably have to fence all or part of our garden in the future.

But enough about the negatives, how about the positives? In July, we broke our previous records by far when we harvested over 7000 pounds of potatoes, a yield of 2.25 lb/foot of row. When you add to that the over 2600 pounds we harvested last month from our summer planting, that's a lot of french fries and mashed potatoes this winter! We dug these potatoes with our new potato harvester, which we bought after our old harvester was destroyed in the barn fire. The new harvester has made the process of picking potatoes from the field dramatically easier, while creating other challenges. (It doesn't handle weeds or mulch, so the field has to be cleaned before we harvest.) Sweet potatoes and winter squash were also outrageously successful, challenging us to find enough storage space, and perhaps enough stomach space as well! The list of other crops consumed over the summer, or waiting for us to eat this winter, is long and satisfying: sweet corn, watermelons, turnips, green beans, peas, spinach, lettuce, eggplant, kohlrabi, broccoli, cabbage, asparagus, blueberries, onions, leeks, parsnips, collards, tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupes, grapes, kale, garlic, beets, summer squash, and more. One of the strengths of our diverse, (non-certified) organic vegetable garden is that, even in a year with significant challenges, we are still able to feed our community with an impressive array and quantity of vegetables.

We are pleased that 2009 was our fifth consecutive season of providing almost all of the vegetables consumed by the community, and most of the fruit, too. Of course, a major reason we can boast of this accomplishment is that our cooks have become enthusiastic about and proficient in working with what we can provide from our own land, and our food processing crew does an outstanding job of putting food by for the winter. There's nothing like the sight of packed root cellars, pantries, and freezers to make a gardener feel proud!

Potato Harvesting in our garden (video)

Twin Oaks' Communities Conference
By Roberto & Marta

Flowers and flyers for
the Communities Conference

What a treat! This year's Communities Conference held at Twin Oaks was quite a gem of an experience. The event was a nice size-- just over 100 people attended. There was enough variety of community experience represented, yet the size was intimate enough that we felt connected to everyone by the end of the weekend.

As new members at Twin Oaks, we had the privilege of doing some prep work to set the stage for the weekend. That meant lots of exciting work from getting the site ready to designing the programs. By the time opening circle came around we had managed to prepare a rich experience for both veteran communitarians and people just beginning to explore community living. Representatives from over 20 communities were present at the event.

The event consisted of two fully-packed days of workshops put on by experienced presenters on topics related to cooperative living, including Consensus Decision-Making, Diversity in Community, Income-Sharing as an Economic Model, Peak Oil and Community, and a look at the personal decision about whether to join an existing group or start your own.

Evening activities included a slide show of a tour of European communities--how fun to know that people across the ocean were doing such radical and diverse experiments in living together. Saturday night was busy with a dessert party, benefit auction for the FIC, and the highlight, a DJ'd dance party for all.

Participants in the Conference Pavilion

One highlight for us was being invited to facilitate the Open Space forum. It was an opportunity to support people's willingness to share a rich array of passions and expertise. Including ourselves! In addition to our own workshop on heart-centered connecting games, other Open Space topics included Permaculture, Being White in a Racist Society, Food Not Bombs, Yoga, Becoming a Better Listener.... to name a few.

From listening to people during and after the conference, it certainly seemed that many people were inspired to continue their personal quests for utopia, be it in their already existing communities or in the formation of future ones. After talking with people during and after the conference, we came away feeling confident that the impact this conference has can be felt like ripples of hope and cooperation throughout the communities movement.

Twin Oaks 26th Annual Women's Gathering
By Calliope

Slumber party, summer camp. These are magical memories, full of mystique. Overnight summer camp is a special example. New faces dimly illuminated by flashlights and campfires. Anything is possible when new faces meet.

Despite worries about higher gas prices in particular and recession woes in general, Twin Oaks 26th annual Womyn's Gathering had a great year. The three-day event was well-attended, bringing in 70 registrants, plus some of our own community members.

Belly-Dancing at the Women's Gathering

Performances, workshops and diversions included DIY psychotherapy, bike repair, mud pit, polyamory, fire poi, an enchanted forest for children, acupuncture, body painting, sexuality, and a performance by a professional belly dancer. Other items of interest included a barter tent, open mic, open drag show, community singers (enhanced entertainingly by sign language interpreters), yoga, organic home-made meals (courtesy Twin Oaks' ace chef Ira), and a sweat lodge.

Self-reliance through community -- a community of women, not women-born-women necessarily, but women who have chosen to be women -- is what the Twin Oaks Womyn's Gathering offered. A little adversity-- some bugs, some rain, some pebbles in the sandals-- is the essential ingredient to this particular form of self-discovery and improvisational community. It's a hike and a camp-out without the expert. The "service" is simply the milieu: inventing and exchanging various expertises from sisters. The fireflies flashing and the crickets chirping are bonuses.

Was there any quality that made this year different from previous Womyn's Gatherings, I asked the main organizer, Byrd. "We've had vendors in the past but wanted to promote a less capitalistic culture this time," she said. "It was cool to see direct exchanges, like bartering massages for art." Another new characteristic was an increase in Queer presence. "We specifically used the language 'non-male identified' to insure that trans-people and people without a definite gender presentation would feel included."

There is a way in which Twin Oaks the community may be seen as a rural enchanted village. There are lots of young people at Twin Oaks enjoying the conscientious absence of any seniority schemes and, since young people are hot to change the world, a fiercely postmodern, post-LGBT culture enjoys an optimistically contrarian expression, too. To put it in pop music terms: The Womyn's Gathering, a specialized yet less tangible form of community, attracts the Holly Near people, pairs them with the Yoko Ono people, then shakes 'em up with the Ani DiFranco and Pink people.

Straw Bale Natural Building Workshop
by Marta

At the end of October, Twin Oaks and Acorn Communities co-hosted a wonderful Natural Building workshop. The presenters, Steve and Mollie, were a stellar team who offered a weekend filled with dynamic presentations and fun cooperative hands-on work.

A "human ladder"
at the Strawbale Workshop.

With just over 30 participants, the workshop started with a colorful slide-show that got me salivating for beautiful, undulating straw bale houses. Mollie and Steve showed pictures of the many building they've designed and built, and walked us through the process of building a straw bale house.

Once we were all fueled with straw-bale inspiration, we headed to the site to get our hands dirty. The project was a 18' by 27' building for Acorn community, using the "post and beam" method. A foundation, roof, posts, and earth bags had been prepared ahead of time and we were ready to add our piece.

The afternoon consisted of everyone plugging into the different jobs of the building process. There were people preparing the bales by rasping the edges; another group was setting up a cob-mixing pool; yet another was shifting clay to use in the cob. By jumping from job to job, each participant got to learn how each step works. It was a sunny day, and with my feet in the cob pool, toes swishing in the mud, I looked up to see a lively assembly line of new friends and acquaintances collaborating.

Mollie and Steve demonstrate

On Saturday evening, Steve and Mollie blew us away with their understanding of natural building with a presentation on passive solar design. They covered basics such as building orientation, configuration options, the benefits of natural materials for insulation, and ventilation.

Even though we got bombarded with rain for the next two days, we got a lot done. All four walls of straw bale were pieced together, each bale placed neatly and measured to fit snug up to the ceiling. Any holes were filled with extra straw, and the final leveling of the surface was done by some participants who woke up at 6am to speed up the process. By the middle of the day on the last day of the workshop, everyone was thrilled to see a building ready for plastering!

Marta learning strawbale construction

Attending this workshop was a highlight of an experience for me. Thanks to Bucket and all the community support that went into making this workshop happen, and to all the muddy hands that sculpted this new building. To anyone interested in learning about this alternative and earth-friendly building technology, Steve and Mollie will add fun, spirit, and an incredible wealth of expertise to your learning experience. For more information, visit their website at: www.MudStrawLove.com

Mourning at Twin Oaks
By Valerie and Paxus

This fall, Twin Oaks mourned the deaths of two people close to us. In mid-October, one of our new members ended his own life, after years of struggling with depression. Later that month, a beloved ex-member in nearby Charlottesville died following some years of living with cancer.

Allen

Though he hadn't lived here for very long, Allen was a bright light in our lives. He was diligent, musical, mechanically inclined. He relished using his cooking skills for 100 people and had recently taken on repairing our equipment and machinery. His parents reported that he had been happier here than anywhere he'd been in a long time, but ultimately he was overwhelmed by his suffering.

Danele

Danele had outlived her doctor's initial prognosis of 6 month by almost 5 years. Always a loving and generous person, Danele's relationships to her family and friends became only more poignant as the preciousness of life was held in awareness every day. She was surrounded by a large extended family, who received as much from her as they gave in supporting her through her illness.

As a community, we are each of us affected by the death of any one of us. We grieve. We support each other. As one member put it: "This type of support is the reason I moved to community". During these times, as a community we shine a healing light on ourselves. When we are at our best, we integrate it into our daily lives, and if we are really good, we will find the switch for that light.

Twin Oaks in the Media

We've recently had two documentaries include Twin Oaks as part of their films-in-progress.

"Sharing & Caring" by David Sheen. A Canadian film-maker who has lived on kibbutz in Israel, David's current project includes rural ecovillages and inner-city squats, lifestyle activists and political radicals. He says: "I am attempting to understand and paint an accurate picture of a movement of people consciously sharing their work lives and their homes lives with one another." To see the Twin Oaks segment: http://www.davidsheen.com/sharing/interviews/valerie.htm

"Americas Mojo" by Adam Tate and Gena Kelly. This project primarily focuses on how individuals and organizations that are thinking of innovative ways to re-invent the workplace and our daily lives during this economic slump. They include Twin Oaks as a place that fosters and promotes individualism and creativity all while working together for the common good. To see the Twin Oaks segment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTwJz8c4wcY or for more general information http://americas-mojo.com/

Twin Oaks Community - 138 Twin Oaks Rd - Louisa, VA 23093 www.TwinOaks.org

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[Twin Oaks] E-Leaves Inaugural Issue (Leaves #106)

2009-08-04T10:51:46Z

Issue 106 - Summer 2009

E-Leaves Inaugural Issue (Leaves #106)

In this issue:
News of the Oaks
Keeping Chickens at Twin Oaks
Soy is Joy-Tofu Business Update
Communards Make Music
We're Full!
Red Barn Renovation
Supporting Twin Oaks Without Living Here
Events at Twin Oaks Community!

Welcome to the first e-issue of the LEAVES!

Zadek and Karma hanging out in a hammock.

We've just passed Summer Solstice, and life is big at Twin Oaks. As of this writing, we have more members than we ever have in our 42-year history-94 adult members, with a Waiting List of about 15 people ready to move here when space opens up. New life and celebrations are bursting out all over, as we're in the midst of a mini "baby boom" here these days with 2 newborns, another baby due this fall, and two more planned for next year. This will raise our child population, and that combined with Population Capacity, means we're taking a break from accepting any new families into the community. We had a spring wedding in May, with two members exchanging vows in one of our large yards, with many friends and family gathered to help the happy couple celebrate.

We haven't had very many fires at Twin Oaks over the years. One was in the early '80's, the next in the late '90's. Now we've had three in the past year. What's up? First Oz burned in June 2008 (on Twin Oaks' anniversary, in fact). Oz was the furniture-finishing building, where we oiled hammock spreader bars and varnished hanging chair frames. It seems likely caused by spontaneous combustion (those notorious oily rags that we should all remember learning about in school). Next, an intentional fire got out of control--we were burning the remains of one of our slaughtered cows, and the fire spread to surrounding grass. Most recently, the Tobacco Barn burned to the ground. We don't know why. At 5:30am, when someone noticed the smoke and flame, it was already too late to do anything. The Louisa volunteer fire department came quickly (thanks!) and contained the blaze. There's speculation about the cause but no clear evidence. The worst immediate impact was that we lost th e use of the new agricultural well located near the Tobacco Barn. We are now using the old well for the garden, and are starting community process to build a new structure for the water-related services lost in the fire.

The smoking ruins of the Tobacco Barn.

Speaking of the Oz fire, the replacement chair-finishing building is just about done. It's a pre-fabbed structure, made of metal (doesn't burn! at least not so easily). The exterior is green, of course, to match the overall color scheme at Emerald City, our complex of industrial buildings. Insurance money paid for it, fortunately, though of course insurance can't make up for the trauma and inconvenience of the fire. For the last year, stretcher oilers worked in a nearby shed, and the chair varnisher used a jury-rigged set-up in a storage trailer. As a result, we were short of hanging chairs to sell last summer and fall, but we had a good supply for this spring's big sales season.

Some recent membership stats, as of June 1, 2009: Our average adult age is 39, with 44 members who are age 18-39, and 40 members who are age 40-85. Fifty-six percent of current members are female. The average length of membership is 7.6 years. (The average male has been here 2 yrs longer than the average female). More news about membership lower down in this newsletter.

And now, the weather. We've had a cool, rainy spring, and this past winter it got cold enough that we had significant frozen water pipe damage but also a wonderful week of ice skating on our pond. Sadly, the cold temperatures resulted in every single fig bush on the property dying back to the ground, although they are already making a come back with a spring growth spurt.

Weather news naturally leads to garden news. This year is described as "promising". Lots of asparagus, a good supply of strawberries (both for fresh eating and jam), the corn will be late due to untimely heavy rain, potatoes look good, only a few harlequin beetles so far in the brassicas. We've planted more fava beans this year. Five new kinds of blueberries are bearing for the first time this year, and we are taste-testing to see which we want more of. We're continuing to develop our own vegetable varieties, especially Roma paste tomatoes and Crimson Sweet watermelon, selecting for early maturation, disease resistance, and good taste. We been saving the best seed for some years, and started selling some last season. In garden equipment news, the potato digger burned in the Tobacco Barn fire, and a replacement will cost $5-6,000. We bought two count 'em two new-to-us (used) rotary cutters AKA bush hogs for use with the tractors. The dual spindle model is fabulously better t han our old one for grooming pastures. (We had the old one for 30+ years.)

We have some phone system changes and challenges. All calls go out by VOIP using our internet line (inbound calls still come over analog lines), a service which saves $2000 a year. But all is not well in Twin Oaks VOIP land. The main problem is high bandwidth media consumption. Some VOIP calls are choppy. We only have 1.5Mbps capacity to service the 47 computers (public and private) on the farm. People watch streamed movies, and use Skype and Google video conferencing. We try to prioritize phone traffic but someday when the connection is saturated by the incoming stream of dominant culture media, someone's emergency VOIP call to her doctor is going to break up. We may need to have a difficult conversation about limiting some high bandwidth media.

In April we had two workshops on Sexuality and Communication in a Community Setting, prompted by concerns about some behavior at parties, and around alcohol use. 30 members came to the first, 35 to the second.

New car news: we have our first Subaru. This is a change as almost all of our small cars are Toyota Corollas. Another first: it has heated seats. We name all of our vehicles, but the entire naming process for this new car was too arcane and controversial to describe here. In brief: the first naming party came up with "Darth Dingo". (The car model is an Outback, hence the Australian reference). There were enough concerns and complaints due to the aforementioned arcane controversy to warrant a re-run, which chose Waltzing Matilda.

Our sister community Acorn (7 miles down the road) is also full, but that's not stopping growth there. Some of the 16 current members and several interns are gamely living in improvised rooms while the community expects to get some extra space built by a straw-bale workshop this fall. (If you are interested in hands-on experience with alternative construction, see elsewhere in this issue for more info on the workshop.)

Acorn's main business, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is expanding by leaps and bounds. This reflects terrific growth in the whole seed industry over the past couple or three years. Acorn bought a new (used) insulated truck trailer for air conditioned seed storage and hopes to build a new seed biz building in the next year or two.

And Twin Oaks is getting into the act. As hammock sales continue to decline (especially wholesale) because of the economy and lower-priced imports, we are looking for new income areas. This last winter a dozen or more Oakers filled many thousands of seed packets as Outside Work. Some did their hours at Acorn, others worked in a new seed packing facility set up in the old Archives room in Nashoba. It's perfect low-stress sit-down work for some older Nashoba residents. Also it's definitely a "right livelihood" job, providing certified organically grown, heirloom and other open-pollinated seeds for a company that promotes sustainable gardening and seed-saving. Check out www.SouthernExposure.com.

In addition to packing seeds, we've also grown them for the past four seasons. We have growing-for-sale seed areas at Lawson Land, Baker Branch, and neighbor George Payne's, in order to provide isolation distance for different varieties. The total area is about 2-1/2 acres. Some locations have irrigation water, some don't. All are certified organic. This year Twin Oaks is growing over 60 varieties of seed for sale, including 6 tomatoes, 5 flowers, 4 squash, 3 corn, 3 peppers, 3 watermelon, plus 7 kinds of garlic.

A few last quickies: one of our under-used buildings has been revamped as an Art and Recreation space; we've created solar clearings just south of two of our residences (to increase natural heat and light inside) and planted low-growing fruit trees a-plenty in those clearings; we were donated a new kiln for the ceramics studio; we now have 4 tropical birds living at Twin Oaks with various members, some of whom also volunteer at the local tropical bird sanctuary; Wednesday evenings now host two different community events-Art Therapy Night, and our weekly musical-film-watchers club; and members continue to be physically active in a weekly yoga class, twice-a-week ultimate frisbee and semi-regular hikes in the nearby-ish Blue Ridge Mountains; and lastly, we soon may not be located along a dirt (gravel) road anymore, as the local paper announced that the state expects to pave our main county road sometime in the next year or two. The end of a era....

Keeping Chickens at Twin Oaks
by Debbie

Our portable chicken coop.

Here at Twin Oaks, we pride ourselves on our food self-sufficiency. We don't buy vegetables for the community, but rely on what our garden supplies us year-round. Our dairy provides us with ample quantities of milk and beef. And this spring, for the first time, our young but growing chicken flock is supplying all of our eggs.

Four years ago, ex-member Woody began the poultry program. He built up the population by purchasing chicks and running incubators which hatched chicks outside his room.

In March of this year, Drea and I inherited management of 130 laying hens and roosters, and a new batch of chicks coming out of the incubators every month. By April we were producing more eggs than the community was consuming. But springtime is a chicken's favorite time to lay; they tend to slow down in summer and often stop completely in the winter. In large confined poultry factories, hens are kept under artificial lights which trick them into thinking it is always spring. We are not fans of this system, either for the energy it consumes or the stress it puts on the birds. If consumption stays high, we will run low on eggs sooner or later.

As the poultry team, Drea, Kayde, Edmund, Bean, and I have taken on the goal of making the community self-sufficient in eggs. But we believe that meeting this goal will require education along with increased production. Like other participants in the growing local foods movement, most Twin Oakers have a very good awareness of the seasonal availability of vegetable foods. All winter we happily munch on spinach, dreaming of fresh tomatoes but knowing we won't have them again until June. Unfortunately, this awareness does not generally extend to animal products. Most Twin Oakers find it easier to do without fresh broccoli than to give up eggs for breakfast. But to be sustainable, egg consumption must also adjust to the changing seasons.

Along with education to shift consumption patterns, the poultry team is continuing to grow the flock. We envision an ultimate size of around 200 birds in the next few years. We experienced one very dramatic setback when the barn where we raised young chickens, burned down in April. Plans are in place for re-construction and an upgrade.

Another constraint we've run into concerns the impact of our main laying flock. Some of our chickens live in a grove of chestnut trees next to a cow pasture. We noticed this spring that the impact of 130 birds scratching and pecking around their coop was spreading beyond the chestnuts and into the neighboring pasture. Knowing that a flock of 200 chickens would make this impact much worse, we began to search for other places to put the birds.

Inspired by Joel Salatin and others practicing the increasingly popular technique of pastured poultry, we looked for ways to run chickens on our cow pastures on a rotational basis. If moved around regularly, chickens have a very positive impact on a pasture. They scratch up cow patties, providing more even fertilization and eating fly larvae and other parasites. Their manure adds nitrogen to the soil. Benefits for the chickens include more and cleaner space to roam, as well as bugs, grass, and clover to eat.

To facilitate this rotation, we have build a portable coop, similar in design to a garden cart, that can house about 20 chickens. We've had them out on pasture for a few weeks now and the chickens definitely seem pleased with the results, and so are we. We plan on building more portable coops, and making pastured chickens an integral part of our poultry program.

Soy is Joy
by Mushroom

The tofu business is in high gear these days! We've seen several big changes in the past few months and look forward to more this summer.

Our new tofu packaging machine,
the glorious VC999

The most dramatic upgrade is, hands down, our shiny new packager. It's about 12 feet long, with a conveyor belt and a fancy touch screen for changing the settings. As it is a bit of a behemoth, it required a team of experts to install it: Shal and Carrol masterfully maneuvered it inside via forklift; Louis and Kansas hooked up the electrics, and Jason and Casey were the air compressor gurus.

We package over one thousand pieces of tofu every production day, and the new machine suits our packaging needs much better. All we need to do is just drop the tofu into cube-shaped pockets and let the machine do the rest, which is a big improvement over the more labor-intensive previous machine. Kele and Noah have been extremely dedicated to seeing that it runs smoothly, and the payoff is big: on a good day, we can package all our tofu in just a few hours. We'll also be saving money, since the new plastic film is much cheaper than bags. Hopefully more labor- and money-saving upgrades like this one will be coming soon!

It's a good thing we're on the road to smoother, more efficient production, because we're about to start selling through United Natural Foods (UNFI) starting in July. We hope to get our tofu, tempeh, and soysage on the shelves of big chain stores on the East Coast. Benji and Steve have taken on marketing projects, as well, like getting a sense of how our tofu stacks up with competitors in terms of pricing and packaging, and applying to participate in a program that would make our products readily available for purchase by schools. We're also experimenting with marketing through trade shows like All Things Organic in Chicago.

Speaking of experimenting, we've recently been making a product called Nufu for ex-member Jon Kessler's soyfoods company, Sunergia. What is Nufu, you ask? It's like tofu...but with peanuts. That's right--no soybeans whatsoever. The process is pretty much the same: we soak the peanuts overnight, grind them and mix them with hot water, pump out the peanut milk, curd it, and press it. Nufu is especially great as a base for vegan "egg" salad, and can be enjoyed by folks who are soy sensitive. We're also still producing soy-based Sunergia products for the "More Than Tofu" line: seven flavors of seasoned tofu with quinoa and amaranth added for texture. Totally delicious!

On a less cheerful note, Dennis, who has painstakingly prepped the Tofu Hut in the wee hours of the morning before production for the past four years, is retiring. Every day when the start-up co staggers sleepily into the Hut and finds it immaculately clean and ready to go, it's all thanks to Dennis. He'll be staying on as the equipment manager, but it'll be up to the start-up crew to do their own prep. His intensive 100-page how-to manual should help them out. Thanks for all your hard work, Dennis.

With all these new developments, it's really exciting to work in the Tofu Hut right about now. It feels great to help people eat locally and lower down on the food chain. We hope to stay on this track of growth and expand our role as a Twin Oaks business even more in the coming months.

Communards Make Music
by Kayde

Communards making music.

For many of us here at Twin Oaks, music is a part of our every day lives. When we are not singing, dancing, or playing instruments, we are thinking of the next available time we will be able to.

Recently, on a drive home from the airport, Elsa who had flown in from New York, was telling Jess, who had flown in from Seattle, how she had learned one of their new songs on the plane. They are both members of the female a cappella group The Jessica Marie Quintet, which consists of Jess, Jessie, Summer, Elsa, and Debbie. They perform songs like "Hello My Baby" and "In the Good Ol Summertime". It is great to have a group that just about everyone enjoys listening to at Twin Oaks and it is fun to watch people smiling and laughing as they perform. A few months ago, the Jessica Marie Quintet had their first off the farm gig, and soon they will record a CD. We are grateful to have so many beautiful voices in our community.

Trout playing the guitar.

This year something great big and Irish happened at Twin Oaks. Trout put together a group of people to play for St. Patrick's Day. Along with Trout on guitar, there were also drums, fiddle, mandolin, upright bass, and banjo. The Jig Riggers played to a packed Tupelo (one of our residences with a large living room). It was a pleasure to have an active St. Patrick's Day on the farm, complete with Irish music.

Trout also plays in another band here named after the construction company that built our newest building up at Emerald City, called Charlie's Steel Erection Band (Trout, Ezra, Keith, Ghost, and Christian). They performed at our Anniversary party, and you could tell they were a hit by all the sweaty bodies on the dance floor, getting down to their Homegrown 70's Grunge.

Violas Heartfull.

Violas Heartfull is the name of the music project created in 2007 by Kayde Deardorff. This project is an exploration of sound and music that is emotional, visual, and child-like. Often the songs are sad and repetitive. This year Violas Heartfull has performed at Twin Oaks, in Virginia and Washington, and West Coast tour is in the works. Currently she is working on a new album that includes parts for dulcimer, piano, violin, drums and vocal harmonies.

Memory is one of our newer members, arriving here in the fall of 2008 and bringing with her two instruments that are new to Twin Oaks, the ukulele and harp. This winter while her sister was visiting from out of town, they performed duets on ukulele, complete with lots of harmony. There's nothing like the vocal harmony of members of the same family. Memory also recently played the harp for Summer and Purl's wedding in May.

For a few months this spring we had an active drum and dance group called Drumgasm. Keith and Kristen began playing together and inviting others. This group has been exploring many varieties of drums, tambourine, ocarina, crystal bowl, and many others. Drumgasm is also friendly towards bellydancers and anyone else who likes to dance.

Brenda, the amazing Twin Oaks pianist, has been coordinating and performing in various concerts here (often for holidays.) The most recent concert was on Validation Day. Brenda often plays accompaniment for voice and duets. This year the Validation Day Concert consisted of a unique blend of songs about love, with lingerie for decoration. Next, Brenda is planning a bad love concert that will be a variety of songs about love gone wrong.

Those are just some of the musical highlights at Twin Oaks this year. If you are lucky you will make it to one of our coffee houses, concerts, or shows, where you will be entertained and warmed by all of our musical explorations. Don't forget to bring some of your own funky instruments to add to the mix.

We're Full! Twin Oaks at Population Capacity
by Paxus

With a couple of brief technical exceptions, Twin Oaks has had a Waiting List for over half a year. Our population capacity ("Pop Cap"for short) is based on the number of adult rooms in the community (currently we have 93 adult members). Being at Pop Cap is a bit of a blessing and a bit of a curse.

Paxus.

On the plus side, Pop Cap means we have lots of people to draw from for work which is sometimes hard to get covered, from kitchen shifts to tofu production work to gardening. Since our population forecasts, which are used to create our labor budgets, assume less than a full house, being at Pop Cap means the Planners have extra hours (called Pop Hours) to fund special initiatives and occasional unplanned holidays. And of course being full gives us an indication that we are doing something right!

On the down side, because of the Waiting List, sometimes people who have been accepted for membership can't wait for a space to open up, and we never get them as a member. Zhankoye, our dining hall, is much more crowded and to some members that can feel like too many people. Another dilemma, especially during an economic downturn, is that members who might otherwise leave the community, instead linger. This can lead to dissatisfied members who don't want to risk leaving the community because if they discover they can't find or create the situation they'd like for themselves in the mainstream, they may not be able to return to the community.

Another aspect of being at our population limit is that we tend to become more selective in our membership process. With so many choices, we become pickier. While this slightly slows the growth of the Waiting List (which is at 15 people as of this writing), it also means that some people who might be good communards are pushed to find other options.

And these options are limited these days because many of our sister communities are full also. East Wind in Missouri has been at it's limit of 70 members for some months, and even discontinued it's associate member program to make space for full members. Acorn (8 miles from us), while still seeking new women members to balance their gender demographics, does not have anywhere to house them immediately with 16 members and 6 interns already occupying their living spaces.

Many people believe the poor mainstream economy is driving our peak in population. I believe this is a factor, but not the largest one. Most of our visitors have not lost their jobs and are coming to community because they think it is a better way to live.

Red Barn Renovation
by Keenan

Proud Keenan & the Red Barn.

In 1967 when Twin Oaks was founded, there were several barns on the property. Each barn, except for the one that recently burned down, is still with us and they have each been in continuous use.

One of them, the Red Barn, has been in disrepair for years. The siding has been falling off for years and materials have piled up and become disorganized. Ironically, this is the building most used by community "tool-users."

The Red Barn is where construction materials are stored. "Stored" is not quite the right word, "dumped" would be more accurate. Well-meaning communards would have some useful thing left over from a project and assume that someone, someday would find a use for it.So the inside of the Red Barn became crammed with old doors, half sacks of solidified cement, tufts of fiberglass insulation, long pieces of interesting metal, and much, much more.

Seeking projects that would give the teens here building experience, I took on the task of fixing up and cleaning out the Red Barn. This project has lots of community support. We want to preserve out old buildings and the Red Barn had become an eyesore. But more, it is hard on everyone who does any maintenance and repair to spend three hours sorting through clutter to find the material for a half-an-hour project.

We started in the winter, since wasps took over the Red Barn every spring. To even get to the decaying siding, we had to start about thirty feet out from the building cutting down and pulling up the trees that had grown up around it.

When we finally started pulling the siding off, we realized what a beautiful view there was on the south side. We would sit and enjoy the view after our days' work was done. People said this would be a great place for a deck, so we posted a request to include a deck on the barn, overlooking the pond, the sauna and the new orchard.

The initial conception of that deck was that it would be a quiet space for a few people to sit and watch the sunset. But many people came over and said what a great spot that will be for parties and that it was big enough to dance on. Yikes! I had nightmarish visions of 40 people all bouncing up and down together to "YMCA". So the teen crew and I have taken some extra time to add additional posts and cross-bracing to make sure that the deck is really durable and able to withstand whatever possible abuse the community might inflict.

This whole project has minimal funding, so we have been scrounging materials wherever we could find them. All those materials that people stored in the Red Barn thinking "...someday..." well, the day has come. We found a wonderful glass door to install onto the new deck. We found plenty of joist hangars for the deck.

Throughout the community, random materials have been popping up. I have found huge oak slabs of wood that are perfect for the posts to hold up the deck on the back of the Red Barn. I also needed lots of cement slabs to put the posts on. Carrol and Chiron both offered up cement slabs that had been sitting around for years covered in weeds. I needed lots of bolts to hold it all together and one day while mulling over where to get bolts, Kristen walked over from the Fairs shed and said, "We have all this tarnished hardware that we want to get rid of, can you use it?"It was a box of long carriage bolts with some surface discoloring, but otherwise in fine shape. I was bolting them on the deck 15 minutes later. And it has continued that way -- with me finding, or people offering, the right size wood, cedar siding for the south wall, pressure treated joists...

The project is about half finished. There is no particular time-line for completing it, but it should be done in time for Twin Oaks' 43rd anniversary.

Supporting Twin Oaks Without Living Here

Receive a tax deduction for a donation that goes to Twin Oaks! This a great opportunity to do this. It isn't a gift; it's a wage paid to Oakers doing "movement support" work. Programmers at the Oaks have written and tested the core of some software for FairVote, an educational non-profit. More labor is needed to make these new tools work on the Web. You can make donations to FairVote and earmark them for the "Twin Oaks project."

Your $10 gift gives Twin Oaks $10; it helps make new tools for co-operation, and it gives $10 to FairVote campaigns that are improving elections in cities from Burlington Vermont to San Fransico.

And it feels good to give a little.

All the best,

To make a donation, please contact Rob Loring, member '75-'77 Loring.Rob@gmail.com

EVENTS THIS SUMMER AND FALL AT TWIN OAKS Twin Oaks Communities Conference
- Friday August 14 through Sunday August 16, 2009

http://communitiesconference.org

The Communities Conference is a networking and learning opportunity for anyone interested or involved in co-operative or communal lifestyles.

Join us for a weekend of sharing and celebration!

Find out more and register at: http://communitiesconference.org

If you want to come, we want you to be here! If you are having financial difficulties due to the economy, or have some other hardship, let us know and we will work out a work-trade or other arrangemet to help get you here! Contact conference@twinoaks.org for more information.

Womyn's Gathering
- August 21st-23rd 2009

http://www.womynsgathering.org/

The Twin Oaks Womyn's Gathering is an annual event for non-male ID folks from all over the world to share, dance, learn, laugh, meditate, and dream! This year the theme is "womyn rising up: exploring the radical in the everyday". We all participate in radical acts every day, each time we mend a pair of jeans instead of buying new, each time we share a car, ride a bike to the grocery store instead of driving. The real revolution will be in all the small actions, and this year we will be sharing our skills and dreams, inspiring eachother to keep rising up!

Find out more and register at: http://www.womynsgathering.org/

3-Day Natural Building Workshop!
-October 23rd - 25th

http://thefec.org/workshop

Learn how to build straw bale shelters in this hands-on workshop. October 23rd - 25th

Twin Oaks Community would like to invite you to attend our three day earth shelter workshop. Come learn about straw bale construction from expert instructors while experiencing our legendary hospitality. Our workshop will be a fun and informative experience you won't soon forget!

We will present both hands-on experience opportunities and "classroom" style learning while we build and learn together. We will give you the explanations you need to understand not only what you are physically working on, but will also help you grasp the wider perspective on how to build as a whole, with an emphasis on natural building and green design, including passive solar.

Find out more and register at: http://thefec.org/workshop

Twin Oaks Events Newsletter

You can also join our Events newsletter at the following web address: http://thefec.org/cgi-bin/list/index.cgi/list/events/

This is a newsletter for all the events held for the public at Twin Oaks. Sign up to hear news and information on the Communities Conference, Natural Building Workshops and Womyn's Gathering.

Thanks!
Twin Oaks Community

Twin Oaks Community - 138 Twin Oaks Rd - Louisa, VA 23093
www.TwinOaks.org

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