Twin Oaks - last week (journal)
10/28 - Saturday
I had my membership interview on Wednesday morning. The first part is a “story of your life.” Mine lasted for an hour! I never thought I could talk about my own life for that long. After that they went through a set of 80 standard interview questions - pretty boring questions with short answers.
Went to community business meetings on Wednesday and Thursday - mostly just number reviews like a quarterly review at a corporation - number of hammocks made, net/gross profits, labor budget used, projections for next year. The second meeting talked about “off the farm” work - work by community members for clients/customers off the farm, which is opening up some interesting opportunities for Twin Oaks.
Mark (one of the visitors) works for the European commission, part of the EU, and gave a general talk about how it’s structured and functions. Hearing his description of the large-scale cooperation between nation-states that is facilitated by the EU made me realize how jaded I am about government in general because of my experience living here in the US and seeing the way our government operates.
The Halloween party last night was rockin’. Lots of good dancing. There was a “broken mirror” cake and a gigantic pig cake - like a skyscraper of cakes. There was a chocolate vulva (bowl-like, filled with cherries). I took pictures of all of these, including some awesome costumes, but unfortunately my camera ate them. There was also some free beer! (Yuengling, which is a popular beer up here). There’s a girl guesting here named Byrd who is really beautiful - she came up to dance with me and I was sort of stuck and didn’t know what to do for a second. It was nice to feel jostled like that.
11/1 - Wednesday
We had our visitor party last night - a huge success. We had plenty of vegan treats and drinks (and a whole box of wine left over). I don’t remember how late I stayed up, but I got really smashed. Hungover today - not bad, but enough to know I should have stopped drinking. I always have that problem with wine - don’t count my drinks. I hung out with Callista some more. I feel very “real” with her - no pretense, everything up front. I’ll miss a lot of these people.
The theme of the party was “fishbowl questions” but fishbowl here means something else, so we didn’t use that word. We wrote questions and dares on slips of paper and put them in a hat - every guest had to draw one. They were things like “give 5 compliments in the next 5 minutes,” “give someone a massage” and “who was your first love?”
At the visitor party last night, I mentioned the “suppression of abundance” that I felt - one of the TO members disagreed and said he felt the egalitarian atmosphere encouraged the sharing of abundance. Good to hear that.
11/3 - Friday morning
I decided to shave my head last night in preparation for my camping trip next week - Carmen wanted to run the buzzers. Afterwards, we had an impromptu naked dance party at Aurora - Carmen, Callista and I danced around in our underwear while Ethan sat naked on the couch (he doesn’t dance). At some point we started playing Truth or Dare and it was the kind of thing where it would take the night into one of two directions - for whatever reasons, we did NOT end up all piled on a bed performing illegal acts on each other. Not the right people? Not the right time? It felt like a social experiment, and as such it was a success.
11/3 - Friday afternoon
Well it’s 4:30 and most of the visitors are gone. Only Callista is still here - she’s staying on as a “long-term guest” for another month or two (instead of applying for membership). I’m looking forward to camping tomorrow. The forecast looks like it may be cold over the weekend, but will warm into the 50’s - 60’s after that. Shouldn’t be too bad, but I’ll pack extra clothes just in case. I think I’m going to try back-country camping, so I’ll be packing light. Fires are not allowed in the back-country so I’ll be bringing all no-cook food. I’ll be bringing plenty of water, in addition to some water purification tabs in case I need them.
I said goodbye to Coyote but it didn’t feel much like goodbye. We know we’ll see each other again. Some Coyote-isms I’ve collected over the past 3 weeks:
* Everything you do affects everything there is. Everything there is affects everything you do.
* Break the Golden Rule up into two parts: Advantage those you love. Don’t intentionally disadvantage everyone else.