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Help us put on an amazing conference!  Got a great idea for a workshop to present?  Send us a proposal.

We are looking for dynamic presenters who can offer interactive and/or engaging workshops.  The focus of the event is on intentional communities, but we also have workshops on other forms of cooperative living and working, as well as other alternative lifestyle topics.  There is of course limited space in our schedule of workshops, so if you’re proposal is not selected you can also present it in our Open Space sessions on Sunday.

Workshop blocks are usually 1.5 or 2 hrs.  The conference site is rustic and mostly outdoors. There is limited electrical access; presentations requiring projectors or other electrical presentation tools can be accommodated if requested in advance.

Presenters are encouraged to participate in the whole weekend.  Camping is the standard accommodation; indoor accommodations are available for a fee.

Please send a one to three paragraph workshop description with title and a little bit about yourself to conference(at)twinoaks(dot)org.

Reblogged from Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History:

Today brings another first in American gay history: NBA player Jason Collins comes out and becomes America's first openly gay and still-playing male major professional athlete.  I'm not really a sports girl, but this is a big deal and as a queer gal I'm grateful to Jason Collins for being brave enough to be the first.  I look forward to the day when this kind of an announcement is no big deal, and it's people like him who will help us get there.

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We are watching the political tide in this country turn. As recently as two years ago many thought it was unlikely the nation would legalize gay marriage, now most think it is all but inevitable. Collins is a privileged hero, but no less a hero. Angie caught some of what is great about this announcement in this post i am happily reblogging.

When I first heard about fracking, I knew it was bad. I just didn’t understand much beyond that.

Post-drilling tap water. A delightful chemical cocktail!

Then my friend Tom said something about getting payments from his parents’ land and a Natural Gas lease.  Yes, it turns out, they have signed a lease with the natural gas company allowing fracking on their land. Last night I watched the rivetting documentary Gasland, which is essentially Tom’s story. Living on the beautiful piece of land he grew up in in PA, one day Josh Fox (creator of Gasland) got a gas lease form in the mail. Curious, he started asking questions. Talking to people. Collecting samples of people’s tap water. Travelling to other fracking sites in the west and midwest.

And the story slowly comes together. Turns out its really quite simple. Ten years ago, 1% of our natural gas came from fracking. Today its 30%.

This past weekend I facilitated a series of meetings in Boston (at Jamaica Plain Cohousing), and I started my work —as I always do—by asking for permission to operate under a set of Ground Rules that I've developed over the years. Among them is the group accepting my being "agreement prejudiced."

As that may sound like an odd request—a) why is that noteworthy; and b) is it OK to be "prejudiced" about anything?—it occurred to me that it would make a worthy blog focus to explain why I go there.

Almost without exception, people who have been raised in the dominant culture have been conditioned to think first in terms of how they are distinct from others, rather than how they are the same. To a large extent, our identities are associated with differences more than with similarities, and you know yourself most surely by the ways in which you stand apart from those around you. Certainly that was true for me. (Note that from an anthropolocigal perspective that all cultures aren't like this. In Inuit society, for example, individuals develop a much stronger sense of "we" than "I.")

Mind you, I am not saying that we have been raised to be cantankerous, or iconoclastic (although some, of course, turn out that way). Rather, I'm saying that when someone says something with which we are in partial agreement (which happens "only" all the time) our overwhelming tendency is to focus our initial response on the ways in which we disagree, rather than on celebrating the ways in which we align—even though they are equally valid responses, and one isn't more true than the other.

In the lead up to the Loud Love event we have reached out to several different communities to both bolster the attendance of the event and diversify the world views of the participants.  This has put us into conversation with local progressive church groups, some of whom are curious about why we reached out to them.  In response to one pastor’s query about my characterization of the event as “edgy” i wrote the following letter.

I took a PAL (personal affairs leave) from Twin Oaks about ten days ago. A PAL can be granted to a Twin Oaks member who is not in the money or labor hole, and has lived at Twin Oaks for at least a year. A person taking a PAL can be gone from Twin Oaks for up to a year and return within that time and still become a member of the community. I don't receive money from the community while I am gone. I'm really not a member, but I can come back, pretty much anytime. Although, I might have to wait until a room opens up. It's a pretty neat thing that I decided to take advantage of.

I felt very content at Twin Oaks after being there almost two years, but I also felt a desire to explore some more communities, and gain some more primitive skills.

Twin Oaks is a community of about 100 people. Sometimes I think of it as more of a village than a community. I've yearned to be in a close knit family, or small group of people who work together and support each other to grow and learn. It seems like I would need a smaller community for that. I also want to be in a community that focuses on emotional healing. There are so many people at Twin Oaks, going in all different directions. There isn't as much community as I want there. There isn't a main goal or purpose of the place. I think this is true just because it's so big. I think it could be possible for me to create that there, but I am not sure. That is part of what led me to take some time off to find out what I really want.
There are some people in Virginia who I really, really miss already..

i appreciate that we try vaguely impossible things.

Dove is visiting Acorn with her 4 kids.  To the casual observer we cant absorb this number of children, particularly in that there is only one parent, but we are trying anyway.  We are willing to risk falling in love with these charming people and not quite knowing how it is that they can live in a place which has a waiting list and is well under capacity for bedrooms.  Fortunately, we are not casual observers.

Dragon did an amazing job of prettying up the Rec Collective.  Until the weather got warm it was being used as a dorm for all the interns and guests.  This is a receipt for entropy maximization.  Take a slightly small oddly shaped one room straw bale and fill it with a constantly rotating collection of scruffy hippies and it will clutter and start to rot.  Fox and a team of declutters shifted it from funky mattress and random junk hell and made it something usable, Dragon took the set up and made the place really nice.  Kara’s two oldest girls, Bob and Anonymous, were reading and playing guitar in this newly liberated space.

Beaders in the newly clean Rec Collective

i just heard that Acorn lost a couple of charming interns because the place is too dirty.  Let’s be clear, it is pretty dirty.  And in our defense the place is a farm.  We grow an increasing fraction of our own food as well as a significant number of seeds for the business. This means an approximately endless supply of people working in dirt and coming in for at least a couple of meals and meetings on the average day.

And this topic inevitably comes up whenever we talk about our diversity as a community; it may be that our biggest barriers are cultural and that if we are truly going to be more open to a wider diversity of people, we may have to do some shifting of our internal culture.  Being cleaner is an obvious starting point.

But please don’t suggest that there is an easy fix, if we all just pitched in a bit more.  It just does not seem to work out that way, at least in the communities i frequent.    There are people who clean, and some clean quite a lot.  And pushing back there are kids and pets and poorly house trained adults (and even well trained adults and kids who occasionally screw up in the scores of entries into the residential buildings each day).  It is going to take some clever ideas and some culture changing.

Who has the time to clean after a hard days work on the farm??

 
Donald Walters—Swami Kriyananda—died peacefully last Sunday in Assisi, Italy. He was 86 and had lived a very full life. The image above was taken in a joyous moment last year.

Though I never met him, I have known of him for many years, first as the founder of Ananda Village in Nevada City CA, and then as the author of a slim volume he wrote in 1988: Intentional Communities: How to Start Them, and Why, which was notable because it advocated cooperative living without proselytizing for the spiritual path he loved.

It is extremely rare, in my experience, for a spiritual person to see that there are many paths that lead to good in the world and that it makes sense to support and ally oneself with others devoted to worthy principles even if they don't share the same spiritual guide, or even have one at all. Donald Walters was just such a man.

To be sure, he was a very spiritual man, and a devoted follower of Paramahansa Yogananda. Over the course of his life Walters established eight successful intentional communities (two in India, one in Italy, and five on the West Coast of the United States) and about 100 meditation and teaching centers around the world, all of which are based on devotion to the principles of Kriya yoga and the teachings of his guru.

I was posting for Loud Love and i ran across this question on Facebook in the open polyamory group.

I see the words “poly” and “swinger” being use together as if they are one and the same… or maybe that is just how I am reading it. Do most consider them interchangable?

For me the answer is clearly “no”.  The equivalent question would be “Is Baptist interchangeable with Christian?”.  Polyamory is an over arching term of which there are many flavors (like Christian).  Swingers are one relatively small subset of the entire group.  Poly is about have honest interaction among multiple romantic and/or sexual intimates.  Swinging is when you are honest about having multiple partners, but you are specifically seeking relatively low commitment and usually short term relationships.  In the best case swingers are people who enjoy sex are responsible about it and want to have more than one sexual partner, but these connections generally do not lead to longer lasting romantic adventures.

Though i have no hard numbers, my guess is that the number of people who are involved in more committed polyamorous relationships far exceeds the number of swingers in the world.  But then i found this graphic:

This is a world which includes dishonest swingers

Reblogged from Loud Love:

As you might have guessed, some of us on your Loud Love organizing team are romantically, sexually or otherwise intimately involved. Paxus and I are an example, and he has beaten the record of anyone before him on the number of love letters he's written me (it's in the hundreds after 4 months). It's easy to write them when you follow his adages: 

Read more… 146 more words

There is increasingly wonderful stuff coming out for the Loud Love blog, this is a piece i am especially touched by. I would love it if you are sure you are coming if you would register thru eventbrite (thru Loudlove.org) and i would relax about people really coming.

No-one can deny that the Boston bombing incident was truly a horrific tragedy.  And while it is important to mourn the tragedy and the loss, its also a fascinating moment to take a little peek behind the scenes of media spin and consider how easily mainstream media can shape public sentiment.  For instance–which photo do you choose use when running your newspaper’s story about Dzhokhar–the fresh-faced, well-lit pic or the shadowy, squinty-eyed one?

Which one looks more like a terrorist to you?

And generally, it is the non-american media who paint a more complete picture.   Writing for al-Jazeera Sarah Kendzior sums up another oh-so-tempting media spin:  blame the ________s (fill in ethnic-minority of your choice).   She says it very eloquently in her article:

“Despite the Tsarnaevs’ American upbringing, the media has presented their lives through a Chechen lens. Political strife in the North Caucasus, ignored by the press for years, has become the default rationale for a domestic crime.

Sky and I went up to the Baltimore Free Farm last week to share our communities slideshow and drum up excitement for the Communities Conference. We left feeling super jazzed and inspired, enough that we gave a strong invitation to the BFF folks to come down and present at the conference.  No final word on that yet but we’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, here’s their story; or hopefully enough of it to get YOU inspired and excited about them too!

We showed up blind on Wednesday evening and right away it was clear that there’s a lot going on here. A little crew of folks hung out in the bikeshop area, and remnants of Free Food day lingered in front of the door. Across the street was a large garden and a cluster of 3 row houses.

“Is he like their ringleader?” Valerie asked

“More like their rainmaker.” Sky replied at the communities conference meeting, which sparked a whole conversation about organizing models in the progressive/radical movement.

The ringleader is running their own gang.  Oft charismatic, this person offers a vision or at least a direction and strongly shapes the role of other gang/tribe members.  There is a sense that elevating the ring leader and their agenda will strengthen your whole house and that often deferring to their wisdom in terms of action will advance the members beyond where they would make it outside of the collective.

Rainmakers are resource people and networkers.  They need not be charismatic nor have leadership skills, they need to  know how to fix and manifest things.  They probably dont know how to get electricity from the nearby light poll to the recently occupied squat, but they know the person who can and they know how to get her to come over soon, so we can stop using these candles before we burnt he place down by accident.

Suspect bomber Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev has been captured after a historic manhunt in the Boston metro area.  Part of what was historic about it was the response of law enforcement officials and politicians to the situation in which they closed significant parts of the city.  Numerous educational institutions were closed.  Trains and buses were closed.  Residents were told to lock themselves in their houses and not go out.  In listening to the radio at one point a room full of experienced new correspondence were asked if they had ever experienced this type of response anywhere in the world and they all claimed it was novel.

Boston in lock down

So i am legitimately torn here.  i dont want terrorists to succeed.  This is a very dirty game, the use of violence on non-combatants to advance your political goals.  So perhaps this extraordinary response of locking down hundreds of thousands of people will be sufficiently discouraging that some other terrorists will not strike, knowing that their chances of disappearing into a crowd (for example) are greatly diminished because extraordinary tactics are likely to be used to catch them including closing entire cities.  Were this to have a chilling effect on terrorist attacks this might well be a good thing.

The lovely and talented Abigail pointed me to this fairly amazing post about an OkCupid add-on which detects likely rapists who are responding to your online dating profile.

Let’s back up a moment and assume you dont know much about the online dating world and OkCupid in particular.  [i will confess i have never actually been on OkCupid, so i am telling you my story of what i think is happening there.]  One of the things you perhaps dont know about me is that i am a match maker of sorts. I help people find communities, romantic partners and allies in being able to live in the countries that they wish to reside in.

who is going to help you find your mate thru the internet?

For finding a romantic partner there is no better service (if you are reading this blog) than OkCupid*. It is free (it has ads), it is vast, it has fun surveys and quizs to fill out to help you find people who might have similar values to you and you can write your own quizs and contribute to the content of the social network.    It is groovy in three dozen ways, it is to online dating what wikipedia is to online general knowledge*.  7 out of 8 friends or allies who have found new romantic partners in the last two years have found them thru this service, it is very powerful.

Reblogged from Loud Love:

"What are you trying to do at Loud Love?" Tree asked me

"We are trying to make people into better lovers" i replied.

Not in the limited sense of improving their sexual technique, but in a more holistic sense, these are some of the thoughts i came up with on how we might actually do that.  Or you could look at it as a laundry lists of things you could work on to be a better intimate:

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i woke up and looked out the window and saw someone i did not know, but i could guess who they were.  i threw on my clothes, bopped out the door and said

“You must be Dragon, i am Pax”

to which he replied “i know i read your blog most mornings”

and of course this peaked my curiosity (and tickled my immodesty).  We talked for a bit, of his mixed ethnic origins (Mayan, Swedish and Mexican), his early life fishing for food with him mom as a child.  The same mom who bought a school bus which she named Lucy and painted it before taking Dragon and his sister across the country, turning their poverty into an adventure.  Dragon told me that he was engaged, which is a state he hoped to maintain indefinitely, not really believing in marriage, but embracing commitment.

i may never know Dragon’s given name.  Wild Horse named him shortly after he arrived and Dragon embraced this with the willing acceptance and daring which seems his style.  And i dont need to know his given name, because for me his taken one is better in every way.

But what won my heart was when Dragon offered to cook at Twin Oaks on short notice.  i had invited a couple of enthusiastic Land Day guests to stay at Twin Oaks and see if it might work for their family.  I got them assigned a week of work each and then they vanished without a word.  And thus their unfilled labor assignments become my headache as their host.  Today i needed a prep cook and Dragon stepped up cheerfully and the crew back at Twin Oaks was impressed with his speed and pleasant manner.

Three are dead including a small boy, over 140 are wounded. Lives are shattered, peace is disrupted.  President Obama stopped short of calling the attacks terrorism.  One would hope this is because there has been no claim of responsibility yet, and we dont know why these innocents have been targeted.  Without threats or demands from a political agent of some type, this is an awful random act of violence, and not terrorism at all.  Yet it is likely the current administration has other motivations from avoiding, for the moment at least, the “T” word.

What we do know is that there is a tremendous search going on right now to find the person or group which planted these devices.  The only hope these killers have of avoiding detection is if they were either brilliant in their coded messages, or they avoided using all digital media completely to plan their horrible attacks.

Boston Marathon survivor

i scanned a dozen newspaper articles on these bombings, many have human interest angles, interviews with witnesses or people in the area.  Most articles are filled with  promises by government officials that they will investigate fully and punish wrong doers.  But what is missing from every report i have read (and there are hundreds that i have not read of course) is why some individual or group might feel justified in doing this.

We have our first workshop confirmed! Embodied Community Intimacy will be led by Elena   Zubulake and Victor Warring:

“This workshop is about creating strongly embodied relationships in community. Through experiential movement, improvisation, dance, music, body work, conscious communication, play, and contemplative practice, we take a group dive below the thinking mind to experience ourselves as members of an embodied organism.”