Talis Cyan Basham (Acorn), born Tuesday, May 5, 1998
Summer 1998, issue no. 87
The biggest news in and around Twin Oaks is that Pier One decreased its spring order by two thirds and Lillian Vernon postponed their usual annual order of net hammocks until 1999. This has caused us to buckle down with many cutbacks and also pass on major cuts to other entities such as Acorn. While we all are feeling the crunch inside and outside the hammocks area, this may be an opportunity to venture into different, more self-sufficient areas of opportunity.
Before the Pier One crunch, Shal invested much time and effort into developing a hemp rope hammock prototype as a possible new product. Now , both East Wind and Tekiah are working diligently to bring a working model to market.
The tofu biz recently made a record-breaking 4000 pounds of tofu in one week! Sales are up, including selling directly (ie. not through a distributor) to Whole Foods (formerly Fresh Fields). There is a lot of new member energy in the tofu hut, which is much appreciated since several long-term workers are moving on.
We had a unique, and very lucrative income opportunity recently when one member was hired by an educational publishing company to write a short play for tenth graders. The play took ten hours to write, and total payment for the job (which went to the community) was $4000. Basic math shows that Twin Oaks earned $400/hour for that job—too bad it was a one-time offer!
In April, Keenan and Kristen were married in a private ceremony at Yanceyville Church just up the road. Arlo (age 4) served as the Ringbearer, and Rowan (2) sat in Keenan's arms eating an apple throughout the ceremony. Home-grown touches included the cake (made by the happy couple) and two songs sung by Devon and Keenan's niece Joanna. A pizza dinner in Louisa completed the occasion.
In a devastating blow to caffeine lovers, the hammock shop ran out of funding for coffee. Given our difficult financial situation due to the aforementioned Pier One cutbacks, the decision was to not extend further funding automatically. Various appeals and political navigation followed, with the end result being the Planners approving OPP in hammocks for coffee. Now, predominantly posted in the hammock shop, is a list which members can fill in to show how much OPP they're doing to help provide the communal caffeine fix.
Improving service to visitors: Many people work full-time jobs and only get a limited amount of vacation. They would like to find out more about Twin Oaks than they get on a Saturday tour, but they can't visit for our usual three-week visitor period. A solution? We're now offering one-week visits (the first week of our regular 3-week visits) to allow greater accessibility and more flexibility for people in this situation.
We've had two fires this year, both luckily smallish, but potentially very damaging. Maia (age 12) noticed smoke coming from the roof of Tupelo, and quickly notified others. It turned out to be a chimney fire, the result of a build-up of creosote from the wood-burning boiler. A mattress fire in Morningstar (from a dropped cigarette) brought out the Fire Department at midnight. Further complications resulted when allegedly stolen alcohol was found in the member's room. The end result was the departure of the member in question, and renewed discussion and concern around fire safety and theft of personal food/drink.
Six members reverted to provisional membership, due to being in the "money hole" by repeatedly overspending their personal funds. There is talk about a new process for money hole administration.
For one day in May, TO's population was exactly 50% men, 50% women. Then Les from Acorn arrived, and now for the first time in eleven years we have more men than women living here. Tanya left us at the end of April to spend some time traveling in Mexico; hopefully she'll return later in the year. Arno ended his residency in early May to return home to the Netherlands. Andy and Lalanya recently arrived, bringing their spirited energy from Illinois.
Clay is off for a couple months helping his mom out on Long Island and travelling out west. Donna is taking some time away to travel and visit women's communities.
An exception to our child population policy allows us to accept a family from East Wind (Shakti, Josh and Sage) as well as the Lloyds, with their 3 kids Eecayo, Calvin and Maechyl. It's expected that both families will be here by the fall.
April Fool's antics included 26 year member, McCune's leaving paper, which revealed his plans to move to Hollywood, become a star, make millions and take over the world! (Nexus penned the paper on McCune's behalf.)
The Compost Cafe compost compartments are seeing the light of day for the first time in eons due to Hildegard's courtyard beautification project. A newly-cleared area in front of the compartments overlooks the pond and has become the smokers outdoor patio area. Hildegard also orchestrated the rearrangement of Llano front office, giving office workers a clear view of the courtyard.
Work started on building lofts in the new warehouse in preparation for building a new rope shop to house the new rope machine.
Ex-member John Hill, is a DJ at a Charlottesville public radio station. His morning program, Acoustic Sunrise, recently was voted the best local radio show by readers of the C'Ville Weekly.
By my mid-twenties I was the youngest senior editor at one of the largest publishers in the country. I lived in a tiny Upper East Side apartment with three locks on the door and a closetful of semifashionable business suits and medium heels. I ate a lot of takeout. My wallet was stuffed with cards(ATM, credit, frequent flyer; a card granting me admittance to a trendy downtown gym, a card with a number to call to see how my 401K fund was doing). On weekends I headed north in pursuit of hanggliding, snowboarding, rock climbing, all the expensive leisure activities favored by my generation.
At twenty-seven I turned down a promotion, quit my job, and moved to rural Virginia to live on a commune.
I don't do much hanggliding these days on my sixty-dollar-a-month allowance. There aren't any Thai or Afghani restaurants eight miles down the road in Louisa, the nearest town, but that's probably just as well, since I haven't got an expense account anymore. My wallet lies untouched in a drawer for weeks at a time. I don't carry a single key. I no longer have a closetful of suits; actually, I don't even have a closet.
What went right?
After five years of big city and big business I felt isolated, disconnected. I didn't know my neighbors downstairs or across the hall. I hardly knew the people I worked with; we all came in at nine a.m., put down our coffees and bagels, and put on our office personas. I saw myself at the bottom of a colossal inverted pyramid, one employee of a department in a division of a subsidiary of a company owned by an enormous corporation that couldn't care less about books, or me, or anything but profit.
My world had fragmented into career, social life, recreation. I worked sixty hours a week for goals that weren't my own. I didn't know how to have fun without spending money.
I looked at my boss, and my boss's boss, and his boss, and her boss, and contemplated taking their places in time. I wasn't excited. But when I thought about leaving my job, it felt like dropping my identity. If I weren't M.R. , Senior Editor, as my business cards proclaimed, who would I be? Would I be anyone?
I decided to find out. I asked for a six-month leave of absence, moved my books and clothes to my parents' basement in New Jersey, and set off with a backpack to look for a better way of life.
I milked goats and harvested tomatillos on a locally supported farm in Colorado. I cut new sections of hiking trail in Wenatchee National Forest and dug out four-foot boulders in the shadow of Mt. Rainier. I rode horses on a friend's Idaho ranch and swam with dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico. I made it as far north as the San Juan Islands, near British Columbia, and as far south as the Guatemalan jungle.
In late October I came to Twin Oaks, a community of a hundred people of all ages living and working together on 450 acres of rolling farmland and woods in the piedmont of central Virginia.
I'd first read about Twin Oaks in a book written by one of its earliest members several years after the community's founding in 1967. I'd always been fascinated by such accounts of utopian experiments, but, like most people, I'd thought income-sharing communities in America had pretty much died out by the early seventies. I was amazed to find out that Twin Oaks had survived and grown for nearly thirty years, through the "Me Decade" and the famously greed-ravaged eighties, on into the last decade of the century. What had kept it going?
To a new visitor, the most obvious answer is that Twin Oaks is a great place to be. Living here means eating raspberries and asparagus and innumerable other offerings in season from our two acres of organic gardens; there's fresh-baked bread, and homemade granola, and every kind of cheese from smoked Gouda to Stilton, made from milk given by our own cows. It means spending a sunny weekday afternoon biking along country roads past peacefully grazing horses, or canoeing with a friend down the tree-shaded river that runs through Twin Oaks land. On a summer evening near sunset, floating in the pond, watching a hawk circle overhead in the pinkening sky, it's hard to imagine wanting to be anywhere else.
A unique labor system makes this freedom and abundance possible. At Twin Oaks, everybody works the same number of hours per week (about forty-five right now), choosing from among hundreds of available jobs. One day I might schedule myself work in the community's businesses, packaging tofu until lunch and weaving hammocks in the evening, leaving the afternoon free for a group trip to Charlottesville to catch the latest movie at matinee prices. Or I might stack firewood, answer the office switchboard, run the rope machine, organize files in our archives, drill oak stretchers for hammocks, or take several children over to play at Acorn, a smaller community nearby.
Twin Oakers work hard, and on a bad day it's easy to feel overcommitted and underappreciated. On a good day, it's a pleasure to do my part for the community and enjoy the results of other people doing theirs: a yoga class in our new studio, a delicious hot dinner served at six on the dot, a beautiful custom-built bookcase for my room.
For most of us over the years who have left the mainstream for Twin Oaks, though, living the good life also means living right. We live together not just because it works for us, but to give the world a working model of a new kind of social organization(one that promotes cooperation, equality, sharing, nonviolence, and ecological responsibility instead of competition, overconsumption, and destruction.
The culture and set-up of Twin Oaks makes it easy for us to make choices we like in our everyday lives. Even those of us who don't think much about the environment, for example, become more earth-friendly just by being here: we shower in solar-heated water, compost our food scraps, cut down on plastic packaging by buying in bulk and eating home-grown. Since we don't have to commute, fifteen automobiles do for all of us.
Men who want to cook or care for babies, women who like to saw logs, drive a tractor, or work in construction, find they don't have to fight the current here. And when I sit down at the lunch table, I'm not likely to hear anyone comparing prices on the latest-model sports car or worrying about layoffs. If somebody asks me who cut my hair, I know they're wondering which Twin Oaker had ten free minutes and a pair of scissors.
On the other hand, living in a city on a hill can be exhausting. Twin Oaks draws a steady stream of sightseers and pilgrims: Saturday afternoon tour groups, applicants for membership, students, newspaper reporters. They all arrive with their own vision of the perfect society and frequently don't hesitate to let us know if we fail to measure up.
The scrutiny of strangers is nothing to our own self-criticism. We, too, all have different ideas of what Twin Oaks should be, and most of us came here with high expectations. Disillusionment, apathy, and status-quo defensiveness make themselves felt with some regularity. As we like to say, it's not Utopia yet.
Do I ever regret giving up my career to live on a commune? No. In the year and a half since I left New York, I've learned more than I would have thought possible. I discovered that I do have an identity, and it doesn't depend on where I live, how I look, or what's printed on my business card. I found that it was remarkably easy to change my life for the better, once I let go of worries about money and status. I've seen that there are good ways to live besides the way we grow up or what's shown on television. Wherever I might go from here, my world will always be bigger than it was before.
This article was first published in Country Connections journal, spring 1998.
There is little written information on the hippie communes, and we have to rely on word of mouth, but we get the general picture that they, too, have something in common with us. This time the common ground is philosophical. The hippies, like us, believe that life should be full of joy and freedom and restricted as little as possible by conventional trivia. They differ from us in that they entirely reject structure. Their communes have no bylaws, no members in a legal sense, and no clear plans for their continuance. Then there is the obvious difference in our recreations: there are no drugs permitted at Twin Oaks.
Despite our difference, the hippies are interested in us. A few have already visited, and it is likely that warm weather will bring others. At first we looked on these visits with thinly veiled dismay, but time and experience are calming our worries. Hippies are, it turns out, only people. They are much like other visitors--a shade less formal than some. They want to know the same things--what are we? What do we do here? And, like other visitors, most of them give some thought to membership, ask themselves how they would fit in. Maybe they decide they don't want to give up drugs or that communal life isn't important enough to justify raising the entrance fee. If a hippie does join the community, what then? No problem. When he begins to wash dishes and split wood, we don't think of him as a hippie any more. He's just a member with long hair.
Over the thirty years since this article was written, the hippie movement, has had a lasting impact on Twin Oaks and has contributed to our diversity of opinions, beliefs and lifestyles.
By far the biggest news on the financial scene is Acorn's departure from the hammocks business. We got the news, just after completing our 1998 budget plans, that the supply of available hammocks was dwindling and was likely to dry up entirely. Of course this has a major effect on our income and budget! We kept on making them for a few more months, while looking into other income ideas, and eventually we made our last one. Folks are still getting used to the new reality, because even though we've spent many hours over the years discussing ways to get out of the hammocks business and when or if we ever would, it's still a little hard to believe that it really happened. So now our time and energy are freed to explore new income ideas and really work more creatively at diversifying our income base. We are in a hard spot financially and need to pull together more than ever right now.
Mostly we've been taking odd jobs here and there, but on a more frequent basis than before. A few people have done new or more wage work at Twin Oaks, including indexing, and outside jobs are being discussed from time to time. Farmer's Market season is just starting, and we plan to try all three of the ones closest to us. We would offer produce and possibly herbs and flowers. The biggest new income source has been a contract with a local nursery, to do tree-planting and other nursery work, several days a week for several weeks. There's also the possibility that this contract will be renewed in the fall, when it's planting season again.
The CSA is doing very well. We sold as many shares as we wanted to, very easily, and have a waiting list, too. One especially nice thing is that we were able to enlarge our customer base in our local Louisa/Mineral area and it seems likely we would be able to have all our customers there, if we wanted to. We feel a responsibility to our faithful customers in Charlottesville, of course, so we aren't making any plans at this time to drop the Charlottesville area. It is nice to know that the CSA has the potential to be an entirely locally supported business venture. More people are helping more often in the garden, but we are certainly still welcoming new folks who have a particular interest in gardening on a large scale.
The water improvement project has been completed, in record time compared to many projects here. Once the project got underway, we discovered there were more problems than we expected with the old system, so we replaced nearly every water line on the farm and added several. These improvements help a lot with watering the garden. Of course, we haven't had to water very much, so far, because it has rained practically every day all spring. Poor strawberries!
Tinnery production is going along pretty smoothly right now, too,thanks to countless hours by ever-faithful Ira and to lots of fresh energy from new member Kathy, who has helped a lot with organizing the shop and doing production work. We've been going to the Virginia Renaissance Fair for several weekends, which has not been a huge success, but is still fun for other reasons. It's not the main season for tinnery, yet, but it looks like we'll have the systems in place by then to help things flow along.
The new children, Skyler and Kasey, are getting settled in fairly well, and with the birth of Talis, we've added our share of children lately.
On the other hand, several adults have moved on. Ken has gone to Twin Oaks for an extended guest/resident period, while he and his family figure out their next steps. Will is off to Europe, for several months of traveling with his sister. It was a surprise and sudden opportunity that was just too good to pass up! Acorn and Louis have worked out a special associate member arrangement that will enable us to maintain close ties with each other, but without the same extended residency period that is usually expected of associates. Les has also taken up membership at Twin Oaks. AmyCora and Eben have gone to Massachusetts to be closer to their families. They'll be gone at least for the summer and maybe for the long-term, but we hold out hope that they'll come back here for the winter. Barr and Andy have recently announced their unexpected pregnancy-due on Winter Solstice. Given the recent birth of another surprise baby, and our shifting financial situation, a new surprise pregnancy is rather a shock to the group. It remains unclear exactly how things will work out. Former member Helen (now Owl) will be returning to Acorn sometime in the next month.
One happy side-effect of the closing of the hammock shop is that we are making steps towards moving the main kitchen and dining room out of the Farmhouse and into Heartwood. It's been a long time coming, so it's exciting. It's interesting, though, that moving the kitchen and dining room are, apparently, fairly low priorities for most people, at least based on attendance at discussions and work parties. With so many adults moving on, those of us who are left are more focused on generating income and keeping up with the basic maintenance of our lives. Nonetheless, the transition seems likely to happen within the next two or three weeks and that will be a morale boost, to make another bit of progress in the"long-term-plan" sort of way.
My religion and spiritual path is Paganism, which I see as being the awareness, appreciation, and worship of, and identifying with, the various energies and deities of the natural world. To me this is a spiritual path, a religion, an environmental awareness, and a culture. I very much appreciate that Twin Oaks is open to this spirituality, and that the community has for decades celebrated the Solstices and Equinoxes as community holidays. These are secular community holidays, but they often include pagan rituals as part of the holiday. Another aspect of Twin Oaks that my pagan heart rejoices in is the land that we are. There are many beautiful trees and in our forests, and we are careful to not destroy these as we cut firewood, and to minimize destruction when we make new buildings and other human facilities. This leaves many inspiring places to create pagan ritual, and just to be aware of the wonder and energies of nature.
Now that we have Quaker meeting in Louisa (Acorn and Baker Branch) twice monthly, I can enjoy sharing meeting with like-minded people close to home (without the stress I was feeling making weekly trips to Charlottesville). I am also delighted that there is a regular meditation practice happening at Twin Oaks, and I hope to try this out as an additional support to feeling grounded.
The basis of my spiritual path is the two-fold desire to, one, feel a connection with and a place in the universe, and two, for an ethical underpinning to my life and my actions.
As a convinced Friend rather than a birthright Quaker, you can expect to see me being a bit extreme. The simplicity of the meeting house and the profound caring I found among the members brought me to identify as part of that community. The Friends Journal keeps me feeling connected as well as a new, small local meeting with five Twin Oaks members and some from Acorn with the once a month use of a Baker Branch house. To use the words of Polly Brokew, an ardent activist, after your first arrest, you break through the "respectability barrier." That's what drew me to Twin Oaks-the issue here is not respectability but authenticity. I feel supported here in being mindful of what is important to me and to others. What is difficult here is to maintain the loving perspective I profess in the face of petty annoyances. On the whole, every day brings more pleasure and cheerful interactions than not.
6:30 a.m. The sun comes up over the trees at the end of the field and shines through my window, waking me up. I prop myself up on an elbow to watch the streaks of color spreading across the sky. Then I roll over and go back to sleep.
8 a.m. My alarm goes off. I stretch and yawn and shuffle to the bathroom. Nine of us live in this building, but as we all get up at different times I probably won't have any competition for the shower.
9 a.m. It's a warm, sunny day, so I decide to weave hammocks outside on one of the jigs set up on the grass. As I work I listen to the latest Anne Tyler novel on tape from the library. My golden retriever, Calypso, lies nearby chewing on a stick. After an hour or so my friend Nexus comes by, so I take off the headphones and we talk across the jig as we weave. When we stop at noon, I jot down "3.0 Hx" on a bit of scrap paper, to remind me to record my three hours of hammock production on my labor sheet at the end of the day.
12:10 p.m. I grab a bike from the public bike rack and pedal up the hill to the dining hall. Lunch is mostly leftovers from yesterday's dinner, but there's a last-minute salad from the buckets of greens the garden crew brought up after their morning shift. I fill my plate and walk over to the 3x5 board to see if any new notices have gone up since last night. Somebody's guest is offering Reiki sessions. The child board is looking for a new member. Someone lost a hat.
1 p.m. Stretcher cutoff up at our industrial woodshop. A visitor helps me, stacking each board on a pallet after I square it with the radial arm saw. Then we bring the wood inside and plane it. These are the first steps in making the oak stretcher bars that keep our hammocks open. Dust masks and ear plugs keep us from talking much as we work, but afterward the ten-minute walk through the woods leading back to the main part of the community gives us a chance to chat.
5 p.m. I've done seven hours of work, more than enough for the day. Nobody's signed out the deep double-sized bathtub in Oneida, the residence next to mine, so I indulge in a long hot soak.
5:50 p.m. I arrive at the dining hall a bit early to check my mailbox and fill out my labor schedule for the coming week. Alder is there and we compare schedules, blocking off time to take a walk together.
At dinner I sit at the "fun table," a large table that attracts a diverse crowd. Lee Ann, who grew up at Twin Oaks and now lives down the road, comes in as I'm finishing. We walk down to the Compost Cafe, a small building originally intended for a composting toilet but now refurbished as a smoker's lounge and popular hang-out spot.
7:30 p.m. The Cafe quickly fills with people. Devon, the teenage daughter of two Twin Oakers, picks up a guitar and starts to play an Ani DiFranco song. I don't like the smoke, but the company's good and the music is great.
10 p.m. I say my goodnights and head back to my room, wanting time to read before I go to sleep. Tomorrow I'm getting up an hour early to drive the older kids to school. It's been a good day.
byBric and Brac
Number of times Chicago reporter fell out of hammock: 2
Number of times Gigi's seen Rocky Horror Picture Show: 35
Number of times Bear has been Eddie (Meatloaf ) in Rocky Horror: 40
Number of names River has had at Twin Oaks: 5
Number of autographs Coyote got from Ken Kesey: 2
Number of years since courtyard woodshed was cleaned: 19
Thickness of policy notebook in inches: 5 1\2
Number of days of exactly 50% men 50% women: 1
Number of years Mccune kept daily weather records: 13
Number of appeals to Planner decisions so far this year: 3
Number for all of last year: 1
Height of tallest asparagus plant in inches: 74
Percentage of T.O. kids who's names start with a vowel: 54%
Number of different types of hammocks made so far this year : 16
Percentage of T.O. adults who's names start with a vowel : 14%
Number of tornados that hit Nashville just before Ann and Logan did : 4
Number of transplants spotted by the garden crew: 8,748
Percentage of these that were broccoli or lettuce: 48
Year that we last had more men than women : 1987
Who We Are:
Twin Oaks is an intentional income sharing community located on 465 acres of land in central Virginia. We are a non-sectarian community which espouses the values of cooperation and egalitarianism while striving to eliminate racism, sexism, violence, consumerism, heterosexism, ageism, and competition from our everyday lives. We believe in living lightly on the land, conserving and reusing as much of our natural resources as possible.
For information about our regular Saturday tours, or to inquire about our 3-week visitor program, please call during regular business hours or write to us at:
Twin Oaks
138 Twin Oaks Road
Louisa, VA 23093
540-894-5126
website: www.twinoaks.org
To Twin Oaks' community page.