Forgive me readers, for I have sinned.  It's been 17 days since my last confession.

A lot has happened in the last 2.5 weeks, of course.  We had our 38th Anniversary celebration, along with the final performance of the All Request Dance Band.  I got to play Madonna, singing lead on "Vogue" just like at theater parties in college, only this time with a real microphone and a full band to back me up. It was our last performance because the drummer is getting married and moving to Charlottesville, and a guitarist and a backup singer are running away to California together  -- sounds like we should get our own episode of VH1's "Behind the Music"!

My mom came to visit for a few days, and her sister and brother came out for over a week.  We even got my brother down here from Baltimore for a day for a full-fledged family reunion on the commune.  It was exciting to see my family, and exhausting to have so many guests here for so long. I have a fairly high degree of autonomy here, and when I have guests I feel responsible for helping them navigate the tiny nuances of the culture and systems of Twin Oaks.  I'm constantly paying attention to them and wondering about their experience and wanting to explain everything they might not understand.  I wore myself out, and probably unnecessarily.  My aunt took to this place right away, making friends and trying new things and relaxing into the freedom of the culture here.  I loved watching her express herself so fully here, knowing how much she holds herself back in her small Pennsylvania town.  Within her first few hours here, she was already sliding around in the mudpit with a group of wild hippies!

more to come -- I'm off to a tofu shift

Today has been a day of forward moving energy for me.  I've been active and engaged (for the most part) since 7am when I started my 4 hour tofu shift.  At 11 I did some computer work, then did my "homework" for a facilitation class that's starting here.  I felt like I was in college again, running up to my room during lunch to read the two chapters of the handbook we're using, underlining the interesting parts and writing in the margins.  :)  I've missed that.  I enjoyed my nostalgia and the reading itself, and then I headed up to the dining hall for a quick late lunch.

At lunch I read some papers on the O&I Board, which is one of our communication tools here.  It stands for "Opinions and Information" (or "Opinons and Ideas" or "Obfuscation and Irrationality", depending on who you ask), and it has about 20 clipboards hanging on it.  The clipboards host  papers written by members offering ideas or questions for discussion.  Each paper has lots of blank pages behind it for everyone else to write comments and concerns and better ideas and personal slams and irrelevant tangents.  It's a system that I think has outlived its time here.  Many people refuse to read the O&I Board, so it's not a reliable tool for putting out information or soliciting broad community input.  It's become a forum for personal agendas and vendettas, more than anything else.  And still, it's one of the easiest ways to get a digest version of what's going on in the community, so I try to keep up-to-date with it all.

After lunch, I went to the first meeting of the facilitation study group, where we set some exciting and lofty goals for ourselves (essentially, to develop more effective group decision-making methods for Twin Oaks!).  In the meeting I was actively and passionately involved in the discussion, which also reminded me of college.  I had opinions and thoughts, and I communicated them with fervor!  Then I went on to the Planner Meeting, where I continued my passionate expression and spoke up more than I had at any previous meeting with this team.  Hooray for having thoughts and ideas that I'm confident about expressing!  I feel like I'm getting into the swing of things here, after 3 years.  (3 years ago I was just finishing my Visitor Period here, and I moved in at the end of the summer.  There are 3 other people from my visitor group who ended up moving here; 2 of them are still around and we're having an "anniversary" celebration next week.)

Speaking of Anniversaries, this week is the 38th Anniversary of the founding of Twin Oaks, and we're having a huge party this weekend.  It's one of our biggest celebrations here, second only to New Year's Eve.  We have a full day of events ranging from fun and mild to debauched and wild.  Read about last year's party for a taste of the fun...

It's official: I'm a planner.  We opened the veto box at yesterday's meeting, and there were only 3 slips of paper, all supportive comments (though this really wasn't the time for comments -- that was for the "input" box that was out for 10 days a few weeks ago.  In that, I got 5 positive pieces of input and one concern, which was from my partner Paxus, who said I don't have enough time to be a planner!).  This isn't an unusually low number for input -- many people only comment if they feel like their opinion is controversial or specifically different than others'.

And so it begins.  I have three months as a "stand-in" planner, and then I can apply, if  I want, to be a full planner.  We'll see how it goes.  Right now we're asking some interesting questions about egalitartianism and members using their "prior assets", money that they had before coming to Twin Oaks.  People don't have to give it to the community when they move here, we just have an agreement that folks won't use their prior assests while they live here, in order to keep us away from economic hierarchy (though it still exists here anyways for various reasons -- we certainly aren't perfect).  In this time of "lower economic abundance" (my own term -- the vocab here is "austerity", but my experience of life here is anything but austere), there are things that we often/usually communally provide that we can't afford this year, like grapefruit and off-the-farm mental health care.  Some members have asked to use their prior assets to pay for things they want that they can't get through the community anymore.   This is a silly question when it comes to grapefruit and other obvious luxuries (no way), and a difficult question when it comes to something like an expensive theraputic workshop.  Someone without prior assets wouldn't be able to get this therapy unless we could find a way to provide for it with our collective resources.  Do we really want to keep someone from getting the kind of therapy they want, because we can't pay for it, even if they individually can afford it?  No, of course not... We're trying to figure out how to pay for it with community resources, possibly doing some kind of absorbable loan.

It's complicated, this intentional living thing.

We scattered my grandmother's ashes around her farm last week.  Not all of them, because the family wants her to be buried in the cemetery next to her husband.  Most of the ashes are still in the plastic bag, closed inside the black and green plastic box that "Cremains" come in ("cremated remains", trendily shortened and combined, like "Craisins").

My grandmother died almost three weeks ago.  She got in her car to drive to church, and was found the next day by the person who came out to fix the tractor.  She was still in the car, key in the ignition, battery dead.  I went home for a week and a half and stayed at my dad’s place, running errands and mowing grass and generally being helpful.  I can get up to three weeks of labor credits from Twin Oaks to come home for a family "emergency" like this.  It's nice to not have to worry about making up labor when I get back to the community.  I like being able to be at Home for all of this intensity, and I realized a while I was there that it's as much for my own mental health as it is to be helpful to my family. 

I'd been curious about my lack of emotion after responding to the initial shock of hearing she had died.  I expected more grieving, more crying, more sadness.  I found myself experiencing it more on an intellectual level, thinking about what death might be like and philosophizing on the nature of dying, and the nature of Life (much like last year, when my aunt died).  People would hug me and tell me how sorry they were for me, and I didn't feel any sorrow, or any need for theirs.  I would say that I was glad to be home with my family, which was true.

Grief finally came at the memorial service.  My family sat in the front row of the church, and two enlarged photos of my grandmother were resting on easels just a few feet in front of us.  Every time I looked at one of the pictures, it became real for me in a way it hadn't been up to that point.  I had busied myself with being the helpful daughter, dutifully taking care of details and supporting my dad, encouraging him to be emotional and running errands with my rented car.  It didn't feel like a defense against hard emotion -- in fact, I wanted to be feeling something deeper.  I went out to her farm with my journal and wrote, I walked through the woods that had been such a key part of my childhood.  I looked thorough old photos and I read through letters on her desk.  Nothing really made it into my emotional center, until the service last Tuesday night.  The power of ceremony, making it real.  Even though the Methodist jargon didn't quite resonate, I was able to translate most of it to be meaningful and significant in its own way.

I found my deepest emotion with the ashes at the farm the next morning.  My brother and my dad and I went out early, before my brother headed off to the airport.  We put some of her ashes around the peace pole we erected a few years ago in tribute to Grandmother and her late husband.  We took some up to the “picnic spot” and scattered them in the fire pit where we roasted hot dogs and marshmallows as kids.  We threw some into the wind, towards the wild pastures and forest.  We scattered some in the flowerbed in front of her house, and watered them into the soil.  I realized we had honored the four elements, and at the flowerbed, after watering, I sang a song I learned here at Twin Oaks: “The river is flowing, flowing and growing, the river is flowing down to the sea.  Mother carry me, your child I will always be.  Mother carry me down to the sea.”  We finished by putting some ashes in the old garden (“to new growth!”, I shouted), and then emptying the rest of our small portion into the stump of a recently-cut tree, dead and decaying from the inside (“for companionship in decomposition,” I whispered).

I’m back at Twin Oaks now, getting back into the swing of life here.  It’s muggy and hot, especially in the tofu hut with all of the steaming bean curds and boiling water.  Whew! The garden is in full swing (strawberries at every meal, and snap peas and snow peas and broccoli and zucchini…) and the fruit trees are abundant.  I eat mulberries right off the branch for breakfast after I go for a morning swim in the pond.  I love my life here, and I love my family and home in Cincinnati.  While I was in Ohio, I imagined what it would be like to move back there and live out at the farm, build a community there.  Being back here, it becomes a much more complicated question.  Am I willing to walk away from here yet?  What of this could I bring with me?  Am I willing to start from scratch, and build it?  Who?  How?  Money?  When?  Really?