Proust's Parlor Game

The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not devised) by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature. Here is the basic Proust Questionnaire.

1.What is your idea of perfect happiness?
2.What is your greatest fear?
3.What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
4.What is the trait you most deplore in others?
5.Which living person do you most admire?
6.What is your greatest extravagance?
7.What is your current state of mind?
8.What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
9.On what occasion do you lie?
10.What do you most dislike about your appearance?
11.Which living person do you most despise?
12.What is the quality you most like in a man?
13.What is the quality you most like in a woman?
14.Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
15.What or who is the greatest love of your life?
16.When and where were you happiest?
17.Which talent would you most like to have?
18.If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
19.What do you consider your greatest achievement?
20.If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
21.Where would you most like to live?
22.What is your most treasured possession?
23.What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
24.What is your favorite occupation?
25.What is your most marked characteristic?
26.What do you most value in your friends?
27.Who are your favorite writers?
28.Who is your hero of fiction?
29.Which historical figure do you most identify with?
30.Who are your heroes in real life?
31.What are your favorite names?
32.What is it that you most dislike?
33.What is your greatest regret?
34.How would you like to die?
35.What is your motto? "

Google is Dead

"Google is dead, long live google."

I am starting a new blog, it is at paxus.wordpress.com

There are lots of reasons why, one of them being it is good to maintain a diverse internet eco-system and not have all ones stuff under the google banner (blogspot/blogger is a google brand).

Come check me out over at my new house, which promises to be a proper superset of this blog from now on. Not exactly sure what (or if) i will use this one for.

Oh the theme of the new blog is that your passport to complaining, is your willingness to do something about it.

Fear and Arrogance

"I think you are trying to gangster in on my community" My stern faced comrade from East Wind was not joking with me. I have been called many things, but not this before.

There are many legitimate concerns. We said we were going to bring 6 people, and 10 arrived - impacting food and social space. We brought the architects into the music room (which is an important social center) in the middle of the day to look topological map on the wall, and people felt run over and intruded on. Some of the personalities that we brought on the trip are a bit tricky and some East Winders bristled at them. We were late in posting the description of the project and the proposed lease. We had not figured out a way to compensate kitchen for our additional meals. And of course the one which was toughest to hear "And you ran over Acorn with this project last year."

Toughest for me to hear, because the stumbled relationship with Acorn was the one thing i was most determined to fix at East Wind. It is why we brought Sara out to live here well before the event to give the community clear signals about what was happening.

And what several people would tell me about my East Wind critic was that they would never trust me because of my arrogance. So i went to the community meeting fearful, this was only one of a number of people who have concerns and there was a small chance that the project would get derailed and a much larger chance that East Wind would be far less generous and careful in ways that decreased the chance of the events success.

Sara and i agreed in advance that i would say as little as i could possibly. It is critical that the community see us as peers, and that some of the prejudices be removed by showing the power balance as it is, rather than what people suspect it might be. I helped create this problem because of my initial funding of the project.

Sara was brilliant. Reflected concerns, was earnest in her willingness to work with everyone, was funny and accessible, was clever in pointing out synergies.

But far more important, the overwhelming response to the project was positive still, even after this suite of small mistakes. No personal attacks on my running over the local culture, no one really even said "we need to reconsider this project". Many powerful voices in the community spoke in favor of the project. Zeke who had been our principal contact, Kara Jo the finance manager, Quinn who has been helping us with the neighbors and community relations (and presented the project proposal he importantly fixed for us), Matthew and Yellow Sun spoke of VIS help forestry, Kris was excited to build the artificial limbs. It was clear East Winders want this to happen.

We are off the ground. There are a million things to do still, but we are flying.

Facebook Greens and Blues

"i love facebook" Feonix is delighted. The cute guy from the previous nights party has accepted her friend request and they are flirting on line and over SMS. "Before facebook i would have had to ask for his number which would have seemed a bit pushy or asked one of his other friends there, where would have felt a little weird. With Facebook i can just go to a mutual friend and find him and ask and he i quite likely to say yes."

My whirlwind visits in Death City, Baltimore and Philadelphia wasw winding up and i needed to get back home. I am often terrible at these types of logistics, leaving them to the last minute. This time i was proud to call the cab company over an hour before i needed to be at the Philly 30th street train station. Only to find that because of the snow, cabs were taking as long as two hours to arrive. i run into the streets of Philly and immediately get turned around and lost and i spring down a dozen blocks to hail a cab who fortunately was an Indy 500 refugee who got me to the station in record time. In Death City i walk to the Greyhound station w/ ticket confirmation number in hand. Only to find out that all the evening buses have been cancelled.

So i go back to Union stations, only to find the next train south is not til the late morning - it is basically 2 AM i have no place to stay and the usual suspects (Beth, Rez and Heather) are all asleep now. So i pull out the new netbook Zappa and fire up Facebook on the AT&T free wifi at the station.

Facebook reveals after some searching that ex-visitor Sarah is in Death City, online and willing to have me sleep on her couch. Turns out she was playing scrabble with a friend in a different time zone. i hail a cab (subways are down and the night buses are rare) and in 15 minutes i am climbing into a couch with a sleeping bag she provided. Far nicer than the sleeping in the station. Sarah is friendly and happy to see me, we have not been in touch for a year.

Winter is the time for dramas in the community. We dont have live television and fairly predictably when we are cooped up inside cold for several month stuff starts to come up. This winter a depressed member admitted that they had considered to hurting themselves when they were in the pit of their depression. The also wrote a bunch of stuff on facebook which was not flattering of their mental state.

We had a sharing circle this evening to talk about members feelings, not to make decisions, just to get hurt, fear, surprise, compassion, confusion out in a public space. Hawina called it and facilitated it. It went really well. At this particular one, the focus person was not present, they will get to hear a (likely less charged) version on Friday. I think the sharing circle went well.

In response to members being worried about his depressed facebook comments, this member decided to delete their facebook account. This will cause it's own problems, one person is already saying "it is deleting evidence." but most Oaks feel like it is theirs to keep or delete as they like.

To paraphrase the man behind me in line at the Indian Consulate (who said this of India).

"You will love facebook, or you will hate it or you will both love it and hate it - no one is ambivalent about facebook."

Jail to home Culture Shock

Out of Jail

Upon returning to Twin Oaks Cameron asked me

"How was jail?"

i quipped "i'd rather be in jail than in a bad community meeting." Which is actually true, but a bit beside the point.

The food was horrible (as in - skip meals for variety), my blanket was too small, the TV was on more than half of the day (even after "lights out" which i found weird), the poor mattress gave me a sore back, the cell was uncomfortably cold, the only natural light in the huge cell came from a handful of long thin windows too high off the floor to look thru, there were 60 guys in my cell, there was basically no privacy, i could not leave the single room cell block for 45 hours, my ride to get home was hours late, the police stopped me when i tried to hitch from the jail, there were a number of felons in K block with serious charges against them. And the overall experience was great.

i got lucky. For what ever reason they decided to place me in the trusterdy cell block (which is block K at the Central Virgina Regional Jail). This means most of the people in the cell are working in the jail - laundry, cooking, cleaning the building. Most do this to reduce their time. If you are sentenced to a year on a misdemeanor charge, you only serve 6 months. If you work while you are there you can cut it in half again. Most cell bock K inmates have a vested interest in not screwing up their shrinking jail time with petty disagreements with the likes of me. This made the initial experience fairly comfortable. I intentionally arrived exhausted and had not trouble falling asleep shortly after arriving at the cell block.


I see jail as an unintentional community where the cottage industry is killing time. I got wiped out in chess, had a number of good conversations with inmates (including a very spooky one where an inmate guessed i was from Twin Oaks right after guessing i was from Louisa), i had no trouble sleeping a lot (noise does not bother me much), and i dont fear going back for a longer time if that is what is needed at some point for some pending campaign.

For me, going to jail is emotionally similar to hitchhiking. Before i go i am worried about it, present to my fear of all the bad things that might happen. Then i do it and remember why i went, the kinds of connections you dont find elsewhere, what it means to trust people you dont know who could be slightly dangerous. And in the end i find myself feeling better about humanity than before i went.

i also think in ways that i dont normally about my life and choices in jail. I wrote 17 love letters. And i was unusually well rested.


"So are you going to do it again?" Jeff is the first guy in K block who shares his name with me. I assure him i am not retiring from non-violent civil disobedience

"You do it for your beliefs?" He wants it to be true and his appreciation is why i need to be in this large institutional room every so often. We speak briefly between Jerry Springer vignettes.

Jail is an almanac of sad stories. Jeff was doing 12 months for failure to pay child support. His son is 25 years old and he had not heard from the child support people in 10 years. He was actually negotiating w/ his son to give him a car loan. Jeff went to church w/ his new girl friend, his ex-wife got upset, called child support and relatively quickly and quite unexpectedly he found himself in jail. There are 200 dead beat dads in this facility, which is around 1/3 of the total population. But Jeff says the law will likely change in Virginia to garnish wages instead of put people in prison seems wise and late. [Another half the jail population is combined drunk driving and drug possession (mostly marijuana) - hardly hardened criminals]


There are lots of small gifts and favors in this cell block community. I was offered shower sandals three times in the first three hours in jail by different people, i finally accepted a pair and started wearing them, just to stop the offers. Every time i was asleep at the start of a meal (breakfast at 4:30 AM) someone would wake me and not wait to be thanked. No food is wasted, so even when i skipped a meal i got a tray of food and gave it to other prisoners - there was little trading and lots of gifting.

I got out fairly quickly and regretted not stealing the gray stripped jail jump suit, which mysteriously had 8 snaps down the front, but only 4 clasps to connect them to inside. Some strange jail house style or budgets cuts or something. The jump suit would have been a great costume for me "get out of jail" party. i borrowed a tight fitting yellow one from Christian instead and it had a completely different effect.


The jail is quite hard to find. Pele had three sets of directions and could not find it and almost everything was closed so their were few people to ask. In all fairness, Trina and i got lost dropping me at the jail and Caroline and Keyvah had a hard time finding it when i first landed there. No sign, no street number, it is basically hidden. So i decided to hitchhike and as soon as i stuck out my thumb a cop pulled in behind me. And he said the best thing a cop has ever said to me as his first words.

"Your not in trouble." i wish every cop would start this way. I am hitching directly across the street from the jail so he has to check to make sure that there are no warrants out for me as a possible escapee. But once we establish this, he is happy to give me a ride a few miles down the road towards Twin Oaks, from where Sparkle is being dispatched to rescue me. My driver cop worked the longest 29 months of his life in my jail, he was happy to have moved on, tho his wife still runs the medical program at the jail.


Thru a classic cell phone game Sparkle and i coordinated our approach to each other and after 3 miles of walking. we meet and i got swooped up, i might have saved him 20 minutes of driving and i got some exercise (pacing the cell made me feel like a caged rat) and re-established that hitching is fading in amerika.

i returned home and Trout and others had organized a "get out of jail" party for me and it was amazing. We talked about A grade parties, parties which changed peoples lives. This was at least an A- and Trout claims higher. Winter came out as Autumn in drag and the pictures will show off this metamorphosis. There were certainly sparky romantic moments as well in the upstairs Tupelo North Wing LR augmented by Trouts perfectly designed room for an additional 12 to 15 partiers on his bed, couch and soft floor.

We established that A+ parties are ones that are remembered, oft named (like the fuzzy tunnels party) and mark changes in the local culture or world view (like the make out party in the cuddle loft where several guys kissed other guys for the first time in their lives).


We played a modified version of ImaginIFF my new favorite game, especially good for finding intimate insights. Michael was a subliminal msg, both Firefly and Moss were time bombs, i was a nuke. i can't do it justice here, it is quite funny.

We danced, we flirted, we rubbed feet, we were serenaded, we laughed. Trout got a whole bunch of my types of things to consume - girly drinks, mixed fruit juices, chips and salsa and fruit salad. Sparkle and Biddy were stunning in drag. And Autumn was tantalizingly hot.

So i swung from a morning of boredom and jail to an evening of memorable celebrations. And i would trade none of it.

Off to jail for two days

After much waiting, I've finally been sentenced for my trespassing charges in connection with the 2008 Southeast Climate Convergence. Twenty people demonstrated at the information center for Dominion Power's North Anna nuclear facility and six of us were arrested for peacefully refusing to leave the property. Most everyone else got off with fines and community service, but being identified as the ring leader, the Virginia Commonwealth Attorney was hoping the jury would give me months in jail--even though the original sentence I was appealing was just two weeks.

But the jury was not interested in draconian punishments and seemed sympathetic. Instead of months, I got five days in jail and I'll serve two. It's a complicated math--you only serve half your sentence for misdemeanors and I'd already served a day when I was arrested. So it all starts today and I'll be free again on Saturday.

Lot's of people have asked how they can support me while I'm in jail--offers of demonstrating against my incarceration and informing the public of it being not uncommon. But, if you really want to support me, help push along the projects that are really important to me.

• Go to www.villagesinthesky.org read what we're up to and make comments, start discussions.
  
• Go to www.brighterplanet.com/project_fund_projects and vote three times for Villages in the Sky by tomorrow--Friday the 15th
• Check out the article published about my sentencing at www.tinyurl.com/paxinjail and post comments
  
• Or just leave a comment here

It turns out the revolution is an elaborate dialogue. Don't mourn, organize.

"it's impossible"

Andy, Sara and i left East Wind this afternoon to drive the thousand miles back east. Last night we had our last Villages in Sky meeting and got the survey initial survey results. 15 out of 16 as Winders felt good about the project, including a number of long time members and heavy hitters. i'm happy.

In the car today we finished the Phantom Tollbooth and again dramatically with poetic demons on his heals the ordinary kid Milo manages to rescue the banished princesses Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason (depicted above). Sara was bemused by my flood of tears as i read the last couple dozen pages in Shana's Subaru flying across Indiana.

The central msg is that the quest was impossible, but they succeeded anyway and i have a bit this feeling with everything from festival organizing to the negotiations in Copenhagen. We might pull it off, but if you were a betting person, you would not be putting money on us. Fortunately, that is not the crowd i seem to be hanging with these days.

Newspapers unite on Copenhagen significance

This is a fairly strong statement on climate change agreed to by 56 newspapers from 40 countries around the world in 20 languages. Many of these papers, including the Guardian fromt he UK (which drafted the piece) printed this editorial on the front page. Check it out

http://tinyurl.com/newspapersoncopenhagen

a couple of the better paragraphs

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

East Wind Versus Twin Oaks

Part of the Villages in the Sky organizing team (Sara, Paxus and Bean) have traveled off to East Wind which will be hosting the event for a week of site inspection, meetings and negotiations. The community has been very welcoming, despite some quite difficult times they are going thru. One young member has just found that he has inoperable brain cancer which is growing very fast - he is only 25. The FDA is requiring a whole host of safety improvements and additional paperwork for their nut butters business (this is part of a trend across the food industry and Twin Oaks Tofu business will likely have to make similar expensive upgrades as a function of the soon to be passed Food Safety Act which is designed by the huge food processing corporations like Kraft).


T





There have been lots of interesting late night
conversations since we have been here and of course one of the things which comes up often is the differences between Twin Oaks and East Wind. Last night Les (who was a member at both Acorn and Twin Oaks before moving out to East Wind) put it well. "Twin Oaks is more of a socialist/communist orientation and East Wind is more anarchist. TO is burdened with the bureaucracy of these political systems, but pretty reliably stuff gets done. East Wind offers its members significant freedoms and often that comes at the cost of unfinished projects and important work going undone."



The more i thought about what Les said the more i realized how big these differences were. East Wind has no labor budgets. There is Industrial Quota (which is income generating work, which means mostly Nut Butters, tho it could be Utopia Sandals) but this is just a handful of hours each week. Members at both communities are responsible for making quota (which i think is 40 at East Wind and 42 at Twin Oaks now).

At Twin Oaks we agonize over labor budgets. Keyvah has recently worked with the Planners on the Trade Off Game and spent dozens of hours pouring over managers requests for labor, previous years actual labor use, cutting budget requests to make it all balance in a tight economy. East Wind does none of this. [Both communities budget money by area fairly carefully.]

At Twin Oaks we have a very complete and complex labor scheduling system (which i love) - another function of our highly organized bureaucracy. At East Wind many members walk up in the morning unsure exactly what they will do that day to make quota. Both communities have survived for decades, both have survived hard times and difficult members (tho i do think East Wind has more tricky personalities than Twin Oaks does).

It is my hope that Villages in the Sky will bring these two communities a bit closer together. We are like sisters who have more in common than different yet we focus (like this entry) on what is different about us.

If you are interested in more information about the Villages in the Sky project you should check out the website and blog.

Keyvah and Caroline get hitched !

One of my big attractions to Twin Oaks is that it is a place which inspires people to do things that other people are not even thinking about doing. To do things which some people think are impossible or at least incomprehensible. Caroline and Keyvah are doing such a thing today. Pairs of women get hitched all the time these days, but like their heterosexual counterparts, their primary motivation is their romantic connection to each other and secondary is their desire to have family together.

Both of these amazing women are key players in my son, Willow's life. And as only a parent can, i see their influence on him, Caroline's theatrics in the quirky YouTube videos they make together, Keyvah's "bored kid does complex math" tricks. And in a kind of spooky transference, Willow now seems to be able to tell when i am going to leave the room, moments before i actually get up and go - an art Caroline and Keyvah perfected sometime back.

And through this unorthodox home schooling they have built something Caroline coined "Framily". A fusion of friends and family. It turns out that the Nigerian proverb is right and it takes a village to raise a kid. But unlike the politicians and educators who spout this phrase i have seen it happen with my son and these wonderful women and our fluidly designed framily.

And i am excited to be on this journey with them and know they will help guide their own extraordinary kids.

Compost Cafe Micro Party

There was an irreversible turning point. And this is what funologists hunt.

Sabrina had been dragged away from reading her book to come to the party which was happening in the compost cafe (the small smokers lounge in the courtyard of the community). Firefly got her, apparently promising there was dancing. What there was was a lovely collection of mostly young people and mostly oakers. The few outsiders were Adam who had lived at East Wind and is well liked and appreciated here and Sara Tansey who seems to have nearly everyone fall in love with her nearly everywhere she goes.

"There is not even any dancing. You got me out of bed for this?" Sabrina complains in a whine that is so uncharacteristic of her normal stoic nature, the universe tilts.

"We absolutely did" replies Shiloh and within a minute almost all the room is standing and Sparkles ipod shuffle has taken over the sound system and dancing ensues.

Trout is anxious for another game of chess with me, when the music tones down a bit he asks if i am willing to leave the party. But i can not "This is a funologists wet dream" i say, certain that i will be misunderstood and mocked. And immediately i am.

But what makes it so funologically important is that it is a nearly perfect party, intimate, intense, highly inexpensive (accepted visitor Hale - who is tall and Nordic and charming and 27 - bought a case of cheap Mexican beer and one of Miller high life), spontaneous, simple/elegant and triggered.

But from this funologist perspective it may be triggered that is the most important piece. The talking and minimal milling and cuddling/massaging before the dance portion was nice. but what brought up the energy and added enchantment was the dancing. Bean, Firefly, Louisa, Foxx, Rusty, Sara, Shiloh, Jason (unusually), Trout, Sabrina and Mushroom make a strikingly telegenic lot bogeying. Biddy, Benji, Andy, Hale and i were more peripheral to the dancing, yet somehow holding the space for the others. And there is no way film can catch this tight, tangled event. Despite how crowded it is the group does not want to move to larger space - moving would break something and the compressed space gives it an added air of impossibility.

We are, in fact, building the better party.

Danele's Passing

Six years ago a specialist told Danele, who had just been diagnosed with Cushing's disease, that she had six months to live. Danele was having none of it.

A couple weeks ago Danele passed. Shiloh and Kate, who were part of the team which took care of her in her last days, said that she was the funniest and liveliest she had ever been in those last days. [When Kate offered her a straw to help her drink, replied "nothing says invalid like a straw."]

Danele and i were lovers in the first year i was at Twin Oaks, over a decade ago now. i was given back all the love letters i wrote her yesterday, a little stack of carefully scripted cards, chronicling our unlikely connection.

We had the memorial service for Danele today here at Twin Oaks. She would have been pleased. i managed to miss most of the event because i got up early and rescued a bunch of folding chairs from a rocking church in Richmond in the pouring rain and ended up restarting my illness. [i do sick badly, so i do it little.]

What i will remember of Danele is her fierce loyalty, her expansive heart, the silky scarfs she always carried, her quirky wit, her adventurous spirit and her tenacity.

Farewell Allen

About a week back a new member of Twin Oaks, Allen, took his life. He had wrestled with depression for much of his adult life and his mother said at the community sharing circle that "Twin Oaks had been the happiest month and a half of his life."

The morning before he took his life i was in the tofu hut with Mushroom and in one of those rare moments when there is no one else there but the lone kettle person and the lone trays person she said to me. "Who do you think is the sexiest person on campus?"

"Allen" was my immediately response. He was quiet, diligent, attractive, musical, mechanically inclined. I had hooked him up with ex-member Denny Ray to help with the communities perennial problem of equipment maintenance. They had fixed the Llano refrigerator together and Denny had been impressed by his quick learning and eagerness. They were working on the ice machine together the day he passed.

16 years ago this community was torn apart by Delancies suicide. It was the last one we had and it was completely different. Unlike Allen, there was lots of warning. Unlike Allen there were many who felt the community could have done more. Unlike Allen there were many who were furious with other members perceived insensitivity to mental health problems. Unlike Allen, half a dozen people left and McCune quit work for a year (something our labor system permits for people who have sufficient balance to do so).

Allen's death is a gift to us. We pull together. We support each other. Many people, especially Louisa, his lover of 9 years, are saying "it is this type of support that is the reason i moved to community". In fact the most powerful msg from our sharing circles and healing rituals is "i dont want to go back to normal"
What we want instead is a place where someone can be crying in public space, without anyone feeling put out by it or drawn into it against their will.

Christian was holding and comforting Bridget in the Tupleo Kitchen. I was in there with WIllow who was being noisy and lively. There was a whole mini-circus that passed before the mourners. When we are at our best, we integrate our sadness and our daily lives.

And his death is a challenge to us. How do maintain some piece of this incredible support we are offering each other. How do we maintain this transparency, this willingness to speak our personal truths. I learned of several peoples struggles with suicide as part of this process. i joined the care team for one of the people today, who i care for and was unaware of their struggle. Allen has helped us shine a healing light on ourselves and now we want to figure out how to keep it shining.

if we are really good, we will find the switch for that light. and if we can i am sure Allen would be proud of us.

Designing Rituals that Stick

My funological comrades and I are in a conversation about what the “central ritual” will be at the Villages in the Sky festival in the Ozarks in 2010. Central rituals play important roles in two of the inspirational events for VIS – Burning Man and the Rainbow Gathering.

At Burning Man there are actually two central rituals. The first (on the Saturday night) is the burning of the man. A 40 foot high effigy is set alight amongst dozens of fire dancers and a host of fireworks displays. Participants run in circles around the burning man and make incredible noise. Crystal actually does not think this is a ritual at all, he prefers to refer to it as “the spectacle” and it certainly is that.

On Sunday night the temple is burned. The temple is further out, and actually much larger overall It is made entirely of wood and is an incredibly intricate art piece. On it participants scribble what ever it is they want to let go of, often sadness about a loved one who passed in the last year (or anytime really). In sharp contrast to the burn of the man, this is a highly somber and quiet. Up close, both of these rituals are physically quite hot. They are also magnificent enuf so that they can be enjoyably viewed from a fairly significant distance.

At the Rainbow Gathering the central ritual mixes noise and quite. Part of the site selection for the part of the national parks which hosts these gatherings is that they need to have a space (for the national gatherings) which can accommodate 25,000 people standing in a large circle holding hands. For the first half of the fourth of July, rainbow kids (some of whom are in their 80s) are silent, doing their daily chores, heading toward a mid day gathering which comes together in a large silent circle. After some length of time which seems cosmologically determined, the kids run into the middle yelling and this is the signal for everyone to run in. Much dancing and partying ensues.

We will have tree houses and zip lines and hopefully turbine platforms as our environment. Presumably, there will be an open field to operate in, and n year one only a few hundred participants. And I believe that this ritual, and its power and effect on people will be one of the things which determines how many people come back for year 2 and beyond.

So I am in dialog with my new lover Premin, who lives in a spiritual resort which used to be a spiritual commune about what gives ritual life and bond people with them. She said these clever things:

The real important thing about ritual is, that it is not a ritual. that it is alive in every moment, that it makes sense, that it takes people into account, and when it doesn’t feel right or fitting any more, it can be changed. It grows with the moment, with the people. It takes presence, and not routine.

Culture Follies

For those of you who have tuned in late, i am a bit of an odd duck.

The other day i was in Boston helping Keyvah and Gpaul and Benji (a charming newish Oaker) set up for the Natural Food Expo at the convention center. Keyvah has a strange addiction to fancy hotels, so we were staying in the Omni Paker House right downtown.

I have trouble talking quietly on a cell phone, so Keyvah had thrown me out of the room while i was chatting about the Testival (test festival) we are organizing for the tree house launch at Acorn. So i went into the hallway at the Omni on the 8th floor and parked myself in front of the elevators.

i did not even think about it a laydown on the super clean hotel floor with my head propped up against the wall, in my slightly strange shorts and continued talking on the phone. My position looked something like the picture below (without the hat and not asleep).

For perhaps 20 minutes no one comes out of the elevator, but then 2 older couples emerge decked out in very nice clothes having an animated conversation. They are clearly a bit shcoked by my presene and position. i ignore them and continue blabbing.

About 5 minutes later a hotel security guy comes out of the elevator, looking for me. He starts with a confrontive manner, clearly a bit unsure of how to deal with the situation. But he quickly notices i have a hotel key in my hand, and he chills a bit.

He instructs me that you cant lay on the floor in this hotel. i am slightly disbelieving, but he assures me this is so. he then points to the collection of perfectly reasonable chairs which are less than 5 meters away from me and asks if i could continue my phone call from there.

i cave to the pressure and sit in one of the plush chairs.

Arguing with Willow

Part of the communities agreements is that children will do small amounts of work for the collective good. The amount they are asked to do is based on age and for a 7 year old, only here part time (because Willow spends part of each week in Cville with Sky) is one hour per week. Next year it will be two hours per week.


For a while we often did part of Willow's quota in the hammock shop. He was getting pretty good at winding shuttles and toddling them over to the welding station. But the economy and our own inability to market hammocks swept the business and now the hammock shop is nearly closed. Hawina has been having Willow do a bit of food processing (where we preserve our harvest for later in the year) and he has been unloading the dishwashers are Tupelo and MorningStar. While we continue to seek places to find labor credits for him.

We had an argument about it yesterday.

Our clothes were up to dry outside MorningStar and Willow and i were taking them down. "You can take labor credits for this." i replied casually. "No i cant." replied my clever son. "These are our clothes and not community clothes" And i realized he understood the system better than i had given him credit for. Indeed, normally one can not take labor credits for work which just benefits ones self.

I explained to Willow that there was actually a policy which gave members labor credits for drying their own clothes on the line, instead of using a dryer to save electricity and money for the community. He was having none of it.

"Can i get labor credits for taking down our own laundry?" Willow asked Hawina, skeptical of my claims. Hawina explained about the perhaps passed eco-laundry labor credits. But i could tell it was not sitting well with Willow. "You should not get labor credits for doing your own stuff." i could see him thinking.

When i was 7, i had quite some notion of family, and some vague notion about states and countries. But i had nothing like the sense of fairness and equity that my small partner seems to have developed.

Just one question

Burning Man was quite the bust this year. We had an amazing team and an interesting project to hype. But dear friends were caught up in this crazy sting/entrapment escapade and much of our energy was defused in getting them sprung.

Ironically, with all the amazing art and bizarre contraptions on the Playa, the best part of this years Burning Man for me was a set of conversations i had with my dear friend Crystal which could have just as easily be held in a Santa Cruz coffee shop.

Crystal wants to build an international camp at next years burn. US nationals could participate, but everyone who is there must pass a short admissions test, which is in it's entirety the question "Are you a revolutionary?"

Armada

There are 17 people at East Wind (including 3 on their way) who will be deploying the Villages in the Sky Burning Man equipment. After a Herculean effort, we finally found an affordable truck to carry all the stuff (thanks Keyvah, yeah Sara). It is an impressive array of stuff:

1) Circus/Revival tent 20' but 60'
2) A Healix tower with two wind turbines on the top
3) A mobile kitchen
4) A small tent village
5) a somewhat undefined collection of vehicles

We are at 6:45 and Fossil. If you are coming to Burning Man you should definitely stop by and especially for the funological brainstorm and naming party on Friday at dusk.

This is getting exciting.

And yesterday East Wind approved the hosting of the Villages in the Sky festival in June 2010. We have a home, at least for a couple of years.

Night Owls

On my way to the Yaffa Cafe (where Tobias and i are now geeking) this morning i asked myself "Why am i going there?"

There are 2 bazillion great places it eat in NYC. It appears that industrial capitalism, which i dont have much good to say about, really works for Manhattan - the average restaurant is better than the national average, by a lot. In this hyper competitive/information rich environment only the great survive.

It is not the charming wait staff, who rolled with it when i said "if you touch that i will hurt you" when the waitress tried to take my nearly empty plate.

The mock leopard skin chair covers and table designs are cute, but actually i had not noticed them before today.

No, it is that it is open all night, every night. Of course it is not at all a strange for Manhattan and i am not currently using this feature, because it is the middle of the day. But i want to support outfits which keep the odd hours i do.

My big complaint about most of the cities i love (Am*dam, San Francisco, even Berlin) is that they roll up the streets between midnight and 2 AM. What is up with that ? i want to be in the city (which as Mz DiFranco calls it) "never shuts up".



We have had amazing hosts in the 3 Burroughs we have inhabited. Teagan and Arrow in Manhattan have put up with a parade of organizers and activists which i seem to hang with these days. Teagan fell in love with Sara (this is easy to do, everyone seems to these days). She seems unstoppable despite being gloriously pregnant. Arrow was immeasurable help with the dozens of details associated with the Villages in the Sky camp at Burning Man. [I have been a few times, but i have never been involved with setting up a real camp before]. He has also agreed to be on the board of directors for our shell company International Funological Initiative Limited, which is something of a relief for me, because he is experience in both big festival organizing and clean fuels.




Diana threw parties, hosted workshops and was stunningly available for our many needs. I want every lawyer in america to be just like her. In fact, if every lawyer were just like her, i would be so out of a job. Just a few steps from the Williamsburg bridge, Diana brought Brooklyn to life and hosted of us in her tiny flat and panoramic roof. And connected us with her lively collection of rad artists, activists and troublemakers.



George at Ganas was gone for most of our visit but i did get in my few conversations about the Tamara in Portugal, why peak oil is not a play, kids in community and why the world would be a better place is we stopped worrying about counting everything.

I leave NYC understand better peoples love of the place.

Headline News

In one of the many late night metaphysical rants Modok and i shared in Santa Cruz, he once said to me "You need to live your life like your are trying to keep the reader of your biography engaged." It has been a good few weeks for my fictitious biography readers. I can't really do justice to any of the topics i am going to hit on - but things are just going to get worse if i dont do some chronicling - so off we go.

Summer Camp: Network for a New Culture does several camps in the US each year. My take on the these events is they are efforts to look at what kind of culture we want to have in a better world we want to be part of. There is an eclectic mix of topics at summer camp, but the ones around crafting a sex positive culture are the ones which get the most attention. A significant number of people who go to summer camps have a transformative experience, especially people who go as first time participants (interestingly, these revelations usually don't have to do with sex, or at least not primarily so). This years camp did the most radical workshop i have ever been in.

Paul who does work with imprisoned sex offenders in Washington state lead a workshop that didn't just take on the myths about sex offenders. Included in these myths is that sex offenders cant change - when in reality, if fully treated sex offenders have the lowest recidivism rate of any major crime except murder. But the big myth (which i bought into until this camp) was that sex offenders are different from us, that we could perhaps tell them if we were close to them and that they are conveniently "other-able".

A space was created for people to confess anything which they had done to the group and hear the groups response to it. This is a restorative justice exercise, where the group takes responsibility for its collective behavior. Several people admitted some shocking things and the response of the group was pretty impressive. There were a fair number of people who were pretty angry and expressed it in clear terms. Others were appreciative of the daring. Still others were thrown for a loop (including me) and forced to face these things as not distant and other, but as part of my community which is working to heal itself. I cant say much about the stories here, but i can talk about the overwhelming sense that i had in the workshop that if the work is going to change around this type of problem it is going to be thru this kind of daring and this type of community commitment.

And i had my own ideological struggles with summer camp. One of the favorite bromides is "Ask for 100% of what you want, negotiate for a win win, be willing to hear "no" as an answer" When i first heard it i thought it was clever and the more that i watch it, i fear it is too sweeping. I prefer the honest seduction stuff, which deals with disclosers and the complex situations where "yes" actually means "i am doing this for the wrong reasons"

Premin

Also at Summer Camp i met and got romantically involved with Premin (pictured above in some tree i have never seen her in, courtesy of facebook). Working with the organizers of summer camp this year i was able to help provide some scholarships for people who could not otherwise attend camp. Premin (who i had never met) was one of these people.

I was worried as i went to Shana's place (where Premin stayed before camp) that our interaction would be weird, since in the past when i have offered financial help to someone who does not know me they think they are in some unspecified way indebted to me. So i stepped into my first encounter with Premin with some trepidation. But i was alone there.

In my first short conversation with Premin, i was blown away. She was there in her simple magnificence. Money dynamics and hidden obligations to me were undiscussed and clearly unimportant. Her power of presence reflexively drew me into my power. I walked out of our first encounter, with its unremarkable transcript, thinking to myself "i could fall in love with this woman". And in the coming days i promptly did.

As a story teller i am drawn to highlight that she lives in Puna, India tho of European decent. She has a camel named tiger which she has invited me to ride and she teaches several workshops on meditation and empowerment thru self awareness. But this misses the essence of her, which as my karate instructor used to say about trying to use words to transmit meaning "is like trying to hold jello to a tree with a knife."

Villages in the Sky

When i first went to Burning Man in 2001, i realized that from a pagan elemental perspective there were a couple of important festivals missing. We had Burning Man as a fire festival, the Rainbow Gathering was an earth festival, but where was the sister air festival ? Where was "Flowing Woman" beside the sea with healing and spirituality?

So myself and some talented comrades have decided it's time to do something about this. We are going to try to build the air festival. Tho Tobias hates the name, for now at least it is called Villages in the Sky ok, he does not hate it, he just thinks it is too long.

The rough plan is have a festival in the summer of 2010 which celebrates and experiences wind. We are planning on building windmills and tree houses and doing a myriad of other interesting things in hopes of creating an event that is so sexy other people want to organize their own versions in their regions (as has happened with both Burning Man and the Rainbow Gathering). But unlike these venerable events, we do want to leave a trace behind - we want to start building a different and better world that lingers.

At first we thought we would do the event near the intentional communities near Rutledge Missouri. Rutledge was attractive because there are three different Eco-villages all in close proximity (Dancing Rabbit, Sandhill, Red Earth Farms). Tobias, Sara and i trekked out to Missouri to try to entice them into joining our project. There was some interest, and there were lots of concerns. And what we discovered is that these communities did not need any help in promoting themselves, they already had more guess and visitors than they could handle.

Time to rethink our strategy. If Rutledge was not the right place where was? Well, one of the other reasons for selecting Missouri is that they have some of the most relaxed zoning laws in the country. If we were going to be building funky towers for windmills and strange tree house villages, it would be nice to not have to be getting permits and explaining everything to building inspectors. And as soon as we were looking for alternative to Rutledge in Missouri, the sister community of Twin Oaks, East Wind, jumped to mind.

In my mind East Wind has always kind of been the wild, wild west of the communities movement. Located on a thousand acres of beautiful land in the Ozarks, it is younger in population and more far more relaxed than it's older sister Twin Oaks. One indicative story, a few years back my lover Deborah was slightly drunk at East Wind and was in the music room looking up at the ceiling and said "we should build a skylight in this room." The next day she and some friends cut a whole in the ceiling and started to install the imagined skylight. Such a project would take months of discussion and planning at Twin Oaks, and might well not happen because of concerns about the roof leaking or budget priorities.

Several East Winders got excited about the project and decided to jump on in a big way. Lion and Zeke are both helping with a demonstration tower for the event and helping Sheppard the project thru community process. Unlike a skylight in the music room, a several hundred person festival and a large foot print tree house village need to be discussed and agreed to - even in the wild, wild west. We are not completely through our process with East Wind, but there is much more enthusiasm and more supportive festival culture there than we found in Rutledge.

Acorn Tree Houses

We wanted a testbed for the tree house village, so decided to build a smaller version locally to learn about how to build then to so they were 1) safe for kids, 2) low impact on trees and 3) serious fun. Perhaps the martest thing i have said in years was to ex-Oaker Pilgrim who is working on the Acorn aerial village, "Put as many platforms up as you can, dont worry about stairs, railings, safety - someone will follow behind you and get these things." Then, with nothing in place, i went to summer camp. I came back 11 days later and he had lofted 9 platforms, the highest was 35 feet up and over half of them were over a dozen feet high. And my thoughts about the entire project changed - especially my thoughts about what was possible and how the organizers interact with the participants.

"Build then design" became the unofficial motto of the project, perhaps to show up on t-shirts soon. Our job, in my current world view is to create spaces up in trees (these platforms) which others can build on top of and around. The test for carpenters working on the project these days is there ability to work without plans, since there are not any. We will ultimately do drawings of the Acorn Tree houses, but they will be describing what is after it is built, rather than design documents.

Burning Man

So i have been saying for a year that i am not going to Burning Man, it was a lie. It is not that i dont like the event, but there ar only so many festivals a year i can go to and i feel like i understand this one reasonably well having been 3 times including the last two years. And it is also and amazing place potentially for networking and to hustle Villages in the Sky. So we are going to go in a big way, we are pulling together a camp complete with tower, school bus, circus tent and a bunch of enthusiastic funological ambassadors. Watch this space for more details. We are hoping to find an existing theme camp to be near - know any good ones ?