Thinking today about the nature of embarassment, how it's a completely worthless and ineffective feeling. What is it? How does it serve me to be embarassed about something? It doesn't, except to give me the chance to prove that I realize that cultural standards exist, acknowledge that I'm not following them, and apologize for that. Fuck that! To be embarassed about my actions or thoughts INVALIDATES them. Embarassment perpetuates the status quo by apologizing for and feeling bad about doing something beyond it.

So instead, when I notice myself feeling embarassed about something, I want to look deeper and see WHY I feel bad about crossing a cultural barrier. Is it just about how other people will respond to me? I think people respond more to the energy of embarassment or confidence more than they do to any actual action or words. So my lesson for me is to trust myself, to act and speak with the confidence of believing that whatever I'm doing is just fine, and let embarassment evaporate along with whatever cultural barriers I think I'm supposed be constrained by.

It's time for the Tribute to Serenaluchang. Those of you to don't know this person, I pledge that this entry will still be interesting to you. Especially if you go read her blog afterwards. Insight into her true nature makes her writing even more exciting. This tribute is in honor of her, and a reciprocation to her entry last week that was entirely about me.

So, Serena Lu. Not her real name, no. We're both wild actresses, and this is a character name from a play she was in that was written by my ex-boyfriend in college. The ex-boyfriend is extremely important to our friendship, for many reasons:

A) She lived next door to me sophomore year of college, and not only did she ignore the fact that he slept over nearly every night (which at Dark Ages Wittenberg University was against the rules -- not to mention that I was the RA, the one responsible for enforcing the rules... not a great job for an anarchist), but she also listened to me moan and bitch and whine when I was upset with him.

B) She reminded me about the moaning and the bitching and the whining two years later when we had broken up and I was a crazed MESS, carrying on about how we had had the perfect relationship, never fought, and now it was over and I was never going to be able to love like that again. She's that friend for me, the one who listened to me cry for HOURS about this breakup, and then gently and sweetly and factually reminded me that it wasn't ever the perfect relationship, and that I was deluding myself for believing so. It was way more dramatic my way ("I'll never love again!"), but way more realistic and SANE her way ("He's not the god you think he is").

Another thing about Serena Lu -- this woman can DANCE. In fact, I just escaped a wild dance party here at Twin Oaks that really made me think of Serenaluchang. She has this move -- a signature piece, really, at least in my mind -- where she bends her knees and then arches her back and leans backwards until one hand can touch the floor behind her... then she flings herself up to standing again, then arches her back and touches the floor with her other hand, flings herself up, then repeats until the song ends or she falls over (she usually busted out this move after a few drinks... so the falling over part really wasn't her fault). I did this move at the dance party tonight, in honor of this wild woman. I fell over before the song ended.

There were 6 religion majors in our senior class. She and I were two of them, and we were the only two without a specific personal dogma. Three of the others wanted to be ministers, and the last was a hard core Buddhist (I was completely crushed out on him... guitar playing, meditating, senior thesis was a self-directed absurdist film...) Serena and I would sit in Senior Seminar and listen to our classmates talk about Christianity and we'd lock into each others' eyes for sanity (not to blast Christianity -- I'll save that topic for another post). I directed a play for my senior thesis; she wrote brilliant short stories.

Then there was "Sex Lives of Superheroes". It sounds a lot more exciting than it actually was, but it's still a fun story. This was a One Act play our sophomore year of college. Every year Wittenberg theater majors direct a series of One Acts, and we both auditioned for many parts. Somehow, the directors just couldn't find brilliant roles to fit our talent, so we got the smallest roles possible: Superman and Wonder Woman in this play about a comic book collector who obsesses about the libidos of the superheroes he idols. Serena Lu was Superman and I was Wonder Woman and we both sat in the audience until one point where we jumped up, threw off our trench coats, and ran onstage wearing skintight blue and red and flesh-colored fabric. Serena Lu, as Superman, even got to have a suit of fake bulging muscles. I just had shiney tights on my legs. We were the hottest superheroes ever, even though we only had 2 lines each in the entire play.

and now Serena the Superhero lives in Chigago, and writes about her life in brilliant prose on her blog called "N is for Neville, who died of ennui." Serena Lu and I both have a poster of this page from the Ghastlycrumb Tinnies. On my first trip to visit her in Chi-town, we took the tiny book to Kinkos and copied the page (a picture of a desolate boy peeking out over a windowsill) onto poster-sized paper. Don't tell the copywright lawyers. Ennui is our enemy. Boredom sucks the energy out of Life. And we have our posters to remind us of that.

So much to write. There's her senior year bedroom with the balcony on the second floor that faced the sorority house. She bought a water baloon slingshot. Enough said. There's the song we sang in a musical tribute to Rodgers & Hammerstein, as drunken heartbroken lounge singers. There's the night of spiritual enlightenment in the back room of Denny's (RIP -- it's gutted and abandoned now). There's the gold sparkly dress that she wore on New Year's Eve. Hot. Serenaluchang's sense of fashion is top notch. I'd raid her closet before theater parties in college. She had this sexy business suit that she'd wear with knee high black leather boots -- her "fuck me boots". Ohhhh... now we're getting into dangerous territory. Theater parties and sex. If you believe the rumours... at least you'll have great dreams tonight. Singing "La Vie Boheme" from RENT at the top of our lungs at EVERY SINGLE PARTY, words memorized, moves choreographed, divas till we die.

and now she's in Chicago and I'm in Virginia and our friendship has grown deeper since graduation than I ever thought was possible. We were actually together in Chicago on the one year anniversary of our college graduation, and we were better friends then than we had been when we lived within a mile of each other in college. She writes to tell me when she's pissed at me, and we say "I love you" at the end of our phone conversations. She's got a cell phone and a job, and I've got my cows and my commune. And we'll still talk nonstop when we see each other Christmas night. We've got to find a Denny's that's open 24 hours, and has a back room with a waitress named Shannon.

I apologize for all the inside jokes... there's too much juice to them to pass them up. Allow them to entice you. Admit you're intrigued. You want to know more about these two wild women. Read our blogs religiously, and you may just well gain a bit of insight into who we really are...

another power outage this morning. Who thought life in rural Virginia could get this exciting? But it's back on now, as you must have already gathered given that I'm writing this on a computer.

This morning, when the power was still off, I was slicing myself a thick slab of homemade bread, and I thought about how much I loved making bread when I lived in an apartment in Cincinnati. I would spend an entire Saturday afternoon making the dough, kneading it, letting it rise, punching it down, letting it rise again in pans, and then baking it, the yeasty aroma filling my apartment, replacing that "cheap apartment in the city" smell. It was kind of a meditation. A Creation Meditation, focused on the act of making something myself, something that I'd otherwise be buying. Baking bread was an act of sanity. I needed to have something in my life that wasn't mass marketed, that wasn't just some empty object to be consumed. I didn't buy bread EVER that entire year in the apartment in Cincinnati. I'd make fancy breads for Christmas presents for my family, and when I was in college my downstairs neighbors paid me to bake bread for them.

When I first moved here to the commune, my parents were a little baffled tha I didn't take on making bread as one of my jobs. I was too excited about learning to milk the cows and weave hammocks. As I was slicing the bread this morning, I realized that most of my life now fulfills what I had been seeking in baking my own bread.

and of course it's not perfect or pure. I drive cars, use computers, and eat grapefruit that was grown in Brazil by migrant workers. I struggle with that, philosophically, sometimes. Is it possible to live beyond these contradictions? (see earlier comment by an angry reader about how I have so many contradictions in my life) Probably, if I were willing to make the sacrifices necessary to do it -- it involves more than giving up grapefruit. I guess where I am right now is trying to live in a way that I can be happy. Right now, that happiness is based on my personal experience AND an awareness of how my actions affect other people. That basic drive for happiness transcends any specific ideology that can be contradicted.

for more on power outages and life on the commune, visit summer.motime.com. She is an amazing writer, with a much different perspective than me.

No post in a while, thanks to an ice storm on Saturday night that knocked out our power all day Sunday. A friend knocked on my door Sunday morning telling me that help was needed down in the dairy barn to hand milk the cows. Yup, even in an ice storm, the cows still need to be milked! So about 10 of us trudged down to the barn to stand 2 to a cow (2 teats per person) and put our otherwise-unused tricep (?) muscles to work. We were without power for 8 days back in September when Hurricane Isabel blew through, so we had mostly gotten the hang of milking by hand then. The day we first started, though... seasoned dairy farmers would have had a good laugh.

after milking, I sloshed my way through the ice and snow half a mile up to our warehouse, where there was a huge shipping party going on. Somehow there was actually electricity up at Emerald City (the name of our warehouse, because it's a giant green building at the end of a relatively long hike), even though the rest of the community was blacked out. There was music and food and lots of singing and dancing while stacking hammocks onto pallettes. The final bundle of hammocks was boxed around 1:00, and ten minutes later the power went out in the warehouse.

A bunch of us sat around in the semi-darkness (just light light through the window from the reflection on the snow) and told jokes and ate the sushi that had been made for the party (you know it's a special occasion at Twin Oaks when someone's made sushi!) Then Pax and I made our way back down to the rest of the community to spend some quality time together before I had to return to the dairy barn for the afternoon milking. But first he had to stop by the community center, because one of his other lovers had told him she wrote him a letter. He said that he could see in her face that it was an important one. So he went to get the letter, and I said I'd meet him in my room. When he came in, I was already wrapped under the covers in an attempt to warm my frozen toes, and he undressed and climbed in with me.

"How was the letter?" I asked. And he said that she was in a pretty rough place. They've been struggling for months; this was not new. I asked if he felt like he should go find her, and he said no. So we laid there and talked for awhile, but I couldn't get her off my mind.

CONTEXT: There was another time back in October when he had a date with her that had an undetermined starting time, and he and I were spending some time together before their date. I asked him when he was meeting with her, and he said they hadn't agreed on a time, so he'd spend a couple hours with me, then go to be with her. I asked him to call up to her building to set a clear time, he tried, no answer. He tried again a while later, and left a message for her. Which she never got. And when she came looking for him and stopped by my building and heard us making love in my room she got pissed. This was a lesson for me that if it seems to me like my lover has responsibilities to another lover -- even if my lover says it's not true -- I should trust my instincts and push them towards that responsibility.

So this time it seemed obvious that he should seek her out. She wrote him a letter, then went to find him to TELL him that she had written a letter. What does that say? It says she's reaching out to him. And him reaching back indicates that the relationship is important to him. So this time, instead of asking "should you go find her?", I said "I think you should go find her." And I told him my analysis of her reaching out to him, and he agreed that that was the best thing to do. And he went to go find her, leaving me to read the latest CrimeThinc book (my current obsession!) alone in my room.

This experience really helped me feel the importance of nurturing something greater than my immediate interests. Our relationship (Pax and me) is in a really solid, stable, exciting, passionate, connected (I could go on...) place right now. We didn't need that time together in order to honor or respect our relationship. He and this other partner did. It seems very clear, but in the "take care of Me" culture of mainstream society, it seems ludicrous for me to push a lover out of bed so that he could go be with someone else. I really understand this now... more than I have in over a year of doing this whole open relationship thing. We can't just make decisions based on what's best for me and my lover, just between us. Because Life isn't just between us. Life extends to include everything that we touch, everyone else who our relationship impacts. And recognizing the truth of that has to affect how we make decisions, or it doesn't work. That's where jelousy and envy and bitterness come in.

It's late, and I'm tomorrow's milker. I've got to be down in the barn in 6 hours, so I'm going to sleep now. Goodnight from Virginia.

a moment of whining before i go to milk the cows: "WHYYYYYY hasn't ANYONE COMmented on yesterday's POhhhhhst?" No typos there, folks. That's whining emphasis. Try it yourself. Read it outloud in the manner it's written, stressing the words/syllables that are capitalized. Do it at your desk at work, and say you're practicing for an audition.

Now I've got to jog accross the commune to the dairy barn to milk those sweet cows (wearing JEANS today. Dirty ones that I already got paint on this morning).

Two thoughts from today:

if you really like a pair of pants, don't wear them to milk the cows (especially if they're white). "White pants?", you say? "Who has white pants?" Your very own Tickledspirit, that's who. And they aren't just any white jeans from the '80s. No, these are velour. Soft and fuzzy and quite possibly one of my favorite pieces of clothing. So favorite, in fact, that I didn't want to take them off yesterday when i went to milk the cows. The cows love me. They never poop in the barn. But yesterday, they must not have liked my pants. At least not Penelope. I was just about to let her out of the barn... but before I could, she raised her tail and let loose the runniest stream of cow shit I've ever seen. Splattered all over the barn. It was late, I wanted to go eat dinner, and instead i had to shovel runny cow shit. And as I was shoveling, I thought, I've got to write this in my blog! A not-so-glamorous part of commune life. "And the pants? What happened to the fuzzy white velour pants?", you ask in a panic. Unharmed. Miraculously. But they could have been... they were in danger. Hence the warning that opened this paragraph.

Thought number two: Dumpster Dived portobello mushrooms sauteed in cheap wine is one fine delicacy. Forsook the community dinner last night to cook with a friend in one of the smaller kitchens on the commune. I miss cooking. I miss the intentionality of preparing food. I could cook here as one of my jobs, but cooking for 100 people doesn't hold the same power for me. So, once in a while, a friend and I will grab supplies from the community fridge and head off to another kitchen and go Julia Child. It was great. And the portobellas -- what a treat! Oh the joy of eating and savoring what would otherwise be landfill.

My apologies to anyone who has visited my blog in the past hour (and according to my counter, that's 14 of you!) -- I've been learning how to change around my format, and a lot of weird configurations came out of it. The tiled pictures in the background? Weird colors of text, random boxes on the sidebar? Me and my schizophrenic blog.

Now that I've been experimenting, just wait and see what comes of it! Pictures! Other exciting things that you can't even imagine!

Last night I turned on a friend of mine to blogging. I read Serenaluchang's post about me out loud to her and she loved it. So she decided she wanted to start her own blog. Hooray for new converts! More tales from the commune. She has a very different viewpoint than I do (being that she's a different person than I am). I don't know her blog's name yet, but I'll post it as soon as I do.

We made 101 hammocks yesterday (perspective: that's a LOT. We had a hard time averaging 30 per day earlier in the year). Less than 200 hammocks to go before we reach our goal for the big Pier One shipment on Sunday.

"Wait a minute? Did she say Pier One?"

Yup, that's right, folks. The hippie commune sells their hammocks to the trendy corporate giant. One of the not-so-radical pieces of life here. It's not Utopia, for sure.

My friends and I are putting on a musical: "Willy Wonka and the Tofu Factory."

(FYI: making tofu is one of the ways we make money here on the commune, in addition to weaving hammocks and writing indexes for books.)

Last year we did "Little Hammock Shop of Horrors" and I played Audrey in the first act, while a man in drag played her in the second act. We take a lot of theatrical liberties here. Tonight in the hammock shop we listened to the audio from the movie of Willy Wonka while we wove unwaveringly (arghh! Too much aliteration for one night!). We sang along to Veruca Salt and said all of her snotty lines that we've memorized over years of repetitive watching. We changed the words to that horrible song "Cheer Up, Charlie" -- in our version it's now "Shut Up, Charlie." In the end, when Willy Wonka tells Charlie he's giving the factory to him because "who else will take care of the Oompa Loompas?", instead of graciously accepting, Charlie tells Wonka how the Oompa Loompas can turn the factory into a worker-owned cooperative.

Theatrical liberties, yes. And it's so much fun.

Working in the hammock shop tonight was great. A big group of us (maybe 15 people?) weaving and singing and laughing. A totally real experience of what most people view as unrealistic idealism. We've got a huge order of hammocks to fill by Sunday, so people are needing to spend a lot of time in the hammock shop. Today I was in there for 4 hours -- and also did 4 hours of child care (and also slept until 10am!). On Sunday when we ship out the huge order, we're having a rave in the warehouse. Black lights and pressurized stapleguns, the posters say.

It's pouring rain and Paxus just ran out of his room (where I'm writing this) to go to the kitchen and make us some tea. He asked me if I wanted to come with him, but I promised to write about him in the blog if he got tea for me. Manipulation? No. Seduction. What's the difference? It's up for discussion... Comment away!

and so, as promised, a brief love letter about Paxus: I love that we stop conversation for three minutes to sing along to a random song. Tonight it was "Won't Let the Sun Go Down On Me", the whole "Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Elton John!" thing. No major significance in either of our lives, as far as I know. It's just on this mixed CD that a friend made for him. I don't need things to make sense with him, we just run with whatever feels right. Giving into gravity, rolling down the hill, no brakes. He gives me permission to act weird, to be a little crazy (a LOT crazy, sometimes!)... and him allowing that in me helps me allow it in myself.

Blech. I'm sick. Still. I had a doughnut last night before I went to bed (dumpster dived from the Krispy Kreme -- they throw out BOXES of doughnuts every night!) and then I couldn't sleep, which didn't aid in the process of my body healing itself. Sugar is poison to my body! I know this, and yet I still crave those fucking Krispy Kremes. They're even better when they're smushed.

so I couldn't sleep and I was tossing and turning and finally I complained to Paxus, who was sleeping beside me (and who's instructed me to wake him up if I can't sleep). He told me to get comfortable and then told me a long, beautiful story. He told me to imagine being a leaf on a tree, then turning brown and falling falling falling to the ground. Getting swept up in the wind with other leaves, moving through the forest and eventually falling in a stream, then floating past fields of grain and eventually ending up in a lake. Floating on the lake, coming to rest on an island in the middle of the lake, where the leaf starts to slowly break apart, and becomes part of the ground, from which another tree will grow. "And then," he ended, "you are complete."

I had fallen alseep somewhere when the leaf was in the stream, but when I heard him say that last line I woke up, wanting to know what happened to make it all complete. So he started in the middle, and told the end of the story again. I wasn't asleep when he ended the second time, but I was in this blissed out place of feeling at peace with my life and life in general. I just laid there next to him, blissed out, until I just simply drifted off into slumber.

I've been having kind of a hard time for the past week... I experimented with a very powerful drug that gave me a Roto Rooter to the mind: Salvia Divinorum, or "Diviner's Sage." It's an herb that can be smoked. I'm not a big drug user at all -- even pot doesn't compel me much. This was something that a lover of mine had tried a few times before and she had some really powerful experiences with it. So we decided to do it together, and my experience was terrifying. I felt like I was loosing myself, loosing all my individuality. I felt like I was dying. The whole idea of one's life flashing before their eyes? Happened. Things from my past, Big Bird, puzzles, my dissappointed dad. And the feeling I had as all of this was being pulled away was: "Game Over, you lost." Like there was a right answer, a right way to live my life, and I hadn't done it. I was completely terrified. I tried to run out of the room but Juniper stopped me (she hadn't taken it yet, she was going to wait and see how I reacted first) and walked me over to the matress and laid down with me and held me while I shook and cried and tried to explain what I was experiencing.

Since then I've been thinking a lot about Death and the nature of Life and other things that deserve to start with capital letters. Asking all those empirically unanswerable questions, like "what's the Meaning of Life?" and "what happens to Me when I Die?". For a couple days after the experience, I couldn't get a hold on Reality at all. Everything I looked at made no sense to me. I couldn't work it through my mind. Everything just looked Weird. And now, over a week away from it, I've pushed those questions to the back of my mind because they get in the way of my day to day functioning, but they're still there. I know I need to explore it, otherwise they'll just fester into some giant monster that I have to deal with years from now. It's hard to handle when the thoughts are still so raw, but easier in the long run, I think. I just need to give myself the space to do it. Take a day or two without any scheduled work (ahh... another benefit of living on a commune!) and go out in the woods and be with myself and these questions.

As soon as I'm done being sick.

Reflections on the act of blogging: I'm obsessed, a bit. I've started checking every day to see if anyone has commented, and to see how much my "counter" has risen. A need to be heard, to have other people hear my thoughts and ideas. To know that I'm not just putting them out in the internet void and they're sitting there, ignored. Serenaluchang at ennui.motime.com calls this "one, long masturbatory exercize." Yep -- exhibitionism all the way. "Hey look! I exist beyond my own experience of life! Other people read my blog!" I've been exploring other people's blogs, going down Motime's "newly updated" list over on the lefthand side of the page, and I'm amazed at what this is for some people... really, probably what it is for most of us: a way to make our lives feel important. A way to put ourselves out in the world in a concrete, tangible way. Here I am! Read my blog!

And I feel it, too. That's why I'm doing this instead of reading a book or weaving a hammock or writing in my journal or planning a revolution. I want to express myself to other people, and this is a safe way to do that. I put myself out there as I am, and no one can touch me.

They can just watch.

"Revolutionary spirituality does not console the world, it shatters it."
-Ken Wilber

For me, that's what Anarchy is all about -- shattering our assumptions about limits and boundaries and definitions, shattering what we assume to be true, and allowing what Is to shine. The "chaos" that people associate with Anarchy is simply unmediated existence, beyond all the structure that we try to put on the world. For me spirituality is becoming more aware of what Is, uncovering a less mediated experience of Life.

Someone posted a comment on my last post that deserves an answer in full form, not just a response in comment-land.

The question is: "what is a commune exactly? how many people live in a commune? i'm curious..."

so many different ways to answer that question...

Well, there's "communes" and then there's "intentional communities". An intentional community can be any group of people who are sharing their lives based on some set of common values. It's wider than the basic construct of family, but it could include monestaries, sororities, the military, an urban co-op, a bunch of hippies living off the land, and more. There's a great website done by the Fellowship for Intentional Community at www.ic.org that has lots of information on communities in the U.S. and globally.

I guess my definition of a commune is one extreme version of intentional community, where people live toghether and share responsibility for their lives on a deep level.

At Twin Oaks www.twinoaks.org we do this on a fairly large scale, creating our own culture that's distinctly different from the mainstream. We are 90 adults and 15 children living on 450 acres of land. We grow much of our own food, we run our own businesses, we share all of the money we make, we build our own buildings, and we share 17 vehicles (no one person owns their own car).

Each member has their own reasons for living this way. For me, and many other people here, it's rooted in not being satisfied with mainstream culture. I don't want to live in a world that perpetuates sexism, classism, and rasicm (and heterosexism, and capitalism, and...). I believe that it's possible to live differently than that, and so I decided to dramatically change my life to move away from those oppressive basics of Western culture. It's not ignoring that those things exist -- it's working to build an alternative.

There's so much more to this place... and every community is different. There are over 700 intentional communities in the United States, and many more throughout the world.

But that's all I'll write for now. Much more about Twin Oaks and communes and community later. Now, I'm going off to weave hammocks. We've got a big order to ship out on Dec 15, so we've got a lot of work to do in the next week and a half.

Reason #146 why I love living on a commune:

I woke up this morning with a sore throat. Yuck. I went to the kitchen and made some herbal tea, then did a two-hour childcare shift with a 3 year old and and a 1 year old, running around and pretending to put out fires with our fire hoses. Then lunch: sweet potatoes with roasted garlic -- both right from our gardens. After lunch I felt even more sick, so I went to my room and took a two-and-a-half hour nap. Then I woke up, felt better, and decided to go down to the hammock shop to weave some hammocks.

The way our "labor system" works is that usually we all work an average of 42 hours a week. (though right now it's 45.5 because we're in a hammocks push, trying to get out a big order by mid-December) 45.5 hours a week breaks down to 6.5 hours a day over the course of a 7 day week. Some days I work 3 hours, other days I might work 8 or 10. It all depends on how I feel and what kind of work needs doing. Today I was feeling sick, so I slept. And that counts as "labor" for me. I'll claim 2 hours for childcare, 2 hours of weaving hammocks, and 2.5 hours "sick" time. That's my 6.5 hours for today. There's no limit about how many sick hours I can take, though if I took a whole week of sick hours, someone from the Health Team would check in with me to find out what was going on with me. I take sick hours sometimes if I have really painful cramps when I'm bleeding, but not if I've stayed up really late a few nights in a row and I get exhausted during the day. It's very much up to individual discretion. For the most part, people don't try to "beat" the system because there's really no system to beat. It's just us.

I was driving into town with Paxus a few days ago, and he asked me why I didn't cut the corners. The drive from Twin Oaks (the commune) into Louisa (the nearest town) is about 6 or 7 miles down one very curvy road. I love driving, and I love driving fast, and Pax was curious about why I slowed down so much to go around corners.

"There's that line in the middle of the road that you aren't supposed to cross!", I explained. The look he gave me made me realize how stupid that sounded coming from a self-proclaimed anarchist.

"When it's not a blind corner and you can see that there aren't any cars coming, what's the point of staying in the lines?", he challenged. And I recognized that the lines were controlling my driving because that's how I learned to drive so many years ago -- and that I hadn't realized that I had the CHOICE to cross them! I hadn't consciously noticed they were there until he pointed them out to me.

That's what I want to do -- I want to help other people see the lines that they automatically and unconsciously limit themselves with, and challenge them to look at whether or not they want to accept the limits of the lines.

I'm doing this whole "open relationships" thing, having multiple intimate relationships and being honest with all of my partners about it. For the most part, it's really working for me. It allows all of my relationships with people to be based on our connection, instead of on labels of "boyfriend", "girlfriend", or "just friends". And there isn't the luscious taboo of being attracted to another person... that taboo just drives the energy, intensifies it and turns it into high drama. I'm an actress, but I'm not really one for high drama in realtionships. With open relationships, I can allow a relationship to develop with whoever it develops with, not constrained by specific labels. And I never have to worry if the other person is "the One" or not. In monogamous romantic relationships, I got so caught up in worrying if I was wasting my time putting energy into that relationship -- especially if we were struggling. I'd get focused on thinking that there was probably someone better for me out there, and that I was keeping myself from meeting them because I was trying to work things out with frustrating lover #34. Getting away from the "the One" hypothesis, I can simply (ha!) be in a relationship. I can hold the struggles in a relationship more calmly -- knowing that it isn't my only source of love and affection makes the struggle less charged, allows me to hold it more for what it is.

But it's not perfect, OH NO. There are definitely HARD and FRUSTRATING pieces of it, especially one particular relationship I'm in with a man who has 2 other lovers on the farm (that's how we often refer to the commune, "on the farm") who are both dynamic and powerful and... intense. One of them just came to his room where I was working on the computer and asked if I knew where he was. She was obviously frustrated, and I could have answered better than I did. I said "I think he's in my bed, in my room." (we all have our own private rooms in one of several large residence buildings). She got more frustrated and stormed out. They're leaving on a trip tomorrow and he had told her he'd come by and help her pack, then never showed up. So him being in my room, in my BED!, was really frustrating to her. Understandably. What she didn't know was that he was feeling queasy and sick and asked if he could rest in my room for a bit while I did other things. Obviously, communicating this information to his other partner would have been helpful, but I didn't think about it until she had already left the room enraged. OOPS. It's tricky, this human emotion thing.