In Cody, WY tonight, the Rodeo Capital of the World.  Two days and two nights on Amtrak and now that I have the chance to sleep in a real bed again -- lying down, no less -- I'm too wired to sleep. 

My mom and I are staying at her sister's home, located at the foot of two magnificent mountains.  I stepped out briefly during the sunset, and stood in their backyard in awe of the combination of dark rock against blue sky holding white clouds reflecting golden sunlight.  And in the background of it all, I could hear the rodeo starting up just a few miles away, the announcer's voice and cheering crowd and national anthem carrying clearly through the dry air.  I'm out west, no doubt about it.

I met a woman on the train this morning who was a nun for 17 years.  She understood my life on the commune better than anyone else I've met at random.  We sat down at breakfast together in the dining car and traded stories about our lives.  Sharing income and living space were nothing new to her, and taking on a new name is something that nearly every new sister takes part in!  In the same way that I had become Phoenix, she had become Sister Mary Mark.

Three days away, and I already miss Twin Oaks.  Tonight we sat out in my aunt's hot tub, and I wore a bathing suit I had grabbed from Commie Clothes (our free thriftstore) the morning I left.  This was the first time I've worn a bathing suit all summer!  And I'm self-consious about my commune-funk smell, especially on public transportation when I have to get something from my bag in the overheard compartment.  Every time I lifted my arms I was acutely aware of any coughing or sniffing noises from the people around me.  I showered the morning I left, and even wore deoderant(!) and nice essential oils for the sake of the people on the train, but I think I still ended up smelling like I live on a farm.  Which I do...

Starting to get tired.  I'm going to go lay down in a bed now, in stark contrast to sitting in the train seat and leaning against the window with the too-cold air conditioner blowing on my face.  Mmmm... sleep...

ABC News article on contemporary communes

More than 30 years ago, a few hundred hippies left California to start a commune in Tennessee. They're still there, and they're not the only ones.

If you thought the communes all quietly faded away, you're not alone. But the communes didn't go up in clouds of pot smoke, according to people in the still-thriving movement.

"Contrary to the public perception of the commune movement being a failure, it was a raging success," said Lois Arkin, one of the founders of the Los Angeles Eco-Village. "When the communities stopped being preoccupied with sex and drugs, the media stopped being preoccupied with them."

For most of the people who began communities like The Farm in Tennessee, it wasn't about the sex and drugs: It was about changing the world, and it still is.

The word "commune" may be out of date, but according to people who still live in them, the ideals behind those "get back to the earth" efforts are not, and they say they're making a difference in many different ways.

There are thousands of contemporary communes — now commonly called "intentional communities" — across the country, from rural Tennessee, Missouri and Oregon to downtown Los Angeles and New York City. They're organized on various different principles, whether concern about the environment, shared political views, religious beliefs or some other set of ideals.

"Intentional community" is a rather clinical and perhaps off-putting term for a simple idea — groups of people who have common views deciding to live together to improve the quality of life for themselves, and in many cases, to try to help those around them.

The definition is rather broad, said Laird Schaub, executive secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, an umbrella organization of some 3,000 such communities worldwide, and a longtime resident of Sandhill Farm in Rutledge, Mo.

By the FIC's definition, an intentional community is a group of people who "share property on the basis of explicit common values," which can be ecological, religious, social, political or psychological. Many of the member communities are eco-villages, focused on environmental issues, while other are followers of the co-housing movement that began in Denmark.

The only firm requirements for membership in the FIC are that groups be "upfront and honest about their views," don't advocate violence and don't hold people against their will.

"As a movement, it's not very focused," Schaub said. "It's more about people who are not satisfied with life the way most of society lives it."

Nearly all of the communities listed on the FIC's Web site welcome visitors — even for weekend stays or longer — and many are open to new members.

People join or form intentional communities for a lot of different reasons, members say. Some come because they feel isolated in society, some because they are concerned about their children's safety or the influences on them, and others because they want to lead a more environmentally friendly or simpler lifestyle.

Though the original communes like The Farm in Tennessee were often portrayed as experiments in free love and uncontrolled drug use by kids who didn't want to deal with reality, that stereotype was not always accurate, which is proven by the fact that many of those communities are still around, decades later, members say.

Instead, the founders of The Farm always had it in mind to be an example for others, and that ideal is shared by many of the thousands of newer eco-villages and intentional communities across the country and around the world.

"The founding principle was creating something that people could emulate," said Douglas Stevenson, who was one of those hundreds who left California more than three decades ago to start The Farm.

The idea was to create a community based on nonviolence and sustainability, and to provide an example of how it can be done, he said. Some 30 years later, he said, that's still what The Farm and other similar communities are doing.

"You want to get far enough away so you can do your own thing without being influenced by society at large, but you don't want to isolate yourself," Stevenson said.

At its peak, The Farm's 1,700 acres were home to some 1,500 people. Stevenson said the population is much smaller now, but it spans the generations, with about a quarter under 30, many of whom are children of the original members.

"Most of the people who live here have lived here at least 20 years," he said. "The majority of the population has been through it all."

For some, The Farm has been almost their whole life.

Julia Skinner, 20, was born and raised there, and she says she plans to stay.

"I grew up here, so I'm pretty much a country girl," she said. "I like how relaxed everybody is. I like it because of the community aspect of it."

While the population may have declined from its peak, in more important ways The Farm has grown from its agrarian beginnings, Stevenson said. Now it is home to more than 20 businesses, including a publishing company, food stores, doctors and construction companies that specialize in environmentally friendly technologies.

More than a half-dozen nonprofit groups also operate out of The Farm, including The Farm Midwives, a retirement village and Peace Roots Alliance, which is working to register new voters.

Another misconception about the communes, according to Stevenson and others, is that the groups of young people who founded them weren't accepted by their neighbors when they moved into rural communities to get back to the earth.

"Once they kind of got over the initial shock of us living there, some of them became our staunchest allies," Stevenson said. "We always had a strong work ethic, so they admired that. It was also a time when a lot of young people were leaving the area, so to see a group of young people coming to the area wanting to learn farming, that made them happy."

Some of the children Skinner met in elementary and middle school reacted with "a little bit of prejudice" that she came from The Farm, but she said that has changed.

"Now when I go back and see kids from the same school now they say, 'You're from The Farm? That's so cool,' " she said.

Caroline Estes of Alpha Farm near Mapleton, Ore., recalls a reaction similar to the one Stevenson said he and the others at The Farm received, when she and the other founders of the community moved there from Philadelphia more than 30 years ago.

"We were told we could do most anything we wanted to as long as we worked hard and paid our taxes. That's kind of an Oregon thing. That's what we did," she said.

Alpha Farm was founded by a group of people who believed that the country was on a path that "wasn't sustainable," Estes said. The inspiration for the social structure of the community came from the Quakers, with their values of nonviolence and the need for consensus in decision-making and a simple way of life.

Like The Farm, Alpha Farm has also reached out into the community around it, opening a bookstore and cafe in Mapleton, the closest town to the farm.

"We're very active in the community," Estes said. "One of the reasons we have a store is to have an open face to the community."

Among the accomplishments of the farm members' activism, she said, were stopping the spraying of pesticides along roadsides in the county, closing parts of the surrounding forest to logging for eight years to protect the spotted owl, and starting a food co-op that offered lower-priced fresh produce.

For many of the communities today, the goal is to be more than a role model. Instead, they want to take an active role in the community around them.

The desire to create a community outside of mainstream American life doesn't send everybody running for the woods, though. For some, the problems in American cities are all the more reason to stay there.

In Los Angeles, for example, a group of people was planning an eco-village in 1992 when the riots — sparked by the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King — broke out in the neighborhood. That forced them to rethink their focus.

"We had already been planning to build a sexy new solar-powered, state-of-the-art eco-neighborhood when the fires came," said the Los Angeles Eco-Village's Arkin. "We took a deep breath and said, 'What should our priorities be?' Our goal was to transform a really unhealthy neighborhood into a healthy community."

So along with trying to minimize their impact on the environment in terms of energy use, waste and pollutants, they tried to maximize their impact on their neighbors, by sharing the produce from their gardens and trying to encourage the people who lived around them to get to know one another and take back the neighborhood from drug dealers, prostitutes and gang members.

They tried to reach out beyond the neighborhood by periodically opening their bicycle repair shop for classes to teach people how to fix their own bikes, as part of their effort to get people to be less dependent on cars.

"We have a very strong public interest purpose, and that is to reinvent the way we live in our cities," Arkin said.

After 2 years, I've finally found my favorite spot in the community. It's the upper level of our old dairy barn, now used for various storage. Right now, the lower half is our recycling storage, and the upper level is full of onions layed out on racks to cure. The sides of the barn are wooden slats that weren't even attempted to fit closely together, and the afternoon sun slants in on all sides through the cracks. There are open windows at the front and the back, so there's a constant cross breeze. The rear window looks out on a cow pasture lined with juniper trees, and below it, the pond. The front window faces one of our gardens, and a main path runs directly past it.

Our garden manager is on vacation for a couple weeks, and so individual members of the garden crew have taken on different responsibilities to keep everything flowing and growing. I've become the Onion Queen. It's my job to check on the curing onions to see when they're ready to be trimmed and bagged for storage. For the past two days, I've spent hours just sitting up there beside the onion racks, snipping off the tops and listening to classical music. It's the only place I've found in the community where I can work for 5 hours straight without seeing another person. I can let my mind wander without external input of people asking me questions or even simply overhearing conversations. I'm by myself, alone, a rare feeling on the commune. And I love it. Luckily, there's still lots more onions to go!

Other news from the commune: one of our current visitors does aura readings, and she's been doing sessions with lots of members over the past 2 weeks. A common conversation in the lounge now begins with "what color is your aura?" Lots of laughing and acknowledging that we're fulfillig the stereotypes of a new age hippie commune, but still, it's not unusual to walk past a group of people and hear them talking about their "primary", "secondary", and "tertiary" aura colors, their "toxic" colors, and their shamanic paths. I'm a Sensitive Tan, with secondary and tertiary colors of Red and Green. Magenta is my Toxic Color -- she told me to get rid of any magenta clothing I have. My personal fashion statement hasn't included a lot of magenta lately anyways.

and finally, tonight I started to learn how to spin poi -- the precursor to fire dancing. Another visitor (not the aura lady) has been spinning fire for years and she performed for us at a party a few nights ago. Tonight she started teaching me (sans fire!), and I love it. Dancing is something I love to do because it roots me in my body. This is completely different because it EXTENDS my movement beyond my body! On a couple of moves I actually had to put down the poi and just made circles with my arms until I could grok how everything was supposed to flow. Very challenging, and very rewarding. A completely different way of dancing for me, using "instruments" that are connected to my body and influenced by my body but operating in their own realm of movement and gravity. It was a stretch for my mind, and I crave that kind of mental and physical challenge. OOH! Just wait until I'm ready to light them on fire...

I laughed harder tonight than I've laughed in awhile, the uncontrollable, tears-streaming-down-my-face kind of laughter.

a group of us got together to play games after dinner. We started out with Pictionary, and then took a break and ran down to the pond for a late night swim. Eight of us floated around in the water for an hour, talking and laughing in the dark. A few times I pulled my awareness back and allowed myself to acknowledge and appreciate the beauty of the experience -- noticing the brilliant stars overhead and the feel of the water on my body, feeling the utter joy of laughing with a large group of friends.

when it got too cold to stay in the water, we went back to the games, and started to play Taboo (the game where one person has to get the rest of the people to guess a specific word, and they can say anything except for 5 words listed on the card). One person started describing her word, saying "when you go somewhere on vacation, you stay in a ..." "HOTEL!" we yelled.
"Yes, and the person who takes your..."
"Concierge!"
"Like that, but different"
"Bellboy!"
"Yes, but the end is bouncy"
"Bellboy-oy-oy!" was the first thing out of my mouth. Another friend and I started laughing hysterically, and started laughing even more when she finally revealed that the word was "Bellhop".

I had a garden shift this morning, which during this time of year is 4 hours, starting at 8am. Lunch is at noon, and one of the reasons why I love garden shifts is that I get 4 hours of work done before lunch. Our labor commitment to the community each week is 42 hours of work, which averages out to 6 hours a day. So when I have a garden shift in the morning, I only have two hours left to do after lunch. Tonight I was scheduled for dishes after dinner, which is a two hour job for 3 people, so I didn't have to do any work all afternoon. I ended up weaving hammocks for awhile anyway because I didn't do much work at all yesterday, so I need to make up for it if I'm going to make "quota" this week. But still, it was nice to know I could take it easy. A friend and I made popsicles with orange juice, and others with mashed up banannas in soymilk. We all ate them tonight during the games, and they were delicious! We decided we're going to be the popsicle queens this summer, and make all different flavors all summer long. This friend is a new member who I "click" with so well -- we actually grew up in the same state and went to similar colleges about two hours away from each other. She's been here 3 days and we're already unseperable! Hooray for friendship!

Yikes, that sounds cheesy. For balance, I'll report that there is currently a big black bug crawling across the carpet in the office.

There is something so powerful in being Known. There's validation of Self, affirmation of my experience of Reality when others experience and know it too.

We just watched a crazy movie about teenage kids at a drama camp. Although I never actually went to camp, I had the same obsession with theater and general life drama as the kids in the movie. Such a huge part of my life, right up until three days before I came to Twin Oaks, my last day as a professional actress working with a travelling theater company.

And now I live in this place where people know I used to be an actress, where I've performed my old audition monologue for open mic nights, and directed kids plays and musical farces of communal life. But they don't know me as an Actress, as someone using my craft to explore and express the deeper parts of myself.

Watching the movie tonight, I longed for the friends who know me in this way, the friends with whom I've shared the stage and the cast party dance floors. They've seen me express the possibilities of who I am -- who I could be -- and in seeing those, they Know me more fully.

after the movie I walked in a daze down to the courtyard (where I live), and as I passed the path down to the pond, on a whim I decided to jump in. Swimming in the middle of the night is magic, and tonight as I waded into the water, I regrounded myself in the reality of what my life is right now. "I'm standing naked in a pond on a commune in Virginia."

I ducked my head under the water and folded my body into a forward somersault under the water. The water on my skin as I spun upsidedown brought me to an even deeper understanding. It's not even a matter of being on a commune instead of on the stage. I'm Here, right now. The water and the trees and the peeper frogs are merely my witness -- I'm not an actress, I'm not a communard... I simply Am. I am.

I came out of the somersault and as my head rose above the water, my Zen understanding faded. The memory of the moment remained, but I was again acutely aware of my life and my history.

Regarding comments: philosophical reflection only, please -- no advice. I want to work this one out for myself.

Home from Iowa on Friday morning. 2am. We left Iowa at 7am. 19 hours in the rental car, and it wasn't really that bad. Two of us from Twin Oaks drove out there, and on the way home we were carpooling with two men who were coming to visit the community. One is from England and the other lives in Australia. Both have studied and wrote about communities for most of their adult lives. They kept us well entertained through the cornfields of the midwest and the mountains of West Virginia. Chris, the Englander (author of Diggers and Dreamers, a guide to communal living in Britain), told us stories of strange annual festivals in England. The winner was the cheese rolling contest, where villagers have been rolling rounds of cheese down a mountain with a 70% grade, then chasing after them -- scrambling furiously down the practically vertical slope -- to see who can catch the cheese first... a 200 year-old tradition.

When we finally arrived back home, we drove the car up to the residences to unload. We had shut all the doors and were walking away from the car when suddenly the headlights flashed and we heard the simultaneous "click" of the four doors automatically locking. ??!??! What is this? Of course, I had left the keys on the front seat of the car so I wouldn't loose them while shuffling around luggage. I went back and tried all the doors, and they were in fact locked. I get that most people live in places where leaving keys in the car isn't the smartest thing in the world, and I appreciate the difference between those places and the place where I live. And yet, appreciating those differences did nothing for me at 2am when the keys were trapped in the front seat of an overly self-protective Chevy that contained all of my baggage in the trunk. Thank goodness for the wonders of Gene at AAA, who jimmied the lock this morning in mere minutes.

The conference was a great 3 days of academia, bringing me back to the question of wondering if grad school is a part of my future. The lectures by brilliant and semi-brilliant professors reinvigorated my academic mind at some points, and confirmed my frustration with meaningless pontification at others. It was amazing to meet Israeli kibbutz members who have been living in community for over 50 years, and hear them describe the changes that are taking place in the kibbutz movemtent. They're becoming more and more privatized, more and more focused on individual resources... I worry about Twin Oaks heading in that direction.

It was also amazing to be onsite at a historic commune, the Amana Colonies (near Cedar Rapids). The community was established as a German religious community in 1855, and over 1,000 people lived communally until 1932, when they decided to privatize everything. Now it's a small tourist trap, with souveniers and Beanie Babies in every "authentic" Amana Colony store. Still, it was fascinating to learn the history and see the seven small towns they had created, which are now quaint semi-suburbs. Maybe I'm being too harsh, it's just that after seeing the life cycles of both Amana and the kibbutzim, I worry about the trajectory of Twin Oaks... the other Twin Oaker and I joked all week about "Ye Olde Hammock Shoppe" and the "Dairy Barn Theater", with miniature hammocks and imitation genuine Twin Oaks tofu sold in the gift shop. Yikes.