It's been awhile since I've written... life is chugging right along on, having jumped the tracks and now careening wildly in a new direction. I think I have a bit of whiplash.

I'm finding that I'm quickly disengaging from life at Twin Oaks, whether I want to or not. It hasn't been a conscious decision to start pulling back -- I'm not leaving for at least another two months and I want to be involved and engaged with what's happening while I'm there. Instead, I realize that disengaging is a neccessary hitchiker to the choice and announcement of departure, no matter how far in the future it's going to happen. My trajectory has shifted. I'm moving away from the commune, and so I'm not putting my energy into the collective vision of what we're doing together. Now it's what they're doing together. I'm seperate from the whole because I'm not moving forward with the whole. I'm not thinking about what musical we're going to perform this winter. I'm not thinking about whose Validation Day card I'm going to make. I'm not investing my thoughts and energy into wondering how to do the projects that come into my mind -- instead I'm releasing them as fantasies and pipe dreams. I'm no longer creating at Twin Oaks. I'm packing. And I'm resisting that, wanting to be creating, clinging to the desire to be invested and involved instead of mourning and releasing. I'm moving on, at least for awhile. I may come back. I may return. And that's not the direction I'm moving in right now. Right now I'm moving towards grad school. I'm moving towards academic exploration and opportunities to teach.

and as I write those sentences, I don't feel passion. I feel dread. A friend who is currently a grad student in sociology at UNC just forwarded me a bunch of emails that have been circulating through his department, highlighting the internal politics and money manipulations and bureaucracy that I guess exists everywhere, and especially in academia. Is all of life a petty battlefield? This is a piece of Twin Oaks I want to get away from! What keeps us from being honest with each other? Fear. What keeps us stuck in fear? More fear. What else? How do we learn to be more transparent, more honest, and take more responsibility? I thought it was communal living. I thought living and working together, making decisions together, relying on each other for basic survival would necessitate openness and trust. And it does, in some ways. I have more open and trust-filled friendships and relationships than I've ever had in my life. And still there's the underlying fear and blame and resentment that poisons our growth at Twin Oaks, and we just don't seem to know how to work with that, how to dissolve its power to keep life stagnant and unchanging.

I'm going to keep exploring, and grad school is just another step on this journey...

Full circle -- I'm back with the cows.

For those of you who have been reading from the beginning, you'll remember my early days as a cow-milker.  I stopped almost 2 years ago after a much-loved Jersey died of mastitis and I began questioning the ethics of domesticated animals.  I was exploring my own capacity for wildness, and I started to despise myself for helping train the wildness out of these creatures I had grown to love.  I stopped eating dairy and eggs... I was a vegan for nearly a year and then slowly started slipping into my old eating habits.  It was just too hard to find food that met my diet when I traveled by Greyhound, and  when certain people cooked on the commune (there are "vegan options" at every meal, and sometimes -- albeit rarely --  that's just a tray of green beans).

And now I'm back in the barn.  A large portion of the dairy crew has been off the farm on vacation for the past week, and the dairy manager asked me if I'd mind coming down and helping out to ease the labor on the remaining crew.  I'd been thinking about going back to milking for awhile, and I was glad for the opportunity to check things out again.  I've been doing the afternoon chores, giving bottles to the calves and grain to the teenagers and filling all the water tanks in the different pastures.  My body remembers the barn and the cows.  I easily swing my legs through the fence and slip my body as always between the poles into the calfyard without thinking.  I navigate the rowdy teens, charging confidently to the grain trough with the bucket held high, warding off hungry heiffers and rambunctious young males.   I've also been helping out the morning milkers, herding the cows and doing small tasks around the barn.  I easily remember the heft of the full milk cans, stooping and lifting from my legs to gracefully heave them into the cooler.   When I'm herding, I again slip into the energetic space of aligning myself with the cows' intentions, and using compassion and suggestion to get them to understand mine.

I love being with these animals again.  I remember how much they have to teach me. 

second thoughts... third thoughts... why am I leaving this amazing place?  It's beautiful here.  I can smell fall.  I can hear birds and the leaves rustling in the trees.  No cars or sirens or cell phones ringing.  I don't touch money.  I harvest the food I eat.  I don't have a lock on my door.  I walk alone in the dark and know every step of the path.

and still, something else is calling to me.  I don't feel the pull in this moment, and I know I'll feel it again.  I want to be doing something... more ?relevant?.  I came here because I wanted to be more connected to the basics of life.  And now I want to be more connected with the other humans on the planet and share what I've been learning in this paradise outpost.  Is grad school and eventual professorship the best way to do that?  It's the most accessible way to me right now, the clearest path.  And still, I retch as I'm filling out my application.  GPA, honor societies, GRE scores... this isn't who I am -- my scores are applying to grad school, not me.  People keep asking me if I'm going to take the Kaplan course to improve my GRE scores, and it feels a bit like steroids in the Olympics.  The Kaplan course isn't going to make me smarter or more prepared for grad school, it'll just help me get higher scores.  So the people who can pay for the course get higher scores and the people who don't pay for the course just get whatever they get without the steroid enhancement.  It's such a basic and blatant stratification of a supposed "objective measuring of smarts" based on economics.  YUCK!  I don't want to perpetuate it, and I want to get into grad school.  What's a justice-minded girl to do?  And of course, there's the whole academic institution thing in itself.  Folks who can pay for college get a higher education and more opportunities.  Fuck...  what am I doing?