Relax..

After a full day and a good night's sleep, I am feeling much more adapted to my new surroundings. Life here is very interesting. It's basically a good old-fashioned commune! We all eat together, do all our own dishes by hand, all help clean the place every morning (and since there are a lot of us, it doesn't take that long), and we sleep in these group tents called yurts (I'd never heard of a yurt before. What a funny word!). The only thing we don't do is cook our own meals. This is taken care of by volunteers who come to stay on the land for a few weeks at a time while workshops or other events are being hosted here. Different volunteers have different assignments, for some it's cooking, others laundry (communal laundry like towels and such, not personal clothes) and others maintain the land. The daily schedule is as follows:

7:45 AM - Susan Parenti, one of the "faculty" members, marches around with her accordion and wakes us up.

8-9 AM - Breakfast is served in The Farmhouse

9-9:30 AM - "Tuto-Tuto" which is Italian for 'everyone'. Susan starts singing this ridiculous song whose only words are "Tuto-Tuto", and we circle up and are given our group's cleaning assignment. Each cleaning crew has a name. We named ourselves Unicornucopia, and even went so far as to give each member an alias. There is Starlight (me), Sparkles (John), Juan Avocado ('Avo' for short...another John), Mr. Moonlight (Rodrigo), and Miss-Direction (for Verena, a volunteer from Germany. She gives us our marching orders.)

10 AM-12 PM - Classes

12:30-1:30 PM- Lunch

2-4 PM- Classes

6:30-7:30 PM- Dinner

8-10 PM - Evening activities which sometimes is guest speakers and other times open for whatever you feel like doing.

10-??? Every night so far we've spent well over two hours singing songs and telling stories and jokes and such. We made a fire in the fire pit the first night, but it was too wet last night after a day of pouring rain. We attempted to make one tonight and it worked...sort of. Still pretty wet, but we got something going. It's pretty great.

We are essentially split into two groups for classes, one with Composition as the focal point, and the other with Activism as the focal point. The whole idea though is that these focal points are merely points of departure, and the idea is to meet in the middle and explore where and how the two intersect and overlap. I think as the week progresses we will be combining the groups for classes and discussion. We've had some very interesting and experimental assignments that definitely make you think.

There's so much more to share, but it's 12:47 AM and time to sleep.