Off to Missouri

As I said a couple of posts ago, I won't remain settled in Boston for long.  (See Life Erupts, 5/1/13)   I've gotten into the visiting program that I applied for at Dancing Rabbit and I'll be leaving Boston Sunday, May 19th (less than two weeks from now) and getting to Missouri the next night.

While I've talked about this before (see my post on Communities of Communities, 6/9/12), I'm going to recap my community info so you don't have to look so hard.  If you do want more info on this, you should look up that old post. Dancing Rabbit (DR) is one of three intentional communities in the small town of Rutledge, MO--Sandhill (a small income sharing community that's been in Rutledge since the 1970s) and Red Earth Farms (a homesteading community that split off from DR and is located right across the road) are located nearby.  But DR, with 70 or so members, is by far the largest.

I'm going to DR, first of all, because I want to learn how it works. Along with Earthaven in North Carolina, it's one of the best known rural ecovillages.  I also want to see and understand the connections and cooperation between the three Rutledge communities.  What I've seen makes me think of the way that Twin Oaks, Acorn, and Living Energy Farm work together.  I've seen that first-hand, now I'm going to get to check out how they do it in the 'Show-Me' state.

While I'm out there, I may also visit the Possibility Alliance, a community forty miles away in La Plata (which is also where the train station is).  I haven't arranged that yet so we'll see if that happens.

Meanwhile, I'm learning to take life as it comes and not plan too much, because I'm never quite sure what comes next.  And so the journey continues...


Quote of the Day: "...it seems to me that knowing where we are going encourages us to stop seeing and hearing and allows us to fall asleep....
"Not knowing where you are going creates more than uncertainty; it fosters a sense of aliveness, an appreciation of the particulars around you....
"The truth is that we are always moving toward mystery and so we are far closer to what is real when we do not see our destination clearly." - Rachel Naomi Remen

Issues in Community: Decision Making

The Spring 2013 issue of Communities magazine has a very interesting article by Diana Leafe Christian entitled "Consensus and the Burden of Added Process: Are There Easier Ways to Make Decisions?"  This is part three in a series that she has been writing on the problems with consensus and alternatives to it.  What I find interesting about it is that with previous articles she focused on her issues with 'consensus-with-unanimity', here she seems to realize that it actually does work for some communities.

In this article, she seems to be saying what I've been thinking for a while.  For certain communities it seems to work (she suggests these are communities formed in the eighties or earlier, but Acorn is one of the communities I know where it seems to work and Acorn was founded in 1993--I also know several co-op households, founded in this millennium, where consensus seems to work as well), whereas for others ('founded after the 1980s' and she specifically cites cohousing and ecovillages) it often becomes a burden and can "lead to disharmony, distrust, lower morale, and dwindling meeting attendance".  The whole article is worth reading--even multiple times.  (In fact, the whole series, including various people's replies to the articles, can give you quite an education in the nuances of consensus and other forms of decision making.) Here I'm simply focusing on which communities consensus works for.

I think she's absolutely right on why this type of consensus doesn't work for most cohousing and many ecovillage-type communities.  A large, very diverse group will probably need something more structured and less open to what she (and others) refer to as 'tyranny of the minority'.  She points out that not everyone is willing to go through the intense processing that this type of consensus can require. On the other hand, it's been my experience that many smaller households and communities (regardless of when they were founded), especially if they share common core values, are willing to do the work of building closeness with each other by working through conflict.

I want to be clear--I don't think that one situation is superior to the other. Diana has a sidebar to this article listing the reasons that 'Cohousers and Ecovillagers Join Community', and I can really understand them. Many of them become impatient with endless processing, especially if building the closeness and trust that comes with this isn't one of their priorities.  I don't believe in 'one size fits all' when it comes to community. In one of the earliest posts on this blog (Looking for The Answer?, 6/28/08) I wrote that I didn't think there was any one solution to our problems.  Like anything else, consensus is just one of the tools in the decision-making toolbox.  It's quite useful, but I know that it won't work for all communities.  I'm glad that Diana has pushed us to look at this, and I'm glad she's realized that this can vary from community to community.  The moral here is that as you're building community, think about what kind of community you want, and then explore what decision-making tools can help build that.


Quote of the Day: "I agree that some people do join communities mostly to experience deeper relationships and are willing to put in the time required.  But I don't think most people join for this reason.  Most cohousers and ecovillagers that I know seem to have other reasons for living in community." - Diana Leafe Christian

Life Erupts

It's full spring once again. May Day, Beltaine, whatever you want to call it.  The time of year when life not only renews itself, it bursts forth in a vibrant, pulsating frenzy.

I'm currently staying in Dorchester, a rather gritty neighborhood of Boston.  Quite urban. But you can't avoid noticing this resurrection.  I've got a third floor room and on the deck outside the kitchen a maple tree is exploding into new being, thrusting yellow-green blossoms at me every time I go out there. Walking around the block confronts me with flowers of purple, yellow, pink, blue, and white. The daffodils still linger and several houses have a riot of many-colored tulips in their yards.  At the end of the street, a tree has wrapped itself in a shimmer of greenish-white.

The street itself is only slightly busy, so a group of boys stuck a basketball net on the curb and were using the road to dribble and shoot hoops from, moving out of the way briefly when the occasional car would come by.  A girl down the other end of the street leapt at a branch of a tree with pink blossoms, pulling it down and collecting a bouquet of petals to bring home.

And my life is renewing as well.  I am reconnecting with a nearby co-op house that I used to live in, where I'll be cooking and eating over the next few months.  I just got an email from Dancing Rabbit in Missouri and I'll be visiting there at the end of May.  And I've been slowly connecting with people who say that they want to create or be part of income sharing communities in New England or nearby.  I've been doing this too long to believe that most of these connections will lead to something, but who knows? Life erupts and right now I'm cruising on the pure joy of that.


Quote of the Day: "Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are." - Marianne Williamson

Lessons from Pennsylvania

Sorry about the long delay in posting.  (over a month, I know.) I'm back in the Boston area after many adventures. (Quite a few of them involving travel--my most recent was trying to return to Boston last Friday when the city and the public transit system were shut down.  If you've been following the news you know why.)

I just spent a month in Pennsylvania.  I learned a lot of things in my time there.  I worked on projects involving hugelkultur and sheet mulching.  One of the people there has a very different method of doing humanure (see my post on Humanure, 1/10/13) involving newspaper.  It was a bit tricky but it was useful to learn.  I took a field trip to Lancaster to learn about the Amish and Mennonites.  I didn't actually go to any Amish locations but I did have an interesting conversation with a Mennonite man who had some insights into why the plain clothes (this was what the common people wore when the Amish were starting out--as opposed to the dress of the aristocracy) and why the Anabaptists (the ancestors of the Amish and Mennonites) and early Quakers were persecuted (the imperialists are always interested in getting rid of those who threaten their way of life).

I also gave a few presentations--one on sprouting (see my post on Sprouts!, 2/26/10) and another (of course) on intentional community.

A bigger learning was from watching these folks and how they were trying to set up something. It turned out not to be what I wanted and I'm not sure that they're actually going to get what they want (I'm not even sure they know what they want) but it makes some of the things that get in the way of building community much more apparent to me.

Probably the most important learning I had was about the ways I don't communicate clearly.  There was a bit of misunderstanding that happened and I could see how I contributed to much of it.   I did try to leave there well but I'm very clear that I need to work on some of my stuff if I'm going to build community (feedback that I got from others as well).  As one of my friends puts it, "Wherever you go, there you are."



Quote of the Day: "The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Snow, Darkness, and Fire

I am in the midst of my final week at Twin Oaks.  Much of the last few days has been spent recovering from the events of last week.

Last Wednesday it snowed here.  I had been wondering if I'd see any snow while I was in Virginia.  Well, we got six inches.  In the Boston area, that wouldn't mean much.  But here there aren't sidewalks or even paved roads.  (At least not within Twin Oaks.)  Everything is dirt roads and paths.  So the experience was quite different from six inches in the city.  To make things worse, it was a wet snow that brought down a lot of power lines.  We were without power for four days.

At first it was fun.  The first night without power, I walked to the far end of Twin Oaks--a place they call Emerald City.  But unlike the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, the road there wasn't paved with yellow bricks.  That night the road was a muddy, slushy mess.

But the stars here are beautiful at night--and the stars and snow kept things from getting too dark.  Four days later, though, the charm was wearing off.  Fortunately, there is a nice woodstove in the visitor's cottage, so we kept warm at night.  And there were lots of candlelight dinners.  And even with all the inconveniences we were very lucky.

Acorn, the community that I stayed at last September and seven miles down the road from here, was not so lucky.  They got their power back much sooner.  However, when the power went out, someone ran into one building to rescue some baby chicks that were being kept warm by an electric heater and apparently moved the heater to the wrong place. When the power came back on it started a fire that turned into an inferno that destroyed the whole building.  Very fortunately, this wasn't a building anyone lived in and no one was hurt--but there was thousands of dollars of damage, including their communal clothes supply and there was at least one automobile nearby that the heat of the fire literally melted the bumper.

Last Saturday, I did what I'm calling a communal trifecta.  A small group of us went over to Acorn briefly (so I got to see the damage firsthand and talk with some of the folks there) before we went on to Living Energy Farm for a work day there.  By Saturday much of the snow had melted, but Living Energy Farm (most of which isn't built yet) was a mud pit.  I was able to help with putting up a fence for an orchard there, but I returned a muddy mess.  Still, it was good to see some of what's going on in the other communities around here.

This Friday, I'll be leaving Twin Oaks and going to stay with a couple of my cousins (and their large and loving family) who live near Richmond.  Then next Monday I'll be off to Pennsylvania, for my next community adventures.


Quote of the Day: "To enter the courtyard at Twin Oaks is--sooner or later--to come face-to-face with the profundity of the utopian question.  Although that same question is everywhere, including wherever you are now, it is perhaps clearer on this commune in Virginia only because in our time several hundred of our contemporaries have totally committed a portion of their lives to wrestling with it in the context of these four-hundred and eighty-three acres." - Ingrid Komar

Issues in Community: Task and Morale Functions

Back in 2008 I wrote a post (Equality and Leadership, 10/2/08) that mentioned a pamphlet which influenced my thinking.  'Leadership for Change' was focused on creating a 'feminist model' of leadership and, among other things, talked about two kinds of group functions that they saw leadership focused on.  The first, which they called task functions is defined as working toward 'group achievement'; the second, which they call morale functions (and I've also heard referred to as process functions) works toward 'group maintenance'.

The authors (Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey) go on to list ten task functions (information and opinion-giving, information and opinion-seeking, proposing goals and initiating action, direction-giving, summarizing, coordinating, diagnosing/figuring out group difficulties and blocks, energizing, reality-testing, and evaluating) and ten morale functions (encouraging participation, harmonizing and compromising, relieving tension, helping communication, evaluating the emotional climate, observing process, setting standards, active listening, building trust, and solving interpersonal problems).  Their point is that groups need both of these type of functions.  I've heard it said that groups that focus only on tasks either fall apart before they complete their first task--or right afterwards, and groups that focus solely on morale often end up drifting and eventually falling apart because members get frustrated about not accomplishing anything.

I'm convinced that communities need both.  Unfortunately, many communities end up focusing on only one of these, since they may be stacked with either people who joined to get things done or people who joined because of the supportive atmosphere.  The result is that I read complaints about these groups, either that they spend all their time 'processing' and never get anything done, or that they burn out their members with overly ambitious schemes.

I think that one reason Twin Oaks has lasted so long is that they do a good job of both: they have thriving businesses, abundant gardens, and wonderful meals, and they have parties and support members social lives and find many ways of taking care of each other.  So my advice to people forming communities is to look at both of these functions.  Ask yourself (and each other) two questions: What do you want to accomplish as a community?  (Also known as, what's your goal or mission?) And how do you plan to take care of your members?  How can you support each other?

In a good community, members enjoy themselves and feel cared for and get things done.



Quote of the Day: "Understanding these functions can make the difference between a group that flounders and a group that moves... Shared leadership... values the morale functions highly and sees that the power of the group in the long run is as dependent on the nurturance of its members as on its efficiency in particular tasks." - Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey

Carbon-Free

The Carbon-Free Home by Stephen & Rebekah Hren is a step by step blueprint for how to reduce your use of fossil fuels bit by bit until you are basically 'carbon-free'.

This is a book of projects, although it includes lots of little bits of their story of how they have weaned themselves free, and lots of explanations of what's going on and ways to think about it.  The authors have chosen to focus on eleven specific areas: energy use, renewable electrical systems, appliances and lighting, cooking, refrigeration, hot water, heating and cooling the house, rainwater, waste, food and landscaping, and transportation. 

Each chapter contains a bunch of projects clearly labeled with the time involved, cost, energy saved, ease of use, maintenance level, and materials and tools needed.  The skill level involved is there as well, and it varies.  Some of these projects anyone could do and for others, some skill with carpentry or plumbing or electrical work is needed.  Still, for the DIY person who wants to begin to work their way out of the system, this book is a gold mine.  And even if you don't have the skills, you will learn a lot about how things work and still find a few projects to get you started on radically reducing your carbon footprint.

I like that their stories include the mistakes that they made--in the hopes that you won't repeat them.  For those who want to live beyond fossil fuels but aren't ready to move to that country commune, this is a good place to start the journey.


Quote of the Day:  "We ... are convinced that as day turns to dusk for fossil fuels, we must take a good look at our surroundings and learn to live with what we have already built, what we've spent our free fossil currency on: the infrastructure, especially the housing, that already exists in our towns and cities.  For us it was time to learn from our mistakes and move back to the city, a city that had oodles of existing and abandoned houses just waiting for a good retrofit..."  - Stephen & Rebekah Hren