Sandhill Farm

In the 2002 hit musical Chicago, John C Reilly sings “Mister Cellophane,” a song about what it’s like to be a nobody, overshadowed by his wife Roxie. In the song, he complains about being the kind of person people "see right through." Today I want to write about what it’s like to be committed to being transparent—which is similar, but different. While John C was talking about being the kind of person that people look past, I’m talking about the kind of person you can see into the heart of.

While John C’s character was safe from exposure (no one cared a fig), when you’re committed to transparency it can be tricky territory. How accurately are you describing yourself (as opposed to exposing your self-distortion)? What if you invite everyone to have a peek inside your soul and no one bothers to look (because they’ve got to walk the dog or collect the dry cleaning)? What if people are repulsed by what they see (and suddenly stop returning your calls or "unfriend" you on Facebook)?

I’ve been a process consultant for 22 years and one of my strongest lessons over that time is that I cannot expect groups to be vulnerable with me unless I’m willing to be vulnerable with them. Given that it’s seldom possible to do profound work unless you wade into the tender spots, this has led me to a surprising conclusion: I do my best work with others when I’m working on myself.

While I used to labor under the mistaken impression that groups wanted their consultant to be a Rock of Gibraltor and unphased by whatever popped out of the closet when exploring impacted distress, I’ve learned that that’s only half true. While groups do want me to be able to ride the bucking bronco, they simultaneously love hearing stories about how I’ve been bucked off in the past (en route to learning the skills that allow me to stay atop the chaos they serve up).

In recent months there's been an sharp uptick in inquires from reporters, wondering if interest in community living is on the rise as a response to the current economic hard times. The quick answer is a resounding "Yes!"

FIC has experienced a 25% increase in web traffic over a year ago—now up to almost 2000 per day. Fully 75% of those visits are to our online Directory, which is the #1 source worldwide for finding out who's doing what and where, in the world of intentional communities. This is our bread and butter, and a lot of people are stopping by our Directory snack shop for a bite of sustenance.

A deeper question is how close are we as a society to major economic upheaval? Who knows. I first started thinking seriosuly about the possibility of major economic collapse as a college junior in 1970, when campuses were on strike in response to Nixon's Cambodian misadventure, as part of our failed strategy in Vietnam (styled euphemistically as an "incursion"). Remember Kent State? I do, and I wondered that spring if colleges would be open for business again the following fall.

College classes did indeed resume that fall, and every fall since then. I've been listening to periodic predictions of catastrophic economic upheaval ever since: the OPEC oil emarbgo in 1973; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; the Battle in Seattle and WTO protest in 1999; The World Trade Center bombings in 2001, Now it's the sub-prime mortgage scandal, Peak Oil, and Transition Towns. I've been listening to forecasts of impending doom for nearly 40 years. Will it really happen this time? I don't know.

I just finished doing a weekend Introduction to Facilitation Workshop at Heathcote Community in Freeland MD. Friday evening through Sunday afternoon I worked and laughed with 16 participants as we explored a wide range of group situations and typical challenges that facilitators face. As a student of group dynamics and a teacher of facilitation, I am frequently in the position of describing the pitfalls that groups fall into by virtue of not having discussed and made explicit agreements about how they want to view to handle certain things.

By Sunday afternoon the workshop participants were all over me to give them a list of these questions, so here goes.

The main thing to understand about this is not there is one right way to address all of the questions (indeed, different groups come up with all manner of good answers). Rather, it’s to understand that having no answer is guaranteed to be a problem. Sooner or later, the ambiguity will to bite you in the butt, and it’s much worse to attempt to sort many of these things out when you’re in the midst of tension resulting from members proceeding from different assumptions—or guesses—about the group’s position.

Almost all groups have some basic agreements: for example, about common values, how one becomes a member, and how the group will make decisions. While that’s a good start, it isn’t nearly enough. Here’s a much longer list of things that groups should discuss—preferably before the water gets hot: Note that none of these questions is limited to residential communities: they are meant to apply to any group trying to function cooperatively.

I got involved with intentional community in 1974, when I joined with three others to start Sandhill Farm. Because I've found a lifestyle that has worked for me—providing just the right balance of stimulation, support, and authenticity—I've stayed.

Moving beyond personal support, I see my life in community also as a platform for social change work. It's about incorporating one's values into everyday life, and about control of one's time—having sufficient flexibility and support to be able to concentrate my attention on what's happening (to me and around me), so that I can learn, and then share what I'm learning.

One of the most important lessons for me has been the need to integrate one's thinking with one's feelings—about paying attention to both the head and the belly, honoring for the insights and compensating for the blindness of each. At its best, community is a nutrient rich environment, perfect for fostering the development of this special kind of indigo hybrid, replete with its promise of understanding and compassion—two fruits for which there is rarely a surplus.

Over the course of our 35 years as an intentional community, Sandhill Farm has had an incredible variety of visitors, and therefore, we've accumulated an equally incredible wealth of visitor stories. One of my favorite memories goes back about 25 years, when we asked a visitor for his impressions of the community after being with is for a week. After a moment of reflection, he replied solemnly, “I really like chickens.”

For a moment, no one spoke. After all, we had been living with poultry (and our own egg supply) almost from the beginning and most of us had a fondness for chickens, but we also knew that no one else had ever considered that standout feature of our community life. Some of us were thinking, “Did he really say that?”

Well, it turned out he didn’t. He’d said that he really liked check-ins, and we’d all simply transposed the vowels. We had such a good laugh over it that we decided, on the spot, to start calling check-ins chickens, and have incorporated that malapropism into our local argot ever since.
• • •
Last Thursday, Ma’ikwe and I arrived in Asheville NC for Weekend IV of the two-year Integrative Facilitation training we’re conducting in the Southeast. That evening we had one of the most amazing chickens I’d ever experienced.

Though I’m hardly a hermit, and I try hard not to be crabby, I nonetheless have no qualms whatsoever about taking inspiration from the hermit crab and traveling through life in the raiment and accessories of others. Some have been passed on to me; some have been procured for me; some have been crafted for me. I carry reminders of my relationships with me all the time, both for economy and connection.

Let me enumerate:

The Traveling Man
—When my dad died in 1989, all of my siblings congregated in South Carolina to be with my mother. I lingered after the wake and helped her sort through his clothes. In consequence, I schlepped his sock collection home (it lasted more than a decade) and 20 years later I'm still using his olive drab canvas suitcase.

—One of my dearest community friends was Geoph Kozeny, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2007. Geoph used to live in San Francisco and sometime back in the late '80s he passed along to me a canvas tote sack with a wood-block image of a devil who had purchased a monster at auction (think Maurice Sendak). Long years ago it had been a fundraising premium for KQED, the NPR station based in San Francisco. As a process consultant for 22 years, I can't recall ever traveling to a job where I didn't have my "little devil bag." When the straps started showing serious signs of fraying last year, my daughter, Jo, surreptitiously made a template of the design and presented me with a replacement facsimile for Christmas—with reinforced straps. Is that love, or what? With any luck, it should last me another two decades.

It’s swarming season again! I wrote about why and how bees swarm a year ago. This year – it’s in the photos:

Photo #1:  a small swarm perfectly positioned:  perfect for the beekeeper/swarm catcher – it’s close to the ground – no having to balance a box on a ladder, etc.  Here I am admiring the bees with my lovely assistants and assuring the bees that I have honorable intentions – to provide a furnished home for them. What is inside the mass of bees? more bees – some hang on to the branch, others hang on to them, and others hang ….. etc. somewhere in the center is the queen.

Photo 2: the bee box is in position to receive the swarm – a quick vigorous shake of the branch to dislodge the bees – they gradually crawl inside on   the frames of beeswax foundation. what? you didn’t see the shake? “the hand is quicker than the eye.”

Photo 3:  ah! the satisfied look on the beekeeper’s face (me).

thanks to neighbors, Pete & Staci,  for calling us and offering us the swarm and thanks to Staci for the photos.

Wow! it’s been 6 weeks since my last post – many things have changed, some not.

It looks like a different world out my window: spring has matured into the abundance  of summer – it’s amazing how much plants grow with plenty of moisture. Our cool weather crops, especially the greens and brassicas are loving it. What has not changed is that we continue to have lots of rain – so much that it is challenging to get garden and farm work done.

In the gardens, we can keep up. We have raised beds and/or heavily mulched paths so that we can plant, weed, and harvest – unless the soil is really wet. We are harvesting leafy greens, asparagus, and now, strawberries. With 4 interns, visitors, and members, we get a lot done and the place is looking quite spiffy.

It’s a different story in our fields. In the last six weeks, we have had about 6 days when we could work the fields – this is the season to plant our annual spring crops. We’ve been in a pattern where it almost dries out – just before it rains again. About 10 days ago, we had about 3 days in the fields, in which we worked down green manure crops and also managed to transplant about 1.5 acres of sorghum. We had another 3 days in the fields a few days ago and transplanted the other 1.5 acres of sorghum, and planted popcorn, field corn (for cornmeal), pinto beans, black beans, yellow & brown mustard, and tillage radishes (to harvest the seed). Whew!

We had 2″ of rain yesterday – I feel lucky we got our field crops planted. We had less to plant this year:  less sorghum because we have not been selling as much, and we have not had access to about a third of our fields due to the creek washing out a bridge. The county has been working on replacing it but have been hampered by the weather as well. Hopefully, they will get it done before wheat harvest in early July.

I have a problem asking for what I want. In fact, I hate it. Probably the only thing harder is asking for what I need (not that I'm particularly good at discerning the difference).

Requests in the Group Context
I’m much more comfortable offering assistance than requesting it. My basic strategy as a community member—and as a partner—is to maximize what I can offer as support, while at the same time minimizing what I request. In general, giving more than one takes creates a certain amount of social lubricant that eases group dynamics. (As a relatively minor example, I often forego taking portions of popular dishes at common meals unless I'm confident that the quantity available will sate everyone; if I have any sense that there might not be enough to provide everyone all that they want, I'm apt to take none. Instead, I try to make a wholesome meal out of what's plentiful. Luckily, on a farm, that's not difficult to accomplish. What's more there's plenty of hump to this camel, and missing an occasional meal is no big deal for me.)

Mrs Malaprop is a fictional character from Richard Sheridan's play The Rivals (1775) who was prone to using the wrong word or transposing letters or syllables to turn common phrases on their head with unexpected—and often humorous—results. It comes, cleverly enough, from mal apropos, Latin for something inappropriate.

For example, my ex-partner Elke tells the story of her Uncle Mickey who (tongue firmly in cheek) was wont to say after splendid repasts at family gatherings, “What a malicious deal.” Although I never met the man, I’m sure I would have liked him. I have a great fondness for word play. Sometimes of course, people don’t mean to be funny, which tends to make it even funnier. Sifting through 35 years of rural living, I want to share today a handful of the accidental acorns that this blind pig has serendipitously stumbled across along the way.

I was reminded of this lighter side of my bucolic heritage while driving home from my regular Wed night bridge game last night (it’s a 45-minute ride, and a person can’t dwell the entire time on how to find a cold small slam with an eight-bagger spade suit headed by the jack and only 22 high card points between himself and partner). Near home I came across a highway sign that a commonplace whenever a stretch of blacktop has just been resurfaced: “Warning: No Center Stripe.” That got me thinking about Joe Pearl & Eva Grover, the couple who inspired Sandhill to go into the sorghum business…
• • •

When I conduct a two-year facilitation training, I devote one of the eight weekends to focusing on Challenging Personalities. I have developed a handout about this that I call the Meeting Menagerie: Personalities from A to Z. Under "B" I describe the Bully.

This is a fairly common type. Bullies tend to be loud and aggressive, hoping to achieve through bluster and volume what they may not succeed with through strength of ideas. They tend to thrive in environments with weak process agreements and unskilled facilitation.

Today I want to focus on a particular subset of this common type: the Productive Bully. This is a highly interesting case, where the loud and pushy person is also highly productive. When the bully is all Sturm und Drang and little action, dealing with them tends to be more straight forward (though not necessarily more pleasant). With the Productive Bully, there may be a real question about whether the group can function well without the Bully's considerable contributions and it muddies the waters about how best to proceed. I am particularly senstive to this type because for some, I am the Productive Bully.

(The irony here is that this personal liability translates into a professional asset. One of the ways in which I'm particularly prized as a process consultant is working with groups who have Productive Bullies among their membership. Based on my own group experience, I find it relatively easy to understand the dynamic and can simultaneously help the Bully find a way to examine their behavior with dignity, and help the group understand their options for engaging on the objectionable bahviors without vilifying the person.)

Sunday morning I lost my wedding ring.

My wife, Ma’ikwe, and I had gotten up at dawn and walked through the gray morning up to Rose Hall (where about 15 boxes of books needed to be loaded into the back of John Stroup’s pickup for the all-day drive to Missouri). We were at Kimberton Hills, a Camphill Village located 30 miles west of Philadelphia, where we had just spent five days of total immersion in FIC World, concluding with a Community Building Day on Saturday where the books were on display at the conference bookstore.

As the air was heavy with moisture, we were thankful that it wasn’t raining. We needed to get the truck loaded as expeditiously as possible, so Ma’ikwe and John could haul ass west. They had a 50-50 chance of getting to Rutledge by midnight. (I was lingering at Kimberton to deliver two days worth of conflict workshops as a barter for lower hosting fees.)

John is the Communities magazine Business Manager, on site for the Board meeting that took place Wed-Fri. He was at his truck right on time, and so was a restless Raines, an FIC Board member who had arrived the day before to help out with the event as an expert on cohousing. Then our luck started to go south. The mist began to coalesce into rain and we found the doors to Rose Hall locked (even though we’d been assured the night before that the back door would be left open). Grr. After a few moments of consternation, Raines managed to roust someone sleeping inside, who reluctantly left his warm bed long enough to pop open the door. While Ma’ikwe checked email one last time, John, Raines, and I swarmed the boxes.

Two days ago, the FIC held a Community Building Day at Kimberton Hills (30 miles west of Philadelphia) and about 56 people joined our crew of 12 presenters and support people to create a wonderful experience (while most participants were from the region, one came from as far away as Arizona, and some from Arkansas). During a general Q&A session right before dinner, one woman asked, “What are the three most critical agreements that a community should have in place in order to succeed?”

What an excellent question! Over the course of my 22 years as a process consultant I’ve slowly accumulated an understanding of a goodly number of key questions that healthy groups need to address, so limiting it to three was a challenge. What trio do I feel encompasses the most pivotal issues?

Here are my nominations:

1. Working with Emotional Input
The main model for appropriate group communication in our culture is to offer one’s best thinking. While rational thought is a wonderful tool, it’s hardly the only one available to us, and it really doesn’t make much sense to paint with only one color. As human beings we take in, process, and communicate information in an amazing variety of ways. It’s my view that groups function best when they openly embrace a wider range of input than just what’s available through ideation.

Yesterday, Sandhill celebrated its 35th birthday as an intentional community. We had over 80 people join us for a lovely all-day party on a sunny day in the 60s. I doubt if there was anyone present who knew everyone in the dinner circle, and that's part of the magic of the day. Perhaps more startling is the recognition that a goodly portion of the attendees were in their 20s, and therefore not yet on the planet when Sandhill was launched. I love watching their faces when I lay this out. (While it's not true that we used to read by kerosene lantern after dinner, we did pre-exist the Internet and Face Book.)

For decades now, we've co-opted the pagan holiday of Beltane to mark our anniversary, joyously eating, drinking, and dancing on the advent of summer. For a couple days ahead we bustle around: sweeping, mowing, and preparing special foods. It's a time of suspending normal routines to laugh and connect. Celebrating our primal, aminal urges.

After 35 years, we've settled into a predictable rhythm for our Land Day festivities. We have a kids' activity around 2 pm, May Pole at 3 pm, potluck feast at 4 pm, sweat lodge rounds beginning at 6 pm, and contra dance at 7 pm. Repeat as needed. If you don't manage to have a terrific time, it's your own damn fault.

Challenges tend to focus one’s mind, and the sharper the challenge, the sharper the focus. If it’s serious enough, you quickly strip down to what’s essential, and jettison (at least temporarily) the superfluous. While you may prefer not to have had the challenge, you still get the benefit of the sorting.

The other day my partner, Ma’ikwe, disclosed an interest in becoming lovers with one of her community mates at Dancing Rabbit, and that’s led to a lot of sorting the last few days. In particular, I’ve been looking at whether this represents a threat to my Relation Ship with Ma’ikwe and, if so, what would I place in the lifeboat.

While not yet a consummated act, things are now at the stage of open discussion with all the key players, including the prospective lover’s primary partner. While things are quite fluid, and could unfold in a wide variety of ways, I’ve given Ma’ikwe full permission to proceed and I’m finding it instructive to do my sorting in the projected reality that this is a done deal. Though this represents a bit of jumping ahead, it’s the most interesting case. (If Ma’ikwe’s hopes for this new intimacy unravel, my main role will be to succor her in disappointment or frustration, which seems relatively straight forward by comparison.)

Fortuitously, I have a couple travel days ahead of me on the California Zephyr, inbound from the West Coast. With no cell phone and no Internet service, I have the opportunity to reflect and journal before meeting up with Ma’ikwe on the train platform in Ottumwa Friday morning. Here’s what I’ve been sorting:

Am I being a good partner?

It's Sunday evening, and I've just concluded a weekend of consulting with a group in northern California. It's the third time I've worked with this group since August, and it was a solid confirmation of the advantage of multiple visits, with breathing room in between.

A number of years ago I recall having a conversation with Sam Kaner (lead author of Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, and principal of the San Francisco-based consulting firm Community at Work), in which he reported being at the place in his career where he no longer accepted clients unless they were willing to commit to multiple visits. What a revelation! Though I had never thought of asking for that, the advantages were obvious. From that point forward I started angling for that whenever I discussed work with prospective clients, and every now and then I get what I ask for.

If you know that you have a future weekend booked with the same client, it can take considerable pressure off the weekend at hand—you don't have to do everything in one go, and you can teach sequentially. The payoff of this more gradual (and therefore humane) approach was never more apparent than this weekend.

Like many groups, my client this weekend had a history of fairly passive meeting facilitation and no history of working emotionally in plenary. My primary assignment was to help them work through a backlog of tensions and to model how to work topics that were simultaneously complex and emotionally volatile. The first weekend (where they were test driving me as a consultant), I did all of the facilitating. When they liked my work well enough to contract for three more weekends, I asked to start the second weekend by observing their facilitators run a "typical" meeting.

Yesterday I attended Green Business Camp in South San Francisco. My friend Raines Cohen got me a ticket (it was sold out), and I was curious what interest existed among green entrepreneurs for enhancing work place social skills. I figure that "green" implies sustainable, and sustainable has a social component. Were my fellow campers thinking along those same lines?

After a keynote talk by Paul Hawken (his best line was describing himself as a "change slut") who emphasized how much our future will be impacted by jumps in energy costs that are outside our frame of reference—he called it "civilizational" change, to distinguish it from the cyclical change that most economists think in terms of. To my delight, he also emphasized the increasing need for collaborative savvy.

So when I attended the first breakout session—on the topic of teamwork, partnering, and cooperation, I was curious to see what the pressing needs were. Though I had my chance to pitch the relevance of what's being learned about cooperative dynamics in intentional communities, there wasn't much grab in the room. Instead, there was a lot of attention to why collaboration—for all its sex appeal—wasn't easy to pull off. (There was also frustration expressed about how there was much more talk about collaboration than there was actual collbarating—which phenomenon we then promptly recapitulated by spending the bulk of our 45 minutes cataloguing shortcomings, and marveling at how similar our stories were.)

In any event, I listened to the laments and figured it would be instructive to round them up in a single list. I came up with nine:

1. Shallow agreement

For the second time in two months, I'm in the East Bay, with its amazing Mediterranean climate and bewldering array of flora. In the front of the house I'm staying at, there are lots of flowers in bloom, including one of my all-time favorites: bird of paradise. In the span of about 10 seconds, here's the sequence of thoughts that ran through my head when I saw these:
—Beauty
—Natural selection (see my blog entry for Feb 27)
—Mah Jongg
—Facilitation

Let me explain those last two leaps.

Maj Jongg is a Chinese game. It's a lot like rummy, but it's played with tiles instead of cards. Instead if the four suits that comprise a deck of playing cards, a Mah Jongg set has three suits (dots, characters, and bamboo), plus honor tiles (winds and dragons). Each suit has tiles numbered 1 through 9. For the bamboo tiles numbered 2 through 9, all you have to do is count the number of sticks of bamboo carved into the face of the tile to know what number you have. For the number 1 tile however, there is no bamboo carved into the face; instead, there's a bird of paradise, and you have to know a bit about Chinese mythology to understand what's going on.

While the bird of paradise is a bona fide plant (though I may not have believed they existed if I hadn't seen them with my own eyes; I have seen them with my own eyes), it's only a mythical creature. Birds of paradise—just like pandas, apparently—only eat bamboo. Thus, any Chinese person could reasonably be expected to understand how the image of a bird of paradise—that singular avian—would be pressed into service to conjure up the 1 of bamboo. Out of cultural context (in America, for instance), the meaning is obscure.

I’m noticing a certain symmetry to my travel rhythms. Today—just like three days ago, when I started this road trip—I boarded Amtrak at dawn, and am composing a blog entry as I rumble toward Chicago’s Union Station and my first latté of the day…
• • •
I spent the last two days visiting my daughter Jo and her sweetheart Peter in Toledo, located at the west end of Lake Erie, at the mouth of the Maumee River. In addition to my daughter, Toledo is home for the Mud Hens, Toledo’s uniquely nicknamed AAA baseball affiliate (do they specialize in hitting fowl balls?), who play at cozy, downtown 5/3rd Field, named after a regional bank (how do you name a bank after an improper fraction?).

Like her father, Jo is a moving target. Unlike her father (who travels a lot but has kept the same bedroom for decades), Jo changes homes about as frequently as a white pelican. After moving to Amherst MA in early ’07, she migrated south that summer and resettled in Asheville NC. After almost living out a year’s lease on the east side of town, last summer she moved to Weaverville on the north side. While there, in the fall, she started dating Peter and they connected fabulously right from the get-go. After a few months replete with new couple romance, both of them got laid off as well, and it was time to change zip codes again.

Let’s take a few minutes to take about minutes. While almost all groups understand the need to have a record of their work (to help new members learn what agreements they’ll be expected to abide by, to clarify group policy when memories fade or disagree, and to help those who missed a meeting know what happened), there are aspects to minutes that can very tricky, and I want to discuss creating a record of discussions about sensitive topics. We have to have more nuanced choices than sealed records (maximum confidentiality) and full transcripts (maximum transparency).

For cooperative groups to function well, there needs to be an easy flow of information. When people are left to guess what’s happening, it erodes trust. When minutes are missing, unavailable, vague, or incomplete, the flow of information is compromised, and therefore trust is susceptible to being compromised as well. Governing bodies have to do better than function as a black box, where information goes in and decisions come out.

Probably the most challenging version of this relates to how minutes record sensitive topics. This tends to come in two different forms: reporting on critical comments (such as may naturally emerge in personnel evaluations, or when discussing negotiation strategies), and reporting on emotional distress. Trickiest of all is when these two occur together. Though each could happen separately, sometimes you get the whole enchilada.

Spring is an enchanting time of year: a time of beginnings & awakening, verdant shoots of green grass, sprightly wild flowers,  multi-colored flowering fruit trees, sap is rising, people falling in love, and so many beauteous things. For me, it is all of those – and also one of the most stressful times of the year. How so?

Spring: “sap is rising” is a common expression – my energy is up too: I wake up at 5:30, coffee, yogurt & toast, some quiet time, and then I’m ready to GO! Except that it’s cold & rainy out – not fair! Nature is geared up & my motor is revved up – with no place to go! I guess I could go fishing, repair farm equipment – but, in the rain?

THIS IS THE HARD PART – WAITING. Many think that the challenging part of farming & gardening is the work – well yes, it is a lot of work – but at least, when I am working, I feel good/productive. I can work long hours and my body aches – and it feels so good compared to “chomping at the bit” (a reference to bygone days when we worked with horses: they were ready to go and we held them back with the bit in the bridle…).

Rain – there is nothing as comforting as the sound & smell of rain when we really need it – I wake up in the night and hear the pitter-patter on the rood and ah! all is right with the world. BUT -  it is equally discouraging when we have too much. Folklore around here says you should always welcome rain – if you don’t, you’ll be looking for it soon. I know I should be thankful for the rain but by the 4th week of it – I’m ready to scream & do an anti-rain dance.

Yesterday I got into tiff with my wife.
• • •
Ma'ikwe and I have got a somewhat unusual marriage in that we don't live in the same place. We live close to each other, but are still three miles apart (up until last July, we lived 1000 miles apart, so we're definitely gaining). I live at Sandhill Farm, an income-sharing community I helped start in 1974, and Ma'ikwe lives at Dancing Rabbit, a thriving ecovillage of 40+ that bought land nearby back in 1997.

I like Sandhill's small, family-like feel, and Ma'ikwe prefers the stronger environmental covenants of DR, plus its vision to become a full-fledged village. So we've accepted the challenge of figuring out the rhythms of a marriage where we don't see each other every day. When we're both at home, we have a baseline agreement to spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights together. The rest of the week is negotiable. However, in busy times—which for two active networkers, is just about all the time—Tues and Wed nights are more often than not our only nights together. I guess you could say were perfecting the art of using scarcity to bolster demand.

Today's the Day After (taxes are due), which means I'm coming back up for air after 72 hours in the accounting tank.

Beginning Sunday noon, I took over the dining room table, skipped meals, socialized with no one, and spoke only to request help in tracking down obscure details about financial exchanges that took place months ago for which our records are ambiguous. It's an unusual art form.

Yesteray I put the last envelope in the mail just minutes before the postman collected everything, once again (barely) navigating the IRS' annual version of Beat the Clock. I was really happy to lay aside spreadsheets last evening for my weekly dose of duplicate bridge, where my biggest challenge was bringing home a 5 hearts contract doubled, missing the ace and king of trump.

As an intentional community, one of Sandhill's aspirations is to be an example of a saner life. That means trying to create a model that others could reasonably emulate (should we be sufficiently inspiring). That, in turn, means operating legally, rather than trying to live outside of government regulations—even ones we disagree with—hoping to escape notice by flying below the radar.

Among other things, that means minding of the tax code. At Sandhill, our thinking about taxes breaks into two parts: a) state & local, and b) federal. We feel fine about paying state and local taxes. These mainly go to support roads and local amenities like schools, libraries, and hospitals. These are services we use (or at least like having in place) and feel it's appropriate to pay our fair share.

With federal taxes we have a different analysis. We tend to be highly critical of what the US government does with its budget, and prefer to minimize our contribution to the US war machine. But what are our legal options?

It's spring, and life is full of promise. Here in the Midwest, the returning green is starting to take a serious grip on the landscape. While the trees lag behind, the grass tells you immediately that its no longer winter and you know cells are multiplying like rabbits on the microscopic level. On a day like this, the recession is just an abstract concept, pushed aside for the immediacy of the burgeoning To Do List of agrarian life.

That said, it's also a day for pause. Of course, Sunday is the traditional day of rest in the workaday world, yet I mean more than that. It's also an exclamation mark on three institutional calendars, and I thought I'd take a few moments to reflect on this convergence, described in ascending order of impact on life in my community.

1. It's Easter. While I can recall an early Sandhill tradition of Annie getting up early and making hot crossed buns, and toddlers hunting for dyed eggs with wicker baskets when the kids were young, that was years ago and this high holy day among Christians is little more than a side note in community life, where the overwhelming majority of members come to us from a Christian upbringing, not with one.

Failure. Ouch! We don’t like to use that word to describe our endeavors or any facet of our lives. In New Age lingo we prefer things like: missed possibilities, unfortunate circumstances, unplanned learning opportunities, new challenges, etc.

What failure?  Sandhill’s tempeh business. In our 35 years on the land here, we have experimented with various crops and products to earn income: (beginning with highest total income) sorghum syrup, honey, mustard, horseradish, condiments (salsa, relish, etc), seeds, and occasionally, fresh vegetables & fruit. For the last five years, tempeh was in the #2 spot. What happened?

First: what is tempeh? It is a cultured soybean product – originally from Indonesia. Some call it a meat substitute due to it’s high protein levels – so it is popular with vegetarians. We make it by from soybeans that we grow on the farm: the beans are cracked in half, soaked, and then boiled until soft (but not mushy), cooled and inoculated with rhizopus oligosporus (a spore, which we buy). The inoculated beans are put in one-half pound ziplock bags, flattened (like a hamburger patty), and placed in racks inside of a homemade box that maintains it at 90 – 100 degrees F for about 24 hours. During this time, the spores develop and grow throughout the soybeans making them more digestible for humans (like yogurt is to milk). We then freeze it and sell it  frozen. There are many ways to prepare it: marinate it in soy sauce, herbs & spices, or simply fry, bake, broil, etc. Tempeh ruben sandwiches are popular in restaurants.

Yesterday was highway trash pick-up day. Taking full advantage of a sunny dry day, Sandhill folks got together with several neighbors from nearby Dancing Rabbit to form a 14-person posse that swept along a 3.1-mile stretch of County Road M, gathering 26 large trash bags worth of stuff (plus some assorted automotive bumper fragments that were too large to fit into bags).

Like a lots states, Missouri has an Adopt-A-Highway program, mainly to help pick up the litter that accumulates along state-maintained roadways. This year celebrates the 20th anniversary of the program, and Sandhill was one of the first groups to jump in and police a stretch of nearby blacktop. So we've been doing this for a while, and I thought I'd share some observations about the Northern Missouri trash scene (No MO Trash).

While the official line is that adopters are expected to pick up four times a year, we live in a quiet corner of the state, and our sleepy county roads just don't have that much traffic (or trash). So once a year is as often as we get out there, usually in spring: after the snow and before the grass starts obscuring the litter.

Yesterday afternoon I endured trial by conference call—a kind of New Age endurance test. I had back-to-back calls set up, running from 1-7 pm and consuming all but 20 minutes—about enough time to pee, get a glass of water, and shake off the first call to get ready for the second.

Because I'd be tying up a phone for so long, I took both calls from the FIC trailer. While I was undisturbed (good) and not disturbing others (also good), there was a decided downside to my choice. A late winter storm rolled in and I experienced the folly of sitting for six hours in an unheated space. Despite being bundled in a down vest and a woolen cap, the rainy 35-degree weather inexorably sucked the heat out of my body, to the point where I was unable to record notes during the last hour because my fingers were numb. Shivering, I was ever so thankful for the restorative warmth of the woodstove in the main house afterwards!)
• • •
Both calls were attempts to untangle conflicts. While the second was work I was doing for a client (facilitating conversations about someone else's troubles), the first was about a conflict I was a party to. And that's the one I want to explore in this entry.

It was essentially an attempt to understand better why a colleague (whom I'll call Dale) and I were having so much difficulty working together the last 18 months. While being in conflict is not new territory for me (having a facility for assisting others through struggle hardly means I'm proof against being reactive myself, or triggering reactions in others), it was sobering to listen to the Dale's story. Here's what I got out of it:

Now that I have your attention, I trust you won’t be disappointed.

The heading could suggest soil/dirt/fertility/etc. BUT what I have in mind is what could be considered the down side of country/rural living. Huh? Again, the possibilities are myriad:  isolation(cultural/technological), having to drive distances for services or to see friends; however, my topic here is CAFOs – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations – aka “factory farms”. Yikes – there’s a heavy subject…

I moved to Sandhill in 1980 – I’d never heard of cafo and as far as I know, neither had anyone else in this county of 5000. Today cafos are a hot topic in many rural areas – due to the evolution of current American agriculture – others have written about it, notably Michael Pollen, Wendell Berry, etc.

This is Part Six, and the final installment of my series on Conflict in groups. Today I'll lay out a solid way for groups to create options for not working conflict in plenary.

While there are a number of solid reasons why groups should choose to deconstruct an erupting conflict in plenaries (ref my blog of March 24), I want to focus here on eliminating one of them: because you have no reasonable alternatives. In general, involving the whole group is the most expensive option, and should the one you choose last, when other efforts have failed to get the job done. Here's a decent sequence of escalating steps on the pathway to resolving conflict. While there may be occasions to skip certain steps, this is ordinarily a highly useful guideline:

A. Try to work through it unilaterally (perhaps with help from others, but not by discussing it with the person who has been the trigger).
B. Try to work it out directly with the person who was the trigger.
C. Get informal help from a third person (this could take the form of third party helping you think about how to approach the person directly, or could involve their facilitating a meeting with the triggering person).
D. Ask the Conflict Resolution Committee for help.
E. Ask the whole group for help.

In this blog, I want to narrow the focus to making Option D as robust as possible. Here's a generic mandate for what I'm styling the Conflict Resolution Committee (I've also heard it called Heart Pool, Dispute Group, Reconciliation Team, and Ministry—the important thing is not the name; it's the function):

o Once this committee is brought into a conflict, they will shepherd it until it's resolved.

This is Part Five in my series on Conflict (begun March 18). Today I'll offer my thinking on an aspect that is very important, yet one which I've seldom seen written about: what happens after the rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air have been appropriately addressed and distortion has diminished—at least temporarily—to manageable levels? It is not enough to just survive conflict; it behooves groups to actively take advantage of the precious (and often hard-earned) clearing that has been created in the group's energy field.

[While I had originally conceived of this as the final installment, it's now occurred to me to add one more, where I'll provide a template for the mandate of a committee devoted to helping members work constructively through interpersonal tensions—for those times when it isn't needed or desirable to do so in plenary. That will be the subject of my next blog.]

Before launching into how I think groups should view everyone's responsibilities in the aftermath of conflict, I want to properly set the stage. Here is a summary of some the points I've been attempting to make in my previous blogs:
o Conflict is inevitable
o Not having a clear understanding about what it is and how to work with it constructively is a bad idea (it leads to chaos, confusion, and serious damage to relationships)
o Sometimes it's better to work the conflict in plenary; sometimes it's not
o Working a conflict in plenary is not likely to go well unless you have agreements in place about how you'll attempt this, and have the skill needed to deliver on your promise

This is Part Four in a series (begun March 18) about working with conflict in cooperative groups. Today I'll offer my thinking about a constructive way to work with conflict in plenary, once you've decided that's the right thing to do.

I'm presenting here what I've distilled from more than two decades of work as a process consultant. It's a four-step process for working a volatile situation in the moment (where at least one person is actively upset). The basic concept is to accurately recognize where everybody is at without judgment or blame, and then trying to figure out what you can do to repair damage and re-establish a basis for trust between the protagonists.

I figure if you can get this far, you've turned the corner and it should be possible to once again have the group function at a high level, with minimal distortion. In my next, and final blog in this series, I'll address what everyone's responsibilities are once the group has successfully addressed the conflict.

Step 1. What’s happening emotionally?
• Acknowledge the feelings of everyone who is a major player in the conflict. Stay with it until everyone feels heard (as opposed to agreed with). Hint: you may need to ask each player what feeling heard looks like to them; answers may vary.
• Focus on one person at a time until everyone has had their say. Other things being equal, start with the person in the greatest distress and work toward the person bothered least.

This is Part Three in a series on conflict in groups that was begun March 18. Today I'll address: when groups should address conflict in plenary (meetings of the whole group), and how far to take it.

On the question of when to call the group's attention to conflict, the essential litmus test is when it's perceived that one or more people in the group are upset to the point where they're experiencing non-trivial distortion of what's happening and what's being said. That is, they're no longer able to hear accurately and it's getting in the way of the group's ability to function well.

Obviously this is a judgment call, and people may disagree as to whether the line of non-trivial distortion has been crossed. My advice is to take a person's word for it. Usually it becomes clear relatively quickly whether that person was accurate in their self-assessment or not. (That is, if you sense that a person has become upset and they deny that it's getting in the way of their participation, if you let it go and return to the regularly scheduled conversation, it will generally become obvious within minutes whether they self-diagnosed accurately or not.)

Trap #2 (the first one is listed in the previous blog): Be careful of assessing another person's behavior based on what it would mean if you were behaving that way. Their frame of reference may be entirely different. Referring to what I wrote March 18 under the heading "Style Clash," someone with a Northern European style (that is, a calm speaker who doesn't interrupt others) may easily misinterpret the emotional distress level of someone with a Southern European style who naturally speaks passionately and on top of others.

My friend Donald, a pagan witch, oft refers to “the mysterious ones”; in my paradigm, the reference is to the spirits or gods/goddesses that are in nature and daily life. Although I can’t see them, I sense their presences around me. I like the “mysterious” part because that is how I experience various non physical forces/energies.

So what does this have to do with agriculture? When I plant a seed, I have a picture of what the plant will look like – BUT no idea if it will be sickly or vigorous,  whether the return/yield will be zero or a hundredfold. It  depends on weather, genetics, soil fertility, care, etc – and yet, to me, the sum of these factors does not account for the variation in the vigor of plants and their yield. I prefer to ascribe the difference to – the “mysterious ones”.

Example:  our  maple harvest. We have been tapping maple trees at Sandhill for 21 years now. During 2002 – 08, the number of trees we tapped/harvested remained constant and everything that we earthlings did was the same. The return/yield varied from 30 to 115 quarts of syrup. Why the difference? Supposedly, it all depends on the weather:  ideal weather is when the nights are below freezing and the days are above freezing. I have not attempted to correlate the ideal temperature factor with maple yields – but my impression is that there is NOT a direct correlation – leaving certain amount of variation as:  mysterious.

Continuing with my series exploring Conflict in cooperative* groups (launched with my March 18 posting), I'm going to outline the remainder of this series. In the next fortnight I'm going to lay out:
1. Why groups need an agreement about addressing conflict (even though most don't).
2. When groups should address it and how far to take it in plenary (meetings of the whole group).
3. How to work with it constructively.
4. Everybody's responsibilities once the protagonists have been given group support to work through their upset.
* While everything I have to say applies equally to groups which don't self-identify as "cooperative," I am focusing on the cooperative segment because I can count on their baseline willingness to question competitive and adversarial dynamics, and I am therefore expecting this segment to lead the way in developing a meeting culture that is simultaneously more humane and more productive.

Ma’ikwe and I have just completed a facilitation training weekend in North Carolina where the teaching focus was on Conflict. Having just been immersed in that particular aspect of group dynamics, I want to devote the next few blogs to some of my thinking about what conflict represents and how to work with it constructively.

In recent years, the phrase “structural conflict” has arisen as a concept in group dynamics, to describe tensions that surface when there’s ambiguity about certain key aspects of what the group stands for and how it conducts business. Employing this rubric, conflict is sometimes sorted into two kinds: “structural” and “interpersonal.”

While I agree wholeheartedly that ambiguous agreements can lead to hell (and plenty of conflict along the way), I don’t find this sorting particularly helpful. First of all, it implies that if a conflict is structural, then perhaps it’s not interpersonal, and I don’t think that’s possible. As far as I’m concerned, if there isn’t at least one person who’s experiencing non-trivial distress, then you don’t have conflict—it’s merely a disagreement. It’s more useful, I think, to view conflict as always having an interpersonal component. What’s more, I’m convinced that recognizing the distress is the most constructive starting point when working with conflict.

We had our first ever maple sugaring/syrup open house on March 7, 2009. The photo on the left with Renay sucking on the tube connected to a tap in the maple tree headlined our invite. You can see 2 blue tubes attached to taps in the maple tree – this was the first stop on our open house tour.

When we mailed out our invitations, we hoped for good weather; a few days before the scheduled open house, the forecast was for 80% chances for rain – bummer! Miraculously, the rain held off.

The photo is of our shitake logs which are close to sugar shack (where we boil the sap) and so on our tour folks see them and want to know all about them. The spots on the logs are where we drilled holes, packed in spawn (shitake spores mixed with sawdust) and then sealed with our own beeswax.

The photo on the left shows the maple sap cooking in the pan in the foreground – see the steam off to the left? The smiling faces are students from Truman University in Kirksville (about 35 miles from us) -who came for the open house. I am the 3rd person from left – trying to blend in with the younger crowd.

One of the most common reasons I get hired as a process consultant is to help groups navigate the treacherous shoals of conflicted dynamics, where the hurt runs deep and the rocks are shallow.

While I'm occasionally asked to simply work a dynamic between two people, it’s far more typical that I’m asked to ply my craft in the whole group, where the variables are compounded, and the wind can blow from any direction. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Most groups don’t have agreements about how to work with fulminating conflict, and thus—regardless of whether working that particular conflict would be a good use of plenary time—the group wants to have a live demonstration of what that looks like. (Having conflicted parties report back to the group that they met, perhaps with the assistance of a third party, and achieved a breakthrough is not at all the same experience as witnessing the breakthrough.)

• It’s not uncommon that progress on an important issue is held hostage to the conflict, and it’s necessary to work through the conflict (as opposed to around it) to get traction on the problem. In this kind of situation, the group wants to minimize any delays and get to work on the issue as soon as possible.

I'm just concluding a week-long visit with my son (Ceilee), daughter-in-law (Tosca), granddaughter (Taivyn), ex-partner and Ceilee's mother (Annie), and our granddog (Zeus, a four-year-old pit bull with the sweetest disposition I've ever encountered in a canine).

This evening I'll take an Amtrak bus to Kingman AZ, where I'll rendezvous with the eastbound Southwest Chief, marking the start of a three-day train ride that will get me to Carrboro NC and the third weekend of an eight-part series of facilitation training with my wife, Ma'ikwe. In addition to the excitement and anticipation that I always feel for training weekends, I will be reuniting with Ma'ikwe when train #6 chugs into Albuquerque around noon tomorrow, ending a three-week separation. I've missed her a lot and am glad we have three days together before we're on stage in the Tarheel State.

Knowing that we'd appreicate some privacy after our three-week separation, I've cashed in credits (I use an Amtrak credit card, which earns train miles in the same way that airline cards earn plane miles) to upgrade to sleeping car accommodations. Thus, the long train ride affords us ample opportunity for other activities than just mapping out role plays, games of Scrabble, and looking out the window.

Ceilee has been in Las Vegas for two years now, and I've visited him here a half dozen times. While we usually go to the Strip at least once a visit, this time we didn't. It's hard to think about Las Vegas without immediately conjuring an image of the Strip—America's most demonstrative tribute to Baal, the false god of materialism and excess. Think of it as cancer as an art form.

This is the time of year for farming conferences – I go to the organic ones. On Feb 21, I attend the annual Missouri Organic Association’s conference.  I have been the vice president for the past two years and in charge of the trade show(so I had to be there – but I always go anyway). The following weekend, several friends and I went to a 2 day Upper Midwest Organic Farming conference in LaCrosse WI.

The two are typical: there are similarities as well as differences. The primary difference is the size: we had about a hundred folks at the local MOA one while there were over 2600 registered at the LaCrosse one. The local one is cozy – most of us know each other and the feeling is like a gathering of the clan. The larger one feels more like being a part of a movement; most of the year, us organic folx feel like a minority – we are constantly talking about why organic is important, how to source and/or produce organic products, etc. Often we producers are alone or one of a handful of organic producers in our county. At the conference, I am one of 2600 (that’s more than half of the population of my entire county!). The feeling is different – we are significant, we are the movers/shakers in agriculture – rah!rah!rah!

The topics of the workshops are similar: basic soil biology & fertility, organic weed and pest control, livestock production and health, fruit and vegetable production, small grains,  row crops,  organic certification, various marketing strategies – local/niche, web-based, tell your personal story, etc., sustainable practices, biological diversity, funding opportunities in the new farm program, etc.

Today is Day Two of a week-long visit in Las Vegas with my son, Ceilee, my daughter-in-law, Tosca, my granddaughter, Taivyn, and my ex-partner and dear friend, Annie (who's also Ceilee's mother). Taivyn has now crossed the 10-month mark and this is the fourth visit to see her that I've been able to finagle since she emerged into the world last April 20. Notably, it is the first time that Annie and I have been with our grandchild simultaneously, and it is already being great fun for both of us.

As someone who's on the road half the time (as a group process consultant, as a community networker, and now as a doting grandparent), I often benefit from the hospitality of others. Often I stay with friends; sometimes I stay with clients. When I'm at a friend's (and I'm not totally absorbed with a client), if I'm there more than a day or two I try to figure out a way to repay their kindness by giving something in return. While this is most commonly my taking them out to eat, or a gift of Sandhill honey or sorghum, on occasion people will allow me to tackle a home improvement project—especially if they know me pretty well.

I've just finished three days in Berkeley, visiting a nearly a dozen folks, and still had time for yoga and a hot tub—though not at the same time. (The hot tub was terrific for clearly out the nasal congestion I accumulated after three days of riding Amtrak with a head cold.)

Berkeley is one of my favorite cities for walking and I probably logged about 15 miles on foot—a great antidote after 60 hours of train travel. I never even used my BART card. Known mainly for its off-the-left-end-of-the-specturm politics, and as the main campus of the University of California (which are not unrelated), I appreciate Berkeley for it's surprises. Here's a taste of my last three days:

A. Restaurants
If you can't find an excellent example of your favorite ethnic cuisine in Berkeley, you haven't been trying hard enough. In my brief visit I enjoyed deep dish Chicago-style broccoli pizza at Zachary's on College, paella at an prix-fixe place on Solano, and a delicious wedge of ham&swiss quiche at Sweet Adeline's on, of course, Adeline. I also found time for visits to Saul's New York-style delicatessen, the Cheeseboard Collective, Kirala sushi, and the Triple Rock Brewery, all on Shattuck.

B. Flora

For about a month now, people had been succumbing all around me to some virulent strain of what my father used to refer to as "the creeping crud" (a cold and flu combo deal) that was laying people low in droves. Michael—one of my fellow Sandhillians—was hit especially hard and was down for about a month. There was nothing about his experience that made me envious, and I was simply glad it wasn’t me. More commonly people had a hard week. Somehow though, I was escaping it—until Sunday.

Despite a steady diet of zinc lozenges (my standard prophylactic against colds), down I went. The good news was that it was a travel day (the sickness held off until I had completed my two days of workshops for the student groups in Kalamazoo and I wasn’t needed on stage again until the following Friday). Unfortunately, that was also the bad news. While I typically look forward to the rhythmic jostling of rail travel, it was not nearly as much fun with a stuffed head.

In Chicago for a couple hours around noon to change trains, I had just enough down time (and residual energy) to bang out the last blog in my series on Economic Leverage in Hard Times… and then I was done for the day. To compound my misery, I was shunted into a passenger car that offered no access to an electric plug and I was facing the prospect of a 54-hour journey without hope of pushing back the ever-rising tide of electrons that flood my In Box. It’s in moments like that that I can start to understand depression.

This is the sixth and final installment of my series (started Feb 5) on how everyone can get more out of the life they want while at the same time spending less money to make it happen. My motivation is that most folks today need to be more careful about their economic choices, and I have some good news.

Through what's been learned about cooperation and sharing in community living, it's possible for most of us to continue to enhance the quality of our life while at the same time cut back on cash outlays. To be sure, my suggestions will require some lifestyle changes. Yet what I'm offering is meant to be widely accessible, and does not involve a change in personality or altering one's core values. In Part 1 I focused on Housing; in Part 2 I looked at Food; Part 3 was about Transportation; Part 4 spotlighted Energy; and Part 5 examined Health. Today I'll tackle Entertainment and Recreation.

This is the fifth installment of my series on how everyone can get more out of the life they want while at the same time spending less money to make it happen. My motivation is that most folks today need to be more careful about their economic choices, and I have some good news.

Through what's been learned about cooperation and sharing in community living, it's possible for most of us to continue to enhance the quality of our life while at the same time cut back on cash outlays. To be sure, my suggestions will require some lifestyle changes. Yet what I'm offering is meant to be widely accessible, and does not involve a change in personality or altering one's core values. In Part 1 I focused on Housing; in Part 2 I looked at Food; Part 3 was about Transportation; Part 4 spotlight Energy. Today I'll tackle Health & Personal Care.

This post does not fall into the agricultural theme, but then life is seamless, right? One thing leads to another… This is one example of what some of us farmers do in the off season.

I completed a 10 day Vipassana meditation course in Northern Illinois Jan 14-25, 09.

Why did I go?

• for about 10 years now, I’ve had friends do these. Everyone indicated they had a good experience and it was well worth it (it’s free!).
• I have a lot of negativity in me – most of the time I repress it – but it’s wearisome. I realize that the real victim of the negativity is me. I’ve tried a variety of methods to root it out/come to terms with it; many helped – but it’s still there. I’d love to get rid of it. So – I’ll try this!

For more info:

See the Vipassana website: http://www.dhamma.org

My fellow communard, Laird, did the same course 2 weeks before me and blogged about it (Jan 8-15) – access it via: www.sandhillfarm.org

The cast: 40 students, 20 men, 20 women, an on site teacher, a liaison person for women, another for men, and several folx who prepare the meals – 2 for women, 2 for men.

The course is taught by Goenka (India), who claims that the method originated with Gautama, the Buddha, 2500 years ago and that the key is the technique – it is experiential (rather than intellectual knowledge).

This is the fourth installment of my series on how everyone can get more of the life they want while at the same time spending less money to make it happen. My motivation is that most folks today need to be more careful about their economic choices, and I have some good news.

Through what's been learned about cooperation and sharing in community living, it's possible for most of us to continue to enhance the quality of our life while at the same time cut back on cash outlays. To be sure, my suggestions will require some lifestyle changes. Yet what I'm offering is meant to be widely accessible, and does not involve a change in personality or altering one's core values. In Part 1 I focused on Housing; in Part 2 I looked at Food; Part 3 was about Transportation. Today I'll spotlight Energy.

Disclaimer:  I speak only for myself.

Short answer:  kick back, relax, and recharge (we put out a lot of energy in the growing season; like the earth & plants, winter is a time to draw inside, slow down, and let things be).

Details:  one of my priorities is recreation – ice skating, cross country skiing, reading, walking in the woods. When there is good ice to skate or snow to ski – better do it now because in these parts, it’s not to be taken for granted – it could melt, get snowed on, etc, in short, outdoor recreation comes first. In the photo below, we had plenty of ice, but it was quite warm; since we could not skate, we rode our bicycles on the ice on the pond.

Of course, there is work: cutting firewood, cooking, keeping up with housework & maintenance, stoking fires, etc. We heat all our buildings with food fires: 2 residences, a common house (kitchen, office), a green house, and a workshop – so we burn a lot of wood (and then there’s the wood to process sorghum & maple syrup). Also,  people travel during the winter to see family & friends, but the buildings need to be kept warm to keep water pipes and/or plants from freezing.

There are plenty of maintenance jobs: keeping buildings weather proofed, building bee boxes, plumbing repairs, etc. Items that may not come readily to mind:  planning next year’s crops – including seeds, cleaning some of last year’s seeds, making tempeh & mustard, market research,  etc.

This is the third installment of my series on how everyone can get more of the life they want while at the same time spending less money to make it happen. My motivation is that most folks today need to be more careful about their economic choices, and I have some good news.

Through what's been learned about cooperative sharing in community living, it''ll be possible for most of us to continue to enhance the quality of our life while at the same time cutting back on cash outlays. To be sure, my suggestions will require some lifestyle changes. Yet what I'm offering is meant to be widely accessible, and does not involve a change in personality or altering one's core values. In Part 1 I focused on Housing; in Part 2 I looked at Food. Today I'll discuss Transportation.

Winter is the hardest time for honey bees. All other bees/wasps that I know of are solitary ones – ie. they do not go thru the winter as a group. In the fall, solitary bees/wasps hatch out a bunch of queens that mate and then crawl into a protected place to overwinter – under leaves, wood, in sheds, etc. In the spring, the queens that survive build  a nest, lay eggs, and feed the larvae all by themselves. When new ones hatch, they help and the group expands.

Honey bees are different – the queen and a cluster of bees (her entourage) overwinter together – which is why they make honey – so they have food to last thru the winter. One hive of bees may number 30-50,000 in the summer, but in the winter it may drop to 10% of that. At this time of year, the cluster is at its all time lowest (in the northern parts of the continent) since they cannot raise brood (baby bees) when it’s very cold. Now is the time the queens begin laying eggs again and the cluster builds up population. But it’s  delicate – if there is a cold snap and there are not enough bees to keep them warm, the brood die. On the other hand, since old bees keep dying, they need to raise new ones before the cluster gets too small.

I began this blog about a year ago – with a posting about making maple syrup  – 2/2/08. For more info on the process, see that post. This year, we tapped the trees on Jan 31. I usually like to wait until Feb, but Jan 31 was a gorgeous day – couldn’t pass it up.

This is being the strangest weather year that I remember since we began maple sugaring 22 years ago. How so? This last week we went from 0 degrees to 60s in 3 days; worst of all, the temperature went below freezing only 1 out of the last 5 days. For the maple sap to run, the temperature needs to yoyo:  above and below freezing. If it stays warm for too long – the buds on the trees open and the sap stops flowing. Most often, I’m not sure when exactly we are at that point; sometimes, it takes a few days or a week to make sure.

The photo is of Renay sucking sap from a tree – she loves sucking the sap straight from the tree – it is very dilute – looks & tastes mostly like water.

Since the weather turned very warm suddenly, I expected the sap to flow abundantly – WRONG. It didn’t happen – it flowed very little.

This year we tapped 55 trees – about 110 taps (I didn’t count) – we usually average about 2 taps per tree – some have 3, others only 1 – depending on their size. On 2/8, we collected 40 gallons of sap and we boiled it down today – that should make about a gallon of finished syrup. Next week we are supposed to have perfect maple weather – nights below freezing, daytimes above. Sure hope it flows then!