Sandhill Farm

Home is one of those elephant words, whose meaning at any given time depends upon which part you’re touching. This is the third installment of a blog series where I unpack some of those meanings…

Essentially, I experience home as the familiar yet precious elements of our lives. Home is where we feel seen and connected. It is where we touch our roots and the place from where we fruit. It is at once a paradoxical touchstone that is both now and hopelessly distorted by a past that we can never really return to, nor ever truly free ourselves from.

I do a lot of training. Some of that is travel (mostly via Amtrak), and some of that is teaching (mostly about group process). I also do a lot of word play (but then, you already knew that).

Apropos these proclivities, one of my favorite signs in the whole world sits at the top of Portland Union Station (Amtrak's Romanesque terminal in the Rose City). High up on one side of the campanile, right above the clock face, is the italicized neon admonition GO BY TRAIN. Such good advice!

Today I'll share some thoughts about how to go by train—in the teaching sense of the phrase.
• • •
I've been asked to conduct a one-day workshop on facilitation at our neighboring community, Dancing Rabbit. It will happen next month on a Wednesday, midway between back-to-back three-day weekends that will comprise their annual retreat. In the morning we'll be focusing on theory and practice; in the afternoon we'll switch gears and I'll coach the folks who will be the plenary facilitators for the second weekend, helping them prep. During the second weekend meetings I'll be in the audience, taking notes and on call for offering impromptu redirection if things get sticky. It should be fun.

I love teaching and this is a body of information I've thought a lot about.

Yesterday we had a community meeting that ended poorly, and I was in the middle of it. While this has happened before (and will likely happen again), it never feels good and is humbling.

Due to a heavy amount of December travel (typical each year around the holidays), it was the first meeting we'd had with all five members present in more than a month. In addition we had three people visiting as prospective members, and this was their first chance to talk with the everyone all together about what they were looking for and how they were experiencing Sandhill.

Understandably, the first half of our two-hour meeting was taken up with a check-in (hearing from everyone about how they were doing and providing an opening for personal reflections about what they'd been chewing on the last month).

When it was the visitors' turn to share, one of them talked about how he had been searching extensively for a community and had narrowed his choices down to Sandhill and one other place, both of which emphasized an economy and lifestyle centered around organic agriculture. To make a decision, he wanted to get current information about the community's commitment to providing ongoing opportunities to learn and experiment with organic farming.

I thought this was a great topic to discuss, yet knew it was beyond the scope of a check-in, so I asked that we come back to it later in the meeting. This guy was going to end his visit in a couple days and I thought it was all together reasonable that we make an attempt to address his question as a group before he left.

Almost half of our 135 acre farm is in woods – we like it that way. A few benefits of having our own woods/forest:

* they provide us with firewood

* we harvest logs to be sawed into lumber for our construction needs

* they are good habitat for wildlife (including deer – currently, our primary source of meat)

* they are a carbon sink – offsetting global warming

* they nurture the spirit/soul – winter time is my favorite time to be in the woods: walking, skiing, cutting firewood. The woods feel like a sanctuary (comparable to church/temple for some) to me – it’s where I feel connected to nature, the universe – my spirit feels nurtured.

It feels appropriate for us to heat with wood: currently, we heat two residences, a common house/kitchen, and a green house. That’s a lot of fires to keep feeding; on these sub zero nights, we burn a lot of wood; additionally, we use wood to cook down our sorghum and maple syrup. How much wood? I don’t know – I’m not in the mindset of thinking in terms of cords, etc. Of course, there is the old adage: firewood warms you twice: when you cut & split it and when you burn it. We like the cozyness of wood stoves – coming in from the outside, it feels so good to toast myself in front of the wood stove.

As a process consultant I get the chance to observe first hand which methods consensus groups use to work their way through issues. One of the most common is the straw poll, employed to determine which way and how strongly the wind is blowing part way through a discussion. As a consensus trainer I cordially detest straw polls, and today I want to make the case for why this is not a good practice.

[Years ago JRR Tolkien wrote that he "cordially detested" allegory when responding to a suggestion that Lord of the Rings was written with Hitler as the prototype for Sauron, and I've been nurturing that turn of phrase ever since, hoping that I'd eventually be able to dust it off and put it back into play. Today I finally found the right occasion.]

Think of me as the Big Bad Process Lupine who is going to huff and puff and attempt to blow down the house of straw... (OK, so I get carried away with the metaphors.)

Consensus is a process that is all together different from Voting. While Consensus is based on the concept that the best decisions will emerge from the full group being in alignment about how to proceed, Voting is based on the idea that the best proposal will emerge from a healthy competition.

For some reason, it always seems that the Midwest experiences its coldest weather the first week of the year. It's like Mother Nature wants to start with a challenge on the way to attempting another record for highest average global temperature.

Ma'ikwe and I returned home from three weeks in the (relatively) balmy Southwest Dec 30. With the mercury—and precipitation—falling steadily since departing Albuquerque Tuesday morning, we were racing (within the speed limit) to arrive home before the roads froze (driving on rain-slicked pavement is one thing; ice capades in a 2000-lb car is another). Our last stop before Sandhill was in Kirskville, the regional center in northeast Missouri and where I indulge myself in duplicate bridge every Wed night. We'd timed our return so that I could catch the last club game of the year on the way home (make those gas dollars count!), and we'd dutifully arrived at 6:45 pm, affording us just enough time for a well-earned cup of coffee before the game began at 7.

Unfortunately, the Washington Street Java Company (which used to be owned and operated by ex-Sandhill member Julia Reed, and is my favorite local stop for a double-shot latte) caters mainly to the student clientele from nearby Truman State University, and with the students on holiday break WSJC was closed early. Bummer! On top of that, Mark (the club director) hadn't been able to secure enough people for a game and my card game didn't materialize that night.

A year ago, I was four days into a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat when the clock struck midnight Dec 31. This year I was sitting at the dining room table, four hours into a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

The puzzle had been given to Sandhill by Lindsey Jones (aka Miss Lindsey, or ML or short), an ex-member who gave us the puzzle in remembrance of Geoph Kozeny, a dear friend who died in 2007 of pancreatic cancer.

(I had last seen ML in February, when I stayed on the couch in her Berkeley apartment as I visited Bay Area friends for three days prior to doing some work for a community outside Santa Rosa. Although she had visited Sandhill this past Sept, I completely missed it because of ill timing: I had repeat work with the Santa Rosa client, and by the time I learned that ML would be visiting I had scheduled to arrive in the Bay Area the same day she departed for Missouri. Worse, I didn't get back to Sandhill until the day after she departed. Oh well, some things are not meant to be. Fortunately, I'd had a nice connection with her earlier in the year.)

I had first met Geoph in the mid-80s, when he came to visit a Bay Area friend, Craig Green, who was living at Sandhill at the time. He and I hit it off right away. We were the same age, both born and raised in the Midwest, and both keenly interested in community networking (that is, in addition to building and living in community, we wanted to promote it). A couple years after we met, we both got involved in the fledgling Fellowship for Intentional Community, and shortly thereafter, Sandhill became a regular stop on Geoph's peregrinations.

Home is one of those elephant words, whose meaning at any given time depends upon which part you’re touching. This is the second installment of a blog series where I unpack some of those meanings…

Essentially, I experience home as the familiar yet precious elements of our lives. Home is where we feel seen and connected. It is where we touch our roots and the place from where we fruit. It is at once a paradoxical touchstone that is both now and hopelessly distorted by a past that we can never really return to, nor ever truly free ourselves from.

Here’s the outline of my series:

—home as family (Dec 24, 2009)

—home as place

—home as culture

—home as routine

—home as work

I’m typing this inbound after three weeks of winter vacation in the Southwest, the last four days of which were with my family in Las Vegas. While that was mostly a good time, it ended awkwardly and I want to explore the hurt and confusion at the end. During the long Christmas weekend in Nevada there were 11 of us in the mix and I think it best to begin this narration with an introduction to the basic cast, so I can properly set the stage:

Dramatis Personae
o Laird (your 60-year-old narrator for this passion play)

o Ma’ikwe (my 39-year-old wife of 2+ years)

o Jibran (her 12-year-old son)

o Ceilee (my 28-year-old son)

o Tosca (his 29-year-old wife)

o Taivyn (their 20-month-old daughter)

o Jo (my 22-year-old daughter)

Home is one of those elephant words, whose meaning at any given time depends upon which part you’re touching. As I’ve promised Ma’ikwe that I’d unpack some of those meanings in a blog series, this seems as propitious time as any to begin…

Essentially, I experience home as the familiar yet precious elements of our lives. Home is where we feel seen and connected. It is where we touch our roots and the place from where we fruit. It is at once a paradoxical touchstone that is both now and hopelessly distorted by a past that we can never really return to nor ever truly free ourselves from.

Here’s the outline of my series:

—home as family

—home as place

—home as culture

—home as routine

—home as work

In this first entry, I’ll focus on Home as Family.

Are you familiar with that phrase? I am.

When I was a child, my parents used to drum into my head the redundancy of the expression consensus of opinion (if you ever wondered where my snobbery with words originated, look no further). What else, they reasoned, could a "consensus" refer to, except a collection of viewpoints held in common?

Today, however, I want to lament the lack of consensus about the meaning of the word consensus, about which I have a definite opinion. My friend Tony Sirna suggested this topic in an email yesterday:

"As the Senate now considers 60 votes needed to pass health care, if the Democrats just forget about the Republicans, then the Democrats essentially need to come to consensus (or at least unanimity) to pass health care.
It's interesting to see how they are stumbling through that process and how up in arms people get about the notion of one person blocking things.
It would be interesting to talk about how this is and is not like consensus."

As this topic appeals to me, here are my thoughts:

The Definitions
Consensus has two main meanings, which unfortunately have a tendency to overlap, fostering confusion: a) it is a specific decision-making process; and b) it refers to a preponderance of people holding a similar viewpoint, which can (sadly, because of the imprecision) mean anything from a bare majority to a unanimous opinion.

Ma'ikwe and I are visiting Hummingbird Ranch, a beautifully sited community tucked into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside of Mora NM. Fortunately, the weather has been benign enough to all us access to (and hopefully tomorrow, egress from) their winding entrance road.

A year and a half ago, the Fellowship for Intentional Community held its spring organizational meetings at Hummingbird, and part of the deal we made in exchange for hosting was that I offer some process consulting. (Barter of this kind is a standard offering we make when searching for a meeting site, and it works out well—simultaneously keeping our costs down and deepening connections with the host.) While it took a while to arrange a good time for me to honor the process commitment, Ma'ikwe and I are making good on that right now.

The community asked for a Consensus training, so that they could better understand how that compares with the Attuned Alignment decision-making process that they've pioneered (for more information about that, check out their publication, The Co-Creator's Handbook), and in yesterday's session we got into an interesting side conversation about integrating new members. In particular, at what point does it make sense to invite new people to participate in community deliberations? I think that's a great question.

It is my first morning at Ojo Caliente, where Ma'ikwe and I will be for three days of combined birthday present to each other. Already we've had an adventure.

Setting the Stage
Ojo is a mineral hot springs in the high desert of New Mexico, about an hour north, northwest of Santa Fe, nestled between the Chama and Rio Grande Rivers. First identified as a healing place by Native Americans centuries ago, the site was developed as a recuperative spa (a Latin acronym, by the way, from Salus Per Aquas, or health through water) by Antonio Joseph in 1868, and has been continuously operated as a privately owned business ever since.

Ojo Caliente (which translates to warm eye in Spanish—don't you just love that image for a geothermal spring?) is unique in that there are four separate hot springs that emerge at this one location, featuring iron, arsenic, lithium, and soda—affording guests a semi-bewildering array of options for how to treat what ails you. The pools come in different temperatures as well as flavors, and options are augmented by a sauna, a regular swimming pool, and a rich menu of therapeutic wraps, mud treatments, and massages.

The Afternoon Surprise

While I know that most of us associate the number 1040 with the form that individuals must file annually with IRS, it also happens to be the exact number of miles we put on the car when Ma'ikwe, Jibran, and I drove to Albuquerque Wednesday night through Thursday afternoon. Ufda.

Fortunately, most of the heavy snow predicted to be dumped on northeast Missouri missed us. As the line of freezing temperature skated to our north, most of the precipitation fell as drizzle and the highway department was more than equal to the task of keeping the roads cleared. When the skies cleared Wednesday evening, temperatures went into free fall and our biggest challenge was the bitter cold and a stiff headwind. We were relieved to exit the cocoon of our car for breakfast in Liberal (does it strike you as odd that there's a major population center located smack in the middle of arch-conservative western Kansas labeled "Liberal"?) and notice that the sun had already pushed temperatures into the 20s. We were going to make it!

Further buoyed by the maple syrup on our pancakes and the caffeine in our coffee, we were borderline euphoric when we remounted for the final one third of our trip. The biggest remaining challenge was rotating drivers frequently enough to keep the person in the left front seat awake (while the person in the right front seat napped).

Though there was evidence of snow all along our route, nowhere was the accumulation daunting and there was hardly any on the roads through Tijeras Pass, where I-40 snakes through the Sandia Mountains that protect Albuquerque's eastern side. We slid painlessly into Thursday afternoon's rush hour traffic, and negotiated the final urban miles without mishap.

About a week ago I started hearing from friends around the country who were reporting their first snow of the winter. While there have been a number of years at Sandhill where our first flurries appeared in October, that was not the case this year and it appeared that everyone was getting snow before we did.

I got emails reporting sightings from Virginia, Colorado, and even Louisiana of all places. Now, finally, it's northeast Missouri's turn, and it appears we will make up in quantity what we lacked in precociousness. We awoke to a dusting yesterday and today it's supposed to start in earnest, with four inches expected by nightfall, followed by an additional half foot in the night. That's a lot, and I have a mixed reaction to this forecast.

Mostly I have a positive association with snow and winter weather—unless I'm driving in it. It evokes cozy warmth by the wood stove with a cup of coffee and a good book; the exhilaration and gliding delight of cross country skiing; the all-over tingling sensation of rolling naked in downy crystals of cold as soft as fels naptha after a sauna; the sound-dampened hush of the barren woods; the unlimited potential of a slate wiped clean.

About 35 years ago I was visiting college friends in Minneapolis in early January. On a whim, we decided to go winter camping in Grantsburg WI, just across the St Croix River from Pine City. We drove to a wooded area, showshoed about a quarter mile in to a frozen pond and set up camp. While there was a lot of brave talk while huddled around the camp stove preparing dinner, one night at 30 degrees below zero was about all the fun we could stand. Nobody slept that well and our car was so frozen that we weren't able to get it started without a jump the next morning. We considered it a moral victory that no one suffered frostbite.

I was reminded of that memory last night, sleeping at Ma'ikwe's new house over at Dancing Rabbit. Though the outdoor temperatures were far more moderate—20 degrees above zero—we were effectively indoor camping in an enclosed-though-not-yet-tight two-story house. We were sleeping on the ground floor, and the BTUs from the wood stove were merrily congregating near the second story ceiling—too far away to do us much good. My initial attempt to sleep without socks or my wool knit hat (as I would ordinarily at home, even on the coldest nights) did not work, and Ma'ikwe and I spend the night alternately warming our front back and sides next to each other under three layers of blankets. The term "bracing" only barely begins to describe the experience. Briskly walking home this morning, I actually warmed up in the course of the three-mile jaunt. The trick in cold weather is to keep moving.

Today is Day Three of this fall's deer butchering and my hands are sore.

I put in 5.5 hours Friday, 7.5 hours Saturday, and I'll keep at it today until I'm done—pushing 20 hours all together. We worked up six deer this season, yielding about 350 lbs of ground meat, roasts, ribs, stew meat, sausage, jerky, and soup stock. With the addition of occasional contributions from our poultry flock (chickens and turkeys) this is Sandhill Farm's meat supply for the year. It's one of the jobs I've learned to specialize in over the years, yet I don't do it regulalrly (or even every year) and I've been using muscles the last couple days that are not typically exercised by virtue of my routine three hours/day at a keyboard. And while I've successfully avoided any major slips with knives or saws (knock on wood), I nonetheless have an impressive array of minor nicks and scrapes on my hands that are souvenirs of my time in the abattoir that is otherwise our food processing kitchen.

Just before dinner yesterday I finished cutting and deboning the last carcass. I got the last of the bones into the stock pots, and all that remains is to complete the sausage making (half done when the dinner bell rang last night), to start drying the jerky (which was marinading overnight) and to grind up about 200 lbs of deer hamburger (which is the way we most prefer it). Monday I'll give the kitchen floor a thorough cleaning and put the equipment away until next year.

It's late in the year, late in November, and late in the day. A weak sun made a cameo appearance this morning before ducking behind the rolling banks of grey and leaden clouds that have been brooding over Missouri most of the month. Temperatures are in the 40s and should slide below freezing tonight. Most days it drizzles a little; some days it actually rains; tonight snow flurries are predicted. It's been a hard season for deer hunters. Yet for all that, it's one of my most anticipated times of the year and nothing can dampen my spirits: it's Thanksgiving week.

The larder is full, we have wood enough stockpiled to heat ourselves into 2011, and both of my children are coming home for the first time in three years. The agricultural year is over and the gardens have been put to bed. It's time to gather, cook, relax, drink, laugh, eat, and tell stories with loved ones. If you live on a farm, Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday to have others come to you. What better place to celebrate the harvest than where the harvest happens?

Late Monday night I got home from a week in Virginia. After a cup of coffee and some trip accounting Tuesday morning, Emily and I got to work butchering poultry—eight older chickens culled from the flock, as well as the featured guest for Thursday's dinner: our biggest tom turkey. We spent most of the day on this ritual, carefully taking the life of each one, plucking, dissecting, and canning all the chickens. The tom, of course, was left whole (sans viscera), ready for the oven first thing tomorrow morning.

For three days this week, Terry O'Keefe (of Asheville NC) and I were visiting Acorn, an income-sharing community in central Virginia which operates Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, a mail order business specializing in heirloom and organic vegetable seeds. We were conducting a preliminary examination of SESE operations with an eye toward seeing if we could offer them substantial help in improving both their bottom line and their member satisfaction. It was the initial field trial for GREEN EGGS—Guild for Relational Economics: Experts in Neighborly & Entrepreneurial Growth that is Green & Sustainable [see my blogs of July 26 & Oct 17, 2009 for more on this budding consortium].

Acorn is a community of about 23 members. It was started in 1993 as a spin-off of Twin Oaks, when that well-established income-sharing community was full to overflowing in the midst of the nation-wide surge of interest in community living in the early '90s (which was the last surge before the one that erupted in 2005 and continues today). Rather than build another residence, Twin Oaks decided to build another community—and Acorn was the offspring of that inspiration. Located just seven miles away, Acorn is an easy bike ride away from the mother ship.

Tuesday I received one the angriest pieces of correspondence in my 30 years of community networking, and it’s shaken me up.

One of my jobs as the FIC’s center fielder is to catch complaints about communities listed in our Directory. While I don't get a lot of these, the few I get are important to handle with sensitivity. This week I didn't so good. There was a ho potato in my In Box last Friday, when a woman registered a formal complaint about her brief experience living with a forming community last September. She felt she’d been treated unfairly, that she’d been discriminated against as an older woman, and that the community had misrepresented itself as a place where everyone had a say in group decisions: her story was that one man decided things by fiat and claimed they operated by consensus.

Sunday I dutifully sent a note to the community passing along her complaint verbatim, and asked for their side of the story. I got a prompt replay on Monday in which the man in question denied the charges outright and leveled countercharges at the woman that were worse than what was had said about him. His story was that the woman was regularly abusive with her language and that on at least one occasion this spilled over into physical violence, leading to the community filing a police complaint against her because of an unprovoked attack on another member.

Have you ever noticed how people tend to make decisions about the attention they'll give to messages based on the mode of communication—rather than on the relative urgency or importance of the message? I have, and I'm not so sure it's a good thing.

In 1964 Canadian educator Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media, this was followed three years later by The Medium is the Massage. Taken together, these two titles comprised his seminal observations about the Information Age. The title of the latter book was a pun on his most famous tag line, "The medium is the message," by which he meant that changes in technology can have profound effects on how we communicate. (He did not mean that content is irrelevant; only that technological skews what gets communicated.)

At the recent Fellowship for Intentional Community organizational meetings (held Oct 30-Nov 1 in Berea KY), we focused one session on the outreach opportunities presented by web-based social networking tools—Facebook in particular. It was a fascinating conversation. About half the people in the room were Facebook users. Some do it once a fortnight; some are in there four times a night. Some relish the breezy updates and easy camaraderie; others are turned off by postings that are mainly about what others are doing on Facebook (kind of like the media's rising tendency to report on what others are reporting—where's the meat?).

Communication is a huge field, and obviously integral to understanding cooperative group dynamics, which is where I work and play. In this field, one of the trickiest things to accurately interpret is silence. I want to talk about what it means when people aren't talking, and I'm offering this as a four-part harmony, one blog at a time:

Part One: Silence in Conversation (Oct 1)
Part Two: Silence on the Road to Speaking (Oct 8)
Part Three: Silence in Consensus (Oct 29)
Part Four: Silence on Email

In this final installment, I'll zero in on the nuances of non-response in what has become the dominant mode of communication today: electronic. I think the first thing to take into account is that email communication is not equivalent for face-to-face communication, even though many of us pretend that it is. Instead, it's a fragment. When we're speaking to one another in the same room, there's plenty of non-verbal communication (or at least there is if you're paying attention). You have a decent chance of framing silence accurately because you have clues about pacing, facial expression, and other cues from body language.

With email, we have none of this to go by. Worse, some of us find it irresistible not to fill in the gaps with guesses. Here's a range of possibilities when your email correspondent doesn't respond (and there was no bounce message):

—Did they even get the message?
—Did they read it?

Ma’ikwe, my wife, has been building a house this year. For anyone who has attempted this, you will be able to immediately relate to how this can be a wholly consuming project, and not at all simple (see my blogs of July 29 and Aug 1). She essentially set aside or downplayed all other threads in her life to focus on house building the last eight months, with the goal of having a livable space (meaning enclosed and weathertight) before winter.

I’m happy to report that she reached her goal, and Halloween night she slept in her house for the first time. She was understandably proud of her achievement, and has been enjoying exhalation and a certain post-finish-line euphoria these early days of November. She undertook this project with no background in construction and had to perform within the stringent environmental covenants of her home community, Dancing Rabbit, where there are serious restrictions on what building materials can be used and how they can be delivered to the work site. She was simultaneously the lead designer, construction manager, in charge of material procurement, labor organizer, bursar, main grunt, and chief cheerleader. Whew.

While there is a substantial amount of interior work remaining and house completion will still be a major part of Ma’ikwe’s labor landscape in 2010, the rush is over.

Last Wednesday I was in Yellow Springs OH. For a couple hours in the evening I was the featured presenter at an FIC House Party—which is a gathering of folks interested in community, where everyone gets to hear from me what the Fellowship is up to, hear my pitch for why that's important in the world, and is then asked to write a check in support of our work. At the end of the night I had garnered about $800 and had fun in the process, getting folks pumped up about our efforts to build a more cooperative world.

It's the third House Party I've done (the other two were in Seattle and Ann Arbor) and it's one of my favorite activities as the Fellowship's chief fundraiser. In addition to help balance the budget (we can always think up good ways to use money faster than ways to earn it), I'm building personal connections with our constituency, learning first-hand what's exciting for them and how community touches their lives. In short, I'm building community in the process of promoting it. How good can it get?

In Yellow Springs, before I gave my 20-minute spiel about FIC's history, its current program, and the opportunities for everyone in the room to take up an oar on the Fellow Ship, we did a Go Round where I invited participants to speak briefly about their connection with community. The answers were touching—both to my heart, and to other threads in my life:

Last weekend I got valuable information from friends—again—about how I don't always pay enough attention to my audience when offering reflections about what they're doing. It's humbling to reflect on how many times I've had the chance to digest this lesson over the years, and still haven't gotten the job done.

There's a certain irony here in that I'm getting feedback about how effective my communication is about how effective I think others are in their choice about how to communicate their thinking. Talk about chasing one's tail (not to mention the pot calling the kettle black)…

Here's how it played out. Back in August I was the overnight guest of two married friends and I inquired about what the man had been up to lately. He's an interesting guy and he had an interesting answer. He's concerned about sustainability and energy consumption, and has been focusing in particular on how this relates to residential housing—decisions about which tend to have longer lasting consequences than most energy choices, such as diet and transportation.

I'm in Berea KY, attending the Fellowship for Intentional Community's fall organizational meetings—three days of fun and stimulation conversation with friends and fellow zealots. All day long, we talk about community, swap stories, discuss strategies for building cooperative culture, and scheme about ways to balance the budget. I love it.

One of the highlights of Day Two was listening to Board member Raines Cohen discuss the activities and missions of a variety of organizations engaged in efforts to build a better world that involved some aspect of community building. The Board's job was to sort out what role we might play in collaborating with these efforts.

This involves a number of steps. First, what do we think we're good at? I believe the answer here—the thing that intentional communities are better at than anyone else—is using a relationship-based approach to problem solving. As much as any other segment of the culture, we're learning how to handle tough issues without leaving anyone behind. We're learning the skills needed to get all of the stakeholders to the table, solicit what's crucial to each, identify the common threads, and figure out how to create an environment of curiosity and openness in which to manifest a solution. While I believe this is enormously valuable, it's interesting how little demand there is for what we know. I can't tell whether others don't believe intentional communities have this skill (perhaps because our experience is considered too alien, or because we're thought to be running away from society's issues), whether they think they have it as well, or whether that skill is not important. It's baffling.

Our farm is a commune: ie, we own everything together and share all our income and expenses. We are a small group: 5 adults and a 13 year old – she spends a lot of time at school. Over our 35 year history, we have generally had 3-12 members; however, we are usually a larger group – we have friends/family as well as community visitors, and during the growing season, have 3-6 interns. Having interns here and being open to visitors, including group tours, is part of our vision/mission of teaching people about how to live more sustainably and grow & preserve our own food. We strive to demonstrate how to accomplish this on a small scale and believe that growing your own food and eating locally is a political/economic statement – to foster communities having control of their own food supply and economic security in the face of multi-national corporations controlling all aspects of our lives.

We are often asked “how do you few you get all this work done?” The answer is that we have a lot of help – our sorghum harvest/operation is an excellent example:  3 weeks ago, there were 20-25 of us harvesting and processing our sorghum crop – there was a labor exchange group from Twin Oaks, a friend from East Wind (both communities are in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities), interns, ex-interns, and visitors. It truly feels like a harvest celebration – many hands make light work. There is an amazing feeling that comes with a group of people working on a common project. It reinforces our commitment to working together and living in community.

Communication is a huge field, and obviously integral to understanding cooperative group dynamics, which is where I work and play. In this field, one of the trickiest things to accurately interpret is silence. I want to talk about what it means when people aren't talking, and I'm offering this as a four-part harmony, one blog at a time:

Part One: Silence in Conversation (Oct 1)

Part Two: Silence on the Road to Speaking (Oct 8)

Part Three: Silence in Consensus

Part Four: Silence on Email

The roots of consensus follow two main historical threads: one is the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and the other is a Native American tradition, especially the tribes of the Iroquois Federation. Among Quakers it is understood that silence means assent. In that culture it is the responsibility of each member to speak his or her mind. Meetings proceed at a pace where there is ample spaciousness for each person to voice their views, and if a member of a Quaker Meeting chooses not to speak it is understood that the group can move forward on solid footing.

In contrast with that, it is my understanding that the reverse was true among Native American cultures. There, silence was understood to be a withholding of agreement, and no decision could move forward until everyone had spoken.

I enjoyed a unique and touching 60th birthday celebration over the weekend.

Friday
It started propitiously enough when Jennifer Martin drove over from Dancing Rabbit Friday afternoon, clothed in more attitude than fabric. Arriving in a skimpy black teddy, black leather boots, long black gloves, and a choke collar, "Mistress Jennifer" got everyone's immediate attention. With an affected British accent she directed me—with crop in hand—to get my things together with alacrity and get in the car. While I was not all together certain what "things" would be needed for what lay ahead (there was a scroll directing me to bring an overnight bag, wine, and cash in small, unmarked bills, but that didn't actually cut the fog much), it was clear I need to make choices quickly.

Hastily selecting some festive apparel (like Jennifer, I also chose a ruffled black top; unlike Jennifer, my selection—a shirt—covered more and accentuated less), I got in the car and away I was whisked for the three-mile ride from Sandhill to Dancing Rabbit. I tried, with partial success, to concentrate more on the driving than on Jennifer's decolletage and we'd only barely (so to speak) gotten into the topic of sex toys when we'd arrived and I could gracefully effect a change of subject. (Where was the weekend headed??)

To my amazement, the birthday celebration started at the Milkweed Mercantile, the not-quite-finished Eco-Inn located smack in the midst of Dancing Rabbit. My birthday dinner (the first of two) was their inaugural restaurant event, and Ma'ikwe and I were the first overnight guests at Kurt & Alline's inn. So it was an auspicious occasion for more than just me.

I'm not typically big on birthdays. This year, however, I may not have a choice.

In two days I'll turn 60, and Ma'ikwe has been plotting for months about how that should be celebrated. I've been told to keep my schedule completely free from Friday afternoon through Sunday morning—that's about 44 hours worth of surprises. So even if I remain not big on birthdays, I reckon this year my birthday will be big on me. (And I'm fairly confident I'll have some great blog material come Monday morning.)

As I'm not the kind of person who tries to wheedle clues out of people, I truly have no idea what shenanigans my wife is up to. I'm just going to let the Force guide me—and hope it's guiding her as well. My mantra will be WWYD: what would Yoda do?

As it happens, Ma'ikwe turns 40 in early February, which means that no matter how out of control things get over the weekend, I only have to wait a little over three months before I have the chance to get even. (Ma'ikwe is fully aware of this, yet I'm not sure whether that knowledge is injecting some sobriety into her machinations, or egging her on to even greater excess in the hope of enhancing the luster of her own hour(s) in the spotlight of a milestone birthday. As I doubt my wife has ever met a lime she didn't embrace the light from, this could go either way.)
• • •

Yesterday I went out to lunch with a friend, Bill Becker, and he picked up the tab. Next time it will be my turn.

To be sure, when the next time rolls around he might "forget" that he paid the previous time and wrestle me for the bill (maybe that tendency in him is manifest destiny given his name, yet Bill has always been a very generous guy), so it's my job to remember and not let him get away with that. Most often, Bill—who has served as FIC's Treasurer for 14 years—and I get together at Fellowship functions, and it's not unusual for both of us to bring some beer or wine for the Board and staff to enjoy after hours. We both try to be generous, and it's part of our vocabulary of camaraderie to be quick to reach for our wallets.

After 14 years I'm pretty comfortable with this back and forth with Bill. However, there are plenty of other relationships in my life where I'm uneasy being on the receiving end. Why is that?

I like the concept of paying forward, of giving in advance of receiving—even when it's uncertain that there will be a future occasion for the recipient of my generosity to reciprocate. I like having a reputation for generosity, and I like how it feels to be helpful and doing a bit more than my share, even if my contribution is anonymous. To be sure, I don't come out ahead in every reckoning (I didn't do as much dish washing as others last weekend during the Green Eggs meeting in Denver); yet this is true in general.

The part of this equation I want to focus on is not my generosity (I like that part); I want to look at my discomfort with receiving.

At Sandhill we had our first killing frost a week ago, and we finished milling and cooking down the last of the sorghum harvest Tuesday. While there are still untold buckets of produce spread across the floor of our walk-in cooler (the physical manifestation of our abundant gardens), for the first time in months we can linger over that first cup of coffee in the morning, because our days are not so packed with pressing work.

It's life on the farm.

The crescendo of the highly orchestrated days of fall has suddenly given way to the lingering days of Indian summer—where there is time to savor the dwindling warmth and walk among the fallen leaves swirling in the autumn breeze. The Earth is turning toward dormancy and there is time to exhale and reflect.

For all of these reasons, fall is my favorite time of year. I love having a full and busy life, yet cherish also these seasonal pauses that Nature periodically inserts into the calendar.

I'm in Colorado this week, gathered with five compatriots—Betty Didcoct, David Waskom, Elph Morgan, Susan Short, and Terry O'Keefe—who together with me comprise the half dozen principals of Green Eggs (Guild for Relational Economics: Experts in Neighborly & Entrepreneurial Growth that is Green & Sustainable). This consortium is exploring whether we have a viable business specializing in services that marry healthy economics with cooperative dynamics. [See my blog of xx] It's a great group, and we're optimistic that some of our creativity will translate into income streams—both for our clients and for us.

This morning, long-term Sandhill members Käthe & Michael picked up a U-Haul truck in preparation for their departure from the community early tomorrow. After seven-and-a-half years, they're "retiring" to land they own in southern Missouri, to be nearer Käthe's adult children, Molina (in Columbia MO) and Andrew (in Fayetteville AR).

While it's always hard losing people who've been part of the family for so long (in 35 years we've only said goodbye to a handful of people who lived here more than four years as adults: Grady, Jules, Annie, French, and Bekka), Käthe & Michael's departure also signals a sea change. In the next few months, Sandhill will get significantly younger.

Where Käthe & Michael are both near 60 (as are Stan and I) and Gigi is in her late 40s, we added Apple as a member last year and she's only her late 30s. Emily joined a month ago and she's hasn't yet reached the age that Jack Weinberg said (circa 1965) that you couldn't trust anyone past the age of. This winter we're expecting Trish & Joe to move up from St Louis and they're a couple in their late 20s with a one-year-old son. By spring, for the first time in two decades, a majority of our adult population will be under 40. Our average age will be in free fall, plummeting from somewhere around 57 to 42. I'm excited about this. We're nearing the end of our first generation of members, and we need to be thinking about what's going to happen next.

Every so often you read a book just at the right time—when the themes of the book are in laminar flow with what's happening in your life. I just had that experience with Audrey Niffenegger's bestselling novel, The Time Traveler's Wife. Though this was written six years ago, I only just got around to picking it up while visiting friends in the Bay Area two weeks ago. I've never read a book that does a better job of exploring the complexities of intimate relationship.

Aside from the clever concept of Henry as a Chrono-Displaced Person—a fictional emerging anomaly in genetic accidents, this is book is about intimacy. In particular, between the two protagonists, Henry and Clare. Henry is eight years older than Clare, and they have 15 years together, interrupted periodically by Henry's uncontrolled habit of responding to stress by transporting himself in time (for periods lasting from minutes to days), either forward or backwards in his life. Most commonly he visits people important in his life, and sometimes himself. In particular, he visits Clare, and this is part of the discontinuous fabric from which their relationship is woven.

Henry and Clare are deeply in love with each, and one of the most powerful aspects of the book is the exploration of anguish and fragmentation that can occur between partners, despite their being deeply in love. It is heart rending when Henry wants to stop trying to have a baby after the fourth miscarriage (for fear of losing Clare) and Clare wants to persist, because she desperately wants to continue what they have created into another generation. Being untied does necessarily mean being of one mind, and this is the real stuff of intimacy.

Communication is a huge field, and obviously integral to understanding cooperative group dynamics, which is where I work and play. In this field, one of the trickiest things to accurately interpret is silence. I want to talk about what it means when people aren't talking, and I'm offering this as a four-part harmony, one blog at a time:

Part One: Silence in Conversation (Oct 1)
Part Two: Silence on the Road to Speaking
Part Three: Silence in Consensus
Part Four: Silence on Email

In this second installment I'll explore the kind of Silence where a person intends to speak (or is at least open to it), but is just not there yet. This is where the silent person is actively working with what's going on and is not shut down. I think there's a sequence of three questions that a person is addressing (or ought to be) in this situation. Though not everyone asks all of these questions (in fact, you probably know people who don't even stop to ask any of them), I suggest:

Step 1: What Do I Think (or Feel)?

Yesterday I attended the Homegrown Urban Country Fair in St Louis—celebrating local food, wholesome food, Farm Aid, and, apparently, oxymorons.

Excepting the part where I had to get up at 2 am (after going to bed at 1 am) in order to get there in time to set up, and the part where it was in the low 40s in St Louis at dawn and we had to wait around in the shade for a couple hours before the customers started showing up—rendering an ordinarily simple task like making change a challenge in dexterity, it was a fun day. The sun, shy in the morning, finally made its full appearance in the afternoon and the temperature obediently rose into the more congenial (and less congealing) 60s. The crowd was boisterous, and we were just the right distance from the amplifiers to enjoy the live music without having it disrupt customer conversations.

The fair was an amplification of the Tower Grove Farmers' Market, which is a regular feature of Saturday mornings in St Louis during the growing season, and Sandhill Farm was invited as part of the expanded vendor list. While you might reasonably question whether food grown 175 miles away still qualifies as "local," at least we were in state. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the main coordinator (the self-styled Homegrown Shepherdess), Cornelia, is based out of Massachusetts! It was a day of contrasts.

Communication is a huge field, and obviously integral to understanding cooperative group dynamics, which is where I work and play. In this field, one of the trickiest things to accurately interpret is silence. I want to talk about what it means when people aren't talking, and I'm offering this as a four-part harmony, one blog at a time:

Part One: Silence in Conversation
Part Two: Silence on the Road to Speaking
Part Three: Silence in Consensus
Part Four: Silence on Email

It seems to me that the place to start is by exploring the many-faceted role of silence in informal conversation, which is the fundamental building block of all communication—it's how most of us communicate at least 90% of the time, and it's where we form our communication habits. Thus, this opening piece will be on Silence in Conversation. Here are seven different ways that silence manifests in everyday face-to-face discourse:

A. When people are lost in the conversation
There is a tendency for many of us to get silent when we find the conversation too complicated, too fast, or too esoteric. We also tend to get silent if we're distracted, tired, or didn't hear what others have said. While this may or may not be irritating (see G below), the conversation has passed you by and you're responding passively.

B. When people go inward

Last weekend I was working with a 36-year-old community in northern California that was founded by Quaker activists. Among other things they wanted to spend half the weekend refining how they work with consensus. It's a great topic, and one that I wished more groups devoted time to—especially groups who supposedly operate by consensus.

Here are the four consensus questions the group wanted to tackle:

1. How to get back on track once the consideration veers into negative or unproductive behavior?

2. How do we define "blocking" and "standing aside," and what are individual and group rights & responsibilities when these surface?

3. When working a topic on which there's substantive disagreement about how to proceed, how do we work constructively with differences and foster an atmosphere of appreciation for people willing to surface their concerns?

4. How can we discern when our input is based on what's best for the group, in contrast with personal preferences?

Well, we didn't run out of things to talk about. In today's blog I want to share some insights that surfaced for me in connection with addressing Question #2—in particular, about how blocking is viewed. In subsequent blogs, I'll try to address the other questions.

Consensus (in some form or other) is the most common way that intentional communities make decisions. As a process consultant I'm often hired to help groups learn more deeply how consensus works and how to develop the culture in which it can flourish. (Unfortunately, many groups make the commitment to using consensus without acquiring a deep understanding or investing in training, and they get indifferent results.) How to understand and work with blocks is one of the most frequent questions about consensus that I field.

Yesterday afternoon I spent a delightful hour with Lynne Elizabeth of New Village Press at her home in Temescal Commons, a small 9-unit infill cohousing community located smack in the middle of Oakland. The community was built in 2000, on the site of a homestead that goes back to the 19th Century and, incredibly, still includes the original barn—used to store the hay they used to cut from the surrounding fields of grass. You have to squint real hard to imagine that the urban asphalt and completely built-out Oakland of today (the place about which Gertrude Stein once quipped, "There is no there there.") once looked like that.

I first met Lynne in 1998, at the FIC's highly successful Art of Community conference held that fall at Christ Church of the Golden Rule, a pacifist community outside of Willits CA. Although that site was over two hours driving time north of San Francisco, we had over 250 people attend and had to turn away 30 more because we couldn't shoehorn them in. At that point, Lynne was just about to launch New Village Journal, a magazine focused on building sustainable cultures. While the magazine didn't last long (at least in print form), Lynne has sustained an interest in urban vitality and sustainability ever since, and it was nice to touch base with her again.

As I walked over to her bungalow yesterday, I didn't have any particular agenda in mind—I was just reconnecting with a friend and wanted to hear what she was up to. Of course, I wasn't completely naive. I knew that Lynne and I are both inveterate community networkers and I expected to discuss potential collaborations. I just didn't know at the outset where the conversation would lead.

Sunday night I arrived in Oakland for the start of a four-day visit, and I had dinner with my friend (and host), Jeffrey Harris, an ex-Dancing Rabbit member. We went out to a neighborhood Italian restaurant with his partner and housemate Ha, and enjoyed a lovely dinner, replete with caprese, carbohydrates (fresh bread & pasta), and conversation.

Though we had our eyes on tiramisu for dessert, alas, they were all out! While they also had cannoli on the menu and that seemed to me a perfectly acceptable runner-up selection, Jeffrey talked me into going out instead to a nearby specialty ice cream shop, Tara's, which features organic and exotic flavors (I had cherry fudge, mango agave, and tarragon chocolate). It was pretty damn good. Jeffrey assured me that they use low-fat milk in concocting their delicacies, yet it was incredibly rich tasting nonetheless. Yum.
• • •
Last night I accepted a dinner invitation at a co-op house within walking distance of Jeffrey's, and once again I did not have cannoli for dessert. Instead I had conflict.

The person who'd invited me to dinner was struggling in her relationship with another house member and she wanted my help in facilitating an attempt to help them work through their dynamics. While it was flattering to be asked, I generally prefer not have these requests sprung on me. Still, here we were, and it seemed ingracious to decline. (Are professional facilitators ever off duty?)

Yesterday afternoon I witnessed a facilitator bring a group back from a break and moon everyone in the first 60 seconds. I'd never seen that before.

I'm working with a group this weekend where the prime directive is for me to coach their facilitators as the community tackles tough issues around refining how they practice consensus and making decisions about the next residence to construct. We have 11 hours of plenaries lined up accomplish as much as possible inside of 42 hours, and that's providing 8-9 members of the group the opportunity to take a turn at the wheel under my tutelage.

As a teacher, this is facilitation improv, and one of the most fun things I do. There isn't much I can prepare for; mostly I just teach the moment, which includes stepping in to offer a redirection or summary while the meeting in progress; conferring with the facilitator(s) on break to help them road map the next sequence of focus; and meeting with folks outside of session to discuss facilitation—all of which takes place in the highly caffeinated world of process junkies, where people meet immediately before and after each meeting to discuss the meeting.

On the front end, I orchestrate the prep: we go over the objectives, identify a productive sequence of engagement, discuss format options, and anticipate potential potholes on the road to success. Afterward we repair to a quiet corner to debrief what happened: we explore confusing moments, celebrate effective choices, and walk through how to handle awkward moments differently the next time around.

Ode to an Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the marketplace;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsmen of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the route
Of lads that wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

—A E Houseman

Twenty-two years ago I was selected to be on a jury. It was a civil case about a local farmer suing a local bank because, the farmer claimed, he'd been coerced into signing over rights to an otherwise unencumbered piece of land as additional collateral when the bank got nervous about the terms they'd originally given him on a loan. The farmer claimed he didn't know his rights and the bank president had taken advantage of him. Presentation of the testimony and evidence was completed in six days. On the seventh day the lawyers rested.

While this story is very much old news, I'm dusting it off for three reasons:
1. The trial took place in the spring of 1987—about six months before I went out on my first job as a process consultant, and my jury experience helped gel in me: a) my interest in group dynamics; b) my sense that I had something to offer; and c) my understanding of the widespread need for something better than the ways we typically make decisions.

2. I was appalled by the gap between the way the jury process is meant to safeguard justice and the way decisions are actually made by the ordinary citizens who comprise juries.

3. This bit of history is on my mind right now because I used the example of this experience during last weekend's facilitation training (Weekend V of the 8-part Integrative Facilitation Training that I'm conducting with Ma'ikwe in North Carolina) to illuminate the opportunities for people to use consensus thinking and facilitative tools in non-consensus situations. While this is an important topic and this was a decent example, I hadn't prepared well to make my points. By writing about it, I figure I can take a second bite of that apple.

Courtroom Curiosities

Ma’ikwe and I unreservedly agree that we have a great sex life. However, when she asked me yesterday if I thought that was one of the main reasons our partnership worked well, we didn’t have the same answer. And that got me thinking…

For me, sex has always been confusing. While I’m generally sure of my footing in most things I undertake (which means I’m either confident in my ability to do a thing well, or confident in my ability to find out how to do a thing well), that’s not the case with sex.

I’m mystified why anyone finds me sexually attractive (though thankful that some do). And while I really enjoy sex (mysterious though it is), I do not have much confidence in the outcome of any particular engagement. On the up side, as I’ve gotten older—I’ve been doing this for more than four decades now—I’ve gotten more sensitive to reading my partner and tuning into what she wants. On the down side (so to speak), my erections have become increasingly erratic and undependable. By unlinking the concept of sexual pleasure from the imperative of male orgasm, Ma’ikwe and I have been able to achieve a highly satisfying sex life.

I give Ma’ikwe a lot of credit here—when it comes to sex she has catholic tastes without Catholic guilt. I’ve had past partners who found my inconsistent erections highly frustrating—even to the point of accusing me of withholding erections (for what reason I cannot fathom).

As the Fellowship for Intentional Community's main administrator, part of my job is to play center field. That means that if something comes our way that's sufficiently unusual that it doesn't fall into someone's defined bailiwick, then I'm expected to field it. This past week I got two communications as the FIC center fielder, which, together with a third dialog that I've been conducting for several months, showcase both the entertaining and frustrating aspects of my job.

Example #1
I opened a letter from a foreign correspondent last week, who is an FIC member and recent purchaser of Geoph Kozeny's Visions of Utopia video. So this is someone familiar with intentional community.

They were writing with an urgent request. This person was concerned about the Earth's impending shift into the Fifth Dimension, which will commence Dec 21, 2012. They wanted my help (as FIC administrator) to get space on the program at two upcoming events—the Continental Bioregional Congress to be held at The Farm Oct 3-11, and the NASCO Institute to be held in Ann Arbor Nov 6-8—to pass along vital information about the Fifth Dimension. Oh boy.

The writer had three pieces of evidence in support of their claim:
a) The growing support for belief that there are other sentient beings in the universe.
b) The emergence of indigo, crystal, or starseed children—all born since the '80s and who are markedly more intuitive and psychically open.
c) The presence of "walk-ins" such as himself who come from other dimensions,a nd are here to serve as go-betweens.

With apologies to Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon (whose top-rated afternoon show on ESPN shares the same title as this blog entry), I want to focus today on the dynamics of interrupting.

While it's a common occurrence in everyday speech—and I suppose we all do it—there are considerable subtleties.

First, let's look at why people interrupt. In casual conversation, any of the following might trigger an intentional interruption:
o You already know what's being said.
o You aren't interested in what's being said.
o The speaker is repeating what they've already said and you got it the first time (or at least you think you did).
o You don't understand what's being said.
o You haven't accepted the premise that the statement is based on and are therefore not willing to consider the conclusion.
o You've asked a question and the speaker is missing the mark in their response.
o You can't handle what is being said.
o You didn't hear what the speaker said and you want them to back up and start over.

There are also unconscious reasons a person might interrupt:
o You don't have the patience to wait until they're finished.
o You want to change the topic.
o You can't resist inserting a joke, or an aside.
o It's your style.
o In your excitement, you want to jump in with a story or statement of your own to continue the momentum of the conversation.

This afternoon I was facilitating a conflict between two people and there were three other group members present for the examination. For the 90 minutes that I worked with them, almost all of the talking was done by the two antagonists and me. Unlike a normal business meeting, where you want to hear from everyone, during a clearing I had no problem with the non-belligerents being almost silent. Toward the end, I asked each of the three if they had any questions or comments about what had transpired. One of them thought for a moment and observed, "We all have to learn to control our egos; nobody benefits from conflict and interpersonal strife. Everyone here means well, and we have to learn how to accept our differences without being so triggered."

The more I thought about what's behind that statement, the more I had a problem with it, and that's why I'm focusing this blog entry on the differences between Passivity and Neutrality.

For the most part, when people are in the presence of conflict and strong emotions, if they don't have a dog in the fight they generally attempt to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible—in the hope that they will not draw attention from the belligerents. Mostly people fear the expression of upset and anger because it's so often associated with people getting hurt. If that's your experience, it makes perfect sense why you'd want to blend in with the furniture when others are going at it. While few people intend to generate collateral damage, nobody wants to be collateral damage.

Crop Failures! OUCH! that's a downer - who wants to know or talk about crop failures? well, ok, I can hear about them - as long as they are someone else's failures. It's hard for me to admit to failure. Some time back, I wrote about our problems/failure with tempeh production - it was interesting that several folks responded with suggestions - it appeared inconceivable to them that this "problem" could not be solved. We were there too - but after 9 months, we conceded defeat (in the short term - we still believe that we will figger it out eventually!).

So what am I talking about? what crop failure?

1. first & foremost: honey. In the last 25 years we have not harvested less than 100 gallons of honey in any year – the record was 410 gallons, the last few years, average 110 gal; this year – 22 gallons. THAT SUCKS – big time.

why the poor year? once again, i’m mystified. Sure, I can point to various factors:

swarming – seems like our bees just would not quit swarming this year; in fact, we had another swarm this week.

weather – cool & rainy; bees do best with the opposite – hot & dry.

But, somehow, it does not add up, because both of the above factors were also present last year, and we harvested 100 gallons.

2. dried beans – for our own eating: black beans, pinto beans, & red beans. At this time of year, they are usually 3′ tall and/or sprawling in between the rows and covering the ground. This year – some are 8″ tall, appear puny & stunted; others are 15″ now. The deer have been browsing on them freely and keeping them short – but this looks stunted, not just short. So why? too much rain, not enough sun, always theories – but it seems there were other years when we had similar conditions, and still had a good crop….?

I do note that the beans I replanted (the pintos and red beans) are doing much better; this year, later planting are more vigorous.

3. sweet corn – this hurts. we all LOVE sweet corn. What self-respecting back to the land commune does not grow their own sweet corn? well, okay, we are eating our own sweet corn now and even put some in the freezer – but many of the ears are short & stubby. Of course, the raccoons have been harvesting just ahead of us, as they like to do, but 4 strands of electric fence around the patch does deter them.

why the poor sweet corn harvest? too much rain, not enough sun, and yet?? This by itself does not satisfy me.

4. Mustard – okay, this is not a surprise. Our mustard crop fails more than half of the time. In fact, many years we do not even bother planting mustard – so why plant it at all? We make and sell prepared mustard as one of our products – we like to grow as many of the ingredients as possible in products we sell. Commercially, mustard is grown in more northerly areas: North Dakota, Canada, etc. Occasionally, we get a decent mustard crop – that keeps the hope/spark alive. This year was not one of them. What usually happens is that the plants are not vigorous, have a small seed set and then are overtaken by foxtail (weed). This last week, those conditions manifested and we decided to destroy the crop – to keep the foxtail from going to seed.

5. Popcorn – we have not harvested it yet, but I can already see it’s a crop failure: poor weather and deer are feasting on it.

SO WHAT IS NOT A FAILURE??

Sorghum – our main cash crop, looks to be an average crop.

Wheat – we had some vomitoxin (due to high humidity and too much rain), but an average harvest.

Green manure crops are doing GREAT! We have acres of buckwheat flowering now – the bees are loving it.

Garden and fruit crops (our food) are doing average; actually, we have had a great year for greens and the best year ever for zuchini.

As farm folks like to say, it’s not a failure unless you don’t learn from it. In that vein, we hope that calling it “failure” is incorrect – although exactly what we are learning is not evident yet.

This past week I’ve been in Fennville MI, visiting my wife’s brother & sister-in-law, Mark & Kim. They have an acreage in the country where they homestead and also hold down full-time jobs—as nearly as that’s possible in Michigan’s seriously depressed economy. (Kim’s an automotive engineer and lately she’s been making better money selling Tupperware.)

For the second year in a row, Mark & Kim have set aside a week in August for “Farm Camp,” where friends and relations are invited—kids especially welcome—to spend as much of the week as they can experiencing the bucolic life, with events scheduled daily. There was garden work, animal care (new calves and ever-hungry chickens who looked forward with relish to every bowl of kitchen scraps that came their way), trips to the beach (Lake Michigan is just a few miles to the west), a horse drawn wagon ride, a field trip to a Michigan State University experimental dairy farm with robotic milking machines, a raku pottery firing with Grandma Kay (proprietress of Capricorn Clay in Jackson MI), and U-pick blueberries. Some days it was hard to catch your breath.

All of this was capped off Friday with a block party. Mark believes that everyone ought to have a neighborhood all-skate at least once a year, both for social relations and to nudge a person into seriously cleaning up their yard. Ma'ikwe and I got a rare chance to dance together and the DJs taught us to line dance the Electric Shuffle (where do they get these names?).