Sandhill Farm

The Cultures I've Called Home

Laird — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:05:52 -0600

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.

Here's the outline of my series:
—Home as Family (Dec 24, 2009)
—Home as Place (Dec 27, 2009)
—Home as Culture
—Home as Routine
—Home as Work

In this third entry, I'll focus on Home as Culture.

Over the years, I've tasted a number of these. I grew up in the Republican Leave-It-To-Beaver suburbs of Chicago. Then there was my intoxicating (in multiple senses of the term) residential college experience, rife with hot stove political debate and social experimentation of all stripes. Beginning in my early 20s I settled into the arcane world of intentional community, with its unique mix of sustainability, authenticity, and grunge. Surrounding that, my community life is embedded in a traditional small town rural America culture that is an amalgam of God-and-apple-pie conservative, live-and-let-live libertarian, and unpretentious aw-shucks hillbilly. (Thus, driving into Memphis MO, our county seat, last week to donate blood for the Red Cross and to browse at the public library, it was like crossing an international cultural boundary—though only separated by 13 vehicle miles, Sandhill and Memphis are thousands of miles apart when measured by temperament and weltanschauung.

Let me examine each of these in turn.

1. Suburban America Culture
This was a self-absorbed culture that didn't concern itself much with what happened elsewhere (think of the movie, The Truman Show). When I grew there in the '50s and '60s the American Dream of upward mobility was not yet discredited.

While there were some things of substance discussed openly (issues around child rearing, the Vietnam War, the job market), there were many other substantive topics that were off limits (intimacy, what constitutes abuse, failures in the democratic process—when you wanted to throw up at the prospect of the Republican or the Democrat getting elected). There's only so much speculation about the weather or what fruit to suspend in your lime jello that a person can stomach, and loyalty to da Cubs, da Bears, and da Bulls palls after the umpteenth iteration.

2. College Dormitory Culture
This was not just a melting pot; it was a stirred pot. Kids who have been placed together primarily on the basis of SAT scores do not comprise a particularly homogenous cohort. By luck, I thrived in a college (Carleton, in Northfield MN) that had little off-campus housing and required everyone to be in residence (no commuters). As it developed, this was a precursor to community living and gave me my first taste of the intensity and stimulation that are characteristic of intentional communities.

I loved the late night bull sessions and trying to figure out the right balance of social and academic where there was no longer parents present to rein me in when I strayed off track. I liked taking responsibility for my own life.

The summer before my senior year the Vietnam War had come to a head. The draft was at its peak, and I got to experience, for the first time, how cultures can clash. I felt that I had more or less fit in and was acculturated pretty well living in the suburbs through high school. In college, just like everyone else, I was questioning the assumptions of the status quo, and felt like I was essentially searching my soul in the same manner as my peers. However, when I went home in the summer of 1970 (student strikes had led to suspended classes the preceding spring, after Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia), it was immediately apparent that my suburban culture was on a collision course with my college culture.

Adults in the suburbs of Chicago were pissed off that students (who were enjoying the privilege of higher education as a consequence of their parents' financially success) were using the opportunity to foment revolution. I learned that not all cultures fit together, and part of what makes a culture "home" is the feeling that you can be yourself and be accepted for who you are. When I returned to the suburbs in the summer of 1970 (it may have been the Summer of Love in San Francisco, but it was the Summer of War in La Grange IL), I found out that I had to work at fitting into a culture that I had left just three years previously as a well-integrated export.

I understood in my belly that the suburbs would probably never be my home culture again.

3. Intentional Community Culture
School ended (it always does), and I had to figure out what was next. Following the social service path that suggested itself out of the challenges I grappled with in college, I worked a two-year stint as a junior bureaucrat for the US Dept of Transportation (where I met the secretary of the administrative assistant for the Assistant Secretary for Administration—the scary part being that I knew what that meant).

While I lived in a succession of co-op houses in DC, that were mostly an extension of my college culture, I yearned to rediscover that cutting edge blend of stimulation and support that I'd found in college—I just didn't want to go back to school to get it.

I stumbled into Kat Kinkade's A Walden Two Experiment in February 1973, a first-hand account of the first five years of Twin Oaks. That inspired me to consider intentional community as the place where I was likely to find the culture I most felt drawn to. That led me to call a gathering of my closest friends from college in Sept 1973 Out of the 12 of us got together, two couples became the founding members of Sandhill Farm seven months later.

Fast forward 35 years. I still live at Sandhill and community culture has now been my identified home for a majority of my life. While it was a direct outgrowth of my college experience, it's instructive that out of that dozen friends who gathered in the fall of 1973, only my original partner (Annie) and I are living in community today. The others all drifted back toward a culture more like the one they grew up in. What seemed "normal" to me turned out to be aberrational for my peers. By affiliating with community culture, I found myself for the first time in a distinct minority.

Cooperative culture is rather rarefied air, and it's quite difficult to explain it to those who have never tasted it. Where I see sharing, auslanders see struggle; where I see support, they see irritation. Over and over I've found that I can meet complete strangers and within minutes—by virtue of our both living in community—can get into a meaningful exchange about topics I've never been able to discuss with my family of origin.

4. Midwest Small Town America Culture
I grew up in the Midwest and have always appreciated the salt-of-the-earth, what-you-see-is-what-you-get lack of pretentiousness about the regional culture. Where jaded coastal eyes tend to see Midwesterners as staid, I see solid (and the lack of cover-of-People-magazine sex appeal means the folks who live here want to live here, which is fine with me).

Yes, small town culture tends to be parochial, and nobody looks to Scotland County for trendsetting fashion statements. We eat low on the hog here. Wages are modest yet so is the cost of living. Productive agricultural land is still a relative bargain (especially when compared with bloated West Coast prices) and you don't have to irrigate to get a crop.

While it was made clear to me when I moved here as a 24-year-old that I wouldn't live long enough to be accepted as a local, my son (who was born here seven years after Sandhill was founded) was elected 4-H King of the County Fair when he was 16, and the librarians in Memphis still ask after him whenever I drop by the public library.

While we've made definite local connections over the years (after all, how bad can it be when we've been invited once again to Roger & Mary Walker's annual Super Bowl Party, where we'll get to schmooze with our ex-Postmaster and her family—who are lifelong natives of this area—while we ooh and aah over this year's offerings from Madison Avenue for the highest priced ads in television), it always feels a bit like speaking a second language, where you're always on guard against the possibility of an inadvertent social faux pas.
• • •
In sum, my home culture is intentional community, and it's common for me to immediately feel at ease in groups other than my own—even when I'm visiting a place for the first time. The familiarity is not with the people so much as with the culture. I know what their issues are; I understand their joys and sorrows; I can speak their language.

While I still retain memories and some degree of social grace relative to the other cultures I've lived in, nowhere am I as comfortable or feel as connected as when I'm in community.
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Go(ing) by Train(ing)

Laird — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:13:05 -0600

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.

In preparation for this, yesterday I crafted a questionnaire that I've distributed to the people who've said they'd be attending. (There are 13 of them, and I couldn't help wondering if it was entirely coincidental that when we offered the opportunity to become initiated into the shamanistic art of facilitation that we manifested exactly enough acolytes to form a coven. It gives one pause.) After putting this together, it occurred to me that it was excellent material to share with my readers, illuminating what range of topics fall under the omnibus (I did not say ominous) heading of Facilitation, as well as what kind of information I want from students in order to make the most of our time together. Just as facilitators need to be able to work effectively with a variety of participants, teachers need to be able to adapt their material to a wide range of prior experience and preferred learning styles. It's a dance.

So here's what I asked:

Background Questionnaire for Facilitation Training
1. How would you rate your experience as a facilitator (pick one):

o Just fell of the turnip truck
o Some experience, yet not confident I grok the role fully
o Solid with basics, yet can get overwhelmed by complex or volatile topics
o Near wizard, yet want to hone my skills in specific aspects

2. Learning styles (pick all that work for you):

o Handouts and lecture with Q&A (you listen to me)
o Demonstration (you watch me)
o Practice (I watch you)

3. Which of the following aspects of facilitation are most important for you to receive help with? As there's undoubtedly way more stuff here than we can tackle in a half day—that's why I offer this as a two-year training—please limit your selections to the three that are most valuable to you right now:

o How to prep for a meeting (don't pick this one, as we'll necessarily have to cover this in the afternoon; I've included it here just to fill out the menu).
o Mind set of the facilitator (how to prepare for being up front and being a servant leader).
o Managing the Discussion phase—where the group identifies the factors that a good response to the topic needs to take into account.
o Managing the Proposal Generating phases—where the group figures out the best way to balance the output of the Discussion phase.
o The facilitator's tool kit (the basic set of techniques for keeping everyone on the same page and the conversation moving productively).
o Formats (an explanation and demonstration of basic choices in how to explore a topic, and why you'd choose each).
o Working with non-trivial emotional distress.
o Understanding the boundary between what to work in plenary and what to work outside.
o Room architecture (setting up the environment of the meeting space to succeed).
o How and when to delegate effectively.
o Working with visuals in support of the conversation (the art of scribing in support of the meeting).
o Closing the deal (the art of finding common ground and what people can agree with).
o Off-roading (when to work off-script).
o Working as a team (there are a bundle of process roles that need to be filled in support of an excellent meeting; we'll lay them out and discuss which can be combined and how).
o When to get help (recognizing when you're in over your head).
o Challenging personalities (working constructively with your nightmares).
o Agenda development (the dance between Oversight and Process).
o When and how to incorporate ritual.
o Balancing thought and energy (both are in play all the time, yet are different lenses through which to see what's happening).
o Working with outliers (how to bring the strays into the fold).
o How to get useful meeting evaluations.
o The serious business of working well with humor (both yours and the participants').

I'll let you know how it turns out.
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Stumbling Over Different Prospectives

Laird — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:22:35 -0600

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.

As it turned out, we didn't get back to this discussion before we ran out of time. Understandably, given that we hadn't met in a month, we had a number of things already on the agenda and items added mid-course tend to fall off the table. It was at this point that I got into trouble.

I was frustrated that we hadn't prioritized addressing the prospective's questions, which was work we needed to do anyway. Others felt that the topic was too large to attempt and that it was better to complete a bunch of smaller items and reserve the big one for another time—perhaps during our annual retreat coming up in March. While I could appreciate that this was a topic worthy of retreat attention, and there's a natural desire to conclude a meeting with as many topics as possible wrapped up with a ribbon and bow (which the question of Sandhill's relationship to supporting agricultural initiatives was not a good candidate to be), I was embarrassed that we had accepted this prospective (as well as the other couple) for a visit to explore membership and then might fail to discuss during his visit what we thought about his candidacy and the issues he raised. As far as I'm concerned, we were falling down on the job. (How do you invite people to live with you, have them travel a considerable distance to get to your place, and then not take the time to thoroughly consider their candidacy in a timely way??)

When I expressed this to the group, and urged us to meet again in the 48 hours remaining with everyone on the farm, it did not go well, and I think it's instructive to break down how this broke down.

There were two main components of the dynamic: a) my view that the group has an obligation to give a response to prospectives, if requested, about how we were viewing their interest in membership before their visit ends; and b) my upset about our not having taken this up in the course of the meeting. While I'm not defending my choice to express my upset (I have no doubt that what happened would have gone easier if I had not been in distress), it's worthwhile to look at how this becomes a mess.

We did not get off to a good start in that the responses to my statement were focused more on my views than on my upset. While there was support to stretch and have a second meeting (which I appreciated and was responsive to my concern), there was also reluctance. One person misheard my urging the group to meet as a demand that we decide right away whether to accept this person as a member, and they objected to being pushed into a premature decision. As people scrambled to figure out how to shoehorn a meeting into their Wednesday schedule, I became impatient. "What could be more important than this?" I asked with exasperation. This didn't go well either.

From their perspective, the other members were trying to work with me and felt trashed for their efforts. From my perspective, my upset had still not been acknowledged (my views had been recognized, but not my upset), and I was still speaking from a reactive place. While we finally got off the merry-go-round (and ended the meeting with an agreement to meet tomorrow to do what we can to tackle the questions raised by the propsectives), there was still a lot of raw feelings. After 35 years, you'd think we could handle this moment better, but here we are.
• • •
The Post-game Analysis
For me, there's still plenty of room to be more mindful about my rising upset and addressing it before it leaks into my responses to the issues at hand. If nothing else, I can do a better job of simply reporting than I'm upset, and uncoupling it from my views (as the commingling is almost never productive).

For the group, I believe that once non-trivial distress enters the equation, we have to work with that before we start working with the issues, or else the unprocessed distress will continue to infect and distort the conversation. Ignoring non-trivial distress doesn't work. And even though I know that (and get steady work as an outside facilitator expressly to handle this dynamic), it is nearly impossible for me to facilitate working with my distress. Part of my challenge is figuring out a way to get the support I know I need when I'm unsuccessful following the advice I've given myself in the preceding paragraph.

Sometimes, living in community is just down right embarrassing.
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Forestry/Heating with Wood

sorghumco — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 09:50:15 -0600

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.

The photo show us about to go off to the woods to cut firewood. Our 3 dogs always come with us, although once we start the chainsaws, they go off on their own adventures.
Sustainability? We have more wood in our forests now than 30 years ago – the trees are growing much faster than what we use for lumber and fire wood – so it appears a sustainable practice. Two years ago, for the first time, we cut logs to sell to a local saw mill – primarily because a lot of trees died due to “Red Oak decline” (for more on this, see Missouri Dept of Conservation literature – it is a widespread disease). We simply could not use the wood fast enough; further, we reasoned that it is consistent with our lifestyle and values. We sell products from plants that we grow intentionally (garden and field crops) – so why not sell from the wooded part of our land as well? As with the crops we harvest, we sell only the “extra” – that is, what we don’t consume.

For us, forestry/wood heat is an integral part of the “good life.”

Sandhill Farm

The Straw Poll that Broke the Camel's Back

Laird — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:22:47 -0600

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.

In Consensus a proposal does not advance to acceptance in the presence of any principled objections—even one; in Voting it only takes a majority of votes for a proposal to succeed. Living in the US, nearly everyone has experience with parliamentary procedure and democratic decision-making that relies on majority rule. While there are number of possible variations, in the main Voting works like this: proposals are put forward, their merits are debated, and eventually there's a vote. If one proposal garners a majority, it passes and the matter is settled.

One of the reasons I'm uncomfortable with consensus groups using straw polls is that it's a form of voting (albeit a non-binding one), and one of the more common difficulties that groups have in fully realizing the potential of Consensus is that they never succeed in creating a culture of collaboration (perhaps because they don't even perceive the need for it). If a group attempts to superimpose Consensus on a culture of Voting, then you're just talking about unanimous voting, and it's no wonder that many groups report frustration and weak results (as the only proposals that can jump that high bar are ones are typically so watered down as to have little potency for addressing issues).

Thus, I'm highly concerned that if a consensus group uses straw polls, they'll be keeping alive a competitive dynamic that undercuts the attempt to build and maintain the requisite collaborative culture.

The point of straw polls is to test for the presence of momentum favoring one response to an issue over another. The idea is that this will clear the fog and help the group move productively through the forest (or at least the thicket) of ideas. While there is undoubtedly a need for groups to know where they are in a conversation and what aspects hold the most promise for being a path through the woods, I think there are better ways to meet that need than with straw polls.

When a group votes, the intention is that the group will be influenced to move in the direction of the majority. (I know that's not always what happens, but that's what the people who propose straw polls are hoping will happen.) No matter how many times you insist that the straw poll is not binding and is informational only, whenever you vote you are invoking the culture of Voting, and the group can hardly help but be influenced by that dynamic. Those in the majority start to relax (after all, they're winning); those in the minority start to feel the pressure (c'mon, you're holding up progress). Some people who suspect they are in the minority may even alter their voting so as not to be singled out for this kind of attention. To the extent that the group slides back into the culture of Voting, it moves out of the collaborative environment where everyone is working purposefully and trustingly toward a we're-all-on-the-same-team solution that everyone can support.

Better, I think, is for the group (led by the facilitator) to learn to follow the energy of a discussion, diligently identifying and working all relevant ends of the discussion (not just trying to find the road where most of the traffic is). Instead of asking the group which views seem to be dominant (the point of a straw poll), you can ask instead, "What ideas to people have that will bridge the disparate concerns expressed?" In a Voting culture the conversation pivots around advocacy (of one's own position) and challenges (of differing viewpoints). In a Consensus culture, the conversation should revolve around how to develop agreements that balance and connect all the factors. You are looking for how to draw an elegant circle around all the input—not just most of it.

Take some device from the Big Bad Wolf: if want to built an enduring collection of consensus agreements, go light on the straw. It may come at a price that's too heavy.
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Weather You're Ready or Not

Laird — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:48:43 -0600

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.

While it's always disappointing to miss an evening of bridge, there was a silver lining. The temperatures had slowly drifted south of 30 degrees and the determined snowfall had finally succeeded in turning the sidewalks slick with a patina of fresh ice. I knew the roads would not be far behind, and was thankful to assay the final 35 miles home three-and-a-half hours earlier than would have been the case if I'd dallied for bridge.

As it was, Ma'ikwe and I drove the snow-packed back roads at 35-40 mph (instead of the 55-60 mph we'd have driven ventured on dry pavement), and we were most grateful to conclude our 1600-mile trek home from Las Vegas (where we'd started our return Monday morning) around 8 pm and without ever leaving the road unexpectedly or sashaying into the rear end of someone else's vehicle. Whew!

Loving Your Wood Stove
After dancing around the freezing point while depositing 2-4 inches of snow during those last days of December, King Boreas got serious. New Year's Eve the thermometer more or less kept pace with the number of hours left in the year, as both inexorably marched toward zero at midnight. Every day since, we've awakened to negative numbers. Some days the temperature bravely climbs into double digits, but nothing even hinting of melting. This makes for nice cross-country skiing and skating (after clearing the pond of snow), yet encourages everyone to concentrate on indoor activities.

While the sunny days that invariably accompany such cold weather are good for solar gain (let's hear it for south-facing double-paned windows!), it's also a great way to find out how bad the infiltration is in your house, as every tiny crack around doors and windows leaks a stream of arctic air, tempering the output of our hard working wood stoves.

These are the days of short, low-angled sunlight, where we're truly appreciative of all the work done in previous winters to have dry, seasoned wood on hand right now. You don't know what anxiety is until you experience bitter cold and an uncertain wood supply, where you need to go out that day to secure the wood needed to keep the pipes from freezing that night. Over the course of our 35 winters at Sandhill, we've had winter moments like that and I'm highly thankful that we're not reliving them this week.

This past week my live has been in orbit around the wood stove. I start each day by drinking coffee by the stove, followed by some reading (or blogging). While I occasionally make forays into other parts of the house (accounting in the office, yoga in my bedroom, a cooking shift in the kitchen, a jigsaw in the dining room), I periodically return to the stove to take the chill off. The last thing before bed is usually checking my email or reading by the wood stove, and then stoking the fire for overnight.

One of my winter rituals is making sure there's plenty of water in an old cast iron pot we keep on the stove in a simple effort to re-humidify the bone dry air. Before retiring for the night I top off the tea kettle we keep on the stove so that we'll save a dab of propane in getting the coffee water hot the next morning—and can get that starter fluid into our bloodstream that much quicker.

I love the simplification of winter. While I have a broken window to replace in the FIC trailer and need to fix a leak in the back porch roof, neither of these tasks can be accomplished in freezing temperatures. So I write more, read more, play games, and bide my time. This is the only time of the year when Ma'ikwe and I can sleep all night cuddled together, entwined in each other's bodies like hibernating snakes (at all other times I get so hot that I have to stick at least one leg out of the covers to wick off heat).

There's an old joke about Death being Mother Nature's way of telling you to slow down. I figure that in the Midwest, where we have real cold, we have the opportunity to use Winter for that purpose in a less dramatic or permanent fashion. We need only pay attention and go with what we're given.

That's my reflection for today. Now it's time to stoke the wood stove.

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Puzzling in the New Year

Laird — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:25:09 -0600

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.

Geoph had committed himself to the life of an itinerant peddler of community. He hit the road Jan 1, 1988, and had almost completed two full decades in the persona of the Peripatetic Communitarian (under which nom de plume he authored about 50 back-page columns for Communities magazine) before the sand ran out of his hourglass. While his love affairs with—and in—community (combined with a minor in social change work in general) might take him anywhere, his regular holiday itinerary was to spend Christmas with his mother in southwest Missouri, followed by a week at Sandhill (in the northeast corner of the same state), straddling both his birthday (Dec 28) and New Year's.

As Geoph was an inveterate gamer, his Xmas booty would often include a new card game or puzzle, which he'd happily bring along for an inaugural spin at Sandhill, where there was a more reliably enthusiastic audience for such harmless indulgences. And thus it came to be that from 1990 onward, Geoph and at least one jigsaw puzzle were regular features of Sandhill's New Year's landscape.

Holidays are a time of reflection, and for being with friends and loved ones. This year I was missing Geoph, and I could think of no simpler way to evoke him than to trot out ML's gift and settle into the ritual of testing my eyesight for the ability to discern subtle shifts in color and shape. I figure it had to be healthier than obliteration by egg nog.

I knew I'd made the right choice when I opened the box for the first time and discovered that ML had pasted onto the under side of the lid a photo of Geoph, Kurt Kessler (a stalwart member at nearby Dancing Rabbit), and me intently hunched over the living room table working a jigsaw puzzle while festooned in New Year's party hats. While the year was uncertain (probably in the vicinity of '00), there was no question but that I was looking at the image on the exact anniversary of the day it was taken. How did ML know I was going to do that? It was both eerie and sweet at the same time, which is not a combination you encounter every day.

While there is still sadness for me about losing Geoph, the ache is no longer so acute, and I was able to stir the coals of our special friendship as I sorted the pieces, and not succumb to anguish. As a worked the puzzle, I would connect fragments of my life with Geoph, and it was a companionable way to ring in the New Year, with echos of the past.

With Ma'ikwe's able assistance, I was able to complete assembly of the jigsaw on New Year's Day. Now, if I could only puzzle out how to fit together as neatly all the disparate and kaleidoscopic pieces of my complicated life, then I'd really be ahead. The reflective pause has passed and it's time again to get back into harness. There is, as Geoph well knew, still plenty of networking out there to do. Share this via

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Home is Where the Hart Is

Laird — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:19:07 -0600

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…

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

In this second entry, I’ll focus on Home as Place.

I've been living in the same place for more than 35 years. While that statement would hardly qualify as remarkable for most of human history, it is a rare today—at least in the US, where we have become a highly mobile society and there is little resistance to scratching the itch of wanderlust. In fact, I know hardly anyone who is living today in the same place they were living in 1974.

Apropos my theme, and people knowing where they live, there is a great story that Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) tells about traveling in the jungles of New Guinea. The group of locals he is journeying with explores beyond the boundaries of its tribal territory and finds it itself unexpectedly needing to bivouac overnight in an unfamiliar location. Needing food, a few break off to forage and return with a quantity of mushrooms. When Diamond expresses his uneasiness over taking a chance on eating fungi found in unknown territory, his hosts reply with disdain, "Why would we feed you poisonous mushrooms?"

The point here being that "civilized" people, such as Diamond (and you and me), have largely been raised without a developed sense of our local environment, and mostly wouldn't know which mushrooms are safe to eat. In contrast, indigenous people tend to be much better connected with their local environment and probably have known which foods were safe to eat since they were five years old. Our lives used to depend on that kind of knowledge. And while you might reasonably argue that they still do, few people today are that aware of the place where they live.

Instead, Home as Place has come to mean familiar sights and sensations: the unique feel of your own bed; the spot where you drink your morning cup of coffee; the view out the west window at sunset; how rain sounds on the porch roof; the smell of the workshop.

Because my community (Sandhill Farm) places a high priority on raising the food we eat, I have gradually extended these markers of home to include more subtle signs, gleaned from a third of a century of homesteading:

o I know within 24 hours when the spring peepers will emerge from the mud to launch their vernal chorus. More than just monitoring the thermometer, it is a matter of sensing the right combination of warmth, length of day, and rising humidity. My body has come to know that combination when I feel it each March.

o I know when to cut hay. While the nutritional value peaks when about 10% of the seed heads have emerged from their sheaths, it is more complicated than that. The cool weather grasses like brome and orchard grass are ready in May and that's also our wettest month. If you cut grass on wet ground it will mold from underneath; if you wait until the ground is completely dry, it may be June. You have to consider the maturity of the crop, the dampness of the earth, and the prospects for enough sunny weather to cure the crop and get it baled before the next thunderhead spoils the lot.

o How many know the optimum temperature for churning cream into butter? It's 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Though Sandhill no longer has its own dairy herd, I used to make butter a lot, and got good enough at sensing the right temperature that I could tell when it was time just by feeling the side of the churn as the cream gradually warmed. If you hit it right, you can turn a gallon-and-a-half of cream into three pounds of butter in about five minutes. If you start with the cream too cold it can take 20 minutes; if you let the cream get too warm, the butter won't separate well from the buttermilk and the butter will tend to sour.

o Garlic is one of our culinary staples (we only semi-joke when we tell prospective members that they can have any dietary preferences they want… as long as they eat onions and garlic). While planting garlic is straight forward—pretty much any time in the fall before freeze up will do—the art to being self-sufficient in the stinking rose is knowing when to harvest and how to store your bulbs.

Garlic is ready when the bottom pair of leaves turn brown. In northeast Missouri that usually occurs around July 1, give or take a week. Once we get close, we pay close attention to the weather, as it's far less work if we can get into the field about 48 hours after a good rain. The rain will soften the ground (meaning most bulbs can be extracted by hand instead of requiring the assistance of a garden fork), and the two days of sunny weather will mean that most of the dirt can be crumbled off the roots by hand (instead of extracting gooey mud balls with each plant).

After that it takes about 30 days for the bulbs to cure in an outbuilding, where summer temperatures and good air flow will gently extract the excess moisture. Then, before the drying goes too far, we trim the bulbs and place them loosely into boxes where they're stored on the concrete floor on an earth-sheltered building. There, the cool temperatures, medium humidity, and modest air flow will keep them in good condition until needed—even into the following spring.

o In these modern times, where most countrysides has been thoroughly reconfigured by modern agriculture, the two largest undomesticated species remaining in northeast Missouri are wild turkeys and white-tailed deer. The combination of low human density (my county has fewer humans than the high school I attended in the suburbs of Chicago) and plentiful woodlands (more than 10%) makes ideal habitat for these species (as well as for raccoons and possums).

In fact, over the years we've lived here, the population of both turkey and deer has increased, to the point where some locals earn more from renting ground to out-of-state hunters than from farming. When it's not firearm season for deer, I enjoy walking the woods (which is fully 40% of Sandhill's property), looking for deer trails and where they bed down for the night. In the spring, I can find clutches of wild turkey eggs by watching where the hens flare up from their nests when I wander too close while stalking for morels.
• • •
Having now invested 35 years in learning some of the natural rhythms of my home place, these lessons have become precious to me. And they are all the more valuable in that I am often not here to enjoy them. One of the paradoxes of my community life is that I feel called upon these days to spend a large fraction of my time on the road extolling its virtues (or consulting with others about how to better unlock its secrets), rather than staying at home enjoying the fruits of my investment.

As this is the last day of 2009, I did some toting up. In the last 12 months I've slept in 46 different places that were not my own bed, and that doesn't count any of the 23 nights I slept on a train. Fortunately, the vast majority of these beds were with friends or clients, and only three were in commercial establishments. With luck, I won't sleep in any commercial beds next year, and I'll spend the entire year either enjoying the place I call home, or sampling a place that's home to someone else I know.
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Culture Clash

Laird — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 10:17:08 -0600

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)

o Annie (Ceilee’s 59-year-old mother; my ex-partner)

o Laurie (Tosca’s 25-year-old sister)

o Bob (Tosca’s 75-year-old grandfather)

o Juanita (Tosca’s septuagenarian grandmother)

The Back Story
Bob & Juanita have a house, a nice house (roughly midway between a suburban home for a retired couple and a palatial entertainment estate) in Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb on the southeast side. This house is affectionately referred to as the "Big House."

Ceilee & Tosca own a more conventionally-sized suburban house in the Mountains Edge development in the southwest corner of Las Vegas. With four house guests, the capacity of this residence was maxed out.

I live at Sandhill Farm, an income-sharing community in northeast Missouri. Annie helped me start that community 35 years ago, and both Ceilee and Jo were raised there. Annie currently lives a similar rustic lifestyle at Left Bank, a rural land trust community outside Floyd VA. Ma’ikwe lives a similar lifestyle at Dancing Rabbit, just a a two-mile crow flight northeast of Sandhilll.

Tosca grew up in De Soto MO, and was strongly influenced by Bob & Juanita, who have been highly successful in the tire business. She spent a fair amount of her childhood visiting her grandparents at their home in Las Vegas, and has always had a positive feeling about the place. Tosca and Laurie both enjoy the stimulation of urban life and the things and opportunities that money can buy. Having said that, all the adults in the cast have virtual calluses on their hands from regularly pulling an oar when there's work to be done. That is, everyone likes to help out.

All of the player’s have a caring personality and are unpretentious. Everyone enjoys spending time with Taivyn, who is thoroughly loved, has a sunny disposition, and is all the more precious for being the acknowledged start of the next generation of two family bloodlines.

Ceilee works in management for Cricket, an up-and-coming cell phone company. He works long hours and is the sole breadwinner in his family. Tosca manages the house and takes primary care of Taivyn. For the Christmas weekend, Ceilee only had to work a few hours Christmas Eve; otherwise he was able to enjoy a rare four-day weekend.

As new parents, Ceilee and Tosca seldom get a day off together without Taivyn.

Setting the Scene
Ma’ikwe is struggling with health issues. As the pattern of her symptoms has become clearer in recent months, it seems likely that she has some form of fibromyalgia, and possibly multiple sclerosis. She’s working with a number of health care practitioners to refine the diagnosis and to determine the best course of treatment. For now at least, she's trying to get on top of this without relying on any heavy-duty allopathic drugs, which course I support. At this early stage, she is mainly trying to be more careful about her diet (consuming minimal amounts of wheat, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol, while making sure to eat some meat every day) and to get plenty of rest.

Jibran didn’t have anyone near his age in this setting. While he is mostly able to entertain himself, he likes to pay games and was given a complex and popular board game called Arkham Horror by Ceilee & Tosca for Christmas. Naturally enough, he immediately wanted to play the game (and had good prospects in that most of my family loves to play board games), but had not succeeded in getting an opportunity to more than start learning it under Jo’s tutelage (she has a version at home and is something of an expert), with Tosca and me learning at the same time. We had only completed one round with the four of us before we needed to suspend play Saturday afternoon in order to keep a dinner reservation, and everyone was too tied to resume when we made it home at 10 pm. This was frustrating for Jibran, yet he held out hopes of returning to the game Sunday, our last day in Vegas.

Laurie had just arrived in town Christmas Day (Friday) for the start of a visit through Jan 12. She had just moved to St Louis (from Columbia MO) after a difficult relationship break-up, and was looking forward to some healing and connecting time with family. She and Tosca are very close, and Laurie loves being a doting aunt to Taivyn (who calls her Aunt Yah-Yah; which everyone views as an inspired fit with her fireball personality). At the same time, as often happens with siblings close in age, too much time together can lead to strain between the sisters, and Tosca was trying to suss out how much time with Laurie was optimal.

Some of us like watching football (Ceilee, Bob, Tosca, myself, and to some extent Ma’ikwe); the others believe you can have a decent life and never watch football.

Some of us like to gamble (Ceilee and Tosca in particular; Bob, Jo, and myself to some extent); others have no interest.

While all of the adults drink alcohol, some do so sparingly and others with gusto. Navigating this range comfortably can be a challenge.

As all of us enjoy good food (whew), meals are often a highlight of our time together, and generally offer a reliable touchstone for social occasions. This particular configuration of characters first coalesced for Christmas dinner at the Big House, followed by a Saturday night dinner that Ceilee had arranged at Buca di Beppo, a boisterous national Italian restaurant chain where Ceilee regularly entertains clients. (Amazingly enough, we ate in the "Pope Room," which features what must be the epitome of Catholic kitsch—an upper half bust of Pope Benedict XVI, smiling benevolently from the center of a lazy susan which dominates the center of the table.)

Sunday's Drama
All along, Sunday had been earmarked for the bettors and football enthusiasts to spend a chunk of the day at a Sports Book, where we could place bets and watch NFL football games.

Despite this clear starting point, the day unfolded in confusion—which, as it turned out, was a theme we continued throughout the day. The night before, following the pasta extravaganza, Ceilee had hired a party van (something that’s a regular part of the landscape in Vegas, apparently) to drive us through a section of a nearby park where a passel of local companies, Cricket among them, had set up a fantastic Christmas light show.

It was 9 pm by the time we had reconvened in the parking lot of Buca di Beppo, and it took a while to sort out what would happen next. The contingent of Ceilee, Jo, and Laurie wound up heading for a nightcap at a bar, followed by a session in the hot tub at the Big House, where the three of them ultimately crashed for the night. While Bob & Juanita weren’t up for more partying, they were happy to take Taivyn home with them, making a total of six in Henderson. The remainder (Tosca, Annie, Ma’ikwe, Jibran, and I) headed back to Mountain’s Edge and an early bedtime.

While this plan gave Tosca a night off from parental care (a good thing), it complicated Sunday’s arrangements, which remained unsettled as everyone went to bed.

There were three wrinkles that prevented the fog from lifting early: a) not having all the players in the same house—despite the miracle of modern telephony, it’s still not as good as having everyone in the same room; b) Ceilee was hoping to go to Emeril Lagasse Stadium at the Palazzo (a major casino/hotel on the Strip), which is a celebrity chef’s Sports Book that opened just three months ago—synergisticly commingling football, gambling, and high-end snack food (imagine salmon tartare served up on rice cakes), but that was dependent on Bob being willing to use the pull of his AmEx black card to pry open a luxury suite at the last minute, and Ceilee hadn’t broached that idea with him yet; and c) Ceilee—one of Saturday night’s party hardy crew—was not quick out of the starting gate Sunday morning.

The Early Action
While most of us at the Mountains Edge house slept great, Tosca had had some disturbing dreams about misplacing her baby (pretty understandable when your child is sleeping in a different house) and arose worrying about logistics. She fielded a phone call from friends wanting to know which Sports Book we'd be rendezvousing at; when she put them on hold to check with Ceilee (out in Henderson) she learned he hadn't gotten out of bed yet. Frustrating!

After the long evening the night before she wasn't sure if she wanted to go with the boys to the Sports Book or not; maybe she'd have a better day staying home and playing games with Jibran and others (which was music to Jibran's ears). When Ceilee arose and called back, he reported that Bob was interested in the Lagasse Stadium idea, but they couldn't be certain of getting in. At this point, Tosca gladly handed off the baton of Sunday Coordinator to Ceilee.

While Tosca, Annie, and Ma'ikwe went to a 10:30 am yoga class (with Tosca still undecided about how she wanted to spend the rest of the day), Ceilee took our bets over the phone and raced out the door to place them at the nearest Sports Book before the 10 am kick-off PST. Jibran and I figured we had time to walk the dog, so we made a brisk 30-minute circuit around the neighborhood, taking us right up to the edge of the desert on the west and south. (It's such an mind boggling juxtaposition having raw rock in one direction, and then turning around to find typical suburban development in the near foreground, boundaried by total glitz on the horizon—there's no place like Vegas.)

While Jibran and I cooled our heels in front of Ceilee's TV set, Ceilee (working in concert with the AmEx concierge) was able to wangle a reservation at Lagasse Stadium for the second games, starting at 1 pm. Because they needed to show up right away to secure the spot, he asked me to meet him there, inside the Plazzo casino. I no sooner hung up than the women waltzed in the door post-yoga, and Tosca decided spontaneously that the opportunity to experience Lagasse Stadium was too enticing to pass up. Grabbing her purse, we jumped in the car and headed for the Strip. If you're keeping score at home, that left Annie, Ma'ikwe, and Jibran at Mountains Edge and Juanita, Laurie, and Taivyn in Henderson.

The Middle Action
Tosca & I were the last to arrive at Lagasse, settling into cushy banquette seating just as the first games were winding down. We just had time to get down a beer and a few final bets before the second games started and we were ushered into Luxury Box #3 (of a total of six). There, in addition to exclusive access to four large-screen digital TVs (showing each of the four games happening concurrently), we had a private waitress and our own pool table (in case the games were not sufficiently riveting or aerobic). It was, in short, a trip.

The food, as expected, was excellent. The football, while up an down, was also as expected. None of the bettors did particularly well, nor did any suffer horribly (I finished the four-day run having wagered $170 and netting $7.55 (which is a particularly modest gain in light having taken Ceilee for $10 in a couple games of 8-ball). As the football wound down, Tosca lost interest early, and after wandering outside the luxury suite, she settled into a session of video poker. She hadn't been there for more than 15 minutes when word came back that she'd won one pot for $134 and another for $80. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that put the taste in her mouth and thoughts of returning home to pick up the suspended game of Arkham Horror faded into the background.

The Late Action
When Philadelphia finally pulled it out with a late field goal against Denver and the last of the second games had ended, we quit our box at Lagasse Stadium. After Ceilee retrieved his car from valet parking, he gave it to Bob to drive back to Henderson. It was 5 pm and the rest of us had the evening in front of us. Walking back upstairs into the casino, people wanted to gamble. As I felt I'd had enough gambling on football, I was happy just to be with my kids and watch. Ceilee & Jo played blackjack side by side, while I stood behind them and coached Jo (in such fine pints as not taking a hit that risked her going bust if the dealer's up card was a 4, 5, or 6—as there are no longer many chances for me to teach my grown kids anything that they're interested in learning, I take my opportunities where I find them). While no winning streak went supernova, neither did the dealer become Darth Vader, and both of my kids finished slightly up.

Meanwhile, Tosca—she of the hot hand—opted for three-card poker, where she promptly hit a straight flush worth $600. When I walked over to congratulate her on her success, I watched her cash three 7s for an additional big payday, and the game was on. After taking a break to go to the bathroom, Tosca resumed her one-woman assault on the house by tackling roulette, where she won again.

By this point, we'd been gambling for about two hours and Laurie called, wondering what the plan was for the rest of the evening—she had dropped Taivyn off at Mountains Edge and wanted to meet up with the group on the Strip (though not particularly a gambler, she wanted to party). Simultaneously, Ma'ikwe also called to find out what was happening. Jibran was getting pretty frustrated about losing his chance to play Arkham Horror and Ma'ikwe couldn't understand people choosing to gamble over spending the last evening together as family. I could see it both ways and knew that there wasn't going to be an easy fit between what was wanted by the group on the Strip and the group at Mountains Edge.

On the one hand, it was easy to sympathize with Ma'ikwe wanting to be with family, and I knew that the casino wasn't going to do it. Jibran, as a minor, couldn't be there at all, and Ma'ikwe needed something more calming than casino action.

On the other hand, it was equally easy to sympathize with Ceilee, Jo, and Tosca wanting to stay on the Strip: it was a rare night out where they knew that Taivyn was being well taken care of; Ceilee & Jo were getting some rare adult sibling time together; and they had prospects of getting some time with Laurie where the young adults could frolic together.

It's hard when everyone's desires don't line up well, and it was a downer ending to an otherwise highly enjoyable visit. Tosca and Ceilee had gone out of their way to totally welcome Ma'ikwe, Jibran and me into their home for a holiday weekend, and completely included us in the Christmas ritual. The Sports Book gambling session Sunday was the exception to that, and yet that was the lingering aftertaste and I felt powerless to deflect her anger. Sometimes you just have to take it.

The Even Later Action
After listening to Ma'ikwe's lament it seemed the sensible thing for me to do was to take Tosca's car and return home. Though I had been drinking beer at Lagasse Stadium, I had quit when the football ended and I was in good shape to drive (unlike the gamblers, who had continued to imbibe as they flowed onto the casino floor). They knew they'd be taking a taxi home and were fine with my taking the car.

I got home without mishap a little after 8 pm, just as Annie, Ma'ikwe and Jibran had started watching the latest Star Trek movie on pay-per-view. Ma'ikwe was in a better space by the time I had returned (and was relieved that I didn't reek of alcohol). After the movie, we all went to bed, and I never heard the arrival of the late night revelers circa 3 am.

While I was somewhat wistful about not spending those extra hours with my kids when they were having fun together, I needed to drive to Albuquerque the next day and I was thoroughly grateful to have had a full night's sleep. Also, my returning home was the right thing to do in support of Ma'ikwe, who especially needs to be able to count on me as she weathers her current health challenges.
• • •
So what is the lesson? While I'm still sorting that out, I think there's something about acceptance, something about patience, and something about not expecting all the puzzle pieces to fit together just because that would be handy.

The lifestyles of the 11 people in this drama demonstrably do not fit together. We nevertheless make an attempt in the name of family, which is both admirable and understandable, yet undeniably a stretch. Looked at from this perspective, I don't think that the tensions that surfaced Sunday are anyone's fault per se. Rather, I think that some degree of awkwardness was inevitable. The question is how can we anticipate and prepare for it better?

Ma'ikwe and I have to sort of how much it makes sense to spend time with people and in settings that are more comfortable for one of us than the other. While we generally enjoy being together (and the opportunities to do so are precious given that we don't live together), that may not always be the right choice.

While I'm not going to give up seeing my kids, Ma'ikwe and I probably have to negotiate more carefully about how and/or whether it's going to work for her and/or Jibran to be with me and my kids at the same time. I don't want anyone to be unhappy, yet I also don't feel that the responsibility for everyone's happiness lies wholly with me. Sunday evening I was forced to choose between my kids and my wife, and I didn't like it one bit. As I digest what happened last weekend, I'm going to try hard to do what I can to avoid being caught in that same situation in the future.

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I'll Be Home for Christmas; Just Not in My Own Bed

Laird — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:20:36 -0600

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.

Home for the Holidays
Christmas is coming! Whether or not the goose is getting fat or I place a penny in an old man’s hat, I’m going to be with family—which is something I look forward to with relish (often made with cranberry at this time of year). I’m typing this in the partly sunny skies of northern Arizona as Ma’ikwe, Jibran, and I zoom west along I-40, inbound for a rendezvous with my son Ceilee, his wife Tosca, and his daughter (my granddaughter) Taivyn for the long Christmas weekend. Ceilee’s mother (and my ex-partner and dear friend) Annie flew in from Virginia yesterday, and my daughter (Ceilee’s sister) will join us Christmas Day. Ma’ikwe’s got Paul Simon’s 1991 Concert in the Park cranked up on the tape player, and we’ll be there by dinner. Life is good.

When I was growing up, I did Christmas with my parents. By my late 20's, after having a kid of my own, Annie and I started Celebratign Christmas at Sandhill. Now the wheel has turned again, and we parents are traveling to our son's. It's both different, and exactly the same.

While it's important to me to protect time with my kids as much as possible, I especially cherish being with them at holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, where it is possible to suspend one’s everyday routines to be with loved ones for days at a time. Thus, today I’m driving home to family. Even though Sandhill, where my mail comes, is 1000 miles in the rear view mirror, in the sense of the word I’m exploring today home is wherever my family is. Thus, if we‘re all together in one spot, then that location is assuredly home.

This year the timing is nearly perfect. We'll arrive within minutes of when Ceilee is expected to get off work Wed afternoon, and we'll depart Monday morning, just as he's due to head back in.

Home for the Holidaze
As it happens, Ceilee and Tosca live in Las Vegas (the glitzy one in Nevada; not the sleepy one in New Mexico), which is perhaps as great a testament to consumption and excess as one can find. The lights of Ceilee’s Christmas tree will be backlit by the never-extinguished twinkle of The Strip, just a few miles to the northeast. (Given Las Vegas’ tireless efforts to promote itself as a major sports venue, you might think of it as the Magi meets Mammon in the best two of three falls.)

While Ma’ikwe, Annie, and I have consciously chosen lives of inconspicuous consumption (at least by first world standards), my son has not and it’s a measure of our love of family that we’re not going to let a little materialism get in the way of a good time. We all like giving one another presents, and no one will be cheated out of the unwrapping ritual Friday morning.

The greater danger, when it comes to the Holidaze, is not so much getting caught up in a billboard driven urge to see Carrot Top live at the Luxor, as it is to not over-indulge in holiday spirits. In the end, no one is proof against libations with too much proof.

Home for the Hollandaise
There are a number of ways in which I bond and celebrate with my kids, including game playing (the internecine Siedler competition is downright fierce), butchering (we did that at Thanksgiving), eating and drinking (hence my cautionary note above), and even wilderness canoeing (we’re hoping to get up to the Northwest Territories next summer). But for all of that, there is perhaps nothing we enjoy doing together more than cooking. While everyone in the family enjoys dining out, we’re accomplished enough in the kitchen (and sufficiently vain about it) to begrudge a meal out when we can often prepare the same thing as well or better ourselves, and at a fraction of the cost.

Ma’ikwe and I have brought with us new crop piñons from the Land of Enchantment, so that we can prepare a dessert featuring vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, and toasted pine nuts. And we couldn’t resist scooping up two-thirds of the fresh brussels sprouts last night at La Montañita (Albuquerque's local food co-op), knowing how terrific they’ll taste after having been kissed by a frost. We’ll steam them until barely tender and then smother them in home-made Hollandaise. Yum!

Of course, that’s just a taste. In five days there’s sure to be time for such family traditions as plum pudding, a roasted turkey, egg nog, baked garlic, and ribbon sandwiches, not necessarily in that order.

I can hardly wait to find out what we’ll cook up. Just like a little kid, I can hardly wait to be home for the holidays.

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Consensus of Opinion

Laird — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:14:05 -0600

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.

The former definition has a couple of roots. The dominant one in US culture is from the meeting practices developed by the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. The lesser known one is from certain Native American tribes, particularly those comprising the Iroquois Confederation. In the '60s, the Philadelphia-based Movement for a New Society pioneered a secularized version of consensus as a decision-making process, adapting the Quaker practice for use in the realm of political activism. Today, consensus, in one form or another, is the most common mode of decision-making adopted by intentional communities. Mind you, I didn't say it was well understood, or widely practiced with consummate skill; only that is was used a lot.

While there are a number of versions of consensus practiced among communities and cooperative groups today (the confusion around which has substantially contributed to my workload as a process consultant), it is clearly understood that agreements cannot be reached if there is any member—even one—standing in the way of a proposal. This is referred to as blocking. While I'm constantly amazed at how many groups blithely opt for consensus as their decision-making process without any attempt to learn what it is beyond reading a book or hearing someone describe it once, there's no question that it's a popular choice among groups determined to find a more cooperative method for reaching agreements.

The latter definition is used to indicate which way the wind is blowing when focusing on a particular issue. It is commonly pressed into service to describe the position currently favored in a political analysis and is scale independent (that is, it's just as likely to be used to label a dominant position at a PTA meeting as a position in the US Senate, as Tony did above). While consensus, when used in this sense, often has a flavor of "a strong or overwhelming majority" (as in votes to burn), that is not always the case, contributing merrily to the obfuscation.

The overlap of these two definitions is that they can both be employed to describe a situation where people are trying to decide what to do, and both are associated with the "winning" position. If the process of decision-making is consensus, then the term refers to the absence of any principled objection. If the process is voting (a la the US Senate), then consensus refers to having secured enough votes to win. In both cases, consensus refers to there being sufficient agreement to determine the outcome.

The Confusion
This similarity of definitions and overlap of usage leads to considerable mischief. Because the cultures in which consensus (the decision-making process) and voting are designed to operate are as different as night and day, when a person speaks of "forging a consensus" the implications are wholly dependent on the context.

In consensus, agreement is ideally built by a process that fosters curiosity, compassion, and creativity. In voting, agreement is reached through a process of coalition-building, compromise, and calculation (often augmented by combativeness, concessions, and control). Now, finally, we are getting to the point Tony was raising about the quality of the Senate's machinations regarding the health care bill.

Note how difficult (schizophrenic?) it would be for the Democrats to apply the culture of consensus to forge agreement on their position, only to turn around and apply the power of that agreement in order to win the vote, which decision resides firmly in the other paradigm and is the one they're deeply steeped in. (It generates the kind of brain-freeze headache you get from eating ice cream too fast.) It is all the more improbable (though the goddess only knows our society needs this kind of cultural change) that Senators would embrace the culture of consensus in that they were elected by succeeding at electoral politics. While there are historic examples of people who had epiphanies about the way they conducted business after they ascended to power, they are scarcer than potato seed and I'm not holding my breath waiting for consensus conversations among the US Senate.

When Obama opted during the 2008 election campaign to promote an image as someone who could work both sides of the aisle, he was essentially claiming the ability to use the process of consensus to get things done in Washington without the divisiveness of politics as usual. It is instructive that this message helped to get him elected, yet hard-boiled political professionals are now using this claim against him, as a sign of his weakness and a wishy-washy nature—something not admired or deemed effective in the culture of voting, where the preemptive strike is applauded, and curiosity is spun as indecisiveness and looked upon with scorn.

Note further how ridiculous it is to talk about one or two Democrats "blocking" a unified party position when there are 40 Republicans poised to join them in voting against the health care bill. This kind of high-level posturing is the ponderous dance of the political pachyderms, and there is no lightfootedness or what's-best-for the-country nonpartisan thinking about it—however much breast-beating there is to the contrary.

The Conclusion
I believe that if we want politicians to operate from the culture of consensus, then we'll have to find a way to build neighborhoods and cities that operate from that culture, and then insist that we have representatives just like us. Can I get consensus about that?
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Sandhill Farm

Strangers at the Table

Laird — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:52:37 -0600

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.

At my community, Sandhill Farm, we typically invite prospective members—even visitors—to attend community meetings, as it's a terrific way for them to get deep insights into the group's dynamics and for us to assess how savvy they are about communication and how we solve problems. We observe how much they speak, how much their comments are apropos, and discuss with them afterward what they observed and what their impressions were. The new people are generally flattered to have been allowed to sit in, and the information we get about their experience has proven to be an excellent predictor to who's likely to be a good fit if they wan t to pursue membership. On top of that, we've rarely had a problem with people inserting themselves inappropriately into our deliberations to the point where it's seriously getting in the way.

That said, there is a legitimate concern that untrained or uninitiated folks can disrupt the flow or sense of safety in a meeting, especially if the group's discussing difficult or sensitive topics. As such, at Sandhill we reserve the right to call a closed, members-only meeting. Though we invoke this only rarely, we make it clear to new folks that this is a possibility, and occasionally some members are relieved to make that choice (most commonly when we're discussing critical feedback about someone in the community and are unsure how best to proceed—it often feels more constructive to keep the circulation of such information to a minimum, while committing to provide all parties who have been excluded from the meeting with a summary of what was discussed).

In the case of Hummingbird, they have many visitors and some members have grown weary of new people taking up valuable plenary time with naive suggestions or requests to be filled in about what they alone don't know. As this can be a real concern, I offered two possible ways to cope with this short of banning non-members from meetings:

First, you can ask the new folks to observe only. You might give them a chance to share how they experienced the meeting during the time for evaluation at the end, or you might assign an established member the job of discussing with the new people how it went in a one-on-one conversation after the fact.

Second, if you're willing to be more expansive, you might allow the new folks to participate, with three caveats: a) that they do their best to be respectful of the group and to take into account that they may not know sufficient background on a topic to contribute constructively; b) that they will not be allowed to block a proposal; and c) that the group reserves the right to not spend plenary time trying to catch the new person up on what they don't understand.

Essentially, this becomes a choice of whether it's more challenging to have the rhythm and safety of the meeting be at risk (by allowing the new people to participate), or more problematic to have the new people complain about being excluded by a group that claims it's committed to diversity and inclusivity. Pick your poison.

In the end, I think the best you can do is to explain to new people at the outset why the group has a policy that allows exclusion, the conditions under which that right might be invoked, and the pathway by which the new person can earn the right to fully participate. If the group does all this, and also commits to reaching out to the new person and listening to what their experience was like (of having limited rights to participate in the meeting), then I think you have a good chance of coming through this with minimal hard feelings.
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Adventures in Hydrotherapy

Laird — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:18:46 -0600

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
Ma'ikwe and I checked in yesterday afternoon. After settling into our room, we strolled down to the wine bar and enjoyed an excellent glass of '06 merlot. Then we donned our swimming attire and robes and headed for the waters. Our first choice was the arsenic pool, which is the hottest at 105 degrees. In the 40-degree outdoor ambient temperature, we could soak (at various degrees of immersion) for about 10 minutes at a time before becoming sufficiently parboiled that a break was in order.

After a few rounds of that I was interested in a dip in the iron pool, followed by a sauna (having been here once before, two years ago, I had a definite idea about how best to build up a state of euphoria as well as an appetite for dinner in the excellent Artesian Restaurant on the premises). As Ma'ikwe wanted to linger in the luxuriation of the hottest waters, we separated.

Imagine my surprise about 10 minutes later when the attendant in the sauna area asked if my wife were at the arsenic pool. Casually admitting that that was so, she went on to inform me that my wife had just passed out. Oops. Now we were off script.

By the time I got there, Ma'ikwe was lying on the concrete next to the pool, swaddled in towels and surrounded by concerned staff. She was a little weak, yet fully conscious and I figured whatever happened couldn't be too bad because she was serving up her typical witty comebacks whenever anyone asked how she was doing.

According to Ma'ikwe, and corroborated by a couple of other women who were near her at the same time, she stood up to leave the pool and felt dizzy. She immediately sat down on the side of the pool. When the dizziness persisted she started to lower her heads between her knees, and passed out before she got there. The next thing she remembered was lying on the concrete next to the pool, looking up. The two women, who attended to her right away and got staff assistance, reported that she was out for about five seconds. On the way down she scraped her face, hand, and knee, but all of that was superficial and there was no concussion.

The protocol in this situation (which makes perfect sense to me if I put myself in the shoes of spa operators) is to call the local EMT, to make sure that the fainting didn't presage anything more serious. The husband and wife team (Craig & Catherine) showed up minutes later and efficiently and respectfully went through the routine checking of blood pressure, pulse, and oxygen and blood sugar levels in the blood. This was followed by a basic scan of body parts and reflexes, and asking the obligatory questions about what day it was and who was president.

As Ma'ikwe had good responses for all these tests, everyone relaxed. Though the emergency response protocol requires EMTs to recommend that someone be checked out at a hospital whenever fainting occurs (for a deeper look at potential underlying problems), we politely declined and signed a release, which Craig & Catherine took in stride. As it happens, Ma'ikwe travels with arnica (in pills and cream no less) and everyone agreed that taking that right away was a good idea (even though Craig & Catherine could only advise that "off the record," lest they run afoul of their allopathic accreditation).

B-ware
While the excitement of the afternoon led to a more subdued evening (entirely appropriate for Ma'ikwe's health, yet not exactly what we had lined up for our couples retreat), it left us pondering why exactly she'd fainted. Understandably, Ma'ikwe was frustrated that her body wasn't performing up to snuff.

Ma'ikwe has been struggling with overall symptoms of weakness and achiness for several weeks, and has been suspecting that she may have some form of fibromyalgia. This possibility had been confirmed by a trusted health practitioner (Carla) that Ma'ikwe saw on Friday—who has the triple threat credentials of DOM (Doctor of Oriental Medicine), ND (Naturopathic Doctor), and RN (Registered Nurse). While the diagnosis was based solely on symptoms and is not conclusive, Ma'ikwe is trying it on, and extra rest is strongly advised.

In addition, Ma'ikwe is trying to treat herself in a variety of ways including the ingestion of vitamin supplements, one of which is a B-complex. Because she's shown a sensitivity to taking B-vitamins in the past (they were recommended during her pregnancies—13 and five years ago—yet she invariably felt nauseous and threw up whenever she attempted them in pill form), Carla recommended trying B's in liquid form, where it's easier to fine tune the dosage. While Carla would ordinarily recommend 10 drops daily for someone in Ma'ikwe's situation, she suggested starting cautiously and gradually increasing the dosage if everything went well.

Friday and Saturday, Ma'ikwe put her toe into the B-complex waters with two-three drops of the liquid supplement. As she had no adverse reaction, yesterday she took six.

Taken all together, three days at a spa sounded just right, and we thoroughly enjoyed the two-hour drive north from Albuquerque on a sunny Sunday afternoon. So what went wrong? Here's what we've puzzled out:

—Ma'ikwe is suffering from a general sense of weakness and achiness (possibly fibromyalgia).
—We increased our altitude by a 1000 feet (to 6200).
—While it doesn't happen often, she has a health history of occasionally fainting.
—She'd just doubled the dosage of a supplement known to make her nauseous.
—She'd had a glass of wine (and no water) right before entering the pool.
—Hot tubs (which the arsenic pool essentially is) dehydrate users.

Pieced together this way, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that jumping into hot water was, well, like jumping into hot water. No wonder she fainted.
• • •
Today, thankfully, Ma'ikwe feels much better. Though she still has some raw souvenirs of her header onto the concrete, those will heal quickly. Today she's going to get back on the horse by attempting the less thermally challenging iron pool and has vowed to drink more water, while eschewing wine and B-vitamins.

I can hardly wait to see how relaxing today will be.
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Sandhill Farm

1040

Laird — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:39:15 -0600

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.

We were warmly greeted by our five-lettered hosts—Denis, Zaida, and Nandi—who had a merry wood fire, a savory lentil soup, and the bonhomie of conversation with close friends to ease our reentry to civilization. It was a soft landing, and it took all of Ma'ikwe's and my reserves to stay present through dinner, after which we were graciously allowed to sink into bed (at 6:30 pm) and the willing arms of Morpheus, whose amazing recuperative powers we benefited from throughout the night. Ah, sleep.

Now Friday, it is the first day of our Southwest vacation. While our hosts are at work and school, Jibran is visiting his best friend, Ma'ikwe is off to a doctor appointment, and I'm writing reports (the loose ends that did not get tied up before my Missouri departure, yet which stand between me and a truly relaxing time at the hot springs in Ojo Caliente starting Sunday afternoon).

Tomorrow, Ma'ikwe and I will join Zaida and others in presenting a free all-day workshop on community living. It's being organized (after a fashion) by a friend who is long on good energy, yet short on structure, which means we have little idea how many will be showing up or what they'd like to get out of the experience. It's an exercise in letting go and trusting the Force (or the goddess of minimalist planning—do you know her?). It should be an interesting day, if somewhat chaotic. Think of it as workshop improv.

Anyway, that's the report from my first 18 hours in Albuquerque, 10-4.
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Sandhill Farm

Snow Job

Laird — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:04:00 -0600

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.

On the other side of the equation, I am dismayed at the prospect of the big dump because, in this instance, I do have to drive in it. Tomorrow night—after my weekly indulgence in duplicate bridge at the club in Kirksville—Ma'ikwe, Jibran, and I plan to journey straight through to Albuquerque for the start of a three-week vacation with friends and family. Ordinarily this drive takes about 18 hours. This time it might be more of an adventure, and I'm immediately reminded of the same trip the three of us undertook the last week of December two years ago, where we unexpectedly got the opportunity to spend New Year's in a motel room in Amarillo because I-40 was iced over the last 300 miles to Albuquerque. I'm fervently hoping not to replicate that experience.

On top of the precipitous forecast, temperatures Wed night are supposed to plunge into negative digits. How good can it get? Fortunately, the car we'll be taking is small and the heater works fine. My biggest concern is icy roads, but luckily, temperatures that cold are incompatible with snowy skies and it will have to clear off for the mercury to drop that low. By staying on major highways I'm reasonably certain that road conditions will be acceptable. Excepting outright blizzards and gale force winds, the most dreaded condition is freezing rain and that, at least, is not in the forecast.

I suppose the silver lining is that winter weather excitement might help keep Ma'ikwe and I awake through the all-night vigil, but I've found as I've gotten older that the adventurous aspect of marathon road trips palls, and I'd just as soon have a boring, clear road with temperatures a more seasonal 40 degrees.

While I gird my loins for the 900-mile road trip Wed night, I am simultaneously trying to buoy my spirits with the prospect of cross country skiing on fresh powder tomorrow afternoon. My dear friend Annie would refer to this as a chance to "burn some ash," which I believe is analogous to occasionally taking the car out for highway speed driving in order to burn off carbon deposits. Humans have been hard-wired for physical exertion and not good things happen when the extent of one's activity is stroking a keyboard and opening the mail. Because 18 hours in front of a steering wheel will not qualify as a physical change of pace (the modest benefit of a manual transmission is canceled out by power steering), I am looking forward to the elevated heart rate associated with 30 minutes or so of cross country skiing.

The goddess only knows what lies in store for us on our return journey from Las Vegas to Rutledge Dec 28-29, where the most direct route takes us through the heart of the Rockies. I can hardly wait.
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A Cold Start

Laird — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:40:16 -0600

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.

Now home at Sandhill, I'm composing this blog in the relative warmth of a well-insulated house. Ma'ikwe and her 12-year-old son Jibran, are facing three months of winter in a house that cannot be easily heated. Brr.

Ma'ikwe did a terrific job to get her house from groundbreaking to enclosed in one season, yet the house is far from complete and only marginally livable at this point. Given that Ma'ikwe doesn't particularly enjoy cold weather, it's all the more impressive that she's embracing a Little House on the Prairie homesteading experience until spring. (No doubt her resolve to not repeat this pioneer reenactment next winter will keep her on task to complete construction in the coming year.)

The hardest part will be keeping her spirits from dropping with the thermometer. While some tasks aren't possible in freezing conditions—such as adding additional coats of plaster to the straw bales—there are still many things that can be done to make progress in the winter, such as mudding the drywall on the ceiling, framing interior walls, weatherstripping the doors, and making quilted curtains for the windows. Beyond that, it'll be important that Ma'ikwe stays actively involved in other efforts (such as writing, or planning her community's annual retreat in February), lest cold weather lethargy lead to depression.

Fortunately, my wife is a courageous woman, and I'm optimistic that she'll weather the challenges of winter well. And come March, she'll probably have a deeper appreciation for the warmth and promise of spring than most of us.
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The Same Old Grind

Laird — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:54:23 -0600

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.

While Sandhill doesn't eat a no-meat diet, we do eat a low-meat diet (on average, we serve meat at a meal 1-2 times/week). We live in a climate with terrific deer habitat (the population has been steadily rising the entire 35 years we've lived here) and with topography that supports grass production (that is, most of the land is too sloped to farm in row crops without serious erosion). With modest stocking rates, grazing animals fit well into the ecology of our land and we believe that a diet that includes moderate amounts of grass-fed animal protein is responsibly sustainable.

My main challenge today will be coaxing the homemade meat grinder (a hand-me-down from Stan's father, Jake, who passed it on to his eldest son when his butchering days in southern Manitoba were over) into working through all four buckets of meat chunks, converting the tougher cuts—plentiful in a deer—into lean hamburger. It'll take all day.

There are many tasks on the farm like this, that take hours to complete and require more perseverance than perspicacity. The trick to it is setting aside the time with grace and embracing it as a meditation, rather than as a burden. I am not butchering deer so much as I'm feeding my family and honoring the deer by using it as fully in the process as possible. The deer graze on our land, we eat the deer, and, ultimately, we will die and our bodies will nourish the land. It's a cycle.

While the gears of this cycle turn slowly, just as the auger in our homemade grinder, it's also inexorable, and I embrace my small part in it and accept responsibility for occasionally having my hand on the crank.
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The Perfect Farm Holiday

Laird — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:34:37 -0600

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.

Thursday we'll be celebrating with a joint meal at the neighbors, Dancing Rabbit. I'll go over early to help my wife, Mai'kwe, make tamales, one of her specialties gleaned from five years of living in Albuquerque. My daughter Jo & her partner Peter will be timing their drive in from Toledo to arrive just as we sit down at 2 pm. After a blow-out meal, we'll repair to Sandhill for the remainder of the day, which translates to more laughter, game playing, and drinking, roughly in that order.

Sometime after dark, Trish, Joe, and their one-and-a-half year old son Emory will arrive from St Louis for the start of a five-day visit. We've been courting each other for most of the year, and Sandhill is hoping they'll move up as early as February, when the Earth quickens for the new growing season. Their last visit was Labor Day Weekend (a quarter turn of the calendar back, at the advent of harvest), and I'm pleased to welcome them into the circle on this occasion of wood heat and camaraderie; the days of toasting and being toasty.

Friday, my son Ceilee arrives with his wife Tosca and my granddaughter Taivyn—now a curious and highly mobile 19 months old, and a match for Emory. As Friday will be the only evening my family is all together (Ceilee has a flight back to Nevada Sunday morning to be on the job Monday), I asked to be assigned to cook that day. Cooking and eating together is one of my family's favorite recreational cum spiritual activities, and orchestrating an opportunity to do that during Thanksgiving weekend renders Friday something akin to a high holy day.

Both of my kids grew up at Sandhill, so their coming this weekend is more than seeing Dad. It's coming home.

Cutting Up in the Kitchen
The last time both Jo & Ceilee were at Sandhill was three years ago, also at Thanksgiving. It was right before Ceilee moved from Columbia MO to Las Vegas NV, and he was happy to spend most of the pre-Thanksgiving rifle season on the farm hunting deer. Jo had spent the summer of '06 at Sandhill while she sorted out what she wanted to do after culinary school. Among other responsibilities she shouldered that summer, she raised two pigs, with an eye toward butchering them at the same time as we tackled Ceilee's deer.

All of this came together in the days before Thanksgiving, when the three of us spent three solid days butchering two pigs and eight deer. There are many choices to be made in how meat can be used and we love the art of catering to people's culinary preferences while making the fullest use possible of all that the animals have provided us. It is simultaneously joyous work and sacred work, as we have a bond with our food to honor it, just as it nourishes us.

This year, though the poultry butchering necessarily took pace before my kids arrived, there are still six deer hanging in our walk-in cooler and it's probable that part of the precious time I'll have together with my kids will be spent in the kitchen with meat and knives—where we'll be strengthening familial ties even as cut up roasts and grind sausage.

On the farm, my children learned about the rhythms of seasonal cycles, about finding pleasure in work well done, and about taking time to savor fresh food, the smell of wood smoke, and the campanionship of others. In the coming hours we'll have together, we'll retouch all of these themes, weaving an ever-finer tapestry of connection and contribution—all of which is why I've found Thanksgiving to be the perfect farm holiday.
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Child as Father to the Man

Laird — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:50:24 -0600

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.

Twin Oaks fronted the money to buy the land and create the initial infrastructure for the fledgling community. For its early years, Acorn's economic base was doing contract work for Twin Oaks' robust hammocks business (for decades, Twin Oaks had the main contract for supplying Pier One, which was the largest hammock retailer anywhere). Thus did the parent offer economic sustenance to its child.

Acorn has not had an easy history. Most of its 16 years have been characterized by high member turnover and a lack of clarity about what it wanted to be in the world. Throughout the uncertainties however, it was sustained by Twin Oaks' benevolent attitude toward the long-term debt and its steady offer of income work in Twin Oak's businesses.

Ten years ago, Acorn made a big decision: they bought Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and committed to building it into becoming their main business. SESE was launched in 1982 as a sole proprietorship. Over the course of 17 years, the owner had painstakingly nurtured the business from a seedling (that had co-opted the homestead kitchen table for seed sorting), into a flowering business featuring heirloom seeds with about $100,000 in annual sales. Happily, when the owner wanted out, Acorn wanted in. Thus did the community begin to emerge from under Twin Oaks' economic skirts.

When an intentional community operates a business (which most income-sharing groups do, but which most non-income-sharing groups do not), one of the trickiest challenges is finding a profitable enterprise that is a solid enough value match. Understandably, groups are chary about being associated with products or services that don't align well with the values they're espousing, and recruiting members to rally around.

In buying SESE, Acorn had a winner. Here was a business providing the seeds and knowledge to help people grow their own food—a basic need if there ever was one. It was dedicated to protecting heirloom seed (varieties that had been established prior to 1940 and the genetic manipulation spurred by World War II and the Green Revolution) and genetic diversity. SESE sells only non-treated seed, almost no hybrids (only four in the 2009 catalog), and as much organic seed as it can find or grow. When it contracts with other growers to supply seed for them, they're offering meaningful income work at home for gardeners all across the country, helping to make it possible for them to remain where they love being yet struggle to find work. What's not to like? On value scale of 1-100, SESE probably scores about 99.

Over the past decade, as it turns out, Twin Oaks and Acorn have been moving in opposite directions economically. Twin Oaks lost the Pier One account (as that giant of the leisure furniture industry abandoned the tried and true in favor of fresher products) and the community is still groping for a business mix that will replace lost revenues. Meanwhile, Acorn posted steady progress in building up SESE and was perfectly poised to benefit from the 70% jump in the demand for garden seeds that ensued from last year's economic nosedive. For the first time, in 2009 SESE's gross sales will top half a million dollars.

When Acorn scrambled to find enough people to grow seeds for them, they contracted with Twin Oaks, which is now growing as many of SESE seeds as Acorn is. In the face of last year's rocket ride in sales, Acorn turned to Twin Oaks to help them package seeds, and even has some of the senior community's veteran gardeners conducting germination tests and fielding customer queries about horticulture.

While Acorn is still paying down its mortgage to Twin Oaks and the older community is still asset rich, when it comes to income work today, it's Acorn offering steady work to Twin Oaks, not the other way around. The child is hiring the parent, and it's working well for both. It's a feel-good story about cooperation a grand scale. Now if we can only get Democrats to see Republicans that way, and vice versa…
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Walking into the Lion’s Den… and Getting Eaten

Laird — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:47:44 -0600

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.

While she claimed that he had reneged on promises of work in lieu of rent; the man claimed that the woman did no work and took advantage of the community. Each said the other owed them money.

While it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that these two individuals had no future living together, I nonetheless persisted in working with the man in an attempt to accomplish two things:

a) To clear up to the extent possible any misunderstandings and hurt feelings between the complainant and the community.

b) To determine if there were any substantive inaccuracies in how the community describes itself in their listing, or if the group is otherwise in violation of the FIC's boundaries around advocating violent practices or interfering with members' rights to freely disassociate from the group.

From the man’s perspective, I was being grossly insensitive to the community’s situation. He reported their feeling violated by this woman and what was I doing questioning the victim? How could I even take this woman’s charges seriously? Was I really following the FIC’s policy about how we handled complaints or was I just picking on him because he was African-American, and trying to mask my racism behind bureaucratic bullshit?

After another email where I tried to clarify what I was attempting to do and assuring him that I was following the same process we always use in working with complaints, he shot back an even angrier email demanding that he be allowed to talk with someone else, saying he wanted to file a formal complaint about how badly I’d treated him. Boy, did that go south fast.

Even allowing for the plausible truth about his being traumatized by this woman, I’ve been struggling to see what the payoff for him was in putting such a negative spin on my motivations for attempting to discuss the matter. (After all, even if the woman was abusive, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wasn't also. Nor does it mean that FIC should look the other way if there has been any misrepresentation on the community’s part in how they describe themselves.)

In my efforts to clear up misunderstandings (a more modest goal than repairing damage to their relationship—which I quickly came to have no prospects for achieving), I had asked a number of questions about the discrepancies between their stories. With the exception of giving me details of the woman’s attack of the other member (the basis for the police complaint), I noticed that in the course of his diatribe against me he did not answer the questions. In short, he deflected the examination of his part in the dynamic and was abusive to me in much the same way he was complaining that the woman had been to him. (And out of this clay we are attempting to mold a cooperative culture. Yikes!)

Today, sadly, I gave up on being able to inject any hopeful ray into my investigation of the storm clouds over this community, and I turned the matter over to two of FIC’s veteran Board members to pinch hit for me.

Much as I like the image of myself as a person who can make any situation better no matter how bad the damage, on this occasion I simply struck out.

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Massaging the Medium

Laird — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:52:37 -0600

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?).

So far, I'm a Facebook virgin (where would I get the time?). My basic analysis is that social networking tools tend to be very broad and very shallow. While I like broad, I'm not particularly drawn to shallow. That said, my position is not immutable and I'm trying to sort out what it means to use the technology intelligently. Which is where McLuhan comes in. I'm wondering how much people are slanting their communication toward Facebook because its sexy and there are cool pictures—rather than because the people they want (or need) to connect with can be found there.

[As an aside, last month I received an invitation from a former client to become her Facebook friend. I hadn't heard from her in 18 months and was pleased to have the contact. I wrote her a personal email declining the link (after all, I don't do Facebook), yet affirming my interest in personal correspondence. Imagine my surprise when she responded by saying she was surprised to hear from me, and that she hadn't sent me an invitation. Apparently the Facebook program had rooted around in her email Address Book and blithely invited everyone there to become her friend. Perhaps she'd inadvertently given her permission for that (at least I hope so), but it's all a bit too 1984 for me, and doesn't incline me toward jumping into the Facebook conga line. In fact, that experience had me wondering if there was a self-help option to join Aboutfacebook, for those who found themselves in too deep.]

My partner, Ma'ikwe, loves Facebook. I believes she now has in excess of 500 "friends," meaning people who have accepted an invitation to link their Facebook page to hers. Like a lot of folks, she's reported that she's established contact with long lost school chums and she appreciates how many people she can offer a first-level update on her life in one pass. I think that has merit and I can respect the value she places on re-invigorated connections. I also notice however, that concomitant with her upsurge in Facebook traffic there's been a diminution of her appearance on list serves we're both on. (The clock only has so many minutes in it each day, and that face time on Facebook has to come from somewhere.)

Because she lives three miles away and I don't see her daily, I have come to rely substantially on email traffic to stay current. While she subscribes to my blog; I don't see her Facebook entries. I now know a bit less about what's going on for her day to day because the email has been tapering, and I don't see the Facebook postings where she's keeping everyone else apprised of her goings on. This is not the result of a decision on Ma'ikwe's part to cut me off; it's a consequence of her communication choices.

In short, Facebook has drawn her attention away from regular email and I believe its having an impact on which relationships are getting juice—irrespective of which relationships are valuable or more interesting. While I'm not worried about Ma'ikwe's and my ability to figure out what communication we need to maintain a healthy vibrant partnership, I nonetheless find this impact noteworthy and somewhat disturbing in its unmindfulness.

Going the other way, I have a dear friend, Caroline Estes, who is an FIC Board member and someone I've known for 22 years. She was one of the early people helping to shape the Fellowship, and has been an important influence on how I learned consensus and facilitation. Caroline lives at Alpha Farm in Deadwood, OR, 2000 miles away from Sandhill. For the first 10 years of FIC, we talked regularly by phone and that sustained the relationship between meetings. Gradually though, email became the increasingly dominant mode of organizational communication and Caroline never embraced that technology (I name this in parallel with how I am balking at Facebook today). As FIC relied more heavily on email, postal letters went the way of the slide rule, and phone calls became more of a novelty. As Caroline participates minimally on email, our relationship has atrophied the last decade. To be sure, she remains an important friend (see my blog about her 80th birthday party March 19, 2008), but she's not swimming in the main channel with me any longer and our contacts are less frequent.

So I've told this story both ways. I don't think that email, the telephone, or even Twitter is inherently good or evil. But I do think they bend the twig, and so grows the tree. The Board's task as it faces Facebook right now is to make a thoughtful choice about which way we want the Fellowship's tree to grow, and then do our best to discern what level of participation in that technology will help us get there.

McLuhan is also remembered for a lesser-known quote that buoys me in these confusing times: "There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." While I can't be sure he's right, I sleep better believing he is.
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Sounds of Silence, Part Four: Silence on Email

Laird — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:23:37 -0600

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?
—Did they understand it?
—Are they having an emotional response?
—Do they not care?
—Are they ignoring you on purpose?
—Are they fine with what you've written and have no comment?
—Are they thinking about it?
—Are they preferring to discuss it with you live (in person or by phone)?

It could be any of these things, or even a combination. And guessing which it is—instead of asking—is about as smart as flicking lit matches out a window while driving through a drought stricken national forest. You might get away with it, but you also might start a conflagration.

As a free-lance consultant and as the main administrator of FIC—a national nonprofit with a geographically dispersed board and staff—I spend a lot of time writing reports, fielding inquiries, crafting proposals, monitoring tasks, and arranging logistics. In short, I send a lot of email where I'm looking for a response. One of the most challenging things for me is managing non-response.

Once I've gotten something out of my In Box and into someone else's, I frequently forget to stay on top of whether I've received a response (even when I've expressly requested one)—because my In Box is never empty and there are always others items clamoring for my attention. Thus, some portion of my time must be periodically given over to reviewing who owes me a response and is overdue. With as much grace and lightness as I can muster, I resend the original message, to stir the pot with a nudge (as opposed to with a grudge). If I'm feeling the crush of many such items, it can take me more than a couple deep breaths to not feel resentful of having to ask twice (or three times).

The worst is when the recipient reports never having received the first email (and they're wondering why I'm so slow). Each of us is waiting on the other, progress is dead in the water, and the relationship is under strain (and technology was supposed to make our lives easier).

One of the tricky management issues with email is how you set the default. Can project managers, committees, or boards assume agreement if people with authority have not responded by a set deadline, or must they wait for all counties to be heard from? In other words, is the default understanding that non-response=assent? As you might imagine, it's important to be clear about this, especially if you make decisions by consensus, where it only takes one downward thumb to quash the deal.

If silence equals assent, then the danger is people not reading or responding to their email in a timely way, and decisions might be made or actions taken without thorough consideration. If however, you do not allow silence to be interpreted as agreement, then the danger is bogging down progress and demoralizing staff who have to keep sending out horses to round up the strays. What constitutes time enough to move ahead, and when are you rushing things? You have to pick your poison.

In the nonprofits I work with, we've adopted the protocol of adding "RSVP" to the subject line if a response is expected. Somewhere in the text, the question(s) will be spelled out and a deadline given for when answers are expected. This helps time-sensitive topics stand out in the flurry of email that most of us download daily. However, even though this helps, it's hardly foolproof.

I tracked response rates for one group I was doing staff work for last year. In a six-month period I posted 16 RSVP messages to the governing board and only once received a response form all eight members by the deadline. Every other time I needed to send out a reminder. Often I had to send the reminders more than once. Sigh.

There can be no doubt that we're in the Information Age. Unfortunately, that does not necessarily mean that all the information that crosses our bow has come of age, or that all the people we're trying to communicate with are under way and tracking. Beware the Shoals of Silence.
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Partnership & Individuality

Laird — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:40:07 -0600

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.

Naturally enough, Ma’ikwe has already been turning her attention to What’s Next—which is a question that has my attention also. As Ma’ikwe and I don’t live together (Dancing Rabbit is an hour’s walk away from my bedroom at Sandhill Farm) it is not a slam dunk figuring out when we’ll spend time together. This calculus is further complicated by my work as a community networker and process consultant, which has me on the road about 60% of the time (which means there’s considerable potential to not be together regardless of whether we share the same mail box).

Like most couples that are happy in their partnership, we like spending time together. Our challenge is figuring out the right mix of together and apart, keeping in mind that we both have diverse interests and already had full dance cards when we launched our intimate relationship four years ago. In some ways, or course, this is an embarrassment of riches, where we need to make selections from a menu replete with worthy choices. As much as we’d like to do it all, we can’t.

Thread #1

When Ma’ikwe slimmed down her other commitments to tackle the house, one of the things she let go of was involvement with FIC, which is a major area of commitment for me and one of the venues where our lives intersected leading up to our courting one another in 2005. Much as I’ve enjoyed her involvement in the Fellowship’s work (especially as an Event organizer), it’s not at all clear that she’ll return to any FIC role post-construction.

Thread #2

While she’s continued to be my teaching partner in facilitation training throughout construction—and that’s something that both been thoroughly enjoyable and nurturing for our relationship—she’s now questioning whether that’s a calling for her in the same way it is for me (to be clear, she loves teaching; she’s just not sure that group dynamics is where she ought to be plying that pedagogical talents). Ma’ikwe and I are committed to completing the training we’re doing in NC. After that’s completed in June, it’s not clear if we’ll do other trainings together (or consulting gigs either, which we’ve done a few times).

Thread #3

The first thing that bubbled up for Ma’ikwe when she contemplated what might be most satisfying for her as an underfed interest was Art: creative writing, painting, music, ceramics, and ritual—pretty much in any combination. As her partner, I want to support her having the life she wants. When you connect the dots however, this desire to explore her life as Artist may translate into my needing to make more money, to make sure there’s enough flow to meet her household budget. That, in turn, probably means my being on the road more, which is where I’m able to make serious money.

Thread #4

Ma’ikwe’s resurgent interest in writing coincides with my commitment to starting work on a book about cooperative group dynamics that has been rattling around inside me for several years. In fact, we have fantasy about renting a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula this summer to do a three-week writing retreat together. While it’s unclear how concurrent dates with the same Muse adds up to time together, I figure there’s something precious in there about connecting with the ebbs and flows of inspiration and written expression.

Taken all together, these threads may weave into a tapestry where the weft of my life intersects less with the warp of my wife’s, not more. I have my personal pursuits and she has hers. I have my callings and she has hers. While this wasn’t how I was hoping our lives would entwine, I’m nonetheless dedicated to her having every bit as much choice as I have, and living the life that seems most promising to her. I have no image of our partnership thriving if it’s based on constriction and my limiting her choices. While it’s not yet clear how we’ll be able to pull this all off, that’s the challenge in front of us.

It’s early days, and Ma’ikwe has not made any decisions yet about what she’ll choose. Our marriage is still young and we’re testing the resiliency of the weave, and what partnership ultimately means to each of us as individuals. While I’ve never felt closer to her than I do at this moment, it’s ironically less clear than ever how we’ll nurture and extend this precious weaving. It’s uncertain how much time we’ll have together at the loom, with one hand on a shuttle and the other in each other’s.

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Funding Community Where You Are

Laird — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:34:21 -0600

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:

o Many lived in Yellow Springs, and connected with community that way. Though a small bedroom village in the outer orbit of Dayton in western Ohio, Yellow Springs has always had a special feeling of community by virtue of being the home to Antioch College since 1852 and the residence for many years of Arthur Morgan, author of the seminal work, Small Community, which advances the premise that small communities are the essential building block of a healthy society. While Arthur did not limited his focus to intentional communities, he was definitely promoting the idea of developing local communities with intention. Since 1940, Yellow Springs has been the headquarters of Community Service (CSI)—now styled the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions—a nonprofit devoted to the promotion of Arthur's thinking. The House Party was being held in the home of Faith Morgan & Pat Murphy. Faith is Arthur's granddaughter, and Pat is the current Executive Director of CSI.

Yellow Springs has developed a rich community heritage by virtue of a citizenry motivated to Create Community Where You Are (which has been part of FIC's core mission since 2005). This reputation has attracted others who have been Finding Community Where You Are. In both cases—whether one is a community pioneer or a community settler—residents are cherishing what they have.

(Faith, incidentally, is my age, and it's awesome for me—who has lived in community for 35 years—to have a contemporary who is not just a fellow lifer; she's third generation community.)

o One participant had attended the Arthur Morgan School a Quaker-based boarding school for grades 7-9 in Celo NC. My daughter had gone there in 1999-2002.

o Three people in the room (Ray & Pat Olds, and Don Hollister) had been part of the founding of Communities magazine in 1972. FIC took over operational control of Communities in 1992, and I'm the publisher of that periodical today.

o Faith, in conjunction with CSI, produced the video The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peal Oil, which is a terrific example of a society responding with creativity, dedication, and optimism to the challenge of drastic changes in their access to energy. It's the inspiring story of how one culture built community in response to crisis. FIC is a purveyor of hope as well, especially when anchored by community building.

o One attendee lived for years in Argenta BC, an alternative community enclave nestled in the Kootenays of southeastern BC. My dear friend Betty Didcoct owns land there and used to be on the staff of the Argenta Friends School. She has been regaling me for years with stories of life there.

The House Party happened because two local people—Faith Morgan and Don Hollister—agreed to put it together. They sent out the invitations, they promoted it locally, they provided the refreshments… they took time out of their busy lives to make it happen. While FIC provided the names and addresses of people in the area with a known interest in community, all I had to do was show up and make the presentation. It was a partnership, and successful House Parties—not unlike successful communities—aren't possible without partners.

Inspired by Faith & Don's example, Raines Cohen & Betsy Morris have signed up to host a House Party in Berkeley next year. Does anyone else care to put their hand in the air?
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Feedback on Giving Feedback

Laird — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:39:59 -0600

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 was stimulated by the conversation to think about how to apply his conclusions to Sandhill, and got excited about the idea of embracing the concept of a passive home (one so carefully constructed that the heat from occupants and appliances is sufficient to meet space heating needs, obviating the need for a furnace or wood stove) to construct my community's next building, perhaps as early as 2011. This technology has the potential of reducing the energy usage in homes by 90% and could make a real contribution in efforts to build a world that works sustainably.

At the same time, the man was troubled by what he felt were misleading claims by architects and builders relying on LEED certification to reduce energy consumption in the construction and use of buildings. He was concerned that the savings claims were specious and giving the public a false sense of progress.

Without making an assessment of about whether the facts were accurate (I'm in over my head in that regard) it caught my attention that he was making the choice to spend a significant fraction of his energy on challenging LEED claims, rather than on promoting his alternate solution. This strategic choice was what I was trying to give him feedback about (not about the importance of the topic or the soundness of his conclusions), but the conversation didn't go well. Worse, I persisted in trying to give my perspective (mainly by saying it repeatedly, with increasingly greater animation). Not surprisingly, this was not an effective tactic. (Why does anyone think that saying the same thing louder and/or faster is ever an effective choice in the face of resistance or misunderstanding?)

Worse, I came away from the August exchange thinking that at least things had ended on an up-note, because I had concluded our conversation by focusing on how impressed I was with his ideas about passive homes. Last week, when I spoke with the woman, I found out that the man felt I'd "chewed him out" in August. Yikes! That hadn't been my experience at all. The woman then proceeded to recapitulate the man's position about the LEED problem, working from the understanding that I hadn't heard what her partner had said two months ago. This was depressing. Apparently I hadn't been clear with either of them. When you take into account that I teach communication and how to constructively navigate moments when there's a significant difference in viewpoints, this bordered on embarrassing. How did I misread what was going on so badly?

As best as I can reconstruct it, I was attached to having the man hear my thoughts about why I thought it was a better strategy to emphasize positive alternatives rather than dwelling on what he didn't like about others' suggestions. For his part, the man had a considerable investment in his analysis and probably felt threatened by my critique. In retrospect, I realize that I had assumed he'd be interested in my reflections, and hadn't bothered to check that out before launching into my analysis (Mistake #1).

That error was compounded by my insistence on restating my "insight" when he didn't seem to get it. Never mind whether I was right or not about what he understood: I had ample evidence that he wasn't finding utility in what I was offering, and I kept hammering away anyway (Mistake #2).

Topping it all off (third time's the charm), I didn't bother to check out how the man felt afterward. Since I was doing OK, I assumed he was also. (Apparently, I was determined to make a hash of the exchange.) That was Mistake #3, the dimensions of which only got revealed to me last week when I got reports from two different sources about how hard the August conversation had landed for the man.

As hard as it was to hear all that, it was important that I ultimately got it, and thus have a chance to do it differently in the future. Stephen Covey encapsulates this lesson in the following nugget: Seek first to understand, and then to be understood.

Maybe someday I'll actually live that way.
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Why Intentional Communities are Important

Laird — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:39:43 -0600

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.

Second, how should we approach these groups to make an offer of support? Often, the trick to getting a good reception is learning as much as possible about what your audience is really looking for and starting to build your bridge from their end—rather than insisting that others come to you. It can come as a shock to many activists that not everyone shares their agenda or that others organize reality differently.

Third, where do we think there's a sufficiently strong connection that we'll get a positive response—in other words, what attempts are worth our time and effort. This is often about as scientific as reading tea leaves, and requires sussing out what feels most likely to work. Because there's not enough time to try everything, you have to make choices. (There is a tendency to feel frustrated when efforts fail, and it can be a challenge to find the patience to give others a sufficient chance to warm up to your overtures. Hang in there!)

Trying to succeed at inter-organizational networking can be like fishing. Sometimes there are long stretches between nibbles; sometimes there's no fish in the pond; sometimes you're using the wrong bait. The thing to keep in mind is that the skill needed to make connections with other organizations is exactly the same thing that's needed in build bridges between stakeholders—that thing I posited at the beginning of this blog that we community people are so good at.

Do you suppose the universe is trying to tell us something about how far we've come on the path to perfection?

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Appreciating Changes

sorghumco — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:00:44 -0500

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.

Contrast: today, I am on the farm by myself. Interns and visitors have left, 2 members are off on a hiking trip, 2 others are off on business – different directions – leaving me, 3 dogs, 5 cats, twenty some chickens and 4 turkeys. This seems such a contrast to the traditional/average family farm – where the human population does not vary much.

I enjoy the changes – similar to how I enjoy the changing of the seasons. I usually do not feed the non human residents here – today I will. As I walk about doing the chores and maintenance tasks, I imagine what it would be like to live this lifestyle by myself. Naturally, I feel alone – but more than that – separated from the human community – like, my actions don’t matter to anyone else. However, I do feel more connected to the critters, plants, and nature in general. I am more aware of my physical environment, noticing animal tracks, birds, various colors of leaves, etc.

I appreciate both: my natural environment and the people I live with and enjoy this sweet homestead & lifestyle. I feel blessed.

Sandhill Farm

Silence in Consensus

Laird — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:09:21 -0500

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.

Upon reflection, it’s obvious that you could go either way on this. The important thing is for everyone to understand which way to interpret silence in your group. After working for decades with contemporary groups using consensus, I’ve found the best solution is generally a hybrid. I ask groups for permission to interpret silence as assent on procedural matters (“Here is my summary of the conversation so far: ____. Does that seem complete and balanced?” or “I suggest that we alter the focus of the conversation from X to Y; is that OK with the group?”), yet typically insist on some active sign from each member about their views when asking for formal agreement on a proposal. I figure the stakes are fairly low when it comes to how the group focuses its attention, and fairly high when it comes to determining policy. I’m willing to go for a streamlined approach to questions about how the meeting will progress, and then slow it down for decisions establishing agreements that will bind the group into the foreseeable future.

Absent an explicit understanding about silence, it's easy to understand how the group can get into trouble. For example, a member may feel that they have nothing to add to the conversation and is not speaking out of respect for the group's time. However, someone observing that member may not be sure that's what's going on. You may guess that the member's silence is out of confusion, or possibly because they're still cogitating about what they think or how to express it. (For this reason, it's common for consensus groups to encourage members who have not addressed a topic to voice something like, "So-and-so speaks my mind" to let others know that everything is copacetic rather than unsettled. It's a simple step that can dissipate the fog and needn't take more than a few seconds.)

In addition, silence in meetings can be a powerful tool in shifting the energy or in shifting the level of engagement. It can be terrific, for example, as a change of pace. When discussions get bogged down a moment of silence can help members step back, take a deep breath, and remove themselves from unproductive wheel spinning by reflecting on what's already been contributed—the better to identify what might have not yet been voiced, or to identify what potential connections between statements have been overlooked. Alternately, silence can be used effectively to ask participants to drop into a deeper level of connection, perhaps where people speak from their hearts more than from their heads.

While the potency of this approach tends to diminish with overuse, it can nonetheless be a valuable option if used sparingly, and in the right moments.

In groups which embrace the autobahn philosophy of open discussion (no posted speed limits on how quickly one person speaks after another), an occasional moment of breath-taking can dramatically alter who feels comfortable entering the traffic flow, resulting in input from the shyer folks in the room—people who may otherwise never be heard from.

If you're part of a consensus group that doesn't normally work much with silence, I have the same advice that Dr. Zeuss offers regarding green eggs and ham: Try it, you may like it!

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Going Like 60

Laird — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:33:47 -0500

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.

In addition to my surprise at seeing the Mercantile ready for service (my immediate impression was of the warm glow of flames dancing in the fireplace, complemented perfectly by the array candles happily flickering on the elegant table), guests started popping out from behind the furniture. First there was Tony, handsome in a red vest, followed by his partner Rachel, in a long print dress. Given that they're both good friends and live at DR, their attire was more unusual than their presence, so I took this first "Surprise!" in stride.

When I turned to my left however, it was shocking to find my sister Alison smiling back. She lives in Chicago. I had hardly digested that before her eldest son Allan added his "Surprise!" to the chorus. He lives in Iowa City. After finally managing to get a kiss from the party impresario, my wife Ma'ikwe, I was urged to look around a bit more closely, and discovered to my furthering surprise that a second sister was in the room—Kyle, all the way from San Antonio. Holy moly, this was getting more special all the time.

After that initial burst, the rate of surprises slowed down a bit. There was time for appetizers and drinks (which I pretty much needed by this point). Other local guests drifted in and I was able to catch my breath. (And, since Jennifer had demurely changed into an evening gown, so could others.)

After a half hour or so, the door popped open and an eager black dog skittered inside. It was one of my granddogs: seven-month-old Yoshi. He was followed immediately by his owner, my daughter Jo, just in from Ohio. Holy Toledo, now they were arriving from different time zones!

This level of surprise was sufficient to get us to dinner: dressed spinach salad garnished with slices of Asian pear, followed by a main entree of lasagna, capped off with tiramisu and dessert wine. Lovely! Somewhere between the main course and the dessert, the door burst open again. By this point it could have been Santa Claus and I wouldn't have batted an eye. Instead, it was Betsy Morris and FIC-Board member Raines Cohen from Berkeley. (Would Max Lindegger from Australia be next?) While not exactly mythical figures, Raines & Betsy are legendary travelers and world-class social butterflies, so it only made sense that they'd make an appearance. After all, there was a party going on, right? (They were en route from California to Kansas City to DC to Berea KY, and I guess Rutledge is sorta on the way.)

It was both confusing and wonderful to have at the same table so many different elements of my life, all happily commingling: my sisters, my daughter, Rutledge community connections, FIC compatriots, and even one of my bridge partners (though Jennifer usually dresses differently for the Kirksville duplicate club). While the numbers were not large, the mix and energy of the evening was satisfyingly evocative of Ma'ikwe's and my wedding in April 2007, and that's as good as it gets. Ma'ikwe was wise enough know both how meaningful for me this would be and that I wouldn't ask for it. Therefore, she didn't ask.

There were no new arrivals after that and the party broke up around 10:30 (poor Alline was patiently reading in the corner, wondering if she'd ever get to bed). That meant that Ma'ikwe and I had the inn to ourselves for the rest of the evening, which we took full advantage of to celebrate in ways that were equally special yet beyond the scope of this blog (and you thought I didn't have any boundaries).

Saturday
After a leisurely morning in bed (read more celebration), Ma'ikwe and I drifted next door to the DR Common House and our morning coffee ritual. Eventually we were joined by all of the out-of-town guests and Ma'ikwe conducted a tour of DR. While I knew most of her spiel, there's been so much going on at DR (20 people have been accepted for residency this year, and there's more new construction then at a gold strike boom town) that it was good to get more current on what the neighbors are up to.

The tour ended at Ma'ikwe's new house, which is now only a fortnight away from being enclosed enough to be able to occupy and heat for the winter (which is very exciting). Alline catered a lunch for us at the house site, after which Allan had to depart for his regularly scheduled life back in Iowa City (though not before he got to share with me a 120-minute IPA from Dogfish Head Brewery, which is worth every penny of the $10 it costs for a 12-oz bottle).

Then the party progressed (as progressive parties do) to Sandhill, where Jo and I were the surprise dinner cooks. I had been worried about being home for five days and not contributing at all to the cook rotation at Sandhill, but my clever wife took care of that. Knowing that there isn't much I enjoy in the world more than cooking (and eating & drinking) with my kids, she arranged that Jo & I got to be the cooks for the second birthday dinner and we merrily spent five hours in the Sandhill kitchen putting together the following repast:

o Fresh mixed green salad with homemade vinaigrette dressing (aka Laird sauce)
o Sliced tomatoes and red onion marinated in homemade basil aioli mayonnaise
o French bread with brie and baked garlic
o Roasted sweet potatoes
o Homemade pasta with a choice of sauces:
—Onions and garlic, slowly caramelized in sage butter, olive oil, and black currant wine
—Mushrooms Berkeley (shiitakes, onions, and green peppers sauteed in butter and then cooked down for hours in sorghum, mustard, wine, and worcestershire)

Nobody went hungry.

Then it was back to the Mercantile for birthday cake (a choice of spice cake with maple frosting, or carrot cake with cream cheese frosting), ice cream, and a second round of partying. After getting all sugared up we watched a video that none of us had seen before: Geoph Kozeny's footage of Ma'ikwe's and my wedding roast, held the night before the ceremony in April 2007. It was just as funny the second time.

After that, we tapered off with a round of Skittles, a wooden game of Appalachian heritage that has been in the Schaub family since before my birth. (Is there anything more grounding than traditional foods, ritual activities, and convivial friends and family?) It's played in an open box that is approximately four feet long, two feet wide, and eight inches high. The box has partitions and there are 15 five-inch high wooden pins (turned on a lathe) that are set upright on designated locations around the box. The more obscure the location of the pins, the more they're worth if you knock them down. The game is played by taking turns winding up wooden tops with string and then releasing them into the box. Your score is the value of the pins your top knocks down. There are tricks to getting a lot of action out of your top, yet it's a mistake to think that your score doesn't depend substantially on luck.

Just as the tops eventually wound down, so did us revelers. After about 30 minutes of Skittles, bed beckoned to us all and the second day drew to a close.

Sunday
This was my actual birthday, yet it worked better for most of the out-of-towners to celebrate early and use Sunday as get-away day. Thus, my sisters and daughter were gone before Ma'ikwe and I had arisen from the luxury of the Mercantile's down comforters.

Again we started with coffee (which is not much different than saying I got out of bed, or the sun rose in the East). After a leisurely breakfast, we schmoozed with Betsy & Raines and then I headed down to Ma'ikwe's house to install the stove pipe for her wood stove. On Saturday I got to cook; on Sunday I got to do some construction. It made me happy (as Ma'ikwe knew it would) to be able to bookend my birthday with the opportunity to be constructive with my hands.

Although rain shortened my work day after about five hours (you can't caulk a roof penetration in the rain), I was able to complete the trickiest part—building and installing the fireproof pass-through, where the double-wall stove pipe goes through the insulated ceiling. That means the ceiling rafters will be ready for the drywall crew expected today. Whew.

Right before sundown, with rain clouds rolling in from the west, I went home and did yoga, which was a fitting conclusion to my birthday. I realized as I was stretching, that yoga was the last thing I'd done before Jennifer appeared on Friday. So while it may be questionable whether I ever got the hang of my birthday, I'm confident that I got the yin and the yang of it.

Afterword
I want to close with a reflection about connection and the threads of life. In addition to the straight forward joy of unhurried time with friends and family (which I'm pleased to report are not mutually exclusive groups), it was a delight to see how things naturally tended to flow in sequence.

o Two years ago I had asked Alison to bring Skittles to Ma'ikwe's and my wedding in Albuquerque, but there was a lot going on and it didn't happen. On the occasion of my birthday, which I didn't even know Alison was attending, she brought Skittles on her own.
o Friday night, after Ma'ikwe had created an ambience which echoed our wedding, Alison presented me with a framed statement of our wedding vows which she had calligraphed and gotten all the wedding guests to sign as witnesses. While I knew this was in the works, it was the first time I'd seen the finished product, which will be mounted over Ma'ikwe's and my bed.
o Saturday evening we watched for the first time the video of the wedding roast, after which we had queued up a game of Skittles. It was eerie to hear Ed Pultz (an original Sandhill member) say halfway through the roast that he "was surprised that no one had mentioned Skittles so far." I had forgotten he'd said that.
o I next depart home tomorrow, for the start of a 16-day trip. My first stop will be Berea KY to participate in the FIC's fall organizational meetings. It will be my first time I've ever in Berea… which just happens to be where Skittles is made.

Are there ever any accidents?
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Birthday Surprises

Laird — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:56:09 -0500

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.)
• • •
I just got home yesterday from a week in Colorado, and was eager to spend last night in the same bed with Ma'ikwe, but it was not meant to be. I depart early next Tuesday for the fall FIC organizational meetings (to be held Oct 30-Nov 1 in Berea KY) and I chastely stayed home (I live at Sandhill and Ma'ikwe lives at Dancing Rabbit, three rainy miles away) to compose as many of the five reports that I'm responsible for authoring for the meetings as possible. Whatever I don't accomplish before I enter Ma'ikwe's Birthday Blackout Zone this afternoon will have to be completed Monday.

I might have gotten a few of the reports done while I was in Colorado, but other than treading water in my email In Box, that time was fully subscribed by meetings about cooperative business consulting, and to be with my long-time friend, Betty Didcoct, helping her rearrange the tables and (deck) chairs among the titanic mess that is her apartment.

I've never seen anyone with such a robust collection of empty boxes—all so that she won't have to spent much time re-manifesting them when she next decides to move. It borders on being a fetish. (Although partially peeved by the problem, I didn't presume to posit the possibility that the proliferation of paraphernalia in her penthouse has produced a predictable pattern that will plausibly precipitate the very peregrination and attendant distress that her procurement of plentiful boxes was meant to be prophylactic against.) I'm telling you, irony is wasted on some people. (While my observations may or may not be illustrative, at least they can be alliterative.)

The way I see it, these boxes—as in mounded so high they rain on your head or grab at your ankles whenever you try to access a shelf or a closet—are manifesting their own destiny and, sooner rather than later, Betty's gonna move.

For all that though, I had a great three days with my friend. We talked at length about her life choices (she's got to find a way to live in community again—living alone doesn't really work that well for anyone, but especially if you're 67, thrive on collaboration, and are trying to juggle multiple health challenges), we overhauled the furniture and organization of three of the rooms in her apartment (everything but the kitchen and the back hall closet—which has a density and tottering quality reminiscent of the legendary Fibber Magee's closet), and even managed to watch a video each night (making a modest dent in our near-hopeless backlog of Movies We'd Really Like to See).

Spending those three days with Betty was an excellent example of how time with friends is a major quality of life issue. In order to fully enjoy the bounty that close friendships can bring, you have to cultivate the garden of your relationships. That means spending time together where you are not always constrained by the need to be on task. One of the secrets to making my life work is that I've figured out a way to accomplish that despite having a To Do List that never reduces to a single page.

While being on the road more than half the time means I'm often away from my wife and my community (things that go on the debit side), I am richly compensated by getting to do work I love (Benefit #1) with stimulating people (Benefit #2). Less obvious are the ancillary advantages of being able to regularly see friends around the edges of my work, by extending my travel to come early and/or stay late once business has brought me to a location (Benefit #3), and by making the choice to travel by train whenever possible, thereby protecting time for reflection and transition in a life that has otherwise crowded that out (Benefit #4).

So, if you want to spend time with me, you prospects are best if you to come to Sandhill when I'm home (good luck), attend an event I'll be at, or get me work in your area. There are also possibilities if you get married and invite me to your wedding, or arrange to travel with me.

Next Tuesday I'm looking forward to spending the day with Tony Sirna, as we drive together to attend the FIC meetings in Berea. That'll supply us with the luxury of about 560 miles of visiting time. Like Ma'ikwe, Tony lives at Dancing Rabbit. Though he's a close friend and lives in the same building as my wife, we rarely hang out together when we're both in Missouri. Instead—because we're both busy guys—we've gravitated to a friendship that is substantially cultivated during blocks of time spent traveling together, usually en route to Fellowship Board meetings. While that's a somewhat exotic solution, the important thing is that it works.

And in the end, that's all that counts.
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Giving and Receiving

Laird — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:43:59 -0500

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.

My uneasiness tends to be lessened if I have a clear sense that I'm running a karmic surplus with the giver (that is, when I have "credit" in consequence of some prior generosity on my part). It's also easier if the would-be exchange occurs in the context of an established relationship, where I'm confident of still-to-come opportunities to reply in kind.

Still, I find it hard to receive. For example:
o On my birthday I try to be out of town, so I can keep a low profile (or at least a lower one).
o I frequently turn down offers of back rubs or neck massages (even when my muscles are knotted).
o When there's a special food served at a meal, I try to not eat any (so that there will be more for others).
o I am often uncomfortable having my partner focus on my pleasure in lovemaking (I didn't say any of this was smart; it's just what I do).

The analysis of any given situation is nuanced in that I try to take into account how much it may mean to the giver that their gift is received (and received gracefully, if at all possible). Because I can inadvertently be depriving the giver of the chance to feel good if I spurn their offer (which, after all, is how it might land with me if our roles were reversed), I try to be sensitive to this. It can be tricky navigating between what I'm comfortable with and what feels good to the other person.

Part of my understanding about how this preference developed (who knows what the entire story is) relates to my being a man living in the feminist culture of intentional community. By "feminist" I mean a culture that is cooperative, egalitarian, and not sexist. As men have much more privilege in the wider culture, I've learned to be hyper vigilant about how I might be perceived to be taking advantage of that. If I give more than I take, it reduces the risk of being seen as one more arrogant and/or oblivious male.

Another part of the story is my aspiration to be what Robert Greenleaf styled, a "servant leader." By foregoing many of the privileged trappings of power, I believe I can be a more effective as a social change agent. I'm sure that this is true, mind you, but it's how I think and it's little enough to make the experiment.
• • •
About 15 years ago I was visiting a community on the East Coast and fresh, homemade chocolate chip cookies were offered for dessert one evening. Toll house cookies are about my favorite, and I happily snarfed up a couple as soon as they came out of the oven. After I'd eaten dinner, I eagerly went back for more cookies. Halfway back to my seat I was upbraided by a community member for being a pig—what was I doing taking seconds before everyone had had firsts; how could I be so rude?

Chastened, and red faced, I put the cookies back and didn't eat any more that night.

A few years later I had a friend who was fond of making fabulous Christmas cookies. Every December she'd make batches of several kinds and then mail gift packages of assorted cookies as a distinctive holiday greeting. For a number of years I was on her list to receive this bounty. However, as good as the baked treats were (and they were terrific), I got nervous about being a privileged recipient. I hadn't forgotten the incident with the chocolate chip cookies, and I got in the habit of opening the box in the community dining room and letting my fellow Sandhillians eat the cookies. Although I was careful to send the baker a note of appreciation every year, once she found out that I was giving the cookies away, she stopped sending them to me.

I was uncomfortable receiving a special favor, and she was displeased that I wasn't eating the cookies myself. Sigh.

These days, I'm pretty cautious about eating cookies, and I tend to steer clear of the dessert table on potluck nights. It's much safer that way.
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Post-Harvest Exhalation

Laird — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:39:20 -0500

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.

Before I left home for this junket, I had enough post-freeze time to finish reading a library book (which is a novel way for me to spend time during harvest), make my final batches of tomatillo salsa & hot pepper relish for the year, and craft a custom-made threshold for Ma'ikwe's new house from Sandhill's stash of seasoned 5/4 white oak—which I delivered to the house site Thursday afternoon, en route to the train station for my overnight ride to Denver. (Though I love working with wood, it was a rare treat to be able to spend time with a plane in my hand, beveling the quarter-sawn oak board to highlight the ray flecks.)

When I return home next Thursday, I'll help Ma'ikwe install the triple-wall stove pipe for her wood stove, and maybe lend a hand with building the cob wall in the southwest corner. Better yet, I'll get to spend more constructive time with my wife—not just more time with my wife's construction. I'm looking forward to that especially. Share this via

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Sandhill's Demographic Transition

Laird — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:10:35 -0500

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.

Instead of having almost everyone approaching senior status—which is where we were headed about five years ago—we'll be much more intergenerational. This bodes well for Sandhill's ongoing viability as a community. An unbalanced age distribution is one of the trickier things for small groups to manage as they mature. There are some groups—such as Springtree (Scottsville VA) and Christ Church of the Golden Rule (Willits CA)—which have essentially gotten too old to continue beyond the current membership.

While fading into the sunset is not necessarily a bad thing, it's more satisfying handing the baton off to a younger generation, to build on what we old fogies have begun. (In Sandhill's case, hopes for the continuation of our beachhead of cooperative culture in southern Scotland County is immeasurably strengthened by the vibrancy of our neighboring communities, Dancing Rabbit and Red Earth Farms, and does not rest solely on the shoulders of Sandhill. We have the luxury of not having all of our cooperative eggs in a single basket.)

Still, there are challenges ahead. Having a clutch of younger folks join gives us prospects, but that's not the same as a sure thing. We have to integrate these new folks into the community, enhancing the chances that they'll become the core of the long-term membership that will be here 25 years from now. Crucial to this succeeding will be the ability of the remaining long-term folks (Stan, Gigi, and I) to create genuine openings for the newer members to do things their way and to establish variations in the community's rhythms. We have to do better than simply "allowing" them to do what we did; we have to support their making changes. In short, we have to midwife the transition of Sandhill becoming their community (and not roll our eyes when they suggest overhauling long-established routines). If we insist they wait until we're dead, the community will be dead.

These challenges notwithstanding, I'm optimistic about what's ahead. We offer new members a community with built facilities, no debt, and established income streams. We're living in the midst of a three-community neighborhood that's thriving, have good local relations, and abundant gardens with topsoil we've been amending and nurturing since the day we first arrived in 1974. (As far as I'm concerned, healthy topsoil is better than money in the bank.)
• • •
Käthe & Michael's leave-taking seems propitious. They're departing on good terms to a new life adventure that they're eagerly awaiting. Simultaneously, Sandhill will be turning a page, and opening a new chapter in its future, seeing if it can reinvent itself. It should be interesting times all around.
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The Time Zone Traveler's Wife

Laird — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:43:12 -0500

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.

I resonated with this book so strongly because the last five months I've been actively looking at the meaning of intimacy and partnership with my wife, Ma'ikwe. Like Henry & Clare, we've been grappling with when and how to talk about touchy subjects, with what it mans to be fully partnered, with how to use awkward moments as a springboard into deeper water (rather than as a signal to get out of the pool), and with how to reconnect after repeated temporal separation (while I don't leave the present in the same spectacular way that Henry does—for one thing, I keep my clothes on; for another, I usually take Amtrak—I nonetheless am on the road half the time and am often in a different time zone than my wife). On top of that, Ma'ikwe lives three miles away from me—so even when we're in the same zip code, we often have occasion to recalibrate our electrons to get them into a synchronous orbit.

I've never been closer to another human being, and I am both grateful and in awe that Ma'ikwe feels the same way I do. This is the miracle of love. Somehow we've stumbled onto this same rare thing that Niffenegger has described for Henry & Clare. And it is all the more precious in that it's not a fairy tale. It is the culmination of daring to be vulnerable, celebrating each other's successes, stubbing our toes, saying the hard thing, holding each other during the scary parts, licking each other's tears, hanging in there, making love to exhaustion, and laughing until we can hardly breathe.

Like Henry & Clare, I am older than my wife, and will likely die sooner. My father died at 72. If my hourglass runs out of sand at the same time his did, Ma'ikwe and I will have had 16 years together—just one more than Henry & Clare had. Ma'ikwe will then be a widow at 52, with much life still ahead of her.

Emily, who lives with me at Sandhill, told me that The Time Traveler's Wife was one of her all-time favorite books and she cried a lot while reading it. While I totally get how Niffenegger touches readers in the heart, I've had a different reaction. Instead of grieving that Henry & Clare only had 15 years together, I am filled with joy that they used those 15 years so fully. What a gift to be reminded that time is always limited, and it's never a good idea to put off what's important until later. One of the secrets to a happy and fulfilled life is to insist on living the life you mean to live right now. Don't wait for the movie, or worse, your obituary to see how it all comes out.

Thank you, Audrey. Thank you, Henry. And thank you, Ma'ikwe.
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Sounds of Silence, Part Two: Silence on the Road to Speaking

Laird — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:48:00 -0500

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)?
A person's response to an occurrence, or to a comment or revelation is not always automatic (thank goodness). Sometimes a person needs to roll it over, let it sink in, or chew on it before knowing their mind (or knowing the response in their belly). There are times when this can take hours or even days, depending on how familiar or scary the territory is, and how high the stakes run.

Note also that knowing one's mind can be quite a different thing than knowing one's feelings. Which kind of response is called for? Maybe you're unsure. It can all be pretty confusing.

However, let's suppose you've figured this out. Now it's on to the next question:

Step 2: What's Appropriate for This Audience?
Regardless of whether you're in an casual conversation or a formal meeting, there is a context that should be taken into account when deciding what to share. Maybe it's TMI (too much information—not every audience is the right one for certain levels or kinds of sharing). Maybe you'd like to share but you're scared or unsure.

However, even after you've sorted this out, there remains a final question:

Step 3: What Should I Say Now?
Maybe you're response is off topic. Maybe you'd like to share at this level, but your audience isn't there yet. Maybe there's not sufficient trust to reveal your response. Maybe the right people aren't in the room.
• • •
This outlines one strain of why people are silent—even when that's not their intent, and they're hoping to break through. It can be a reason why it's good that people are silent (rather than blurting out the first thing that pops into their head). Of course, if you're on the receiving end of the silence, it may not be apparent that this is what's going on. You may be imagining much less productive possibilities.

The good news is, if you're unsure, you can ask. If the silence signals distress, you're likely to get a surly response… or none. If, on the other hand, the silent person is on the road to speaking, you're likely to get a more even-handed response such as, "I'm thinking about it," or "Give me a while to sort this out."

A lot of times, the ambiguity of Silence is compounded by the people observing silence in others not talking about how they're interpreting it. When everyone is guessing, it's that much harder to get it right!
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The Bag Ladies (and Gentlemen) of St Louis

Laird — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:46:13 -0500

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.

As an intentional community committed to sustainability—especially when it comes to food—Sandhill participates in many weekend festivals during the harvest season (next weekend we'll be in Keosauqua IA for the Fall Scenic Drive Festival, and the one after that in Hannibal MO for Historic Folklife Festival). For economic, as well as sustainability reasons, we mostly stick close to home and driving to St Louis for a half-day event was a stretch. However, I made the most of it, delivering two buckets of organic sorghum to Black Bear Bakery, giving a ride down to a farm organizer named Severin (also from Massachusetts, oddly enough) who was tabling at the fair, and giving a ride back to John, who will be visiting nearby Dancing Rabbit for a week. (Given how little sleep I'd had the night before, it was a godsend that John was with me on the return. The fair adrenaline had worn off by 4 pm and I gratefully turned the wheel over to him for most of the drive north.)

While it's true that sustainability was one of the themes of yesterday's fair and you'd expect the crowd to have a greener, above-average crunchy granola flavor to them than those who typically attend your plain old vanilla fall festival, something happened yesterday that I didn't expect to see in my lifetime: not a single person asked for a bag for their purchases. I was blown away. It figure it was the equivalent of walking along a mile of highway and not finding a single aluminum can.

I've been doing fairs for more than 30 years (which translates roughly to 100 events), and that has never occurred before. In fact, we are so used to the request that we stockpile all the plastic bags that inevitably accompany our mainstream purchases during the year just so that we'll be able to reuse them during the fall fair season. Yesterday I had a large supply of recycled plastic tote sacks on hand, and I didn't use a single one of them. True, two people accepted an empty cardboard box to hold their booty, but nobody wanted plastic. I think there's hope.
• • •
I have one more story about the fair. We were given the option to have our booth fee waived if we committed to giving a public talk during the event, and I jumped right on it. Cornelia asked me to talk about intentional community for 15-20 minutes, which is something I can more or less do in my sleep. As it turned out, my turn at the mic followed a discourse on vermiculture. While the "crowd" for my talk (encouraged by public announcements and a ring of straw bales placed suggestively around the stage) barely outnumbered the media recording it, I'm pleased to say that I easily outdrew the worm lecture.

That said, it's an open question who got upstaged by whom. Later in the day, Cornelia came by with a tape recorder and cameraman, hoping to get interviews of interesting people. Having appreciated my talk, she approached our booth and made her request (I graciously agreed, of course), and was just about to get started when she suddenly realized that her crew needed to dash off for another opportunity—a worm race.

Adding insult to injury, the race was apparently sufficiently distracting that she never did make it back for that interview. Sigh. Such is the ephemeral quality of fame.
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Elder Care Business Opportunities

tahitigod — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:21:42 -0500

Greetings,

Incredible opportunities exist for egalitarian communities to participate in the elder care industry. The elderly are the fastest growing segment of society and in desperate need of care on many levels. Personal wealth & government benefits make them an abundant & reliable source of income and it's work you can feel good about - helping people truly in need.

A google search will amaze you with information from turn-key franchises to totally do-it-yourself operations. Opportunities range from one person "in-their-own-home" visiting care services to full-service elderly housing facilities. The possibilities are endless.

There are requirements for accountability, certification, licensing, & etc. which many may find too oppressive to deal with. But, if reliable income derived from helping others is a goal of your community, elder care may be a source worth investigating.

Food for thought.

Twin Oaks Community

Sounds of Silence, Part One: Conversation

Laird — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:16:12 -0500

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
There are times when a person gets quiet as they take in deeply what another has said, chewing it over in their mind (and body) to see what fits. This is an active response; just not a verbal one (at least for now). There may be a response coming later, or maybe not. There is an exploration going on (often related to insight) and the silent person may have no idea at the outset whether that inquiry will lead to a sharing.

C. When people are unsure how to respond
While related closely with B, in this case the silent person is actively trying to form a response, and is only quiet because of uncertainty about what to say or how to say it. The person knows that some kind of response is called for and is groping to figure out the best way to proceed. It may include elements of frustration or fear (see G below). Sometimes the speaker understands this is happening and it leads to a pregnant pause, affording the respondent time to gestate their response. Sometimes the speaker is oblivious, as when there are too many people in the conversation to track them all, or when the speaker is self-absorbed.

D. When people are bored or uninterested
Essentially, this is when people check out and their attention drifts. It's different from A in that they don't care. While this is generally a passive response, there can sometimes be an aggressive edge here, where the silent person is hoping to starve out the topic by intentionally denying the speaker fuel.

E. When people are observing or being receptive
This is the situation where the conversation is going fine, the listener is engaged and simply doesn't have anything to say at that point. This is an active silence, often characterized by a nodding head.

F. When people are enjoying a stretch of companionable non-talking
This phenomenon is most common when people are together without time pressure, or without the desire or need to communicate. It can occur regularly among close friends or partners as a way they enjoy time together (or among more casual acquaintances on a long car ride). Periods of silence can also naturally arise among people working together. While it may or may not be connecting, it's peaceful.

G. When people are reactive
I've saved this one for last. This is where the person is emotionally triggered. Unfortunately, it can be the outward manifestation of a wider variety of feelings than prizes in a box of Crack Jack. Included are:
o Anger (the person is upset, yet unable or unwilling to express it)
o Frustration (the person may be tongue-tied, or uncertain what to say that will illuminate what's happening)
o Fear (the person feels unsafe and is quiet to protect themselves or others)
o Sullenness (the person does not speak because they're sulking; they feel isolated or misunderstood and are withdrawing their energy)
o Depression (the person lowers their energy and gets passive in response to despair, or feeling overwhelmed)
o Overwhelm (the person is experiencing an intensity of feelings—it could anything: rapture, acute pain, massive confusion, rage—such that they are paralyzed in the moment)

As you might imagine, more than one of these feelings may be in play at the same time, greatly complicating the diagnosis.
• • •
Even if you assume that I've fully delineated the main reasons for people being silent in conversation (which I doubt) and I've convinced you that it's complicated, it's actually much worse, because many of these meanings can be combined. Talk about a hair ball!

For the most part we depend on non-verbal clues to help categorize which of the above meanings to assign to a person's silence. Often, facial expressions alone will tip you off. However, depending on propinquity, perspicacity, and lighting, it doesn't take much to get it wrong. Whence the popular admonition: when in doubt, check it out.

In fact, given how much of a rat's nest this can be, it's often a good idea to check it out, even if you aren't in doubt, the better to establish a sound foundation for where you want to take the conversation next. Keep in mind that just because you're talking doesn't mean you're communicating. Just a thought.
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Power of One

Laird — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:36:00 -0500

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.

In some cases, especially where groups are unsure of their footing around how the group can successfully navigate deeply held differences (reference Question #3 above), the group can become terrified of blocks, for fear of divisiveness and polarization.

In the case of the community I was working with last weekend, we were able to resolve fairly quickly what I'll style the difference between "blocks" and "pseudo-blocks." In a typical sequence of engagement on an issue, the group will go through the following phases:
o Presentation of the Issue (what portion of the issue needs to be tackled at the plenary level?)
o Discussion (identifying the factors that a good response needs to take into account)
o Proposal Generation (what response best balances the factors named in the previous step?)
o Decision (is the proposal good enough?)
o Implementation (who is doing what, when, and with what resources?)

In consensus theory, a "block," or "standing in the way of," occurs only in the Decision phase—at the end of thorough Discussion and careful Proposal Generation. Essentially, healthy groups rarely experience blocks because they almost never advance proposals that everyone cannot accept.

However, when a group is unsure about what constitutes a legitimate block and/or how to handle that examination, then trouble tends to show up earlier. A person with a strongly held position (or style) may draw a line in the sand early in the Discussion phase with a statement something like, "If someone proposes that we use capital reserves to fund repainting the Common House, I'll block it. That money should never be used for maintenance."

Although the speaker actually used the B word, it wasn't really a block because wasn't a proposal on the table. Rather, it was a strong concern, and a factor that will need to be addressed (which is exactly what should be surfacing during the Discussion phase). We call this a "pseudo-block" because it didn't occur during the Decision phase, yet it can be every bit as effective as a legitimate block in stopping a line of inquiry if the group does not know how to work differences.

The community I was working with was struggling mainly with pseudo-blocks. And while that was fairly easy to sort out to everyone's satisfaction, the confusion was partly begged by their being unclear what actually constituted a legitimate block. And it was that conversation that was especially potent for me.

To my knowledge, there is no single way that groups using consensus define a block. That said, it's typically a problem if groups don't define it and, for my money, I prefer that the test of legitimacy be that the blocker believes that the proposal either violates a common value of the group or a prior agreement in force. In other words, that the proposed action or agreement will harm the group in some substantial way.

While the group was united in its desire to to define a block (no one was standing up for ambiguity), there was not clear agreement about what that would be. In a Go Round, the majority expressed comfort with the standard of legitimacy that I offered. However, a notable handful dissented. And I was touched by this dissent.

After 22 years as a process consultant, I've run into many examples of groups which have been hamstrung by obstinate individuals who claimed they were blocking proposals for the good of the group yet no one could see how the proposal violated a group value. It just looked like the individual was abusing their right to block in pursuit of a personal agenda, and the group was reluctant to push against this.

The people who were uncomfortable with requiring that an individual needed to "justify" their block, or (put another way) that the group could override a block, spoke eloquently for trusting that members would take seriously the responsibility to think deeply and carefully before exercising their right to block. While I'm not yet convinced that the standard for a block should not be "for the good of the group," I can see how trusting members to do well may be a better model than preparing for churlishness or manipulation by protectively putting in place a process for invalidation.

There was not a shred of doubt in my mind that the dissenters were operating for the good of the group when defending the right of individuals to be the sole judge of whether their block was appropriate, and thus, in the true Quaker tradition, this group will let this question season and come back to it later. After all my years in the field, I've learned that groups tend to manifest what they expect to find. Those dissenters reminded me of the power of expecting the best, and I was touched by how they all exemplified the very care and integrity in considering this matter that they were projecting that all group members will exercise when considering whether to block.
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Booking My Future

Laird — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:58:40 -0500

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.

As her home is also her office, I was greeted at the door by Terry, her part-time assistant. As I waited for Lynne to finish up something upstairs in her work space, I glanced around at her books (isn't this what everyone does when you first have a moment alone in someone's house?). So, naturally enough, we started the conversation talking about books.

New Village is a small publisher that focuses on titles which build sustainable culture. They bring out perhaps 2-3 books annually, and are picky about what projects they accept. All of which made sense to me. After all, I'm a picky writer. Suddenly, it seemed obvious to mention to Lynne that I was in the early stages of writing a book, and I wondered if she'd be interested in publishing it. She asked me to tell her more, and we were off to the races.

For some years now, I've realized there's a book in me trying to come out. It will be about cooperative group dynamics—essentially a distillation of my 22 years as a process consultant and my 35 years of living in intentional community. At this point in my life, the hard part is not figuring out what to say (two years ago I printed out copies of my collected writing—at least all that's in my computer—and it was half a ream), nor is it writer's block (I author 8-9 blog entries every month, craft 1-2 articles for every issue of Communities magazine, and crank out reports on the average of one per day).

My main challenge is carving out sufficient time in an over-packed schedule to regularly push the project along. Two years ago I started setting aside a half-day per week for the book, but wasn't very far along when Geoph Kozeny tragically turned up with terminal cancer. I laid down the book to concentrate on supporting Geoph for the four months he had left. As part of the deal, I took onto my shoulders managing the completion of his video, Visions of Utopia, and two months after Geoph passed away I started my career as a blogger. (Where does the time go?)

Now, finally, I'm about ready to blow on the coals of my book project and bring that fire back to life. Right after Thanksgiving, I'm committing two half-days per week to the effort, for as long as it takes.

The conversation with Lynne helped in several ways. First, I think it's important that I work with a cooperative publisher. Which is not to say one that's easy to get along with (though that would be nice!); I mean a publishing outfit that operates cooperatively, so that the dynamics of bringing out the book are concordant with the message of the book. While New Village Press is not the only choice that meets that test, they're a strong candidate. New Society Publishers would be another.

Second, talking with Lynne brought into sharp focus that I don't want to be in charge of marketing and promoting my book, which is something all good publishers do. As I listened to what New Village does to promote their titles, I could tell viscerally that I didn't want to self publish (and therefore be in charge of my own marketing). Before that conversation I didn't have that clarity. Don't get me wrong, I'm certain that I'll love giving talks about my book; I just don't want to be the one setting up those talks. While working with a publisher may mean I'll make less money than self-publishing (at least that's a possibility) it will surely mean that there's greater distribution of the book, and that's really the bottom line when you're in the social change business.

Third, Lynne got me to see that I need to be much more clear about my intended audience before I start writing (or re-writing, given how much already exists in the form of handouts, reports, and monographs). While I'm working all the time on clarifying what I think constitutes effective cooperative group dynamics (in fact, at this point, I can't turn it off; I process even casual exchanges recreationally, whether I share my thoughts with others or not), that is only part of the equation.

Think of a book as a bridge, attempting to connect the author with readers. While the traffic is generally one way, it's nonetheless all about connection. My thinking, while important, is only one bridge abutment. My intended audience is the other, and it only makes sense to place both abutments on solid foundations before you start constructing the bridge deck. (Lynne was glad to hear that I grokked this. She shook her head while lamenting the number of manuscripts she sees where the author does not appear to have thought at all about the intended audience.)

Fourth, Lynne is connected with urban planners. In particular, she has ties with progressive planners and the New Urbanists, who are trying to refine and define what constitutes sustainable cities. This is a world I have not entered and I am hopeful that Lynne may be able to provide me with an entree, so that I can learn more about their world and how my work on cooperative processes can apply.

All and all, it was a highly productive hour visiting with an old friend. This business of building sustainable culture is complicated stuff, and it's important to have friends helping one another along the way.Share this via

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Conflict for Dessert

Laird — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:13:58 -0500

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?)

As it happened, the other player in the conflict (a guy) also didn't know about this plan for postprandial processing. So it was a surprise all around. Fortunately for the woman (and my story) the guy was willing to give it a try. Even though he was tired from a long day at work and wanted to get to bed early, he was willing to give it 10 minutes.

(Well, I knew that that wasn't working—if it's serous conflict, 10 minutes is rarely sufficient to hear even one side of an upset, much less get the whole picture and make an attempt at working it out. I figured though that once we got started, things would pretty much move along on their own momentum, and, sure enough, a half hour went by before anyone thought to check a watch.)

While the presenting incident involved the proper use of dish racks in the common kitchen, I was never under any illusion that that was the underlying issue. It didn't take too long to uncover the pattern. Her story was that he is always defensive and resists her attempts to work through issues she has with his behavior. His story was that she's always pushing him to change and doesn't respect any boundaries about what or when to discuss her concerns. He was defended to guard against her pushing; she pushed to break through his defenses. Each thought they were responding in a measured way to what the other had started. This is how wars get started.

After many months of living together, they had found themselves on a merry-go-round that neither wanted to be on. Going round and round was not proving to be productive, and it was never merry. The good news is that they both wanted it to be different. I got the woman to see how she might get different results if she did two things differently when she had a bone to pick with him:

a) Ask the guy if this was a good time to talk about an issue, and respect his answer if he said, "No."

b) Once they had agreement to talk about her concerns, that she start by hearing how the incident in question looked to him and that she not proceed to tell her side of the story until he indicated that she'd understood his experience of the incident. (Note: When trust is low between people it is generally not sufficient that she felt she had heard him out; he needs to acknowledge that he feels heard as a prelude to the conversation staying constructive.)

Going the other way, I got the man to commit to:

a) Not agree to hear her feedback unless he thought he was in a frame of mind to work with it constructively.

b) If he puts her off in the moment, that he take primary responsibility for coming up with an alternative time that was not unreasonably distant (Hint: something sooner than "when hell freezes over"). It's not cool to expect her to come to him, if he requests a postponement.

c) When it comes time for her to state what's been hard for her, that he offer her the same thing she offers him: an acknowledgment to her satisfaction that he got it. (Note: affect here is typically just as important as the words.)

Finally, I got both of hem to be allies in jointly bringing to a future house meeting the topic of:
What are the expectations of house members to provide a reasonable avenue to hear feedback from other members about their behavior as a member of the house?

At the end of the day, conflict is most often about the same incident being experienced through different frames of reference, and misunderstandings about other people's lenses of reality. Fortunately, sociopaths are much rarer than TV would have us believe, and few people are truly evil. While behaviors that are selfish or unmindful are numbingly common, if you can remind yourself that no one actually meant harm, it will go a long way toward helping you find a way through the slough of ill feelings.
• • •
So dessert has been a surprise adventure each of my first two nights in the Bay Area. Tonight, I think, I'll just bring my own damn cannoli.
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When to Reass

Laird — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:48:05 -0500

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.

When you're addicted to good process, like I am, it's hard to imagine a better life. I'm in meetings all day (I'm composing this blog before dawn, because when the sun comes up I'm in a meeting), I get to teach people who really care about what I'm good at, there's strong coffee (with half-and-half) available all day long, everyone is laughing a lot, we're accomplishing real work, there's excellent beer at the end of the day, and I get paid to do this. How good can it get?

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley —Robert Burns

Getting back to yesterday's meeting, I was observing the final plenary of the day, sitting right next to the flip chart easel. During a break, I had worked intensively with the two guys tag-teaming the facilitation to tease out the nuggets from 40 minutes of small group deliberations and determine possible ways to focus the final 30 minutes of the day—where the emphasis was on ending with as much solid product as we could gather. It was the fourth quarter, and we needed a touchdown. It was an animated 15-minute huddle (while everyone else was stretching, going to the bathroom, getting a cup of coffee, or all three), and my position was roughly analogous to a football coach drawing up a new play for the team on the back of a napkin during the final timeout.

As we were running a little late (the 10-minute break had stretched to 22) one of the two quarterbacks hastily scribbled the revised agenda on the flip chart and called everyone back to their seats. From my sight lines, I couldn't read what had actually been written on paper, but I knew were in trouble when one woman joked that "She was OK with the plan generally, but wanted no part of being "reassed"; she was fine with the one she had."

This comment immediately drew attention to the author's half-assed attempt at spelling, where the term "reassess" was missing its final "s." In the midst of this rising tide of ribald back door jocularity, the facilitator decided, wisely in my opinion, to ride the wave (rather than buck it) and the next thing I knew he had his pants down and was bending over to demonstrate how "reassing" was actually done. This did a marvelous job of unifying the energy in the room, though not necessarily on the topic of construction.

After a minute of silence, everyone was able to resume a normal heart rate, as well as proper meeting decorum. The final 30 minutes was satisfyingly productive, and a valuable lesson was learned: in the heat of the moment, sloppy spelling can sometimes bite you in the assessment.
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Bad News at Home

Laird — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:10:36 -0500

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

I learned last night that my friend Tamar Friedner has been diagnosed with terminal cancer in her liver, pancreas, and uterus. The disease is so advanced that the oncologist considers it inoperable and untreatable. I feel that I've been kicked in the gut by one of the horses of the Apocalypse, and this has cast a pall over the tri-communities of Scotland County (Dancing Rabbit, where Tamar has been a member for many years, Sandhill Farm, and Red Earth).

Two years ago, I lost another friend to pancreatic cancer—Geoph Kozeny. Geoph was my age and his life was cut short at 57. As much as a tragedy as that was, it is even more shocking with Tamar, who is only in her 30s. You can never imagine it, and it brought to mind the poignant A E Houseman poem I opened with. How can a life so full of promise and inquiry be ending so soon?

My partner, Ma'ikwe, moved to DR a year ago and is now in the midst of building a house there. She worked extensively with Tamar last winter in designing the house and Ma'ikwe asked her to serve as the general contractor on the project. My most recent conversations with Tamar have been to discuss design details about Ma'ikwe's house.

Tamar likes construction, yet she declined Ma'ikwe's offer in order to free up her summer to travel and explore options, which is what she did. In the spring she traveled to Vermont to explore a possible life partner relationship. When that didn't work out, she planned trips to other parts of the US, to see friends and assess other potentials, springboarding off her substantial foundation of sustainable living experience at DR.

While not an athlete per se, Tamar may reasonably be likened to a marathoner, who knows how to exert herself steadily—both physically and energetically—for the long haul. It is the ultimate tragedy that in Tamar's instance, the haul will not be long. All of her friends in Scotland County are stunned and sadder today. How can such a vital life force be so cruelly truncated? It is a time for grieving.

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Consensus in the Courtroom

Laird — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:17:40 -0500

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
o Although I believe laws governing court procedures vary somewhat by state, in 1987 Missouri jurors were not only forbidden from discussing a case in progress with people outside the trial (for example, when one went home at night), we were also forbidden from discussing it with one another until the case was turned over to us, and we were forbidden to take notes while the court was in session. Interestingly, we were allowed to make notes when court was in recess.

To me—already 13 years into my life in intentional community—taking notes during serious meetings was automatic, and I figured a trial counted as a serious meeting. I was taken by surprise when the judge halted proceedings the first day to make sure that my notebook was closed whenever he was in the room. This meant I had to rely on my memory instead of notes taken in the moment, and I had trouble seeing this as an enhancement of justice. Why not give everyone a notebook and encourage the practice?

The judge told us that the rationale for banning notetaking among jurors during trial was that those who didn't take notes would tend to defer to those who did, thus destabilizing the equality among jurors. As it turned out, the other jurors in fact did defer to me when the case was turned over to us, because they all knew I was recording notes during the breaks, and they trusted my record better than their memory. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; heaven forbid I should be allowed to use both eyes. What a system!

o Leaving the rules about notetaking aside, I don't understand why jurors are not allowed to ask questions. If we don't understand something, we can't we ask for more information? When lawyers plead before the Supreme Court, after all, the justices are allowed to query them. While everything that is admitted into evidence is physically handed over to the jury for perusal once the case has been handed over to us, the reality was that no one looked at any of it, nor was it referred to, except from memory.

And that was just the beginning of the curious things that transpired.

o When the case was finally given to the jury, it marked the first time in a week that any of us were allowed to discuss the case. As we had been directed by the judge to start by selecting a foreman, we did so. They selected me. (Perhaps my taking notes projected an impression of organizational competence.) While I suppose there's a general expectation that the foreman has some kind of authority to manage the deliberations, nowhere is this spelled out and you have to make it up as you go along.

As I reflect back on that first hour together in the jury room, the image of herding cats leaps to mind. Everyone wanted to talk at once, and everyone was fed up with listening. After a few futile attempts to focus the conversation, I announced that I was giving up: the lot of them could simply engage in freewheeling commentary until everyone felt ready to have a single conversation. Somewhere in the second hour we reached that point—though not before I was able to discern that there were a lot more things on trial than just a lawsuit about collateral.

o The demographic of the jury was eight men and four women. I was 37 years old at the time, and there was one other man about my age; the other six were over 50. When we did a straw poll early on, to see which way the wind was blowing, the vote was 6-6. The four woman and the two younger men combined in favor of the plaintiff; the six older men sided with the bank. It turned out that that was not a coincidence. The older men were viewing events through different lenses than the rest of us:

A. It happened that the lawyer for the plaintiff was from St Louis, and not someone local. While there's a certain amount of parochial favoritism that's probably characteristic of rural counties everywhere, this non-local prejudice was compounded by the lawyer also being Black. My county has no Black residents and the jury was all White. Although Brown v. the Board of Education happened more than 30 years earlier, there was nonetheless palpable racial prejudice among some of the older men. To some extent there was a clear preference to see the White lawyer prevail over the Black one. Thus race was on trial. Ugh.

B. Most of the older men were farmers, and they didn't have much respect for the plaintiff as a peer. It grated on them that he might earn a financial reward through a lawsuit that they felt was outside his capacity to earn agriculturally. In fact, if he were a better farmer, they reasoned, he wouldn't have been in such substantial debt to the bank in the first place. They felt he should not be bailed out for his inefficiencies. Thus the trail became an assessment of farming competency and a referendum on what constituted fair return on one's efforts.

C. As farmers, the older men were typically dependent on local banks for cash flow loans. With only two banks in town, they were afraid that finding against the bank would be bad for business—either because the bank might take operations elsewhere, or might close off credit to any jurors who found against them. Thus the trial became a measure of what was best strategically for the local economy, and how to play it safe.
• • •
Where, I wondered, was there room for the case being decided on its merits? Boy, did I feel naive.

Because this was a civil case (not criminal) the standards for a decision were different than those I had absorbed watching Perry Mason on TV. Instead of requiring unanimity, it was sufficient that 9 of the 12 agreed with a course of action (either in favor of the plaintiff or the defendant). Nor were we asked to decide "beyond a reasonable doubt" what happened. It was enough to reach a decision based on what we felt the evidence showed most probably occurred.

Consensus Tools at Work
Here are the things I did as foreman in an attempt to navigate this complicated group dynamic, and which ultimately led to a verdict that we could all support.

1. Move away from positions and navigate from core interests
It was crucial to uncover early on that the 12 of us were not judging the case on the same basis. While some of us were focusing on whether the farmer had a legitimate beef about how the bank handled the request for additional collateral (it all boiled down to what we thought most likely transpired in a closed-room conversation where only the farmer and the bank president were present), it was important to know that the older men were afraid of incurring the bank's displeasure and that they didn't respect the plaintiff as a farmer.

2. Walk away from tangential inflammatory statements
While I had a knee-jerk outrage reaction to the racist side comments that some of the men made about the plaintiff's lawyer, I chose to let that go. I figured that as long as this was not being put forward as a reason to side with the bank (while I was on guard about this possibility, it didn't happen), then we were more likely to be able to build a workable solution. My immediate needs would be met so long as I was vigilant about not allowing the farmer's lawyer's race to be a factor in how we came to agreement.

3. Focus on bridging instead of advocacy
In attempting to build consensus in situations where there exist non-trivial differences, it's often useful to approach the issue in two stages: first, flush out all the factors that are in play; and second, make a transition to focusing on the search for a course of action that adequately balances those factors.

4. Make sure that all speakers feel heard—especially if they say something controversial
If a person says something edgy, or something they feel strongly about, they are highly likely to repeat themselves (often with increasing volume and frustration) Simply making sure that you've heard someone (to their satisfaction), can make an enormous difference in how smoothly you navigate tough topics.

5. Proceed at a pace that doesn't feel rushed to anyone
While this may seem obvious, everyone does not process information or know their own mind at the same rate. If you chivvy along the slower processors (in the name of reaching the finish line sooner), it's often false economy. Pushing tends to result in push back, which will either undermine how quickly you'll be able to tackle the next topic, or erode the trust needed for a solid decision. People tend to get indigestion when asked to swallow before they're finished chewing. In fact, if you push hard enough, they'll spit out their food and it's messy all around.
• • •
After several hours of deliberation, we were able to reach agreement on finding for the plaintiff (establishing that the bank president should have known better what the proper process was for boosting the collateral on the loan), yet honored the concerns of the older jurists by limiting the damages to something modest. Thus, the bank wasn't hurt badly and the farmer didn't get rich.

In the end, I think we approximated justice pretty well, yet I wonder to this day how things would have gone if there hadn't been a nascent process consultant serving as the foreman, able to bring the tools of consensus into the jury room.
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Coffee, Tea, or Me?

Laird — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:05:10 -0500

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).

Not trusting my sexual response or sexual performance, I’ve emphasized connection in other ways: mainly emotional, intellectual, energetic, physical, yet even spiritual and psychic. For me, sex is a private exploration that is an enhancement to an established connection; it is not a lead-up to intimacy, it is a celebration of it. Thus, for me, sex is magical and potent, yet it is also quixotic and non-essential.

This choice has also been reinforced by my emerging role as a public figure in the Communities Movement and as a group process consultant. The Communities Movement and my work as a consultant are both rooted in a commitment to creating cooperative culture. While that culture is certainly not anti-sexual, it is anti-manipulative, and there are far too many stories of men in positions of power or prestige who have parlayed that into sexual advantage. I am determined to not be one the men about whom such stories are told (and not because I didn’t get caught; I want it to be because I never went there).

In contrast, I experience my wife as marvelously sure of herself sexually, and amazingly open (which, no doubt, enhances her sexual attractiveness—I believe that centeredness is more potent than pheromones). I think her sexuality is well integrated into her identity as a vibrant, fully-featured person, and it makes sense to me that for Ma’ikwe sexual connection is more centrally positioned in her personal pantheon of life’s important relational elements.

All of which sets the stage for yesterday’s off-hand query and the surprised look on her face when I reported after a moment’s reflection that I didn’t think that our creative and deeply connecting sex life was central to our marriage. For Ma’ikwe, she can’t imagine being happily married to someone with whom she didn’t connect well with sexually. For me, I would never assess the soundness of a nutritional program by the dessert menu.

Luckily, we both like sex, we especially like it with each other, and the authenticity and power of our sexual connection is independent of whether we label it appetizer, main course, or remedial training. It’s all good.

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FIC as a Home for the Halt and the Lame

Laird — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:43:15 -0500

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.

Well, I always get queasy when people tell me they have inside information and I just have to take their word for it. I can't tell that their wrong (which, of course, is the beauty of that assertion), but my bullshit indicator is on red alert.

In essence, this person predicts that the Age of Possessions is coming to an end (no shit, Sherlock) and the Age of Relationships is dawning. In this coming age, intentional communities will play a key role in midwifing the transition, which will feature a balance between natural energies (as in forces of Nature) and beings from other star systems. (While I don't know anything about how other star systems will play into our future, I do resonate with the appropriateness (even need) to redefine happiness away from materialism in favor of relationships and the quality of social connections.)

Last, the author wanted my support for getting writing published in Communities magazine.

Clearly, I was in over my head. In my response, I carefully explained that FIC had no sway over the program choices made at CBCX and the NASCO Institute. Further, I had no expertise whatsoever when it came to extraterrestrial intelligence, and was not aware of people seeking that kind information from FIC or from intentional communities (though, to be sure, there are some communities which have focused on preparing for major Earth changes—witness Stelle and Adelphi, which were founded on the prophesies of Richard Kieninger).

When it came to Communities magazine, I explained that our publishing standards: articles must be well written; relate to cooperative living; and be of interest to our readers (as near as we can discern what that will be)—it is not sufficient that the subject is of interest to the author.

Thus, I was the voice of ignorant skepticism, possibly halting their initiative. (As someone who had devoted his adult life to inquiry and experimental culture, it is somewhat embarrassing and uncomfortable to be on the conservative and mainstream end of a conversation about reality, but I reckon there is no position so extreme that there isn't at least someone on either side of wherever you stand.)

Example #2
This letter reminded me of a dialog I've been carrying on over the course of the last half year with another FIC member, who has queried me from time to time about groups interested in working with membership not limited to the corporeal plane. This person has recently gotten interested in the possibility of groups functioning with the explicit understanding that there are non-physical entities who can be part of the group's consensus decision-making. In particular, they were thinking of members who had died and could continue their participation from the spiritual plane.

As with the correspondent in Example #1, I plead ignorance of such a phenomenon, and could report no awareness of groups which functioned in this way. When I asked how the physically present members could discern the will of those who existed only spiritually, my friend was uncertain about how that would work. (If this gets cleared up, you can be certain that I'll blog about it.)

Example #3
On Friday, we got an web inquiry from someone who was appalled that we included in our Directory a listing for a group which does the following:
o Proselytizes at Grateful Dead concerts
o Expects women to be subservient to men
o Tells members how to dress
o Arranges marriages among members

For the correspondent, this added up to CULT (yes, the complainant used all capital letters), and demanded to know why we allowed this, if we cared a fig for our credibility.

I responded:

"We allow a group to list so long as it meets the following criteria:
1. It styles itself an intentional community and wants to have a listing with us.
2. It's accurate in what it says about itself (not misleading).
3. It doesn't advocate violent practices.
4. It doesn't interfere with a member's right to leave the group at any time.

"While I personally am not drawn to a community that has gender-defined roles and where leadership directs members' personal choices (such as who to marry), FIC takes the position that this is not our business so long as the practices in question are choices among consenting adults, and do not cross any of the boundaries mentioned in the list above.

"In our experience, the label of "cult" is typically applied to groups doing something that the labeler disapproves of, and is used as a blanket pejorative. While I totally get it that you don't like what this group stands for, FIC's job is not to only list groups that you like; our job is to list all groups and let individuals make their own choices. In fact, our credibility, as we see it, depends on this neutrality.

That said, "cult" also has a more specific and nefarious meaning: referring to a group which intentionally attempts to hold people against their will and to confuse them about knowing their own minds. It implies brainwashing. If you have specific evidence that such a thing is happening with this group, this is quite a serious charge and we'll look into it."

Within a few hours I got a reply expressing incredulity that we'd never heard of this particular group's "antics."

In turn, I asked what "antics" were being referred to, stating that FIC would not deny a listing to a group on the basis of the four practices cited in the original email.

This was followed minutes later with a wikipedia reference that included information about this group's practice of spanking children who misbehave, and expecting children to contribute labor in community businesses—over which they were found guilty of violating state child labor laws. For the correspondent, this added up to a clear case of child abuse.

As I reflected on how some people consider spanking to be violence (in fact, that's our position at Sandhill, where we forbid it). I thought we were starting to get into interesting territory. Of course, I was also aware that no parents have been convicted of child abuse solely on the basis of spanking their children for disciplinary reasons, and I knew that FIC was not about to apply a more stringent standard in this regard than the US legal system. Still, I could sympathize with the writer's anguish and was in the process of composing a reply when this arrived in my In Box—nine minutes after the wikipedia reference had been sent:

"You guys are lame. I used to like your web site, but now I think it sucks, and I won't trust it or use it anymore."

Guess I wasn't quick enough.

This kind of exchange is highly frustrating. About six-eight times a year we get a communication like this and they often end in the same way. Someone writes to FIC complaining about a group and demanding that we drop their listing. We try understand the exact nature of their complaint and offer to act as a go-between in an attempt to resolve the concerns directly and informally with the community. Almost always, the complainant isn't interested in that; they prefer that we take up their cause, and they don't understand why we hesitate at all (never mind that it's essentially their word against the community's and that we rarely have any direct information about the events in question).

Because we have a core commitment to solving problems in a way that enhances relationship, and because we are trying to build a world that does away with us-and-them polarizations, we are oriented toward conversation rather than judgment. It's fascinating to me how often we get labeled "lame" for trying to consider both sides. And in this last example, written off because we didn't jump high enough or fast enough in response to a complaint. Since we're not fully aligned with the correspondent's position, that makes us the enemy. Sigh.Share this via

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Pardon the Interruption

Laird — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:16:43 -0500

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.

While I'm sure I'm not thinking of everything, you get the picture. Interrupting is a normal part of most people's speech patterns. To be sure, some do it a lot more than others (in fact, I do it a lot). While there tends to be less of it in structured meetings—where the norm is having one person speak at a time—facilitative interrupting is an art form. Here are a handful of reasons why the facilitator might step in (over and above the occasions mentioned for casual conversation):

o The speaker is off topic.
o The speaker is not following the accepted sequence for working the topic.
o The speaker is out of turn.
o The speaker is not engaging the topic at the right level (for example, the group is trying to do heart work and the speaker is into problem solving).
o The group cannot hold all that the speaker has to contribute, and needs a summary.
o The facilitator senses that the speaker needs help wrapping up (no terminal facility).
o The facilitator wants to check that others are grokking the speaker's meaning before continuing.

Recently, Ma'ikwe (my wife) gave me feedback about how irritating it can be for her when we're in a serious and delicate conversation and I don't let her finish a statement before jumping in with a response. Ma'ikwe is thoughtful and it's generally worthwhile for me to get her reflections on topics of mutual interest. That said, she does not tend toward concision, and if we're in tender territory I can get in big trouble cutting in to guess what she's about to say or to attempt a preemptive strike on multiple trips around the mulberry bush. Instead of cutting to the chase, she experiences it as disrespectful and imperious—which does absolutely nothing to improve the energy, or expedite the dialog.

Since we discussed it, I've been working at being more mindful whenever the conversation veers toward the ditch, attempting to curb my tendency to enter the conversation before she reaches a natural pause. To be clear, if the conversation is easy going and jocular (which, thankfully, is most of the time) I'm still prone to interrupting and Ma'ikwe can generally roll with it. The No Passing Zone is only in effect when the yellow caution flag is out.

A couple days ago, as an experiment, I tried carrying my heightened awareness into a Sandhill business meeting. Stan mentioned that a neighbor was interested in buying black locust posts from Sandhill for constructing grape trellises, and he seemed to remember that we'd dealt with a similar request recently but couldn't remember the outcome. Instead of pausing to see if anyone had a response however, Stan started musing about why he couldn't remember what we'd done the last time. As the person who dealt with it six months ago, I knew we had a policy and was poised to respond. However, rather than launching myself into the midst of Stan's meanderings (as I was wont to do), I decided to wait politely until Stan finished.

Fascinated to see how long this might go on, I listened as he told the story of his confusion in three different versions without pause. Although he still hadn't run out of steam, Michael hopped in at that point to state that he agreed that we'd dealt with that request before but, for the life of him, he also couldn't recall how we'd handled it previously. Before Michael was finished, Gigi offered that she suspected that I might be able to shed some light on the matter. Fortunately, that created the opening I was hoping for, and I inserted something like "I was the one who handled that last time and I can take care of the new request," which satisfied everyone.

While this whole sequence only took about five minutes—which means my interrupting Stan, had I done it at the beginning, would only have saved three-four minutes—it was an instructive contrast with the work I was doing with Ma'ikwe to alter my tendency to interrupt. At the Sandhill meeting, my interrupting (if done graciously) would almost certainly have been appreciated as a time saver. Yet that same impulse is what landed me in hot water with my wife.

Sorting this out, I can see a handful of lessons:

1. Some people tolerate interrupting much better than others (Hint: how much interrupting occurred at the family dinner table in the household where that person grew up?). Know your audience!

2. Tolerance tends to shrink when tensions increase. Thus, the latitude you're given to interrupt is situational. In a meeting, the facilitator (see above) probably has appreciably more latitude than others, yet even here there are limits.

3. Interruptions have a legitimate place in human discourse (that is, they're not just benchmarks of social ill-grace).

While it's not easy to change one's habits around something so ingrained as interrupting, there can be surprising dividends to be had in effecting even modest shifts in behavior, especially in delicate moments. Sometimes—if you don't want emotional fender benders to turn into T-bone tantrums at high speed—you're better off not crowding other people's air space.

There are times when getting someone to pardon you will be much more complicated than tolerating the long-winded explanation you thought were short circuiting by indulging in the interruption. Put another way, there will be occasions where you don't have time to go in a hurry, and you're better off interrupting your inclination to interrupt. It's something to think about.Share this via

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Passivity Versus Neutrality

Laird — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:50:39 -0500

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.

I think what underlies this position is the notion that people are prone to say and do things under the influence of strong feelings that they'll later regret. If you accept that strong feelings are dangerous, it can make sense to attempt to conquer them (or at least contain them). Viewed from this perspective, the expression of strong feelings represents a loss of control. When they erupt, the person with this philosophy may have compassion for those emoting, but they will politely refuse to engage with protagonists emotionally; they'll keep trying to pull the conversation back into the rational plane. Often this translates into the choice to zone out of the conversation, waiting patiently for the fireworks to end. This is Passivity.

While the passive person is not contributing to the problem, neither are they contributing to the solution. I don't think this is good enough.

Without denying the volatility or dangerous possibilities of strong feelings, a passive approach (the attempt to calm rage by denying it oxygen) has several liabilities.

Problems with Passivity
1. It tends to reinforce the upset person's sense of isolation. This undercuts relationships, and tends to pathologize people who express strong feelings (they are labeled immature, or less evolved).

2. It fails to recognize emotions as a source of information and insight into the issues at hand. (Hint: not everyone "knows" things principally through their brain.)

3. It makes it virtually impossible to harness the energy in strong feelings to generate enthusiasm for problem solving (providing you can successfully navigate the tension that surfaces at the outset).

4. It leads to suppression of strong feelings (who wants to be labeled immature?), which then leak out elsewhere (often in the form of an overreaction), making the clean-up that much harder.

I have a different idea about how to view strong feelings. Instead of seeing them as dangerous, I see them as indicators that folks are working close to the bone, by which I mean close to their core values, close to their core damage, or both. While I'm not blind to the possibility that bad things can happen in those moments, good things can happen as well.

Advantages of Active Neutrality
o When worked constructively, conflict can build relationships. In addition to better handling the presenting issue, there's potential for healing and gaining a deeper understanding of one another that will pay dividends in future discussions. This is the flip side of the relationship destruction that can ensue from angry, accusatory salvos where people are left scarred (as well as scared).

o If the group can learn to not freak out because one or two members are freaking out, then it will greatly reduce distortion about what's happening, and significantly enhance the chances that information will be accurately exchanged. In particular, there's a tremendous amount of distortion that occurs in groups because people are so afraid that a particular statement might trigger conflict that they decide to sugar coat in an indirect generalization (which leads to the debilitating dynamic of the group struggling to ferret out the kernel of meaning in a field of cotton candy). Or worse, they choose to not speak at all (at which point the group gets to participate in another energy-draining game: What's the Meaning of Silence?).

o Well understood feelings and intuitions about a topic (as opposed to thoughts) can provide valuable insights into how best to balance factors when problem solving. When feelings are always translated into rational statements, it's easy to misinterpret potency or the depth of concern.

o Unaddressed strong feelings run the risk of losing the active participation of the upset person in problem solving (they're so absorbed in stewing that they miss or seriously distort what others are saying). In fact, when it's really bad, one person's upset tends to distract those around them from what others are saying as well, and the disruption mushrooms.

Seen from this perspective, it makes sense to get active in the presence of strong feelings, mainly so that you can realize these benefits. The key to this is understanding that being active does not necessarily mean taking sides. You can be active and still be Neutral. In particular, you can be active about safeguarding relationships, and helping to remind protagonists of their commitment to being constructive with their criticism and open to hearing feedback. The group's commitments to one another ought to be about authenticity and being constructive; not about being nice or nonreactive.

It's Alimentary, my dear Watson
Shit happens. If you automatically equate the expression of strong feelings with immaturity, it will lead to a cultural norm where strong feelings are suppressed (which, in turn, will probably be accompanied by a lack of skill in managing volatile moments, which will tend to validate why you don't allow the group to go there). This can lead to emotional constipation, and will not tend to enhance the free flow of ideas or energy.

Going the other way, neither am I advocating for emotional diarrhea. In a mature group, members use discernment about what feelings are sufficiently potent and relevant to bring forward, and they work at developing the skill to express themselves cleanly ("I'm angry with you for leaving the car windows open yesterday before the rainstorm" as opposed to "You asshole; the car seats are getting ruined because you're always leaving the windows open; were you born in a barn?")

One of the most potent understandings I gleaned from the Vipassana retreat I did last winter (see my blog series of Jan 8-15, 2009) was that Buddhist non-attachment does not translate into being passionless. Eschewing the addiction to attractions and aversions is not the same as suppressing feelings. The Buddha admonished us to notice everything, while holding onto as little as possible. This includes shit.

For my money, groups need active Neutrality from members to perform at a high level. That is, when you aren't a stakeholder on a topic, step up to the plate to safeguard the quality of the examination, helping to build bridges between people with different viewpoints. As a neutral party, your suggestions will have a greater chance of landing well. Take advantage of that; don't just sit there passively and look at your feet.
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Sandhill Farm

CROP FAILURES

sorghumco — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:51:58 -0500

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.

Sandhill Farm

Farm Camp

Laird — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:49:40 -0500

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?).

I thoroughly enjoyed a week of being with my wife every day. This was her one break from a summer of house construction and she was cherishing putting up peaches and blueberries for the winter ahead. Heretofore she’d had no time whatsoever for food processing, and we did tomatillo salsa, pizza sauce, peach chutney, apple-peach sauce, frozen peaches, and blueberry preserves. (Of course, living on a farm myself, if I’d been home this past week I’d have been doing food processing there—but it was a pleasure nonetheless “putting up the summer in jars” (a la Greg Brown) for others. It was especially satisfying helping Mark & Kim get current with their garden during a stretch when they were serving nonstop as hosts & tour guides.

I even had time to read a Jeffrey Deaver potboiler, and watch Kay’s Alaska slide show (she was at Denali last month).

The thing I did not have was Internet service. Mark & Kay have rigged up some kind of dial-up service to work with their laptop, but I did without. Every now and again it’s good to be reminded that the world can basically get along just fine without me being plugged in every 12 hours—though I'm girding my loin for the 100+ emails relentlessly accruing in my In Box.

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