My Cohousing Adventure

Common Ground

2009-11-17T06:47:00.000-08:00

Last night I experienced one of those triumphs that may have looked inconsequential to someone else but that I enjoyed.

I facilitated the weekly community meeting of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community.

For these meetings we previously had sat around a table. Back when our complex still was under construction, and we met in the board room of our marketing office in a shopping mall, we sat around a large table. There we didn't have any choice. That pretty much was the only configuration that was feasible in that space.

More recently, after the completion of construction, we switched our meetings to the communal dining hall in our Common House. Yet, although we had masses of space and almost unlimited options, we continued to sit around a table. Actually in this case there were three smaller tables that we placed in a row. But the effect was the same. It felt like one large table.

Now and then I had mentioned to the members of my community that I would like us to sit in an open circle without a table. But there had been resistance to that idea. It felt to me as if it was impossible to dislodge the table. It was almost as if it was carved in stone.

From November 5th through 8th, I participated in a meeting facilitation workshop at Roberts Creek Cohousing on the "Sunshine Coast" of British Columbia (BC). It was one of a series of quarterly workshops in which we are learning how to implement the consensus decision making model that intentional communities use. Representatives from eight intentional communities in Coastal BC -- six cohousing communities and two ecovillages -- attend these workshops. The participating communities take turns in hosting the workshops.

In comparing notes with members of other communities, I discovered that they'd all adopted open circles for their meetings. The last hold outs, besides ourselves, had been Cranberry Commons Cohousing. They had switched from a table to an open circle in the spring of 2009. Their representatives reported that the quality of their meetings had improved dramatically after they'd changed their format.

You may wonder why I'm going on about this. Why is seating such a big deal? Well, as it turns out, it is quite significant. You may not be aware of it, but a physical barrier in the midst of a group creates an emotional barrier. It affects the quality of your communication.

When I was at Roberts Creek, I sighed and said that Pacific Gardeners seemed unable to let go of our table. A member of Cranberry Commons suggested that I lead by example. She said that, if I stood while I facilitated meetings, that alone would shift the energy.

Oh yes, that's another part of this that I forgot to mention. In the other cohousing communities, they not only sit in an open circle, but their meeting facilitator stands throughout the meeting. A standing facilitator is much more equipped to engage with the group than a sitting one. A standing facilitator can jot notes on a flipchart or whiteboard to capture salient ideas. He or she can take a step or two towards a meeting participant who is talking for too long. Interestingly enough, that small movement can have the effect of "waking up" a person who is rambling and making him/her aware of what he/she is doing. If two people get into conflict, a standing facilitator can step between them and break their line of sight. A standing facilitator is better able to see the raised hands of people who want to speak. A standing facilitator gets tired of standing -- I mean physically tired -- and is motivated to keep a meeting to a reasonable length.

So, at our first community meeting following my return from Roberts Creek, I did just that. I was the facilitator, and I stood while everyone sat around a table. After that meeting, one of my community members emailed me, complimented me on the flow of the meeting, and said it had been an improvement over our usual meetings. This person did not make any reference to the fact that I had stood, but I suspect that that had contributed to the perceived improvement.

Then, when I facilitated our community meeting a week later (last night), I took a bold step and asked for an open circle. To my pleasant surprise, my fellow Pacific Gardeners agreed to give it a try.

At the end of the meeting we spent a few minutes evaluating what had gone well and what could have been improved.

Some meeting participants disliked the open circle. They were the people who liked to take notes, to have minutes of previous meetings readily to hand so that they could refer to them when questions arose, and so on.

Other participants liked the open circle. They said it felt to them as if everyone was more equal, they had a better view of everyone else, there were fewer opportunities for distracting side activities such as eating or drinking, and they found themselves remaining more alert.

I suggested a compromise. I asked if the people who liked to take notes would be willing to bring trays that they could put on their laps. I then floated out the idea of TV trays (small trays on legs that originally were designed for eating while one watched television). It transpired that one couple in our community had a large collection of TV trays. They agreed to lend them to us for our meetings.

So that was where we left it. Next week we will assemble in an open circle, but some folks will have TV trays in front of them.

When I went to bed last night, I had a warm, fuzzy feeling. The members of my community, who had been polarized on this issue, had found common ground.

Canada's Most Wanted

2009-11-04T06:41:00.000-08:00

I bet you think the woman in this photo looks sweet and harmless.

But appearances can be deceptive. Sharon Fulton, spotted here at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community's ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 22nd, keeps a stash of weapons in her apartment. Her arsenal goes by the innocent sounding label of "kitchen." In that innocuous looking laboratory, she produces a steady stream of lethal concoctions.

Her latest attempt to do us in was the apple walnut cake and caramel sauce that she served at our potluck supper on Monday night. It was to die for -- literally and figuratively.

After my first rapturous mouthful of it, I regained my composure sufficiently to say, "Sharon, you will be the death of us." Without batting an eyelid, she smiled and said, "Don't worry. I know how to do CPR."

Look, Mommy, no hands!

2009-10-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

Today we held a farewell lunch for Suzanne, our Office Administrator of nearly six years.

She was our Rock of Gibraltar during the planning and construction phases of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. Now that the construction phase is drawing to a close and we're actually living in our strata (condominium) apartment building, we owners will be handling the administrative aspects of our strata corporation ourselves. I'm sure that on Monday morning we'll feel as if our training wheels have been stolen. Eek!

Originally we were going to hold Suzanne's farewell lunch at a restaurant. But then Suzanne paid us what I thought was a delightful compliment by suggesting that we might consider having a potluck lunch in our dining hall. She said that she had enjoyed the impromptu suppers to which we had invited her. They had demonstrated to her that our dining hall and our cooking were a pleasant combination.

Prior to this our potluck meals miraculously had worked out all right, notwithstanding the fact that we almost never had communicated in advance about who would bring what. Today was the hilarious exception. Three of us showed up with cakes!

I remarked to Suzanne that, as she could see, we still were tweaking our systems. She, of course, has been witness to our tweaking in other arenas for a long time. She smiled and said she imagined the tweaking would continue indefinitely.

Whether or not members of cohousing communities are familiar with the concept of wabi sabi, they live it. We all took the three cakes in stride, and focused on the intention of the occasion. As I relished the delicious meal, in the company of kindred spirits, looking through our glass doors towards the autumn colours in the woods, I felt a warm glow.

May the awareness of wabi sabi ever remain with me. May it not desert me when I walk into our office on Monday morning. :-)

Honest Conversation

2009-10-14T07:22:00.000-07:00

I love naming elephants in living rooms. We did that at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community last night when we discussed our generational focus. By that I mean the age group(s) that we want to attract.

All along we have said that we wanted to be a multi-generational community. We wanted a mix of young, middle aged and old people, and we wanted a variety of family constellations.

So far, however, we have attracted people in their forties, fifties, sixties and seventies. Our two youngest members are 39. Our community has no young children so far. Some of us owners have grown children who are living independently and others of us are childless.

The reason we had this discussion was that one of our owners, Yonas Jongkind, pointed out the discrepancy between our marketing message and the reality he has experienced when he has visited our community.

Yonas and his young family live at WindSong, a cohousing community in one of the outer suburbs of Vancouver. His mother, Mia Jongkind, is one of our residents, and he has invested some money in her apartment. As the co-owner of one of our units, he has voting rights in our community.

For most of his tenure as a shareholder in our real estate development company, Yonas has been what we have referred to as a "distant owner," and has taken a mostly hands-off approach. Now that we are completing the final touches of construction and marketing our remaining units, he has become more actively involved with us. His MBA, his four years in a viable cohousing community, and his action-oriented personality are very useful to us.

At last night's meeting, Yonas shared with us what it was like to live at WindSong. He said there were heaps of kids under six, and it was a noisy place. Right next door to the dining hall, there was an equally large play room for children. That led to a fenced, outdoor playground. About a third of the community's annual budget for upgrades was spent on play equipment for children. Because parents placed a high priority on their young children's safety and also because they were just so busy being parents, WindSong had fewer of the adult-oriented activities that are common in some other cohousing communities.

We then went around the circle and shared our hopes and dreams about children. Most of us had assumed all along that Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community would include children. Indeed, the multi-generational focus was one of the features we liked. None of us wanted to live in a senior citizens' residence. Most of us longed for the life and energy that children bring with them.

On the other hand, when we considered the reality of our property, we realized that some elements of it were not all that user-friendly for children. The room that we had designated as a children's playroom was much smaller than the one at WindSong, and it was not adjacent to our dining hall. Our three-bedroom-and-den units have two storeys. The bedrooms are laid out in such a way that parents would have to sleep on one floor while children slept on another. Alternatively, parents could share one floor with one child, but another child would need to sleep on a different floor. One of the bedrooms on the lower level of each three-bedroom-and-den unit has french doors that open out to our parking lot. This would be great for a resident who ran a home-based business and who might have clients visiting him or her, but it would be less comforting to the parent of a young child. Our unfenced pond represents a drowning hazard for young children. We also do not have an outdoor playground.

Yonas said that, if we really wanted to attract families with young children, there were some proactive steps that we could take right now. We could be assertive in finding families with young children to rent a couple of our three-bedroom-and-den units. This would serve as a draw for young parents, as they would see that there already were children living here. There were three rooms near our dining hall whose walls could be dismantled to create one large play room. Finally, we could build an outdoor playground just outside of our dining hall.

When push came to shove, we discovered that we were not so committed to young children that we were willing to go out of our way to attract them. We realized that our warm, fuzzy visions of children really centred on older children, say six and up. We liked the idea of doing crafts with children, having them cook and garden alongside us, and so on.

We decided that, at this time, we would do nothing to adapt our property to young children. We would welcome them if they came to us, but we wouldn't bend ourselves out of shape to draw them to us. There were a couple of families with children in the eight- to ten-year-old bracket who seemed very interested in our community, and we would be delighted if they bought in.

If a crop of young children arises at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community in future, it will be feasible to retrofit the building for them at that time. That will be a decision for the owners of the day.

I am very, very glad that we faced the discontinuity between our marketing message and the reality on the ground. For me one of the benefits of an intentional community is that its members are conscious and authentic. I am so grateful that Yonas named the phenomenon he had observed.

Even if you have no desire to live in a cohousing community, you might want to consider how you could raise the bar and make your family more of an intentional community. Would you benefit from opening some closet doors and acknowledging skeletons that are lurking there?

By the way, near the end of our meeting, Yonas's five-year-old son, Julian, walked into the dining hall and said, "Daddy, Ouma says it's eight thirty, and we all have to go to bed." We chuckled, because it illustrated the very point Yonas had been making about life with young kids.

Symbiosis in plant and human communities

2009-10-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

With her permission, I am quoting a message that my friend, Sharon Fulton, posted on Facebook.

One of the most unique features of tree communities is their relationship with underground fungi called—mycorrhiza (micro-rye-zee). These fungi live on or near the roots of the plants and they extend beyond the plants roots to collect water and nutrients for the plants that live in the community. They form connections underground from tree to tree and to other plants in the community, thereby interconnection most of the plants of the plant community.

If one area of the forest has excess nutrition or moisture the fungi will balance the forest and share the nutrients. The connection of many plants underground with these fungi is called a ‘mycorrhizal grid’ and because plants can use this grid to share water and nutrients. Parent trees living in sunshine actually feed their young by means of this underground web of connection.

I learned this from Starhawk last night and I have been thinking about how some people in our communities act like mycorrhiza, being the connection by which nutrients and information are passed between individual members who can't quite touch each other.

Nature has so much to teach us. Amazing!

You may not be surprised to learn that Sharon herself is one of the "connecting" people to whom she refers. Although she had a fulltime job as a nurse, she coordinated the volunteers for the Emergency Weather Shelter at the First Unitarian Fellowship of Nanaimo during the unusually heavy snows of last winter. She herself also worked several volunteer shifts, assisting homeless people at the Emergency Weather Shelter. When I was waiting for my fridge and stove to be delivered to my apartment at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, she spontaneously offered to share her fridge and stove with me. The list goes on.

One of the neat things about living at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community is that Sharon's generous spirit is the rule rather than the exception. I have found my fellow Pacific Gardeners to be supportive and nurturing, within both our immediate group and our wider community.

Although my fellow cohos already were great contributors before we moved into Pacific Gardens, the physical layout of our community enhances the pre-existing spirit of collaboration and cooperation. Thus Kathryn Hazel's piano has made its way to our music room, and the furniture from the large house that Mia Jongkind left behind has made its way into our communal dining hall, guest bedrooms, exercise room and balconies. A delicious communal supper has been conjured up on each owner's moving day. Helpers have appeared out of the woodwork to unload moving vans.

If I went on in this vein, I'd need to write a book. Perhaps I'll do just that. Ah, but if it's about cohousing, it would be fun to do it collaboratively, wouldn't it? Be warned, Pacific Gardeners. This is bound to involve the formation of another committee at some point. :-)

Thanksgiving

2009-10-11T10:44:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow -- the second Monday in October -- will be Canadian Thanksgiving.

As I reflect on the meaning of the holiday, I realize that I am thankful for SOOOOOOOO much. I live in a warm and supportive community, I have wonderful friends both inside and outside of this community, I live in a vibrant little city with more cultural and intellectual offerings than I can handle, and I am surrounded by natural beauty.

This is our first major holiday celebration since we've moved into Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. As I look around our delightful building, I have to pinch myself to check that we really are here now. When we gather for our communal Thanksgiving Dinner tomorrow night, it will be a very special moment.

But for me there are some poignant aspects of this holiday too. I am far away from my adult sons, who will celebrate with their dad in Calgary.

I also am far away from my South African family members who are rallying around my oldest sister following the death of her husband a few days ago. He was a lovely man, and everyone who was close to him will miss him terribly.

For me this underscores what I shared in yesterday's post about wabi sabi. It is a life skill to be able to trust the beauty in imperfection. My brother-in-law's death also reminds me to appreciate every moment while I still have moments to appreciate. I am glad for him that he did that.

Wabi Sabi

2009-10-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

Recently I derived deep satisfaction from Wabi Sabi Simple, a gem of a book that my friend, Richard Powell, wrote. Wabi sabi is an ancient Japanese concept that has some features in common with the Voluntary Simplicity and Slow Food movements in the West. In the Introduction, Richard states, "[Wabi sabi] nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."

Back in August I had what I now recognize as a wabi sabi day. My friend, Eileen, introduced me to Newcastle Island, a five- or ten-minute ferry ride from Nanaimo.

When we disembarked from the ferry, I initially felt slightly disappointed. I had hoped to get some good photos looking back towards Nanaimo. However, it was an overcast day, and the couple of pictures I took looked nothing like as pretty as they would have done if the sun had been shining.

Still, although I had not yet read Wabi Sabi Simple, I intuitively knew that the sky was doing me a favour. I returned my camera to my backpack and decided to focus my attention on Eileen's and my conversation and on the things we saw as we walked the perimeter of the island. What an enchanting day that turned out to be.

I have realized that a cohousing community is a wabi sabi creation too. To use the analogy of food, creating a cohousing community is like baking bread according to the super slow recipe in Richard's book. The experience is rich and textured and nurturing in a way that the drive through window of a fast food outlet can never match.

One of life's traps is that I can become overcomitted to worthy activities. My trip to Africa in June and July gave me distance from Nanaimo and therefore increased objectivity. I realized that, in my enthusiasm to embrace the smorgasbord of experiences available in Nanaimo, I had taken on too much. The causes, organizations, courses and cultural opportunities all were great. It's just that there were too many of them. I resolved to divest myself of some of them when I returned. The Excellence series of seminars has been helping me to discern which elements of my life resonate most deeply with who I am and that I therefore want to continue. At this point, cohousing is a high priority for me.

Richard's book itself is a keeper. When I donate several of my favourite books to Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community's library, Wabi Sabi Simple will be one of the special treasures that will stay behind on my own bookshelf.

ET, call home

2009-10-01T10:32:00.001-07:00

Just checking in briefly to say I'm still alive and well and living in Nanaimo.

We at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community had our official opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 22nd. It was a joyful celebration that many friends and supporters shared with us. I took photos, and have been looking forward to posting them here.

However, the day after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, I temporarily moved to the home of a friend who had just been released from hospital following surgery. Except for a break last weekend, when another friend of hers took over from me, I have been caring for my "patient." At first her need for my assistance was fairly intense, but as she has been healing her independence has been increasing, bit by bit. I will be returning to my own home tomorrow evening, October 2nd.

My "patient" is a beautiful person, and I have delighted in this opportunity to get to know her more deeply. I also have enjoyed observing the community of friends who coalesced around her following her surgery. There has been a steady stream of people, besides me, who have arrived, bearing gifts of comfort and joy.

I imagine it's evident from this blog that I love Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community to bits. But community exists in many guises, and it's a treat to experience the broad spectrum in which it shows up.

Lifelong learning

2009-09-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

Mia, who is one of my fellow Pacific Gardeners, told me that she was uncomfortable with the slogan that appears on quite a bit of our promotional material. It states that cohousing is a place where neighbours become friends.

Recently Mia discussed this with her son, Yonas, who has lived in a cohousing community for a few years. Coincidentally, I was billeted with Yonas, his wife, Julia, and their three young children when I participated in a workshop at WindSong in late July.

Yonas agreed with Mia that the slogan was too simplistic. He said that his fellow cohos were not exactly his friends. Rather, they challenged him, stretched him, and inspired him to try things that, if he'd been left to his own devices, he would not have tried.

He went on to say that his fellow cohos belonged to a category that was somewhere along the continuum that had family members at one end and friends at the other end.

The cohousing model falls under the umbrella of intentional communities. I think "intentional community" probably is a perfect label for the phenomenon. It's a closely knit community, but it's one to which people belong by choice.

In the case of the family into which you are born, you have little option but to belong to it. Certainly that is so when you're a young child.

As I've stated on this blog before, most cohousing communities are secular and have no religious affiliations. However, it has been observed that there are a disproportionate number of Unitarian Universalists (UUs) in cohousing communities.

There is a noticeable overlap between the demographic compositions of the two groups. One of the characteristics that is common to both of them is a love of learning.

From my experience of cohousing so far, it is a way of life that calls on you to be flexible and open minded. I agree with Yonas that my fellow cohos are not merely friends. Because they have a habit of raising the bar for me, I think of them as spiritual companions.

If you go down to the woods today

2009-09-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

To say that I'm enjoying living at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community is something of an understatement.

One of the things I love about this complex is its situation in a wooded area that nonethless is just a couple of kilometres from downtown Nanaimo, the harbour, and Vancouver Island University.

The landscaping is starting to come together. The property gradually is losing that torn and scarred appearance that construction gave it. It's starting to look more serene.

This is the view from my patio, looking left across the Common House patio, towards the woods that lead down to the Chase River.

Below is the view to which I wake up every morning. I love opening my eyes and looking out across the Gobi Desert - as fellow Pacific Gardener, Kathryn, calls it -- towards the trees and the little glimpse of Mount Benson.

Of course that is facilitated by the absence of drapes on the west side of my apartment. But, hey, I love that view so much, I may leave the drapes open even when I get them.

The Gobi Desert's days also are numbered. Tomorrow that area is going to be seeded with a ground cover called fall rye. Later on, we will plant vegetable gardens there. Organic vegetable gardens, naturally.

Below is the pond in the northeast corner of our property. It is home to an indigenous species of tree frog that, at certain times of the year, treats us to a chorus that I find divine. It also is home to mallard ducks and any number of other wild things.

I recently had a hilarious experience in connection with this pond. A visitor looked at it, wrinkled his nose, and said, "But it's so ... so ... so ... ummm ... wild." I smiled and said, "Yes, it is."

Below is a view of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community from Seventh Street. It is the scene that greets me when I return home from downtown.

Things are moving apace

2009-09-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

Lots is happening at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. Buyers are moving into their apartments. Landscaping is being done. The place is looking spiffy.

Our potluck suppers at 6:00 pm on Thursdays are turning out to be great fun. Friends, neighbours and strangers drop by, sit around, and chat. Some of the people whom I've met have been fascinating. The reality of this community is exceeding my hopes.

Every now and then I remember that I've been wanting to take photos, so that I can record our pioneer days. But then I get so involved that I totally forget to lug a camera.

That's all I have to say for now. Stay well.

Another day, another blog

2009-09-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

If you follow My Cohousing Adventure to any extent, you'll be aware that my posts on this blog are eclectic. Yes, I do have quite a bit to say here about my experience of cohousing, but I discuss other stuff too.

Well, for some time I had been feeling as if a blog that nominally was about cohousing was an inadequate container for some of my ramblings. I don't mean the tangents that you've witnessed so far. Rather, I mean the topics that I would have liked to have discussed, but about which I remained silent.

To give myself what felt like a more appropriate space for those musings, I have created another blog called My Phase 2 Adventure.

That blog is about my personal philosophy. Because I view things holistically, I see the physical, intellectual, emotional, social, psychological, environmental, economic and spiritual elements of life as being integrated. From my point of view, therefore, My Phase 2 Adventure defies classification. But I suppose there are some people who would see it as being about some sort of metaphysical exploration or perhaps my personal brand of spirituality.

If you visit my other blog and there is anything there that resonates with you, it may be the catalyst that sets you off on a journey of exploration of the Phase 2 concepts. If your Expanded Self does not want you to go down that path, your eyes will glaze over, and you'll say, "Whatever."

Please let me emphasize that the personal philosophy of one person, Judy Roberts, is independent of the cohousing movement. People who live in cohousing communities are Atheists, Humanists, Christians, Buddhists, Pagans, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and on and on. Although there are a few cohousing communities that have been founded by religious groups, the majority of cohousing communities are secular.

My cohousing community, Pacific Gardens, has no religious affiliation.

Anyway, I'll see you over at my other blog if you feel so moved.

OCCUPANCY !!!!!!!!!!!!!

2009-09-04T17:13:00.000-07:00

Today -- Friday, September 4th, 2009 -- inspectors from the City of Nanaimo deemed Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community to be safe, and issued us with an occupancy permit. This means that those of us who have bought apartments here are allowed to move into them.

I feel as I imagine a NASA announcer does when he says, "We have lift off."

My first (temporary) piece of furniture is an air mattress that I borrowed from a friend.

Here is my living / dining room, looking towards my kitchen.

It's a treat to start with a clean slate. I look forward to bringing this space to life. But of course there is a lot more to Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community than my apartment. Over the last few days, a number of trees and shrubs have been planted in our grounds. Our property is starting to look like Pacific Gardens in fact as well as in name.

We continue to have many social events and interactions that are fun and stretching, making this a garden in which not only plants but also people grow.

I love it!

Sacrificing boredom

2009-08-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull

A few days ago I realised how much my life had changed when one of my Facebook friends remarked that she was bored and did not know what to do. Her comment stopped me in my tracks. It dawned on me that, way back in the mists of time, BC (Before Cohousing), I too had experienced boredom. But, when I reflected on the last year, I could think of only two occasions on which I had been bored.

One was the morning on which I woke up with my seafront condo shrouded in a thick fog, and felt as if I was in a sensory deprivation chamber. However, I shifted the lens through which I viewed the fog, and came to appreciate the magic of it. I shared that experience in my blog post entitled Embracing FOG.

The other occasion was the day on which I wore ear plugs to get a hint of what it was like to be hard of hearing. That felt very trying to me. But I think it's fair to say that, during The Experiment, I came by the sense of boredom honestly, so to speak.

When I saw my Facebook friend's comment, I found myself wondering why, except for two unusual instances, I did not recall having been bored during the last year.

I suspect that boredom is related to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

I do not believe that we feel bored when our physiological needs are threatened. When that happens, we experience panic, pain, or some other heightened form of discomfort. I was in a vehicle accident at the age of seven. Boredom is not the word that springs to mind when I remember my body being assaulted by glass, metal and hard ground as I hurtled through the windshield (in the days before seat belts).

I suspect that I experience boredom when my subtler, higher level needs are thwarted for reasons that feel invalid to me. When I make what might be called a sacrifice for a goal that is important to me, I do not feel as if I am suffering. During my trip to South Africa in June and July, I spent the better part of a day at Cape Town Airport. My original, morning flight to East London was cancelled, and I was re-booked on a later flight. Then that later flight also was cancelled, and I was re-booked on a third flight. If you can believe it, my third flight was cancelled, and I was re-booked on a fourth flight. However, the third flight subsequently was re-instated, and that was the flight on which I flew to East London in the late afternoon.

Spending a day at Cape Town Airport was not something I would have chosen to do if I'd had many other options. However, since I wanted to reach my mother and brothers in East London, I bit the bullet and settled into a chair at Cape Town Airport. I read Bill Bryson's hilarious book called Down Under. From time to time, I took breaks from reading, and watched the people in the airport. People watching was an interesting exercise. I learned a lot about the demographic changes that had taken place in the fourteen years since I'd last been in South Africa. In any event, my desire for connection with my family members in East London made it feel worthwhile to tolerate what otherwise might have been a boring day at Cape Town Airport.

But, at other periods of my life, when an emerging new value has clashed with an old value that has started to feel obsolete, living up to the outdated value has felt boring. An example is laundry. It'll give you a clue to my age when I share with you that there was a time, admittedly decades ago, when it mattered to me that my laundry came out whiter than white. Back then, the effort felt worthwhile. But I gradually realised that I didn't care. Once that transition had taken place, any extra effort expended on laundry felt boring.

When I look back, I feel that boredom has been my Higher Self's way of telling me that there is an agreement that needs to be renegotiated. On the one hand, I have experienced fear, because I have perceived that a change in my behaviour might alienate someone whose good opinion I have needed for security. If my laundry no longer was whiter than white, the people who valued whiter than white laundry might expel me from the whiter than white laundry club. On the other hand, if I have wanted to progress to other values that have come to mean more to me, I have had to risk criticism from the whiter than white laundry club.

Of course I'm using laundry as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek example. Some of the taboos that I have broken on my journey to self-actualisation have been more serious than changes in my laundry practices.

When I turned my back on my old life in Calgary, it felt risky. No, actually, that's not true. It didn't just feel risky. It felt terrifying. I can identify with the Richard Bach quotation. It wasn't easy to sacrifice the boredom that at least seemed to have security attached to it.

But what happened when I took the plunge, bought into Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, and moved to Nanaimo? I have participated in shaping our community, learned a great deal about real estate development and communication, grown in confidence, made new friends, and accessed beauty through singing, dance, theatre, walking, hiking and photography.

The alignment between the external expression of my life and my inner values is demonstrated, I think, by the fact that boredom now is almost unknown to me.

A year later

2009-08-28T07:45:00.001-07:00

The cohousing ride in the Earth Amusement Park has been rather ... ummm ... interesting in the last while.

There are times at which I look around me and bask in the conviviality of the company, the beauty and user-friendliness of our building, and so on.

But there are other moments at which I turn a corner, and I'm assailed with a piece of unwelcome news -- a construction delay or worse.

On a couple of occasions recently, I have felt the strain. But, for the most part, I have been pleasantly surprised by the generally calm approach I've managed to maintain. When I recall the Judy of a couple of years ago, I remember a person who would have been stressed out by developments like these. I believe the serenity that I feel much of the time is evidence of my growth, for which I'm grateful.

A year after buying into a cohousing community -- when the honeymoon definitely is over -- I still love cohousing. I appreciate many aspects of it -- the philosophy that underpins it, my fellow Pacific Gardeners, the sense of community, the land on which we have built our project, the design of our building, and my own apartment.

When I reflect on it, the past year has fulfilled my expectations in some ways but in many ways has been very different from the way I thought it would be. In some respects it has been far more challenging than I was prepared for it to be. Yet, paradoxically, it also has been far richer than I imagined it would be.

I find there is a lot of truth in my kids' expression, "It's all good."

Another community

2009-08-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

This has been a year in which I have jumped back and forth amongst the different worlds that I have inhabited during my lifetime. Another leap took place this past weekend, when I caught the ferry to Vancouver to participate in the a reunion of seven women who had attended the same Johannesburg high school and who now live across North America.

The reunion was a remarkable event. Except for Pauline, who had lived in Vancouver during the period that I'd lived in Calgary, I had lost touch with these women for nearly forty years! Yet, when we saw each other again, after recently reconnecting on Facebook, the decades just melted away.

I noticed some common threads during this reunion as well as the meetings I had with former classmates during my June / July 2009 trip to South Africa.

We were raised in a time and place in which our parents sealed over the cracks and did not share with us children what was really going on. In our milieu, the parent who actively encouraged his/her daughter to think of a career was rare. The general trends of the era were exacerbated by the fact that we attended a school run by Catholic nuns. The insulation from a fast changing world was all the greater amongst those of us who, like me, attended the school as boarders rather than day scholars.

Yet all of us have developed into resilient women who have met adversity head on. Most of us have worked very hard to grapple with our demons and to become more conscious. Many of us have done therapy. A persistent theme is that our relationships with our children are more authentic than the relationships our parents had with us.

Regardless of the fact that we were launched into the world as "good Catholics," only four out of 25 of us still are married to our first husbands. We felt this demonstrated that our husbands and we had high standards and would not settle for marriages that were less than meaningful.

Those of us who have left Southern Africa have the additional commonality of the emigrant experience.

Although our political and religious views varied considerably, I detected a sense of goodwill amongst us. We had a "live and let live" attitude. There also was a groundswell of support towards women who were facing challenges. Towards the end of the weekend, one woman spoke for all of us when she said she had experienced a safe space in which she had felt free to share.

I am grateful for the many communities to which I simultaneously belong. In their different ways, they support me in creating a life that feels rich, purposeful, loving and fun.

Here is one of those communities -- the seven women from the Parktown Convent class of 1969 who now live in North America:

We are, from left to right, Colleen (Vancouver), Jane (Atlanta), Anne (St Louis), Felicity (Seattle), Vanessa (Los Angeles), Pauline (Vancouver) and Judy (Nanaimo).

The photo was taken at Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver, where I was about to catch the ferry back to Vancouver Island, and just before the others also returned to their respective homes.

Chase River Cathedral

2009-08-02T11:19:00.001-07:00

It's Sunday, so naturally I went to church today. Here are some photos I took while I was there.

This is the view one sees as one walks down the riverbank from Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community towards the meadow that runs parallel to the Chase River.

This was the spot in which Aboriginal elders built an Inipi (sweatlodge) on Earth Day 2000, and held a ceremony to bless this land.

This is Chad and Susana's tree. That's what I call it because two of our members, Chad Henderson and Susana Michaelis, were married at its base. They chose this unusual tree, with three trunks, as a symbol for their marriage. The left trunk represented one of them, the right trunk represented the other of them, and the central trunk represented their relationship. Our nextdoor neighbour, Ian Gartshore, who has been a good friend to our project, performed Chad and Susana's wedding ceremony.

This is the path that leads through the forest floor from the Pacific Gardens portion of the riverbank towards Ian's portion.

It was this view -- this specific view -- that sold me on Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community when I came to Nanaimo on a reconnaissance trip in August 2008.

I thought that I wanted to join a cohousing community so that I could learn how to create peace in my life. My hope was that, if I could "do" peace myself, it would have a helpful ripple effect on the rest of the world. A year on, I feel that I am indeed on the path of which I dreamed back then. There also are numerous other benefits -- a supportive social network, friendships, sustainability, a smaller environmental footprint, just plain fun, and on and on.

But, if I'm to be honest, I have to admit that, at the instant that I made the decision to buy in, none of that mattered. It was a moment of pure selfishness. I saw the moss-covered tree leaning out across the stream, my heart leapt, and that was it.

I think of it as my tree. I since have discovered that several of my friends consider it to be their tree too. In fact, it has been quite amusing to sit by the stream with one or more people, each of whom thinks it's his or her tree. But that's okay. Sharing my tree with others does nothing to detract from my enjoyment of it. If anything, soaking in the view with someone else who appreciates it only amplifies my pleasure.

At the risk of boring you, here is my tree from a slightly different angle.

Well, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I mentioned church and then proceeded to share photos of the Chase River. But only a bit. In reality, I feel restored every time I go down to the stream. It's something I do pretty regularly. I don't hang around waiting for Sunday.

Patio Potluck

2009-08-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

This afternoon we had a potluck lunch in the Common House of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. As you can see from the photos, our Common House still is under construction. Consider these the before pictures. In a couple of months, I'll show you the after versions.

The above photo looks westwards from the communal dining room, across the patio, to the future garden beyond.

Looking across the communal dining room towards the patio.

Looking northwards from the patio.

This is a public holiday long weekend in British Columbia. Several of our members as well as friends of our community were out of town, so our patio potluck was an enjoyable but small gathering. I'm not one to talk, as I recently was away for eight weeks, but I would have loved to have had my missing friends with me in what is about to become my home. With that said, I know we'll be hosting many, many more of these kinds of events in future. We still have lots of fun ahead of us.

Chaos

2009-07-28T08:03:00.001-07:00

At the moment I am homeless. Not homeless in the sense that I don't have a place to sleep. But homeless in the sense that I don't have an official residential address.

That has been the case since I vacated my rental house at the end of May. However, I was able to push that fact onto the back burner while I was galavanting overseas for all of June and most of July. Now, as I sit on my bed at the Painted Turtle Guesthouse, with my laptop balanced on my lap -- I guess that's why we call them laptops -- the reality has sunk in.

Before I left for my trip abroad, I made an offer to purchase my apartment at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, and Pacific Gardens accepted my offer. (As I am a shareholder in the development company that is building our apartment complex, I am -- effectively -- both the vendor and the purchaser.) Back then the assumption was that construction would be completed during my absence, and I would take official possession of my apartment upon my return to Nanaimo near the end of July.

Now I've come back to Nanaimo, and it turns out that construction is not finished. It's close, but it's not quite there. The big thing, from a legal point of view, is that we don't have an occupancy permit. As I understand it, the City of Nanaimo will be inspecting the building later this week. The inspector will look at things like the sprinklers that belong to the fire suppression system. If the inspector is satisfied, we will get an occupancy permit. When that happens, purchasers officially will be allowed to take possession of their apartments.

Being involved during the construction phase of this project has been a lot messier than I had dreamed it would be. Along the way there have been surprises, delays, panics, you name it. From an emotional point of view, it has been a roller coaster ride.

But, through it all, the sense of camaraderie amongst us cohos has been tremendous too. We've all pitched in, volunteered for the project, and supported each other as individuals. Even after the shocks I've sustained, the reality of belonging to a cohousing community has exceeded my hopes and expectations.

Sitting here on my bed at the Painted Turtle Guesthouse with my laptop perched on my lap, a profound realization has sunk in. I am a Pacific Gardener, and that is tied into much more than a physical address.

Good Enough

2009-07-27T06:46:00.000-07:00

At one point during this past weekend's consensus decision making workshop, one of the participants expressed concern about some deficiency or other. Our workshop leader pointed out our time limitations and said that, under the circumstances, things were good enough.

The concept of "good enough" was one of my take-aways from the workshop. It was a term I had heard before, but this time I got it at a new level.

The single incident that illustrated it to me most powerfully was our attempt to assist a blind man who participated in the meetings of our host community. A volunteer from our group sat next to him and reported to him what was happening. The idea was to help him as much as possible to access the information that was available to everyone else from non-verbal sources.

In chatting with the volunteer afterwards, the blind man expressed appreciation for her assistance. He described to her how isolated he felt and how, even with her help, there still had been some pieces of the meeting that had been missing for him.

When I heard the volunteer's feedback, I felt sad. Although I hadn't consciously put it into words, there must have been some part of my mind that had been in denial. It was as if I had been under the illusion that, if I just learned the correct protocol for interacting with a blind person, I effectively could give him eyes.

According to this world view, there was a magic wand that could meet every challenge. If I had just found the one perfect book on parenting and had read it from cover to cover, my kids would have had happy childhoods. If I could just get my hands on a book called Cohousing For Dummies, I could ensure a blissful future for my fellow cohos and me at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community.

This weekend the realization sank in that I was not perfect and that the magic wand that would make me so did not exist.

Oddly enough, I felt relieved.

Consensus

2009-07-26T05:34:00.000-07:00

Woke up at 5.00 a.m. today. Another half hour later. Woo hoo!

Doing these quarterly consensus decision making workshops is awe inspiring.

During each workshop the residents of the host community share with us a couple of their conflicts. They are issues on which they have tried, but so far failed, to reach agreement. We trainee meeting facilitators then attempt to assist them in clearing the blocks.

Both the participation in, and the facilitation of, the process are peak experiences. When people who had been in conflict reconcile, there rarely is a dry eye in the room.

Presenting the trainee meeting facilitators with a real life challenge with which the host community is grappling is far superior to presenting the trainees with a hypothetical exercise on which to work. The difference is huge.

In an emotionally charged scenario, it is particularly useful to introduce an exercise that encourages each meeting participant to share from the heart, to access their feelings, and to take responsibility for their contribution to the situation. Alternative meeting formats that employ elements of movement or art or storytelling or drama are amongst the skills that we are learning.

Elliott Willis and Judy Roberts during the lunch break at WindSong Cohousing Community yesterday. Elliott lives in Nanaimo, as I do, and she is a member of O.U.R. Ecovillage in Shawnigan Lake.

WindSong

2009-07-25T04:58:00.000-07:00

Yup, I woke up early again this morning. This time it was 4.30 a.m., so that was a half hour improvement over yesterday. But the good thing about my jet lag is that, although I have a full day ahead of me, I still get a chance to blog.

Along with some residents of eight intentional communities in Coastal British Columbia, I am participating in a consensus decision making workshop.

On this occasion the host community is WindSong Cohousing Community in Langley. This is the first time that I have seen the community that provided the inspiration for the design of my own community, Pacific Gardens in Nanaimo.

Here is the glass-covered pedestrian street that inspired the founders of Pacific Gardens. We too have an atrium. I thought it was an awesome design for the rainy winters of the Pacific Northwest. Ironically, I am experiencing it as a terrific design even during the glorious summer weather that we're having right now. WindSong has lots of young children, and it provides them with a wonderfully safe environment.

Here is another part of the atrium.

Some apartments and townhouses at WindSong obviously are home to kids .......

....... while others have a more sedate, adult look about them.

Here are the vegetables gardens .......

.......and next to them are one of a couple of different playgrounds.

During meal breaks, we workshop participants are able to spread out amongst WindSong's gardens.

These are my charming hosts, Marcus and Julian. When I return home, I will take with me instructions to give their Ouma Mia big hugs on their behalf.

Re-entry

2009-07-24T06:56:00.000-07:00

Since yesterday afternoon, I have been back in the cohousing world. I am participating in another workshop on consensus decision making. This time it is being hosted by WindSong, a delightful cohousing community in Langley, BC.

I am billeted with Yonas and Julia Jongkind and their three cute little kids. They are the son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren of Mia Jongkind, one of my co-owners in Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community in Nanaimo.

This morning I woke up at 4.00 a.m. No doubt it's the result of jet lag. Luckily I am sleeping on a separate floor from the rest of the family. I'm in Yonas and Julia's study, which houses a computer that they kindly invited me to use. So I started organising my vacation photos. I will add more as and when I get time.

Home sweet home

2009-07-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back. It is difficult to summarise an overseas trip that lasted over seven weeks. However, these photos may give you some idea.

Southern Africa was a kaleidoscope of cultures. These buskers at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town were every bit as good as Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

The reunion to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday was heaps of fun. Here is our clan at Mbuluzi Game Reserve in Swaziland. My mother is in the centre of the photo, wearing a green sweater.

It was magical to walk through the bush and see wildlife like this.

Yet I also witnessed grinding poverty. People who live in a village like this one in Swaziland have a very tough life.

This roadside fruit seller in Swaziland told me her name was Anne. She said that, of the six children with her, three were orphans whom she had taken under her wing. My guess is that the children's parents were victims of the AIDS pandemic.

One of the downsides of South Africa is that it has a horrendous crime rate. The friends with whom I stayed in Johannesburg had a high wall around their property, topped by this electric fence. In addition to that, they and half a dozen of their neighbours had clubbed together to pay for a security guard outside their house, twenty four hours a day. They told me they felt like prisoners.

After Johannesburg, it was a relief to get to safe, environmentally-friendly Switzerland. This photo was taken in Berne.

There is no good reason to include this photo of Gruyeres, other than to show off. I liked the way the mist-shrouded castle came out.

Here I am this morning, at the home of friends in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver. Although my overseas trip was amazing, it is great to be back home in Canada. I am one very happy camper.

Four-leaf clovers, guardian angels, and their ilk

2009-06-05T16:06:00.000-07:00

So far my overseas trip has been going extraordinarily well.

When I consider that I left the planning very late and that I shortened the UK portion of my trip by two days in order to squeeze in The Wall prior to my departure, it feels almost miraculous that it has been going as smoothly as it has.

If I am to see everyone I hope to see here, my UK itinerary contains no room for error. I have been incredibly fortunate that everything has lined up in my favour. In fact things have not merely worked out as well as could have been expected. So far they have exceeded my hopes.

My British rellies and friends have been amused by my assertion that I have horseshoes up my ass. But, if you had witnessed how obstacle after obstacle had evaported, I believe you would agree.

Although I had been reluctant to leave Nanaimo at a critical time in the life of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, I am very much enjoying my reunions with family members and friends in the UK. For the first time, I've also seen something of the UK beyond London. I've been to Wales and Devon.

I am enjoying the UK's gorgeous and charming old buildings but, in contrast to my previous visits to Europe, seeing all this history has not left me with a sense of deprivation. I do not feel as if Canada is deficient because it lacks this kind of architecture. I just feel as if Canada is different from Europe. Different. Neither inferior nor superior.

On the train between Wales and Devon, a woman asked me where I came from. I said I lived on Vancouver Island in Canada. She asked me what it was like there. I said I loved it. She said she was psychic, and she could tell that I was very happy. She said it was a burden being psychic. She said that, in light of the amount of unhappiness she detected on any given day, it was a pleasure to meet someone who was as happy as I was.

The woman may or may not have been psychic. I won't bother speculating about that. But, as my niece subsequently said, you didn't need to be psychic to know how I felt when I talked about Vancouver Island.

My Wall

2009-06-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I completed a three and a half day workshop called The Wall. The objective of the workshop was to identify my driving needs and life purpose.

For me it was a profound experience. Prior to this, I had undertaken other activities that had been designed to help me understand who I was and what made me tick. I had gone into therapy, done other workshops, hired a life coach, read self-help books, kept a journal, and meditated. Along the way, I had found out magnificent and terrible things about my family of origin and about myself.

During this latest workshop, I peeled away another layer of the onion, and went deeper than I had gone on previous occasions. I realised that, almost my whole life, I had operated from the premise that, if I revealed that I was clever and capable, my father would kill me. It started out as a belief about my father, but later transformed into a belief about all men and, I would go so far as to say, a belief about the world in general.

If previous experience is anything to go by, my mother and my parents' friends would think I was stark raving mad if they heard this assertion. I once shared a much less significant revelation with them, and they reacted very negatively. "How could you say such a thing about your father? He was such a wonderful person."

Yes, I know what an awesome person he was. According to some people's values, he did great things for society. He also loved his family and gave us some happy times. When I was a young kid, he used to have "circus hour" after dinner every night. He would get down on the living room floor and do acrobatic tricks with us kids. Alternatively, he would take us outside, lie down on the lawn, look up at the sky, and point out the constellations to us. We lived on a farm without light pollution, so we had the luxury of a dark sky. He used to take us hiking, camping, boating and fishing. He adored the ocean. Whenever I'm at the seaside or at a lake, I am aware of his presence. I can feel the delight that he would experience in a scene like that.

So, yes, I do know that he was a terrific person and that he loved me. And, yes, I also know that he would have wanted to kill me if I had not dumbed myself down and protected his fragile ego.

I now have a better understanding of the terror that I experienced when I separated from my husband, bought into Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, and moved from Calgary to Nanaimo. It wasn't just the uncertainty of leaving family and friends behind, moving to an unfamiliar place, and getting involved in a somewhat experimental venture.

Yes, to be sure, it was all of that. But it also was the fact that, like Bluebeard's wife, I was unlocking the door to the forbidden room and, if I was caught, I would die.

During my first couple of months in Nanaimo, when I was experiencing both exhilaration and panic, I watched a movie called The Void. It was about Joe Simpson's terrifying mountaineering ordeal in the Peruvian Andes. Simpson's courage and perseverance were a great inspiration to me as I stared into the abyss and broke into a cold sweat.

Tomorrow I will be leaving Nanaimo for eight weeks. Amongst other things, I will be participating in a family reunion in Swaziland to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. Things have been crazy busy, and this was an insane time at which to take out three and a half days in order to participate in a workshop. Yet, as I was going into it, Kari, one of my fellow Pacific Gardeners who was a graduate of the workshop, said that it would be invaluable for me to do it prior to my meeting with my family. Having come out the other end, I wholeheartedly agree with her. I feel way more grounded and ready to see them.

I also am leaving in the happy knowledge that Pacific Gardens is even more closely aligned with my driving needs and my life purpose than I had dreamed. It's as if someone had taken my driving needs and life purpose and used them as a template to create a model. They then gave that model a name. It's called cohousing.

I am so glad that I scaled the symbolic wall that isolated me from a life affirming community and that I now belong.

Sabbatical

2009-05-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

On June 2nd, I'm going to be leaving for an eight-week trip. The motivation for the journey is to participate in a family reunion to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday in Swaziland.

Between now and then, I'm going to be participating in a workshop called The Wall, vacating the house I've been renting, and storing my stuff in a kind friend's basement.

Construction of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community will be completed during my absence, and several of my fellow owners will be moving in while I'm away. I feel sad that I will miss a momentous phase in the life of my cohousing community.

However, my mother's 80th birthday -- with one of my brothers travelling to the reunion from Australia and my travelling to it from Canada -- also is an important milestone.

Fortunately, Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community still will be here when I get back home to Nanaimo. I am excited about moving into my apartment upon my return. Our building looks more attractive every time I see it. When the cranes and delivery trucks are gone and our landscape plan has been implemented, our property will look beautiful.

One of the things that I love about our community is our name. The founders were environmentalists, and the garden element was important to them. To me there are different kinds of gardens. Whether or not the founders consciously articulated this, I believe they would agree with me. There will be the botanical gardens as well as the spiritual gardens that will be embodied in the interior and community lives of the people who will enliven the structure.

I look forward to being reunited with my community on July 27th.

Rights of Indigenous Peoples

2009-05-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

I am ashamed that Canada is only one of three countries in the world that have refused to endorse the United Nations' Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The other two recalcitrant countries are the United States and New Zealand.

When the UN initially adopted the Declaration in September 2007, Australia voted against it. However, even Australia now has agreed to it.

My excellent Member of Parliament, Jean Crowder, will be holding an informal meeting here in Nanaimo tomorrow. It happens, by coincidence, that she is the Federal NDP critic for Aboriginal Affairs. I am going to attend the meeting and tell her what I think. I'm sure she'll agree with me, so in that sense I'll be preaching to the choir. Still, I feel an urge to do something.

Hmmm ....... I wonder if I could convince Jean Crowder that she is too good for the NDP and that it would make sense for her to switch her allegiance to the Green Party. :-)

10 Steps to Peace

2009-05-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

I like this excerpt from the website of The Center for Nonviolent Communication.

10 Things We Can Do to Contribute to Internal, Interpersonal, and Organizational Peace

Spend some time each day quietly reflecting on how we would like to relate to ourselves and others.

Remember that all human beings have the same needs.

Check our intention to see if we are as interested in others getting their needs met as our own.

When asking someone to do something, check first to see if we are making a request or a demand.

Instead of saying what we DON'T want someone to do, say what we DO want the person to do.

Instead of saying what we want someone to BE, say what action we'd like the person to take that we hope will help the person be that way.

Before agreeing or disagreeing with anyone's opinions, try to tune in to what the person is feeling and needing.

Instead of saying "No," say what need of ours prevents us from saying "Yes."

If we are feeling upset, think about what need of ours is not being met, and what we could do to meet it, instead of thinking about what's wrong with others or ourselves.

Instead of praising someone who did something we like, express our gratitude by telling the person what need of ours that action met.

At this moment, the most challenging advice on the list, for me, is Number Three. Of course I subscribe to that value ....... in theory. But talk is cheap. Whether or not I walk my talk is the test.

Vargas Adventure

2009-05-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

I promised to tell you about my camping trip to Vargas Island over the Victoria Day long weekend. It was enchanting.

What I liked best about it was the solitude. The first time we saw anyone besides the members of our own travel party was around noon on the day of our departure, just as we were packing up to return home. The scenery was gorgeous, as was the sound of the waves when I fell asleep on the beach.

Although the sky was overcast most of the time that we were there, the rain was confined to short overnight showers. The weather was dry during daylight hours, and that made the logistics of camping and hiking easier.

The company was congenial too.

We left home on Saturday morning, May 16th, 2009, and returned on Sunday evening, May 18th, 2009.

In the picture above, we have just disembarked from the boat that ferried us from Tofino to the near shore of Vargas Island. We are about to hike across the island to Ahous Bay on the far shore. From left to right: Sarah, Sue, Lynne, Michael and Ian.

Above are our tents on the beach at Ahous Bay, on the west coast of Vargas Island. My trip was made possible by the generosity, cooperation and collaboration of friends. Charles and Lynne gave me a ride from Nanaimo to Tofino and back again. My fellow Pacific Gardeners, Chad and Susana, lent me a tent and a backpack. Ian lent me a sleeping bag and a foam camping mattress, as well as sharing his camp stove with me.

Above our party is setting out for a Sunday morning hike. Left to right: Sarah, Sue, Charles, Ian, Peter, Lynne and Michael. The piece of foam that Peter and Michael are carrying was salvaged from the beach. The idea is to use it as a raft with which to cross a lagoon further up the island. Sarah and Michael, in particular, displayed great creativity in finding uses for found objects.

I liked the patterns that waves had made in the sand.

Sunset from Ahous Bay.

In the series of peak moments I have experienced since I moved to Nanaimo, a period during which one superlative has overtaken another, Vargas Island is right up there with the best.

If you would like to see more photos, I have posted some on this website.

Off to Vargas Island

2009-05-16T06:16:00.001-07:00

I am off to visit Vargas Island with friends for the Victoria Day long weekend. We will drive to Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, catch a boat to Vargas Island, hike across the island, and camp on the far shore. I'm expecting it to be fun. When I get back home to Nanaimo, I'll let you know how it went.

Eureka

2009-05-15T06:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we hosted a visitor from out of town. We had lunch with her and took her on a tour of our Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community construction site.

She told us how she had spent a considerable amount of time defining what she wanted. Once she'd gotten clear about that, she had no idea where she would find it or if it even existed. Then, during an Internet search, she stumbled on the concept of cohousing. In amazement she realized that was it.

I found it fun to speak with her. I got the impression that she started out feeling a little sceptical, as if this might be too good to be true. She asked us question after question. No matter what she asked, it turned out that we not only had addressed the issue, but also had done so in a way that aligned with her values.

I watched her almost pinching herself to check that she was awake. I am very familiar with that sensation. In fact that's how I feel right now.

Response to the responses

2009-05-14T07:42:00.001-07:00

There have been some thoughtful comments on my previous blog post in which I confessed to being a so called Controller.

OVERLAP

One of the questions Krista asked was whether or not I had observed any inconsistency between the Pursuit of Excellence (TPOE) and Nonviolent Communication (NVC). So far, I have observed only very minor contradictions between the two. They have been differences of style rather than substance. In fact, I believe that TPOE and NVC complement each other. They, in turn, tie in nicely with two other concepts I have been studying, namely, consensus decision making and conflict resolution.

REFRAMING

I agree with MidnightCafe's observation that "Controller" is an unfortunate label and that something about "leadership" would sound more constructive. I like the way in which Krista used the language of Nonviolent Communication to reframe the labels in terms of needs.

NUANCES

I want to add to the information about myself that I provided yesterday. I am not a pure Controller, what the Pursuit of Excellence folk call a Controlling Controller. When I completed the communication Styles questionnaire, I recognized myself in each of the four quadrants to some extent.

This was confirmed yesterday, during a chat with one of my fellow Pacific Gardeners who also had done the Pursuit of Excellence. He said that he saw me as being close to the middle of the graph, where the four types intersected. However, our Pursuit of Excellence instructor encouraged us to identify our strongest quadrant, even if it represented only a mild preference.

The exercise in TPOE revealed that I had a secondary communication style that moderated my primary one. My secondary personality type is what they called the Supporter. That is the sympathetic person who loves to help others, who will go to the ends of the Earth to save a relationship, and who avoids conflict. The Supporter's downfall is that he or she finds it difficult to say, "No." Hence, his or her needs often go unmet. That was the person whom I used to like to think I was.

So, in TPOE language, I am a Supporting Controller.

STRETCHING

My fellow Pacific Gardener with whom I discussed this told me that he was a Controlling Analyzer. The Analyzer is a person who loves to study facts and data. He or she does not like to look foolish. He or she also dislikes being rushed. At the extreme end of the spectrum this person can suffer from analysis paralysis.

He told me that, since he had become aware of the personality types, he had made a deliberate attempt to stretch himself. For example, it does not come easily to him to be spontaneous (like a Promoter). He also may overlook other people's suffering (which a Supporter automatically would notice). So, from time to time, he reminds himself to be sensitive to other people's circumstances, and he also reminds himself to have fun.

MORE STRETCHING

On Monday night I experienced an extraordinary example of someone stepping outside of his comfort zone. The weekly meeting of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community's shareholders was challenging. There was one point, in particular, in which I had a meltdown. As had been the case the last time this had happened, I felt deeply ashamed of myself, and apologized to everyone.

About twenty minutes after I got home, the phone rang. It was one of my fellow Pacific Gardeners. He is not a Controlling Analyzer, like our other co-owner whom I mentioned above. Rather, this person is a pure Analyzer, an Analyzing Analyzer. He examines numbers in spreadsheets and the wording of legal documents in excrutiating detail. He expresses his emotions relatively rarely.

He said, "Hi, Judy. After what happened at the meeting, I just wanted to check how you were feeling now." To say that I was surprised doesn't even begin to tell you how I felt. This question, coming from our resident Analyzing Analyzer, was nothing short of astonishing. I also felt deeply touched that he had reached out to me. I knew that he too was a graduate of the Pursuit of Excellence. I was in awe of the positive effect that his efforts at personal growth had had on him.

ASKING FOR HELP

Being aware of the weaknesses of my personality type helps me to identify areas in which it would be wise to ask for assistance. For example, I made a snap decision to buy into Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. Last August, I travelled to Nanaimo, a place to which I had never been before. I looked around the city, met the folks who were involved with Pacific Gardens, and did a tour of the construction site. Three days later I signed on the dotted line.

When I look back on that, I shake my head. It's true that I'm glad I moved here. I love my life in Nanaimo. Although we go through wobbly patches, I also love my involvement with Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. But it was a huge decision with significant, long term implications. If I was faced with such an enormous decision in future, I would force myself to spend more time in Analyzing mode. I also would solicit the opinions of a couple of Analyzers who had no vested interest in the outcome.

UNDERSTANDING OTHERS

Awareness of personality types helps me in my dealings with other people. A while ago, a man -- whom I now recognize as a Promoting Promoter -- let down a volunteer organization to which I belong. He said he would do something for us, and he didn't. As is typical of a Promoter, he is full of brilliant ideas. But his strength lies in starting things, not in finishing them. Now I will take into consideration the fact that he is weak when it comes to focus and closure. Instead of being disappointed in him, I will be realistic about the gifts that he can and cannot contribute to our group.

In saying that this man is a Promoting Promoter, I don't want to suggest that he has been sentenced to that pigeonhole for life. Maybe his self-awareness will increase, and maybe he will expand into the other quadrants in due course. But, at this point, he is not a close friend. Other than wishing him goodwill in a general way, I don't care what he does with his life. The only information that feels useful to me right now is an awareness of his personality type insofar as it affects the volunteer organization to which I belong.

Being aware of personality types also helps me to package information when I'm making proposals. I now understand that an Analyzer, for example, will want lots of information and will want time to process it before making a decision. I will allow the time and space for him/her to do that, rather than expecting him/her to get back to me right away.

VARIED TERMINOLOGY

There are other personality classification systems. Two that I have studied in the past are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Enneagram. In the MBTI, there are sixteen types, while in the Enneagram there are nine.

I don't think it matters which system I use. I think they all offer the benefit of awareness that some people view the world as I do and some people view it differently.

Owing to my previous studies, I already knew that when I went into the Pursuit of Excellence. The big Aha for me during TPOE was that the Supporter was only my secondary personality type, while the Controller / Leader / Decision Maker was my primary one.

My secret is out

2009-05-13T23:00:00.001-07:00

At the Pursuit of Excellence seminar this past weekend, we did a module that helped each of us to identify our communication style (which is akin to personality type). My results shocked me. They claimed that I was a Controller. As the name suggests, it's at the dominant end of the spectrum.

A Controller!!! To me that term spans the water front, all the way from control freak to megalomaniac dictator. Yikes!!! That's not who I am! I am a nurturing, supportive person, right?

I guess my denial stemmed from the fact that I had witnessed the misuse of power. When power had been employed destructively, people whom I loved and I myself had suffered -- either because we lacked the skills to assert ourselves or because we simply had been too little to defend ourselves. Consequently I regarded power as evil.

Our Pursuit of Excellence instructor said that it was important to fulfill our driving needs and to acknowledge our personality types. She said that, if our needs went unmet and/or our personalities went unrecognized, they would leak out in destructive ways. Often they were the source of addictions and other self-defeating behaviours.

Conversely, if we fulfilled our driving needs and recognized our personality types, we could harness their energy constructively. In that case, they were gifts.

Today I told a friend about this additional Blinding Flash of the Obvious (BFO). She was someone who had been telling me for months that I had leadership qualities, but I had discounted her opinion. When I shared my BFO, she said, "Hallelujah!"

My friend went on to say that she thought that my continuing education was instrumental in my gaining this insight. She said that, because I had witnessed abuse and because I lacked confidence in my ability to exercise leadership for the benefit of all, my subconscious mind had protected me from the knowledge that I had leadership qualities. But my workshops have been building my capacity. She referred to the seminars I had taken -- conflict resolution, consensus decision making, and the Pursuit of Excellencer. In her opinion, my subconscious mind must have assessed my growing skill set, concluded that I would be able to handle power, and then let me see that I had it. I thought that was an interesting insight on her part.

In any event, now that I've recovered from the shock, I feel liberated.

My BFO

2009-05-09T07:03:00.000-07:00

"What is a BFO?" you ask. It is what my Pursuit of Excellence instructor calls a Blinding Flash of the Obvious. I had one of them after the second session of the workshop last night.

Our instructor asked us what we wanted for our kids. We gave various answers that described rich, joyful, fulfilling lives. If I was to sum up all the answers I heard, I would say that all of us in the workshop who were parents wanted our kids to thrive. Our instructor said that the greatest gift we could give our kids was to model in our own lives what we wanted for them. She went on to say that, if that was what we wanted for our kids, it also was what our parents wanted for us. So living a happy life also was the greatest gift we could give our parents.

On my way home last night, I had a BFO. I realized that, to the extent that I had arranged my life to be less than fulfilling, I had done it to spite my parents. It was as if I had said, "You didn't do this, this and this for me. Okay, then I won't give you what you want either. I'll show you. I'll be miserable."

Since I separated, joined Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, and moved to Nanaimo, my life has really taken off. I did what Joseph Campbell advocated. I followed my bliss. It feels to me as if my life can be divided into two eras, BN and AN -- Before Nanaimo and After Nanaimo.

But even my AN life, splendid as it is, has room for improvement. That's why I'm committed to lifelong learning.

I know it already has given my mother and my sons joy to witness how I've been flourishing, but now I'm going to kick it up a notch. Tomorrow is Mother's Day. The flowers I ordered for my mom already have arrived. She said they were gorgeous, and she was thrilled with them. Well, she ain't seen nothin' yet.

Okay, enough of this chit chat, amigos. I'm off to a full day of Pursuit of Excellence.

The Last Outpost

2009-05-09T00:36:00.000-07:00

The other day I heard someone saying something about the Empire Days Parade. The Empire Days what?

Well, it turns out that Nanaimo is something of an anachronism. It still has an Empire Days Parade during the Victoria Day long weekend in May. Who knew?

If I was going to be in town, I'd attend the United Against Empire Rally and Concert at the Krall Space. But I will be observing another Canadian tradition -- going camping for the Victoria Day long weekend.

Guilt and Resentment

2009-05-08T15:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I participated in the first session of a workshop called Pursuit of Excellence.

One of the Aha moments I had was an insight into guilt and resentment. They are two sides of the same coin, which is a difference between expectation and reality. Guilt is the cognitive dissonance one experiences when one's performance differs from one's expectation of oneself. Resentment is the cognitive dissonance one experiences when someone else's performance differs from one's expectation of him or her.

That sounds straightforward enough. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand it. But sometimes a drawing illustrates a concept more clearly than words, and the understanding penetrates to a deeper level. That's what happened with me. The instructor drew two overlapping circles on the flip chart. She then drew a little frill around the left hand circle. The "pretty" circle represented our expectation, and the plain circle represented reality.

The parts of the circles that overlapped represented the aspects of our expectation and reality that were consistent with each other. The parts of the circles that did not overlap represented the differences between expectation and reality.

When our own performance differs from our expectation, we have to decide what to do. If I think of myself as someone who always makes my bed, and I don't do it, I have a choice. Either I make my bed and bring my reality back in alignment with my expectation, or I leave my bed unmade and I get over it. Feeling guilty doesn't accomplish anything.

When someone else's behaviour is inconsistent with our expectation, we have to decide what to do about it. The instructor said that what we resented was not the person's behaviour but rather the choice we faced in light of their behaviour. Would we silently stew, would we tell them we didn't like what they were doing, would we suspend contact with them? Often that process of choosing our response and then implementing it is what we don't like.

That was a big insight for me. It also helped to make it more objective for me. I could frame it in terms of the choice that lay before me rather than making it about the other person.

Air travel -- the new smoking

2009-05-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

My mother likes to watch classic movies on TV. She says it's easy to tell the era in which a movie was made. In the old movies, everyone smoked, and no one had sex. In new movies, everyone has sex, and no one smokes.

I take some comfort from that when I despair over the environment. People in the western world used to think of smoking as a sophisticated activity, but they no longer do. Few of my friends smoke and, of those who do, most would love to give it up. They carry on smoking because, by their own admission, they are addicted to nicotine.

I am hopeful that, over time, cultural attitudes towards ecologically devastating activities will shift too. I am feeling guilty because I'll soon be flying from Canada to Southern Africa to participate in a family reunion to celebrate my mother's eightieth birthday.

The good news is that I'm feeling uncomfortable. It's a sign that I have some awareness of the harmful effects of air travel on the environment. Carbon emissions from jet aircraft are staggering. A few years ago, I wouldn't have given the environmental implications of this trip a second thought.

Now I am re-thinking destinations I had wanted to visit in future and how I will reach them. I feel much more inclined to stay closer to my (admittedly beautiful) home. When I do travel, I will be more inclined to use surface transit.

Something that is helping me to feel connected with distant family members and friends without flying to them is Skype. With webcams connected to our computers, or built into them, we can chat, even if we're separated by thousands of miles. I particularly have enjoyed long conversations with my brother in Australia.

As for our current movies, I will refrain from speculating what it is about them that people of the future will find noteworthy.

Personal versus collective responsibility

2009-05-05T08:23:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's blog entry, I shared my regrets about my past mistakes, with a focus on my parenting style when my children were young. Although I take responsibility for missing the mark, I also believe that the society in which I lived supported me in some ways and thwarted me in other ways.

Recently I chose to join Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. There were many things about it that attracted me, but one of them was the fact that a cohousing community would create an environment that would support me in living the way I wanted to live.

Because British Columbia is in the midst of a provincial election campaign, I am noticing more than ever the balance between personal and collective responsibility at broader levels -- municipally, provincially, nationally, and internationally.

Yes, people are responsible for what they put in their own mouths and what goes into their children's mouths. But the larger society can either reinforce or defeat parents in their attempts to keep their children's diets healthy. For example, it's difficult for an individual parent to ensure that his or her kid eats healthily if school vending machines tempt the kid with sugar-laden beverages.

At every turn, the infrastructure that the larger society has created either helps or hinders people's efforts to be well.

Most people in my circle of friends in Nanaimo care about British Columbia's provincial election on May 12th, 2009. But, when I am out campaigning for the Green Party, some of the people whom I encounter seem apathetic.

I wonder about the reasons for their apathy. It seems to me that some of them might include:

They don't believe that government makes much difference in their lives. If that is the case, I wonder how I can share with them my perception that it does.

They believe that government has the power to influence their lives, but they don't have faith that they have the power to influence the government. I believe that our first-past-the-post electoral system contributes to individual people's sense of powerlessness in their relationship with their government. I believe that proportional representation would give individual people a greater sense of power. For that reason, I am supporting the Yes side in the referendum about introducing the Single Transferable Vote (STV).

They are very busy working and raising children. They don't feel as if they have the time or energy to research and assess different political parties' platforms. If that is the case, I sympathize with them. Again, that leads me to wonder what I can do to make it more feasible for them to access information about the political choices available to them. How can I reach them where they are, and how can I deliver the information in a way that feels helpful to them? Instead of condemning them for their apathy, how about providing services that would make it easier for them to get information? For example, I could suggest to the local branches of the various political parties that we club together to provide child care at all candidates' forums. Hmmm ....... That has given me an idea. It is too late for this election, but it's something I will suggest to local political campaign volunteers for future reference.

A new day

2009-05-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

The entry entitled Six on Annie's Sensible Living blog brought up regrets for me. When I see how Annie, Krista of the This Inspired Life blog, and some other parents of young children employ the principles of nonviolent communication, my heart aches.

When my kids were young, I did the best I could with the information, resources and personal capacity I had at the time. But, if I had known then what I know now, I would have done many things differently. Yet I don't have a rewind button that allows me to go back and start again. So my whole past -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- remains my past.

What I am focusing on now is cultivating compassion for myself. I believe that, if I am kind to myself, it will increase my capacity for kindness towards others. I have a tendency to beat up on myself. I am inclined to judge my past actions on the basis of facts and support systems that are available to me now but to which I did not have access then. When I notice myself doing that, I make a conscious effort to return to the present moment, because that's all I have to work with.

With that said, I look forward to interacting with children at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. The prospect of living in an intergenerational community was one of the features that attracted me to cohousing. It will provide me with the joy of being in close proximity to little people who are full of life and energy. I experienced that exhilaration when I spent a few days at Creekside Commons in Courtenay, BC.

Not only will it be fun for me, but it also will provide a supportive environment for the parents of those young children. I will be one of the people who will form a surrogate extended family for them. The younger families in our community will have relationships with middle aged and older people who, although they are imperfect, nevertheless aspire to nonviolent communication.

Moving into cohousing will give me an opportunity to interact with children in new ways. I may not have a rewind button, but I do have the capacity to change, to chew through the cocoon that protected and yet imprisoned me when I was a caterpillar and emerge as a butterfly with greater range and freedom.

Happy sixth birthday to Lily, and happy metamorphosis day to Judy.

Finer points of meeting etiquette

2009-04-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

In reviewing my notes from the meeting facilitation workshop last weekend, I stumbled on the section about intervening when a meeting participant was talking for too long. These were ideas that trainees floated out:

Stand up.

Ring a bell.

Take a step or two towards them.

Say, "Thank you."

Say, "Time's up."

Hold up a red card. (This is in the context of communities that use coloured cards to send signals during meetings.)

Implement an agreed upon procedure.

Make a hand signal.

Address the person by name.

Throw balls of paper at them.

Shoot at them with a water pistol.

Ask them to wrap up.

Ask them to be succinct.

Act like a court jester.

Set a timer.

Say, "We're going to a commercial break."

I rather fancy the water pistol idea. As you may be able to tell, I'm in a kind of goofy mood this evening. :-)

The Zen of Meetings

2009-04-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

After participating in Tree Bressen's workshop on meeting facilitation last weekend, my view of meetings has been transformed.

I used to think of meetings as a necessary evil.

But, when I look back on the way in which the workshop unfolded, I see meetings as an art form. If it is well planned and well executed, a meeting is a thing of beauty.

At its best, a meeting draws out people's feelings, bonds them to each other, identifies their common purpose, and moves them towards the realization of their vision.

I have a meeting to attend this afternoon. Rather than thinking, "Sigh," I am thinking, "Oh goody."

Feelings and values

2009-04-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

Something that I learned in my conflict resolution workshop and that I witnessed again during the meeting facilitation training in Courtenay, British Columbia was the importance of a dialogue in which feelings and values are expressed and heard.

When people encounter challenges, they often respond with what they believe are solutions. Hasty solutions, however, sometimes have unintended consequences that, in themselves, become problems.

One of the issues that we trainee meeting facilitators observed the members of Creekside Commons discussing was whether or not to surround their community with a deer-resistant fence. Prior to our arrival, members of the community had been divided on the question.

Attempted solutions that had created new problems were the fences and walls that about forty percent of the households had erected around their individual back yards and the temporary fences around the community vegetable garden and community orchard that many residents considered ugly.

When people who disagreed with each other about a perimeter fence sat down and had a dialogue, they were very surprised to discover the values they shared.

A theme that emerged was that members of both camps cared deeply about the meadow on which they had built their community. Most of them also were committed to sustainability. But what did sustainability mean? Did it mean ensuring food security for humans? Did it mean living in harmony with deer and other wild animals?

Creeksiders also found out that many of them regarded themselves as prudent. But again, how was that defined? For some community members prudence meant fiscal responsibility. For those people, the cost of a perimeter fence and Texas Gates (cattle grids) were a concern. For other people, prudence was tied to stewardship of the land for future generations.

Other issues that emerged were aesthetic considerations (what balance to create between edible and ornamental landscapes), privacy in individual owners' back yards, and maintenance of an open and accessible community while providing safety for children.

Allowing for minor modifications because of our community's different layout, I can see us at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community having to address the same issues in due course. I also see the same range of values and interpretations of those values represented amongst our community members.

The meeting that we external trainees facilitated for Creekside Commons did not result in a consensus decision. But it cleared the air and elicited mutual compassion amongst Creeksiders who previously had disagreed with each other. Towards the end of the meeting they figured out some next steps that we all were confident would result in a resolution in the near future.

This exercise demonstrated to me very powerfully that a discussion of feelings and values was not a waste of time. Indeed, while it involves an upfront investment of time, it is more efficient in the long run. It also leads to win-win outcomes.

An engaging workshop

2009-04-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

The first workshop in the Community Facilitator Intensive Series was a heart warming and meaningful experience for me.

It was the first time that I'd participated in an event with members of other intentional communities. In this case there were representatives from six cohousing communities and two ecovillages in Coastal British Columbia. It was wonderful to hear about life in other intentional communities and to witness it first hand in the case of our hospitable host community, Creekside Commons in Courtenay, BC.

The purpose of these workshops is to teach meeting facilitation skills. That, in turn, is intended to build the capacity for consensus decision making within each participating community.

During the three and a half days that we spent with them, our host community had two meetings. In advance of those meetings, members of the host community briefed us trainees. They explained to us what the issues were, how long they'd been wrestling with them, and what they'd done so far in an attempt to resolve them.

We trainees, in turn, chose meeting formats that we thought would be most constructive for each issue, and we created agendas for each meeting. The facilitator, time keeper, vibe watcher, scribe and minute taker for each meeting was one of us external trainees.

In case you don't know what a vibe watcher is, it is someone who monitors the moods of meeting participants and alerts the facilitator to an emerging issue if it escapes the facilitator's attention. A scribe is someone who jots down key points on a flip chart that is visible to meeting participants.

The two community meetings resulted in a rich cross fertilization of ideas. The host community had a chance to try meeting formats that were new to them. There was one in particular that they liked a lot and said they would use again. They also had the benefit of external facilitators and other meeting aids who felt compassionate towards them but who were not personally invested in their issues.

For the trainees, it was a high privilege to witness members of the host community discussing their challenges at an authentic level. It was comforting to hear from the members of established communities that they had grappled with the same issues around the two year mark (which was the age of our host community). Those of us who belonged to forming communities or communities under construction gained insights into what it would be like to live in community. From the point of view of our training, it felt much more relevant to work with real issues being debated by real people in real time than it would have felt if Tree had created hypothetical scenarios.

The drive back to Nanaimo with Roz, my fellow Pacific Gardener who had participated in the workshop, was delightful. She wisely chose to take the slower but more scenic route that hugged the coast, rather than the quicker but more mundane inland highway. On the way home, we unpacked the meaning that the workshop had held for each of us.

I am deeply grateful for this experience.

The adventure expands

2009-04-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

This is a short break during a three and a half day workshop in consensus decision making that I'm doing at Creekside Commons in Courtenay, BC.

For me the rewards of this experience are off the charts. I'm learning so much from observing the dynamics of our host community, and from accessing the combined wisdom of eight intentional communities in coastal British Columbia. Besides that, it's just plain fun.

I rather suspect I could get used to this cohousing gig. :-)

Happy Earth Day

2009-04-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

Last week, one of my fellow cohos and I attended a campaign planning meeting at the home of our future next door neighbour, Ian Gartshore, who is running for the Green Party in British Columbia's provincial election. As we stepped outside after the meeting, we heard the beautiful symphony of frogs croaking in the pond on our property.

I keep on catching glimpses of what it will be like to live at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. It gives me goose bumps to think that I will be able to open my window at night and hear the Earth sing.

When I see the kids at the school across the street playing during recess, I hope that this song will endure for them and their children and their children's children.

Pedestrians are anything but pedestrian

2009-04-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

This morning I responded to Bruce Elkin's Happy Earth Week greeting on Facebook. As Bruce is wont to do, he challenged folk to view environmentalism from a creative rather than problem solving point of view.

That got me thinking about the boldest eco-friendly move I had made in quite a while, which was to sell my vehicle back in February. Taking up Bruce's challenge to look at it as a creative act, I reflected on the surprisingly pleasant side benefits I have experienced.

I love walking, and I get to exercise without going to a gym. When I walk, I feel much more engaged with my neighbourhood than used to be the case when I drove. I interact with people, and I notice small details.

Because of the way in which Bruce frames things, I felt motivated to describe my new lifestyle in creative rather than problem solving terms. So that got me thinking. Would I describe this as a car-free lifestyle? Perhaps a pedestrian lifestyle?

Pedestrian lifestyle! That stopped me dead in my tracks. Pedestrian, when it's used as an adjective, usually means ordinary, nondescript, dull.

That makes it sound as if the act of walking is boring, while other ways of getting around, by implication, are more exciting.

Ummm ....... Hello ....... Walking improves my health, it strengthens the social fabric of my neighbourhood, it's economical, and it reduces my carbon footprint.

But it's far from pedestrian because, more than anything else, I find it fun.

Fakes Anonymous

2009-04-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken.

It's a no-brainer, isn't it? I mean it's one of those statements that's so obvious that you might be tempted to say, "Duh!" Yet, when I saw the title of the Mike Robbins book on Bruce Elkin's blog, it struck me as profound.

Although I have taken enormous strides towards being authentic, once in a while I still am tempted to focus on the ways in which other people may be judging me rather than concentrating on what I want.

I bet you there are enough of us that we could hold meetings. Hello. My name is Judy .......

Voluntary Complexity

2009-04-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

Yup, I did it. Although I nominally believe in voluntary simplicity, I'd gotten caught up in complexity again. I'd become over-committed. My involvements all were worthwhile, mind you. It's just that there were too many of them.

At three o'clock this morning, I woke up feeling anxious about my To Do list, which I knew had spun out of control. I resolved then and there to cancel something I'd planned this coming weekend. It had promised to be so much fun. But the enjoyment dissipates pretty quickly when I feel overwhelmed. So I felt relieved as soon as I'd made the decision to drop an arrangement that felt unsustainable to me.

In considering what happened in the wee hours of this morning, I recall an occasion on which I had struck up a conversation with a Jewish family in my neighbourhood, back when I lived in Calgary.

It was pretty obvious that they were Jewish. There was a Conservative synagogue not far from my home, and it was fairly common to see people walking towards it in business attire on a Saturday morning, when most other people were in jeans and runners. Another give-away was that the father of the family was wearing a yarmulke (skullcap).

As we found ourselves walking in the same direction, we first commented on what lovely weather we were having. But, after a couple of minutes of superficial chit chat, I asked them about the rule that forbade them from driving on the Sabbath. They explained that there was a prohibition against initiating anything on the Sabbath. At least that's my recollection of what they said.

They went on to share with me some of the implications, over and above the fact that they didn't drive on the Sabbath. They said they also unplugged their phones and computers. The parents said that, with two teenagers in the house, it was bliss to have the phone unplugged for twenty four hours out of every week.

I have just stopped to consider how close my lifestyle is to the Conservative Jewish one. I don't have a car so, when I'm home on my Sabbath, which is Sunday, I don't drive. So far so good.

But I go away on weekends quite often. When that happens, I invariably catch buses or trains or carpool.

Even if I'm home without a car, I use my computer a lot. That's it. My computer. It's my biggest tie to complexity.

I wondered if I could be "Jewish" (in the sense being discussed here) for one day a week. No way. Not with the kinds of commitments I've made.

But how about being "Jewish" for one day a month? Yes, I believe that's feasible. Actually, I think it would be rather fun. I'm going to give it a try this coming Sunday.

Glue or Shrapnel

2009-04-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

I like this entry -- entitled In Community, Are We 'Glue' or 'Shrapnel'? -- which was posted on the blog of The Cohousing Association of the United States.

Tofino, there I was

2009-04-06T16:16:00.000-07:00

My first visit to Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island was awesome. I went with a friend who knew the area. That helped me to make good use of time.

The bus ride there and back in itself was lovely. The bus travelled through glacier-covered mountains, lakes and forests, including Cathederal Grove. At the high altitudes there still was snow on the forest floor.

Another first for me was staying in a hostel. I was spoiled by the award-winning Whalers on the Point Guesthouse. It has a view worthy of a multi-million dollar hotel. It's very clean and comfortable, and I enjoyed chatting with fellow guests from Canada, Australia and Germany.

Still another first was kayaking. Although I was a bit clumsy while I learned the technique, I enjoyed it. Led by a guide, we kayaked to Meares Island, and hiked in the old growth rainforest there. I loved the huge trees, the ferns, and the moss.

On another day we caught the bus to Ucluelet and did the circular walk, through the magical forest, overlooking the cliffs, to the lighthouse.

We then caught the bus back to Long Beach, where we walked, ran, explored rock pools, and played on a teeter totter [see saw] made of driftwood. I loved the roar of the waves on Long Beach. Fond as I am of Nanaimo, that is one thing we lack. We're protected by several islands just offshore, and we don't get that pounding surf.

Returning to Tofino from Long Beach involved yet another first for me -- hitch hiking. Luckily, a friendly couple who were visiting from San Francisco stopped within minutes and gave us a ride. (They said they'd seen us using the teeter totter they'd made.)

Tofino and Ucluelet are 40 kilometres (25 miles) from each other, and Long Beach is about a third of the way from Tofino to Ucluelet. It would have been a challenge to visit Ucluelet and Long Beach by bus in a single day. Hence the need to augment the bus with hitch hiking.

Had we gone to Tofino a few days later -- from April 9th, 2009 onwards -- it would have been easier. Each day there would have been two southbound buses to Ucluelet and two northbound buses back to Tofino instead of just one bus in each direction.

With that said, I feel we visited Tofino at an ideal time. The town was relatively empty and quiet, compared with the summer months, when the population reportedly swells by 20,000.

Everyone warned me that rain was very common on the west cost of Vancouver Island. They all said that the area's outdoor activities still were wonderful in wet weather, as long as you dressed appropriately.

I packed a Goretex jacket and rain trousers, but didn't use them. As it turned out, we had glorious weather. Local residents were astonished at how warm and sunny it was.

Walking around the quaint little town centre was fun. The art gallery that housed the paintings of Roy Henry Vickers was particularly inspiring. This was recommended by both my real life friend and my cyber friend, Rob. The Common Loaf Bakery was a cute place to stop for hot chocolate.

Stupendous as the west coast of Vancouver Island is, it is not immune to imprudent exploitation. Clearcut logging already has taken place. The only stands of old growth temperate rainforest left are those in Pacific Rim National Park and on Meares Island. (By comparison, the First Nations people of Canada harvested bark and planks in such a way that trees continued to grow.) Local residents are concerned about plans for a copper mine on Catface, a mountain just across the bay from Tofino.

There are complex relationships amongst old growth forests, wild salmon, the ocean, streams, and bears. Human activity, unless it is conducted with care, upsets the natural balance that sustains us. The guide who led us on the expedition to Meares Island gave us a great explanation of this.

I was attracted to Vancouver Island because it felt to me like Paradise. But, even during my mini-vacation, when I would have been more than happy to escape from the real world, I received many reminders that our unparalleled quality of life depended on dedicated stewards.

British Columbia is gearing up for a provincial election on May 12th, 2009. I am more conscious than ever that I want a government that values different kinds of capital -- ecological, social and financial. Our environment is the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs. God forbid that we should kill it. Then we may as well kiss our financial capital goodbye, and I dare say our social capital as well.

Tofino, here I come

2009-04-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

Shortly I'll be leaving for my first visit to Tofino, a small town on the west coast of Vancouver Island. People tell me it's a magical place. Pacific Rim National Park. Old growth temperate rainforests. Clayoquot Sound. Long Beach. At this time of year, wild waves. Whales. Good chance of rain. This is, after all, the Wet Coast. It's all about Goretex. And moss. And ferns. Well, enough of this. I'm off to catch the Tofino Bus.

Creative Tension

2009-04-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I did a tour of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community with a representative of our construction management company. She was upset because there was a problem with the kitchen cabinets. The way in which the subcontractor had installed them failed to meet her company's usual standards.

While she was pointing out problem after problem, one part of my mind was appreciating her commitment to quality and her attention to detail. Another part of my mind was looking out the kitchen window towards the glass-covered pedestrian street that runs down the middle of our building. I was visualizing myself standing in my kitchen, preparing a meal or making a cup of ginger tea.

I imagined times when I would enjoy privacy, and when I would keep my blinds closed. I do like to curl up with a book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. But I imagined that there would be other times when I would open my blinds, when I would take my cup of tea out into the glass-covered atrium and see who else was out and about, and when I would participate in shared meals in our Common House.

In the last few days I have been bombarded by so called problem after so called problem. Although I don't always do it, this week I have done a good job of returning again and again to the vision of what I love.

It helps that I recently read Bruce Elkin's free ebook, Staying Up in Down Times. I enjoyed the entire book, but especially Chapters 6, 7 and 8, in which Bruce discusses creative tension. I find it takes discipline to be fully aware of where I am now and simultaneously focus on what I want to create. As Bruce indicates, creating is qualitatively different from problem-solving. I find it tempting to default to problem-solving, but this week I have spent the majority of my time in creative mode.

The so called problems with the kitchen cabinets are being addressed.

I am co-creating a phenomenal community.

Metamorphosis

2009-03-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

In replying to my e-mail about my previous week, my mother observed that my account was peppered with reports of singing and dancing. She noted that this was something that had emerged in the last several months. She didn't remember my being interested in music or dance in the past.

She said this shift reminded her of her own mother, who had almost developed another personality around the age that I am now. In my maternal grandmother's case, the great awakening involved art. She discovered a talent and passion for painting. She became something of a Grandma Moses, which was neat to witness.

My grandmother was a really cool person. To be compared with her -- in any way, shape or form -- feels like a compliment.

How could I?

2009-03-25T22:25:00.001-07:00

During a meeting that I attended a couple of days ago, I had a temper tantrum. I shouted and swore at the facilitator.

As soon as I'd done it, I felt ashamed of my behaviour and apologized.

Luckily it didn't phase the facilitator. As a matter of fact, she gave me a ride home after the meeting, and was perfectly friendly.

But that isn't the point. What's more relevant is that I am deeply committed to compassionate communication, and I violated my own principles.

Only a week previously, I'd participated in a two-day conflict resolution workshop. I did a consensus decision making workshop in September, and I'm registered for another one in April. One of my favourite books is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

Yet, when it felt to me as if one of my core buttons was being pushed, the blood rushed to my head, and I lashed out.

When I later recalled what I'd said, I was grateful for a couple of things. First of all, I had used I statements. Secondly, I had criticized the facilitator's behaviour (or at least my perception of her behaviour). I had not called her names or questioned her integrity as a person.

Of course that doesn't excuse my behaviour. I consider it to have been totally unacceptable.

I have been going over the incident in an effort to recognize the dynamics, learn from it, and be better prepared when a similar situation arises in future.

I have tried to avoid beating up on myself, as that would only compound the problem. I've tried to accept that I'm imperfect and to forgive myself.

In our Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community meetings, which was where this happened, we have a beautiful tool that is designed to address this very scenario. Each meeting participant has three cards.

When a meeting participant holds up a green card, it means, "I agree," or, "I have information to contribute." A yellow card means, "I have a question," or, "I have a concern." A red card means, "I disagree," or, "There is something terribly wrong going on here."

When a participant holds up a red card, the facilitator is obliged to stop the main discussion so that the issue can be addressed. If I had remembered to use it, that one thing -- a little red card -- would have created a very different outcome.

I also forgot to maintain an attitude of curiosity. Instead, I jumped to conclusions about the facilitator's intentions.

In the interim, I have thought of a way of tweaking the meeting process so that it will accomplish what the facilitator wants while at the same time addressing my needs. I will suggest it to her before our next meeting.

Interestingly enough, I once again have found myself playing leap frog with another blogger. Yesterday there was an entry entitled Control on the Sensible Living blog. As soon as I saw it, I thought, "Oh, Annie, you've read my mind."

I never promised you a rose garden

2009-03-25T08:02:00.000-07:00

Way to go, Michelle Obama!

Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.

2009-03-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

This weekend I watched a couple of thought-provoking films about rivers and water at the Global Film Festival here in Nanaimo. There was some gut wrenching footage, including some of a hydro electric scheme in my own beloved province of British Columbia. Perhaps the scene that haunts me the most, though, is a field of gorgeous yellow roses being irrigated in Kenya while children drink from a filthy cesspool nearby.

I remembered the times I'd ordered flowers for friends. Why? In some cases it was because they had lost a loved one. I wanted them to know that I was sad for them and that I cared about them. All the same, it often was difficult for me to discuss death.

It was awkward if I knew that a friend had mixed feelings towards a parent who had just died, for example. I knew, from my own father's death, that you could feel angry about some of the things that your parent had done, but still feel as if you'd been punched in the solar plexus when they died.

Perhaps the bereaved person was someone whom I knew through work or business, someone to whom I felt obliged to be polite, but to whom I did not feel close. (This scenario admittedly is one that I do not expect to encounter now that I have embraced what I would call a more authentic lifestyle.)

Perhaps I felt guilty for having emigrated and for living far away from the bereaved person.

Perhaps I'd experienced the bereaved person as competitive, and wanted to prove that I could send them just as big a vase of flowers as the one they'd sent me (or, better still, an even bigger one).

Well, for any number of reasons, it suited me to order a safe vase of flowers, accompanied by a one-size-fits-all note, "Thinking of you at this difficult time." But, in taking that easy way out, I was killing people in a Third World country.

You may think I'm being melodramatic. You may think it's ridiculous to characterize myself as an axe murderer just because I did something as innocent as buying flowers. But stop and think about it for a moment. Those flowers were using up water and soil that local people otherwise could have used to grow food. In order for the flowers to be unblemished, they would have been sprayed with pesticides. If the Third World farm labourers were typical, they worked in poor conditions, for low wages. The transportation of the flowers from a warm country to Canada used non-renewable fossil fuels and pumped greenhouse gases into the air.

The next friend who loses a loved one is not going to get flowers from me. If they live close to me, I'm going to deliver a homemade casserole to them. If they live far away, I'm going to sit down and write a letter, even if it takes me forever to figure out what to say.

Well, at least one good thing came out of this weekend. I had been struggling to shake my caffeine addiction. But I walked out of those films feeling the same way about coffee as I felt about flowers from distant countries. I never want to touch the stuff with a ten foot barge pole.

Duet in A Major

2009-03-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was inspired by Annie's blog post on Patience. I especially loved the John Ciardi quotation, which was new to me, "Patience is the art of caring slowly."

I reflected on a couple of my endeavours about which I currently was feeling impatient. Annie's blog entry reminded me that, like babies, my projects needed time for gestation. When they came to fruition I would be rewarded very amply for any patience I had invested in them.

But, compelling though Annie's message was, it felt slightly out of focus. It seemed almost -- but not quite -- right. I wondered, "What's wrong with this picture?"

What was bothering me was the recollection that, in many instances, I had been patient. Actually, I had been too patient, for too long. I had endured situations that had felt unacceptable to me. I wondered how to reconcile the need for patience and the need for assertiveness.

After reflecting on this for a while, I realized that unrelenting silence and stillness had not always served me well. Yes, there are times when I do need to wait. But it seems to me that quiet is not a manifestation of true patience if I am stewing inside, and passivity is not a substitute for right action.

That raises the question of what constitutes right action. I'm not sure. I think that, at a minimum, it is action that is informed by respect -- respect for myself, respect for the other person, respect for the situation, respect for our planet.

I love to look up words in the dictionary, find out their roots, and unpack their meanings. Patience comes from a Latin word that means, "to suffer." Respect originates from two Latin words that mean, "to look again."

Being respectful -- looking again -- speaks to me of living in the present moment, letting go of past baggage, looking at the person in front of me with fresh eyes even if I have known them for years, asking myself what the situation is calling on me to do at this moment.

When I want to charge full steam ahead, slowing down and looking again does require patience. It feels to me like suffering.

Recently I have been noticing the importance of opposites. The letters of our alphabet can have meaning only because they are a combination of black squiggles and white spaces. If a sheet of paper was left blank, it would convey no meaning. Conversely, if the entire sheet was painted black, it would convey no more meaning. It is the combination of substance and emptiness that gives writing significance.

Bringing this back to Annie's post, I do not in any way want to suggest that it was “wrong.” In fact, I found it deeply moving. Rather it was that I needed to add another piece in order for it to make sense to me.

Using Annie's message and my own thoughts, I needed to compose a dance -- between Yin and Yang, between sound and silence, between what is and what is not, between action and inaction.

Now that I have done that, I feel at peace.

Mrs. Nice Guy

2009-03-17T14:07:00.001-07:00

"Uh oh. There are a couple of guys walking towards me. If I'm to maintain my image of myself as a nice person, I'll step to one side and make way from them. But my homework assignment is to practise operating in my least favourite mode. So, this time, I'm going to keep walking and force them to make way for me. Oh my God, I'm a total jerk. Oh, but look at that. They made way for me. Nothing terrible happened."

What was that all about? It was my homework assignment from the second day of my workshop entitled Essential Communication Skills in Conflict at Vancouver Island University. The assignment called on me to practice using my least favourite conflict resolution style, which in my case was competition.

One of the big Ahas I had that day was that there are no good or bad conflict resolution styles. Rather, each one has its uses. Each is helpful in some situations and unhelpful in others.

Each style can be measured by its levels of assertiveness and cooperation. Another big Aha for me was that a conflict resolution style could be highly assertive as well as highly cooperative. My previous thinking had been that assertiveness and cooperation were mutually exclusive.

Here’s a run-down of the styles:

Avoidance
Assertiveness – Low
Cooperation – Low
Behaviour – You do not engage.
Uses – When you are in imminent danger.

Accommodation
Assertiveness – Low
Cooperation – High
Behaviour – You give the other person what they want, and sacrifice what you want.
Uses – When there is little time for discussion, when it’s a one-off situation, and when the outcome is unimportant to you.

Compromise
Assertiveness - Medium
Cooperation – Medium
Behaviour – Each of you gets some of what you want, and each of you sacrifices some of what you want.
Uses – When attempts at collaboration have failed and there is insufficient time to discuss things further, the best you may be able to achieve is compromise.

Competition
Assertiveness – High
Cooperation – Low
Behaviour – You get what you want, and sacrifice nothing.
Uses – In an emergency, when there is little or no time for discussion, someone needs to take charge.

Collaboration
Assertiveness – High
Cooperation – High
Behaviour – Both of you get what you want, and neither of you sacrifices anything.
Uses – If you have the time to pursue it, collaboration produces win-win decisions, to which the stakeholders have a high level of commitment.

Traditionally, my conflict resolution style leant towards avoidance and accommodation. Since I have bought into Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community and have been learning about consensus decision making and nonviolent communication, I have grown better at compromise and collaboration. I’m still uncomfortable about being competitive. But watch out –- I’m practising.

"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice

2009-03-13T23:11:00.000-07:00

Today I participated in the first half of a two-day workshop called Essential Communication Skills in Conflict, which was designed by the Justice Institute of British Columbia and delivered at Vancouver Island University here in Nanaimo.

Our instructor encouraged us to choose an anchor word that we would say to ourselves when our emotional buttons were pushed and we felt ourselves getting angry. She said her own anchor was, "Be curious." Although she said we were free to choose different anchors for ourselves, I actually liked hers and decided to stick with it. Approaching a situation with an enquiring mind helps us to avoid being judgemental.

Earlier in the week, I had confronted a friend by saying, "I feel hurt because you did such and such." At the time, I felt proud of myself for raising the topic at all, as it had involved overcoming my reluctance to bring up a difficult subject.

Secondly, I thought I was doing well, because I started out by saying, "I feel ......." But the second part of my sentence -- because you did such and such -- turned it into blame.

Fortunately the conversation went well and the issue was cleared up. I attribute that to my friend's excellent communication skills, which turned the conversation in a positive direction.

I'm still glad I raised the issue. Although my delivery wasn't perfect, at least it was better than allowing my resentment to build. But, with the benefit of some conflict resolution coaching behind me, I now would start out by saying, "I wonder if you could tell me more about such and such, because I didn't know what you meant by doing it, and I'm feeling confused."

The Experiment

2009-03-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the day on which I had promised Mog that I would wear earplugs to experience for myself what it was like to be hard of hearing (HOH). The Experiment turned out to be more unpleasant and difficult than I had expected. But, for all that, I’m glad I did it. I discovered things that I believe would have been impossible to learn any other way.

It was disorienting. From The Experiment I discovered that sounds help me to delineate time and space. When I hear the footsteps of the letter carrier on my front path or the children pouring into the schoolyard across the street for recess, it helps me to track the passing of the hours. When I tip my laundry basket out, I expect to hear a “plop” sound when the contents hit the floor. This confirms for me where the room ends. I found it surprisingly disconcerting to be deprived of these clues that I usually take for granted.

It was boring. Sounds provide me with variety, the auditory equivalent of colour, texture and taste. Maybe it’s true that silence is golden. But, for that to be so, there needs to be contrast between silence and not-silence. When there was much more silence than my environment typically provides, and when that silence was sustained for hours, I grew uncomfortable. As the day wore on, my annoyance increased and escalated to downright fury.

As I am typing this post, the day after The Experiment, I have Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik playing in the background. Being able to hear it is beyond delicious. Not being able to listen to music created a far deeper experience of deprivation than I had anticipated.

I was fortunate in that it happened to be a gloriously sunny day with a clear blue sky. From my house, I was able to look out at the greenery, the crocuses and the daffodils in my garden. Had it been a foggy day here at the coast or a brown, late winter day back in Alberta, I would have suffered even more than I did.

It took extra work. Many tasks that I take for granted -- climbing steps, walking through traffic, cooking -- required far more attention than I normally pay them. Multi-tasking was difficult and often impossible. Cooking required total concentration. I didn’t hear the signal that the dryer cycle was finished, so my blouse got creased. To un-crease it, I threw a wet cloth into the dryer, and ran it for a few more minutes. Regularly interrupting what I was doing in order to check on this and that made my day more complicated.

The phone was a pain. I could hear it ringing, albeit more softly than usual. However, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear anyone speaking, so I just let the calls roll over to the answering machine. No one left any messages, though. Perhaps all the calls were from telemarketers.

One of the primary reasons for carrying out The Experiment yesterday was that I didn’t have any phone appointments. In selecting a time for The Experiment, I couldn’t find a single day on which it would have been convenient. No matter when I carried out The Experiment, it would have created hassles. But being able to have a phone-free day was a non-negotiable requirement for The Experiment.

It was disappointing. Last night Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Upside of Down, was speaking. I had been very excited when I’d heard he was coming to Nanaimo, and had greatly looked forward to attending his talk. I didn’t bother going, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear what he said. Perhaps he would have had a PowerPoint presentation with slides that I could have seen and that would have given me an inkling of the topic. Still, it seemed like a waste of the $10 admission as well as my time, so I gave up on the idea. I was very sorry about that.

It was embarrassing. The biggest challenge I faced was how to handle the weekly meeting of the shareholders of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. We are a development company. We monitor the construction of the apartment complex in which we will live and are working towards the creation of a strata (condominium) corporation. There are many financial, legal and practical issues for us to deal with.

I knew there were a number of important items on the agenda for yesterday afternoon’s meeting. I knew that, to get through that agenda, we would need to be efficient. I knew that, if I participated in my HOH state, it would slow down the meeting and perhaps even grind it to a halt.

It seemed to me that our consensus decision making model also would complicate things. In order for a proposal to be adopted, everyone has to agree with it. But how would I be able to participate in the discussion, to hear other people’s input and provide my own? How would I be able to collect enough information on which to base each vote?

If there had been time to prepare for this, I could have told my fellow cohos about my dilemma, and we could have rigged up something to assist me. But since there was little time to prepare and since it was a one-time occurrence, it seemed too much to ask of my busy fellow cohos.

I was very fortunate in that I knew I was philosophically aligned with my fellow cohos. I knew what was on the agenda. I trusted them to make wise decisions.

I decided that the least harmful course of action would be to stay away from the meeting. In fact the one moment that I cheated during The Experiment was the time that I removed my earplugs and called into the Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community office half an hour ahead of time to say that I wouldn’t attend the meeting.

But it seems to me that this too illustrates something about hearing loss. It must take tremendous guts to belong to organizations and to participate in activities when you know your involvement makes things inconvenient for other people.

Another thing about my fellow cohos was that I trusted them to understand when they found out the unusual reason for my not having been at the meeting. I trusted them to respect my need to march to the beat of my own drummer, even if that involved making a wild and wacky promise to people whom I'd met through the Internet. Since my fellow cohos are committed to inclusiveness, I expect they'll be interested in these findings.

It helps to have friends. In the evening, my Skype friend, who knew I had committed to The Experiment, e-mailed to ask me how my HOH experience was going. I was sitting at home, feeling crappy about skipping the cohousing meeting, disappointed about missing Thomas Homer-Dixon’s talk, and feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t hear music.

I e-mailed him back and asked if he would be willing to contact me through Skype. I said I wasn’t sure how it would work. I thought that, if I turned up the volume at my end and if he talked slowly and enunciated his words carefully at his end, we might be able to communicate.

He did call me through Skype, and it did work, albeit I often had to ask him to repeat himself. When his voice was so faint, seeing his face helped. For one thing, it indicated when he was speaking and not speaking. Even that information was useful.

I told him how grim it was to be HOH. I said it was worse than I had appreciated. He asked in what ways it felt bad. I said the lack of the auditory equivalent of colour, texture and taste impoverished me much more than I had expected. I also told him that I'd sacrificed the meeting and the lecture. He said that was all interesting. It felt comforting to have my reality acknowledged.

This morning I woke up to an e-mail from Susana, bless her heart, that updated me on a couple of key decisions that had been taken at the shareholders’ meeting. She did this without even knowing why I hadn’t been at the meeting. I appreciated it enormously that she had taken the trouble to keep me in the loop.

There were a few benefits.

I’m sure that one day of doing The Experiment was worth a whole semester of theoretical learning about hearing loss. I understand the situation of HOH people in ways that I would not have dreamed of.

When my back was up against the wall, I realized how much I trusted my fellow cohos to make prudent decisions.

As difficulty tends to do, the day of The Experiment helped me to identify a couple of exceptional friends.

Skipping Thomas Homer-Dixon’s presentation saved me $10.

When I went grocery shopping in a supermarket, I was spared from the abomination of Muzak.

In closing.......

I want to acknowledge Mog, Marnie (ms toast burner), Sarah (SpeakUp Librarian) and all others who have been enrolled in The Experiment, not for a day but for the rest of your lives.

Vancouver to plant community garden on City Hall lawn

2009-03-06T07:48:00.000-08:00

VANCOUVER – Mayor Gregor Robertson announced today that a portion of the City Hall lawn will be converted into a community garden. The idea to grow local food on the grounds of City Hall is the first ‘Quick Start’ recommendation to come from the Greenest City Action Team.

“If we want Vancouver to be a truly sustainable city, City Hall needs to lead the way,” said Mayor Robertson. “By converting part of the City Hall lawn into a community garden, Vancouver is walking the talk when it comes to producing local food.”

I was interested in seeing the above news release in light of yesterday's blog post about food and Ms Toast Burner's and my exchange of comments.

Kudos to the City of Vancouver.

10 Things We Didn't Know About Food

2009-03-05T07:10:00.001-08:00

How the authors of the new Rough Guide to Food lost their appetites for the food industry.

The full review is at TimesOnline.

Don't take any comfort from your location if you're a North American. The authors may be British, but the situation here is no less abysmal.

One of the issues that George Miller and Katharine Reeve raise is the distance that food travels. I have come nowhere close to achieving a 100 Mile Diet. However, since my move to Nanaimo, I have become a lot more conscious of the geography of food.

I buy most of my fresh produce from the climatic zone in which I live (British Columbia and the nearby state of Washington). A moderate amount of my produce comes from the Mediterranean zone of California.

Since I started paying attention to food miles, I have bought no tropical fruits and vegetables. To my astonishment, this has triggered no withdrawal symptoms. Who knew that a banana-free life could be this blissful?

Who would have thought?

2009-03-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

One of the things that gives me joy is learning from people who are younger -- way younger -- than I am.

The person who most recently has popped into my life to teach me is Annie.

Our interests initially intersected in the arena of compassioniate / nonviolent communication. She saw a couple of my blog posts on that topic. Then on March 1st 2009 she introduced herself to me at Nanaimo's Seedy Sunday event. I was one of the people hosting an information table about Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. She said she recognized me from the photo on my blog.

Annie's Sensible Living blog is coming in usefully at a time during which I am learning to eat more naturally, to focus on seasonal fruit and vegetables, and so on.

Annie, I am glad to have been introduced to your blog and, better still, to have met you face-to-face.

Community is my delight

2009-03-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

In Touching the Void, Joe Simpson described how, when he believed he was dying, the prospect that bothered him the most was that of dying alone. By that point he wasn't even trying to stay alive. But he still was trying to reach other people so that, when he died, he would be with someone. I found that very moving.

We humans seem to have a deep need for connection.

Yesterday I felt discouraged. I did not want to discuss my issue with my local friends, because they were facing the same challenge. I thought it might be more constructive to share my dilemma with someone who wasn't caught up in the drama, so I e-mailed a friend in another city. This morning he called me via Skype, and we had a video conference.

My friend refrained from trying to fix things for me. He just listened. I found it very comforting to be heard. I don't mean that my friend registered the sound waves coming from my voice or that he understood the meanings of the English words I was saying. I mean that he conveyed the impression that he recognized the reality I was experiencing.

The encouragement that I feel following that conversation has caused me to reflect on the meanings of words like courage, encourage, and discourage. Courage comes from coeur, the French word for heart. I believe that, when we display courage, we are enlivened by our core (heart) values. When we encourage another person, we help him or her to tap into those deep resources. Conversely, if we discourage someone, we introduce a barrier that makes it more difficult for him or her to access his or her inner strength.

I believe it takes courage to live. If Joe Simpson's experience is anything to go by, apparently it also takes courage to die. It seems that, in either case, an attentive witness facilitates our communion with our true self.

To me, local relationships are vital. The Internet could not have replicated my experience of dancing with my fellow cohos and our guests last Friday night.

But, with that having been said, technology has created avenues of communication that overcome some physical limitations. The alphabet, the telephone, e-mail, video conferencing, Internet forums, instant messaging, blogs, etc., make it possible for us to share and acknowledge each others' lives across time and distance.

I appreciate community, whatever form it takes.

I'm way too important

2009-03-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that one of the blogs featured in my Blog List is you hear some funny things when you are deaf.

In yesterday's post entitled hard of hearing for a purple squishy day Mog reports how she persuaded Inukshuk Rob to find out what it felt like to be hard of hearing by wearing earplugs for a day. To his credit, Rob gave it a try, and then reported his findings.

The thing is, Rob jettisoned the experiment after half a day.

For a moment I thought I would be magnanimous and undertake the experiment myself.

But I quickly ran into a question about online banking, and needed to call the Help line.

Then, after getting that sorted out, I headed off to a church discussion group. Well, it wouldn't do to be hard of hearing (HOH) if I was going to be participating in a small group discussion, would it? Neither would it be convenient to be HOH when the group went on to dinner at a restaurant. Needless to say, it also would have been inconvenient to have been HOH when I invited the gang back to my house after dinner. Finally, it would have been much less fun to have been HOH when Louise and I put on some music and gave the others a demo of the West African dance we had learned from Esther.

After my guests left, I went to bed. I suppose it wouldn't have mattered if I'd been HOH while I slept.

But, shortly after I woke up this morning, my mom phoned from East London, South Africa. That conversation would have been impossible if I'd been HOH.

After speaking with my mom, I walked to a garden fair called Seedy Sunday, where Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community was going to have a display table. As I am wont to do, I took the short cut that involved walking along the railway tracks. But, in order to do that, it's crucial for me to hear trains hooting at level crossings. It warns me to get out of the way when a train is approaching. There is no way I can afford to be HOH when I'm walking along the railway tracks.

Of course, in order to answer people's questions while I was hosting the display table, I needed to be able to hear.

After spending four hours at the Seedy Sunday event, I retraced my steps along the railway tracks. I once again needed my hearing for that, don't you know?

Then Mia, one of my fellow cohos, called to ask me a question. Well, how could I have conversed on the phone with Mia if I'd been HOH?

Jeez, I had important things to accomplish. As long as I was awake, I couldn't afford to be hard of hearing -- not even for an hour.

I'll bet you that's what Mog thinks too.

My beloved community

2009-02-28T09:21:00.000-08:00

Last night was a peak experience for me.

It was Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community's monthly potluck. This time I had offered to share the story of my childhood in Swaziland and how that had sent me on a quest for true community in Canada.

The cohousing community said they thought that would be a great idea. They suggested that we refer to it as an African-themed evening, and tell our non-cohousing friends about it. Consequently more people than usual showed up, and we quickly doubled up the number of tables and chairs that we'd set up in the Unitarian Church, which we rent for these occasions.

Susana provided sarongs for people to drape over their Canadian clothes, so as to add to the atmosphere. During dinner we had African music playing in the background.

After supper I told the story of a Swazi hunter whom I had known during my childhood. The loss of the habitat in which he had led his traditional lifestyle, the destruction of his society and culture, and his personal disintegration when my father replaced the natural bush with a sugar cane plantation seemed to me to be representative of the damage that globalization did to Swaziland.

During my midlife crisis I had come to long for the community spirit that I'd witnessed amongst the Swazi people during my early childhood, while their world still had been intact. This had sent me on a search that ultimately had led me to Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community.

Later several people expressed appreciation, and told me that they really "got" what I'd shared.

A key element of the evening was that a local teacher of African dance, Esther, and a band of drummers, led by Voodoo Dave, attended. When my story was finished, I handed things over to Dave and his crew. They led the audience through a couple of African songs. To the band's surprise, several of us already knew the songs, and indeed introduced different harmonies, as they were part of our repertoire at Everybody Sings on Thursday mornings.

The band then transitioned us into West African dancing, led by Esther. The potluck participants were great sports. The majority of them joined in the dancing. We dancers ranged in age from a university student through to a 79-year-old woman who is an energetic as people half her age.

I remember looking at the roomful of dancers and sarongs. Owing to the drum music that was providing the rhythm, Esther's teaching, and the participants' willingness to give it a try, everyone was moving in beautiful unison. It was community in action. It was a group of Canadians who, in a few minutes, had morphed into Africans. I mean they actually replicated that ability that a group of African people has to act as one body. You know how a school of fish is swimming in one direction and suddenly the whole school of fish changes direction in unison? Like that.

I knew I had been the catalyst by suggesting the theme, giving my talk, and persuading Voodoo Dave to join us. But, from that point onwards, other people had taken over. Norah gave me a ride to the church, as the route would have been long to walk if I'd been carrying a pot of stew. She also lent us her tape recorder for the background music during supper. Dave brought Esther and the other drummers. The potluck participants brought the dishes that turned into a delicious feast. The audience listened attentively to my story and, when they were invited to dance, jumped in with both feet. For the evening to turn into the magical event that it was, it needed everyone's contribution.

At various times, different members of our community take leadership roles. We're like geese who take it in turns to fly in front and then fall back into the slipstream for a more relaxed flight. If we confine the discussion just to potlucks, last month Andy Sibbald gave a presentation about his life in Canada's Far North. (Ironically, there are many parallels between Andy's experience and mine. He too witnessed loss of meaning and purpose amongst former hunters.) For next month's potluck, we're thinking of holding a Mexican fiesta, with Roz at the helm.

Anyway, back to that moment when I looked around the room at my fellow dancers, saw them totally "into" it, knew that I was one of them, and felt one with them ....... Words do not exist that could convey the profundity of that moment for me.

We are scheduled to move into our cohousing complex this coming spring. If our cohousing calendar is punctuated by occasions like this -- and I fully expect it will be -- the joy of living there will be off the charts.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss

2009-02-27T09:12:00.000-08:00

In reading the website of a cohousing community in the United States a few moments ago, I stumbled on their gun policy. My jaw dropped.

At Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community we don't have a gun policy.

May it ever remain thus.

Plight of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories

2009-02-24T05:43:00.001-08:00

My maternal grandfather was Jewish. My great grandfather, grandfather, mother and uncle survived the Holocaust because my grandmother's Catholic family members hid them. But several of our Jewish family members perished.

As someone whose family members died in the Nazi Holocaust, one of the ironies I face is that the tables have turned. Today, the plight of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories shares many elements with the plight of Jews in the Axis countries during the 1930s and 1940s.

Since I saw The Boy in the Striped Pajamas on Sunday night, I have been mulling over its implications.

As I said in my previous post, I didn't care so much about the story's plausibility vis a vis the topic that it nominally addressed, namely, the WW II concentration camps. I was more interested in the message that the movie might carry for me ... where I am ... today.

I felt when I got home from the movie that I was being called upon to acknowledge my empathy for the Palestinian people more openly. Previously I had hesitated to do that because I had feared it would make me look like a flake.

But that's what authoritarian forces do. I saw it up close in apartheid-era South Africa, and I have seen it in several instances since. If you cause what they perceive to be trouble for them, they ignore you. If that doesn't silence you, they ridicule you. The fear of being discredited is enough to stop many people in their tracks. If you keep on speaking out, however, and if you are effective, the harassment escalates. In post-9/11 North America, there have been veiled threats, like the possibility of ending up on a No Fly list or worse.

In the case of some elements of the Israeli government, Israel's political allies abroad and much of the mainstream media in the West, issues deliberately are conflated so that critics of Israel's actions are portrayed as anti-Semitic.

My little gesture after returning from the movie -- my current equivalent of serving tea to the white electrician and his black assistant in two identical china cups and saucers -- was to join the B'Tselem group on Facebook. B'Tselem is a human rights advocacy organization in Israel.

Naming a situation that is inconsistent with my values just feels like the right thing to do.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

2009-02-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas shook me. It was part of the Fringe Flicks series here in Nanaimo, and I saw it last night. It's the story of an eight-year-old German boy, the son of a concentration camp commander, who befriends a boy of his own age on the other side of the fence.

The criticism I'd heard in advance was that the plot was implausible. It was said that it would have been impossible for a child in those circumstances to have passed an apple to a child on the other side of the fence. I resolved to check out the movie and decide for myself.

I came away not giving a rat's patootie about the credibility of the plot. I still am not convinced that something like that could have happened, but ....... who cares?!?!?!?

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." I would extend his quotation to an insistence on credibility in a historical novel.

I have lived in a situation that, although it was not as intense as WW II Germany, shared many similarities with it and at times felt frightening to me. That situation was apartheid-era South Africa.

I can attest that the movie accurately depicted many of the dilemmas that a person in a situation like that experiences. For example, the protagonist's mother mainly coped with the presence of a camp inmate who worked in their house and garden by ignoring him. But, when he had performed a kindness for her son, you saw her struggling to decide how to respond. She ended up saying, "Thank you," but did so without looking at him.

I was reminded of a similar moment that I experienced in South Africa. When I was newly married, I needed to call an electrician to fix something in our house. The electrician who turned up was white. The job reservation laws that excluded black people from the skilled trades made sure of that. But, walking behind the electrician, carrying a ladder and a tool box, was the ubiquitous black assistant.

After they'd been working for a while, I asked the electrician if he would like some tea, and he said that would be lovely.

If I'd been a typical white woman, I would have gone into the kitchen and asked my maid to make tea for the workmen. However, I had chosen not to have domestic help, so I made the tea myself.

I also had decided not to acquire a set of boys' plates. They were tin plates and tin mugs in which to serve food and drink to black people. Their name was derived from the fact that white South Africans referred to black men as boys and black women as girls.

I carried a tray with two china cups and saucers into the room in which the electrician and his helper were working. The electrician was up on the ladder. He looked down at the tray. He didn't say a word, but I thought his eyes were going to pop out of their sockets. It seemed to be all he could do to keep his balance on the ladder.

Just as the camp commandant in the movie struggled to curb his wife as the implications of his work started to dawn on her, my husband started to hear complaints in our small town that his wife was out of control. He asked me very politely if I would try to contain my behaviour, as his job on the mine would become untenable if I carried on unchecked.

My gestures of defiance were so feeble. I was too scared to stand up to apartheid to any significant extent. Yet the system demanded such unwavering loyalty that even my puny resistance would have been perceived as a threat, and I would have found myself in hot water sooner or later.

Luckily we managed to emigrate to Canada before things got out of hand.

The joy of transition

2009-02-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday a friend, who is a firm believer in it, raised the topic of Peak Oil. You probably are aware of the concept of Peak Oil but, just in case you are not, some people foresee a precipitous decline in the supply of cheap energy and a catastrophic collapse of western-style civilization.

My friend's reference to Peak Oil reminded me of the period, a few years ago, in which I became aware of the possibility of energy descent. Back then, I felt confused.

Some scientists were publishing credible data that supported the hypothesis that we were heading for mayhem. On the Internet I even read about people who had prepared for Peak Oil by creating rural bunkers stocked with guns and ammunition.

Yet some technically savvy people were telling me that humankind would invent a solution and the perceived threat would evaporate.

For a while I spun my wheels, not knowing what to do. I sure as heck didn't want to resort to firearms. My attitude was that, if survival came down to that, I would yell, "Stop the world. I want to get off!"

But, in the meantime, there was something else going on in my life that had no obvious connection with Peak Oil. It was the fact that I felt so darned lonely in the suburbs of a large-ish city. It was my longing for community that attracted me to cohousing.

Although protection of the environment and preparation for Peak Oil were not my primary motivations for buying into Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, the founders of our project ensured that it would incorporate the following features that leading environmental experts talk about again and again:

Space for growing food.

A location that allows residents to access local amenities on foot.

A multi-family residential building with a single exterior skin that minimizes energy loss.

I increasingly have come to value these elements of our project.

The friend who mentioned Peak Oil told me about a British website called Transition Culture. After our walk, I went to the Internet and looked for it. I found it interesting. The site was created by Rob Hopkins, a practitioner of permaculture. One of the things that he does is assist communities in designing action plans for energy descent. Apparently there are over forty Transition Towns in the United Kingdom.

In looking around the site, I felt that we at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community already had implemented many of its recommendations.

My experience also is that making the transition is fun. At least that is what it has been like for me. It has not felt to me like deprivation.

If I could convey only one message to the residents of my previous suburb, which I found sterile, it is the level of joy I have experienced since I've joined a cohousing community and started living a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.

Now I'm off to Esther's West African dance class, with Voodoo Dave playing the drums. I'll be getting there on foot, of course. :-)

My meeting minutes will launch my 4-year-old neighbour

2009-02-18T09:21:00.000-08:00

Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so our children can fly!

Those were the words of a 19-year old single mother, as reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on November 2, 2008.

I learned of those words in an e-mail that my fellow coho, Susana, forwarded to us owners of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community this morning.

They captured my imagination, and invigorated my efforts. Right at this moment, my "efforts" involve typing the minutes of some cohousing meetings.

I tell you, there are moments at which I envy the Swazi people amongst whom I grew up, because they didn't know how to read and write. At those times I view literacy as a double edged sword.

But of course writing is an enormously useful tool. It enables you and me to communicate, regardless of your location and regardless of the time at which you access this blog post.

In the context of cohousing, minutes of meetings enable us to gain traction and move forward. We are juggling a lot of balls. Minutes help us to recall our decisions and our commitments.

The quotation about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama refers to the courage they exhibited in breaking through social, political and economic barriers.

Taking minutes of meetings does not require that kind of guts. Yet it's part of the slog that's needed to get a project off the ground.

When the housekeeping aspects of our cohousing development feel boring to me, all I need to do is to think of the four-year-old boy who will be my upstairs neighbour. I am helping to create the village that will wrap him in love.

It is my firm conviction that he will be able to soar to heights that would have been impossible had we not been here for him.

So, little guy, for your sake, it's back to those minutes.

To a friend's house the way is never long.

2009-02-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

To a friend's house the way is never long.

That was a poster that my friend, Mary, had in her kitchen in Calgary. Whenever I was in her house and saw the poster, I reflected on the truth of it. She and I lived at opposite ends of Calgary, but visiting her never felt like a chore. It didn't even feel onerous later, when a visit to her involved that protracted trans-Pacific flight from Melbourne.

I’ve just been wondering why I don't notice the "work" involved in visiting a beloved friend. The answer, for me, is that the reward far exceeds the effort.

In the world of financial investments, this is called ROI (return on investment). I have witnessed this principle again and again in the context of cohousing.

Last night, half a dozen or so members of my community had a difficult discussion. It took a long time for them to work through their issue, and it required tremendous patience. Each person listened, suspended judgement, and parked his/her ego off to one side. Tree Bressen, who facilitated a workshop for us last autumn, refers to this as being of service to the group.

After a lengthy and demanding conversation, my fellow cohos got through their dark tunnel and back into the light.

In one sense, it took a lot of effort for me even to witness this interaction. Yet, in another sense, I thought nothing of it. It doesn’t occur to me to count the cost, because the rewards of the entire enterprise so far outstrip any exertion that I put into it.

Community definitely is one of those phenomena of which it can be said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The ROI that I have received from it is beyond measure.

I also happen to believe that, if anything will enable us humans to meet our challenges, it will be community, which I view as just another word for love.

My Goldilocks church

2009-02-16T09:01:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I found the church in Nanaimo that felt just right to me. That is saying something. My favourite cathedral is nature. A church has to feel pretty special if it's going to lure me indoors when I could be walking outside.

On and off, since I'd arrived in Nanaimo, I'd tried a few different churches. Then, when I was at a social function on Friday night, someone praised St Andrews United Church, and I decided to try it on Sunday.

After just one visit, I knew this was it.

Ironically, I'd already been in the adjacent church hall. That is where my Everybody Sings group gets together on Thursday mornings. But, for some reason, it had not occurred to me before this to attend a service at St Andy's.

Another irony is that the other churches that I'd tried all had been further afield. Now that I no longer have a vehicle, any one of those other churches would involve a much longer walk, a bicycle ride or a bus ride. St Andrews, on the other hand, is within easy walking distance of home.

What a walk it is too. All the way, there are glimpses of the water, nearby islands and, behind them, snow capped mountains.

Oh ....... my ....... goodness .......

Walkabout

2009-02-15T15:48:00.000-08:00

When I lived in Melbourne, white people used the term "walkabout" quite frequently. For example, when I phoned my friend, Jean, her husband, Piet, answered and said, "She's gone walkabout." All he meant was that she was away on some unspecified errand, and he didn't know exactly when to expect her back.

But, while I was in Australia , I learned that Aboriginal people attached a more significant meaning to "walkabout." To them, dropping everything and "going walkabout" meant answering a call to go on a spiritual quest.

I don't know exactly what Aboriginal people do when they go walkabout. I gather they go into the bush for a while, re-establish their connection with nature, and feel spiritually replenished. I dare say the experience is unique to each person who undertakes it.

Today it occurred to me that the ultimate joy would be to feel as if I had gone walkabout (in the Aboriginal sense of the word), but without having to leave home to access that experience.

Then I reflected on the life that I had created in Nanaimo, with people in and out of my cohousing community, and realized that that was exactly what I had accomplished!

Oh ....... my ....... goodness .......

Tribal Dancing

2009-02-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

Last night Fierce Light by Velcrow Ripper was screened at Vancouver Island University. Notwithstanding the fact that I was fascinated by the topic, I decided to get the Coles Notes version from several of my fellow cohos who, I knew, were attending.

Instead I went to a tribal dancing session at which Voodoo Dave, amongst others, was drumming. Oh my goodness, what fun that was! Just what the doctor ordered.

I'll be back for more.

The stone stops here

2009-02-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

For much of my life, I have been a rolling stone. I have lived in ten places, in five countries, on three continents.

Because I did not have a geographical anchor, I used to get a sense of identity from my circle of family, friends and acquaintances around the world. I used to feel that being known by that group of people was what confirmed my existence. I had a low grade fear of dropping off their radar screens. I used to put effort into staying in touch with them, sending Christmas letters and that sort of thing.

That changed when I followed my bliss and moved to Nanaimo, British Columbia last autumn. Although I had never lived on Vancouver Island, relocating here felt to me like arriving home. Since I have settled on the island, it has felt insignificant to me whether or not there are people around the planet who know me.

I put this down to the fact that I am basking in the warm glow of a friendly and caring community whose ethos is compatible with my values. I am referring of course to Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, which constitutes my home base in Nanaimo.

Ironically, at the very time at which I no longer needed them, I received a cascade of e-mails and Facebook messages from former classmates from my Johannesburg high school. These developments had been triggered by a classmate who had done some detective work and had found out where many of us lived. In most cases it had been forty years since we’d been in contact with each other.

It has been tremendous fun for us to catch up. Happily, I will be able to see some of them in the United Kingdom and South Africa when I travel to my mother’s eightieth birthday celebration in Swaziland later this year. We’ve also discovered that a handful of us live on the west coast of North American, all the way from Vancouver down to Los Angeles. This contingent is planning a mini reunion in Vancouver.

I may have confused you when I said that I didn’t need my former classmates and yet was enjoying hooking up with them. Well, yes, that’s exactly what feels so delightful. It is cool to communicate with friends from a former life. Yet, because I really do have a life, I don’t need them. I hope for their sakes that they can say the same.

Living the dream 24/7

2009-02-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

Last night I returned home from an awesome visit to Calgary, where I had lived for a cumulated total of 27 years prior to moving to Nanaimo, British Columbia in September 2008.

I saw my two sons, who are in their twenties, and a handful of long standing friends. It was lovely to catch up with them all. It was a special treat to spend some time with my older son, whom I had last seen in September. (My younger son, in contrast, had visited me in Nanaimo just the previous weekend.)

But the very best part of the trip was the sense of resolution that my ex husband and I achieved.

When we'd separated in August 2008, exactly a month short of our 35th wedding anniversary, we had been determined to be civilized about it. We definitely wanted to avoid what I would describe as a divorce from hell, which was a phenomenon we'd witnessed a couple of times amongst our friends.

We both were extremely polite. My husband was kind enough to help me pack the belongings that I wanted to ship to Nanaimo.

He really went above and beyond the call of duty when he gave me his water colour painting of our sons. It portrays them on a lakeside vacation in BC's Okanagan Valley at the ages of approximately eight and five. I was very touched by that gesture.

Nonetheless, the courtesy between my husband and me was stilted.

The strain in our politeness haunted me as I got increasingly involved in consensus decision making, compassionate communication and conflict resolution both inside and outside of my cohousing community in Nanaimo.

I felt like a fake, because I did not believe I had achieved a state of peace in all areas of my life. I really wanted to walk my talk. As long as I was feeling so guarded and defensive in my very few communications with my ex husband, it did not feel to me as if I was living up to the standards that I claimed.

Then a few things happened. I had planned to visit Calgary for Christmas, but extreme weather had prevented me from doing so. After that, I still wanted to see my sons. That wish partly was fulfilled when my younger son visited Nanaimo, but I also wanted to see my older son.

Then a friend passed away, and I wanted to attend his memorial service in Calgary. I timed my trip to coincide with the planned memorial service. For complicated reasons, the date of the service was changed. As it turned out, I did not manage to attend it. But when I committed to the trip, it was one of my motivations.

Finally, I wanted to sell my vehicle, my ex husband offered to buy it, and I offered to deliver it to Calgary. I discussed that in my previous blog post entitled, "Molly's Farewell Tour."

As I headed to Calgary, I dreaded interacting with my ex husband. He later shared that he too had been nervous about my visit.

But, once we saw each other, our fears melted away. We discussed many issues, we gained clarity on a lot of points, we reminisced, we laughed and we cried.

We confirmed our original decision to separate. We agreed that, in some fundamentally important areas, our values were sharply different. We had very distinct ideas about the ways in which we wanted to spend our remaining time on this planet.

We felt that, as long as we had been in more of a "survival mode," our busyness had masked our disagreements. But, once our kids had left home and we had had more spare time on our hands, our differences had become more apparent.

By the time of my visit to Calgary, my ex husband and I had had a five-month break, and we weren't driving each other bonkers any more. We both were cheerful and relaxed. We got to see each other in a favourable light again. Each of us thought, "Wow, you really are a nice person."

That radically changed the atmosphere in which we parted this time around. We felt goodwill towards each other. When my ex husband dropped me off at Calgary Airport late yesterday afternoon, he gave me a card in which he had written a beautiful message wishing me the very best for the future.

The sense of closure that I now have is indescribable.

Molly's Farewell Tour

2009-02-05T10:37:00.000-08:00

I am on a visit to Calgary, Alberta.

Although I had snow tires and and tire chains, I lucked into a window of glorious weather for my winter drive. Over two days, I drove amongst snow-covered mountains, on good roads, through light traffic, in brilliant sunshine. Life doesn't get much better than that.

I was reminded, once again, of my failure to find the ugly route from Vancouver to Calgary (or vice versa). That statement tends to puzzle my friends. They ask, "Why would you want to do that?"

My joke stems from the several requests for travel advice that I've received from overseas family members and friends when they've been preparing for trips to Western Canada. They ask, "Should I take this highway or that highway?" I say, "Throw a dart at a map, and choose the route on which the dart lands."

No, I don't really leave them dangling without any more information. I do share with them what I consider to be the advantages of each route. But I also tell them that, after three decades, I have discovered it's impossible to design a bad itinerary in British Columbia and Western Alberta.

Anyway, that stunning drive was a high note on which to end my relationship with my vehicle, which I had named Molly. My ex husband is buying Molly from me. We are about to leave for the registry office, where I will transfer ownership to him.

After visiting with my ex husband, our two adult sons, and a handful of long standing Calgary friends, I will fly back home to Nanaimo, British Columbia on Sunday evening. That will be the start of my car-free lifestyle.

Part of me is going, "Eek!" But mostly I am excited at the prospect of reducing my annual carbon emissions by 1.2 tonnes and discovering how resourceful I can be in implementing this change to my lifestyle.

I will be walking, catching the bus, riding a bicycle, car-pooling with friends, and joining a car sharing club called the Co-operative Auto Network for those occasional trips and errands that really do require a car.

Yes, I'm sure there will be a few frustrating moments. For example, about ten days ago I set out to walk a route that I had planned from my map of Nanaimo. A street that the map showed and that I intended to take wasn't there in real life. Aaaaaaargh! That necessitated a time consuming detour.

Friends later told me that maps of Nanaimo show streets that are planned, not necessarily streets that exist. What's up with that?!? Grrrrrrr!

Yes, a little glitch in Paradise. But onwards and upwards, eh?

My beloved son in whom I am well pleased

2009-02-01T12:47:00.001-08:00

This past weekend, one of my sons visited Nanaimo from Calgary. We had a terrific time together, and I enjoyed showing him my world. He loved this area, and said he could totally understand why I had moved here and why I had bought into a cohousing community.

Spending time in his company is a real treat for me. For a second I thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to live in the same place, so we could see more of each other?" But it was just a fleeting idea. The answer was a resounding, "No."

For his masters degree in a subject about which he is passionate, he needs to be exactly where he is. For my personal growth and for my exploration of cohousing, to which I am so ardently committed, I need to be exactly where I am. We love each other enough to give each other that space.

But chatting with that young adult, who is not just a family member but now a friend on an equal footing, was a most agreeable experience.

Plugging in

2009-01-30T10:08:00.000-08:00

At a function the other night I met a woman who recently had moved to Nanaimo. She invited me to meet her for coffee. She told me she was trying to get to know local people. She said, "You know what it's like when you move to a new place and don't know anyone."

Yes, from previous relocations, I knew what she meant. But that reminded me how different my move to Nanaimo had been. When I'd arrived here in September 2008, I'd hit the ground running. I plugged in so quickly, it would have made your head spin.

That was entirely owing to the fact that I'd joined Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community. Even before I'd moved to Nanaimo, while I still was packing up in Calgary, my fellow cohos already were e-mailing me and telling me about upcoming events in Nanaimo and activities I could join.

Very soon after getting here, I knew heaps of people, had a full calendar, and felt as if I'd lived here for years.

When I scanned my calendar to find a free slot in which to meet this lovely new acquaintance for coffee or lunch two weeks out, I did not want to sound like a poser. But the fact was that I had to pick through several activities to find some openings.

On almost a daily basis I am reminded of my gratitude for having found and joined a cohousing community.

Irresistible Nanaimo

2009-01-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

Our lunch with our American visitor, whom I mentioned in my previous couple of posts, was illustrative of why Nanaimo is such a neat place to live.

We took him to the Thirsty Camel which, as the name suggests, serves Middle Eastern cuisine, and is my absolute fave in Nanaimo.

The restaurant was packed, and the five of us were occupying a table that could seat six. A woman came along and asked us if she could sit at the end of our table, since there was no other space for her. She promised to do her own thing and not disturb us. We said, "Sure. Go for it."

While she was sitting there, she was stuffing and addressing envelopes. We just carried on with our conversation. Each of us told our visitor what had drawn us to cohousing. As Sharon said, each of our reasons was quite complex, and these were concepts that were not that easy to convey in a short sound bite, on a website, or anything like that.

Some time after the woman who had shared our table had left, Susana noticed that there was a piece of paper at the woman's place. Susana thought it was something that the woman had forgotten, and almost felt embarrassed about reading it, but she did.

Then Susana said, "Hey, guys. Look at this." On the piece of paper, the woman had written, "Key words that I heard were .......," and she went on to list what she considered to be the most important nuggets from our conversation. Then she'd written, "For information about community, contact Dr. So And So at Such And Such University."

We said to our visitor, "This is one of the reasons we love living in Nanaimo. The people here are so awesome."

Our visitor, who was in discussions about the formation of a cohousing community back in his own city, said, "I want to tell folks back home what people here are like. Can I take that piece of paper to show them what I mean?"

A friend indeed

2009-01-25T10:23:00.001-08:00

Yup, yesterday's visit was what I hoped it would be and more.

To say that we cohos and our out-of-town guest were kindred spirits really doesn't go far enough.

It was a very meaningful day for me.

A friend I have yet to meet

2009-01-24T08:20:00.000-08:00

Today some of my fellow cohos and I will be showing a visitor around Nanaimo, I'll have him over to my house for supper, and then one of our other cohos will be billeting him at her house tonight.

Our visitor lives in the United States, but is in Vancouver on a short-term work assignment. His family has a long history of involvement with intentional communities. So, when he was preparing to come up to this area, he put out his feelers to find out what sorts of intentional communities there were around here. I guess his Google search must have brought up Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, because he contacted us.

It just goes to show what a useful tool the Internet is.

But the Internet takes you only so far. It can serve as an introduction to people in distant places. Yet the Internet cannot meet your ferry, chat with you, take you on a walking tour along the harbour and through downtown, feed you, and so on.

The cool thing about being involved with intentional communities is that it gives you so much in common with folks in the movement. You pretty much know, in advance, that you will be kindred spirits.

Or at least that's my theory. I am off to test it right now and to find out if, indeed, a stranger is just a friend whom I have yet to meet.

I'll let you know tomorrow how it went.

My sacred body

2009-01-23T09:09:00.000-08:00

As I created a title for a new blog post, I chuckled when I noticed that I'd transposed the letters, and had typed My scared body.

That typo probably says it all. I used to be afraid.

As I have settled into supportive communities in Nanaimo, love, peace and joy have flowed in and replaced fear.

One of the developments I have noticed is how much I have been drawn to physical activity and how much I have been enjoying my body.

Last week I moved to a house from which I can walk to most amenities that I need. It has been a tremendous pleasure to walk. I enjoy the sensation of walking. I'm grateful for my comfortable shoes and for a body that is healthy enough to walk. When I walk, I notice so many things about my neighbourhood that would not be visible from a car.

Recently I joined a Tai Chi class, and have been enjoying the slow, gentle, but surprisingly demanding, movements.

Yesterday, Everybody Sings resumed after the Christmas and New Year break. It was delightful to participate once again in the lively singing, clapping and dancing. Shirley said it reminded her of kindergarten, and Ian said it reminded him of summer camp when he'd been a teenager. It sure is fun to be transported back to kindergarten or summer camp as an adult, or to experience them for the first time if you missed out as a kid.

Last night I tried Sacred Circle Dancing for the first time. I found it peaceful, meditative and grounding. I especially liked the fact that there was very little talking, and we dancers just gave ourselves over to the soft music and flowing movement.

Our Sacred Circle Dance teacher, Maureen Wild, said that dancing helped us to be conscious of our bodies, to feel connected to the planet and nature, and to experience ourselves as something other than "a head on a stick."

Food has taken on a new dimension for me too. I have just taken a break from typing and eaten a perfectly ripe tomato. As I sank my teeth into its juicy, red flesh, I reveled in the delicious taste. I was conscious of the earth, water, air and sunlight that had poured themselves into the tomato plant. I appreciated the tomato for giving up its life to sustain mine.

I am experiencing myself as a sacred being, sharing my life with other sacred beings, in a sacred time and space.

My scared self, in the meantime, seems to have kicked off her shoes and joined the dance.

Flourish or stagnate

2009-01-21T10:31:00.000-08:00

Less than a year ago, I was not a happy camper. If I had been Goldilocks, I would have been whining because the porridge was too cold, the chair was too hard, and the bed was too soft.

But it wasn't really about the porridge, the chair or the bed. In hindsight, I believe I was frustrated because I had yet to identify my life's purpose and figure out how to live in alignment with it.

The psychologist, Erik Erikson, identified eight stages of life. According to Erikson, each stage involved a task. If you completed the task demanded of the relevant stage, you would be rewarded with a benefit that you would enjoy for the rest of your life. But, if you failed to accomplish a task, you would suffer from a disadvantage.

The good news, though, is that it is possible to catch up later. For example, if you did not acquire basic trust in the world as an infant, it is possible (if challenging) to do the necessary work and establish basic trust later in life.

The stage in which I personally am most interested is the one in which I am at the moment -- middle age. According to Erikson, the accomplishment of this stage is what he called generativity.

What Erikson meant by generativity was a contribution that had the potential to last beyond your own lifetime. The contribution does not have to be spectacular or impressive. The main requirement is that it is meaningful to you.

For example, you might teach a hobby, such as photography, to a child. You might create a garden. You might act as a mentor to a younger member of your profession.

Failure results in stagnation. If you do not give something of yourself to the world, you become stale.

That's how I felt in Calgary, before I bought into Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community and moved to Nanaimo. I felt dull, to the point of suffocation.

My membership of a cohousing community has given me many opportunities to contribute, directly to the cohousing community itself and to the wider community, with which my fellow cohos and I have lots of connections.

Linking this back to my previous couple of posts, I suspect this is one of the greatest losses that hunters experience when they are robbed of their habitat. Older men are denied the opportunity to mentor younger men and boys.

In Iron John, Robert Bly goes on at length about the importance of the role that older men play in the lives of younger men and boys. He also describes how meaningful it is to older men to play a useful part in the lives of younger men and boys.

All the way from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, hunting-gathering societies implicitly understood this. They all incorporated sophisticated initiation rituals and ceremonies into their customs.

Returning to me, since I have found a renewed sense of purpose, porridge, chairs and beds have ceased to be issues. Those kinds of things have just fallen into place.

Making peace with men

2009-01-20T11:09:00.000-08:00

It was serendipitous that my visit to the Royal British Columbia Museum took place at a time when I was re-reading a marvelous book, Iron John by Robert Bly.

Although the museum collection caused me to recall the suffering to which "progress" and "development" have subjected hunter-gatherers, our modern way of life has created challenges for contemporary men too.

As Bly states, the relationship that has been most severely damaged by the Industrial Revolution is the one between father and son. During our hunting-gathering days and even during our agricultural days, fathers and sons used to work alongside each other. Think of the farmers, blacksmiths and carpenters who passed on their skills to their sons.

In an agricultural society, fathers work close to home. They return to their houses for lunch. Their wives and children understand what they do for a living and interact with them a lot.

But that changed for us when men went off to work in distant factories and mines, and later in offices. Their work became specialized, their family members no longer understood what they did for a living, and their wives and children saw much less of them.

Some men, who were forced to work punishing hours, were exhausted, and behaved like jerks.

Women resented being less powerful, but let off steam by disparaging men. One of the rhymes that I remember my mother reciting was:

Girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice.
Boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails.

Once we were both middle aged, I told one of my brothers that I felt uncomfortable about having been elevated at his expense. I asked him how he had felt when he had heard those words. He said, "Like a piece of shit." I felt so sad when he shared that with me.

We see variations on this theme all over the place. For example, television ads invariably portray the dad as the resident idiot who doesn't have the first clue about cold medicine. Then the mom rolls her eyes before revealing the magic elixir that will fix everything.

I am sorry to report that there was a time when I was that smug mom. But I like to think that I have outgrown that attitude.

I know, from first hand experience, that some men behave badly. Yet, with that having been said, I am finding it deeply rewarding to be gaining a new recognition of the gifts that men have to offer the world.

The society that I want to nurture is one that is supportive towards men, women, children and, indeed, our planet. My membership of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community is central to that commitment.

The hunter’s broken heart

2009-01-18T19:57:00.000-08:00

I have just returned to Nanaimo from a weekend visit to Victoria, two and a half hours away by train. While I was there, I spent half a day at the Royal British Columbia Museum.

The museum has excellent exhibits that depict the traditional hunting and gathering (or, in some cases, fishing and gathering) lifestyles of the First Nations people of British Columbia.

I also was lucky enough to have a personal tour with a docent (volunteer guide) who was knowledgeable and passionate about the collection. Under normal circumstances the docent would have led a group through the museum. However, one of the advantages of visiting in winter, as I did, was that it was a slow day at the museum.

Although in many cases Europeans did not deliberately set out to be evil, the effect of their contact with the Aboriginal peoples of British Columbia was brutal.

To understand a museum's collection, it is not enough to look at the display cases, and say, "Isn't that lovely?" To make sense of a collection, the visitor needs context.

In the case of this museum, for example, it was relevant that only a tiny percentage of Aboriginal artefacts had survived European contact. Well intentioned missionaries had encouraged Aboriginal people to demonstrate their conversion to Christianity by burning their "heathen" artefacts.

The visitor is more equipped to understand the implications if he or she has witnessed the effects of the cash economy on hunter gatherers in another time and place.

My friend, Andy, who spent a couple of decades in Canada’s Far North, has described the devastating loss of identity and purpose that Aboriginal men suffered when they were denied their traditional role as hunters.

The same tragedy unfolded in Swaziland, where I grew up. Consummate hunters and trackers were reduced to shadows of their former selves when their traditional lands were sold from under them, and survival meant working for wages on a plantation or in a mine.

Contemplating the consequences of imperialism, capitalism and globalization used to have a crippling effect on me.

Fortunately, I now have carved out a way of life that feels supportive, but that still is nested within a conventional setting. It does not involve raging against the machine (to paraphrase the name of a well known rap metal band).

In my next few posts, I will share some strategies that I am employing in mending my heart. Hmmm ....... well, come to think of it, perhaps that's what this entire blog, down to the last post, is about.

Man in the Arena

2009-01-14T23:33:00.000-08:00

Was just reminded of this Theodore Roosevelt quotation that I like:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

I find it helpful to remember this when I'm doing something challenging.

Although I don't always succeed in pulling off this feat, there also have been times when I've managed to shut up when someone else's performance has been imperfect. It seems more constructive to say, "How can I help?" than to snipe at them from the peanut gallery.

Cohos are cool

2009-01-13T01:13:00.001-08:00

The other day, just off the top of her head, Susana came up with this list of hobbies in which we owners of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, collectively, are involved:

attending musical events

baking

bicycling

bird-watching

book clubs

camping

celebrations of different traditions

choir

cooking

dancing -- all kinds of dance!

dialogue groups

drumming

festivals of all sorts

gardening

geocaching

good films

hiking

kayaking

naturalist outings

opera

organizing and participating in events

parties

personal growth work

photography

playing music

playing with children

potlucks

singing

skiing

spiritual retreats

spiritual rituals and gatherings

story-telling

swimming

symphony

Tai Chi

theatre

travel

voluntary simplicity circle

volunteering in the community

writing

women's circle

yoga

In running down that list, I like the look of drumming. But I've just taken up singing, dancing and Tai Chi, so I'll have to see how I can work drumming into the mix. Susana says there are classes in which one can do drumming and dancing.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that I'm getting back into bicycling. Of course that's not counting the kayaking lessons that I'm planning to take this spring. Or the visit I'm soon going to pay to Tofino for storm watching.

One Week

2009-01-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw one of the movies in the Fringe Flicks series. It was called One Week.

It was about a young man in Toronto who was diagnosed with cancer. Before starting treatment he bought an old motor bike on the spur of the moment and headed west.

It was thought provoking and at times funny.

My gut reaction when I walked out of the theatre was, "I am so glad I didn't wait until I was diagnosed with cancer before I hit the road." On the other hand, I'm also older than the protagonist. About ten years ago, when I was in my mid forties, school friends started dying, one by one.

So it was a while ago that a sense of my mortality started to build up. Eventually it reached the point that the thought of dying before I'd lived was intolerable.

Transcending Hell on Earth

2009-01-11T10:57:00.001-08:00

My favourite book is Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculée Ilibagiza.

I have seen the after effects of the Nazi Holocaust in my mother's generation of my family. All my life I have interacted with family members who, I recently have come to realize, have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I myself experienced an authoritarian regime when I lived in South Africa during the apartheid era. At that stage, which lasted from my teens to my mid twenties, the most effective response I was able to mount was to emigrate to Canada.

Ilibagiza's experience of the Rwandan genocide fascinates me because it seems that her intense faith in God enabled her to bypass the psychological processes that would have been natural in an extreme situation. The degree to which she felt supported by God in those terrifying months when people were hunting for her was extraordinary.

Furthermore, once the crisis was over, she displayed an exceptional level of forgiveness towards her family members' murderers. Again, her deep faith seemed to enable her to transcend the normal stages of grief.

I read this book during a period in which I was questioning the existence of God and exploring atheism. My reaction to Left to Tell revealed to me that I was, after all, a theist.

Of course Ilibagiza's faith does not, in and of itself, prove that God exists. The visions that she saw while she was hiding from the machete-wielding gangs may have been figments of her imagination. But, even if she was deluded, it just goes to show how resilient the human spirit can be.

This book has inspired me to be more buoyant in the face of my much smaller challenges and to be more forgiving. It was one of the influences that informed me on my long and winding road towards a cohousing community.

Embracing the work(shop)

2009-01-10T13:34:00.000-08:00

When Tree Bressen led Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community in a consensus decision making workshop in September 2008, she said, "Joining a cohousing community will be the longest and most expensive self development workshop you'll ever do in your life."

She went on to model for us a receptive attitude towards life in an intentional community. That is, when there is a bump in the road, we have the opportunity to treat it like a workshop exercise. We can observe it, ask ourselves what's going on, figure out if there is some learning we can extract from it.

Since Tree introduced that concept to me, I have found it very helpful to approach everything like that. In fact I believe that has contributed enormously to the happiness I described in a previous post.

But, while the saying that Tree quoted was cute, I have come to disagree with it. I now would say that life is the longest and most expensive self development workshop you'll ever do!

Cultivating an attitude of curiosity about my life and everything that happens in it -- whether it's supposedly good or supposedly bad -- has felt very supportive to me.

The dance of life

2009-01-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

One of the skills that Marshall Rosenberg discusses in Nonviolent Communication : A Language of Life is expressing our needs. He states that, in an ideal world, other people should be sensitive to my needs. But, by the same token, I have a responsibility to tell them what my needs are.

In my former life, I was poor at this. Since I have been involved with my cohousing community, I have been practicing it.

At our weekly shareholders' meeting last night, I asked if we could change the meeting from a Thursday night once a month. This was to accommodate my desire to participate in Sacred Circle Dancing at the Unitarian Fellowship.

Even as I was asking my fellow owners of Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community to consider rescheduling, there was a part of me that felt embarrassed. I thought it was a frivolous request. But, to my delight, everyone else treated it like a perfectly valid desire.

It is gratifying to deal with people who are alive and who support my journey. You guys mean more to me than you can imagine.

Everybody Sings

2009-01-08T08:41:00.000-08:00

Since my December 9, 2008 blog post elicited a question, I will provide an update.

Everybody Sings took a recess over Christmas and New Year. We will start up again on Thursday morning, January 15th, 2009.

The weekly session starts at 10.00 a.m. and goes till 12.00 noon, with a short break for tea about half way.

It's held in St Andrew's United Church Hall, at the corner of Fitzwilliam and Wesley Streets, in downtown Nanaimo.

The fee is $7.00 if you drop in. You also have the option of paying $25.00 for four weeks. The fee is reduced to $3.50 for the underwaged.

Another group, in which I have not participated, meets at St Philip's Church, 7113 Lantzville Road, from 7.00 p.m. - 9.00 p.m. on Tuesdays.

You are welcome to e-mail me via my Blogger Profile. If you do so, I can tell you how to get onto the e-mail notification list for Everybody Sings.

I sure am looking forward to singing those toe-tapping songs once again. Everybody Sings operates on the principles of Ubuntu Choirs, and is very informal. You don't have to be able to sing or believe that you can sing in order to join in the fun.

Could you bear to be happy?

2009-01-07T08:10:00.001-08:00

Ever since I moved to Nanaimo, British Columbia in the middle of September 2008, I have been happy -- delectably, deliciously, deliriously happy.

Sure, I've had the occasional test, like the time my vehicle got stuck in the snow on a country road. But even those challenges have turned into blessings. They have brought me into contact with kind people, angels in disguise, whom I otherwise would not have met.

When I first got here, I thought I was going through a honeymoon phase and that it might wear off. Now admittedly, it's still relatively early days for me in Nanaimo. But it is coming up for four months, and -- if anything -- I'm feeling even happier than I did when I arrived.

Some days -- and this has been one of them -- my joy has been so intense that I have found it almost unbearable. I am not accustomed to serving as the container for so much delight.

This has caused me to reflect on my past, when I rarely was as ecstatic as I am now. If sustained happiness could have been handed to me on a platter back then, would I have been receptive to it? Maybe, but then again maybe not.

You may be puzzled by my assertion that I previously could not have tolerated being too happy for too long and the implied extrapolation that many people are the same way. You may be thinking, "Of course I want to be happy. Who wouldn't?"

But just stop and think about it. Could you stand to live in a state of bliss for four months? Never mind that. Could you stand it for four days?

Based on my past performance, I would say I would not have been able to take it. I suspect I was too attached to sadness and fear. They were familiar. I was comfortable being uncomfortable, paradoxical as that may sound.

Having very few breaks from my current state of cheer has been a stretching exercise for me. But, wow, it feels to me like a nice challenge to have.

Listen for the Truth

2009-01-06T08:02:00.001-08:00

This is a follow up to my previous post about people's unmet needs.

When Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community participated in a consensus decision making workshop with Tree Bressen in September 2008, she told us something related to this.

She said that, whenever someone else was talking, it was important to listen for the truth in what they were saying. Again, this was in the context of someone behaving "badly," expressing themselves poorly, being too strident, etc.

Tree said that, in these circumstances, the person often had a gift to offer, even if they were failing to package it attractively. It was our job to find the tiny kernel of truth that was buried deep in the middle of what they shared with us, regardless of how inarticulate they were.

I have found that this has been a valuable practice when someone has been venting. Some of my ranting friends have gifted me with pearls of great wisdom. :-)

Unmet Needs

2009-01-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

One of the nuggets of wisdom I learned from Marshall Rosenberg's book, Nonviolent Communication, is that a person who is behaving badly has a need that is not being met.

When I say a person is behaving "badly," this could mean mildly negative behaviour, like pouting or rolling their eyes at what you're saying. At the other end of the spectrum, it could mean they're holding a knife to your throat.

But, wherever their behaviour is on that continuum, they have an unmet need.

Since I have become aware of this, I have found that it has taken a lot of discipline for me to remember it when someone has been ranting at me. But, wow, it sure improves the outcome of the conversation!

When I have been able to listen to someone and let them finish venting, they eventually have calmed down, and we have gone on to have a rewarding interaction.

Recently my son asked me about the main insights I'd gained from the consensus decision making workshop I'd participated in and my reading of the book on nonviolent communication. I cited the recognition of unmet needs as one of them.

My son then asked, "Well, what has that enabled you to do? Have you recognized what the other person's unmet need is, and what have you been able to do with that information?"

I responded that I had not always been able to recognize what the other person's unmet need was. Sometimes all I had been able to do was say to myself, "S/he is ranting. Therefore s/he has an unmet need."

I told my son that, if nothing else, this helped me to avoid getting caught up in the other person's drama. At a minimum, I was able to stay calm, and listen. This bought me time. I felt that that alone was valuable.

But, later in a conversation, when my initial feeling of defensiveness has quietened down, I often have been able to detect what the other person's unmet need has been. Then I have been able to acknowledge it and, together, we have been able to discuss how the need could be addressed.

My point, though, is that this insight has been valuable to me even when I have failed to recognize exactly what the unmet need has been. Just reminding myself of the existence of the unmet need in itself has been useful.

With that having been said, I do not want to sound as if I am discounting the amount of commitment and self control that are required to implement this strategy. At times, the effort needed to do this is huge.

Touching the Void

2009-01-03T08:59:00.001-08:00

A while ago a friend recommended the above mentioned documentary to me. Somehow I had managed to miss Joe Simpson's popular book of the same title that had been translated into sixteen languages.

My friend said that, while the documentary was faithful to the book, the book's first person account had a different quality to it, and it was worthwhile taking in both of them. Having watched the documentary, I now am half way through the book. I agree that they both are excellent. However, if you have time for only one of them, the movie certainly is a quicker (and still very compelling) way of accessing the information.

In 1985 two young British mountaineers were the first (and so far only) people to summit the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Soon after starting their descent, Joe Simpson broke his leg. This was a virtual death sentence. Nonetheless, his climbing companion, Simon Yates, made the choice not to abandon him but to lower him in stages with the use of a 300-foot rope.

But there came a point at which Joe dropped over an overhang and was dangling in the air. Simon had no choice but to cut the rope and consign Joe to a certain death. The only other option would have been to let gravity pluck them both off the mountain.

Miraculously, Joe's fall did not kill him. His lone struggle to reach help is one of the most gripping accounts in the history of alpine mountaineering.

It just happened that I watched the documentary at a time when I was scared out of my senses by developments in my own life (my financial situation, etc.). The documentary helped me to put my problems into perspective. Frightening as they seemed to me, my challenges were by no means life threatening.

There seemed to be another parallel between Joe's situation and mine. There was no safe way out of his bind. If he was to have the remotest chance of survival, Joe had to embrace even greater danger.

Although my position was nothing like as precarious as Joe's, it sure felt terrifying to me. I felt as if I was plunging into an abyss. Consequently, my friend's recommendation of Touching the Void was very timely.

I am glad I chose to follow my bliss. I don't feel as if I am out of the woods yet. But there is no comparison between the quality of life I am enjoying now and that which I was experiencing while I supposedly was "safe." I am living in such a profoundly different mental and emotional space that I may as well be on another planet.

I used to be such a wuss but, in following my heart, I now have displayed courage. Interestingly enough, the English word, courage, comes from the Old French word, cuer, which means heart.

A poignant New Year's Eve

2009-01-01T17:39:00.000-08:00

Last night I did another volunteer shift at the Emergency Weather Shelter at the First Unitarian Fellowship of Nanaimo.

It felt challenging to me. The behaviour of some of our guests was difficult.

Yet, with that having been said, our guests showed great caring and empathy towards each other. My volunteer stints at the Emergency Weather Shelter have demonstrated to me that homeless people form communities.

Although being homeless seems to be incredibly harsh (I'm sure more than I can begin to imagine), the level of concern and kindness within those communities is humbling.

My fellow volunteers also were inspiring examples of compassion and authenticity.

There is a silver lining to every cloud. The three-week (and counting) spell of severe weather we've experienced in Nanaimo has enriched my life by providing me with unexpected encounters with remarkable people.