EMDR to the Rescue

Tuesday morning at 9 am I was in the classroom standing in front of the students in the Ecovillage Education US course for the first time since learning Sunday afternoon that my marriage was over. In addition to the challenge of admitting in public that I had failed to be the partner my wife wanted and needed, Ma'ikwe is the lead teacher for the course, and I had major ongoing responsibilities as her second-in-command. 

When I woke up Monday morning I had no idea how I was going to pull this off—continuing to actively partner in the training right through the trauma of the breakup of our intimate relationship. Though Ma'ikwe suggested that I take Monday off from being in the classroom (which offer I gratefully accepted), I was still in major distress and wasn't confident I wouldn't break down or otherwise be triggered by being in the same room with her. 

Fortunately, I had an appointment Monday afternoon already set up with the couples counselor that Ma'ikwe and I had been working with, so I took advantage of the timing to get her help. It may have been the best thing I've done in years.

After talking for a few minutes about how I was doing generally—to ascertain how well I was functioning—the counselor suggested we do a session of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) to work with the trauma I was going through. So that's what I did for the next 45 minutes.

EMDR was first developed by psychologist Francine Shapiro in 1989 to help process trauma, under the theory that people can sometimes get stuck in their distress when their normal cognitive and neurological coping mechanisms are overwhelmed. While it was too early to tell if I was stuck (we started our session a mere 24 hours after Ma'ikwe delivered the bad news), there was no question that I had undergone major trauma and the process can help move things along before you get stuck just as well as afterwards.

The basic concept is to give the patient brief periods of sensory stimulation, alternating on one side of the body and then the other. While this can be accomplished in a variety of ways, my counselor gave me hand-held buzzers, one for each hand. 

At the outset, the counselor asked me to focus on the clearest moment of trauma (Ma'ikwe saying the words, "I'm done") and to rate my level of distress on a scale of one to ten. I told her it was an eight. (The only reason the number wasn't higher was because Ma'ikwe had been telling me she was close to ending the marriage for weeks and thus I wasn't taken completely by surprise.)

I was given about two minutes of mild, alternating stimulation while I sat in silence. I could keep my eyes open or closed: it didn't matter. After the buzzing was halted, I was asked to take a deep breath and report anything that came up.

It could be a color, a feeling, a story, a sensation—anything. The counselor listened, perhaps asked a question or two and then asked me to be silent again for another round of stimulation whenever I finished reporting on the previous round. The counselor offered no direction or interpretation—I just went wherever I was drawn to go.

I believe the therapeutic concept is that we all know on a subsconscious level where we need to go in processing trauma, and what will be a productive sequence in which to do it. The therapist merely creates a container, keeps things moving with stimulation to alternative hemispheres of the brain and lets the patient find his/her own way through the maze.

As best I can recall, I went through 10-12 rounds of stimulation and reporting. Sometimes I would be in tears; sometimes I would be calm (accepting); sometimes I would remember a tender moment; sometimes I was angry; sometimes I would tell a story about my father; sometimes I would share an insight... In short, I was all over the map. If the therapist asked where the feeling was centered in my body (which she did about half the time) my answers varied widely. There appeared to be no logic or pattern to where my progression took me, and the counselor never suggested where I "should" go; she just accompanied me on the ride.

At the end, she went back the place where we started (Ma'ikwe saying, "I'm done") and asked me to rate my distress on a scale of one to ten. This time my answer was three or four. Wow! Was I really that far along in processing this awful thing??

To be fair, this was the one and only time I've ever done EMDR. I had never spoken to anyone else about it, and I had no frame of reference for understanding what had happened, how my response measured up to that of others (did I do well?), whether the movement I experienced regarding my trauma was temporary or permanent. All I knew was that I was as much less triggered afterwards than I was at the start. I could now imagine being in the same room with Ma'ikwe—this amazing woman whom I deeply love—and it would be OK.

Frankly, if this wasn't done under the supervision of a trusted therapist, I'd have been much more skeptical about that I was doing legitimate work with grief and loss (as opposed to indulging in some trick that allowed me to skip steps to bypass misery). In fact, if I hadn't experienced it directly, I doubt that the Laird I was Monday morning would have found credible the story that I'm realting today. I just wouldn't have believed it.

My intuitive sense is that I may have processed a month or two of hell in 45 minutes. I'm typing this Thursday morning, and my distress level when I recall "I'm done" remains at around three. That is, there has been no backsliding into the pit so far.

To frame this properly, tears are still close to the surface and I am still sad. I still have work to do. But Ma'ikwe and I have met once to start talking about how to unweave our lives and it went fine, we're now in the classroom together again (I taught all day yesterday with Ma'ikwe in the room and didn't get triggered by her presence or her occasional comments—which were cogent and appropriate, as they almost always are), and we've even hugged a couple times. 

I'm not over her, but neither am I feeling like road kill. I can look at the sadness and not be overwhelmed. I can function and am not wallowing in self pity. I'm going to be OK.

There's a student in the EEUS class named Marita who shared with everyone that whenever she puts out an intention, it always come true—though often it arrives in ways she never imagined. When I married Ma'ikwe back in 2007, my intention was that I be with her until I died. As I stood in front of the class Tuesday morning, I looked at Marita and it suddenly occurred to me that I'd just had a Marita experience: though my heart was still beating, over the weekend a part of me had died. I shared that insight with the class, and they seemed to understand.

While the dissolution of my marriage was definitely not the experience I had intended to have, with the help of loving friends, my caring ex-wife, and the miracle of EMDR, I am no longer dying.

It Is Finished

About an hour ago Ma'ikwe told me she was done. Our marriage is over. 

It was a day I'd hoped to never experience. Ma'ikwe was close to ending it this winter, but stepped back from the brink when she had an initial positive response to our doing couples counseling. Things took a bad turn again in June, and this time we were unable to recover.

While my head knows that I'll survive this, my heart can't imagine it. Right now I feel broken and can hardly believe that I'll ever smile again—much less find the courage (or temerity) to consider trying another intimate relationship. I gave all I had to this partnership and, in the end, it simply wasn't enough. 

I loved Ma'ikwe as deeply as anyone I've ever known, and it wasn't enough. She has made her choice and I wish her the vibrant and joyous future she aspires to and deserves. It just won't be a future with me.

I took my wedding ring off this evening and placed it on the shelf in my bedroom where I keep my memories. Tonight, that's all I have left.

Group Works: Group Culture

This entry continues a series in which I'm exploring concepts encapsulated in a set of 91 cards called Group Works, developed by Tree Bressen, Dave Pollard, and Sue Woehrlin. The deck represents "A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings."

In each blog, I'll examine a single card and what that elicits in me as a professional who works in the field of cooperative group dynamics. My intention in this series is to share what each pattern means to me. I am not suggesting a different ordering or different patterns—I will simply reflect on what the Group Works folks have put together.

The cards have been organized into nine groupings, and I'll tackle them in the order presented in the manual that accompanies the deck:

1. Intention
2. Context
3. Relationship
4. Flow
5. Creativity
6. Perspective
7. Modeling
8. Inquiry & Synthesis
9. Faith

In the Context segment there are eight cards. The fifth pattern in this segment is labeled Group Culture. Here is the image and text from that card:

Groups tend to develop their own culture over time, based on knowledge, beliefs, practices and behaviors their members hold in common. Awareness of shared culture builds trust, cohesion, and a sense of safety among the members, thus furthering collaboration.

I love the image for this card, both because the reflections off the glass in front of the party create an additional sense of motion (which life is often like) and because it's clearly a celebratory meal of the Red Hat Society (that I first wrote about last Dec 18, From Purple to Indigo to Green).

While there's no doubt that groups tend to accrete their own culture over time, the trick of it is to be intentional about that culture rather than just drifting blindly into replicating whatever habits are brought to the group by its pioneers.

This applies to meeting culture, dinner table culture, greeting people on the path culture, whether it's OK to knock on someone's door without an invitation after 8 pm culture, whether you pick up your dog's poop when you take Fido for a walk culture… you name it.

To be fair, a good bit of culture is minor and essentially arbitrary (like shaking with the right hand—so long as your bathroom hygiene ensures that both hands are equally clean—or even whether you shake hands at all instead of, say, head nodding or bowing when you greet someone). That said, if you lack mindfulness there's risk of slipping into us/them culture—such as laughing at inside jokes—that leave baffled those not among the Illuminati.

In a group dynamic this precious culture that reinforces cohesion and trust can be a barrier that's difficult and mysterious for newcomers to penetrate. If you're alert to how this can inadvertently happen, then members can pro-actively step forward to put guests and visitors at ease by explaining group norms and practices (such as whether you're supposed to be silent at the dinner circle and not schmoozing with your neighbor).

What is familiar and comforting to insiders may be off-putting (or even bizarre) to visitors and prospective members. Why not help them out before the newbie puts their foot in it?

• • •

I got into some tension recently when discussing community norms with respect to visitors who expressed serious interest in membership. My view was that we owed them a conversation toward the end of their visit during which we'd inquire whether they were still interested and, if so, we'd give them a read on:
o  How members had responded to them, making note of anything that seemed a concern.
o  Whether we wanted to encourage their potential membership.
o  A likely pathway that would work for us to continue that exploration (such as whether to visit again, when, and for how long), assuming that there was a positive response to the previous question.

Others preferred to leave all that open, so that members could spontaneously encourage prospectives to visit again if they felt so inspired, with the idea that new members tend to work out better if they have one or more champions in the community. If there was no advocate, then the invitation would not be extended and the members would be saved from a potentially awkward conversation where we dashed someone's hopes.

While I think there's truth in the analysis that new members are more likely to work out if they have internal support, I think it's brutal asking visitors who are self-identified member candidates to figure out on their own the subtle signals of whether the existing membership is interested in supporting their candidacy. Putting it on them (after having declared their interest before they arrived) is placing them in an awkward position with no cultural context to help decipher what's happening, and I think we owe them a straight answer.

To be fair, this dynamic is compounded by my often being on the road and therefore not reliably on hand to manage the potentially awkward conversations that I'm advocating. Thus, people who are reluctant to make the commitment may well be the ones who will have to carry it out, and that's not landing well.

Fortunately, part of my community's culture is that we slow things down when we bump up against a clash in values interpretation like this. We keep breathing, keep talking, and keep believing that we'll eventually find an approach that all can accept. That's the part of group culture that I like best—even if no one has a red hat.

Pedagogical Choices

I'm now immersed in the 37-day Ecovillage Education US course. It started July 5 and will run through Aug 11.

In addition to being a teacher for a number of the topics in the Social and Economic dimensions of the training, I have responsibility (along with my partner, Ma'ikwe, who is the lead teacher for this course) for helping to integrate what's being taught. Many of the teachers will not know what others have presented, and it will be up to Ma'ikwe and me to help weave the connections between sessions.

Quandry #1
Teachers develop their own flow and style. At least some of he time, that won't be the same as mine. Thus, there is a potential cost to my stepping in and interrupting their rhythm, and that needs to be weighed when I consider whether the point I have in mind making is sufficiently worthwhile. Tricky.

The comments I might make are of two general kinds: a) an amplification or more nuanced observation about what is being discussed; or b) an integrating comment, tying what was just said to what has been said before, which the teacher may or may not be aware of.

In general, I'm more willing to insist on the latter (which is likely to be missed if I don't speak up) than the former (which is more a question of style—that is, it isn't always obvious that my framing will be any better than the teacher's, or that my ancillary point is that edifying).

Quandry #2
There is a lively conversation among the teachers as to what constitutes effective pedagogy. While the prime directive is what is effective for the student, the answer is surprisingly complex.

Here are some of the nuances: 

 o  People have different dominant learning styles
While I don't know if this list is complete, I've found it useful to think in terms of three main ways people take in and digest information: aural, visual, and kinesthetic.

Of these, the default mode is aural, where hearing is the main input channel. In the context of meetings you rarely need to worry about this because speaking aloud is one of the main ways we communicate (though I don't want this glib statement to slide by the rich field of body language and facial expressions unnoticed).

With modest attention, it's typically not that hard to provide visual reinforcement for what's happening aloud. That includes posted agendas, scribed highlights of conversations, draft agreements written on a whiteboard, etc. Beyond that, it can be surprisingly helpful to have graphics that help evoke and maintain a productive attitude or mood relative to the topic at hand. Be creative!

The poor stepchild in this trio of learning modes is the kinesthetic, or body knowing. Some people work best through grounding information in their bodies, and the way most meetings are run means that little is offered in their comfort zone. To the extent that groups are aware of this need, it most commonly surfaces in the form of energy or stretch breaks, rather than developing movement options that solicit and massage information germane to the issue at hand. It can be done, but it's a rare facilitator (or teacher) who is savvy to the techniques and the potential that can be unlocked by employing them.

All of that said, the key concept is grokking the need to mix it up, so that you are not always relying on the same teaching techniques. Students benefit from variety and there is no single approach that works best all the time. As an evaluator, I'm coming face-to-face with the question of how to fairly assess the effectiveness of teaching techniques that I don't use much.

o  People have different paces at which they process informationOne the factors that needs to be taken into account when deciding what teaching style to employ (more on that below) is how much time it allows students to assimilate and process what's been presented. Not everyone proceeds at the same rate, which is not a question of inherent intelligence or ability to grasp complexities.

A more modest version of this question surfaces in the mundane matter of when to call a break. In general, 90 minutes is a serviceable upper limit, though kinesthetic learners will need them more frequently if there's been no movement, and people will run out of gas sooner if they've been working hard emotionally. Going the other way, an examination that's been uplifting or energizing can be parlayed into extended play.

o  People respond to the environment differently
—Diurnal cycles
Some people love mornings and are pretty much toast after dinner. Others don't hit their stride until the sun is west of the yardarm, and good until midnight. In our training, we meet every morning (except Fridays) and all evenings are free time. While that's not an unusual schedule, it clearer favors the chicken end of the diurnal spectrum: up at first light, and in bed by dark.

—Climate change
The context of the training is that it's happening in Missouri, smack in the midst of summer. That means a hot and muggy ambience. While our student from southern Indiana is doing just fine; the one who came from Oregon is sweltering and struggling to get enough sleep.

—Acclimating to community
In addition to the temperature and humidity, a number of the students are new to community and are experiencing culture shock. How should they greet residents on the path? Is it OK to swim in the pond au naturale? Do people drink coffee (and who do I have to bribe to get a cup)? When all of the teaching staff lives in community, we tend to forget how disorienting it can be to encounter it for the first time.

—Fan noise
I'm not talking about too much cheering (or jeering) when someone's at the free throw line; I'm taking about how hard it can be to hear someone's heartfelt statement with an air conditioner or ceiling fan whirring in the background. We have a handful of students who are naturally soft-spoken and it can be a delicate matter asking some to speak up when sharing a personal tragedy that you didn't quite catch.
 o  Teaching formats
While there is a rich array of choices in this rgeard, let me walk through four basic choices:

—Small groups (emphasizing student-derived input)
While this tends to take longer to generate useful product (which also tends to be less profound), and limits sharply how much you can cover, it generally results in solid buy-in, and rarely results in anyone falling asleep.

—Group discussion
This is more engaging than a lecture, and less diffuse than small group work. It can, however, take considerable skill to draw out the points the teacher wants to emphasize.

—Storytelling
This can be riveting (if you select powerful stories that are on point), yet is slower and less direct than lecture and only involves the students to the extent that they can place themselves in the story.

—Lecture
You can cover a lot of ground; yet this is the most tenuous format when it comes to rapport with students. This approach can be highly effective with students who have sufficient familiarity with the territory and the motivation to learn the topic, yet you cannot count on that condition.

—Focus on problems or assets?
One school of pedagogy is that it's better to build on what works (generating and maintaining a more positive atmosphere); another is that it's more effective to focus on issues such that breakthroughs lead to an immediate sense of accomplishment. Which way to go?

In short, it's a puzzlement.

The Write Stuff 2.0

A couple days ago it arose in my consciousness that I had something to say about writing, and I hit upon (what I thought was) a clever title, The Write Stuff. Then it occurred to me that I may have already used it, and I'll be damned if I hadn't. I employed it almost four years ago, for my July 20, 2009 blog (on the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's moon walk). Oops. At least I caught myself in time to label this entry as a sequel.

• • •

As a process consultant and as FIC's main administrator, I see a near-constant flow of emails, reports, proposals, and monographs. Over the years I've developed enduring respect for the power of clear and concise writing to inspire, to bring people together, and to be a record of the moment.

As someone who labors diligently to be an effective writer, I'm aware of the benefit that clients get from my ability to pathfind a solution to a knotty issue and then to write it up before I go to bed. (I can hardly count how many times I've seen genuine agreement slip away for lack of its being clearly captured in writing while the energy was aligned. It is a dangerous practice to rely solely on memory and oral tradition to see you through.)

As near as I can tell, public education is not doing a good job of teaching students to write well, nor is it developing in students a good attitude about learning to write. While I don't have a sense of whether teachers themselves are below-average writers, it's not hard to speculate on why students are getting so little practice at such a basic skill (it is, after all, one of the three R's—reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic—even if you have to butcher the spelling in order to force the mnemonic): classes are too large for teachers who are underpaid. 

Under pressure of time, it must be all but irresistible for instructors to reach for true/false or multiple choice options for tests and homework assignments, rather than using essay questions, which require much more time and thoughtful analysis to review. With lack of practice or encouragement in school, youngsters are left with parental guidance or individual initiative as a source of motivation to develop their writing muscles. It doesn't appear to me that it's enough.

The Demise of the Art of the Letter
Making matters worse, today's young are overwhelmingly immersed in communicating via mobile devices, instant messaging, and social media, where the breeziness of Facebook stands out as spacious and loquacious when set aside the 140-character hard limit of Twitter and what people can accomplish with thumbs via texting on their smart phones—where the emphasis is on acronyms (WTF?), abbreviations, and sentence fragments that make a joke out of the concept of syntax. 

When email caught on as a major form of communication in the early '90s, it led to a standard of briefer and less carefully created messages, undercutting epistolary skills. With the surging dominance of mobile devices, attention spans are shorter and so is the average length of messages and the amount of care that goes into crafting them. Who writes letters any more?

Who works at writing clearly today? It's not as if the need is disappearing; just the practice of it.

Dissecting the Craft
Writing is not a single monolithic skill, any more than facilitation is. There are several components, and a person can be good at one and not so hot at another:

—Conceptualization
This is the ability to present main ideas in an understandable sequence, so that the reader can see the forest and not get lost in the trees.
 
—Evocative phrasing
This is part creativity (so that the melody will stand out and be memorable); part composition (so that the images and concepts flow); and partly word choice (so that your meaning is precise). Good writing entertains and engages, not merely elucidates and edifies.

—Copy editing 
To be fair, English is a brutally complicated language with spelling and grammar as complex as Balkan politics or voting rules in Florida. While it's not easy to master all the nuances and the ultimate test is clarity—not how well you colored between the lines—inconsistencies, sloppy punctuation, and poor word choice all erode meaning. 

—Matching tone with context
The extent to which you slant your composition toward the formal and away from the colloquial depends partly on the medium and partly on the audience. There are different standards for blogs than for scientific magazines; a speech written to be delivered before the House of Commons will be structured differently than a sketch to be performed before a live audience at the House of Comedy Theater.

—Lean of expression 
How concisely can you make your point(s) without compromise of clarity or depth? If brevity is the soul of wit, how funny are you?

Bombs Bursting in Air

Today is a national holiday, celebrating the 237th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While there won't be mail service and we can expect more noise and bursts of bright light in the night sky than usual, my attention is mainly focused on my marriage and a 37-day educational adventure that starts tomorrow, for which I'm serving as Ma'ikwe's main assistant on the teaching side.

Tomorrow starts the Ecovillage Education course at Dancing Rabbit. We have 10 students (which was the magic number that we'd established in January as our must-have minimum to produce the course; below that the budget doesn't work), including six from the US (Josi, Ted, David, Natalia, Erin, and Fiona) and one each from Canada (Miguel), South Korea (Myung), India (Manasi), and Australia (Marita). 

[Alliterative aside: Interestingly, the last member of the matriculation pool to drop out (because he was unable to manifest the money) was Medoune, a male from Senegal—which mentioning makes possible the metaphysical observation that we have mainly been a magnet for foreign students whose monikers begin with "M." What do you suppose it might mean? Meditating on this for a moment, my mischievous mind suggests a mystical connection between the year (2013) and M being the 13th letter in the alphabet. Mmm, maybe.]

For Ma'ikwe this is big: she has dreamed of doing the course at Dancing Rabbit ever since she joined in 2008 (right on the heels of her participation as a member of the four-person organizing and teaching team in Albuquerque that first delivered the full Global Ecovillage Network's Ecovillage Design Education curriculum in the United States).

While we tried to get this going last summer, we only had four students register by late May and reluctantly we had to cancel the course. This year we made it!

Understandably, in the last week both Ma'ikwe and I have been devoting an increasing fraction of our attention to preparations for the course. While exciting, working out last-minute details has also been frictional, exposing ongoing concerns Ma'ikwe has with me as her partner.

In particular, I failed to meet deadlines she set for when teachers were asked to turn in course outlines and handouts. By not respecting her guidelines I squeezed the time she had available to review materials and make adjustments. She was not happy. Instead of the final prep week being a buoyant time for us a teaching couple, Ma'ikwe was experiencing me as a sea anchor. 

While that wasn't good, it got worse. After we got snarky with each other about my being disrespectful about deadlines, another challenging pattern of mine emerged. Here's how Ma'ikwe describes it:

M: "I don't like that you did X."
L: (hears X plus mentally adds on top of X "she thinks I'm not good enough" = L experiences M's feedback as a much bigger problem than just X; L's sincere attempt to reflect back feels exaggerated or overamped or universalized to M and sounds something like): "You just said you hate working with me," or "You're saying I never do it right," or some other globalized catastrophe.
M: "That's not what I said."
L: "That's what it sounded like. I think that's what you meant."
M: Grrrr... (feels discouraged to bring anything up)

On the one hand, this is an unfortunately accurate description of the pattern (because this isn't a helpful thing that I do). On the other hand, it's a fortunately accurate description (because we can agree on what's happening and because it excited our therapist when she heard about it).

On the conscious level, the good thing I think I'm doing is being diligent about not dismissing critical feedback just because it's uncomfortable. Instead, I tend to dive in and explore how bad it can be. After a time (which used to be days, but with Ma'ikwe's help has now more commonly been shortened to hours, or even minutes), I emerge from the dark side of the moon with a sense of what I can own and what I can do about it. Mind you, I'm not saying I'm always brilliant at this; just that I always come back into the light.

However, even if you agree that there may be a useful side to my pattern (and maybe you don't), there is also an unhelpful side which Ma'ikwe's generic dialog above captures pretty well: my reactivity and exaggerated responses tend to undercut a person's willingness to give me feedback (why bother if I'm just going distort it and use it as a flail?). And when that person is my wife, it's a real problem. 

Essentially, I have a deep groove within me that automatically translates non-trivial feedback into "I'm not good enough." Having been in the presence of this pattern for seven years now, Ma'ikwe has learned to be careful about playing her cards when it comes to giving me feedback. It takes a build-up of steam to trigger her pressure relief valve, which point was reached last Saturday. Then, once the valve has been opened, all kinds of stuff comes spewing out. 

While I experienced this cascade of problems as overwhelming evidence of my unworthiness, our therapist (who we saw on Tuesday) heard something else that totally took me by surprise. She heard Ma'ikwe's complaints as a request for more of me, rather than pushing me away and judging me as unworthy. Wow! I never saw that coming. 

While it's still possible that Ma'ikwe may decide I'm not worth the effort, she's continuing to give me a chance to make meaningful progress on this debilitating pattern. Part of that work will be done by me alone; part will be done by my working with our therapist; and part will be done together (with and without the therapist).

As we're about to embark on a 37-day journey together as teachers and partners, Ma'ikwe painted this picture for me of the request that underlays the anguish in her critical feedback:

What I want more of is the guy I have fun with, and the ways you contribute to my life, whether that is getting projects done, sex, or your simple presence. I want more of our really positive creative juice in teaching and contributing to the world. I also want a deeper sense that we are in our lives together, rather than operating mostly in separate domains and then coming back and reporting on our lives out there. I want more of a sense of making decisions together, and just having more time together period. 

While I doubt I could have ever found my way to that translation on my own, it's enormously helpful for me to hold onto as a buoy in stormy seas. It's the message I want to rely on as my mantra whenever there are bombs bursting in air—even if I'm the one who lit the fuse.

I don't expect there to be anything dull about the next 37 days.

The Peace Bridge

In the summer of 1927, a mile-long steel bridge was opened spanning the Niagara River, connecting Buffalo, New York and Fort Erie, Ontario—about 20 klicks upriver from Niagara Falls. Commemorating the achievement of 100 years of (mostly) cordial relationships between the the US and Canada, this structure was dubbed the Peace Bridge.

Building on that heritage 86 years later, I want to celebrate a new partnership between the Fellowship for Intentional Community (the US-based nonprofit for which I serve as Executive Secretary) and the Tamarack Institute (dedicated to eliminating poverty in Canada). Think of it as a virtual peace bridge.

Our partnership with the Tamarack Institute started with a couple of phones calls in the spring of 2012, and ultimately led to their sponsorship of the summer 2013 issue of Communities magazine, on the theme of Community Wisdom for Everyday Life. It was a good fit for Tamarack because they’ve come to appreciate that you cannot end poverty without the engagement of healthy communities, and Communities magazine accepts as a central part of its editorial mission chronicling what is being learned about how to build and sustain vibrant communities. (It’s not accidental that the subtitle on our masthead is Life in Cooperative Culture.)

It was a good fit for FIC because part of our mission (since 2005) has been Creating Community Where You Are, taking what is being learned in the crucible of intentional community about how groups can function well, and making that available to the widest possible audience. We realize that the number of people hungry for more community in their life—a greater sense of connection, safety, and belonging—is vastly larger than the number of people interested in jointly owning property with others to create intentional communities.

As a lever for social change, the impact of the intentional communities movement will not be so much about how many people live in them, as how many people are able to lead better, more connected lives inspired by what intentional communities have pioneered about sharing and manifesting a high-quality life that isn’t founded on the bedrock of material acquisition (he who has the most toys wins).

1,000 Conversations of Light

In pursuit of their mission to end poverty, Tamarack has conceived of a national effort to promote community. They reason that if they can advance caring about one’s neighbors, that’s the key to gaining a purchase on eradicating poverty. In line with that they have launched a three-year Seeking Community campaign to host 1,000 conversations across Canada on the topic, “What are we learning about being in community?”* Think of it as dialog about how to move toward the light of cooperation, and away from the darkness of isolation and alienation.

The point of these conversations will be to enjoy each other, to care for one another, and to work together for a better world. To the extent possible Tamarack will record the conversations and make them available on their website. As the results come in, they will sift through the recordings to identify themes and lessons that can be distilled into guidance about what people want and what’s been successful in manifesting it. The concept that undergirds this initiative is the radical notion that people already know what they want, leaders just have to pay attention and help midwife its arrival. Community, after all, is something we do together; not something we do to or for others.

Inspired by the synergy of our collaboration on the summer 2013 issue of Communities, Tamarack and FIC have decided to double down and do a second joint issue next year. On Tamarack’s part they’ll help put together a set of articles for our fall 2014 issue based on what emerges from the recorded conversations.

On the Fellowship’s part, we’re inviting our constituency to join the party and host conversations as well (it doesn’t matter whether you’re Canadian; everyone needs community). If you’re inspired to play along at home—and I hope you are—ask friends and neighbors (which, by the way, are not meant to be mutually exclusive groups) to join you for an afternoon or evening of conversation about community.

Here's a template of questions to consider posing (feel free to use whichever of these inspire you, or to make up your own—this is a participatory sport; not a test to see how well you can follow instructions):

After introductions you might ask:

—What has been a memorable experience of community in your life?

—What does community mean to you?

—Why is community important to you now?

—Where do you experience community today?

—If you’ve ever had a negative experience of community, please describe it.

—What would deepening your experience of community look like?

Toward the end of the session, you might ask:

—What did you hear today that stood out for you?

—What were the new ideas or perspectives that you heard?

—What ideas and feelings resonated with the whole group; what themes emerged from the conversation?

—Are you interested in continuing this exploration of community?

—Are they any specific actions you’re inspired to take based on what happened in this conversation?

If you can swing it, I encourage you to record your session and send the results to Tamarack. Who knows, maybe you’ll see something from your group quoted in Communities a year from now.

While it’s rare for a single voice to be strong enough to change the world, I believe that collectively our voices will be substantial enough to bridge from where we are today, all the way to Peace.