Dia de los Muertos 2021

In the spirit of the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos I am pausing to reflect on three souls who dedicated their lives to community, who touched me in their transit across the firmament, and whose brightness dipped below the horizon in the last 12 months:

Linda Joseph • passed May 31 (age 68 )

Although Linda and I were of a similar age and shared a burning desire to promote community, our paths were mostly parallel rather than intersecting. She invested in the ENA (Ecovillage Network of the Americas, a subsidiary of the Global Ecovillage Network) while I sailed under the flag of the FIC. While FIC focused on intentional communities of all stripes in North America, ENA focused on hemispheric connections that emphasized ecological values. While I lived at Sandhill Farm, a homesteading community in northeast Missouri, Linda pioneered EarthArt Village in the high plains of southern CO. Both of us lived in rural communities dedicated to exploring self-sufficiency and resource conservation (think downwardly mobile).

Linda served as a commissioner in Saguache County (2007-15), and was steadfast in her support of GEN and GEN-US (a splinter network from ENA after the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries calved off from ENA circa 2012.

Linda and I had a number of interactions during 2013-15, when there were active conversations about whether it made sense for FIC to assume GEN-US' portfolio, or to continue as two separate organizations. While we ultimately decided not to interweave, it was fruitful to discuss mission and identity, and Linda was very much in the thick of things.

Stan Hildebrand • passed Aug 30 (age 75)

Stan was my long-term fellow traveler at Sandhill Farm, where we lived together for 35 years (1979-2014). I have honored him previously in my blog post of Aug 30, Hildebrand Elegy.

Pat Murphy • passed Oct 1 (age 82)

I first became aware of Pat in the early '90s, when FIC held its fall organizational meetings at the Lama Foundation (San Cristobal NM) and they were attended by Faith Morgan, a third-generation community person whose parents raised her at The Vale in Yellow Springs OH. Faith had married Pat and moved to California to be with him and assist with a tech venture company that Pat had launched.

Eventually the company was sold and the two of them relocated to Yellow Springs, where they could care for Jane (Faith's mother) toward the end of her life, and they became active members of The Vale community (established in 1960). While there, they took over from Jane the management of Community Service, a network organization launched by Faith's grandfather, Arthur Morgan, in 1940. Under Faith and Pat's stewardship, Community Service redefined its mission from a focus on small community to one on Peak Oil and what Pat styled "Plan C," by which he meant community as a solution to society's main challenges. In the process they tweaked the name to become Community Solutions. Pat wrote books and articles while Faith did videos, notably The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil and The Passive House Revolution.

This dynamic marriage continued its leadership at Community Solutions until 2015, when Susan Jennings replaced them as Executive Director and the name was changed yet again to its current incarnation: the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions.

• • •

Farewell to you three, one and all. I salute your lifetime of service to making a better world.

Hildebrand Elegy

Stan Hildebrand died this morning at a Kansas City hospital. He was 75. He had been in pain for a while, battling a peptic ulcer, and his body just gave out.

Stan and I journeyed through life together as fellow members of Sandhill Farm for 35 years, and I'm taking time today to recall this special person, who was forever curious and adventurous.

Stan first visited Sandhill in the summer of 1979. He had hitched to the community one summer afternoon, arriving unannounced. From that inauspicious beginning (dropping in at communities is considered poor etiquette) things improved greatly. I was the only one home when he walked up the gravel road, and it wasn't long before he was helping me dig postholes and install fence posts for pasturing our milk cow. It was the start of a relationship centered around farming and building community that endured for half my life.

We were an unlikely pair in that we came to our confluence from completely different paths. He grew up as the eldest son of Jake & Alma, a Mennonite farming family in the Red River Valley of southern Manitoba, near Halbstadt. I grew up the son of Val and Bob, in the Republican suburbs of Chicago. We both were acorns who walked away from the conservative trees from which we fell, to explore the world with fresh eyes, nurturing a root interest in trying to make a positive difference in a world that was largely going to hell in an adversarial, competitive handcart.

Stan quickly established himself as Sandhill's farmer, and taught himself to become an expert in the homestead manufacture of sorghum syrup—the community's main agricultural cash crop. After a number of years struggling to make ends meet solely through food production, he and I stabilized the community's income through value-based outside work. While I was an administrator for the Fellowship for Intentional Community and offered my services as a facilitator and trainer in cooperative group process, Stan became an independent organic inspector.

I have deep memories of working the fields before dawn on summer days to hoe out in-the-row weeds from our fields of sorghum, corn, and beans. As organic farmers our herbicides were attached at our wrists. While a field cultivator would do a decent job of removing weeds between rows, we had no mechanical advantage for removing weeds in the row (excepting what we could effect with a rotary hoe if conditions were right). 

That meant early morning trips to the fields in July and August (to beat the heat) and walking the rows to remove foxtail, purslane, bindweed, velvetleaf, and cocklebur, one plant at a time. While progress could be excruciatingly slow working alone, it was a social occasion when you did it as a team. Stan was most often the one who organized the weeding parties.

Trial by Fire

Sandhill first made sorghum in 1977—two years before Stan arrived on the scene—and it was the community's signature crop until a couple years ago. Over the course of more than three decades we overhauled our cooking process twice, always guided by Stan's insatiable hunger for making a better product.

Each fall, harvest would begin somewhere around the autumnal equinox and extend two or three weeks into October—until we either ran out of cane, or ran out of weather, as the syrup would be ruined by a hard freeze. In the early years, we cooked sorghum by the batch method, where one body of raw juice would be boiled down to a finished state in one go. In a typical 36-hour period we might cook 500 gallons of juice nonstop—in several batches, one after the other—to yield 6o gallons of salable syrup.

When we were in full tilt production, cooks had to stay up through the night every other day to stay ahead of the field work. During those intensive stretches, Stan and I would often take turns being the person who covered the graveyard shifts from midnight to dawn—mesmerized by the flames of the wood fires, and the sweet smell of the softly popping syrup as it gradually thickened. Even though we weren't awake at the same time, we were bonded by the work—generating a quarter of the community's income in three weeks.

I cherished partnering with Stan as a long-term member of Sandhill—as someone who joined with me to create and sustain an open attitude toward new members. Often there would be pressure from newer members to be more selective about additional people joining the group (the pattern, which I've encountered repeatedly in my work with intentional communities, is that the last ones to arrive have a tendency to want to close the door) and Stan was my steadfast ally in resisting the urge to pull up the welcome mat for the newest immigrants.

Stan and I had different personalities, and different sensibilities, but the dream of community and a strong belief in the basic goodness of people burned brightly in us both. I will be eternally grateful to have had him as a partner in building an open-hearted community.

Extended Family

In addition to being community members together, my life with Stan was more closely woven together by his becoming a second father to my son, Ceilee.

Ceilee, was born to Ann and me in 1981. Shortly after the birth, Ann and I broke up as an intimate couple and Stan got together with Ann. For the next 18 years, all of us—Stan, Ann, Ceilee, and me—lived together at Sandhill and Ceilee effectively had three parents. While that wasn't something I was particularly looking for, it worked well. I never felt threatened by Stan (he didn't try to replace me as Ceilee's father), and it was a bonus for Ceilee.

It's All in a Name

Stan had many nicknames at Sandhill, but the one that stuck the most was "Pooch," which had a convoluted etymology. Before coming to Sandhill, Stan was in a relationship with Sandy and the two of them experimented with community homesteading in Guatemala for three years in the early '70s (Tierra del Ensueño). During that time Sandy took to calling him Poophead—later altered to Poopsie—lampooning his grumpier side when the two of them were struggling in the highlands of Central America. Sandy shared this history with us (she tried living at Sandhill also but didn't stayed long), and Poopsie became his moniker.

When Shining arrived as the second child born at Sandhill, half a year after Ceilee, she had trouble saying Poopsie. It came out more like "Pooshie" which later got shortened to "Pooch." For reasons that will forever be obscure to me, that corruption of a small child's temporary mispronunciation stuck, and it's still the name I use to evoke Stan today. (Another thing that Stan and I shared was an appreciation for whimsy and life's oddities.)

All of that said, by any name Pooch, I'll miss you.

Día de los Muertos 2015

This is my annual post, taking a moment to remember people impactful in my life who have passed away in the last 12 months. I enjoy this seasonal ritual far more than an orgy of candy consumption.

Mildred Gordon (Jan 4)
While I wrote a eulogy to Mildred when she died 10 months ago (Mildred Gordon Crosses the Bar at 92), I'm happy to salute her again here. She was one of my two main mentors in my work as a process consultant, and special to me for her efforts to integrate the rational and the emotional—something this culture tends to do badly.

Mildred worked with others in one of two ways:

a) One-on-one (or one-on-two in the case of couples), where she'd be more flexible and patient in helping people find their way through conflicted thoughts and feelings. She was adept at saying things in multiple ways, so if her first approach didn't work, she'd simply try another. For example, if a direct exploration didn't land she might try a role play. Her door was always open for community members seeking advice.

b) In open group discussion, where she was the facilitator and impresario. In this role she was more directive, and would often pause to make a teaching point. While anyone could speak and raise a concern, she would never relinquish control of the conversation. It was a weakness that she couldn't share the center spotlight.

Her stamina was legendary, willing the group to remain with her through the examination of dynamics—sometimes for hours.

One the things I admired most in Mildred was her ability to speak plainly and to convey difficult concepts in easily understood words and metaphors.

Though Mildred tended to be obsessed with the possibility of dying young (as many others in her bloodline had), she reached the exalted age of 92 and enjoyed life in full measure.

Marshall Rosenberg (Feb 7)
While I never met the man, I read his book and listened to his audio tapes, and his seminal work on Nonviolent Communication (NVC) pervades the field of cooperative group dynamics. 

One of my consistent messages to groups is that they need a way to recognize and work constructively with conflict—that not having any agreements in this regard doesn't work. Once groups recognize the need, NVC is one of the most common choices made about how to proceed. Partly its appeal is its gentle language; partly it's because trainers are everywhere, so it's easy to get support.

While I approach conflict somewhat differently than Marshall, you have to tip your hat to someone who's body of work has become so widely known.

Bigger than life, Marshall's work was successful enough that it suffered from getting codified and ossified (which is probably an inevitable consequence of success), with practitioners latching onto the structure instead of the underlying compassion, with the unintended result that "certified" teachers were applying an NVC formula regardless of the audience or the application—to the point where sometimes expressions of anguish were being discounted because they we're not delivered as proper "I" statements. I can only imagine that this was painful for Marshall to observe.

Still, you have to love a man who devoted his life to the active pursuit of peace, and who sought out conflicted dynamics in which to insert the balm of his approach.

Marshall was 80 when he died.

Alma Hildebrand (Feb 13)
Alma was the mother of my friend and long-time fellow Sandhill member, Stan Hildebrand. In all the 40 years I lived at Sandhill, Stan was the person who lived there with me the longest: 34 years.

Over those decades, his parents, Jake and Alma, came to visit a number of times. When Jake's health failed to the point where he could no longer travel, they stopped coming. Yet Stan would religiously head north to Manitoba in early Dec, both to miss the Xmas craziness and to celebrate Alma's birthday, Dec 4.

Alma and Jake were Mennonites and Stan was their eldest son. They were farmers in the Red River Valley (that forms the border between Minnesota and North Dakota, and flows north into Lake Winnipeg). The homemade meat grinder that Sandhill uses during deer season was donated to us by Jake and Alma, and we always enjoyed the connection of both being farm families: there's was traditional and ours was new age, but the carrots and chickens couldn't tell the difference.

After Jake died, Alma moved to an assisted living facility in nearby Altona. Fun loving and social, Alma always had a jigsaw puzzle going or wanted to play cards (canasta and Uno were equally big).

I can only imagine that they have multiple deck cards games in heaven, too, and that Alma is playing still. She was 92.