Giving and Receiving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another part of the story is my aspiration to be what Robert Greenleaf styled, a "servant leader." By foregoing many of the privileged trappings of power, I believe I can be a more effective as a social change agent. I'm sure that this is true, mind you, but it's how I think and it's little enough to make the experiment.

• • •

About 15 years ago I was visiting a community on the East Coast and fresh, homemade chocolate chip cookies were offered for dessert one evening. Toll house cookies are about my favorite, and I happily snarfed up a couple as soon as they came out of the oven. After I'd eaten dinner, I eagerly went back for more cookies. Halfway back to my seat I was upbraided by a community member for being a pig—what was I doing taking seconds before everyone had had firsts; how could I be so rude?

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

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

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

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

Post-Harvest Exhalation

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

It's life on the farm.

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

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

I'm in Colorado this week, gathered with five compatriots who together with me comprise the half dozen principals of Green Eggs (Guild for Relational Economics: Experts in Neighborly & Entrepreneurial Growth that is Green & Sustainable). This consortium is exploring whether we have a viable business specializing in services that marry healthy economics with cooperative dynamics. [See my blog of July 26, 2009 for more on Green Eggs.] It's a great group, and we're optimistic that some of our creativity will translate into income streams—both for our clients and for us.

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

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

Sandhill's Demographic Transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

These challenges notwithstanding, I'm optimistic about what's ahead. We offer new members a community with built facilities, no debt, and established income streams. We're living in the midst of a three-community neighborhood that's thriving, have good local relations, and abundant gardens with topsoil we've been amending and nurturing since the day we first arrived in 1974. (As far as I'm concerned, healthy topsoil is better than money in the bank.)

• • •

Käthe & Michael's leave-taking seems propitious. They're departing on good terms to a new life adventure that they're eagerly awaiting. Simultaneously, Sandhill will be turning a page, and opening a new chapter in its future, seeing if it can reinvent itself. It should be interesting times all around.

The Time Zone Traveler's Wife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Audrey. Thank you, Henry. And thank you, Ma'ikwe.

Sounds of Silence, Part Two: Silence on the Road to Speaking

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

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

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

Step 1: What Do I Think (or Feel)?
A person's response to an occurrence, or to a comment or revelation is not always automatic (thank goodness). Sometimes a person needs to roll it over, let it sink in, or chew on it before knowing their mind (or knowing the response in their belly). There are times when this can take hours or even days, depending on how familiar or scary the territory is, and how high the stakes run.

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

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

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

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

Step 3: What Should I Say Now?
Maybe you're response is off topic. Maybe you'd like to share at this level, but your audience isn't there yet. Maybe there's not sufficient trust to reveal your response. Maybe the right people aren't in the room.

• • •

This outlines one strain of why people are silent—even when that's not their intent, and they're hoping to break through. It can be a reason why it's good that people are silent (rather than blurting out the first thing that pops into their head). Of course, if you're on the receiving end of the silence, it may not be apparent that this is what's going on. You may be imagining much less productive possibilities.

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

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

The Bag Ladies (and Gentlemen) of St Louis

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

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

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

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

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

I've been doing fairs for more than 30 years (which translates roughly to 100 events), and that has never occurred before. In fact, we are so used to the request that we stockpile all the plastic bags that inevitably accompany our mainstream purchases during the year just so that we'll be able to reuse them during the fall fair season. Yesterday I had a large supply of recycled plastic tote sacks on hand, and I didn't use a single one of them. True, two people accepted an empty cardboard box to hold their booty, but nobody wanted plastic. I think there's hope.

• • •

I have one more story about the fair. We were given the option to have our booth fee waived if we committed to giving a public talk during the event, and I jumped right on it. Cornelia asked me to talk about intentional community for 15-20 minutes, which is something I can more or less do in my sleep. As it turned out, my turn at the mic followed a discourse on vermiculture. While the "crowd" for my talk (encouraged by public announcements and a ring of straw bales placed suggestively around the stage) barely outnumbered the media recording it, I'm pleased to say that I easily outdrew the worm lecture.

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

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

Sounds of Silence, Part One: Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As you might imagine, more than one of these feelings may be in play at the same time, greatly complicating the diagnosis.

• • •

Even if you assume that I've fully delineated the main reasons for people being silent in conversation (which I doubt) and I've convinced you that it's complicated, it's actually much worse, because many of these meanings can be combined. Talk about a hair ball!

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

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