Early Valentine

I know it's not yet Feb 14, but I had time on the train yesterday to think about all the ways I appreciate my partner, and it seemed a good time articulate them. Here's what I came up with:

o You like being held
o You're willing to talk about anything
o You're highly articulate about what's going on with you
o You hang in there when I'm struggling
o You have a goofy & playful side
o You live a happy life on a frugal budget
o You're a terrific training partner & a skilled facilitator
o You're willing to read my writing and offer constructive criticism
o You're a good cook and do at least half the cooking when we're together
o You have a positive attitude, all the more impressive in that you're more or less in constant physical pain
o You're not a fearful person
o You're a good administrator
o You're a competent organizer
o You're willing to try new things
o You're a good mother
o You try to integrate everything what happens in your life
o You try to make our partnership work
o You can match my bigness and are not swamped by me
o You have a solid public presence
o You don't build your life around me
o You like hot springs
o You enjoy dining out and a variety of cuisines
o You don't get upset when I eat fish
o You sometimes play games with me, including crosswords & acrostics
o You make sure there's coffee and half & half in your kitchen

Ma'ikwe has been struggling lately with how critical I am, and how worn down she feels being around my dance with perfectionism (see Enneagram 1). It seemed a good time to step back and focus on the other side of the coin.

Treating Social Arteriosclerosis

People mainly come to community seeking relationship and connection. What happens when those hopes and aspirations fall short?

I recently witnessed a set of meetings where veteran community members painfully unpacked some of this. Sandy & Chris talked about feeling hurt when Dale chose to continue playing music on the porch instead of coming to the dinner circle on time—that disrespected the hours that the cook had devoted to preparing a group meal. Dale spoke about how hard it was as a new member hearing Sandy and others laughing and having a good time in Sandy's room while Dale was left out. Chris had a story about feeling excluded when Dale and friends were packed onto a couch giggling and there was no room for one more.

The poignancy of these stories is that it's relatively easy to put yourself into either position in all them: times when we've been among the subgroup connecting and having fun; times when we've been the person on the outside looking in; times when we've been irritated by others opting out of a connecting ritual; times when we were the one who opted out because something else felt more pressing or more pleasing. Thus, it's not hard to see how these incidents could have happened without anyone meaning to have slighted anyone—yet all of them had that result.

Where is the intersection between individual flexibility and observance of the group connection? While no one would try to argue that there should be no individual discretion (you must show up for every dinner circle and connect lovingly with your fellow members at 6:02 pm every day), neither would anyone advocate for total individual discretion when it comes to observing group norms (hey, if you don't feel like cooking when it's your turn, just blow it off). The challenge is finding the sweet spot where connections are robust yet no one feels trapped in a straight jacket.

Even though we readily agree on the desire for connection with one another and the need to nurture relationships as a priority, we don't all prefer to do that in the same ways, or at the same times. I'm a person who enjoys connecting through work or skill sharing (where I'm learning or passing along knowledge). Others are more comfortable hanging out, going on a walk, or lingering after a meal. Nobody's wrong, yet things won't necessarily flow well without someone stretching beyond their comfort zone.

In addition to collaborating with others, I enjoy eating together with friends and connecting over food and drink, but there are limits. Up to 12 can work well for me, beyond that it's too chaotic and I tend to shy away. And it's even more nuanced than that. To feel comfortable connecting at a meal, I need to have a sense that what I have to say will be interesting to those present. While I'm willing to do a certain amount of testing the water, if initial forays don't land well I'll often stay quiet.

It's humbling for people to discuss hurts like this, to admit that there's blockage in the informal group flow and a need to attend to social arteriosclerosis before the heart stops. Meetings to discuss the phenomenon can help in that it's a chance to clear the air (social angioplasty), to affirm good will, and to discuss ways to alter how people reach out to one another (dietary adjustments).

In the meeting I described at the outset of this blog, the session ended with Sandy, Dale, and Chris all making dates with one another to work through their hurts. They were brave enough to admit that they needed help and were willing to do the work to remove the plaque that had built up in their arteries, restricting the flow to the hearts.

Super Sunday

I'm going to have a full day today.

After my usual caffeinated start to the day (coupled with keyboard communing), I'll walk over to Sandhill for the opening session of our annual retreat. This year we'll be meeting every morning from 9-noon for four days. It's a time to step back from the immediate, reflect on where we've been, take stock of where we are, and set goals and priorities for the year ahead. Think of it as sharpening the saw—Senge's habit #7—where it's a heart meld as much as a mind meld (retreats: not just for Vulcans anymore).

Having been mostly over at Dancing Rabbit since mid-December, I'm anticipating getting in sync with my fellow Sandhillians over the next few days.

Immediately afterwards Ma'ikwe and I will do some counseling with a divorcing couple trying to thread their way through the delicacy of who will live in the house they built, and who will find lodging elsewhere as both attempt to continue actively parenting their kids. It's tender and important work, walking two loving people over a bed of hots coals, trying to encourage them with assurances that the blisters will eventually heal.

Then there's a football game. There should be just enough time after the counseling session to scoot back home to stoke the fire and enjoy a cup of coffee before Ma'ikwe and I rendezvous with Kurt & Alline for the half-hour drive to participate in Roger & Mary Walker's annual Super Bowl Party. Yeehah! We get to critique this year's most expensive television commercials while noshing and generally yukking it up with friends. Who knows, maybe the football game will be entertaining also. You never know.

I'm really looking forward to the party because I haven't seen Roger since he and his sons supervised pouring the concrete slab for Ma'ikwe's house in the summer of '09, and I haven't seen Mary in longer than that. Maybe not since she stepped down as the Rutledge postmaster in 2007 (after a 17-year run). Yikes. At the very least it's time to sit down and have a beer together.

Depending on how late the game runs, I hope to have time after getting home to check email, post this blog, and work a bit on editing minutes from the two days of FIC Oversight Committee minutes that happened mid-January.

In my world, that adds up to a Super Sunday…

(… Which will be followed closely by Merrymaking Monday. After another round of retreat in the morning, it's back to DR to cook for Ma'ikwe's 42nd birthday party. Sometimes it's a challenge to fit everything in, but you gotta try. It's 48 hours of concentrated time with friends and loved ones, which is precisely what community is all about.)

Small Beer & Small Minds

Most people are familiar with the bumper sticker: Beer: it's not just for breakfast anymore

While most folks connect the humor dots in that one-liner by laughing at the absurdity of starting the day with Budweiser, there are deeper waters here. As near as anthropologists can tell, beer (or some version of fermented beverage based on locally available materials: perhaps wine, cider, or mead) exists wherever grain is cultivated, and is second only to water as a universally consumed drink among human cultures.

In medieval life it was common to drink beer at every meal. That said, much of it was weak in alcohol (no sense in having the family get ripped before cows were milked, fields hoed, or trees hewn), from whence the term "small beer." It was probably what the small fry drank whenever ale was served. (The concept of a legal drinking age is strictly a modern phenomenon; in medieval households parents were far more concerned with getting the wool carded, not the kids.) Small beer was likely what everyone drank when they had work to do afterwards requiring focus and dexterity.

Interestingly, in British culture, small beer has taken on the additional meaning of someone or something of little consequence.

Let's move along the timeline now from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. It wasn't that long ago (in the course of human events) that factory workers were given beer breaks to break up the drudgery (and perhaps to promote docility). In fact, when unions came on the scene, it wasn't uncommon for access to beer to be written into their contracts. Yes, there was a time when drinking on the job was considered normal, and the employer supplied the suds. If you're thinking that died out with the advent of the horseless carriage, think again. At the Carlsberg brewery in Denmark, drinking on the job wasn't curtailed until April 2010 (over strenuous union objections).

I enjoyed a latter day variation of this quaint practice in the early days of the Berkshire Brewing Company (in South Deerfield MA). For the first decade or so of their existence, they invited volunteers to show up for bottling shifts every Monday and Friday, compensating them with a case of anything they brewed, plus all the beer they cared to drink from 10 am onward. If the shift lasted well into the afternoon it was a challenge driving home safely. While this custom was phased out circa 2005 (when the brewery got successful enough to hire bottling crews), I have fond memories of a handful of Fridays volunteering at the brewery when my travels took me through western Massachusetts.

30 Days
Ma'ikwe's community, Dancing Rabbit, was featured on a 2005 episode of 30 Days, a reality television program created by Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame). A couple from Manhattan (the one in New York, not Kansas) lived for a month in a rural ecovillage while Spurlock's crew filmed the cultural juxtaposition.

My version of a one-month documentary involved walking over to Sandhill yesterday (to file our annual sales tax report with the state of Missouri). Because I had made regular trips to Sandhill to cover FIC office shifts over the holidays (filling in for Emily while she was vacationing with her family back East), I knew that the highway glass, plastic, and aluminum along the three miles from DR to SH had been fairly well picked up as of Jan 2—I know because I did it myself. (For previous ruminations about highway trash, see my April 2009 blog: No MO Trash.)

Thus, 30 days later, I was curious to see what I would find walking the same route. The results were depressing:
—4 glass bottles (three Pepsis and a Silver Bullet)
—23 plastic bottles (mostly soda, but there was one polyethylene pint of Canadian Mist)
—41 aluminum cans

Of the cans, a majority were either Bud Light or Miller Lite, which got me thinking. The calorie content of Bud Light is 110 per can. For Miller Lite it's 96. In obeisance to a culture that's obsessed with obesity, I observe that breweries (at least the big boys) are constantly striving for malt offerings with fewer and fewer calories while still producing something that still tastes like beer. Miller, for example, now holds the pole position in this race with Miller Genuine Draft Lite, which manages to squeeze into a svelte size 64 (calories per 12 oz serving).

As the proliferation of light beer continues and the presence of highway litter persists, I wonder if there's a direct relationship between the low calorie count per can and the IQ of the consumer. I figure light beer is essentially the commercial equivalent of small beer, and I'm positing that the consumers of small beer tend to be, well, small beer.

What are these people thinking?? Mind you, I can understand how a person who loves beer wouldn't want the beverage to go their waistline, but couldn't they couple that with a determination to not have the container go into their waste line (trailing behind their vehicle)?

Think about it. I was only collecting the recyclables along a three-mile stretch of seldom-used byway in the middle of winter: two miles of which are gravel; one mile of which is paved. While there's no doubt some of what I collected yesterday was there Jan 2 (you never get it all), the vast majority of what I plucked from the grassy shoulders were fresh deposits: a total of 68 pieces—all of which could have easily been recycled. People took the effort to open a window on a cold day to indulge in the ultimate act of NIMBY mindlessness. It's like children who hope they won't be seen if they close their eyes (if that empty can is out of my sight, then—voila!—it's taken care of). Oy.

• • •

I love beer. While most people report having to get through a period of initial distaste when consuming it for the first time, I liked it immediately—starting with the first can I drank during an unsupervised moment at a neighborhood block party at age 10.

Ben Franklin is reputed to have written: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to happy." While there is apparently some dispute as to Franklin's authorship of this line, I'd drink to the sentiment at the bottom of it at any time. What I won't drink to is all the sediment that careless imbibers are leaving as residue along our roadsides. This level of irresponsibility is more than small beer to me.

That Old Bird

I recently came across an Inuit soapstone carving of a ptarmigan that I had given a special friend many years ago, and it brought back fond memories…

Back in 1975, three college friends and I spent two weeks canoeing the lower stretch of the Coppermine River, terminating our trip in the Inuit outpost that bears the river's name, on the southern shores of Coronation Gulf in the Arctic Ocean. The entire trip was north of the Arctic Circle.

At that latitude, summer as a meteorological phenomenon only lasts about six weeks and we planned our trip smack in the middle of that window. (You know the joke about Minnesota—the place where many are cold, but few are frozen—they only have two seasons: winter and July. Well, north of the Arctic Circle it's really like that, so we went in July.) That close to the pole, the sun doesn't go up and down; it goes round and round. It dipped below the horizon for only 90 minutes a day (between 1:30-3 am) and it never got so dark you couldn't read. It was weird going into the wilderness and never needing a flashlight, or caring when you made camp because there was no need to preserve sunlight for cooking dinner.

People speak in awe about the legendary mosquitoes of northern Minnesota, but they're a joke if you've ever been to the Arctic in summer. Having done our homework beforehand, we wore a double layer of clothing at all times and hats with veils when not on the water (where the wind dispersed them). On that trip our record confirmed kill with one hand slapped against your thigh was 29 carcasses. Just think about that density of insect eagerly drilling test holes in your clothing hoping for a gusher. Now that's mosquitoes.

Nearly My Last Trip
As much fun as I get out of horrifying listeners with stories of big league mosquitoes, the most memorable feature of the Coppermine trip was that I almost died.

Several days into the trip, Ann and I were in the lead canoe when we came upon a relatively moderate set of rapids. After quickly scouting them from shaor we decided to run them in our loaded canoe (which saves gobs of time—as long as you don't flip). While we negotiated the white water just fine, our trailing canoe (with Kip & Tony) did not. When they swamped, we had a problem.

Our #1 priority was getting the dunked canoeists out of the water. They had life vests on and were in no danger of drowning, but the water is cold that far north. In addition, there were duffle packs, paddles, and a canoe bobbing in the water, merrily continuing their downstream journey without us. Thus, after quickly unloading our canoe on shore, Ann & I ventured into the water downstream of the riffle and guided our wet friends to safety. Once they were secure, I left Ann to help them get out of their wet clothes and dry off while I immediately took my pants off (wet jeans act as a sea anchor), donned my life vest, and went into the water in an attempt to collect the unmanned canoe, after which I hoped to round up the baggage.

As aluminum canoes are packed with styrofoam ballast in the bow and stern compartments, they float about 18 inches below the water when swamped. As you can still see the tips of both ends sticking out, it was no problem locating the boat. But it was traveling at the speed of the current (about three miles per hour) and I needed to overhaul it. Passing up the canvas Duluth packs (which were traveling more on top of the water and thus were not as much in the grip of the current), I breast stroked and frog kicked my way directly to the canoe. By not putting my head in the water, I conserved precious body heat.

While I made steady progress, it nonetheless took me about a mile to finally reach the wayward 17-foot Grumman. The good news was that by the time I got the canoe, the near shoreline was close enough that I could touch bottom. The bad news was that we'd already reached the head off another set of rapids and the pull of the current was increasing. After several moments of struggle, I realized that I had enough strength to be able to hold the canoe in place, but not enough to be able to wrestle the waterlogged canoe out of the current. Sigh. Accepting this tactical defeat, I climbed into the canoe and decided to take my chances on having better luck further downstream. (It's much safer to ride a rapids inside a swamped canoe that aside it, where you might get pinned against a rock.)

While rolling through the rapids was rather fun (in a Six Flags kind of way), this next set didn't ended quickly and it dawned on me that I needed to be concerned more with getting out of the water because I was losing too much body heat. I knew enough about hypothermia to know that I was at risk for it, and that the symptoms include sluggish muscle response and clouded thinking—which meant that my ability to access critical judgment was degrading even as my danger was increasing. Uh oh.

As the canoe was responding to the laws of hydrodynamics (centering itself midstream, where the pull is strongest), I decided to abandon ship before we (the canoe and I) entered the next set of fast water, figuring, not unreasonably, that my survival trumped all other concerns. After a couple minutes of purposeful stroking—the shore was only about 25 feet away—I wasn't making much headway and I was dismayed to turn around and see the canoe only five feet behind me. With considerable reluctance, I again reentered the canoe as the current quickened for the next set of white water. This was starting to get serious.

Fortunately, there was enough slack following the next rapids that I was able to swim to shore. Though I was numbed by the cold and not thinking straight, the sun was shining and I had enough residual energy and sense to start walking upstream along the shore. By the time I got back to my waiting friends (who were getting increasingly anxious about me), my mind had cleared, I was no longer cold, and we all enjoyed a heartfelt reunion. Whew!

The truth is, I was woolly headed enough that I really don't know how close I was to succumbing to hypothermia and there were no eyewitnesses to offer a more objective opinion on the matter. That said, I satisfied myself that that was as up close and personal as I ever cared get with dying young.

In one of those fate-takes-a-holiday turn of events, there is a humorous postscript to my near-tragic failed canoe rescue. When the four us continued our trip the next day (with one walking along the shore and three crammed into our remaining canoe) we happily encountered our beached canoe less than a quarter mile downstream from where I had abandoned ship to save my life. That's right, after nearly dying in an unsuccessful attempt to get the damn thing out of the current, it accomplished that seemingly impossible feat all on its own shortly after I withdrew from the scene. While I was totally baffled by how that happened, we were more than grateful to have a second chance with the second canoe.

• • •

While there are additional stories from this canoe trip, I'm going to fast forward to the last days, which we spent in the northern outpost of Coppermine (it was renamed Kugluktuk in 1996, but back then it as still Copperimine). It's my one and only time on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and we enjoyed our brief immersion in Inuit culture. Coppermine is one of a small number of settlements scattered within a vast tract of land (and you thought Wyoming was sparsely populated).

We ended our trip there both because we ran out of river and because we could get scheduled air service (on a recycled DC-3, that workhorse two-engine aircraft that was developed in the mid-30s and is still in use in the hinterlands today) from there back to Yellowknife, where we'd parked our car. Scheduled service was a big advantage in that it cost only a quarter of what we spent chartering a float plane to drop us off at the west end of Dismal Lakes, where our journey began.

While the native people still engage in traditional hunting and fishing, their income has been significantly augmented in recent decades through the sale of art, especially prints and carvings that feature simple lines and abstract representation. While in town, we particularly enjoyed visiting an artist collective where all four of us bought soapstone carvings to take home.

As I recall, Ann and I bought at least three pieces. One was a small loon that she still has (though it's neck broke in a fall, it's been epoxied back together) and I enjoy seeing it every time I visit her in Floyd VA. Another was a bear that I had for a number of years and then gave to Kip as a wedding present several years later. By then, Kip had gotten seriously interested in Inuit art. While he concentrated on collecting prints by certain artists, I knew the carving would have special meaning for him.

The third piece was a massive ptarmigan, weighing perhaps 10 pounds and standing 10 inches high. With the bulk of the carving was 400-grit smooth and minimally defined, birdness was evoked by the merest details: a sharpened beak on the head, the outlines of rough circles for eyes, and feet scratched into the base to suggest feet. I lovingly gave that carving to an older friend who was very dear to me. For years, she kept that bird in her bedroom, on the carpet near her bed, where she'd see it every day. When I'd visit her over the years, I'd get to see it also. While the floor may seem a lowly place to display art, I always enjoyed that the location was subtle and echoed the habitat of the ground dwelling ptarmigan, who survives by blending in.

• • •

My friend died in 2003 and for a while I lost track of the bird. Then, unexpectedly I ran across it recently, now in the possession of relatives. While happy to see the bird again (I've circled back to where this blog began), I was chagrined to see that the carving was now being used as a doorstop to channel a breeze from the back porch into the house. Looking closely, I saw that there were now scrapes and nicks in multiple places over the bird's body, marring the smooth finish of the malleable stone that the artist had worked so painstakingly to effect.

I was awash in sadness. It was like seeing a Chippendale chair pressed into service as a substitute sawhorse on a construction site, or finding a Monet having been rigged as a window screen. You could see how it would do the job, yet how could the regard for the artistic achievement have sunk so low?

As I sat with it though, my feelings began to change. The relatives undoubtedly had kept the bird as a memory of their mother. For years, their mother had kept the bird on her bedroom floor, where it had probably been used on occasion to prop the door open. They were just continuing mom's tradition. What I took to be defilement, they probably saw as reverence. Where I had a connection to a living artist eking out an existence on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, my friends were honoring their mother's quirky and conversational choice in a doorstop. Nobody was wrong.

The bird was still being loved, just in a different way. Who was I to claim that my old ptarmigan friend was being abused. Maybe the old bird was happy to be useful, and preferred that to sitting on a piano, collecting dust.

Now that I'm approaching old bird status myself, it occurred to me that being reliably useful in one's latter years is not necessarily a bad way to go. Certainly it's preferable to being placed on a shelf and admired from time to time for what one used to be able to accomplish. So I patted the old bird on the head and sat back down without saying a word. After all, I've got plenty of nicks and scars myself.

A Fair Hope of Success

Ma'ikwe and I just spent four days visiting my brother, Guy, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where he and my sister-in-law, Elaine, retired two years ago.

It's different here than in the Chicago suburbs where they lived for 35 years. For example, when we went to bed Wed night the outdoor temperature was still north of 70 degrees. For Jan 25, I considered that a little odd. Pleasant, mind you, but definitely odd.

As an example of the amusing ways that Fate tends to spring little surprises on people, Guy & Elaine have inadvertently settled in a town that's home to one of the longest lasting communal experiments in US history: Fairhope, Alabama. That's funny because I've been totally immersed in the relatively obscure world of intentional communities since 1974. And while my family still loves me, my four siblings all think I'm a little (or you could substitute a more robust adjective here) weird for having removed my particular acorn so far from the Republican conservative tree from which we descended.

To be clear, Guy & Elaine moved here because of the climate, the ambiance, and the year-round golf—not because of any late-breaking egalitarian urge inspired by brotherly propinquity. Consider it serendipity, but Ma'ikwe and I enjoyed an informative hour in the Fairhope Historical Museum Wed afternoon (there's a sandwich board on the downtown sidewalk outside the building, informing strollers in chalk that there's "Commune inside," in much the same you might be enticed by a shoe sale, raw oysters, or gingerbread lattes).

• • •

The intentional roots of Fairhope go back to 1879, when the economic philosopher Henry George published his seminal work, Progress and Poverty. While apparently dry reading, it was nonetheless a hot item in its day—outselling everything except The Bible for several years. George's basic premise was that people should be entitled to the full benefit of what they created with their labor, while that which was produced by nature—notably land—should be shared equally by all. To address what he saw as the inequalities of modern life and the uncertainties generated by boom and bust industrial growth cycles, George came up with the single tax concept, based on the value of land, as a potential remedy.

Among other things, George's writing inspired the Populist Party in the latter part of the 19th Century, which reached its peak in 1892 when James Weaver ran as a presidential candidate. He carried four states in that election, making it one of the strongest showings by a third party candidate in US history. Breaking from the Republicans led by Civil War hero Ulysses Grant, Weaver felt that the party of Abraham Lincoln had fallen too much under the control of big business (do some things ever change?).

The Populist Party ran on a platform which included the advocacy of direct election of US Senators, graduated income tax, and relaxation of the gold standard for backing US currency—all reforms that were eventually adopted. While the Populist Party waned after the 1892 election (its support eventually absorbed by William Jennings Bryan), there was a cadre of folks in Des Moines who were inspired to experiment with Georgist thinking on the ground, rather than through the ballot box.

Under the guidance of newspaperman E B Gaston, this forming group articulated the following mission:
—to establish and conduct a model community or colony, free from all forms of private monopoly, and to secure to its members therein equality of opportunity, the full reward of individual efforts, and the benefits of cooperation in matters of general concern.

In 1894, the group bought a few hundred acres on the undeveloped eastern shore of Mobile Bay, and the experiment was begun, with "a fair hope of success." The Fairhope Single Tax Colony was begun with 28 intrepid souls, nine of whom were children. With the exception of one couple from Pennsylvania and another from California, all the first settlers came from the upper Midwest—foreshadowing a migratory trend that continues today [I couldn't help but notice that the calendar section of the daily Press-Register ("connecting coastal Alabama since 1813") is chock full of meetings dates for the Michigan Snowbirds, Iowa Snowbirds, Minnesota Snowbirds, Indiana Snowbirds, etc].

While progressive and adventurous, the early colonists were not particularly well off. Their early self-descriptive tagline was: Fairhope is a place where none are rich yet few are poor. Their modest original landholding was greatly expanded in the 1910s when philanthropist Joseph Fels (scion of the Fels Naptha fortune) was sufficiently inspired to pony up the money needed to increase the holding by more than 4000 additional acres—which is essentially what the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation owns today.

(Fels also provided the financial backing for a second Georgist colony in Arden, Delaware—started in 1900 and also still going today.)

Sprouting from its progressive rootstock, Fairhope created an enclave that was an early proponent of gender equality, and a strong supporter of education and artistic initiative. In 1907, Marietta Johnson founded the Organic School. Singled out for praise in John Dewey's 1915 classic, Schools for Tomorrow, the school continues to this day based on Johnson's original (and surprisingly modern) philosophy:

1. We respect a child's individual learning style and pattern of growth.

2. We encourage children to experience the world by trying new tasks and ideas, experimenting and experiencing with all their senses.

3. Rather than requiring traditional tests, examinations and pressure to achieve an adult-designed goal, we allow freedom in approaching learning experiences according to the individual child's needs.

4. We strive to create an atmosphere that promotes the desire to learn by offering a flexible, free-flowing structure, adaptable to each child's needs.

Early on, the colony became an artistic center, and the tradition continues with the annual Fairhope Arts & Crafts Festival which has straddled a mid-March weekend for 60 years running, and now attracts a quarter million people to a town that only boosts 16,000 year-round residents. (Talk about a boon to local business, it must be about as easy to find a Fairhope motel room around the vernal equinox as it it get one in Louisville the first weekend in May.)

In its early years, Fairhope was a relatively isolated outpost. Most of the colony's income was earned from docking and ferry fees (boats were the only reasonable way to get to and from Mobile until the causeway was built across the top of the bay in the 1930s—prior to that it was a two-day road trip because you had to go up around the extensive delta wetlands north of the bay).

Holding its land in common, the single tax corporation was able to use its lease fees for the common benefit and developed extensive public parks and also utilities. Though mostly these public assets were turned over to the town in the 1930s, when lease income was no longer sufficient to cover property taxes, it provided the town with such a strong financial base that Fairhope was able to operate without a local sales tax until only a few years ago.

Today the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation quietly continues with about 1800 leaseholds, owning somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% of the property in town. From its start as a utopian experiment, the community evolved to become an artist and intellectual enclave, eventually transforming into the boutique resort and affluent suburb of Mobile it is today.

Nov 15 is Round Up Day in Fairhope—marking the day that the 28 original settlers first set foot on the land. Rather than the sinister associations that adhere to "round up" in connection with pogroms or Monsanto, it's nice to know that there's a fair hope of rehabilitating that term down in Alabama.

When Good Facilitators Step Down

I recently received this inquiry from a group I'd worked with before, asking about how to navigate the delicacy of encouraging folks to join their facilitation team, while at the same time protecting the quality of the work and the solid internal relationships that the team had worked so hard to develop. Here was the communication (suitably modified to obscure the identity of the group):

I have a question that I am hoping you might be able to help us with. Our Facilitation Team has been able to accomplish some really important things with our community over the past two years, in large part because of the wonderful training we received from you.

More recently, the community has had a series of thefts and muggings in the parking lot and this has lead us to organize a series of meetings to figure out a security plan that fits with the values of our group and that tries to bridge the strong opinions members have on how to make the community safe. We would never have been able to figure out how to approach this contentious discussion if we hadn’t had your training.

All this background brings me to our present concern. The members of our team who went through your training are all beginning to think about serving the community in different ways. One has already left to go back to school; another will leave the committee once her house sells; one is thinking of serving on the board next year instead, and a fourth may need to leave suddenly if an adoption comes through.

So, we are trying to figure out how to make sure the community continues to have effective facilitation.

To that effect, we have invited two other students of yours from other groups to come at some point in the spring and lead an intensive training weekend for people we have identified as having potential strengths in facilitation. (We are going to include those individuals who may be too busy to join the committee now but could perhaps become available in the future.)

A big concern for us is that over the past six or eight months we have had a few community members who have joined the team who to our minds do not have much promise of being good facilitators (too scattered to be able to track conversations, in one case, and too accustomed to running meetings in the corporate world, in another). We also have a new team member who has had some disasters in her attempts to facilitate so far. While we might be able to work with her to do some limited facilitating or to participate in some team facilitation, the other two would be very hard to work with. We want to encourage them to stay on the committee and serve in other capacities, but that might be a hard sell.

Our question is whether you have suggestions about how to recruit good future facilitators and how to discourage those who might not be gifted in that direction. We were hoping that you might be able to speak from your experiences or from your wisdom about how to set up a system for continuing facilitation in a community that would keep individuals who are interested but not well suited from feeling as though they have been rejected. We know that our community will not tolerate inadequate facilitation after what they have learned to expect over these past few years, so we feel the need to ensure the best possible facilitation. At the same time, we also don’t want to offend people and potentially set up a bad dynamic in the community.

What a good topic! Let's take the two aspects separately:

A. Recruiting Good Prospects
The first thing I'd recommend is to develop a job description, listing the qualities you want in a Facilitation Team member. If you're open to people serving on the team yet have different criteria for plenary facilitators, then create a separate list of criteria for that. While you may have already done this, the fact that you've attracted some candidates that aren't that well qualified makes me wonder.

Beyond that, it's not hard to imagine the veteran members of the team sitting down and walking through the entire group roster to determine who you'd like to recruit. I would not be shy about doing some sidewalk jawboning to try to talk the more promising prospects into applying. You may need to sweeten the pot by having one or ore of the exiting team members committing to continuing long enough to offer the new folks some decent mentoring.

Maybe you could invite those sitting on the fence (from among the pool you deem worth recruiting) to attend a few debriefing sessions after a plenary, to get a peek behind the curtain on how you operate, and what kinds of things you attempt to take into account. Maybe that would persuade them.

It also may make sense to have a session with the community where you talk up the importance of the job, and the qualifications, to generate some excitement in the work. It seems like the community had a good response to your skills development and you probably have some social capital you can draw on to ask the group to prioritize filling this with folks you deem qualified to follow in your footsteps.

B. Discouraging Inappropriate Prospects
In many ways this is trickier. I think in the long run, you simply have to commit to being honest (as we tried to do in the training class). There's an important distinction between encouraging someone to improve being fed a steady diet of positively slanted feedback, and blowing sunshine up their ass such that they're not really getting it about the gap between how they think they're coming across and how they're perceived.

It's my view that the key assessment here is how well someone hears and absorbs constructive criticism (I'm not talking about someone being able to handle being blasted; I'm talking about how open someone is to working with honest feedback in a debriefing from fellow facilitators where you're being frank.) I figure it's easier to train a naive person who's open to growing and listening, than it is to correct or advance someone who's ears are closed.

Toward that end, I'd make it clear both that openness to constructive feedback is an important criteria in the members you're seeking for the team, and that you'll assess candidates (during a trial period) for their ability to hear accurately, their ability to exercise appropriate discretion with the information they hear, and their relative lack of defensiveness.