Certainty

[greenstorm]

I'd like to state, for the record, that any time I'm certain of an event or make a sure declarative about the future that thing will not come to pass. Homes, relationships, jobs, leaving, staying: in my life, if I come to completely expect something, it will not come to pass.

A&E have had a bid accepted on a property in the mid-north Vancouver Island. Everything happens for many reasons each with its own lens:

I. just. Said. That. I. Was. Staying. Here. My heart just believed it and I had less than a day of rest alone in this space after mom left and before they viewed the property.

Also it's spring and people are selling, so this was a reasonable time for this to happen after braking for the winter.

Also A&E have been waiting all winter and are more able to compromise on location, especially since Tucker (without telling anyone, but they got the message at least) removed his requirements from the search. It's pretty remote.

There are a lot of subjects to remove on the offer including sale of A&E's place (they have ten viewings this week), inspection, water test, and ability to get insurance.

I have not been there to walk it. After A&E's place has an accepted bid (if?) I'll fly down for a day or two to look it over, mark trees for clearing, mark fencelines, and then come back up here and live with Threshold for awhile longer. There's no way to go down before it's ready for the animals, after all.

Not having walked it I can't tell you about it. I can tell you about North Vancouver Island, though. It's intensely pacific northwest, west coast. It freezes in the winter intermittently, and not for many days at a time. It's heavy overcast to drizzly well over half the time; almost no one would recognise the rain as rain because not a lot of water tends to come down at once but it is always damp. It's a little dryer and sunnier in summer but less than you might think. Everything is green and smells like leaf mould and conifer and water. Summers are also cool; I'm not sure exactly how cool yet but I may not get much warmer than here. Thing is, it would be the same temperature as here but frost free for maybe twice as long. That introduces possibilities like yuzu and very hardy kumquats.

I don't really want to talk about it though? I'm here with Threshold, and I want to be here, and enjoy here. I don't want to spend my thoughts on places far away, though I do love the planning exercise. I want to be in the present moment because I love it here.

There's lots before this is completely sure: interpersonal, financial, legal. It may never happen, who knows? But it's looking likely at this moment. A&E will look over offers Thursday and until then I am so far outside my mind and my body I'm finding myself just standing places, staring, and it's hard to move.

There's a lot more to say about this. I wanted to put it down here though. Ahead of me may be this place without (yet) a name. I once again don't know what happens next.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

whoooo, that's a lot. North Vancouver sounds not unlike the parts of Seattle/Washington I've experienced, including that rain that hangs in the air that isn't fog exactly and isn't rain exactly but it's definitely very wet and limits visibility to the point that there are no horizons. i think almost everything grows in Seattle (this is my impression from wandering Queen Anne, where my cousin lives, looking at people's gardens). moss is powerful and can eat a house there. terra teased me so hard for taking photos of the moss growing in the sidewalk but i'd never seen anything like it (moss is rare! delicate!), and then later i learned that every desert person, visiting the PNW, does that, and i felt vindicated. of course the sun eats things here the way moss and rain eat things there.

and Threshold, everything you say about it here, sounds so beautiful and particular and right. when you said you renewed your loan on it i thought, good, you can feel secure and safe in this place, in relationship with this land, settled, putting in your own roots as well as those of the plants & animals.

and, but, community. if you want any resources about community living or to process anything about it, whether or not things do go that way, lmk.

[greenstorm]

It's so much, and it feels hard to do from a distance, while working a job.

As a bit of a nitpicky note and discourse on naming: this is the north-ish part of Vancouver Island, which is definitely not North Vancouver or Vancouver (those are on the mainland). Now, why is there an island without a town named Vancouver on it, that is named Vancouver Island, while the neatby major city of Vancouver is on the mainland? Probably the same reason there is a William Lake which is 600km away from the town of Williams Lake. Anyhow, that's my native pedantic streak and not ultra relevant. North Vancouver and this part of North Vancouver Island are actually pretty close in climate and are both as you describe. One of the major issues with "proving" Indigenous land claims is that all their stuff was made of the abundant wood, and much of it rotted post-contact-epidemic (or was swallowed by a small sea-level rise after the ice age, THEN rotted).

Almost everything will overwinter down there but almost nothing will ripen, and so many things languish half-alive under disease pressure without producing anything or necessarily growing well. Global warming will significantly increase what can be fruitful there.

Oh, and the forests are pretty much completely connected by mycelial nutrient-sharing networks between the trees and shrubs, which is pretty neat.

I also thought that about Threshold and rest. I'm not good at settling for what I have. For most of my life I've been proven right in going to the next thing. This-- what if it does give me 20 more hours per week to work on my garden and animal projects? That's so much time. Plus if it lets me get away from time to time for, say, a trip to NM to pull grass roots out of a bed and chat for a bit, or to a permaculture gathering -- that must be good? But also what if it requires me to mask myself and my feelings, to not do the experiments I'd like to do, or to be in anxiety about money or interpersonal much of the time? Then of course it's not worth it.

I've cracked open your "Creating a Life Together" book recommendation and I think I've got to page 12 or something and I already am finding it tremendously useful. A&E have ordered copies as well. I have no intention of selling Threshold until I've worked through it with them.

I appreciate that offer! There are two things on my mind right now:

I haven't been accepting vague statements of reassurance and have created a google doc we've been talking in. I think it's go to 25 pages so far and it's getting unwieldy. I know you do a lot of real-time talking (like the retreat and regular meetings) but do you have any systems for talking asynchronously, and where it might be good to record what's said? I'm envisioning an internet forum type platform.

I'd also maybe like to chat around how folks' energy is in community like that; how do you handle folks who are nearby and kind of enmeshed going into that dark hole of the spirit, or do none of you do that? Not necessarily asking for an answer on lj if that's too personal or public.

And gosh I'm going to have to always be on top of my feelings about money. I'm a poor kid and they're two upper-middle-class kids.

[yarrowkat]

i'm good to chat here or over email or whathaveyou, but i "live out loud," as it were and am fine with discussing personal things in a public-ish space.

for asynchronous communication, and also synchronous alocal communication, we use Slack. i expect discord or whatsapp would work just as well. we have a free subscription, so messages & files do expire over time and have to be saved in other ways if someone wants to save them. we have every possible kind of conversation there, from the exceptionally mundane (there's a grocery list channel and a hardware-store shopping list channel) to the extremely emotive and interpersonal. i do observe that our particular percentage of big emotional hard conversations via slack has gone down like 80% since the lumpy wheel left. we are having fewer of those in general 'cause we're beter aligned (tho of course not none, particularly me & tristan), and when we do, we do it in person.

various people here struggle with various mental health experiences. when Jenny's adhd makes it so that she can't really function, we all step in with reminders, motive-force (that's my job - "hey i'm physically here in your space to help you walk outside and start the thing we said we'd do!" and of course compassion and pulling to-do items off her plate. same when Tristan's depression gets bad.

we have house meeting every week for two hours on Tuesday night. house meeting for us is in two parts, and is an instrument we have heavily refined for ourselves over time; ymmv (it will vary; individual needs & processes are very important here). first half, we reset The Board (i'll send you a picture of our absolutely bomb-ass project management board that i love), go through current & upcoming tasks, celebrate the work that got done the previous week. we keep all the sticky notes from finished tasks and make a pile and measure the pile at our annual retreat, partly to entertain ourselves, and partly because it gives us a visible measure of how much we got done vs how much we *feel* like we got done (often feels like less than it was, so it helps us keep perspective).

that all takes roughly an hour, maybe less. then we do personal check-ins. each person has the "mic" as long as they need to talk about how their week was, how they're feeling, what's up in their personal world. if there's a hard emotional thing it can come out in this space. this helps us stay connected around the often profound asynchrony of our lives. our volunteers are encouraged to attend house meeting as often as possible and to contribute during boththe board process and the check-ins. this also helps us fine-tune our volunteer hosting process and make sure they have everything they need, from information to supplies to time committments from us to deeper knowledge of our processes & goals.

that structure is partly supportive because we don't really do group meals (it just doesn't work for us - i think this makes us different from 90% of ICs but i could be wrong), 4/5 of us work off the farm, we have overlapping but distinct friend-groups and personal hobbies aside from the farm per se. again, ymmv. but - SOME kind of regular check-in structure, with group expectations for that structure & process clearly articulated and a process worked out for what happens when those expectations aren't met/ fail (how to amend the process and also how to mend emotional fallout when that happens), is vital.

that book is soooooooo helpful. i have given away something like 8 copies in the time i've lived here; i keep buying it and loaning it out and realizing it's gone and buying it again. i am perfectly fine with supporting this author in this way for the rest of my life; her work is so *helpful*!

and YES on not accepting vague reassurances. clear communication is vital. everyone really doing the deep digging work in their own psyche is important - why are we here, what are we doing, how are we doing it, from the meta level to the concrete practical details. class differences are a swamp but not un-navigable. jenny & rev both come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, tristan from uncomfortable-but-not-impoverished New England landed poor (it is its own thing, that), and i'm aggressively working-class, grew up on food stamps, knew several kinds of precarity & scarcity though fortunately not housing-related for myself, as a child. but my dad was essentially homeless and lived out of his truck - loooong before that was cool - and was an alcoholic if not exactly a bum, and my mom raised two kids on a single income with great effort and financial strain. so, we're from a bunch of different places, class-wise. and it really does mean having group converastions about money and how the group uses it, and being aware that you will have those conversations for the rest of your life if you sign up for this.

will there be group finances? we have a shared bank account that we all put a fixed amount into every month. we also have a finance commmitte that meets monthly, makes sure we're paying all the bills and fixes it if we aren't, and determines priorities for any money we manage to save. that group is also working on strategies for not borrowing money from our silent partner, tristan's non-farmer husband billy.

how to structure group finances is non-trivial. how will the land be paid for, and also projects? if one person has a pet project does the group fund it or that individual? how will group project priorities be determined and by whom? (house meeting & retreat do this for us). can someone hare off and just do something random and that's fine? or no? what types of decisiosn can you just hare off on, and what types are group decisions? in our case, the latter is anything that affects the group in terms of physical space or time/energy expectation. for example, Rev can't remodel the aquaponics system without my input because i help maintain it in a daily and seasonal labor sense. but jenny doesn't care about it much and has exempted herself from that conversation, which makes it a "committee" conversation. (this is not entirely factual, just an example of how we decide.) if Rev & I came up with a plan that we suspected or knew would impact everybody else, we'd still take it back to the whole group. when A's yurt came down, i took my idea to make a garden to the group, and then i took the garden bed design to the group, and then they signed off on tt and it's my garden now and i run it. tristan did the same with his mint bed - had us sign off on its existance and placement, and now its his experimental space. i can't plant something in it without his agreement, nor he in my pollinator garden. asking "can we plant X there" would be totally acceptable, though. in the group garden, it is understood to be all of ours, and i just stuck calendula everywhere last year and let them know so they wouldn't accidentally pull it out. its group-ownership status means i didn't need to check in to do that.

you'll find these edges over time, some easily and some with conflict. how you as a group manage conflict is therefore also extremely important.

[greenstorm]

"various people here struggle with various mental health experiences. when Jenny's adhd makes it so that she can't really function, we all step in with reminders, motive-force (that's my job - "hey i'm physically here in your space to help you walk outside and start the thing we said we'd do!" and of course compassion and pulling to-do items off her plate. same when Tristan's depression gets bad."

Thank you, this is interesting to me. How did you come up with those solutions? Did they evolve through trial and error, did the folks involved ask explicitly? How does having this extra bit interact with other folks' own limits? In fact, how does the group manage group energy resources vs projects? Do you tend to (or have someone who tends to) be good at estimating energy and timelines before something is begun, do projects get jettisoned or changed partway through, how does that work? You mention some more personal projects, I imagine it's easier to accurately budget energy for a one-person project?

[yarrowkat]

trial and error, mostly. when we all moved in together, we also all had less complete understandings of mental health, neurodivergence, etc. Jenny's ADHD has existed her whole life but only got officially diagnosed last year, after some trial and error with the medical system - she's known she had it for maybe 3 years. so, we've tried various things, fought, cried, worked on it, tried again. as she has thought of what she wants, then she's able to ask it of us, which helps a ton. it's so much easier to respond to a direct ask than to just hope i'm doing it right!

it's harder with tristan - his awareness around his things is less acute, and he snaps at people without provocation when he's frustrated, which is harder for me to deal with than J's simply not getting stuff done or leaving a mess behind. and even there, we figure out what helps little by small and are moving forward, easing the bumps in the road. we had a long heartfelt crying conversation at the Retreat (it is also for that, though those are never easy), and i think came to some really helpful realizations this time.

it's definitely easier to budget time/energy for a one-person project, and my personal superpower is leveraging our volunteers. so if i see that J is collapsing on something, and the thing doesn't require specialized knowledge, i'll get the volunteers focused on it. if it does require specialized knowledge, T & I will try to help J get out there and work on it. when i'm collapsing (usually by running out of interpersonal energy), i'll text J and T and ask them to pick up some intern teaching/management for a week or two while i recover. these solutions have evolved over time.

energy vs projects is less an issue than money vs want these days. but to answer the question, the wwoof program is absolutely integral to this farm. so right now, we have identified 6 priority projects - Elysium electric (specialized, stewards-only); garden (not specialized; volunteers with guidance); gnomedome (volunteers & stewards working together on work party days only - so it goes more slowly but also more carefully); new back pasture fence (currently in the "get fencing materials" stage; when we go to build it, Rev will set all the corner & gate posts with volunteer help digging, and then we'll have a work party where all of us get the fence done together, as that is totally a 10 person project); aquaponics (some prep tasks volunteers; final set up stewards); animal housing (jenny & terra are doing a work hour every tuesday & thursday plus all work parties until this is finished, but they're making a ton of progress).

that's too many priorities, except that we DO have the volunteers. we try hard not to jettison projects partway through, and personally half-finished things drive me crazy, so i'm motivated to not let htat happen and i will herd people into finishing them (not unlike a cattle dog nipping at their heels, ha. i have had to learn how to do this in a way that doesn't upset/hurt everyone). i need to send you a photo of our project management board. the Board will explain a number of things and gosh it's a fantastic tool. it's a modification of a kanban, straight out of corporate culture except modified for IC use and it works really well. the board keeps us from forgetting/abandoning things, helps us sort & reorder our priorities based on Retreat and on emergent things, ensures there are tasks attached to each project so things can keep moving forward, and helps sort who "owns" each task and if things aren't getting done, what the group can do to unblock that task/project. this process makes an enormous difference in our effectiveness.

oh! and tristan is going to teach his extremely helpful Tools for Communities class again this year, in August. we'll record the lecture parts of it (not the exercises, to protect the privacy of the attendees, but can include a write-up of do-it-at-home exercises), and i will make sure you get a youtube link to the recording. the first day is Consenus Process and Group Facilitation. the second day is Communication & Project Management Tools for Intentional Community.

[greenstorm]

Responding to a direct ask really is so, so, so much better.

Oh goodness, it hadn't occurred to me to discuss how to prioritize projects. I think of my time as so much my own. I know E has mentioned that I'd take point on planning the garden & animals, but that is neither a prioritizing process nor an energy distribution so I kind of handwaved it. Thank you, I will look into this more.

I know my work process can be pretty difficult for other folks to join in on; when I'm personally going to go do something I almost always have to get up and go out to do something else (thanks PDA) so I'll literally say "let's go bring wood in" and end up fixing the fence instead. Obviously not great to do work together in groups, though I can join work that other folks are doing, usually, as long as they get moving first. A&E do NOT have a handle on PDA yet and when I brought it up in conversation they mostly wanted to compare similar experiences about their mental health stuff. Repetition will hopefully help get it in there.

A friend who was in the military has what I think is probably a similar board. It's a fantastic tool; I've added it to my notes for "things we need on startup". Come to think of it, a weekly meeting to discuss priorities etc would be less onerous if I wasn't working full time.

I am super happy to get that link, thank you! That is exactly what I want.

[yarrowkat]

the PDA work process definitely sounds difficult for another person to readily navigate, unless the process is that the other person goes and starts a project and you jump in, which sounds like a strategy. they will learn to navigate it with you.

how best to send photos of our board? here? instagram DMs?

in addition to getting at least a prototype process for project prioritization (ha!), i'd find out what E means by "you'd take point." do A & E want input, to engage creatively, to have their own garden/animal projects? or do they want to follow your lead entirely on that? will that become tiring to be the decision maker always (i realize you already are at Threshold), or will you want a way to share responsibility? right now you don't need to know for sure, because it will change once you're in it and emergent needs arise for everyone. just to have the conversation open.

[greenstorm]

Looks like instagram worked! I didn't know you could send photos here.

I have a lot of workarounds for the PDA thing. Sometimes I'll say I'm going out to work on one of these three things, would someone like to join me? and that helps take the pressure off one thing, so I'm more able to be consistent. Asking someone else to start works well. The workarounds are why I like to either do my own projects and let other people drop in as they see me doing things and feel like helping, or let other people do their projects and wander by and ask if they need a hand when I see them working. It takes a lot less energy than navigating around the demand avoidance.

Yes, I basically parse statements like that as "I'll have some role in this, seek explanation". I'm very used to people using a couple phrases which they think clearly mean something, but that many different people would read differently, so I know to seek clarification (see also: "we're monogamous" or "I'm poly").

I'm definitely feeling the need for an online forum-type medium for these conversations. We all get excited and talk a lot, and that's not the way to pin down a set of things as a greed and remembered.

[yarrowkat]

i can reccomend Slack as a forum tool for tracking and capturing the conversations. you can make multiple channels, send files and pictures, and it works on phones and laptops equally well. the free version does have a max limit on storage so you need to download files someone posts, but it's easy.

[greenstorm]

Structured group meals hit my PDA harder than almost any other thing in existence. Food, people, organization, demand stretching forever into the future, timelines, lack of control over what I eat, oof. I dated someone once in a bit of a community house where they each had a meal night and he was great with it but I had to avoid thinking about it because it made my skin crawl.

That said, a regular check-in makes sense. And maybe a movie night or something.

I also love-- you talk about an explicit process for when something fails. That idea is relatively new to me as an interpersonal strategy and I love it. I suspect it will be really, really hard for the folks with people-pleasing tendencies involved (maybe rather die before thinking of something going wrong enough for actual conflict?) but is also a good requirement for me to set before coming fully onboard: if we can't sort out at least a couple of these beforehand, then that's a giant red flag.

[yarrowkat]

i kind of hate eating with people. i am aware that humans are supposed to enjoy group meals and sometimes i do but mostly, no. i don't want to listen to other people eat, and i would nearly always rather read while i eat.

some kind of regular social gathering is helpful for community building for sure.

it is super hard for some folks to think about what happens if things fail! our exit plan is, we succeed! and - that can't be the exit plan. you just watched mine implode in full living color; feel free to use that as an example. we are putting our properties in a land trust so that they can never be threatened again if someone needs to exit. however, we are also developing a real exit plan for in case another of us, or a new person who comes on, ever needs to exit. there just can't not be a method.

that's worst-case - in a more ordinary case, there's conflict but not someone wanting to exit. so, how do you resolve conflict? what communication strategies do you as a group employ when (when, not if) it happens? we use consensus process, and if that fails, mediation. mediation failed hard for us when my ex was around because he would sabotage the process. so - we needed a process that people wouldn't sabotage, and mostly, that meant we tolerated him and didn't include him in decision making processes when we thought there was risk of conflict - not the most functional method, and i can't reccomend living like that. it was tense. but if everyone agrees on mediation and can work with a mediator, that can be a great tool.

[greenstorm]

Eating with people is my biggest masking/unmasking situation. I'm a food geek, I'm often evaluating and trying to decide what's going on (is that /nutmeg/ in there, maybe it should have been steamed instead of baked?) and when I'm not I'm generally super enjoying. I often eat with my fingers. Folks who like to participate in all this are awesome to eat with! Folks who don't approve of it, I don't want them near me when I'm eating. These days I mostly curl up with food youtube though.

I truly don't understand why some folks have so much trouble with thinking up possibilities. It's like that counselor I had, who thought that because I wanted to think through ending a property-buying partnership before we bought, that it would fail because I couldn't commit. I guess this is why seatbelts and masks had so much trouble catching on, and why our healthcare system is how it is. No one wants to plan for the bad case.

I definitely hope not wanting to exit is the more ordinary case! (laughs) That book was the first I'd heard that consensus was a specific process instead of just a result ("everyone agrees"). I'm lookng forward to learning more! I quite enjoy learning tools to deal with folks.

I believe the Haida/BC government land management entity on Haida Gwaii is supposed to operate on consensus. My understanding is there's a fair bit of people swallowing things they don't like because of that process, but it means that when someone feels really strongly about something there's room for it to come up

[yarrowkat]

it's an engineering mindset - how will this fail, and how can i prevent it from failing in that way? as a design constraint always. i found it very difficult to start from the worst-case scenario and work backwards, when we all started here, not least becuase my mind mostly lives in a space of 'what you focus on, you will create' so i want to focus on the things i *want* to have happen, rather than the undesirable outcomes. but over time i've found the value of that approach. we've also gotten better at communicating around it, and at co-mingling those two approaches, in our conversations with each other.

Consensus Process is an actual thing! it's super formal and has all these rules. we use a modified form of it, rather than Formal Consensus, with formal consensus as our fallback in times of deep conflict, as it helps ensure every voice is fully heard.

actual consensus (which may not be what governmental bodies are practicing) is not a compromise; you shouldn't need to swallow much that you don't want to. unless you decide to compromise in your consensus building. but inherently these are different. in compromise, one or more parties give up bits of what they want until a decision is agreed on. in consensus, you keep changing the entire plan until it meets all needs. does this mean it took us 8 years to agree on how to fence our primary field? yes, yes, it does. but when we did, we were in 100% alignment on how & when & why and the details & execution of it. that's an extreme example; most things go lots faster. we were just weirdly slow on that one.

so the first step in doing a project by consensus, is a Needs Assessment. what does each person need from this? as completely as possible. every voice gets fully heard. this is a great tool for avoiding big conflict, tbh, because you hash it out in the design stage, when it's a conversation. then separate needs & wants, particularly if the needs assesment reveals divergent needs. because it might be that everybody can get what they *need*, but not what they *want.* but you try for it all, each time. then the person/committee doing the design/ project plan does that, trying to build in all the needs, and then brings this back to the gruop for discussion. it gets adjusted, then when the group feels that the plan takes everything into account, you/y'all execute it. of course nothing is perfect; there will be times something gets built/ exists and then somebody says "oh, wait, i just realized i need X out of this and it can't do it." and the group gets better at that process over time, you all learn how to be people who can predict your future selves well enough to say "i am going to need X." this grows over time and practice; it's a muscle.

you may want to look up Beatrice Briggs "Introduction to Consensus Process." that one for sure you can find online.

i turn out to have a pile of articles i could scan & email you. Consensus Basics by Tree Bressen, An introduction to Financial Development of Communities by Rob Sandelin & Lois Arkin, Six Ingredients for Forming COmmunities to help reduce conflict down the road, by Diana Leafe Christian (this content may be covered in her book), Community, Intentionally by Geoph Kozeny, Committing to Community for the Long Term, by Carolyn Shaffer.

none of those are recent - they're stuff i compiled when i was in the pre-SR planning stages, early 2000s. there's probably more recent work on the subject. and, recency may not be the most important consideration in its utility. anyway let me know and if you want any/all of these i can scan & email them to you. it's a paper folder.

[greenstorm]

I would quite enjoy those articles, especially the first two and the last one.

I have a whole thought on predicting what future self will need that basically boils down to: I've learned to do this for poly, and I get annoyed when folks aren't good at it. It's reassuring that you say many folks gain the skill over time, that I may not be stuck with it for good. I'll definitely have to pick up that mindset around farm and house processes too, it's a super useful frame.

Land management (in haida gwaii) has so many decisions required, I suspect that deciding what to bring forward and what not to is an energy management strategy for everyone involved. Not doing something, or putting it off, can be deeply consequential. Folks have a limit to what they can figure out. So they self-censor, swallowing things instead of speaking and only bringing up big things or easy things.

I dislike spending energy to recover from things that were easily avoidable. Well, that, and controlling the future through planning was a way I addressed anxiety and a lack of control in my life generally. Living on my own has reduced the need for that somewhat.

[yarrowkat]

i'll get the articles scanned next week!

are A&E poly? everybody here is, so our assorted poly-skills and community-skills probably do all dovetail neatly. but - we also started this in our early 30s and have matured & settled down a lot along the way, individually & collectively.

Not doing something, or putting it off, can be deeply consequential

yes. we try to sort things by urgency & importance, and start with the ones that are both, but not to lose anything important to a wash of thigns that are merely urgent. things that are neither, but that we know we want anyway, may take years. (there's a hole in the ground out back that we affectionately call "the root cellar." it's not. it might be, someday! but it's literally just a hole right now.)

So they self-censor, swallowing things instead of speaking and only bringing up big things or easy things.

yeah. that is a pattern that will need to break, if it's there in your group. it's really human! and it really causes long term problems, resentments, cracks in the foundation. if the group is a genuinely safe space for each person to speak what's going on for them and to share hard things, and if a time is created where hard things are supposed to come up, are expected and even wanted (for the sake of keeping the group healthy), that can do a lot to support breaking those kinds of patterns. our Retreat is that kind of space/time - hard things always come up, the group supports the individuals in talking it out as needed, and hard things are expected. someone will have something, every year. and being able to air these things and work on strategies to correct them has been enormously helpful for us. when the ex was around during the years it wasn't safe for certain types of conversations to happen in front of him, then they happened withotu him at house meeting instead - though the whole "the fact that we're not safe with you means we need to change this radically" conversation took a long time to build up to. the whole thing was a huge set of lessons for all of us and i'm honestly proud of us for weathering it. with someone else, someone who didn't shut down emotionally challenging conversations or blame all hard feelings on other people, that would have gone very differently.

[greenstorm]

Money conversations being for the rest of my life sounds so ominous. OTOH I've gone from being unable to get out words around half an hour of sobs when talking about money to needing to take breaks to regulate but being able to get through it. Practice tends to either ease this sort of thing or make it worse, depending on who I'm practicing with.

[yarrowkat]

it's not that bad! it's not constant. but it has to be something everyone is able to talk about. who is paying for a project? are all three of you in on the pigs? is pig feed a shared expense or individual? if it's a group project but one person is paying for expenses, how does that even out? etc.

once you have a system in place that everyone agrees to, you don't have to discuss it all the time, just do it and check in occasionally - unless the system breaks down.

[greenstorm]

My experience with my triggers indicates that in a truly safe environment where I'm not being taken advantage of something that was once unthinkable can become boringly routine. I'm looking at this in part as a way to get over my money stuff, if it is a good situation, and if it's not then it'll reinforce everything. So my hope is that it becomes not that bad!

We've had the feed conversation now! And the "this place is expensive to heat, how do we do utilities" conversation, and some of the "when money comes into the farm from the farm where does it go" and I've stated my need for some structure around the process of deciding rather than me trying to think of everything that might occur now and bring it up.

[greenstorm]

We haven't had the "if a financial catastrophe occurs how do we handle it" talk

[yarrowkat]

definitely worth keeping that one on the list. "what if we suddenly need a new roof" style catastrophe, and what if we stop agreeing on priorities, too.

for the former, MRT has a savings account that acts as a group cushion. the savings are inviolate, save that disasters can be handled from them. when the washing machine died, we bought a new one from the MRT savings, with the agreement that SR will pay back half the cost of it (with the other half being MRT's group contribution) over the next year from farm income sources. we are generally able to achieve that, and end up running a tab with MRT but it's always moving - we pay things off, we borrow, we pay things off. the 3 months-of-expenses savings pad basically stays put.

[yarrowkat]

and i want to just articulate this - we're just one example. we're highly functional! and we are very far from the only way to be a functional community. while the conversations must be had, the solutions may be similar, or quite different.

[greenstorm]

This is excellent. I have a lot of experience with this sort of thing through autism; I have to pick and choose tools from an array of sources (maybe this is actually all-human typical actually) so the more sources I can access the more I can choose good toold from them, and also the more I can be creative at thinking outside those boxes.

[yarrowkat]

excellent! i think it's a people thing, but that not all people are conscious of it, especially in a new process/experience.

[yarrowkat]

that sounds like a lovely progression. i can feel the sense of looking back at it and realizing "oh, this used to be awful, and now it's just a regular thing." what a relief that would be!

those all sound like great steps forward! and yeah, there's no way you can think of everything right now; life is emergent. so the processes support emergence & change, and the process itself is like a net in that way.

[greenstorm]

The first couple times it really felt miraculous; I never thought I'd have access to these experiences. Now I'm beginning to be able to rely on it, and with that reliance comes trust that if something continues to feel unsafe it probably is, but that in a safe environment I can heal-- so if I'm not healing, it's probably not safe. It's such a change from feeling "crazy"/irrational. Gives me a lot more trust in both myself and my ability to figure out my environment.

Right? And who wants to try and think of everything, that's a huge weight. I'd rather sort through things over time rather than try and frontload it all. I'll know more by then too.

[yarrowkat]

that is SO much great information packed into that process, wow. awesome.

you will absolutely know more later, about all kinds of things. so yeah, a process that holds room for change and supports whatever arises.

[greenstorm]

Oh, and the conversation and my own feelings about it are compounded by the fact they've been a single financial entity together for ten or fifteen years. I don't think they have any separate money or property. Which is... not my style.

[yarrowkat]

i'd have some hesitation around that, too. otoh, since we moved in here, Tristan, Billy (who isn't a Steward but is Tristan's husband) and Jenny have become a single financial entity - one that meets biweekly to sort priorities & do an accounting process, and it has worked out surprisingly well. i'm an individual and so is Rev, and each of us interact with the SR finances and the MRT (monkey-raven-tiger, ie, billy-jenny-tristan) finances, and MRT interacts with SR and sometimes it gets confusing but we're getting better. we just did a major financial reorganization in the wake of the Ex leaving, and things are much clearer now, if also more capital-constrained than they used to be. the process is cleaner.

all to say - it can be done! clear communication & clear expectations/responsibilities/processes are the key.

[greenstorm]

Hm. That's reassuring, thank you.

[yarrowkat]

i have to run out to the garden now because i committed to it today, but i will come back to this conversation as soon as i can because i totally have more to say.

[greenstorm]

Yay garden! I happily accept asynchronous communication at any time. :)

[yarrowkat]

yay! also, just to be clear, i don't need the answers to any of those questions unless you feel like sharing or want to talk it out. but over time you will need to know them all.

[greenstorm]

Thank you! That was the sense I'd got, and I also appreciate the clarification. :)

Right now I'm setting a couple things I need to have happen before I commit. One thing I need from A&E is to talk about things until we come to a conflict (of any kind) and then resolve it; I need to know we can go through that process. Can they recognise and set their own boundaries and then communicate those? What happens when those boundaries conflict with someone else's? My main worry is that they will be too people-please-y and then lose it at some point (I historically get involved with this kind of person).

I also need to be able to put my stuff out there comfortably, emotions and history and whatnot, and not have that shock and appall folks. So far I do feel comfortable putting it out there, so that's good.

[yarrowkat]

that is extremely reasonable. i imagine you're communicating these questions to them, about can they set & hold boundaries, etc?

that sounds like a major green flag about feeling comfortable with emotions & history and so on.

[greenstorm]

Had a very good talk this weekend. I just, I don't know. I won't feel comfortable until at some point they've communicated a hard no to me about something. They as in, each of them, not one of them.

Maybe I need to ask what it would take for them to say no to me.

[yarrowkat]

that's a good idea.

[yarrowkat]

i'm not at all sure i responded to everything here and i'm also not sure what i missed. trying to catch up today. :)

North Vancouver Island, got it. i will look at a map, that will help. :) i appreciate the precision!

does greenhousing/season extension help things ripen and/or evade/resist disease?

i'd love to have you down to the farm if you do end up with time to do things like travel! or we can revisit that permaculture/young farmers/queer farm convergence/something like that conference idea!

20 extra hours a week to work on the farm sounds heavenly! i hope it does work out like that for you! plus time & help; minus anxiety and masking. :)

[greenstorm]

Just south of "Sayward, BC" will get you there. You will see a lot of trees, though honestly BC is kind of like that everywhere.

I'm not entirely sure what greenhousing will do in terms of heat; it's awfully grey there a lot of the time. Keeping tomatoes dry, so it doesn't rain on the foliage, makes an enormous difference against the blights. Still, if I can breed for short season I can breed for blight resistance, and lots of people are working on blight resistance by breeding in wild ancestors right now.

That would be a lot of fun :)

Had some good talks yesterday including financial stuff and indicated willingness to take consensus training. I'm super gun-shy (what an expression!) about promises to talk about a relationship after it's been entered into without some of that talking up front, thank you Tucker, so we'll need some more conversation. But. Good start on the anxiety front.

[yarrowkat]

that makes all the sense about keeping tomatoes dry and it broke my brain a little. lol. it rains so much less here!

that all sounds like excellent progress on the conversations. soooo much talking happens in this stage. it's gotta. talking up front, and then continuing to talk, both.

i looked at Sayward BC and wow it looks wet. and very very green. Terra says Vancouver Island is gorgeous (Terra is fron Seattle/ & the Port Townsend area).

it seems very possible that we/i could visit you on your island sometime, when we are in Seattle anyway, that being a place we usually go every couple years; i have some family & several friends there, as does Terra. not that's it's near, exactly, but it seems near enough to make an easy trip.

[greenstorm]

It's good progress. I wish I had more time/energy for them.

I grew up in that kind of area so I didn't understand why everyone who came said it was so green; then I went to the prairies and even moved up here where there was a brown season (and a white season, but that doesn't count). Where you are must be so so different.

The coast is also hella humid. It's just so... moldy. And blackberries and alder trees eat everything.

I'd love that visit!

[yarrowkat]

a brown season 🤣

new people here often exclaim, it's so brown! i usually interpret this (uncharitably) as unwillingness to see the variety and beauty in this often-austere landscape. or to understand the variety within an hour's drive. the desert holds a thousand shades of green, but none of them are the dominant pallette. there must be three thousand shades of brown, and grey green and grey brown. really the dominant aspect is the sky. it's enormous. and nearly always bold bright blue.

mold seems to be the bane of wet places.

[greenstorm]

Intimacy with a landscape is a slow build of attention and detail. There's a certain kind of bond to be had with something that presents starkly to an initial observer and then holds so many secrets; landscapes that are suspicious of people who might treat them badly, and only give up their gifts and secrets as your attention earns their trust. I picture the desert watching these new people and waiting to see whether they'll slow down and look around them.

I'm used to mold, though it's been lovely to have a break from it. It's the blackberries that I think of as being a problem, eating houses and trees; I'm so grateful the property is salmonberry instead, they're short bushes instead of long thorny vines.

[yarrowkat]

the desert spits people out sometimes, too. she's fierce and she wants you to listen and watch. certain types of inattention can kill a person - which is true in every environment, i think, but seems highlighted here. she withholds mercy, and is infinitely generous. i have a poem on this theme to remember to send you when I'm at a computer tomorrow.

and yes, attention and detail build that relationship. I'm still learning this particular desert, different from the one i grew up in, after 24 years here.

and salmonberries are delicious, too! my dad lived in the mountains in North Carolina the last 11 years of his life. that property has two houses, on a hill sloping down to a creek. the Big House, and the Annex which is built over the garage, uphill of the Big House. the main drive comes in from the little road to the northwest, but the Annex has its own drive coming off the small highway to the south. when I first met that land in 2004, that driveway was in use, and lightly gravelled. a few years later, they stopped using it, and by the time i was visiting him at the end of his life in 2015, there was no driveway. it was entirely eilanthus, blackberries, and honeysuckle, and the faint suggestion of a flat strip of earth underneath.

my step-aunt lives alone in that rattling big place now. i have often thought it would be perfect for an intentional community who wanted a fixer-upper. the big house has 4-5 bedrooms (depending on how you count the 'office') and the parlour, library, kitchen, and an upstairs sitting room. the Annex is a 2-br apartment, and the place is on 5 acres with the creek and a spring house and the garage/workshop.

[graydon2]

Goodness. That is a lot. I wish you, of course, all the luck. Times 10,000.

[yarrowkat]

just wanted to let you know that the delay in response is because I'm in the Retreat this weekend and it is eating all of my bandwidth. I'll be back in a couple days!

[greenstorm]

Thank you for the heads up! I hope it all goes well.

[yarrowkat]

yes! today was extremely busy at work, and tomorrow likely as well. I'm hoping to carve out time and energy Thursday or Friday. i want to give each question the time and consideration it deserves, also.