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]

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.