Heathcote Winter Retreat

This weekend is Heathcote Community’s quarterly retreat. We also have weekly business meetings and frequent “feelings meetings” we call teas. But several times a year we gather to do more extended work. So this weekend we’ll be all together, sharing meals, doing yoga and bonding activities, deeply listening, baring our souls  and consensing on our Strategic Plan. To make things even cozier, twenty-four inches of snow are expected! The flakes have been falling for a while as I write. The new accumulation will be added to our leftover two inches that has just been hanging around. There’s talk of firing up the cob hottub during the blizzard.

Normally I can be counted on to whine, bitch and moan about winter generally and even snow. I have a running joke with the kids that no one is allowed to sing Jingle Bells because I’m convinced that calls the snow. So, of course, they love to sing it loudly whenever I remind them. And, interestingly, it does usually snow soon after…I am a powerful witch!

But I don’t think I’ll complain too lingeringly over this particular blizzard because I have a new (three year-old) pellet stove to keep me warm! My old stove was ready to go. And it was never really powerful enough to heat my cabin. So I bundled up and spent all winter haunched in front of it, whimpering. When we installed this newish, larger one, I set it to ninety degrees and did my dance of joy. I’m also loving it because it automatically lights itself and turns itself off and on, to hold my temperature setting. Fancy!

Okay. It can snow this one time.

These photos are from our last retreat, during which we all (humans and dogs, not cats) hiked to our old friend, Grandmother Tree, who had recently fallen. It was possibly the oldest tree on our land and a regular meditation destination for community members. So it was magical to come together there to bid her goodbye.

Now you might be asking yourself, “Where do people who run a conference center go to retreat?” I have asked myself some variation of that very thing for fourteen years. I have reminded my community mates that the very definition of the word implies vacating the space we normally occupy. My online dictionary would seem to back up my theory:

re⋅treat

/rɪˈtrit/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ri-treet] Show IPA

–noun

1.	the forced or strategic withdrawal of an army or an armed force before an enemy, or the withdrawing of a naval force from action.

2.	the act of withdrawing, as into safety or privacy; retirement; seclusion.

3.	a place of refuge, seclusion, or privacy: The library was his retreat.

4.	an asylum, as for the insane.

5.	a retirement or a period of retirement for religious exercises and meditation.

6.	Military. a. a flag-lowering ceremony held at sunset on a military post. b. the bugle call or drumbeat played at this ceremony.

Hmm. Number four gives one pause. Still, most of our retreats occur on the same battlefield we hold 365 days a year. I don’t harp on this to complain. When we live in paradise, why leave? Why rent when we own? I get it. Of course, there are many paradises besides ours. One year we did all go tent camping together at Pine Furnace State Park. But mostly I just like to rag on Heathcote for having a retreats without retreating to anywhere.

What else could we call it, our quarterly endless meeting? Our quarterly pajama party…quarterly advance! Yeah! Advance!

–WT

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I recently visited Liberty Village Cohousing Community near Frederick, Maryland. About an hour from my own Heathcote Community, Liberty Village had been on my list of places I’d like to visit for some time. I was invited by my friend C.T. Butler, author of On Conflict and Consensus, A Handbook on Formal Consensus Decisionmaking. C.T. was presenting a workshop and I was excited to get to see him in action.

After the workshop, I stayed for a community dinner. C.T. and I discussed similarities and differences between Cohousing and Intentional Community. That could and should be a post in itself, as well as a report on C.T.’s workshop, and meeting his friend and colleague, John Buck, author of We the People, Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods. C.T. and John Buck are teaming up to present a comparison of formal consensus and sociocracy in a two hour workshop at the Mid Atlantic Cohousing Conference, March 20, 2010.

I could write for the next year on the discussions we’ve had! But right now, let me enthusiastically invite you to this year’s Cohousing Conference. Besides C.T. Butler and John Buck, my facilitation trainer Laird Schaub will be presenting, as well as Heathcote’s Permaculture educators Karen Stupski and Patty Ceglia. Maybe I’ll see you there!

–WT

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Yes, it’s a stereotype: hippies living on the commune, dressed in homemade tie dye as they garden and strum guitars. But if stereotypes are rooted in some small reality, this one is alive and well at Heathcote Community.

Here at Heathcote, we have a ten-year member, Carol, who loves to practice and pass on this craft. She’s usually up for a tie dyeing party, and she’s even held workshops in it. Carol dyed Hippie Chick Diaries’ spiral banner for us. And she mentored the Open Classroom kids in tie dyeing sheets for our Chinese New Year dragon, which we paraded up and down our road with much fanfare, making as much noise as possible from Heathcote Earthings’ fair trade instruments!

Most of us have t-shirts, sundresses, skirts, sweatshirts, etc., tie dyed in community with Carol’s help. I love seeing community mates showing them off!

So when Heathcoter Charles gave my partner and me two sets of queen sized organic cotton sheets, I knew what I wanted to do!

Iuval and I, and the two shelties, were ready to graduate from a double bed to a queen. Charles had a mattress to give away. But I loved my old bed, an heirloom. It wasn’t anything fine, a double bed that had been bought for my two old great great aunts when there was a fire at the old farm in Kentucky. Iuval and I decided to adapt the old headboard and footboard to a new queen sized platform. It took us a couple of days to get it just right. The time we spent working together on it was magical, as we problem-solved and puzzled it out.

But I was worried about the sheets Charles so generously included with the mattress. They were thick and clearly expensive, too nice for my dirty, rustle-in-the-woods family. We would have them stained and grungy before you could say, “What dead thing have you been rolling in?”

So, off to Carol’s  tie dye emporium! She and her partner Paul live on Heathcote’s back parcel, in a pioneer log cabin with their two children and a very large cat named Smudge. This cat will let you pet him, but will eventually, without warning, attack your hand as if he were just injected with Tasmanian Devil DNA. He and my dog Tuatha have known each other their entire lives. Despite this history, Smudge still appears appalled and ready to defend his border whenever Tuatha visits. And Tuatha still acts as if Smudge should just get over it and start wrestling around the ground with him. “If you would simply let me sniff your butt, and if you would just smell this corner of the porch I’ve so thoughtfully marked for you, you would understand I’ve come in peace!” If dog people and cat people can coexist, why can’t dogs and cats?

On the lawn of the cabin, Carol helped me spread out dropcloths and organize the colors of dye. I would dye the off-white sheets; Iuval would dye the set that already had a pale lavender color. I planned my pattern for a long time and selected colors that matched the decor of our loft. Iuval grabbed bottles as they suited him and started squeezing with the consideration of a three year-old. Everyone had fun and the results were enchanting.

After leaving the sheets and pillowcases tied over night, we rinsed them with a garden hose and laundered them. And when we made the bed and climbed inside, it was the little world we had built entirely together, not my homestead at Heathcote, not his veggie bus in Arkansas, but a queen sized new start.

These days I’m still at my homestead, down to one dog and no Iuval. He’s moved on to Atlanta to be with his son. I think I’ll send those lavender-and-every-other-color-he-could-grab sheets down to Atlanta. I’m keeping the ones that match my loft.

And maybe this spring, long after the Chinese New Year, I’ll show up at Carol’s cabin with the bag of old shirts and skirts I’ve been saving. Who else is ready for a burst of color?

–WT

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Heathcote Community is a pretty special place to live, with many unusual blessings. Friends and visitors often gush about our community dinners. Six nights a week, most of the community comes to the Mill for a shared meal.  Each community member signs up to lovingly cook about thrice a month. That way, the work is light and people usually cook their particular vegetarian specialties, making the Heathcote cuisine legendary!

A few years ago, we gutted the first floor of the Mill to open up the space as we add members. We renovated and expanded our dining room and kitchen areas.

We wanted more members. So we brainstormed about recruitment and we meditated on our intention, picturing the people arriving. They did!

Since that time, we’ve gone from eight adults and four kids to sixteen adults and six children living on the land. I imagine the economic downturn helps our population explosion, with people who’ve considered Intentional Community for years, finally pursuing that adventure.

Now, long ago when we were fewer, dinner cleanup was a drag. We always had the agreement that whoever cooked for the night didn’t have to clean. But some cooks have simple ways and some cooks, well, they use every pot in the place, open twenty-seven cans and fling food on every conceivable surface. We would rotate a couple of members to clean, who were sometimes at it for hours.

Then it was proposed that we try having all eaters except the cook clean up. This seemed like overkill to some, awkward to others, but we consensed to try it.

At first, I found it way overstimulating, having eight or more adult bodies in our tiny, pre-renovation kitchen. Whenever I could snag the dishwashing job and face the wall, I would. I want to be a good girl and do what’s expected, but I’m not one of those personality types who thrives on chaos.

Folks soon found that, like our communal dinners themselves, the cleanup had become a group bonding experience. People would continue dinner conversation, sing songs, gather consensus around where things belonged in the kitchen and what do do with plastic bags–”I still can’t believe we actually wash these!!!”

And our renovation certainly created some elbow room, smoothing out the chaos. That is, until the people we imagined showed up, picked up dish towels and asked, “Where does this thingy go?”

Our dining room tables used to host cooperative jigsaw puzzles, slow chess games, kid art projects, and so forth. Suddenly it’s, “Where can I sit? Who’s stuff is this? Can we make an agreement about kids’ stuff in common areas? I have some feelings about this…”

And I’m back to wishing for a cleanup job that faces the wall. But I stand there, on a team of four waiting to dry and/or put away dishes. I look around to see two dishwashers at two different sinks, one rinser, two or three dryers, three or four put-awayers, two sweepers (only two brooms), a cloud of bodies spooning leftovers into containers, labeling and dating them, and a few newbies standing on the edges, trying to figure out how to cut in and steal the ball.

The chaos is made more delicious with the addition of the Heathcote kids to dinner cleanup. They have spent years building their own community in our Open Classroom program. After several years of using consensus to create kid systems to cook and clean up their own lunch, they understood the take and give of community. When some adults expressed concern/resentment/pissiness that kids just ran off to play after dinner, the kids problem solved and offered an agreement that kids would do twenty minutes of cleanup each night. Their presence has been heartwarming, distracting, loud, hilarious, usually effective and generally a wonderful gift.

Lately, I’ve been counting twenty-three and more bodies at dinners. I’m curious to see what will bubble up as we co-create the systems that work for our growing community. Open Classroom went from three to five students this year. We needed to create new structures for everything, waiting for our new students to buy-in to our problem-solving consensus. What will the adults say? Should we go back to shifts of cleaner-upers? I already hear folks saying that we have too many eaters for one cook to feed. Cooking teams?

The delicious problems of success. In the meantime, outta my way! Hippie Chick with a wet dish!

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