Community Plus Partner: Integrating Significant Others

Relationships, polyamorous or monogamous, are complicated enough. Imagine if all your friends had to reach consensus on whether you and your sweetie(s) could move in together. Well, actually, your friends might relish that power. Anyway, welcome to the alien terrain in which my partner and I find ourselves. I live at Heathcote Community and in order for my partner to share my home, he has to apply and be accepted as a member of the Community, a process that can take eight months or more to be finalized.

Even though Heathcote is a mixture of couples and singles, this is not an issue we’ve often faced, considering a membership application from an existing member’s lover. It’s a very different dynamic than welcoming a couple together or an individual. What happens if someone doesn’t like this new partner?

In our tried and true process, we invite an applicant to visit for 21 days, either consecutively or over time. We get acquainted and discuss the Community’s values, systems, etc. Either the applicant or a Heathcoter can decide at any time that things don’t seem to be a match. But if all seems cozy, we approve the applicant to move in and begin a seven month provisional membership period.

But what if there is an issue, and it’s a community member’s lover? The stakes get much higher. If the Community rejects this applicant, they stand a good chance of losing an existing member, too. Will people feel pressured, in that case, to ignore problems?

My partner, C.T., has unique worries. He’s a consensus trainer and writer. Will Community members feel self conscious practicing consensus around him, or will they be resistant to his thoughts on our process, assuming that he expects us to do things his way? How to tread lightly and lovingly when you’re something of a big wig in your field…

Mostly things are smooth sailing so far. But I know everyone’s aware of the new dynamic. We did dance here briefly before when a former partner of mine applied. That was quite a minefield, as that partner truly wasn’t a fit for Heathcote, despite being likable on many levels.

Now C.T. and I aren’t the only ones. Nick’s partner Rachel has applied for membership. Previously, I experienced that moving to a small, rural Community as a single person was a decision to remain single. It seemed very hard to make, maintain and grow connections.

Did something shift? Has the internet negated that isolation? I have had good luck with GreenSingles… Whatever the case, along with the singles and couples interested in Heathcote, we also have partners coming to roost!

—WT

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C.T. Butler makes me look good. It’s my turn to cook the Heathcote Community dinner again and the consensus trainer/vegetarian chef and co-founder of Food Not Bombs is my guest and helper! Or more accurately on this day, I’m his helper.

Nearly all of the adult members of Heathcote take turns cooking dinners, which we share six nights a week. It comes out to cooking about twice a month. The rest of the nights, we just show up and get fed. Since we rotate, folks tend to make their specialties. So not only does someone else cook my dinner, but I get their best.

I don’t profess to have a best.

I observe with bewilderment people who savor cooking as a hobby, a joy, a vocation or avocation. I didn’t get that gene or whatever. Me, I like to eat well so I cook. I get no special creative satisfaction out of the process. Even so, since I like to eat well, I do know how to get a sparkle from my spicings.

Cooking with C.T. is like taking a car ride with a war correspondent. We have consensed upon his traditional refried beans, a recipe that originated in El Salvador & Nicaragua.  As he casually chops onions and garlic, he tries to remember the recipe from his days of feeding homeless people and protesters with Food Not Bombs. As he slices proportions down to feed the twenty or so we’re expecting, he’s reminded of arrests and police beatings and stories start to flow.

Food Not Bombs just observed the thirtieth anniversary of the occupation of Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant (May 24, 1980). The six activists who would eventually rent a house together and establish the first Food Not Bombs collective, were all protesters at that event. When one of them, Brian Feigenbaum, was arrested, the others literally started holding bake sales for his defense! I’m reminded of the t-shirt/bumper sticker slogan, It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Thus started a food/activism connection for the collective. “Most of us worked in restaurants at the time, cooks, waiters, etc., and we knew first hand the mountains of food that’s wasted,” C.T. explains. At first, the group collected the restaurant and grocery store leftovers hoping to feed themselves for free, liberating time and resources for their activism. But immediately they could see that they had discovered a resource far beyond their own needs. “Of course, we were activists, so our values were to see the food get used where it was needed,”

This took several forms. The collective gave food away in Harvard Square, which established the non-violent direct action template that eventually prompted clashes with police in cities around the world and arrests for serving food without a permit (although their home town of Cambridge, Massachusetts was supportive, negotiating with FNB and eventually naming C.T. Peace Commissioner). Food Not Bombs also catered demonstrations and direct actions, feeding participants so they could stay on site long hours, keeping the protests going.

Thirty years later, C.T. stands in the Heathcote Mill kitchen, mashing the pinto and black turtle beans in small batches, because we couldn’t find a masher with a long enough handle to reach the bottom of the pressure cooker. “I always say I’m mashing in the love, it looks violent but it’s made with love,” he smiles without stopping.

So many times, that sentiment has been spoken in this kitchen. I’ve heard many Heathcote members describe the act of feeding their community as one of nurturing and love. How broken and sad it seems to me that the FBI would eventually target Food Not Bombs as a “terrorist” organization. And that feeding the hungry would be viewed as a crime in dozens of cities over the globe, resulting in thousands of arrests of Food Not Bombs chapter volunteers the world over.

But right now, C.T. is feeding me and mine. As from that first Food Not Bombs collective house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, autonomous chapters operate by consensus. C.T. has written two books on consensus decision-making. And he’s had a long friendship with Heathcote through his consensus workshops. This community’s consensus on this meal is: forty thumbs up!

You’re a cheap shoe,
a K-Mart ingenue,
white sole, synthetic smile,
sloppy laces fated to fray,
sloppy canvas that bleeds my socks.
Always complications!

I’ve been lucky enough
to find just my size
and then the surprise of
an enjoyable fit.
A one season shoe,
no presumptuous spring
in your step,
bouncing back from
the perils of pavement.
You give in at the toe, heave ho.
And I out grow, and,
Dear John, move on…

—WT

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This is not a promise,
just a flaky muse:
What if I gave you peaches, cut to the pit just
at the moment of sugaring? What if
you shivered when the juice tracked your chin,
amused to be sticky again?
What if a moment were enough?

I can’t say, but what if I showed up with
wildflowers and you’d just been pondering that
empty corner in your kitchen? Would they be
just perfect or are you allergic

to wildflowers

or gifts that show up, riding a beaming smile as if
you’d asked the universe a question? Be careful of
requests; Choose your words like a lawyer.
The universe might just make you divorce that
habit you wear…out.

Funny how the badminton shuttle rights itself with
each hit. Funny, the sight of you, chattering and
restringing my racket…again, endless patience and
contentment at twenty paces. My limitless listening.

My serve…

What if the night sounds of my house became
familiar and you slept eight hours, your hand, food on
the plate of mine, feeding us rest?

You could plant tomatoes and I could weed when
I remember. Wineberries, catnip, tearthumb. Just
a notion. Could be shiny.

I have to laugh that we can’t seem to get more than
five volies of that shuttle off before I miss. I’m willing
to practice but the weight of your gaze on my hair
is distracting. What if I got the rhythm?

Your serve…

—-Wren Tuatha

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Words are thin.
Don’t paper me at midnight when the
truth is you’re leaving.

Don’t start a fight to make the leaving
right.

Keep me in your eyes instead, cunning,
murky, devoted. Everywhere your eyes land
I will be the hue of desire, the fabric in your

grasping hand. You wear me and no change of
season will have you putting me down. Even as you leave, to travel,

to find what I was not,

you take me with you.

__________

These are the things that are falling away.
The quickness in our pulses, the sympathy of our
eyes for each other, dances without obvious music.

This is my skin, continuous with only itself.
In my room, a box of stillness and furniture
that knew you.

And a breath comes like the turning
of a motor with the oil all burned off.

There’s no way the next one could be better.

–Wren Tuatha

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