Tag Archives: training

Tribal Introductions

Work on the house and garden ground to a halt again for the last couple of weeks.  It was roughly 15 degrees below average, but the thing that really stopped me is the snow and lack of sunshine.

I’ve used the time to get ahead in web work and explore Missouri.  In the last week I’ve gone to the Mardi Gras celebration in St. Louis, spent a couple days at Dancing Rabbit, and discovered a local organic brewery/restaurant in Columbia.

If you’ve never been to the St. Louis Mardi Gras celebration, I bet you’d be surprised how big it is.  I missed the formal parade, but I think the informal parade of revelers was probably more entertaining than the parade could ever be.

It was fun, but it reminded me of something from the documentary, Collapse.   Michael Ruppert makes an analogy that there were really only 3 kinds of people.  There are those that are completely caught in the headlights and don’t know what to do.  There are people who say, “ok, how can we build more life rafts?”  And then there are the people who say, “this is the Titanic, it’s too big to fail, I’m going to the bar.”  I felt like much of the Mardi Gras celebration fell into the latter category.

I’d been e-mailing back and forth with Liat, a member of Dancing Rabbit for awhile now.  At some point I was mentioning how I believed the most difficult aspect of community life is decision-making and conflict-resolution.  People are all different and can be very unpredictable. By comparison, it’s pretty straight-forward picking up some tools and materials and building a house.  She brought up the fact that they were doing some training on meeting facilitation, so after asking the other members if it was alright, I got invited up to attend it.

I really enjoyed meeting people, but I still felt very much like an outsider.  Visitor season hasn’t started at Dancing Rabbit and I certainly saw a look of, “who is that? should they be here?” on several faces when I first arrived.  After a sledding session immediately after I arrived and an introduction at the potluck on the first night that subsided.

I felt like I was seeing what it’s like to be part of a tribe.  Even the protective glances I got when I arrived spoke to that fact.  It was clear we shared many of the same values, however, I also knew that this wasn’t my tribe.  I saw the rhyme and reason for how they put those values into practice, and fundamentally I agree with them, but I have something slightly different in mind for what I’d like Maya Creek to be like.

That said, I had an excellent time.  It was interesting and insightful getting a close look at what others had done with these natural building techniques and whether or not their experiments were successes or failures.  What really sticks with me though is the feeling I got when I was in those buildings.  They were labors of love and have a level of character that I can’t really even describe because I’ve never felt it before in an inanimate object of that size.  Even when I look at ancient ruins I can’t help but think that the people building these temples were probably doing it against their will.

The training was extremely informative to someone who hasn’t even witnessed a consensus-type meeting.  It really made the point that it’s not just about making a good decision, it’s just as much about the people aspect and making sure everyone leaves the meeting with as much enthusiasm and focus, but hopefully more than when they entered.  I’ve got a couple of books on consensus and a big thick manual on how to facilitate meetings, but I haven’t gotten to them yet.  After all, since it’s just me right now, I tend to come to consensus pretty easily.

After the morning training Liat took me on a tour of the nearby community of Sandhill later that day.  We only ran into a couple people at Sandhill, but it was clear they have a very industrious operation going, making molasses, maple syrup, honey, and growing and brewing all kinds of things for sale and their own use.

All in all I think it was good trip to introduce myself and my goal at Maya Creek of a similar type of community.  I’d like to visit again when the weather’s nicer but that may not be this year because if the weather’s nice I really need to be working on my own projects.