Rekindling Friendships, written March 2014

Sights, Inspirations and Rekindling Friendships  March 18, 2014

It’s three weeks since I’ve written.  At the moment I’m on a bus in Oregon along the Columbia River that Amtrak has hired to shuttle us— our train lost time in the Cascades behind a limping freight, and now they are aiming to make up time and catch the eastbound Empire Builder that left Portland ahead of us.  

One way or the other, I should end up in Sandpoint, Idaho in the wee hours of the morning.  I have a place to stay for the next 2 nights, and various leads to follow towards finding a small place or room to rent for the next months.  I expect these next few days to also rendezvous with Shane and my little car, battery reconnected after its long winter of hibernation.  For sure, I am unlikely to be sitting around much in the next while, so this bus ride seems the perfect opportunity to write you all.  I plan to stop by the Sandpoint Library tomorrow, connect to the Internet, and send this off!

These weeks have been rich in incredible countryside, and even richer in people, stories and  conversation.  In the midst of much unknown, I am also hopeful and inspired.  

Powerful winter storms and uncertain timing of ice in Chicago encouraged my friend Elizabeth and me to err in the direction of caution and cancel our long-planned trip to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in nearby Missouri.  We turned the disappointment into quiet time together and a project with Elizabeth’s vintage Singer sewing machine and a lovely Goodwill Store silk scarf to create a lavender-filled eye pillow as a gift in appreciation for our hostess at Dancing Rabbit whose significant coordination efforts were for naught.  And we feasted on the incredible variety of an orchid show at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Traveling by public ground transportation has gone well.  It was just delightful to benefit from my strategy last summer of accumulating Amtrak points and to have earned a tiny sleeper space on the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco.   The space design is superb and I took notes and pictures:  living and sleeping space for 2 along with a compact closet in less than 32 square feet!  I loved it!  During the day there were 2 comfortable facing chairs that at night flattened into a lower berth with another bunk above:

Arriving in the soft spring of California began with another wonderful Servas host family in Palo Alto and a gentle transition to Petra, Joseph and the Wilderness Guides Council’s annual Gathering in an absolutely sweet place along the Pacific near Bodega Bay.  At night, I could hear the ocean surf, and this is the time of year that the grey whales are migrating back north from Baja along this shore with their newborn calves.

The entire Gathering was incredible for me:  I particularly loved all the new members we had, many of them in their twenties and thirties.  And hard work that I and others had invested beforehand concluded in a broad and amazing consensus process to move ahead with the intention of becoming a public benefit nonprofit that I will continue to be significantly involved in, towards long-held dreams by many of us to one day make earth-based rites of passage work accessible to every family and community.

I’ve spent the week since the Gathering with 4 different sets of friends in northern California, sharing news and hopes for the future.  Over the weekend, I was with Dominique, David and Torin, hiking along Sly Park Lake and catching up- we originally met when Shane and Torin were in a Montessori pre-school together.

And yesterday I was with my two best friends from California teacher training for the first time in 13 years or so.  Deb and I joined Arlene in her 5th grade classroom, and then had some great visiting time together before I caught the train last night out of Sacramento.

I feel quite blessed in all these circles of amazing friendship and possibility in my life.  Connecting, and staying connected across wide gaps of years and geography--- it's a discipline that seems vital to community and creating the potential for it in a broad variety of ways.

P.S. Wednesday, March 19  Arrived safely in Sandpoint in wee hours last night and found a friendly fellow-traveling family to give me a ride to the home of the young friends where I am staying through tonight, so I didn’t have to wake any one up!  Currently at the library with internet access and have started following leads for congenial places to live.  

Community Winter and Idaho-Bound, written February 2014

Community Winter and Idaho-Bound  February 26, 2014

I realized that this winter was a time to put some good foundations in place and tie up loose ends   I sold my car and my old laptop, finally got a will and a Health Care Power of Attorney written, moved everything into a different storage unit for a lower monthly rent, wrapped up final energy models with my engineering work, navigated the Affordable Health Care Act, and the like.  

I spent a good deal of time with my sister Susan, Mom and as many friends as I could manage to connect with, and with the land of North Carolina.  
 

And I had the good fortune to share the home of my good friends Becky and Lee, surrounded by their larger co-housing community of Arcadia.  

Our neighbors were welcoming and generous to me, sharing beeswax for a candle-dipping project, a bike with great side baskets that supported some helpful bus-bike travel on various errands, an interesting book on off-the-grid power, and some hiking boots to keep my feet dry climbing various springtime mountains with Shane!

33 homes clustered this way chew up much less land in roadways, and neighbors walk past rather than driving, so connections happen easily.  The storm water pond attracts birds, and there are shared garden, play field, and community dining/cooking space for meals and celebrations together.  Every morning I could run through the small woodlot next to the pond, greeting my favorite white oak tree and whoever else was out at the same time.  (You can tell we had an unusual heavy snow a couple of weeks ago!)

Of course it’s crucial to be kindred, AND I am more and more inspired by the huge benefits of house-sharing with others— now more than ever, with natural resources precious and dwindling, finances tricky, and demographics leaning towards many single people.

The most lovely part for me is how easy it is to counter the isolating impact of busy schedules this way, with impromptu and rich conversations, laughter over side-by-side meal preparations, games.  I reveled in it!  Turns out Becky had as much fun dipping beeswax birthday candles as I did, and we are a dynamite jigsaw puzzle duo!

Instead of working inside all day after our big storm, I yielded to temptation and played with my buddies in the snow!

Becky dreamed up a shared trip as I was leaving North Carolina that was an incredibly sweet transition:  first to the mountains near Asheville to visit land that is about to leave her family, while camping with my dear friend Justine.  We had a sweet morning snuggled in our sleeping bags near the pond full of springtime frogs, and talking about life. 

Then Becky and I headed to Charlottesville, Virginia and we each visited good friends before her return to North Carolina and my boarding the train for Chicago.  I had a joyous evening with my high school friend Jane and her good husband Mark.

And I’m getting to spend time with two lovely women I got to know last year— Kristina in Charlottesville 

and Elizabeth in Chicago.  

Before I head on to the San Francisco Bay area, Elizabeth and I are quite anticipating a weekend trip together to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, a very interesting intentional community in northeastern Missouri that is hosting us to learn more about what they have figured out.

Most of the tiny house frame, various tools, my bike, and boxes of books, cookware and some clothes are tucked into my 10 x 10 storage unit as I head towards Sandpoint, ID and the mysterious yet-to-emerge patchwork of community and livelihood that await me there, along with great time with Shane.  I expect I’ll head back to North Carolina in September or so, and maybe this next winter will see the tiny house taking form.

Upcoming Journey

All my life, I have had an abiding connection to the land, and I have made a commitment in many arenas of my life to discovering and demonstrating more cooperative, sustainable and small-footprint ways of living.  Now I am leaving my paid work as an engineer in sustainable building and energy work to broaden how I am contributing my time and heart to the world.  

I have been voicing the commitment I am now making as leveraging all my skills and my heart as a gift towards co-creating a sweeter future for all the children within a multi-generational and multi-cultural framework.  And to teaching and listening-- supporting a shift in the balance of human impact on climate change to protect and safeguard the amazingly beautiful array of life on our planet home.
 

Towards the end of June, I will begin a 4+ month "sojourn" across the country, starting from this part of central North Carolina that has been wonderful roots to me these last 11 years.  I will return to part-time home here in early November.

I expect much of my time will be out West, where my heart also has strong connections, including the Pacific Northwest and California.  Conversation and community that support the future I yearn to be part of bequeathing -- these are integral to this cross-country journey of mine. 



Conversation-- sharing, inspiring and co-creating stories and ideas that stretch beyond the beginning point



Community-- in the sense of being heart-connected and caring about each other's well-being
 

I will be looking for part-time home in the West, too, and work tied to community building, to cross-generational connections, to raising food & living simply and compactly with small energy & resource use, to nature-based rites of passage.... to interweaving all this training & experience of mine.
 

My current highest priorities are completing shop-time on my tiny house timber frame, so that it is ready to store as a ready-to-assemble kit, and down-sizing everything else so that I can move into a 10' x 10' storage unit in early to mid-June.  

This is the 6th timber frame I've designed and cut, and the tiniest.  It will be an 8' x 12' tiny home.  More on this in future blogs!  Here are a few recent pictures of test-fitting and tuning the joints.

 

My precise departure date will be when I complete all my other preparations, including roughing out my immediate travel method and initial itinerary.  After that, I will be writing more!  Including what "ripe communities" mean to me.