The Common Place

Abe

Our adventure is reaching its next transition stage. This feels like a loss, but we're working hard to frame it as just another step, or a change.

When we opened our house up as the location of the intentional community, there was no 3rd baby in our immediate future. However, since people have moved in, Melissa and I have become pregnant with #3. In preparing for arrival of the baby in December, Melissa, with my full support, has been adamant that our family would not thrive with both the chaos of a new baby and the chaos of a community house. Therefore, at last night's meeting at the Red House, we broke the difficult news to the others that we would be asking them to move out in December.

This is very painful because it feels like a dream is fading...but I'm still convinced that we can continue to strive towards our misison and values. The other three now have a lot of decisions they need to make about their future, so we'll see how it goes.

On the plus side, we still have four months left, and look forward to four wonderful months together. It will be a total of eight months, which is still quite an achievement and has been a amazing learning experience.

Abe

Dan commented rather astutely on my previous post that compliments are a double-edged sword: you feel joy for what you have accomplished, but feel shame for what you have failed to accomplish. So, we find joy in that we have been able to live a simpler life, to consume less, to shop locally, to grow our own food, to eat less red meat, to spend time together in fellowship, to spend time together in prayer, and to invite others into our home to share our vision with them. Yet, at the same time, I find shame in that most of our neighbourhood is unaware of our existence, that we have not engaged those at the margins, that we have not come together to meet and pray as much as we committed to, and that some aspects of our lifestyles remain glaringly unchanged.

Abe

On the ground, here in the house, sometimes it feels like we're just mucking around, co-housing, and accomplishing nothing of worth beyond what we would living individually. This is partially due to a lack of time to spend together and focus on mission, and partially due to not knowing exactly what we should be doing. At least this is how it feels when I'm having a bad day.

Fortunately, we have been blessed by recieving much encouragement from others. People have been discovering us on the blogosphere and leaving very encouraging messages. As well, I have met a couple of people around town that I don't know personally who have heard of our endeavours, one last night said that our efforts are being discussed in the community and are encouraging others. This kind of encouragement makes it feel like what we are doing is much bigger even than our community house. Even though we have yet to acheive some drastic movement of growth and love in our neighbourhood, we are proving that it IS POSSIBLE to live another way, to embody a Christian alternative lifestyle. And I think this might be just as important or more important than what we actually do day-to-day. The ultimate measure of 'success' of our community might perhaps be if we inspire others to take the plunge.

Either way, the encouragement is awesome!

Abe

After myself and Melissa were away for a week and a half, we have been having a delightful time the past couple of nights just playing boardgames and watching movies with the housemates. It's wonderful to reconnect. I feel like the housemates are my immediate family, and missed them as much as I would my family while I was away.

Abe

Within social and healthcare services, the acronym NIMBY is used to represent 'not in my backyard'. This concept is the one that every neighbourhood or street wants social issues and outcasts to simply go away somewhere else rather than dealing with them. However, the obvious problem is that these issues and people have to end up somewhere. I had often heard of police pushing homeless people out of neighbourhoods, but could never imagine exactly how this was done, because you can't just simply physically move people away.

During my Washington trip I was walking around Georgetown, a high-end neighbourhood just outside metro D.C., that is actually a town older than D.C. itself. It is famous for its architecture, cobbled steets, and unique shops. While there I was checking out a canal with horse-drawn boats, and observed and interaction between a police officer and a homeless man.

I missed the start of the conversation, but when I arrived the police officer asked if he could search the guys stuff, and was going through his bags and backpack. The man was obviously agitated by the interaction, and when the office was finished searching and looked like he was going to leave, the man started shouting, "Why don't you just shoot me! Shoot me now! Put me out of my misery! You might as well shoot me!" The officer then placed the man under arrest for creating a public distrubance, cuffed him, and began questioning him.

At this point I felt very badly for the homeless guy, because I had a sense of the pain he was in to ask to be euthanized. If I was back in London I would simply have approached and asked the officer what was going on and advocate for the man that he didn't need to be arrested. However, being in a foreign country I was hesitant, having heard horror stories of arrests for simple driving infractions. So, I didn't want to end up arrested myself, but couldn't stand by doing nothing. So, while the officer was getting a verbal history on the man about mental illnesses, past arrests, places he stayed, I walked up and put a $20 bill with the man's stuff beside him on the bench, looking the officer in the eyes. I then walked a little ways away and stood obviously observing the proceedings, until another officer with a car came (the 1st being on a bike) and took the man away.

I now understood one of the ways that police can 'clean-up' neighbourhoods, by harrassing those considered 'undersireable'.

Abe

Things appear to have settled in with everyone's schedules, the result of which we have had our first house meeting since Micah moved in. This was productive, and I'm definitely feeling more organized now.

One of the points we discussed was our values statement of practicing non-violence. I raised the point of how we do so in today's culture, as physical violence isn't a part of our everyday lives. We came up with a number of suggestions:

1) Being careful not to cause emotional violence through our words and actions. This involves all of us honestly exploring unhealthy anger in our lives, and seeking to temper this. We spent a good time talking about the way we lash out against anonymous others, such as when driving.

2) Considering how our consumption leads to violence in the lives of others. For example, buying gas from Shell, where Shell Petroleum is involved in the violent relocation and murder of indigenous people on the oil bearing land of the Niger Delta. Or buying clothes from American Apparel, where the CEO is sexually abusive towards staff.

3) Being like Gandhi, where we're not afraid to be %#*@-disturbers, but do so in a non-violent way.

We'd like to hear your suggestions as well.

Abe

As most of you already know, I recently obtained a full-time faculty position at The University of Western Ontario. This significantly alters the finances of our community, and has opened things up in terms of exploring novel ideas. In particular, we have thought about the idea of having the rest of us support one commonist to be a full-time commonist. Now, however, we just need to figure out what that person would actually do. We don't want them to just become a housekeeper/cook, or to spend all of their time volunteering at organizations outside of the community, we want this to be an outreach component of our community house. This was a dream we had had before, but it seemed so distant that we never worked out the details.

So, I turn to your expertise: What would a full-time commonist do? If you had a community house, what kind of outreach would you like to do?

My one thought was just have her start to work on getting us incorporated, and then getting charitable status, so we could work towards receiving donations and acquiring a building.

The other thing that I'm looking forward to is I am meeting with Nathan from a community/emergent church in Sarnia, http://www.thestory.ca/. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas from him about how we can move things forward.

Abe

So last night Micah started moving his stuff in. Melissa has been working hard on getting the upstairs cleaned out and ready for the 4th commonist. The energy in the house is palpable as we take the next big step forward. I have discovered that there is no feeling as good as having someone else join in on your dreams, and bring their own as well.

Part of the moving was getting his queen-sized bed upstairs. We knew it was possible as we had a queen as well, but what I forgot is I had built the 1/2 bathroom on the mainfloor in the meantime. This meant that we were unable to manouveur the boxspring into the position we needed to for navigating the stairs. So, we decided we would lift it up onto the rooftop patio and bring it through our bedroom. However, there were only 3 of us so we had to decide whom would be on their own, and who would work together. Micah's buddy volunteered to be by himself on the bottom, so we helped him prop it up against the wall while we ran upstairs to grab it. It took us a good struggle still to get it up and over the railing, but we finally did.

Our boys (aged 3.5 and 2) were super excited all day for Micah to be moving in, all day Chris was saying "Micah coming, Micah coming".

While Melissa was working on the upstairs, I rearranged the new rec-room in the basement so that the pull-out couch was accessible. Amanda has been crashing in the room that MIcah is now occupying, so she needed somewhere else to stay. This is all set-up now, and this means that she can move-in any time as well. It looks like the job situation could work out for her in town, so we may be adding our 5th in no time.

It's a rush, I've gotta say.

The Common Place has officially grown to now include the Red House and the Tan House. We had a wonderful time this past holiday Monday hanging out with Chris, Helen and Kenton to discuss their dreams for community living. We had meals together, enjoyed the sunshine, and got a lot of work done on the basement of the Red House. We continue to let things grow organically as we are not entirely sure how we will work out the coordination between the two houses, and the outreach projects we want to lead, but the first step is to just start living the life we feel called to.

Micah's move-in date is rapidly approaching, and I look forward to having more of a critical mass as our 2 meetings/week have been rather informal with just the 3 adults. We have also been sharing our plans with our neighbours, and have had positive feedback thus far. There isn't really anything they can officially complain about, as we aren't breaking any by-laws (at this point).

Abe

It is looking very good for the second house coming to fruition. We are meeting with the four people who would be living there on Monday to hammer out the details. I can't wait, it's amazing to think we may grow like this already. I'm picturing houses across the city...amazing.