Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Defining "the cohousing principle"

[vbradova (vbradova]

<Jose wrote: However, on the practical side, if you want to have more community
interaction where do you eat if you want to combine a meeting with potluck?
 Always at the biggest house?  It's nice to have the option, I think, and very
hard to build later sometimes.<

I did not mean to suggest we should not have a room in the common house for
eating. Potlucks and impromptu dinners etc are fine with me!

>>I wrote: Most folks want neighborliness that does not
become a stone around one's neck.

>Jose wrote: Then they can buy a house pretty much anywhere and enjoy casual
relationships with neighbors.  It doesn't make sense to water-down cohousing
when the rest of the world offers that very thing. 
etc.>

Well, the way I see it, there is a vast land between an unrelenting round of
community chores and events, and mainstream neighborhoods.
What I want is people dropping by at the spur of a moment, people visiting each
other in the back yard just to hang and chat, people getting together for a
singalong on a couple of benches, kidpacks running around where the older kids
watch out for the younger ones, people wandering off for a walk together, people
sharing a hot tub... and of course sharing work on community projects as well,
in moderation. This is a far cry from any conventional neighborhoods I have
known in the U.S.

>I believe that learning all of these lessons together has ingrained them in
our minds and we have truly learned from experience.  I've been hearing a lot
lately on this list about how to avoid the tough stuff.  
NO....you can't have meaningful community without some of the tough stuff too>


I don't mind tough stuff. There is plenty of tough stuff in getting anything
built, all the more so when building a whole small village! But I believe that
meetings are not healthy for people; all that sitting, immobility, indoorness,
talk for talk's sake, being-in-the-head stuff... there is a better way, I know
it! :-)

>Rob Sandelin wrote: So if you remove community meals, what will be the way
your community connects and reforms its relationships? Community meals are the
touch point,where scattered individuals, who are busy with there OWN lives,
have a regular place to come together as a community. Frankly, if all you do
is hold monthly meetings, unless you find some other non-decision making place,
it is unlikely you will have much in the way of connections with each other,
and so how is this any different than a condo? This bonding process is what
makes people give service to each other, do things to support each other, care
about each other. Without regular meals to connect, how will you accomplish
this?

The American mindset for housing is isolation and privacy, and so by not 
reinforcing
the opposites of social interaction and togetherness, and by not making any
kinds of commitments that serve the groups well being, I would suspect that
very shallow relationships would be the result. In your model, in what way would
individuals make commitments to the greater good of the group? What would be
the actions that people would do, the things they do together to form 
relationships?>


This sounds like either/or thinking... Why is it that regularly planned 
community
meals must happen to build community? Why not expect that working on community
maintenance projects will accomplish the same? And community hikes? And putting
on plays, lectures or workshops? And working together at the CSA farm or 
community
garden? Surely we don't need one template for everyone. I don't want another
extended family; I want good neighbors.

I think you make a good point tho: is it necessary to have one focus, one common
activity that all the community members agree to participate in? I tend to think
that the commitment to keep building the community in whatever ways one is drawn
to (expressed in some form of broadly-defined work credit) is good enough.

Vera