Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re:Re: [C-L]_Opening Ritual

[pattymara (pattymara]

At Tierra Nueva, our opening and closing rituals at business meetings consist 
of passing a rock around the circle.  I started the practice, nearly ten years 
ago after we returned from a group camping trip in Big Sur.  The rock is a 
perfect flat oval of dark jade.  Our facilitation committee had just formalized 
the meeting process, and I brought the rock to the meeting when I facilitated 
and passed it around for the opening circle check.  The rock found a permanent 
home in our facilitator bag, and comes out every meeting.  Five years later, we 
moved into our homes; a new member brought back a rock from his former east 
coast home.  He suggested we use it for our closing circle, and we do.  It is a 
white sparkly oval about the same size as our first rock.  These rocks serve as 
"talking stick", and when you hold it, you alone speak.  

Another ritual we have used is unnamed, but I would called it "silent calling". 
 If a member of the group is in need of support, or a request is made, we hold 
the thought in silence, or sometimes humming together, sometimes chanting the 
words of request.  I know, it sounds hokey, but in the midst of it, even our 
most jaded skeptics get into the swing of it.  When a prospective family sought 
financing approval to buy a house here recently, we spent some time at our 
community life meeting calling them in with chanting "home...home....on the 
range!" erupting into laughter.  Things usually don't stay too reverent here 
for too long.  But laughter is powerful medicine.  Their loan was approved and 
they have since moved in, to our collective delight.  When I described the 
process of us "calling them home", my new neighbor was incredulous:  "You did 
that for us?"  Yup.  We did.  And at the next community life meeting (first 
saturday of each month) someone asked that we do the same fo
 r another prospective family.  My new neighbor got to participate in the same 
ritual that helped draw them home a month earlier.  She continually shakes her 
head, and pinches herself to see if this is all real.

coheartedly,
Patty Mara,
Tierra Nueva, central CA coast
but currently, at large, in Panama, visiting my Tia Rosa, and watching toucan 
peck at papaya in the trees outside.  Iguana saunter through the yard, while 
monkeys explode in the trees above.  Surreal tropical interlude.    



  




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