Cohousing-L Mailing List: Was Pet Policy now "To Do or Not To Do"

[Dave and Diane (daveanddee]

Hi all,
This brings to mind for me the concept of positive and negative space, which I 
spent a lot of time working on in art school. It was a very difficult concept 
for me to grasp, because my natural inclination was to fill up all the space 
on the page with as much text and as many pictures as possible. Gradually, 
after many semesters of hard work, my teachers finally managed to get it 
through my head that "not space" is space, it's just that it's used in a 
different way. It's  purpose is to give the page room to "breathe" so the 
reader can focus on the important things. 

The problem in cohousing is that we all have competing needs and we all want 
to fill up the space with our "stuff." But that does not leave any "white 
space" in the plan for the eye to rest. Trees are nice, but if you fill your 
landscape with trees, then you don't have room for a bench set or a pond. If 
you fill your landscape with gardens, you don't have room for an open green 
space. If you fill your walkways with chairs, toys, boxes, carts, wagons, etc. 
you don't have open paths for kids to play on, or for elderly people to get by 
with walkers or wheelchairs.

Every placement of "stuff" that fills up a niche takes away from the "white 
space" which is not only useful but necessary to our mental health. I hope you 
will all mull this over carefully the next time someone in your community 
raises an objection to some object being sited, no matter how wonderful it may 
seem to many of you at the time.

--Diane Simpson
  JP Cohousing, Boston


Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 15:43:46 -0400
From: Rod Lambert <rod [at] ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us>
Subject: [C-L]_ Pet Policy

Sharon (and Others)
I was speaking as well to the larger issue of not doing something because one 
person objected. We had a problem at one point where the landscape committee 
kept having to move where a tree was to be planted because of one "objection" 
until it had painted itself into a corner and gave up planting it at all. I 
have seen this happen on other issues as well and wondered if others had found 
a good simple process for working with objections informally. Sometimes it 
seems that if the 'obectioner' could just be helped to get a larger 
perspective the objection would be dropped. Do you know what I mean?

Rod