Re: The Village of Wildflowers | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Fred H Olson (fholson![]() |
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Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 09:07:39 -0800 (PST) |
Coleen O'Connell <oconnellcoleen [at] gmail.com> is the author of the message below. It was posted by Fred, the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org> I combined her message with her reply that supplied a URL which I edited in below. Also note that tho she addresses her first sentence to me, I only reposted the message as I am doing with this one. The message she is responding to was written by WW Gilman, The Village of Wildflowers <Wwgilman [at] aol.com> . I also deleted the long quoted message. -------------------- FORWARDED MESSAGE FOLLOWS -------------------- Fred, Though I certainly can resonate with forgoing endless meetings and a long time to develop, I have to say that our community would not be as strong, or probably even functioning, had one person had the vision and made it happen. I am not suggesting that you can't make your vision happen, but you will need to be gracious and very open, spacious, and generous in allowing it to change from your original vision if it is truly going to work. If you stick to some rigid fantasy you hold, people will not find that attractive. I certainly wouldn't... speaking for myself. I know of another community where the person used their own money, developed the rules and regs, all the documentation, designed the houses, and Common House, and is now waiting for people to sign up... and very few are. The purpose of community is to become one ... it takes years to become that. Otherwise you just have an expensive neighborhood with some hopefully shared values. I think the intentions are great ... the values good - but people want to co create. I think it is in our genes. And in systems thinking, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts ... the point being you need many parts. It could be so much more than what you dream. A wonderful model that I have toured and spent time at is the Enright Ecovillage [ http://enrightecovillage.org/ ] in Cincinnati, Ohio. A few neighborhood people, slowly over time, gathered with neighbors in a historic neighborhood, bought a large building that was a church? or something, turned it into a community center, and one by one, as houses went on the market, they found people to buy them that wanted to be part of the Ecovillage neighborhood. They started farming the land in the back and they have a really wonderful model. I think there are lots of people out there thinking outside the cohousing box... and yes we must all do that ... cohousing is but one model that has arisen out of many thousands of years of humans living cooperatively and closely. And there is no one right way to do things. What I do know, is that it is hard to find people to sign onto someone else's vision, when in fact, the joy of community is co-creating one. That takes time and effort but hopefully it is worth it. And the outcome of such shared vision is infectious. Coleen from Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage -- Coleen O'Connell Faculty/Coordinator Ecological Teaching and Learning MS Program Lesley University oconnell [at] lesley.edu 207-699-8275 Check out these two exciting things I am engaged in: http://www.mainecohousing.org http://www.lesley.edu/gsass/audubon/etl_program.html
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The Village of Wildflowers Fred H Olson, January 26 2013
- Re: The Village of Wildflowers Fred H Olson, January 27 2013
- Re: The Village of Wildflowers Fred H Olson, January 28 2013
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