Menu

Category Archives "Community"

What we are called to: a sermon

January 22, 2023 By Community, Featured, Practice 4 Comments

Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Kwakw’kwa’kwa’kw Elders and youth teaching together in the Kwagiulth big house at Fort Rupert in 2005.

Once a month, in our little United Church here on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) I fill in for our not-quite-full-time minister by leading the service and offering a sermon. I’ve never published those sermons here, but why not? Here is today’s.

Reading: Matthew 4:12-25

We are well into the season of Epiphany and so this is the time of year that we contemplate Jesus’ ministry in the world and his early life. We get to witness a Jesus who is called from his work as a carpenter and who becomes an important and radical spiritual leader in his time. For the first 28 or 30 years of his life, things are somewhat uneventful, and although he shows some talent for interpreting scripture as a precocious child , he isn’t doing much else of note.

To set the stage, Matthew, whose terse words we will be studying this year, offers this text from chapter 4, which is the first time he writes about Jesus as a spiritual leader. The first few chapters of his book concern Jesus’ birth, the visit of the magi and the story of John the Baptist.  With chapter 4 we get two important stories. The first, which we will hear in the first week of Lent, is the story of Jesus retiring to the wilderness of a 40 day retreat in which he meets the devil and wrestles with temptation. It is a story of a spiritual coming of age that echoes that of other great spiritual leaders, including Buddha, who sits under the bodhi tree struggling with his mind in the form of the temptress Mara as he approaches the great insights and liberation of Nirvana.  Somewhere in this story of baptism, retreat and now calling, Jesus has gone through a similar transformation.  He is not longer a carpenter.

Now these events are often told in a breezy narrative of what Jesus is up to, but as I read and meditated on the readings this week I was struck by how the simple structure of the story that Mark just read mirrors four deeper callings that I think are part of our work as Christians.

A calling is just something that one cannot ignore. It is a movement of Spirit that reaches deep inside and changes a person.  It hits you like, well, like an Epiphany, which is to say that a calling is a manifestation of Spirit inside of oneself that changes behaviour.  It can draw us towards a life mission, and an identity.  It has the power to surprise, to give insight, to change one’s ways, and to ultimately align one’ purpose in life with the needs of the world. 

What I also love about the way that this little story is told is that it also provides some simple guidance for ourselves, to act in tune with Spirit.

The first calling is to withdrawal and contemplation and alignment with the light of God that shines through the soul of a person and turns their heart and mind and hands to acts of justice and compassion, the words of the prophet Isaiah.  This comes on the heels of news that John the Baptist has been arrested, and will soon be killed. John is very much the pre-cursor of Jesus and this news provides the gravitas for Jesus’s choice. He knows that choosing to reveal himself will result in his death. His choice to act has a consequence from which he cannot escape and so he withdraws to rest and wait before responding to the call.  Like the morning sky waiting for the sun to rise, Jesus withdraws to cultivate his light. It does not good to burn too brightly right out of the gate.

Discernment is a critical part of responding to a calling. A calling changes lives. Even on the micro-scale if we realize that we are about to confront a major decision in our lives, even burdened by urgency and overwhelming need, the first act should be to withdraw and consider the consequences.  It’s not second thoughts so much as it is deeper thoughts.

The second calling is revealed in the simple statement ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’  With these modest words, Jesus’ entire message of spiritual liberation is embodied and in saying it he has become a spiritual teacher.  As we’ve learned before the word “repent” is the English translation for the Greek word “metanoia” and it is a terrible translation.  “Repent” means to feel guilt, remorse and shame for something and it’s as far as you can get fro Jesus’ message of compassion and forgiveness.  “Metanoia” means to change one’s life, literally to turn around. Jesus offers this as an instruction: if you have done something wrong, go back to that point and take a different tack, apologize, heal yourself, and you will find forgiveness because the “kindom” of heaven wants you to belong, wants you to be in relationship and wants you to be connected and whole. Like the Buddha, Jesus knows that life is hard and that we all walk around with shame and guilt and regret. He is not interested in doubling down on that, pressing on teh bruise and making you feel like shit. He is about liberation, and he is about giving you a simple pathway to addressing the burdens you are carrying. Simple in concept, tricky to execute. But to be left riddled with shame and guilt is literally NOT what Jesus said.  So, “Change your life: stopping harming yourself and others and the forgiveness and love you seek – which is always there – will fill you with joy and healing.” That’s a better translation of the phrase.

The third calling is to community and movement-building, gathering the disciples around him in a core team to activate the mission of love and justice. The phrase “become fishers of people” is a reference to the sayings of multiple prophets who point to the rich and unjust people in the world who rule with cruelty.  Jesus’ mission is to rally a group of people together to transform the society they are all living in. To practice radical love and forgiveness, to gather people together, to heal and feed, to support and care for one another. Once he is committed to this call, Jesus’s mission becomes gathering many people into a movement to make change.

Justice is not the work of a single person. We have just passed the annual commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and when I think about him, and Indigenous rights leaders here in Canada like Delbert Guerin and Simon Baker and Marge White and Khelsilem and George Manuel and Gisda’wa and Wedlidi Speck, I can see that the project of becoming a prophet, literally a social justice warrior, is not work to do alone, nor is it work that one can do part time. Jesus asks his disciples to leave their professions and engage in the work of world transformation alongside him.

A life’s calling has that effect on a person. Suddenly you know what you are made for and whatever you were doing before falls by the wayside as you fully commit yourself to the work of Spirit.

And finally we come to the fourth calling: the work of healing people and the world. It is not just enough to advocate for a more just world. The world cries out for healing and reparations and repair and reconciliation.  We have damaged social relations, our connection to the planet and to our selves. In order to make change in the world, we need to heal and restore. You can see that no matter how you have healed – cooled your anger, broken your addictions, restored an ecosystem formerly devoid of whales, life floods back in. Joy and Spirit and wellness fills you. The “Kindom of God” surrounds you. Being healed is the name we give the way from guilt and disconnection to wholeness and life.

And so the readings give us a map of our calling, a checklist of things to do if we are to follow in the footsteps of Jesus as his followers.  May we have ears to hear how our callings can contribute to a just and kind world.

Leadership enables gifts to make meaning

January 10, 2023 By Art of Hosting, Community, Featured, Football, Invitation, Leadership, Organization, Philanthropy 2 Comments

A box of donuts that Joanna Vervoza-Dolezal, the starting centre back for TSS Rovers, brought for the Swanguardians on the last game of the season. Reciprocity in support.

Yesterday I had an informal call with a person who is leading up customer relationships for a large local company. The company is both a profit-making venture but also is a community institution and has a profile and responsibility beyond just the bottom line. We were talking about how the organization was stuck and the different approaches that the organization was taking towards customer relations when we stumbled onto an untapped area that may help to get the organization unstuck.

For organizations with double or triple bottom lines, the moment your focus moves beyond a financial return on investment, your customers and clients stop becoming ATMs and start becoming friends. Yes. Friends. The lines between your organizational life and the community become blurred. Social license becomes a reality, and that means that customers suddenly make decisions out of love and loyalty to the bigger vision which they can help co-create. They become non-material investors and shareholders in what you are doing. Your sustainability does not solely rely on making a profit. It relies on how those people that buy your services AND how they help shape and co-create your mission.

Where we got to in this conversation was that the organization needed to find ways to allow customers and clients to offer something back. Rather than going out and catering to their needs constantly and trying traditional marketing methods of giving the illusion of being a part of something, customers and clients of the organization need to have a chance to be meaningfully involved. In fact there are probably at present lots of people who are trying to give back and be involved but haven’t been seen because the organization has no way to receive their gifts. This is a real shift for how this organization has grown to see its customers. As the connection to social license fades away, customers increasingly get seen as people to be catered to, responded to and served. On the surface that seems a noble customer relations strategy, but when challenges are met, there are very few people with a meaningful investment in the organization to help repair it and set it back on track. Customers can just walk away at any time. And if you have customers who have bought into the social bottom line but you are only chasing the dollar, those ones will feel the lack of reciprocity first. When they leave its hard to get them back.

Why? Because people want to give. They want to be a part of something. They want to do something meaningful with their lives, their time and their money. We love a good product, but we also crave being a part of making it. Witness the way Apple for example has created a Distinguished Educator network. This is a way that educators in schools who love Apple products can help create new applications for these products in their schools. These folks are often cutting edge front-line teachers who are exploring pedagogy and using technology in a way that supports good learning theory. They are no longer customers. They are helping the company grow its brand, for sure, by working with schools but they also helping Apple find new ways to use their technology in service of education and learning.

As the Chair of the Board of Rivendell, a non-profit spiritual retreat centre, we’ve been exploring this angle through fundraising. We are an organization that has been generously supported by a Foundation throughout our whole existence and we have decided that we want to start doing fundraising not because we need financial resources, but because we want to create a different relationship with the community of people who love and support us and for whom our organization has made a deep impact in their lives. None of us on the Board are skilled at fundraising, and for all of us the prospect of doing it is terrifying. So we decided to learn together. We worked with a friend of mine who specializes in fundraising in these kinds of situations and he said his job is not parting people from their money but rather “helping people with money them heal by giving them a way to make meaning.”

Heal from what? Partly from a world that has completely commodified us either as a customer or as a unit of productivity. I think humans have a deep need to give and to be a part of something, but those of us who live in capitalist market-based societies are primarily valued as transactions. Everything we do is tracked for the benefit of dominating our attention and ultimately our wallets. But when I am offered an opportunity to provide a gift of time or money because it enters me into reciprocity and relationship, suddenly my life has the meaning I have been seeking. It is truly healing to give a gift and have that gift received.

To refuse an authentic gift is dehumanizing to both the giver and the receiver. Over time, losing the opportunities to provide gifts causes us to lose touch with what fundamentally makes community.

You cannot build communities around transactions. If your organization has a social bottom line at all and your entire customer relations strategy is transactional, I reckon you will always fail on this score. I think many companies who start out with a social bottom line leave it behind if they can’t figure out how to do it and revert to the single financial bottom line. That is enabled with customer management systems and managers who are trained in this type of work. Through our Art of Participatory Leadership training, we seek to teach leadership practices that enable social sustainability through enabling contribution. I’d love to know if folks are seeing this meaningfully taught in MBA programs or inside other institutional management and business programs.

The sustainability of an enterprise with an implicit or explicit community mandate rests in the ability of the enterprise to create spaces for people to give and co-create. That leads to co-ownership which can be material – like with our TSS Rovers FC community-ownership model – or more intangible, like the feeling of connection people have to helping create a space for spiritual renewal at our Rivendell retreat centre. Our sustainability depends on financial security and community. TSS Rovers FC needs to make a profit to survive, but we cannot do that without a community of people investing their time and talent over the long term to create an organization that is about developing humans, whether on or off the pitch. We encourage folks to offer what they can to the enterprise with two principles:

  1. Assume your talents are needed and;
  2. Proceed until apprehended.

The result at Rovers is that we have a happy patchwork of folks who offer expertise, enthusiasm, money and sometimes just an extra body to move things around. We even have a tradition of our players helping to set up the stadium and prepare the supporters section before they begin their warm up routines. We try to provide opportunities for everyone to experience gifting, because that is fundamental to the game of football anyway. Giving, receiving, offering space and time, and enabling your team mates to succeed is what secure victory on a football pitch and so we try to bring that ethos into our lives off the field too. That is how we go from being a successful football club to being a place that makes better humans and builds community whether you come to a match, in cleats, boots, shoes, sandals or bare feet.

Think about that. In the place where you are involved as a formal or informal leader, how are you enabling people to give? How are you receiving and holding the gifts and intentions of those in your orbit who are already giving to you? How are you enabling reciprocity to build community and sustainability?

End of year reflections

December 24, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Being, Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Football, Leadership, Learning, Music, Practice, Stories, Travel 10 Comments

Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week.

Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them.

The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at my best. And that’s added on top of the persistent and low level background radiation that comes from the feeling that the world is slowly coming apart on this part of the planet and we are collectively ill-equipped to deal with it.

It hasn’t left me pessimistic, but I have noticed that I’m sad at what we have lost, which most of all appears to be the collective capacity to DO SOMETHING about the long term prospects for our planet and the community of living things that occupy it. as irrational as that thought is, because truthfully, it has been that way for my whole life, nevertheless, there is a feeling of loss. I’ve always described myself as an optimist because I believe that there is always something better we can do or embody, but the general prognosis needs power and wealth to radically change directions, and increasingly, I’m not confident that will happen. And so we push on.

Work

My work is changing, and has done throughout the pandemic. In the past I did much more face to face and one off facilitation work and delivered teaching through Art of Hosting workshops, for which I travelled the world. As I get older, I am more interested in teaching and supporting younger facilitators and so there is much more teaching now and one-to-one coaching and we are also taking work that is larger in scope than facilitating single meetings, in which we are focused on longer term support for leaders and organizations who want to be more participatory and more engaged with meaningful work. I like this as it means we develop longer term relationships with a few clients and are able to see the results of our work together over time. Additionally most of this work continues to be online, which suits me well as I have become more of a homebody and more introverted in the last three years. I do love face to face work, but as I get older I find it much more tiring, and I appreciate the ability to deliver quality content to folks and then turn off my computer and go to the garden or play guitar for an hour.

In 2023 I will turn 55 and I have a strong commitment that on my 55 birthday we will begin the process to scaling back and only working four days a week. We have been planning on this for a while, and I’m really looking forward to this shift. I feel like I need it for all kinds of reasons. In my calendar starting June 13, every Friday for the rest of my life has a recurring event that says “Fridays off for the rest of my life.”

This year Harvest Moon which consists of Caitlin Frost and myself along with our stellar assistant Laura O’Neil, had 27 clients. Many of these were larger projects working within large organizations and involving a lot of teaching and capacity building to support leadership and organizational change. We do this with a set of tools and practices that include participatory facilitation methods from Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development approaches, Participatory Narrative Inquiry, complexity work and personal practices for rigorous inquiry on limiting beliefs. This year we packaged these into bespoke programs in complexity focused participatory leadership for the Executive levels and senior leadership of a major university, a Crown corporation, an Indigenous government, a national labour union and one or two smaller organizations. We embedded several three day Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership workshops in these settings, and also used our course material we have been developing around complexity and personal leadership practices to complement the strategic conversations that we hosted. We have written four extensive workbooks for these programs and this might well turn into something more formal in the years ahead.

We amplified all of this work with story collections primarily using NarraFirma to gather stories and PNI to design sense-making and strategic interventions. This last capacity has become key to our work now and I have now run upwards of 30 story collection and sense-making projects through NarraFirma since the pandemic began. Although we have become really good at working with this material online, this work is most powerful in person, and it is one of the things I am looking forward to doing more face to face.

Partners

Over the past year we have worked with many partners and it is my usual practice to name them. They live in five different countries (Canada, USA, Netherlands, Moldova and Australia) and working with them makes it possible for all of us to do amazing work together. My gratitude to them all.

  • Harvest Moon partners Caitlin Frost and Laura O’Neil
  • Tatiana Glad
  • Meribeth Deen
  • Bhav Patel
  • Kris Archie
  • Kelly Foxcroft Poirier
  • Tiaré Jung
  • Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions
  • Phill Cass
  • Ciaran Camman
  • Amanda Fenton
  • Quin Buck
  • Corrina Keeling
  • Jodi Sanford
  • Kinwa Bluesky
  • Chad Foulks
  • Geoff Brown
  • Teresa Posakony.

Teaching

This year I offered several open enrolment courses with colleagues.

Learning

In addition to everything I learned from teaching these courses I also enrolled in two important programs myself to deepen my own practice.

  • Weaving It In: Making evaluation part of your work. This was an inaugural offering from my close colleague Ciaran Camman and combined their decades of evaluation experience with solid complexity and participatory practice. A nice combination of theory and practice and experiential learning.
  • Co-Resolve introduction to Deep Democracy with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson. After about 20 years of Sera challenging me to become friends with conflict, I finally came to study with her and this was a great course. The biggest shift in me is seeing how my conflict-averse tendencies have shifted from conflict resolution to what I’m calling “conflict preservation.”
  • This next year I have signed up for Cynthia Kurtz’s deep dive into Participatory Narrative Inquiry which is a 20 week long practicum during which my colleague Augusto Cuginotti and I will be running a PNI project with a client. I haven’t done any learning like this at this sort of scale since University. I’m looking forward to it.

Living on the web

My first website was a collaborative writing project with my old friend Chris Heald called Stereotype back in 1995. It was a proto-blog in the style of suck.com, which even 25 years later is a remarkable documentation of the shift of life from physical to online. So I’ve lived through a lot of iterations of web life. This past year I started a long wean away from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and began writing again on my blog with more frequency. I started a Mastodon account and have used that as an opportunity to rethink how I have compartmentalized my life online to suit various audiences. For the most part I have maintained a professional kind of look here and on my @chriscorrigan twitter account and I have devoted hours and hours of time to soccer life through my @salishsea86 twitter account. That is all changing slowly. I maintain some twitter accounts for the supporters group of the soccer team I co-own, but otherwise, I think everything will eventually be centralized back here with micro-posts on Mastodon. I will republish links to these posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter as usual.

I’m slightly looking at LinkedIn again as there is some interesting professional content there that used to be published on blogs, but as much as possible I am integrating interesting content into my feeds at NetNewsWire. That is where I will be doing most of my reading, as the endless scroll of twitter and facebook are no long giving much value and Instagram is useless for my life, other than keeping up with our footballers who are half my age who only post there!

Avocations

This year has had three big commitments outside of family and work. As a founding member of the TSS Rovers Supporters’ Trust, I have spent the year selling shares to 351 co-owners of Canada’s first community-owned semi-pro soccer team. We have done some remarkable things this year including winning a League Cup on the men’s side and qualifying us for Canada’s national championship, the Voyageurs Cup, which is, mindbogglingly, the pathway to the FIFA Club World Cup. We will play a meaningful match in the first round of that competition in April against a Canadian Premier League professional team and the only thing better than actually getting this far would be effecting a giant killing in April. It has bee a remarkable journey all it’s own.

Another responsibility that I have devoted myself too is chairing the Board of the Rivendell retreat centre, a contemplative centre on Bowen Island. We have come through a pandemic and stayed afloat and are now beginning to engage in active fundraising for our longer term sustainability. This role is part of the way I live out my contemplative spiritual practice alongside a commitment to leading worship once a month at our little United Church on Bowen Island. I love that job. It helps us to afford our part time Minister and I get to dive deep into topics and scripture readings that are close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll post my sermon notes here in the new year if that’s of interest to you.

Music is my love and my third commitment. I have been singing with a renaissance choir doing medieval liturgical music and madrigals and studying jazz guitar on my own. My guitar teacher sadly died in April, and I miss him dearly. We had only a few lessons this year as he grew sicker. Learning jazz alone with only you tube videos and fake books is incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding and I’m hoping this year I might be able to study with another teacher and finally get a chance to play with folks.

Life on an island

I have lived on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) now for 21 years and seen many changes over that time. I have blogged about living here for most of that time. These days we are facing a huge population turnover and some rapid growth which has introduced lots of new folks to the place and radically changed the culture. Community events are returning which is essential if we are to repair the cohesion as a community that has been lost through the pandemic. I feel that we are fragmented in many ways, and we are being confronted with some very challenging situations including a ferry system that is crumbling under global staffing shortages, strains on our little island infrastructure, economic pressures from living in one of the most expensive places on earth with no level of government committed to radical change, tourism pressures and mindset that sees the places increasingly as an under served and under resourced suburb rather than a rural community. These changes have been steadily occurring over the past number of decades but social media and a lack of face to face contact has made them more pressing.

In the natural world, the big news is the tremendous numbers of humpback whales and orcas that have returned to our seas, and there are almost daily sightings of these mega-fauna. Ten years ago that was unimaginable. While that is happening, we have also witnessed some extreme weather, including long hot droughts in the summer which are the biggest threats to the place. Things change here and being grounded in place means that one can be a long-eyed witness of it all.

So that is the state of play on Christmas Eve 2023. At the end of a year in which I was not at my best, after three years of living in a strange new world, entering the half way point of my 50s. Thank you for sharing this year with me. Say hi. I hope we can cross paths next year.

The theology of the Art of Hosting

November 24, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Being, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Emergence, Featured, Flow, Learning, Podcast, Practice 2 Comments

In the Art of Hosting world we have a few shared core teachings that show up in nearly all the learning workshops that happen. At some point we talk about complexity – we usually explore the Chaordic Path as a simple introduction into complexity – and we always touch on the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting.

Back in 2014 I was doing a project with the United Church of Canada looking at the different levels of their structure in British Columbia and imagining what they could also be. If there is one thing that Churches have consistently done from the beginning it is that they adopt new forms. At the moment the United Church, and many other mainline progressive Christian denominations, are going through a massive shift, probably the biggest one since the Reformation. And it’s affecting everything.

So as I was doing this consulting work I started meeting communities of people who were asking how could they live through these transitions. Not survive them necessarily, but go with the transformation that was happening. As a part of the work I was doing I started offering talks and workshops based in the Art of Hosting, but wrapped in the theology of the United Church, becasue it turns out that having a way to understand complexity and to host life community is both necessary in struggling churches AND is pretty much the basis of Christian practice.

Now for those who don’t know, the United Church of Canada is a progressive, liberal Protestant denomination committed to radical inclusion and social justice. I was raised in that Church and at one point had my heart set on becoming a minister in that Church. My own spiritual practice is grounded in contemplative Christianity and I am an active member of the Bowen Island United Church where I help lead worship and preach one Sunday a month so we can give our paid minister a break.

That is just context to help you understand the theology behind this talk.

This talk was a keynote for the Northern Presbytery of British Columbia annual meeting from 2014. That year the churches of northern BC were gathering in Prince George to be together and practice being a bigger community. They invited me to come and speak on the work I was doing around community building and I chose to share the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice and I relished the chance to share these ideas using stories and teachings from scripture.

So if you work with Churches or Christian religious communities and you are interested in the way the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice basically help us use the teachings of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel in practice to build community, click here and have a listen.

The stages of engaging with conflict in small towns

September 5, 2022 By Bowen, Community, Featured 3 Comments

A couple of years ago i posted this on our local facebook page. There was something happening that caused me to reflect on how one’s approach to conflict changes the longer you live in a place. As we have turned over our population by more than 50% in the past five or six years, I was trying to give folks a helpful road map. I daresay this is pretty much consistent in every small community anywhere.

For folks experiencing their first Bowen Island conflict, here’s generally what happens next.

  1. Years 1-3. You move to Bowen and fall in love with the place. You’ve found heaven. You can’t believe how beautiful this is, how amazing the community is, how precious it is.
  2. Years 3-5. Some controversy happens and you discover that there are people that think very, very differently from you. In fact, it seems like if they get their way, some core thing you love about the place will be damaged forever. You step up to defend it, on social media, in real life. You get involved, get organized and try to stop it.
  3. Years 5-8 You lick your wounds or revel in the victory depending on how that all went. Regardless, it redoubles your commitment to fight again another day.
  4. Years 8-12 ANOTHER FIGHT! Man the barricades! Take on the social media hordes! Side-eye folks at the General Store. You’re ready this time. You might even connect up with people in a meeting and form a group of concerned citizens. And when you do you see a bunch of people on YOUR side that you were fighting against last time. Your head explodes, but you dive in anyway.
  5. Years 12-15. Well, that went well. Or not.
  6. Years 15-18. ANOTHER fight? What?? Okay, this time, you sit back and watch everyone go through the first five steps. You find yourself in a small group at the pub one night with former friends and enemies, nursing a pint together and shaking your head as you tried to remember why you hated each other so much that one time.
  7. Years 18-20. You get quiet, you don’t get so involved anymore, or if you do it’s on a committee of some kind doing completely unappreciated work making design guidelines or running a community water system or deciding what flowers to plant in the bed by the ferry terminal.
  8. Year 20. You realize you are here for the long haul. You fall in love with the place. You’ve found heaven. You can’t believe how beautiful this is, how amazing the community is, how precious it is.

Enjoy the ride folks.