There’s a heady and dizzying mix of despair and gratitude wafting around our community in these obvious crisis days. March, and the beginning of this crisis, have been a lot for so many of us, and that’s true for the more immediate us—in our four-person community—here at Woodsy Way. We see and feel the reports and a few sharp pings of the impacts of what is going on across the world. We are—by a request or a demand of society—brought closer together and given time to focus on work that we’ve been wanting to do here with each other and on the land. Rather often our efforts at collaborating are exposing outstanding conflicts and traumas that we have turned to face and resolve. I believe that even as we’re stretching against the limitations of what four people can do, each of us in our little community often feels gratitude that we are living with these three other people whom we love. We’re learning more and more about how to work together and how to exercise that love.
A few days after we started to get a whiff of the upcoming impacts of responding to COVID-19, I began a rough journal of what we have been experiencing here. (As I’m writing this now, I hear laughter from upstairs, and I wonder if I’ve recorded in those notes any of the amazing laughter that we have shared.) As my mates responded to help me fill in details of the missing days, we went even further back. A big shift in my awareness happened on Wednesday, March 11th; but Lorna, who is the medical director at a (now (temporarily?) closed) veterinary spay-and-neuter clinic, said that she started getting reports about COVID-19 in early February. The 11th was the middle of Steve’s spring break (he teaches mathematics at a university), so we reveled in him being home by planting a bunch of things, including starting a project of propagating existing Autumn Olive trees by tucking cuttings into the earth. (I am very excited with hope that these cuttings may indeed take root and sprout buds. It would feel like a minor resurrection miracle!) A friend came over to teach us about pruning fruit trees, and at some point that day Steve learned that his school was going to close for the following week, which (at that point) was going to involve extending their spring break. In our weekly house meeting, we discussed this as well as our busy plans for the next few days.
Our busy plan for Thursday proceeded largely as planned. We piled into the car to travel into town for work and errands. Our friend, Isaac, had planned to stay with us for a few days, so we visited with him and his parents for a little while, then packed him into our car. We had a truly epic dinner at a remarkable Jewish deli in an eastern suburb of Cleveland; our delightful waitress kept bringing us an array of pickles, and then we divided up plates of corned beef, cabbage, blintzes, potato pancakes, and brisket. She expressed delight in how we shared things. As of right now, that was the last time I’ve eaten at a restaurant.
On Friday we finished the Autumn Olive planting project. On Saturday Lorna had some blood work done in the morning, Steve made some blintz-inspired chestnut flour crepes for breakfast, and we had a community planning meeting, where we finished organizing a system for intentionally distributing chores. We had wanted to put such a system in place for months. I had planned to help facilitate a meeting that was scheduled for Sunday, but hearing more and more people discuss cancelling their events, I decided to cancel that meeting and to invite people to a more casual teleconference in its stead.
After I made that call, we had a few more friends stop by that afternoon. We didn’t really have a plan for their visit; I felt a heightened sense of alert about what was going on, and I gathered that a couple of us were anxious about having them over, for various reasons. Towards the end of the meal, I saw that Lorna was struggling not to fall asleep in her chair; I suggested that she might head to bed, and she sagged with relief and lurched off to her room. I also gathered that Emily was tense, and when she and I reviewed the day later, she shared that she can sometimes feel scared around the prospect of food insecurity. I had not prepared a very large meal, and she needs to be able to trust everyone to share equitably. Those needs were also tied in with broader growing anxiety around the state of the world. At some point during this weekend, she and I curled up together, and we wept. She asked me to write about what’s going on, and I’ve been struggling to do so.
The next morning I woke up early to get started on writing some of my thoughts. We all had a Meeting of Rest, singing the Taizé song “Our Darkness” and another song called “Bless His Holy Name”—two favorites among our small community. We were all staring at Monday—tomorrow—wondering what to do. The request came in for people to engage in broad-spectrum deliberate distancing as an infection rate control measure. Lorna was waiting to hear from the board of the veterinary clinic about whether the clinic was going to close. They did end up closing, but Lorna later learned that while making the decision the board was divided, and she felt some intense anxiety about it. The plan was going off the rails. Isaac had planned to stay only until Sunday morning, then extended his stay through Monday morning, and perhaps indefinitely. Isaac’s visit developed into a conflict—within himself, and among us all.
Monday seemed anxious and restless for all of us. Lorna was trying to decide if she should still commute to the clinic to help guide them in their closing process, and while she was making that decision I had a phone call with a friend about using the timebank to facilitate mutual aid response in Northeast Ohio. When I returned from my call, I saw that Lorna and Steve had conflicted about her decision; I tried to mediate, with little initial benefit: Lorna decided in frustration to go to work and left Steve in pain and anger. When I probed him about it, he shared that he was frustrated that Lorna seemed to be acting in contradictory ways, and he needed to understand her decision-making process in order to trust her. They were later able to connect with each other and reconcile around this.
Much of the next several days were spent in uncertainty and unease. Isaac was despairing over where to live going forward, as he wanted to protect his parents from risk. His flow of life was substantially out of sync with the rest of us, and having both Steve and Lorna around all the time was at the same time exciting and confusing and close. Not quite sure how to proceed, Emily and Lorna engaged in some intense house organizing projects. We did make some delicious food together, including some very thematic foods for St. Patrick’s Day and a really fun team dinner and cleanup time on the 18th. We continued our weekly house meetings after that dinner on the 18th, and there we were able to begin to think about how to restructure our flow of life as an expanded full-time household. We planned to have a more focused discussion the next day.
That meeting on the 19th very quickly crashed into an outstanding conflict that Lorna had been experiencing with Steve and Emily. Lorna wanted to present her research into possible responses to the pandemic, but she was overwhelmed by anxiety and began intensely vomiting information. This definitely raised discomfort in Steve and Emily; Lorna picked up on it quickly, panicked, and fled to her room to recover. This startled all of us; Emily asked me to go on a walk, and I was able to give her some empathy around her own frustration and her need for us to be able to work together as a community and make substantial and meaningful progress on our goals. We were able to regather, then check in around what had happened. We learned that Lorna was angry and afraid of talking with Steve and Emily. Emily and Steve shared their frustrations, as well. We were able to then progress to some discussion about how we wanted to respond to the pandemic. This round of the meeting ended with lunch. The third session of the day meandered around Isaac’s uncertainty about what he wanted to be doing. I talked with Emily and Lorna following this third attempt, and we felt some relief when we were able to agree that important decisions were being held in abeyance by Isaac’s indecision. We agreed that we wanted to encourage and support Isaac in gaining clarity. Later that day he was able to make a plan to return to the city. Even now I remain curious about what I perceive as Isaac’s criticisms of Woodsy Way goals and ideals.
The following day, a Friday, I drove into the city with Lorna and Isaac. We delivered him back home and ran a few errands. On the drive back, and then at a house meeting later in the day, Lorna began exploring a conflict that she had been having when trying to communicate with Emily, a conflict that was also related to older troubles with communicating with Steve. We had seen an example of this yesterday at the house meeting when Lorna retreated. In looking at it, Emily and Steve also had unmet needs around communicating with Lorna; the conflict was largely symmetric. That day, and several times over the next two weeks, we would turn and return to this conflict, diving deeper into it and learning more about each other and our needs.
Lorna and both Emily and Steve were each, to varying degrees, feeling frustrated and anxious about their past attempts to communicate with the other “side”. On the 20th, Lorna was focused on trying to strengthen her relationship with Emily, but a week later our awareness of the conflict would expand to include her husband. We learned at this meeting—and then at a follow-up meeting on Sunday—that with Emily, Lorna was afraid of dominating the relationship, and so she would often retreat and thus not be able to offer her true self. This pattern was exacerbated as Lorna has heard from others that she has a jarring conversation style that can be difficult to follow. Emily expressed that she had fear around having her ideas dismissed or criticized into insignificance, and so she, too, would hold herself back from fully engaging with Lorna. These fears compounded each other. I tell the story that it was very helpful for both of them to be able to express and to hear the others’ needs in this conversation.
That Sunday, the 22nd, was also the day when we learned about the shelter-in-place directive being issued (here) in Ohio. That was three weeks ago, and (as I’m writing this section) today it is Easter Sunday. It was—and still is—scary to think about the scope of this pandemic. We were able to get a number of tasks done over the following few days, including Emily and Lorna being able to connect around their immediate understanding of how the farm is laid out and organized.
We had planned to give a lot of time to processing the communication conflict between Lorna and Emily on Friday, March 27th. The thorny situation that Lorna wanted to examine was The Dog Times: the turbulent and stressful period right after Emily and I moved into the community in late spring and early summer last year when Lorna doggedly pursued, well, adopting a new dog after her and Steve’s previous dog died. After poking at the history of the situation for a little while, we quickly determined that Lorna’s desperation around having a dog was tied to an existing conflict with Steve, and that the roots of that conflict went all the way back to when they had been living in Athens. That was a fraught time for both of them. And as their lives were warping around them, Lorna had been too scared to make true requests, Steve had been insisting on his own strategies, and neither of them was able to see the reality of what was going on for the other.
We quickly saw that this was all very alive for them now, years later: Lorna was intensely distressed, and Steve quickly grew agitated and angry. I tried role-playing the historic situation, in order to allow them to give each other the gifts now that they had wanted then: Steve needed empathy for his experience, and Lorna needed skillfulness around making requests with care. I was able to go back and forth playing at representing each of Steve and Lorna, and as a proxy I could provide them with a tool to step back from their immediate engagement in the conflict and to see what playing with their communication could look like. Emily offered me and them support and suggestions when things grew particularly intense. Ultimately, I sensed relief from everyone around being able to understand these distant—though still very much present—conflicts, and I was excited to witness all this.
I was only really taking notes through the end of March, as a bit of an experiment. We continue to have conflicts, including some that may seem to focus on details but are often connected radically to shared needs, but we’ve also been able to arrive at strategies that previously seemed very distant and difficult. In the last few days we’ve been able to establish a shared routine around caring for our dog, Teddy, and we have worked together on coming up with a plan for how to build up mutual respect and understanding with him—how to incorporate him into our lives together, not just into Lorna’s life. Among other things, having such a plan will eliminate a significant obstacle to easily welcoming guests and to incorporating future community members.
Even with making so much progress on communicating and building trust, there are conflicts that arise naturally all the time, almost continuously. I want to be clear, though: these conflicts are expected and inherent to being alive, and addressing them is healthy, even exciting; I note that they exist because I want to emphasize that our experience of relationships here is that these relationships are built upon continual maintenance. In fact, I think that taking time to look into the past at outstanding conflicts has itself been a form of maintenance of our relationships, just long-delayed or postponed maintenance. So we’ve seen that diving into unresolved conflicts is not about fixing something in the past, but rather preparing ourselves to better meet our needs in the present (and, by extension, in the future).
The communication and connection work that we’ve been doing has, indeed, helped to set us up and to strengthen us to address these conflicts as they arise, and to address them more quickly and with greater ease and with more satisfying results.