Itineraries Fall 2008
Contents:
Embracing Generations and the Larger Community by Dorit Fromm
Senior Cohousing: The First Three Years, an interview with Chuck Durrett
Paying it Forward by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Awakening to Community: Beyond the Veil of Separateness by John G. Sullivan
Books of Interest: Two Books on Senior Retirement Communities Reviewed by Barabara Kammerlohr
Embracing Generations and the Larger Community by Dorit Fromm
A fellowship brought Dorit Fromm to Denmark for the research on cohousing communities which she later wrote about in the Architectural Review. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to research European collaborative housing, the basis of her 1991 book, Cohousing, Central Living and Other New Forms of Housing. She has worked as an architect, was communications director for ELS Architects, and has researched senior cohousing in the U.S., Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. Dorit writes about architecture, communities, and aging, with articles in Metropolis, the Architectural Review, Urban Land, and other publications. In 2006 she spent a year in Europe, researching examples of housing for seniors. She now consults with design and development firms on communications and collaborative senior-friendly developments.
Many years have passed since I first started looking at collaborative communities in Europe and in the United States. The questions I had then, balancing career, marriage, motherhood, and friends, have been partly replaced by time, and new unresolved questions have emerged. Many have to do with the transitions of aging, and a curiosity about how collaboration could work to improve day to day life as I age. How can our housing and communities help us balance this new phase of life?
A few years ago I had the opportunity to live in Europe for a year, and I made a shorter return visit this summer. I knew Americans were aging at a fast rate; but few realize that Europeans are graying even faster. Within 40 years, almost a third of their population is expected to be seniors versus a fifth of the cohort of boomers in the U.S. Northern Europeans have paid high taxes all their lives. Unlike many of us, they have the expectation of receiving nationally subsidized care and appropriate housing as they age. Unfortunately, such a cradle-to-grave social contract cannot hold when nearly 1 out of 3 will be over the age of 65.
With a limited window of time, Northern Europeans have already started creating alternatives, spurred by nonprofit organizations, municipalities, foundations, and self-organized groups. Interestingly to me, instead of concentrating exclusively on elderly facilities, the focus is on strengthening neighborhoods with a multi-generational approach. The results so far are a variety of senior-friendly developments that embrace generations as well as surround residents.
Neighborhood Centers
In Germany, I not only saw the continuing unification of east and west through building and economic programs, but also heard much discussion on social unification. Coupled with a high number of seniors (20% of the population is over 65 and rising), there is a strong interest in helping seniors age in place and in strengthening communities.
Taking the idea of the private extended family of the past and re-interpreting it through a public network, multi-generational neighborhood centers bring generations in a community together. The “mehrgenerationenhäuser” combine some of the services of a senior center, health clinic, pre-school and youth group at a neighborhood level. Located in church basements, on the ground floor of nonprofits or senior centers, or within high-rise housing towers, they usually are placed into under-utilized spaces. Activities include whatever the local community wants and needs, from exercise and health classes to infant care.
In 2006, the German government launched a well-funded initiative to create 500 neighborhood centers. That ambitious number has already been reached this year (2008). Volunteers working with professionals run the center. Their overall aim is mutual support, whether through classes, services, programs, or simply drop-in visits.
Balancing Generations
The neighborhood centers evolved from experiments and models that had already met with success in Germany in delivering affordable services. One of these, a model I had never come across elsewhere, can be found in southern Germany, in Swabia. I find it interesting because developments for the elderly tend to either focus on independent seniors or frail seniors, but don’t usually mix the two; nor do they typically add in a younger generation of residents, along with affordable housing and services. This intergenerational model is the product of the St. Anna Foundation, nonprofit developers and managers of housing for the elderly. Gerhard Schiele, their research and community director, believed that, as in the past, people would informally help each other if a supportive environment was in place. In 1990, he had the idea of creating housing for the elderly that gave them the chance to continue to live independently, but among other generations. A community framework would help them remain fit and socially connected, prolonging wellness. Schiele’s housing model started with the idea that two-thirds of residents would be over 60 years of age; one-third would be below. A sizeable amount of common space was included, with a part-time social worker to help residents organize common activities, such as a catered lunch. Funding comes from St. Anna’s, from the municipality where the developments are built, and from donations. This money is placed in a social fund which pays for social workers, one half-time social worker for approximately 40 residents.
When the first development opened in 1994, critics felt professionals should be looking after older, somewhat frailer residents, not their neighbors. But to their surprise, the scheme worked well. Since then, 25 developments have been built. They range from 13 to 80 units, all handicapped accessible. Though affordable and open to all, residents who live in the municipality where a development is located are given preference. Providing mutual support and participating in common activities is done voluntarily; no one is required to do so. With a total of 800 units, and well over a decade’s track record, they have proven their success.
In one development in the central part of Ravensburg the morning begins in the community’s common space with a play group for toddlers and pre-schoolers, which is organized and run by residents and volunteers. Karin Bruker, a social worker from St. Anna’s, helps schedule and coordinate this and many other activities, including exercise and arts classes, as well as information on health. A catered lunch, the large meal of the day, is served in the main common space to senior residents and others from the neighborhood who pay for this with a small fee. Aside from scheduling events and bringing residents together informally — such as the monthly resident meeting with cookies and drink — Karin’s services are providing advice, tips on health, and integrating the community of residents into the larger neighborhood. The surrounding community can participate in events and rent out spaces for a small fee.
Residents, a mix of owners and renters, can voluntarily work in the garden, do maintenance, and informally help neighbors by shopping, cooking, and occasionally babysitting. When greater care is needed by older residents, St. Anna’s provides in-home aides and nursing care for a fee, and guarantees admittance to their nearby nursing home if long-term round-the-clock care is required.
Conflict?
This model views creating community not as a romantic notion, but as a responsibility. Those aging around us have too often acquiesced in their segregation from younger generations. Options for developing aging services through mutual help require residents with an open attitude. Monitoring is also important. Finding ways to engage young and old together requires effort, as some elderly may feel they have little to contribute of interest to the young; others have concerns about noise and worries about security. Many younger people, who may not live close to their own aging relatives, have no idea of how to relate to this growing segment of the population.
Moving from environments of age segregation to integration invites interaction and the inevitable differences of opinion in behavior, attitude and outlook. “It’s a lifestyle for people who like to live in the center of things, with activities going on,” explains Anne Oschwald, of St. Anna’s.
An attitude of working out conflicts and not avoiding them is required. In a model like St. Anna’s, the social workers not only help residents to help each other, they are also trained in mediation. Along with activities and opportunities for getting together is the safety net of having a non-involved third party available to smooth out differences, if necessary. Any resident or neighbor can come and ask for a social worker’s mediation services. If a particular person isn’t getting along with others to the point of continuing to cause conflict, and mediation is not successful, “we work with them to find another living alternative because they’re not happy living here,” explains Karin. According to St. Anna’s, this has happened twice over the past 14 years.
Contributing
Studies in Europe that look at the components of successful aging have had an impact on European aging policy. The Leiden-85 study, carried out in the town of Leiden in the Netherlands, looked at 85-year-olds in the community to identify the components of “optimal functioning and well-being.” For overall well-being, social contact was found to be most important. In the U.S., a study at the University of San Diego by Jennifer Reicstadt, M.S., and her colleagues found that “a sense of engagement … and being useful to others and to society, was considered a prominent aspect of successful aging.”
Contributing to the lives of other people increases social contact and makes each of us, no matter what age, feel less passive, more animated and involved. As the ways we normally have for sharing stories, advice, or help changes — either from decreased work or the loss of losing those close to us — how can we retain a sense of engagement and usefulness rather than only a recipient’s role? From the standpoint of our own well-being as we age —not to mention affordability — community may not be just an option but a necessity. If so, how do we envision it?
Here are some bold suggestions for combining generations and embracing the neighborhood, based on examples I’ve researched: site elderly housing next to a kindergarten and have both share a common courtyard; combine old age homes with community centers; have a nursing home share a cafe open to the neighborhood; and have elderly volunteers help the handicapped to jointly run a neighborhood center. And here are some new forms we might look closely at: senior-friendly cohousing-type communities that offer some neighborhood amenities, “intentional villages” for seniors such as Beacon Hill (in Boston) providing services for the whole neighborhood, for example.
New models for aging can create opportunities to re-envision care as not just for elders, but in a broader context of activating generations and neighborhoods. I’ve seen it work in other countries and know we can make it work here.
Senior Cohousing: The First Three Years, an interview with Chuck Durrett
Architect Charles Durrett has designed over 30 cohousing communities in North America and has consulted on many more around the world. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, the New York Times, the LA Times, Architecture, and a wide variety of other publications. He and his wife, Kathryn McCamant, have received numerous awards for their work including the most recent World Habitat Award, presented by the United Nations, and the Mixed Use, Mixed Income Development Award, presented jointly by the American Institute of Architects and HUD. Contact them at www.cohousingco.com.
Charles Durrett was just finishing his book, Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living, when I snagged a ride with him up to Nevada City, California, where he and his family were living in temporary quarters as they waited for his latest intergenerational cohousing neighborhood to complete construction.
In the interview (published in the Summer 2005 issue of Communities Magazine), Chuck shared how his own frustrations in his effort to find a reasonable housing solution for his aging mother were the catalyst for him to return to Denmark and research the emerging senior cohousing movement there. As co-author — with his wife and architectural partner Katie McCamant — of the first U.S. book on cohousing, he had a wealth of stories about why these intentional neighborhoods so effectively assisted and empowered seniors in their later years. Recently, I was able to repeat the journey with Chuck.
After spending some time in Berkeley, we took the train to Sacramento, giving us several hours to catch up on the state of senior cohousing in Denmark, Europe, and the US. Again, he told great stories of his experiences in his new home in Nevada City Cohousing and of his ongoing efforts to create a cadre of people who can teach what the Danes call (loosely translated) “Aging and Quality of Life in Community” — a crucial but, as yet, still missing educational piece needed if senior cohousing is to enter the mainstream.
Below, you’ll find the highlights of the interview, with my questions in bold. Our interview ranged widely, and I’ve done some shuffling to keep the thread of the discussion focused. Those without time to read the full article can use the links in the table to the right to access the topics that most interest them.
Senior cohousing in the US: the “big picture”
- The role of education in creating a market for senior cohousing
- An update on projects since the book came out
- Beyond age segregation: “elder-rich” intergenerational cohousing
- Overcoming fear of change: helping people make active choices for community living
- How Chuck’s own aging is affecting his understanding of community
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Q: What’s the big picture of what’s going on as far as the senior cohousing model for aging in community is concerned? You’ve been busy for the last three years since your book came out. People are living in senior cohousing in the U.S. and creating new communities. Are you seeing some evolution of the movement?
A: The big picture, Raines, I hate to say, remains pretty unchanged from three years ago. Too many seniors don’t know how much they would gain from living in the social setting a functional neighborhood community provides. At the end of the day, when a senior desires to be with others, nothing beats proximity. The aging process does compromise our abilities to get around. So, on the one hand I feel strongly that we’ve got a long way to go. On the other hand, it’s clear that we’ve made inroads.
The experience in Denmark, where cohousing began, can be instructive. Just now, 36 years after it was built, Denmark’s second cohousing community is seriously planning its future as a senior cohousing community. The whole movement is just 17 years old in the U.S. I expect that in the next 5-10 years, there will be increasing demand for us to go back to cohousing communities and retrofit them for more and more seniors, as these communities become elder-rich.
Still, I generally believe the market share for cohousing will probably be limited to one percent of the population—UNLESS, that is, our society becomes deadly serious about the need to conserve resources.
That may happen. You know, last year in this country service-providing organizations drove five billion miles in the care of seniors. Fuel costs are starting to dramatically depress that number. Meals-on-wheels food-delivery services, for example, are dropping from daily to just one day a week. All those volunteers across the country don’t get reimbursed for their gas costs.
Bill Thomas calls this the $3 trillion problem: In the year 2018 that’s how much more money it will cost to care for seniors at the level we care for them today. It’s no longer a viable alternative. We have to get creative. And here’s the good part:—alternative solutions, besides being considerably less costly, are also much better!
But whether cohousing garners 1% of the market or 10% or 20%, one can argue — as people in Scandinavia today do — that cohousing has already affected much of the housing market—for example, the design elements in multi-family affordable housing that intentionally encourage neighbor interaction. Or, another example, single-family neighborhoods, where the residents of a street can vote to close the whole street to cars, create kid-play areas in the middle, and require people to park at both ends. A change like that vastly alters the behavior of residents and how well they know each other.
You know, we in this country spend so much money holding society together with laws and prisons and police. And yet, every study in the world has shown that if a neighborhood feels like a community, the residents will keep each other accountable. Delineating clearly what’s public and common helps neighbors feel mutual regard. They simply do things for and with each other which no municipality can afford to do. And the neighborhood bonds together, and it’s apparent that police are less necessary. At some point in our society we’re going to see that.
I live in town of 3,000 people with an annual city budget of $4 million: $1.4 million on police, less than $100,000 for planning, virtually nothing for figuring out how to provide quality of life for seniors. That is an upside-down society. It’s not obvious that anytime soon that we’re going to be able to rely on government to play a positive role. So what if I turn to my neighbors instead and that way create a mutually beneficial society. I do things for them that are easy for me and hard for them; in return, they do things for me that are easy for them and hard for me.
Q: You, an architect, have personally devoted enormous time and energy creating what I would call an educational curriculum — what you call the Study Group Process — that focuses on the transitions that are a part of aging. What is your thinking behind that?
Let me answer that with an illustration: If you were to stop 1,000 seniors at random on any street in America, you’d find only five who’d put community anywhere near the top as a requirement for their senior years. If you were to stop 1,000 seniors who had taken some kind of successful aging or aging-in-place seminar, about 400 of those 1,000 would rank community as important to their quality of life. The number 400 comes from the research the Danes have done to evaluate their own educational efforts. In America, we have to bring that five up to 400 before we have a viable movement where seniors are moving into senior cohousing communities — or, for that matter, intergenerational cohousing — one after another.
The focus of most retirement planning is on financial well-being. Many seniors, for example, are clear that they have to have post-retirement income — whether it’s from savings or from continued earning — income of, let’s say, $4,500 a month. Few, however, anticipate the many requirements for emotional well-being and the other challenges of aging. Few have fully gripped the implications of their children being grown and often geographically scattered. Their friends may have left town or died. Or they are divorced, or their spouse has died. And they’re vulnerable from an emotional point of view.
Having just finished planning Wolf Creek Lodge, a senior cohousing neighborhood, I’m rather astonished by the level of consciousness the core group participating in the planning develops. When elders spend time talking about the issues of the day and about what it means to be an elder, they get honest and open. They get out of denial. They come to grips with reality.
Several members of Wolf Creek Lodge have gone through the Study Group Process. But they’ve done it more organically (versus doing the workshop at the earliest stage of planning ). They ended up increasing their consciousness; but this happened in the middle of the planning phase, not the most cost-effective time to start rethinking design choices. So there’s a clear advantage to the design teams to get the core up to speed at the very beginning with what they need to accomplish, rather than having them figure it out as they’re planning the project.
Q: So what’s actually happened on the ground in the U.S. since your book was published? What effect is this having on people’s lives and the world?
A: Since the book came out, we’ve had three senior cohousing communities occupied — Glacier Circle in Davis, CA; ElderSpirit in Abingdon, VA; and Silver Sage Village in Boulder, CO — and twelve in the planning phases.
Just now, 36 years after it was built, Denmark’s second cohousing community is seriously planning its future as a senior cohousing community. The whole movement is just 17 years old in the U.S. I expect that in the next 5-10 years, there will be increasing demand for us to go back to cohousing communities and retrofit them for more and more seniors, as these communities become elder-rich.
Of the 12 communities in development, let me single out Wolf Creek Lodge, which is now ready to start construction. It’s a 30-household community, currently with 20 committed residents, in a semi-rural part of California. Three residents are moving from homes with 15, 17, and 20 acres each, all together with their neighbors onto 0.9 acres, a single building. It’ll be very energy-efficient, a cozy “euro-esque” environment, with many outdoor facilities around them. They’ll have access to three acres of outdoor space — including a thousand linear feet of mountain creek — that they can use without having to own them.
This community is using little resources and is walkable to downtown. The members’ goals are to live lighter on the planet and enhance their quality of life. In the planning profession, the more energy we put toward accomplishing the former, the more we achieve the latter.
Cohousing provides the opportunity to live closely with others — effectively playmates, not just neighbors. Everybody has a private house. The process results in an amazing emphasis on what can we do, what are the common facilities we can have. What can we do together to make my life more convenient, practical, economic and fun?
Living in community, it becomes increasingly obvious how people can leverage the things they own together to accomplish these feats they envision better than they can themselves on their own.
It’s like ping-pong. It’s hard to play by yourself. But in a neighborhood with 30 adults around, you are almost always assured of having the opportunity to play. And that level of engagement keeps you light on your feet, and mentally dexterous.
Q: When I’m talking to people at national aging conferences about the senior cohousing vision, even people in their 80s and 90s sometimes say “I don’t want to live with all those old people.” I’ve experienced some push-back from people reluctant to leave their longtime homes or reluctant to embrace age-specific communities that don’t include kids. How do you address this type of concern?
Besides senior cohousing, there’s an emerging concept of “elder-rich cohousing.” Over the last few years we’ve really learned to appreciate that cohousing groups may see themselves as intergenerational, because of the area’s demographics or the initial recruiting by the core group. The pattern tends to be that they recruit a lot more people over 50 than under. Although there are children, they’re not the 30, 40, 50 children that were typical of the earliest cohousing neighborhoods in the U.S.
Cohousing started out being known as an incredibly child-friendly, family-friendly environment. But who joins can vary greatly, depending on the local market. One of our current projects, La Querencia Cohousing in Fresno, started out oriented towards families, but it attracted a lot of retired people.
t’s one thing to live with people who are all 50 or 60. Most senior cohousing encompasses quite a range, from 50 to 90. There are a wide variety of attitudes and abilities, but your neighbors in general are anything but old and decrepit, anything but staid—especially because people who move into senior cohousing are pretty can-do, thoughtful, proactive, and entrepreneurial. These senior cohousing communities are anything other than the places advertised as “active adult communities” of the sort Del Webb creates.
As I’m visiting senior cohousing, I’m repeatedly astonished by the heightened level of fun these seniors are having. It’s an atmosphere akin to a college dorm, versus “this is where the old people live.” (By the way, I think that seniors and 17- to 22-year-olds have a lot in common!) The agenda of these residents is not about kids, careers, recreational opportunities. It is more about “What kind of fun can we have today? What can I do to stay interested in my day, my neighbor?”
Q: What do you say to people who are scared of senior cohousing because of the change it represents in their lives?
A: There are a lot of reasons that nearly every senior I see says, at first, “They’ll never get me into one of those.” It has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. It’s about a fear of losing control. And there’s only one way to get happier, which is to get in control.
It’s ironic that so many people think that the challenges of aging won’t happen to them, while at the same time they don’t have another plan. Cohousing gives them a plan, an option, an alternative. It’s so critical that seniors, if they’re going to come to any better solution, really need to come together, get organized, get a plan. It’s so straightforward.
Throughout Europe, where senior cohousing is well-established, they have planned guest quarters that can be utilized by caregivers when that’s needed. They might be there for just a week, or for the duration of the project.
I just got a letter from a slightly newer senior cohousing project in Denmark (the first ones were built in 1985). After eight years in residence, they had the first occurrences of people being incapacitated.
The most common question around the model is “What happens when all these people get old at the same time?” The reality is that capacity has nothing to do with age. Many 90-year-olds are more robust than their 60-year-old counterparts. The key is to stop boxing yourself in with a scenario driven by fears.
A community may have one person with slight dementia. Living in community, she never sits by herself at dinner. Who knows whether a second person will become less capacitated and overwhelm the community’s ability to provide support. One day the degree of her incapacitation may require she move to institutional care, but even then she’s developed supportive friends who will visit her wherever she ends up and will continue to play a role in her well-being. As anyone who knows anyone who has been in assisted care or nursing homes, the degree to which patients get cared for is directly proportional to the number of people looking after them.
Senior cohousing doesn’t preclude other kinds of care. In it, more people are able to realize the possibility of dying at home, or not being in an institution longer than necessary. Too often somebody breaks a hip, gets placed in assisted care, and doesn’t come back out. They feel so bad from being abandoned there that they don’t live as long as they otherwise would.
Research identifies three key components to longevity:
- eat right, mostly light
- stay active, mostly with low-impact activities
- stay connected, with friends and neighbors
You remove all three as soon as you put someone in assisted care, no matter how hard you try. There are some phenomenal staffers out there. But giving up control is fundamentally incongruent with our personal image of the conditions for living successfully.
I was asking a couple of friends, “Why don’t you live in a cohousing community?” They live in a very progressive neighborhood, in Berkeley, California, in a cute single-family bungalow. They’re as nouveau as you can possibly get. You would think from talking to them that they would be ideal candidates for senior cohousing.
“Well, you know,” Mary said, looking over at John, “we borrowed money from our parents to buy this house. Our parents thought we would succeed, so they helped us with our transition into adulthood. And to tell you the truth, I feel very self-conscious. I think that our parents would think we hadn’t made it, that we have resigned from the mainstream, if we don’t move to something expensive.”
Frankly, there are a lot of seniors who feel that their friends would think they have resigned if they don’t live on their own.
Q: How has your own aging affected your own understanding of community?
A: At 52, I don’t feel that old. In fact, emotionally I feel more like a 20-year-old. But, I’ve seen a lot of people older than me, uncles and aunts and relatives, fathers and mothers, who, once they cross that threshold of 60+, face big changes in their lives. I especially see their independence wane considerably. Their job, career, is not necessarily their life any longer, their kids are certainly not their life any longer, their friends are not as much their life as they would like them to be. I think that their lives are unnecessarily isolated.
I luckily live in a cohousing community with lots of kids, I love hanging out with the kids. We have lots of seniors and I love appreciating them. I feel very lucky. If I didn’t live in cohousing community, . I would very much want to live in small town.
When it became obvious I wasn’t going to be able to talk my wife into moving back into the small town where I grew up, I had to figure out how to simulate a small town, to the best of my ability in the more anonymous kind of suburban or urban environments we ended up living in. There was no model that consistently appeared as viable as cohousing for making the kind of relationships between neighbors healthy.
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Raines Cohen works to build community at home and at work, as a Cohousing Coach and Co-working Coach, teaching, advising, and consulting on effective practices for creating enterprises of mutual support, sharing, and caring. He served two terms on the Coho/US board and is currently on the board of Fellowship for Intentional Community, an international support network and information clearinghouse. He works extensively in the online blogging and social networking world, creating connections between communities.
Paying it Forward by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Socially Active and Engaged Elders
A while back, a group of friends and I discussed the amount of political and social activity necessary to support the environment, the earth and her people. We looked at all the activities required to take an active role in guarding the health of the planet and speaking up for her people. Who would write letters? Who would write emails? Who would organize us to voice our opinion and influence lawmakers closer to home? Would it be possible for us to create an organization where we could have one person do what needed to be done for the community? We’d have to have a salary line to support such a person or persons.
The idea, though a good one, just didn’t seem to work. Even amongst us older adults, there was not one who was interested in actually taking on the job. Some needed more than a grass-roots income; others felt the service would require too much; others felt the task was beyond their understanding.
I feel it would be worthwhile to organize a cadre of elders who have retired to serve as a clearinghouse for political and social action, as advocates for a better life on this planet to create a web of elder mind and elder caring. Such experienced voices could help us hear what the issues are, which ones to support, what rationale and stance to take.
This task of forming a visible web of actively engaged elders is part of the “November work” for us (see page 14, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, ©l995, Warner Books). How would it look? In the social-action arena, some elders could help with correspondence around local issues, telephoning, some with filing, some with running errands. Consider paying back (ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country) and paying forward for future generations.
We could create a core of retired people to visit prisons —elder home hospice volunteers, elders reading in the schools. Retirees could become engaged by passing on their professional experience and wisdom in all occupations, thus mentoring (giving good ear and support to) younger workers who are meeting the challenges of the working world.
These would have two benefits: recipients of the care from elders would benefit from personal attention, understanding and experience of the elder, and the elders themselves would find inspiration and enthusiasm for the work they do for others.
Giving back to the organization of the social fabric, we could see a parish, a ghetto, a neighborhood, a community where elders are naturally involved. Where elder minds support those who are breadwinning and do not have time to spare for the daily tasks that require presence.
Paying it forward, we would find that when our time comes to be in a retirement home, in hospice, or diminished in our own home, there would be people in our community available with loving, caring friendship. The elders would play a role different than that of chaplains who visit the sick and home-bound. Chaplains play a sectarian role with the goal of salvation or spiritual guidance. I’m talking about elders who have no such mandate, but who are genuine friends and companions to peers regardless of sectarian background. These tasks would require elders with open hearts and patience, understanding, humor—all of the qualities of spiritual maturity we encourage with the sage-ing work and contemplative practices.
This kind of social action often comes into consideration with clergy who meet to plan together for the good of the community. But clergy have the difficult task of teaching and energizing the members of their communities. An elder group or council, locally, could assume some of the social support role.
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Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was an internationally recognized loving teacher who drew from many disciplines and cultures. He has was at the forefront of ecumenical discussions, enjoying close friendships with the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, and many other leading sages of our time and was the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement which laid out the foundations for 21st-century Judaism.
He was instrumental in inspiring the convergence of ecology, spirituality, and religion and in his later years put special emphasis on Spiritual Eldering, or “Sage-ing” as he called it in his seminal book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older. Reb Zalman’s “Sage-ing” work — work which commenced after he was 60 — was seminal in the emergence of a conscious aging movement in America and the inspiration of our own efforts with Second Journey. He died on July 8, 2014, at the age of 89.
Awakening to Community: Beyond the Veil of Separateness by John G. Sullivan
Once upon a time in ancient China, the inhabitants of one city were constantly in conflict. Efforts at reconciliation had failed. Finally, the king himself intervened, had the citizens arrested and thrown into prison. Then he ordered that the hands of each were to be attached to five-foot long chopsticks. Cooked rice was available but no one could feed himself. The people were rapidly approaching starvation in the midst of plenty. Then, as if prompted by a collective dream, they started to feed one another. The lesson was clear. If one only tended the circle of oneself, emptiness grew. If each fed a neighbor, then – in this expanded circle – all would be well.
Where do we begin in learning anew to recover and cultivate community? Often, in workshops, I tear up a piece of paper, place the scraps of paper on the ground before the group and ask, “What do you see?” For me, there are two ways of relating to the scraps of paper before us.
- Starting from Separateness, we might say: We see many pieces of paper that happen to be in the same place.
- Starting from Interconnection, we might say: We see one piece of paper that happens to be in many places.
I recommend starting from what deeply joins us, remembering we are one piece of paper, one human family, one web of life.1
Communities of Different Sizes
Arthur Koestler coined the term “holon”2 — a whole that is also a part of something larger — as atoms are wholes unto themselves and also parts of molecules and so on through cells, organs, and organisms. Humans are wholes unto themselves and also parts of friendships, families, organizations, nations. The entire human species is a part of the web of all life on the planet. The planet, in turn, is embedded in an ever-surprising universe. In this view, we dwell in nested fields — in concentric circles, of a sort. Starting with the principle of unity at each level will begin to shift our sense of wholes and parts.3
Relational Fields of Two
The smallest relational field (larger than my separate self) is the one-to-one relationship. Such relationships come in a number of kinds:4
- In the realm of friendship, think of two friends.
- In the realm of family, think of two spouses, or a parent and child, or a brother and sister, and on and on.
- In the realm of the wider world of work, think of two colleagues, or a teacher and student, or a doctor and patient, or an employer and employee, or a government official and a citizen, and on and on.
Suppose we make the shift from separate individuals as primary to relational fields as primary. Then, we must learn “to see two but think three”: the partnership and the parties within it. Think partnership first and then you and me. Examples highlight the differences.
Consider two couples, each at their wedding, each ready to recite the traditional vows:
”I take you to be my husband or wife to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.”
Imagine we can see into their thought processes. The first couple — call them the Separateness couple — dwells in the mindset of separateness. For each, self-interest is primary. Each says the traditional words while thinking: “As long as it is a good deal — good for you, yes; good for me, certainly.” Quid pro quo. Score-keeping. For better, yes; for worse, I don’t know. And so on through the list. Nothing unites this couple except separate acts of the will. Is it any wonder that when the going gets rough, they return to the default position: two separate selves engaged in self-protection?
The second couple — call them the Oneness couple — starts from interconnection.
They see that the relational field as a “third” reality, encompassing the two parties. This relational field contains shared purposes, shared values, shared history, shared defining moments, actual and potential, and is itself changing and evolving. The relational field requires tending, like a garden in which the two grow. The relational field requires recognition like a bowl in which the two are held. When things become difficult, one party to the marriage may say to the other:
I see who we are together at our deepest and best.
I hold the bowl of our relationship and that bowl is strong and whole.
I know that there will be times that I will forget what joins us and
collapse our relationship into two separate beings.
Then I ask you to hold the bowl and remind me of what we are
together — in the depth as well as on the surface. In like fashion,
I pledge to remind you when you forget.
Consider Kuan Tao-Sheng’s beautiful poem “Married Love:”
You and I
have so much love
that it
burns like a fire,
in which we bake a lump of clay
molded into a figure of you
and a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
and break them to pieces,
and mix the pieces with water,
and mold again a figure of you
and a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one bed.5
The poem recognizes “we are in each other’s clay.” Yet, we could go further. Think of each partner as a small crystal bowl filled with clear water. Each unique individual is a bowl with surface and depth. Next, see these two bowls as themselves floating in a third, larger crystal bowl — also filled with water. The marriage itself is a bowl with surface and depth. Here we have uniqueness-in-communion, communion composed of differences. And the partners can remind each other when they forget.
Relational Fields Larger Than Two
- One-to-one partnerships are situated in larger units — families, voluntary and work organizations, communities, nations, the planet itself. As we widen the focus, several lessons emerge:
- Wherever the size of the unit, we can start with the unity at the heart of each community.
- Whatever the size of the unit, communities tend to exhibit two aspects: a shared task (mission with division of labor) and shared morale (emotional, motivational bonding). Skills that build community look to both aspects: the action-task aspect and the relational-communion aspect.
Let us think of the move to recover oneness and the skills to cultivate community as part of what Thomas Berry calls “the Great Work.”6 In other words, it is part of a paradigm shift from the modern world to an emerging ecological worldview.
After five hundred years of high individualism in the West, this is a large step to take. We are not accustomed to seeing relational fields as real, not practiced in seeking first what deeply unites us. We are more practiced in seeing separate selves as primary and groups as merely the sum of individuals. So moving to a new paradigm requires skillful strategy — a bit of jujitsu. In what follows, I suggest two steps. Allow ourselves first to think of a set of practices in the old way and then take up the practices in the newer context.
Skills for Community Living
Step One: Leadership scholar Stephen R. Covey speaks of an Emotional Bank Account. In the banking metaphor, one can make deposits and also withdrawals. Here is my variant of Covey’s approach.7
Deposits
Keeping commitments
Acknowledging others, offering simple kindnesses
Letting go of being right
Practicing deep listening (in order to understand)
Encouraging partnership with others
Withdrawals
Not keeping commitments
Not acknowledging others, not offering simple kindnesses
Refusing to let go of being right
Failing to listen in order to understand
Practicing “superiority over” rather than “partnership with”
Whether we focus on a friendship or a family or a more structured organization, surely the practice of making deposits and apologizing for withdrawals will aid community to flourish.
Step Two: Let us shift the metaphor from banking to gardening. Think of cultivating community (much as cultivating a garden). Next, put in place three new elements to move us from separateness (parts first) to interconnection (relationships first):
- We are not alone (help is available). I do not do the Great Work by myself alone.
- We begin from the positive communal core — what joins us together. I do not do the Great Work for myself alone.
- Because of the nested nature of community, wherever in the web we perform good actions or water good seeds, the whole is modified and benefitted.
Let us revisit the five practices introduced above, broaden them and place them in the paradigm of interconnection. Think of five practices of mind and heart to cultivate the garden of community:
1) Together we can cultivate a sense of the Whole and its Participant-parts.
Here we rest in the awareness that we are already communal beings, already interconnected and interdependent. We honor the relational field and those within it.
We can say:
I see that you are present to me and for me. You see my surface pattern and my deep nature.
I pledge to be present to you and for you – to see both your surface patterns and your deep nature.
I realize that what joins us together also deserves care (as a garden in which we grow, as a house in which we live).
Held in the beauty of this relational field, I pledge to offer help when I sense you are suffering.
Held in the beauty of this relational field, I pledge to ask you for help when I am suffering.
Together, we will remember the surface and depth of each other and the surface and depth of the evolving relationship in which we dwell.8
2) Together — honoring surface and depth of each union/communion, we can rediscover sufficiency (or intersufficiency/abundance).9
We each have in ourselves and those who companion us all we need to live a life of quality — right here and right now. As Gandhi reminds us, there is enough for our need, not for our greed.
Coming from oneness reminds us of the positive — what brought us together, what we prize about the whole and its constituent parts, what we notice in the positive core of our life together.10 Together, we are enough and there is enough.
A sign of coming from intersufficiency is the practice of gratitude and generosity — receiving abundantly, giving generously.
3) Together —honoring surface and depth, we can release from old surface stories and allow the deeper qualities of peace and joy and love to become manifest.11
We can certainly let go of “being right,” confront our own blunders, apologize and, where appropriate make amends. More profoundly, we can examine together our unexamined beliefs and emotional triggers. We can release those that are too small to live in. When living in community triggers old stories and old emotional charges, we can aid each other to recover largeness of vision and return to the bonds that support us.12
4) Together we can practice deep listening and loving speech — entering the unknown together13
We begin to realize that all beings are more mysterious than we know. We learn — in the waters of unknowing — to hear what is said and unsaid, the words and tone, and to pay attention to the images that are just forming.
5) Together we can enlist collaboration (partnership with) and move with emerging currents.
Realizing that all beings seek to fulfill themselves, we can learn when to act and when to give space, when to advance and when to retreat, for the sake of the whole and its participant parts. We do not do the Great Work for ourselves or by ourselves.14
Aiding one another to develop and deepen these five practices shows us community-in-action. I think of St. Paul’s famous discourse on love in this context of community-building:15
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
With such reminders in place, even disturbances can prompt growth. The poet-mystic, Rumi, makes the point in his poem below:
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.16
This, in a sense, is one of the fruits of practice. We can appreciate it in the form of a final story:
A desert monk is surprised to learn that a gardener in a nearby city has a way of life more pleasing to God than his own. The monk visits the city; finds the gardener selling vegetables; and asks for shelter overnight. The gardener is overjoyed that he can be of service. He gladly welcomes the monk into his home. The monk cannot but admire the gardener’s hospitality and his prayerful life. However, one thing disturbs him: the vulgar songs of drunks can be heard coming from the street nearby.
“Tell me, what do you conceive in your heart when you hear these things?” the monk asked.
The gardener replied: “That they are all going to the kingdom.”
The monk, marveling, said: “This is the practice which surpasses my labor of all these years. Forgive me, brother, I have not yet approached this standard”17
//
Notes
1 In my book Living Large: Transformative Work at the Intersection of Ethics and Spirituality (Laurel, MD: Tai Sophia Press, 2004) I attempt a synthesis of the pre-modern and the modern epochs. For me, the move from separation to interconnection is part of that paradigm shift.
2 Arthur Koestler introduced the term in his book, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1967).
3 Once we shift paradigms from a world of separateness to a universe of interconnection, we shall find ourselves moving from parts as primary (separate pieces) to relationships as primary – unique relational wholes composed of unique constituent parts. This will start to shift our understanding of wholes and parts. For a brief discussion, see my To Come to Life More Fully (Columbia, MD: Traditional Acupuncture Institute, 1990), chapter 10.
4 This is, of course, a Confucian insight. See my To Come to Life More Fully, chapters 2 and 11.
5 The poem is translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. It may be found in Robert Hass & Stephen Mitchell, Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), p. 13.
6 See Thomas Berry, The Great Work (New York: Bell Tower Division of Random House, 1999). For Thomas Berry, the Great Work seeks to shift to “a period when humans would be present to the planet in mutually beneficial ways.” In this essay, I see the Great Work, in part, as a quest to take the best of the Pre-modern and the Modern and resituate their gifts in a new Trans-modern, Emerging Ecological era.
7 For Covey’s original Emotional Bank Account, see his The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon and Shuster Fireside Book, 1989), pp.188-199. For a fuller story of why I chose the five practices I did, see my book, Living Large, mentioned above.
8 I am glossing TNH’s relational mantras. Here is basically how I remember them from a retreat at Stonehill College, August 2007:
Darling, I am here for you.
Darling, I recognize that you are here and I am very happy.
Darling, I wonder if you are suffering / having difficulties. I am here. May I help?
Darling, I’m suffering. I need your help.
I am adding a sense of the relational field and how one partner might remember this when the other forgets.
9 In the banking approach, I placed here acknowledging the other and giving simple gifts. Here, we acknowledge the relational field and its participants and see the core unity under the aspect of abundance or sufficiency or intersufficiency. The giving and receiving is seen as mutual support.
10 Hence it profits from a way of proceeding close to that of Appreciative Inquiry. See, for example, David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005).
11 Here honoring “what is” in surface and depth and letting go of what no longer serves becomes the dominant practice. This more general practice of “letting go” includes but goes beyond simply letting go of being right.
12 For a powerful way of working on issues of honoring what is and letting go of old stories, see Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell, Loving What Is (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002).
13 As in the bank account model, listening is again the key practice. Now it is broadened to deep listening and loving speaking and deepened to include the context of unknowing. The deep listening and loving speech echoes Thich Nhat Hanh’s Fourth Mindfulness Training. See, Thich Nhat Hanh, Friends on the Path: Living Spiritual Communities, compiled by Jack Lawlor (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2002), pp. 265-266.
14 For more on enlisting collaboration, see Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), especially practices 9 and 12.
15 Corinthians 13: 4-8 New International Version translation.
16 See Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson, The Essential Rumi (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 109.
17 Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993), pp. 98-99. She references the story as coming from Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., ed., The Desert Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1975).
Books of Interest: Two Books on Senior Retirement Communities Reviewed by Barabara Kammerlohr
Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias
by Andrew D. Blechman
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008
A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America
by Dudley Clendinen
Viking Adult, 2008
Two years ago, when Itineraries first published an issue whose focus was community, we reviewed the “how to” manuals for cohousing development, and stories written by pioneers at the forefront of the cohousing movement. Although cohousing sparked interest among our readers as a seemingly unique phenomenon, private real estate developers have been building and touting the charms of senior retirement communities for many decades, particularly in the warmer climes of southern Florida, southern California, Arizona, and Texas. Who could have predicted that this second theme edition of Itineraries would coincide with publication of two new books on these kinds of communities?
Bleckman and Clendinen, reporters previously published in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, update us on this important movement within our society. Both authors delve into the customs and lifestyles of seniors living in age-specific environments. Andrew Blechman (Leisureville) focuses on The Villages in Central Florida, a huge resort-like age-restricted community of new homes to which his New England neighbor of many years suddenly retired. Dudley Clendinen (A Place Called Canterbury) examines an older group of retirees (average age 86) in a geriatric apartment building on Tampa Bay, offering full services and a nursing wing. Here his mother reluctantly went to live out her final days.
Leisureville should be required reading for any “young” retiree tempted to leave their home of many years for the promise of a life-time of resort living without the civic responsibilities associated with life in most communities. Bleckman decided to research the growing phenomenon after two very civic-minded residents of his small New England town succumbed to the promise of life in a type of “Disneyland” where all is positive and elders are entitled to a life without responsibility. While the author focused on The Villages in Central Florida, his research also took him into Arizona and Del Webb (one of the titans of senior real estate development) territory.
Leisureville’s report on these utopian retirement communities contains major surprises not readily apparent when one is considering a move into such a community. Blechman devotes a whole chapter to governance. The Villages is a privately owned enterprise, not an incorporated city or village. The owner maintains control and has the ability to back out of the enterprise at any time:
…The Villages, despite the fact that it spans three counties, is a privately held business situated on unincorporated land. It’s an exceedingly Byzantine enterprise…with an alphabet soup of legalisms. Its amorphous complexity obscures the fact that Gary Morse owns much of the community and exercises enormous political control over it.
By choosing to live under the Morse family’s private regime, Villagers have voluntarily relinquished many of their civil liberties. In exchange for unlimited leisure and recreation, they traded the ballot box for the suggestion box.
The most frightening claim in Blechman’s report is the fact that there are no long-term plans for financing upkeep of the infrastructure of the community, located on unincorporated land. What happens when the infrastructure wears out and the roads and utility grid need repair? Even worse, what happens when the residents of these age-restricted places get too old for their golf carts and need medical facilities — and walkers?
While Blechman’s most important contribution is his clear message about governance and financing of important services, his description of the residents (and one’s potential neighbors} is absolutely brutal. There is little to admire in the characters he came to know as part of his research. The author portrays them as bigoted, self-centered, and hedonistic. In their focus on swimming pools, alcohol, craft classes, and golf, they accept no responsibility for the community’s greater good. Having visited a couple of such communities (although not the Villages) this reviewer is tempted to believe that Blechman’s characters may be typical. However, not all residents are as bad as his characterizations. And his failure to do more than note this possibility detracts from the credibility of Leisureville. The reader is left wondering if Blechman just failed to connect with a true cross-section of residents.
//
Dudley Clendinen’s A Place Called Canterbury is a more satisfying book because it reflects on the courage and ingenuity of its characters as as they deal with the last stage of life. It is a book for the caretakers of aging parents and for those of us preparing to face the winter season of our own lives. Caretakers will identify with the author’s challenges, and the rest of us can find inspiration for facing our own fears and realities.
It is no coincidence that the title refers to the classic Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Years may have passed since we sat in literature class and read “The Prior’s Tale,” but we may still remember his story. So too will readers remember the stories of these modern-day pilgrims — the tales of our own parents and the tales of our future selves.
Canterbury, like other nonprofit life-care facilities, was designed to serve the middle class at a price that they could afford when they entered and that would not impoverish them in their final days.
“The equation on which life-care facilities are based is an actuarial bet — a gamble. It doesn’t matter at what age over sixty-two a person wants to enter, but new residents have to be able to walk through the front doors on their own power. No wheelchairs. They have to have enough money to afford the sizeable down payment due when they come in, and enough income for the fee they contract to pay each month. The down payment buys them no equity so if they die soon, they lose. But if they live long, they win, especially if they end up in the nursing wing, because the nursing care costs no more — except for the extra meals, pills and nursing supplies — than the monthly apartment fee.”
Clendinen’s iron-willed, southern belle mother went to this life-care facility in 1994 when she could no longer live in the home she had shared with her beloved husband as they raised their children. In 1998, she suffered a stroke and was moved into the nursing wing. During those years, Clendinen spent so much time there that the Canterbury residents, especially his mother’s friends, trusted him and shared their aches, pains, worries, stresses, life stories, and aspirations.
He finds a quiet dignity in those stories and has made them come to life in A Place Called Canterbury. They form the backdrop for his account of caring for his mother, the story of her physical decline, and ultimately, of her physical death. Caretakers of aging parents will identify with many of Clendinen’s moments of truth — such as the moment he realized that his mother could no longer use the toilet by herself:
“It is our ability to live and function at a personal remove from others, able to tend to our own private needs, that gives us the sense of being sovereign in our own space. Learning the toilet is perhaps the first grown-up ability we gain as children, and the last we relinquish to age. I was sitting with my mother—my elegant, strong-willed, dignified mother—in the week after she woke from the coma of her first stroke. We were in a private hospital room, talking carefully, quietly, when suddenly she stopped.
“Darling, I need you to help me to the bathroom, ”she said.
Uh-oh.
“Let me call a nurse,” I answered. The bathroom was ten feet away. It might as well have been a mile.
Many readers of Itineraries find satisfaction, deep peace, and meaning by deliberately facing the autumn of our lives. We have come to understand it as a time unlike youth, and unique unto itself. It may be more difficult, however, to look winter squarely in the face. — as a season of constraints, bare trees, frozen ground, and death. A Place Called Canterbury offers a fertile ground for facing that which we are all tempted to deny. The residents come to life in its pages, showing courage and nobility in the face of Alzheimer’s, dementia, strokes, and saying goodbye to a spouse of 50+ years. Their ability to maintain a sense of dignity and integrity until the end inspires the reader to do likewise. These new Canterbury tales give us a way to begin thinking about the journey into life’s winter.