Itineraries Winter 2007

Contents:

Choosing a Community: One Couple’s Odyssey by John Cronin and Jonelle Soeling

The “Burning Soul” Behind ElderSpirit by Jan McGilliard

Books of Interest: The Quest for the Beloved by Barbara Kammerlohr

Choosing a Community: One Couple’s Odyssey by John Cronin and Jonelle Soeling

The authors recount their six-month odyssey which followed John’s retirement. Their search for—and discoveries about—community began in the West African country of Ghana and concluded at an intergenerational cohousing community on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. John is a member of the Second Journey Board of Directors.

“I need you to know the world is there.”
— Olafur Eliasson

John: I learned about cohousing through my involvement with Second Journey. However, I didn’t immediately consider it for myself, because I assumed it meant living only with other elders. As I prepared to step down from a long career leading a health care system, I was focused on what work to do next—not how to live in a fundamentally different way. Nonetheless, I spent hours poring over Internet sites having to do with cohousing, paying particular attention to intergenerational communities in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.

My intention after retirement was to continue our traditional lifestyle, financing it by doing consulting work in the area of facilitating groups such as Parker Palmer’s Courage to Teach circles. However, before embarking on this new path, Jonelle and I decided to spend two months in the West African country of Ghana, doing a month of volunteer work and a month of travel.

The compound where we lived was part of a middle-class neighborhood consisting of rudimentary concrete structures and thatched mud houses. In a climate of continuous extreme heat, Ghanaians lived in a way that we would consider a form of continuous camping: sleeping outside, walking to a pump to collect water, sweeping the sand in their courtyard every morning, washing clothes in aluminum buckets, and cooking over an outdoor charcoal stove. Partly because we shared the water pump in our compound, there was a constant stream of neighborhood women who came over during the day. Their children also visited for hours at a time, looking for volunteers who would play with them and provide access to things such as soccer balls and books. Without realizing it, Jonelle and I were being introduced to the idea of an intergenerational community where sharing of resources of various kinds was the rule.

We both observed how Ghanaians seemed to have a special richness in their connection with people, as well as contentment with their lives, despite what we would consider very limited possessions and economic opportunities. We received so much pleasure from the children who came to visit us at the compound and the warm greetings from adults in the town who always took the time to welcome us and have a conversation. We came away wondering at how the world had suddenly opened up to us—and so effortlessly. All we had to do was be there and be ourselves.

Jonelle: While John was still doing his job as CEO of a health care system, I had no thoughts of moving. John’s job was what brought us to our community of 8,000, and it had been a difficult adaptation for me. Without my consent, I had taken on a new identity, “wife of the hospital CEO,” and with it came unwanted scrutiny and unexpressed expectations. It took me years to sort myself out and discover people with whom I could be authentic. However, after ten years, I had created a nourishing community involving music and art that had very little overlap with John’s professional life.

On a kayaking trip off Vancouver Island in British Columbia shortly after John made the decision to leave his job, I spotted a small ad in a free alternative newspaper. It described a cohousing community in the nearby town of Nanaimo, and using the hotel’s computer, we were able to immediately get information and make an appointment to see it. Our kayak trip, meanwhile, took an unexpected turn. On the first night out, while camping on a rocky beach miles from our launch point, I became violently ill. I spent the entire night getting in and out of our tent, vomiting and dizzy, feeling as if I might actually die. Twice there was an interval of loud tail slapping and rhythmic breathing right off our campsite — seals and harbor porpoises, which I was sure had responded to my distress.

In the morning, we left the group and paddled back to our launch point. One of the guides mentioned that we might enjoy a yoga class given every week on neighboring Reade Island reachable only by boat. When we unexpectedly showed up at this very local venue that week, we were treated like unexpected but welcome friends. When a woman in the class observed John limping from a sprained ankle, she took us to an area where wild comfrey grew. Using her careful instructions, I made a poultice from the stalks and effectively treated John’s ankle. I believe that this experience was the beginning of my being able to envision some other kind of community—one where people were allowed to keep their authenticity and had useful things to offer.

There was another unexpected benefit of getting ill and missing out on the group kayak expedition. We had some long talks with Lannie, who normally works behind the scenes of the kayak company she owns with her husband. The two of them live off the grid on Reade Island and are active in the Green Party and environmental causes. Their solar shower, composting toilets, and wood-fired sauna are sometimes their kayak clients’ first exposure to a more sustainable, alternative life style.

Lannie listened to our stories about where we were in our lives, and she brainstormed with us about how we might reinvent ourselves in the area. She told us about how she and her husband had met and come to Reade Island to homestead when they were in their early twenties and knew nothing about what they were getting into. In talking over the Nanaimo cohousing project, Lannie suggested we also consider another cohousing project she had heard about in Courtenay, just an hour north of Nanaimo, on the east coast of Vancouver Island. So that’s how we found out about Creekside Commons.

John: I grew up in New Brunswick, a maritime province in eastern Canada, and moved to the U.S. with my family the summer before my senior year in high school. I maintained my Canadian citizenship, eventually becoming an American citizen as well. As Jonelle and I traveled to British Columbia for vacations, I felt a very strong connection to the land, lifestyle, and people. After our first trip, I found myself reading about the area, monitoring current events, and exploring the real estate market. After our second visit, I began to actively imagine living on Vancouver Island.

Jonelle: Since I moved from Seattle to Boston in 1978 to go to graduate school, I have felt that there was something in the eastern U.S. culture that made it more difficult to connect with people. Great stock was placed in what kind of work you did and how successful you were. On being introduced to people, I was sometimes asked to spell my last name and give its origin, seemingly to help people more readily understand who I was and how they should therefore treat me. No matter what my accomplishments were in my first career or in subsequent artistic ventures, I experienced a sense of not being able to claim success. During our travels last summer in British Columbia, I read about a Romanian artist, Sorel Etrog, who said that leaving Romania released personal energy in him and created a space “between the ego and one’s self” that made many things possible for him as an artist. That is what struck me as possible in our move to Canada.

Since leaving my own career in health care finance in 1993, I have been able to spend all day at home in my studio, pursuing my ever-changing music and artistic interests. While John worked long hours at the hospital, my life had virtually no distractions, seemingly ideal for creative activities. My primary social vehicle was picking up the mail at the post office and having a cup of tea at the one coffee shop in town. I would prolong my stay by writing in my journal, and many people recognized me as the woman who was always writing. Although I eventually came to be on speaking terms with a fair number of people, I always felt as if no one really knew me. Besides being lonely, my art suffered.

The Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson, expressed the essential role that community plays for him when he said that he makes things, but it takes somebody else to see them with him: “I look at an object on the table, and I have no empathy with it…. but then you come into the room and the object starts to glow. I need you to know the world is there…. it is why I have so many people working with me.”

During periods in my life where I have been in residence with other artists, I have found that conversations with other people who know me on some level have been of great value in making headway with whatever I was creating. I could go only so far on my own. I envision the Creekside Community as providing opportunities to interact with people, some of whom will be kindred spirits. I hope that I will find a variety of people who will make an object “start to glow,” who will accept my artistic offerings, and who will nourish my creative spirit.

John: As we explored options over the spring and summer, we both realized a need to restructure the way we lived, particularly in how we approached our work. The old way, in which I worked at my job endless hours while Jonelle worked in solitude at the things she loved, was not the way we wished to live in the next stage of our lives. I began to think about how to turn this approach upside down. I imagined our relationship in a situation where we spent most of our time together in our work, volunteer activity, and recreation, deliberately setting aside time for each of us to pursue our own particular interests.

Over time, we came to embrace this concept and began to think about how we might implement such an approach. As I reviewed the Creekside Community’s intention and values statement and got to know the people involved, I came to believe that this particular community could support and reinforce our decision to turn the traditional model for living upside down. As Jonelle and I discussed restructuring our lifestyle, we also delved into our relationship with each other, focusing on what we wanted it to be in our next stage of life. We began to explore how we might express our aspirations in the form of a conscious or mindful pledge. As we prepare to join the Creekside Community, we are engaged in writing this pledge and are looking forward to a new beginning.

Jonelle: In the end, our decision to join the Creekside Commons Cohousing Community was about responding to a persistent call from the time of our first visit to the area several years ago, when a bookstore owner in Campbell River said to me, “You belong here.”

The “Burning Soul” Behind ElderSpirit by Jan McGilliard

Geraldine (Dene) Peterson, profiled by Jan McGilliard in the article below, following a pleasant kitchen-table conversation over morning coffee, is the founder of ElderSpirit and a member of the Second Journey Board of Directors.

Within a few minutes of our meeting, I’d discovered a “kindred spirit” in Geraldine Peterson, founder of ElderSpirit Community. Dene and I shared a common bond, having been raised on dairy farms featuring Jersey cows. You don’t get more “kindred” than that! We chose the kitchen table and mugs of coffee for our conversation, in the company of my dog Maggie, an elder spirit in animal form.

Dene, a Kentuckian, was born into a large Catholic family of eleven children, an excellent foundation for understanding both family and community. She would use these skills throughout her professional life and into retirement with the spawning of the first elder cohousing project in the U.S. Church was a central feature of the Peterson household. Three Peterson sons, including Dene’s twin, Gerald, became priests, studying at St. Meinrad Seminary from an early age. At 18, Dene chose the Glenmary Sisters, a newly formed and non-traditional religious order whose mission was to serve the rural poor in Appalachia and in cities—such as Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati—to which these populations migrated to find work. The Glenmary Sisters were young and enthusiastic, drawn to a life of serving the church in new ways in a new age.

New ideas and visions that infused the Catholic Church after Vatican II came with new challenges, and the cutting-edge work and practical lifestyle of the Glenmary Sisters proved controversial to the church hierarchy. By age 35, Dene was working in Chicago with the poor in the “Appalachian Ghetto” known as Uptown and simultaneously studying psychology at Loyola University. She described a progression of growth and deeper understanding of those she served: “I went from proselytizing to socializing to humanizing… finally realizing these people did not need to change. They were God’s people just as they were.”

The Glenmary Sisters reached a significant turning point in 1967 when a majority of them, including Dene, left the order. It was a painful but liberating decision for most of the nuns. “For my part,” Dene said, “I realized that God didn’t care if I was a nun.” And so she decided to discover new ways of serving the poor and marginalized populations in Ohio and Michigan, always blazing new trails, to be “first” in each position she undertook.

With each new challenge, Dene broke with tradition with ever-higher expectations, goals, and positive outcomes. Working with teen mothers in Ann Arbor, she taught classes entitled: “I Am Lovable and Competent.” She insisted on attainable goals and empowering programs that were always ahead of their time. The last position in her “second career”—running the Newman Center at the University of Michigan where she oversaw a capital campaign of $2.5 million and the first-time hiring of a development officer—allowed Dene to hone her fund-raising skills.

“Retirement” for Dene (she was 70 in 1999 when she left the Newman Center) started out reasonably enough with her moving to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where she reconnected with family and friends, many from her days as a Glenmary Sister.

When the order had fractured in the 1960s, a large number of the Sisters formed FOCIS (Federation of Communities in Service), an educational and community development organization that worked in many locations in Appalachia. Recognizing their commitment and ground-breaking work, Dene called some of the FOCIS members together and posed this question: “Have you ever thought about retiring together?” Not unlike the rest of the population, most hadn’t given this much thought.

From that question—and the collective skills and and hard work of Dene and a committee of FOCIS—has come ElderSpirit, the first elder cohousing community in the U.S. Its residents are committed to mutual support and late-life spirituality, two attributes considered by its founders to be essential for living out a purposeful and meaningful later life. ElderSpirit the vision is now ElderSpirit the reality, located in the beautiful, historic community of Abingdon, Virginia. Currently, 37 residents live there interdependently, offering one another support when needed, sharing responsibilities of the community, taking part in interest groups, while they till the garden of the soul…. together.

Dene observes that our lives are lived in a spiral, rather than a straight line—perhaps not what we expected as we began the journey of life. Born with a bright light, a “burning soul,” Dene continues to share that light freely with others.

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Jan McGilliard is Executive Director of ElderConnections, which provides consulting services, leader development, educational workshops, keynote presentations, and retreats on issues of aging and spirituality. She has special interests in Celtic spirituality and congregational care.

Jan served as Associate for Older Adult Ministries for the Synod of the Mid-Atlantic, Presbyterian Church (USA) for 15 years, working with middle governing bodies on issues of aging and the church. Her husband, Mike, is a professor of Dairy Science at Virginia Tech, and they have two grown children, Josh and Carey.

Jan’s other great passion is training for three endurance events (marathon, triathlon, century bike) each year and raising research funds for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Books of Interest: The Quest for the Beloved by Barbara Kammerlohr

The World Is a Waiting Lover: Desire and Quest for the Beloved
by Trebbe Johnson
New World Library, 2005

Trebbe Johnson, vision quest guide and author, lives with her husband, Andrew Gardner, a potter and rustic furniture maker in rural Pennsylvania. She leads ceremonies and workshops to introduce the Beloved to others throughout the United States, Canada, and overseas. Her writing on myth, nature, and the human quest for meaning has been published widely. Johnson trained as a vision quest guide with Animas Valley Institute, the School of Lost Borders, and SOLO Wilderness Medicine. Visit her website, visionarrow.com, for further information on her publications, public appearances, workshops, and vision quests.

Late Life Love: Romance and New Relationships in Later Years
by Connie Goldman
Fairview Press, 2006

Connie Goldman began exploring the positive aspects of aging in a culture obsessed with its denial 25 years ago after leaving the staff of National Public Radio. Through public radio broadcasts and distribution of her audiotapes and books, Goldman creates listening and reading experiences that encourage us to look at what we gain in aging, not just what we lose.

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When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Thank God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

— Rumi

One thing we can say about love with certainty is that it manifests in so many different ways no one understands it completely. We encounter one or two of its many manifestations and mistakenly believe we have experienced the wholeness of love. Love is a complex force, more easily understood in the heart and through metaphor and stories than through words. Trebbe Johnson and Connie Goldman, however, find words to bring us closer to understanding the concept that has confounded all. Their books are very different, but both illuminate aspects of love that give added meaning to life during this second journey.

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The World Is a Waiting Lover begins on the day Trebbe Johnson, a happily married, mature, woman, recognizes her own feelings of passion for an equally happily married, significantly younger man. This is the beginning of her search for the inner Beloved, a quest through raw emotion, Jungian psychology, mythology, Christian mysticism, and her own psyche.

Were the concepts of love and passion that Johnson pursues to their origin not so deep and complex, it would be easy to comment that “The World Is a Waiting Lover reads like a well -written novel.” Johnson unabashedly describes her moments of shared intimacy (nonphysical) with the “unattainable other,” her husband’s realization that “something is not the same,” and her own intense feelings and embarrassment when that “other” does not continue to share her passion beyond the fateful encounter. These are elements of a great story, and Johnson is a master storyteller, interweaving suspense with the concepts she wants to convey.

But that story is only an introduction to the central plot, Johnson’s search for the Inner Beloved. Examining her intense reaction to this “unattainable other,” she discovers a desire for nothing less than romance with the cosmic itself and takes us with her on that quest. The realization that more than human infatuation has taken hold is described on her website. A reprinted article from Body and Soul (July/August, 2003) contains the following lines:

“It felt that what I really yearned for was to fall into the embrace of some great force, to communicate with unknowable mystery, to know as my lover, not a human man but the whole world. So began my quest for the inner Beloved.”

Her journey is a compelling and complex one, but its story calls forth a desire in the reader to take the same trip. Chapter after chapter, we travel with Johnson as she pursues her Beloved, knowing that the quest is not over until she finds and “gets on track with him.” As we journey with her through mythology, mysticism, self-reflection, and human passion, we begin to realize that our lives too would be more joyful and meaningful if we could find our own inner Beloved and “get on track with him or her.” Eros lives, and the more we are guided by passion and desire, the more fullness our lives will have.

In any good story, the plot must reach a satisfying conclusion. Johnson’s search finally takes her to the Sahara Desert and the final dawn of a four-day vision quest. There, alone, she awaits the arrival of the Beloved. She has prepared, performed the proper ceremonies, and opened herself to mystery. The ending is at hand and it is instructive, satisfying, and surprising.

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Late Life Love also delivers its message through story. In these 22 interviews with couples, most of whom are in their seventies, Connie Goldman found the perfect vehicle for her efforts to shine light on positive aspects of aging. Her couples all found romance, happiness, and new relationship during their later years. True to her roots as a reporter and producer of documentaries, Goldman lets each couple tell its own story. Each chapter is an interview with a different couple.

Candidly, the pairs share details of how they incorporated the “leftovers from other lives” into their new relationship. Adult children, grandchildren, health concerns, previous living situations, sexual expectations, financial discrepancies, divorce, caregiving experience, grief, and loss all played a part in shaping the new relationship. The result is a book in which the reader experiences the joy and satisfaction of individuals who found another to help fulfill the need for love, companionship, sharing, intimacy, touching, and sexual pleasure.

Reading the stories, one is struck with the magnitude of adjustment needed to make a new romance work after having been with someone else for 40 years. These couples were equal to the task. Most called on skills they had learned in previous marriages to find solutions to the differences in the new relationship. Several explain their philosophy of life:

“You don’t plan a relationship; you just live it…there is no point in getting upset about little things in a relationship” (Carl, page 131).

“At this point in our lives we bring a lot of experience and judgment about what is worth fighting about and what is not” (Norm, p. 137).

“Our cuddling is as important as anything” (Norm, p. 136).

“We’re partners, so I don’t know what the advantage would be to be married” (Donna, p. 143).

These couples are not baby boomers; they are from the World War II generation. Their median age is 75. Ten are in their eighties; one is 90. One couple is gay; another is lesbian. Fifteen of the 22 couples are not married. Eight do not live together. All are reflective of creative ways to experience joy and happiness through integration of past and present lives. All offered details that could prove useful to others seeking solutions to similar issues.