Red Cedar

As my relationship with Brian was developing three years ago, one of the things we agreed on right away is that we both wanted to live in a home where the doors were open to our friends and family. Where dinner parties, backyard bbqs, and celebratory functions of all kinds were not occasional… but frequent enough events to characterize our home, to imprint warmth and companionship throughout.

We’ve been in our house now for about twenty months (coming up on two years – how does that happen?), and in that time we’ve hosted at least a dozen dinner parties, two wedding celebrations (one of them our own), a few birthdays, meetings of our neighbours group, and several impromptu backyard hang-out sessions with friends. With the addition of our “Bookshed” and hot tub last spring, we created more useable social space in our yard that got lots of thumbs ups over the summer. And we’ve got more of the same planned for 2011, as well as some Village Vancouver workshops and the like I’m sure.

It probably goes without saying that the most memorable gathering at our home this year was our commitment ceremony and party (which followed on the heels of our very tiny legal wedding ceremony on the island). About forty-five people crowded themselves into our small living room to witness and participate in the vows that B. and I shared with each other – my friend T. “officiating” by helping to secure and maintain our space, many of our guests sharing words to honor our life and the home we have created together. Beautiful, humbling and definitely tear-inducing (and not just in me either!)

And after all that incredible communion of love and words was shared? Well then we just got down to a serious par-tay….. Two and a half cases of wine, I don’t know how much beer, two table-loads of food, an *incredible* cake made by our friend Jill, and a bottle of Amarula were consumed between five pm and two in the morning when the party actually ended (the remaining guests, naked in the hot tub) – and it was all super fabulous, replete with wine-soaked love and conversations all night long.

And it was the conversations, of course, the meeting of our friends from various places that tickled me at my core everytime I looked around our house at the people knit together in bright conversation. My really good friend A. came all the way from LA and for the first time ever was introduced to my Vancouver  crowd (many who said – “that’s the guy you were hiking with when you broke your ankle?”), friends from Victoria descended and camped in our house, and people who had never met previously just generally got along with each other – laughed and told stories, and found out some new things about the world.

Wild and crazy? No. But that’s not the hallmark of a great party to me. Warm, sociable, diverse, friendly, and meaningful are some of the words I would choose to describe this most valued of gatherings in 2010. And although we can’t replicate a commitment party every year, I hope the spirit of it lives in all our planned social gatherings upcoming (next one, open house on Xmas eve!) I haven’t written much about this party here because it happened during a particular rush of activity in my life – so I want to say a belated thank-you to all you awesome folks who came and shared such an incredible night with us!

Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed my workplace web filter is suddenly blocking reverb10.com because “The Websense category “Sex” is filtered” which is bizarre beyond belief. I’m not sure if I should complain to IT because I know they don’t put the website addresses in, it’s done by the company running the filter software. Irksome, but not the end of the world. Hopefully it gets ironed out soon.

In any case, I get the prompts by email so I’m not at a loss for what today’s writing is about – the prompt being: Beautifully different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful.

Good question – eh? I mean, we all know I’m a bit “different” but what exactly is it that makes me so? And are any of us really so different from one another? What is the standard by which we are considered “different”? In opposition to what? Entirely subjective, I suppose. Just like what is beautiful.

But if I were to enumerate that which I think sets me apart?

• I’m in love with the world a little bit all the time. Not entirely and  unreservedly, but I always try to find the parts of it I can love – the forests, literature, gardens, rainstorms and music that set my heart free from the difficulties the world also presents.
• I value hands-on arts and skills in myself and others which has lead to a home full of art made by people I know (paintings, photos, carvings), with my own approach to additions and arrangement.
• I am willing to try myself against new projects or ideas, even if at first I can’t wrap my head around how to think about or act on them. This requires a self-confidence I never had in my early twenties, and is something I’m quite proud of now.
• I have wide-ranging interests – literature, art, politics, writing, gardening, sewing, evolutionary biology, government policy, insects, cooking, philosophy, fisheries, theology, music, psychology, healing, community-building – which gives me the opportunity to talk to pretty much anyone I come across and to connect with all different sorts.
• I am an extrovert who is just as happy staying at home alone. I have learned the skill of aloneness and I cherish it more than any other attribute.
• I am not afraid to do the work of living.

Do these things make me beautiful? What I do know is they are the things I am most proud of, and they are the things that set me apart from other people I know. At root I want to expand all aspects of myself to encompass all the good the world has to offer even if some bad gets inside with that. When I encounter beauty in others, it’s always related to that – openness to the world and all the ideas and permutations of it. That doesn’t mean agreeing with everything, or accepting that the worst of it has to exist… but it does mean shedding cynicism which is something I’ve spent the last ten years working on. And I think that does make me a more beautiful person, and increasingly different in a society marked by discouragement and distrust.

As a social justice and enviro actvist, community-building has been core to my work for more than two decades. Community in the sense of “like-minded people” mostly, community in the sense of that which sustains those of us outsiders to the mainstream when the going gets tough. A community built in tandem with temporary spaces of resistance, alongside meals cooked group-fashion, in opposition to that who we did not want to be. That is – everyone else.

But almost five years ago now, a fairly cataclysmic event took place amongst a segment of my community, when a number of close friends went to jail in the United States for breaking the law in service to that resistance. The fall0ut from that continues to impact my life in ways I could not have imagined when I read the first newswire report of two activists arrested in Eugene, Oregon – but most clear to me is how much my sense of community has changed as a result. Part of that change involves some reflection on the importance of physical community – that is neighbours and co-workers – both in creating supportive space, but also in solidifying the foundations for social change.

In the last year, Brian and I were lucky to be invited to join a nascent neighbours group in our new neighbourhood. We call ourselves Sunrise Commons – in deference to Hastings-Sunrise, and to the fact that we are seeking ways to create more shared space and ideas amongst those of us who live in our nine square blocks. We are a funny little group – a few households comprised of teachers, small business owners, counselors, labourers, drug policy researchers, bureaucrats, film industry workers, trade unionists and the like. None of sharing exactly the same set of ideas, but all of us wanting to make space for a little more friendliness, safer space, and more ecological awareness in our corner of East Vancouver.

Together, we have managed to wrangle some money for boulevard gardening and an awesome block party that took place in August – but mostly the benefit of the group has been in getting to know more people in the neighbourhood, and giving each other a place to come with a grievance or an issue we want to work on. It’s all very in its formation stages at the moment – so who knows where it will go as a group…. But for me it has really helped to deepen my connection to the households around ours, and when it comes to municipal issues (and grants), it is these physical neighbourhood “communities” that matter at city hall.

In the next year I would like to keep working on my neighbourhood ties, and find ways of increasing community through food growing – whether in a community garden setting, or just in our own backyards. I really understand community best as a function of sharing work (and the resultant leisure), and finding ways to work and dream together is the stuff that makes us whole as a society.