I think I give my power away too easily. I think I let it slide off me, like skin cells dying.

When I bought the ranch from Trudi it was called Saint Finnbarr Farm, I note that my Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t have an entry for Finnbarr. However, I remember Trudi: she was an artist in the Fauvist tradition and she drove a big current model Lincoln Continental⎯white always⎯and I know that, whether or not the Brittanica has got it straight or not, Saint Finnbarr held deep realities for Trudi. I didn’t keep the name, in fact Trudi took the name with her and applied to her next home down by the Catherine store. For a while I didn’t see any need for a name for the place beyond just plain Collins Creek*, the river that runs through it, named after Henry Collins who homesteaded the place in the 1880s.

Judge Wendt lived in the white house up Little Woody, the one now lived in by the Huffmans, and drove a big white pickup into town where he held court. John was portly, pompous, and rode to the hounds in full livery⎯quite a sight, and a bit of a joke to the local ranchers who still rode their horses from ditch to ditch in the hay fields wearing their irrigation boots and with a sharp shovel balanced over their shoulder. The Judge had Lenado Farm written large and red on both sides of his white and ever-clean pickup, and it struck me as something of a joke, for I didn’t think of his place as a farm or of him as a farmer.

At that time I was not myself farming Collins Creek. Stan Natal had traditionally leased the place from Trudi, put up the hay, and pulled her white Lincoln out of whatever ditches the jug red wine led it into, and this was still the arrangement in the 1970 that I speak of. I did, however, have a pretty old, pretty beat-up red GMC pickup and I thought to mock my neighbor’s, the Judge’s, pomposity a bit with a sign on the doors of the beater. And so the ranch took on the name Lower Collins Creek Coyote Preserve and the initials, LCCCP, were hand lettered onto both doors. I still think the initials look a little bit like the initials USSR written in Cyrillic, as you’ve seen them on the side of the Soyuz rocket ships and other places. This name lasted until 1983 when suddenly Flying Dog Ranch seemed more appropriate, more just, more wise, more poignant even. But that is another story.

In March of 1972, for reasons of professional ennui and marital distress, I moved⎯in that same red GMC⎯permanently to Collins Creek. Professional ennui meant that I was bored with an academic career and looking for a change in life-course: marital distress meant that I was suddenly a single parent to two adolescent boys and expecting summer visits from the youngest two of my five children. If you’re counting carefully this means that the oldest daughter will not be seen at LCCCP immediately; so it is with divorces. We dealt with these kinds of life things: people tell me now, in retrospect, that we didn’t deal all that well⎯I don’t know.

In late May, at a reasonable morning hour, the phone rang and it was Stan. The children were still asleep, perhaps it was a weekend. Stan’s message was short; “George, I’m not going to take care of your land any more. Meet me on the West mesa at 4 o’clock this afternoon with irrigation boots and a shovel, I’ll show you how to do it.” At 4 o’clock I showed up on the West mesa in my fishing waders and with a brand new long-handled shovel from Sardy’s Hardware Store. Stan said, ”I’ve cleaned your ditches, harrowed your fields, turned on the water, and now it’s yours to do.“ He showed me how to do three cuts in the ditch bank; slice a gap in the lower bank of the ditch, plop and pat the sod from that cut into a dam just downditch from the cut, let enough water flow over the dam to go on down the ditch, oh, 10 or 12 big paces, and make another cut, repeat the damming, repeat the 10 or 12 paces, at the third cut build the dam so that all the remaining water is spread. Three cuts, twelve hours, an acre irrigated. Given ridges, draws and high spots, 30 days will irrigate the 33-acre West mesa.

I loved it. There was meaning in this irrigating, purpose and necessity; more so than physics anyway. I found easier irrigating boots at the CO-OP and fitted my Bultaco Matador with a veritable spider’s web of bungee cords so that the shovel flowed backwards into the wind as I wheeled from field to field. In the morning I could look towards the East and the backlit alfalfa would show a generous green gratitude where last night’s water had flowed. In the evening I would look to the West for reward. Hippy Jon’s hippy wife asked if she could join me for a morning set; horny, I said yes and told her just exactly when and where she could grab me around the waist and share my Bultaco ride, her long hair flowing even behind the shovel. I took this request as a sign of marital distress in their childless wedlock. I fantasized; a roll in the hayfield perhaps? In the morning the ditch water is much colder than at the end of a sunny day, and while the shovel does most of the hard work, the hands engage the details, the slight adjustments necessary to those sod dams that split the ditchwater ever so judiciously between one cut and the next. In the morning hands are red and cold, which seems an ungenerous approach to a first sexual encounter with Jon’s wife. My fantasy moved on to parking the Bultaco at the backdoor and towards breakfast or perhaps a warmly shared shower ….

She never showed; divorced Jon I heard, I never saw her again. Other things happened to my life, but every year after I irrigated more or less as Stan had taught me, and it’s been a blessing.

I think I give my power away so easily because I fundamentally do not understand people in relation to myself (as most writers don’t, which is why we write). I relinquish power and allow others to fully disrobe themselves. Not sexually. No, that power I have always maintained. Too scary as a woman not to. But emotional power. I refuse to believe my parents’ mantra that: the whole world sucks and what has anyone done for you lately?, and so embrace the contrary by assuming that the whole world is innocent until proven guilty. I wait for you to push me until I push back, usually in the form of walking away. Classic passive bullshit. George fears being discovered; I fear being harassed. Because if you harass me, and then I cry, I have lost. You have won.

Trust is a key component of collaboration. Trust may be defined as confidence in the reliability of a person or system, regarding a given set of outcomes or events, where that confidence expresses a faith in the probity or love of another, or in the correctness of abstract principle. Trust, in other words, can be invested in persons or in processes. Trust can include intimacy and warmth as well as predictability and reliability.

The other day, while in the playground with my (almost) one year-old daughter, I started chatting with an acquaintance who had worked with George at the Community School many years ago. She said she liked George, but that he could be ornery at times, and that others had difficulty with him. But he would listen to what you had to say, she said, and wasn’t stuck in any kind of mindset, and she appreciated that. I have not seen the ornery side of George yet. Maybe I haven’t pissed him off yet; maybe I haven’t seen him enough and the odds have been in my favor. But, then again, I don’t think he’s seen the real ornery side of me either. I reserve those pleasantries for my family.

When George worked at the Community School as the Principal, he was there every day, sweating and bleeding for the success of his vision. That’s what investing yourself profoundly in an organization (and perhaps, even family) does. It brings out everything in you – the good, the ugly, the unexpected, the ornery: the whole self.

Personal trust can build loyalty, commitment and effectiveness in the enhanced capacity that comes from shared decision-making. But it can reintroduce problems of paternalism and dependency that characterize more authoritarian form of organization. Collaborative cultures that depend upon exceptionally strong leadership of a personalized nature may find internal collective confidence transformed into collective complacency, carrying with it reduced capacity and willingness to network and learn from other kinds of expertise from outside that are not grounded in immediate and trusted personal relationships. In conditions such as these, too much reliance can be placed on this leader to be responsible for external linkages.

How deeply do I want to invest in this community where I live? I ask myself often lately. Do I belong here – or anywhere? Do I and this community have a positive symbiotic relationship? Is this my home?

Additional trust in expertise and processes helps adaptive organizations develop and solve problems on a continuing basis in an environment where problems and challenges are perpetual and changing. Processes to be trusted here are ones that maximize the organization’s collective expertise and improve its problem solving capacities. These include improved communication, shared decision-making, creation of opportunities for collegial learning, networking with outside environments, commitment to continuous inquiry and so on.

I find myself asking so many similar questions as those I have found in George’s writings. His extended life experience lends more answers, of course, and his collective historical branches  date back to 18th Century Western European (Irish and Scottish) immigration to America, quite the contrary to my Eastern European roots. Many of his questions I have been asking myself for a long time: the meaning of life, history of man, relevance of science, justice and childhood, value of capitalism. But his perspectives have injected the most jarring, and newly conscious, question in my life, a question that a friend always credits George for instilling in him:  What is one’s active responsibility to community? Or, rather, what are you going to do about it? I can ask questions all day long, but if they remain in my head or let loose only during collegial and sedentary conversations, then what have I done to leave this planet better than I entered it?

Trust in people remains important, but trust in expertise and process supersedes it.

Trust in process is open-ended and risky. But it is probably essential to learning and improvement. Thus, risk is something to be embraced rather than avoided. Risk-taking fosters learning, adaptability and improvement.

What risk am I going to take – not for the betterment of me (although the right step will inevitably make me better), but for the betterment of others? Why have I believed for so long that discovering and embracing my God-given (do I truly mean God-given?) talents is meant for only me? Well, I have a guess, but even Freud (perhaps not Jung, though) would get bored in the regurgitation.

As a mountaineer doesn’t just “wander around” on a fog shrouded mountain an organization operates on some general or guiding principles that are designed to move the organization forward and upward. A jiggling, a zitter-bewegung, will move the organization backwards as often as forwards. The Guiding Principles under development (with continual revision) are Standard Operating Procedure for wherever it is that we find ourselves on the landscape. In some sense, the guiding principles define the interaction between elements in such a fashion that the organization self-organizes towards its mission; the mission is embedded within the guiding principles.

There is another set of principles that give us guidance in moving towards more fitness and these are framed in the Good Community Organizing statements:

Good community organizing wins immediate and concrete improvement in people’s lives.
Good community organizing gives people a sense of their own power.
Good community organizing alters the relations of power.
Good community organizing springs from the concerns of the common interest.
Good community organizing understands individual wants.
Good community organizing is based on relationships and self-interests.
Good community organizing develops leadership.
Good community organizing implements collective ways of solving problems.
Good community organizing both confronts and negotiates.
Good community organizing teaches about democracy and creative conflict.
Good community organizing provides a critical social analysis.
Good community organizing brings about imagination and dreams of the possible.
Good community organizing produces public judgment through public dialogue.
Good community organizing includes appreciation, celebration, evaluation, and reflection.
Good community organizing trains mentors.
Good Community organizing supports and sustains personal transformation.
Good community organizing creates a learning community.

How am I going to irrigate the land?

*The Collins Creek Ranch is an environmentally and economically sustainable demonstration of transforming western ranchland into a setting of beauty, solitude, sensitivity to a long range vision of the changing larger world community and that brings spiritual, cultural, and civic value to the local community.

The Collins Creek Ranch exists in order that those that live there can have this mission as their work and their way of life.

The Collins Creek Ranch exists in order that the Woody Creek community has facilities that enrich their individual lives and promotes growth in their community lives.

The Collins Creek Ranch exists in order that the Valley, and the Western region know and understand that the mission is doable.

The Collins Creek Ranch exists in order that residents and visitors to the valley can have affordable  experiences of solitude that promote reflection and the higher dimensions of the human spirit.

The Collins Creek Ranch exists in order that an ever-widening audience knows that these visions can be achieved, these values lived.

The Collins Creek Ranch exists in order that native wildlife has a bountiful sanctuary.

The Collins Creek Ranch exists in order that COMPASS have a setting and activities that complements their own setting and activities.

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