Robert Paterson's Weblog

Slow Road Home - Fred First - Doorway to a better Life

Do you believe in magic? I do.

I have just finished Fred's elegiac book "Slow Road Home". I don't recall being moved so much by a book - ever!

"All who wander are not lost" - J R Tolkien (p 204)

Why? Let me tell you. When I was a boy I read the Odyssey and saw it as an adventure. I read, Moby Dick and thought it was an adventure. But when I read them again in middle life, I saw them as my life. When I read Slow Road Home, I saw it as my life and then as a real adventure. An adventure that I knew well. Fred has become, as Dickens did, the hero in a mythic tale of his own life and so showed me, my own. The adventure and the mythic tale are all about seeking home and finding its magical and restorative power.

Home, is not your house. Home is the place that chooses you. Home is a place where you go to find your true self. Home is the place where you as a steward will leave your legacy to the next generation. Home is the place you choose to die in. Home is where you may choose to leave your ashes. Home is not a house.

He describes the "call" "When we are young, we live where we are born. For some of us, the place of our birth is a perfect fit and we never leave it. For others, like me, something is missing there and we look for home in places we have never been but long to find." There is something about the power of longing that I know too. "Something has drawn us here over the years, brought us back. A longing we cannot name has caused these hills to hold a nutrient we cannot live comfortably without".

For me it was the Atlantic property of my Grandparents. The smells of pine and seaweed, the morning mists, the gentle summers and the long winters. For Fred and Ann, it is the mountains of Virginia, the summer heat, the spiders webs, the brooks and the winter stove.

In our busy lives, most of us lost our sense of place and how it could work its magic upon us. Fred says "Whether we know it or deny it, place molds into each of us its latitude, its elevation, its geometry and chemistry. But it is possible to live so fast that we become oblivious to our relationship with the land that requires a daily attention to the particulars every season."

There is a sad scene in John Boorman's excellent film Excalibur, when Merlin, wistfully says that the age of magic is dying and so must he. But I wonder - is the age of magic returning? Can Fred help us find it?

Where does he work his magic? He works it in the "Daily particulars of every season". What do I mean by this? Have a look at some of his photos - here. Fred' s eye sees the details of these daily particulars and sheds new light on what we pass by every day without seeing.

This is how Fred sees the details we pass by.
Or this - an Ice Curtain

The book is called a Blue Ridge Book of Days. Like medieval Book of Hours, it is a series of contemplative vignettes about daily life. Fred looks with an eye that most of us have forgotten we own. He sees life in all the mundane actions of existence for him, for Ann and all other living and non living parts of his landscape. We meet spiders, deer, snakes, birds. We hear the insects, smell the bloom, hear the crunch of ice, the buzz of the chain saw. We share his coffee, smell the flannel. We sense the waters rushing below and the life beneath the soil. We meet his family and we meet his people. For me, above all, we also meet Buster.

For what is a man or a place without a dog? How can we know a place well without a dog to guide us? Buster and then Tsuga are deep undercurrents of energy throughout the book. The account of Buster's death had me cry out "Oh No!" as by his deft touch, Fred set up the scene and I knew what would unfold.

What a deft touch. Fred writes prose that reads like poetry. He also has the gift of on one page providing an aha, on another a ha ha and then another a tear. The book is a series of of scenes that layer upon each other to build a whole. It is like a series of snacks that become a meal - leaving the reader complete and sad that it is over. I want to hear Fred read it. I can hear his voice on every page.

This is not a self indulgent book. This is a mythic tale that can grip the heart of any person who seeks to find themselves and hence home itself: that place where the person melds into the world and readies us for that time when we all go back to that larger home.

In this busy world, we have forgotten how place can inform us and make us whole. We have forgotten how the mundane, gathering wood for the winter, working in a vegetable patch, walking the river bank serves the sacred. We have forgotten the meaning of being true to a place.

Fred ends with this sentiment. " A man can be fond of women, but he will settle down in a relationship and build a love affair of meaning with one woman. And so it is, ultimately - if we are fortunate - with finding our place....For the first time in my life, I feel a monogamous fidelity to one fixed and particular place that is as deep and permanent a commitment as the vows that I have taken to this one woman, my wife."

And so our hero, Odysseus, after a lifetime of adventure is called home to his woman, Penelope and to his home - as all men are so called.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fred First, Magic, Place, Slow Road Home

Recalled to Life - Part 1 - The Magic Garden

The Magic Garden

People ask me all the time "What part of England do you come from?" My answer confounds them. I reply that I come from the Montreal part of England. However, in many ways my life does begin in England. Here then, is how Rob became a Brit. Here is how I became an adventurer. Here is how I learned to love being free. Here is why I am, at heart, a sad person - for the price of all my adventure and freedom was love.

In this picture you see me with my sister Diana and our maternal great grandmother, Charlotte. It is 1954. We are in my granny's garden in St Andrews New Brunswick.

We are with her because our mother had left that summer with our father to set up house in England. The plan was that Diana, aged 2, and I aged 4 would follow in the late fall with our nanny on board ship.

Great Gran, aged 70, thought this a remarkably irresponsible idea. She felt that Nanny was a buffoon and we were so young. So she, aged 70, was going to accompany us and ensure that we did not fall overboard or whatever. So that fall, Great Gran, Nanny and Diana and I set off from Montreal on the Empress of Australia for Liverpool and for an adventure that was to shape our lives.

Here is the Empress of Australia at dock in Montreal. This was an interregnum for CP ships. The Old Empress of Britain had been sunk in the war and the new one was not going to come online until 1956. The Empress of Australia had been an old French Liner, the De Grasse, that had been sunk in Bordeaux and raised for CP.

I remember none of the voyage. But our arrival in Liverpool is engraved in my mind. Our mother was there. We had not seen her for months. She met us at the docks and gave me, of all things for a 4 year old, a book. It was a pop-up book and this one inspiring moment started a passion that I have all my life for reading. By the time I was 8 she was sending me book parcels to school. I had read Moby Dick, Tale of Two Cities, Beowulf and even War and Peace before I was 9. I discovered the world of the mind and of the imagination.

As we journeyed to our new home, 14a Airlie Gardens, I was also struck by how different London was from home.

Everything was small - the cars, the trains, the houses. It looked, in the fall of 1954, as if the war had ended the day before. There was bomb damage everywhere. The house next to ours was a bomb site. People wore pre-war clothes. Rationing was just ending. Many children had never seen any fruit other than an apple. There were very few cars and very little petrol. No one had central heating. Instead people still had grates to burn coal. Coal that was delivered by men who looked like Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady. They wore funny leather hats with a long back so that they could carry coal in sacks off the horse drawn wagons and tip the coal over their heads into the coal holes in the pavement. When you walk the streets of London - look for the round iron coal covers - underneath were once coal cellars. We had smogs and all the buildings were black. Milk was delivered by horse drawn wagons. Taxis were all pre war. It was a London hardly changed from Edwardian times.

14a Airlie Gardens. This was a truly Magic Garden. This was the special place that formed much of my life.

Here Diana and I are with Nanny Cosgrove in the garden. Behind us is our 2 story, 5 bedroom flat. It cost 210 pounds a year to rent. Note we are with Nanny and not with our mother. We had lunch with our mother once a week on Thursdays - Nanny's day off. More on Nannies in a later chapter.

Here is the garden now. It seems even more magical than in 1954.

Here is the pond at the centre of the garden today

Here are the buildings that surround the garden as seen today

14a is off to the right of the picture up the lane. Airlie Gardens surrounds one of the most lovely gardens in London. The garden is completely enclosed and hence is very safe. Diana and I and all the children from the buildings ran wild here. We lived like the children in Swallows and Amazons.

This was the formative safe container that did so much to shape my world view. Here I learned to love nature and adventure.

Of course, the garden was only a garden to the adults. For us children, it was a portal to anyplace we wanted it to be. It was our Narnia. In it, we re-enacted the wild west, oceans where pirates were common and more than any thing we re-enacted the war. Not all the residents appreciated the noise that 10 kids could make when replaying the Battle of Britain and roaring around the garden with arms akimbo being Spitfires and Messerschmitt 109's making machine gun noises. But one resident did. Better still he had a huge collection of Toy Soldiers and Guns. Better still he was a movie star!

Here he is - Peter Cushing - the lord of the Hammer Horror films. For my younger readers, he was the commander of the Death Star in the first Star Wars film. On the left, you will see what looks like two boys with guns facing the camera. The shorter boy is in fact my sister Diana. The taller boy is me. The year is 1958.

He was a lovely man. It is so ironic that he played parts like Dr Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes who were very distant men. In person, he was very warm and I suspect that he had never been able to have children of his own. He had a special place for them in his heart. He loved to play.

This was our gang. We spent all our days with each other. The boy almost crouching away from PC was called Ronald. He had a huge collection of Airfix models - more on them later.

The sweet little girl on the right is Fiona. She caught my sister's hand in a gate. In revenge, we persuaded her brother, Andrew, the sweet little boy on the left, that we had this brand new lemonade from Africa. We got him to take a deep draught. Of course, it was not lemonade. Nor was it from Africa. I leave to you to wonder what it may have been. Needless to say, I got into a of of trouble.

This garden is where I lost my Canadian accent for ever. After all, a child has to fit in and this was a cultural pressure cooker. There was no TV. Every waking moment was spent in the garden with this gang. My greatest crime, and the event that introduced me to the most mysterious person in our family, was committed with them. As I have said, rationing was just ending. No one had had any kind of luxury for 15 years. An admirer of my mother, she looked like Grace Kelly, had given her a box of Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigars. They had this wonderful box all full of color.

Mum had put them away for the day when she and my father really had to make an impression. I had found this treasure. What really appealed to me and the gang however was the box. We tried to smoke a few, most of us were 7 or younger, and became suitably ill. So we broke up the rest of the cigars and I traded the box with Ronald for an Airfix model.

The big night came. My father's boss had come for dinner. The fatted calf was killed. And then - the big moment. Dad asked if anyone would like a real Cuban Cigar. Men began to faint in expectation. He strode in triumph to the drawer to find - nothing. I will never know how he guessed. I am also not much of a lier. Enraged he pulled me from my bed, and asked what I had done with the cigars. When I told him that we had smashed them all up, he could not contain himself and he spanked me for the first and the last time.

That was my first memory, aged 6 of meeting him, my father Jim - the mystery figure in our life in the nursery.

Next - English Food and Sweets in the 1950's

Technorati Tags: Airlie Gardens, Autobiography, Diana (Paterson) Fischer, Family, Peter Cushing, Rob Paterson

Rare Dog Breeds - The Sheprador

Ginger sent me this photo of her very rare "Sheprador". She tells me that this breed is designed to test beds.

Note the passing resemblance to the Silesian Bandersnatch.

If you own and love a "Rare Breed" that you want to have posted in this series - please send me an email plus pic and I will do my best

Technorati Tags: Dogs, Rare Breeds of Dog, Sheprador, Silesian Bandersnatch

Nichola Goddard - Women in the front line

It is clear that Capt Goddard was an exceptional person. I bet she is not alone. I bet that there are lots of Nichola Goddards in the army now and maybe others who would join, if the challenge was altered a bit. And I don't mean reduced.

It is also clear that the fuzzy line that tries, in some armies, to keep women soldiers out of harms way is silly and insulting.

What if the PPCLI created an all volunteer all female company? What kind of woman would aspire to be part of the most elite unit in our army? What would such a unit to to lift the performance of the entire army?

"Oh, women are too small and weak" some say. Really! Not the ones that I know. And by the way the Vietnamese were small and weak too.

What about "G" Company (Goddard Company) - a band of sisters?

Technorati Tags: Military, Nichola Goddard, Women in the Army

Rare Dog Breeds - The Silesian Bandersnatch

Some of you have asked me what kind of dog is Jay - See my photo on my Blog

He is a very rare breed - a Silesian Bandersnatch. Silesian Bandersnatches were dogs bred in Silesia to help Silesian Postmen ride their bikes from door to door without been bothered too much by the many guard dogs that Silesian Households used to have. So, as Dalmatians were carriage dogs, SB's are bike dogs.

They have to look fierce but be very nice - especially with children. After all, you don't want to be the postman who frightens the children.

SB's look very odd as puppies - they are all ears.

The large ears enable them to listen to the bike while keeping their eyes out for guard dogs or for children.

One of the reasons that SB's are very rare is that they tend to have odd ideas about mating.

This confusion can get very extreme - hence so few Silesian Bandersnatches today

Another reason that they are so rare now is that they can only eat human food and only on a bed with a human.

So I am very lucky to have a specimen of this very rare breed

Technorati Tags: Dogs, Silesian Bandersnatch

Tip to Tip - More Photos

Here is the link to Margaret McPike's Flickr set on Tip to Tip

Here are a few samples - if you have more pics - send the link to ma and I will aggregate them here

Margaret at the start

Chas and Christina

Coming through those danged gates

Technorati Tags: Biking, PEI, Pictures, Tip to Tip

The Future of Public radio - A Parable Part 4

The Meaning
That 43 members raised at least $20,000 dollars for a worthy cause was the superficial bottom line of our weekend. Can you get 43 members of your station to raise $20,000? Next year there will be many more and we will raise much more. I know that to be true because of the experience that we all had. We are going to bring more to join us. As Cyn was my angel, I will offer my help to other old farts like me. The expert riders will ask their expert friends to come. There need be only a small investment in marketing. We the members will do most of it.

So what was the experience that we had? What is the deal here? The deal is that we all became more us. We endured a challenge as individuals that created a community. We are like "Vets".

This was not a "fun" weekend. But it became joyful.

We had this experience of finding out more of the answer to whom we really were as a result of a wonderful design. This design is how eBay, Google, Starbucks and Southwest all work. I will speak as clearly as I can in my report about this. But for now it is this. Tip to Tip is organized as a trusted container in which people are safe enough to go to their limit and then find it OK and then find others.

Inside the Container, there is great freedom and all the work is done by the members. The container has deep structure to make it strenuous and also safe.

It has "Shepherds". These are experts who do not sit on the sidelines and advise but who mingle with us. One was at the front, one at the back and 2 roamed. No one was going to get lost, get left behind or get into trouble without help. Their job was to ensure the health of the entire system. (Geddit?????) Their job was to make even the weakest feel safe. If even the weak fell safe, the community can develop. When there is fear, it is every man for himself and women and children last. (Geddit???) Fear is disabling. The fear of the weaker stations is justified. If we do not act to deal with the fear of being hurt, left behind or lost, the system cannot emerge.

Who were these people and did it cost a lot to have them? They came from the Ski patrol. The organizers made a contribution to Ski patrol and these guys came as volunteers. We forget that the greatest motive of all is to serve. What was their reward? They have our love and respect. Surely they need money? Yes as do we all. Do you now see the linkage between reputation and being able to earn? What is the motive for all the open source world? Do leaders in this world miss out financially? But they too were rewarded by becoming more human.

Was all this freedom a licence for chaos? No there was massive order, as many of you may have experienced when Johnnie lead us in May. This is a natural design that sets the environment. The leadership job is not to control my bike ride but to provide every biker with the optimal experience that fits them uniquely. Do you offer this to your staff or to your listeners?

Every aspect of the experience had been thought through as an environmental experience. Would their be weak riders? Of course - so what do they need more than rescue? They need an option to do less and it be OK. That was designed in. What do the experts need? They need a chance to go to new levels. That is designed in. What do we all need? We all need good food and fellowship and an opportunity to share with each others as people. That was all designed in. Every aspect of the experience from being bused out and bused back was considered. Considered as an experience. Even the fund raising - we used Pay Pal to make it easy to give. Do you know all the environmental levers in your organization? Is this what you pay attention to?

What about the support costs? The organizers used the goodwill of many community partners - hotels, church groups, the bus company, restaurants. They pulled in a mass of support from the community. Do you rely on your relationships with your partners to fund most of your infrastructure or do you try and do it all yourself?

I remind you that 43 people raised $20,000. I remind you that there will be more next year and more the year after. What is your conversion rate for "members" Who does your marketing? Is it you??????

So what about Public Radio?

What if we saw participation and engagement like this?
What is we created a community like this with our members and between ourselves?
What if we looked after the health of our entire system?
What if we designed containers like this?
What if we raised money like this?
What if we marketed like this?
What if we built infrastructure like this?

So what then would be our mission?

I close with this passage that calls me and ask - would it call you?

"There will come a time when humanity will choose to go against nature, to exploit her bounteous gifts, causing a sickness across the planet. People will forget the ecstasies of communion, and life will become drab and colorless.

In these coming dark ages, though, a deep sense of loss will cause the beginnings of a Great Return. They will look at the landscape and the old temples, built to withstand the cataclysms of millennia and understand once again the sacred laws of Existence.

When this day comes, humanity will have come of age. It will consciously acknowledge its role in the creative impulse that comes from the Sun, fertilizes the Earth, and calls forth the flame in the hearts of men and women to worship Life and the miraculous forces behind Creation."

Miller, Hamish & Broadhurst, Paul. The Sun and the Serpent: An Investigation into Earth Energies

My report is more like a report. It is very detailed and I examine many more points than this and I hope offer you an accurate assessment of what you told me and what I think you can now do.

But I hope that this parable will give you a sense of where you may go. Not because it is an idea. But because it is real. You can do this and no one else in media can. You can create a new "New World" where we can be human again and where we can come together to do hard things like, improve our health, educate and raise our kids, develop the local economies, make bridges across cultures, make peace and come alive again after being asleep for so long.

Technorati Tags: Biking, Culture, Gift Economy, Organization, Public Radio, Tip to Tip

The future of Public Radio - A parable Part 3

Resurrection and Redemption
....... we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the heropath. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world." (Joseph Campbell)

On the third day we found acceptance. Not the acceptance of the others but the acceptance of ourselves. So the skilled set a speed test for themselves and shot off averaging 28K an hour over 100 k. Those of us at the other end realized that we could simply have a nice day and we did coming in hours later. It was all OK. Any way any one of us wanted to ride this was ok. I did not feel like doing 102 k and so I took the soft option and did only 55. The soft option was designed into the whole design!!! Behind all the freedom of the design was very careful consideration for what would drive the optimal environment.

We were a group but the space for each of us to do exactly what they felt best was there. Now in the safety of the mood of acceptance in the entire group it was safe to be who we really were. No one was going to criticize the fit for wanting to go fast. No one would criticize the weak for going at their own pace. Everyone could be themselves. What a feeling! To be ourselves in the context of a community that accepted that.

Campbell says it best: "The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are"

That night we all stayed up even later. We had music, we danced! We drank. We told stories around a fire (actually 3 candles). We returned to a communion that all humans had lived in for 4 million years.

The next day - Redemption.

We awoke changed even more. Today, our last, we decided innately, with no conversation, no vote and no debate that we would like to spend this precious day together. So, as the pictures show you, we spent the day in community. We dawdled. We chatted. We laughed. We looked around at the beauty of our landscape and wondered. All the veneer of polite society vanished. Much of the conversation was about our poor private parts. We reached out to each other. We cried.

We knew that we had been part of something special. Now the shepherds were hardly needed, we all looked out for each other. Even the most injured, got on her bike for the last few k. She had to finish this in community.

We finally arrived at East Point in triumph.

Here is Cyn my Angel of hope. Imagine feeling like that!!

Next the Sunday School lesson - The design and the business model

Technorati Tags: Biking, Culture, Gift Economy, PEI, Public Radio, Radio

Future of Public Radio - A Parable Part 2

The Cross - Challenge, Individuation and Community

"..... The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. "Live," Nietzsche says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribes's great victories, but in the silence of his personal despair."

There was a paradox in how we all reacted to each other over the 4 days of riding. The first 2 days were what i will call the "Cross". The third day was Resurrection and the last day was Redemption. My point? That real community is formed from individuals who are doing something very difficult.

So off I went, alone but with 43 others.

We all set off alone in our fear and uncertainty. Would we be OK? Would we be able to meet the challenge? As you can see in the pictures, the day was glowering with low cloud, rain and a 40k headwind. We had 60 k to do. I and others went inside. At first into our fears and into our thoughts and then into our bodies. " Fuck Fuck Fuck" was my mantra as the grade uphill turned into yet more grade. The wind was blasting in my face and the wet gravel slipped under my tires. There were times that first day when all I had left was my will. This was not fun!

But in the background were the shepherds. Every now and then one of them would whip up beside me. "How are you doing?" "Fine" I would say even though I did not feel that it was fine. Just as I thought I could not go further, I came around a bend and there was the break station. Volunteers had food, water and encouragement. Then back out again - grind grind grind. But all the time the shepherds were there. Had a puncture, they fixed it. Put your back out, they had Midol and carried your gear. Could not go on - there was the truck.

As I saw how the weak and the unlucky were being looked after, I began to realize that I was safer than I thought. Heh maybe this was not a race. Maybe the point was that we would all make it in our own way? The organizers had created a safe container in which we could be ourselves.

We were on our own. No one was pedaling for us. But we had support. All around us was a framework of support. The shepherds, the system facilitators, were the obvious support. But so were all the breaks, the lunches and the first night at a resort hotel with entertainment put on by two of the most experienced members. This was for many of us the most challenge that we had ever faced. It was a challenge of body and more important of spirit. In the first two days, the ordeal was so great that each of the members could only rely on the official supporters to help us. We discovered the meaning of "the silence of his personal despair" Being in pain, and hence being inward looking, we could not help the other members much. But the design of the ride mean that there were people there who were above our pain and who could and did help.

By day three, most riders had done over 170K. Something changed inside us. We had each overcome our fears and had discovered that we could do this. We had also spent 2 nights with each other. The first night I went to bed at 8.30 exhausted. But the second night I closed the bard with a large number of the gang. We were starting to see and know each other. We had shared something. We had each of us carried a cross of our own. Every cross was different but all had carried one. So when we looked at another, we saw a fellow and not a stranger. We had respect and the beginnings of love for each other. For each of us had been on our own cross.

Now we could begin to help each other. Now we broke free from being alone and could be a group. How different from the false community that parades itself frequently on the net. Now the process of resurrection and redemption could begin. We felt like a band of skilled veterans at war. We were becoming a band of brothers and sisters.

Our motivation was starting to transcend our own needs and extend to the whole group. As I set out on the third day I recalled this passage from William Manchester's memoir of his life as a marine in WWII.

In this passage, Manchester has returned as an old man to Mount Suribashi where 7,500 marines had died and had just climbed to the top of the mountain. Standing there and looking down the grass covered hill he had an epiphany:

"And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man's real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understood at last, why I had jumped hospital 35 years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front line and almost certain death.

It was an act of love.

Those men on the line were my family and my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than my friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have survived them.

Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, the the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for each other. Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or whom he is willing to die for, is not a man at all. He is truly dammed."

Next - Part 3 Resurrection & Redemption

Technorati Tags: Biking, Community, Public Radio

Future of Public Radio - A Parable Part 1 - "The Members"

Rob's Road to Damascus - Part 1 - The "Members"

I am committed to providing a report to the Board of NPR and to the system of public radio by June 5th. I have completed the draft and my editor Margaret McPike is working away at it now with the hope that we will have something for next week.

While I am sure that Margaret will make it easier to read and will put on a great summary at the front, I don't think that the core ideas will change. So I thought I might test run them in a short parable today. I call it Rob's Road to Damascus because I "saw" it on my bike ride this weekend.

I lived your future
What did I see? I saw the key relationships needed to set up a healthy and prosperous system of public radio in the new media era. I saw what a "Member really was and how they related to each other and to the organization. I saw how the "Mission" informed everything. I saw the essence of the design and structure of the truly "Networked Organization".

I saw all of Public Radio and not just in my mind. I lived your future for 4 wonderful days. If you want some context as to why I was riding a bike for nearly 300k with 45 people - here it is. If you want to see what it looked like go here.

The components foreshadowed
The essence of the trip is this. A group of about 45 "Members" were attracted to spend a 4 day weekend riding bikes over a 300k trail to raise money to support a micro-credit project in the townships of South Africa. Each Member had to place a $100 deposit and had to raise in addition $425. We raised at least $20,000.

The organizers looked after transportation there and back, accommodation, food and safety support all the way. They created a safe container for all of us.

The ability of the Members ran from middle aged novice = me who had few skills and little strength to experts who have done this all by themselves in less than 24 hours! Key to our cohesion and feeling of security was a group of 4 volunteers, "Shepherds" on the trip from the ski patrol. They ensured all our ongoing safety and al the day to day direction about the route and how best to navigate it.

The larger issues of our supporting environment project were provided by a wide range of "Outside Partners". The hotels all gave us a break, food was prepared by churches, a dinner was cooked by a retired supreme court judge etc. The Members had therefore an ideal "Container" that enabled them to do their own best.

I plan to write a short series over the next few days. Each will have the "Parable" and then I will add the Sunday School lessons in italics. When I finish this weekend, I will summarize the main ideas.

The Members - Participants not just folks who send a cheque
On the last day of the ride at the lunch break, the favorite couple of the group entered the community hall an hour later than the rest of us. The hall erupted into cheering. Many wept. Dagny and John, significantly older and less strong than any of us, had made their own best time. This was the defining moment for all of us. This group of 45 strangers had coalesced after 4 hard days into a real community that cared deeply about each other.

No one was being judged on some external mark of who was the fastest or the fittest. What was appreciated was the challenge that each of us had set and how each of us was doing to meet our own individual goals.

The paradox was that as we became more of a community, each of us became more of an individual. We were being accepted for whom we really were and not how we fitted some competitive norm. So as we looked up the trail at another, we saw not a competitor but another person who was on a journey to find themselves as we were.

Each "Member" was there now for their own reasons but had the support of all the rest.

This idea of being unique but also being supported is so foreign in how we normally organize to get work done. The Ford organization demands that we fit in and that while we are in a group, when push comes to shove, we are on our own or worse expelled. In our ride, the organization was there to meet the funding mission but also to enable each of us to find an important part of our inner selves. Our experience was in becoming more our selves rather than giving up our selves to fit in. Now to raise the money and become yourself - that is an experience!

So here is what happened to me and how I become increasingly myself and yet found myself loved and supported

The Call & the Support of Angels
Until last year, I had never really biked before. Not only had I no real experience of biking (not even as a child) but I was very unfit. When my doctor told me this winter that if I did not get into shape and lose 30 pounds, I might die young as my father had, I wondered what to do.

A dear friend who is at the centre of the biking community suggested that I set myself a big challenge and convinced me that I did this in the community of a great group, I might be able to pull it off. So I signed up in February for this bike ride. I knew nothing of the cause, other that I am familiar with Micro credit, but going into this with my friend was the key. She got me to go to spinning classes to get fit. She, who is an iron woman, spent many boring mornings spinning in my class for support. Her going along at the outset got my inertia broken.

At the spinning class, there was a group of women of my age. They and the instructor bathed me in support as I struggled to get fit. I saw that others as old as I had already made a big change. Their achievement gave me hope. They made me welcome and all helped me in their own way. There was never any sense of my being a "Loser". As my confidence grew, my angel was able to drop out of this phase and leave me supported by the Spinning girls.

Now the need for good equipment. Again I was lost. What did I know. But my angel returned and introduced me to the owner of one of the better bike shops. I had a very different experience I think from the walk in punter. I was tagged as being related to a person who could not be short changed. I ended up with a beautiful a machine and with the confidence that I now was "Known' and could continue to get support from the store on my own.

My spinning instructor is also part of a biking family who own the other main biking store. She set me up with all the clothing that I would need. My two angels had taken an outsider and made him an insider. I now wanted more.

Lesson 1 - How I found that real community works
I am sure that many of us have joined "Social networks" and been plagued with wannabe new "Friends". You can see that my experience of joining a real community was very different. This was all about love and trust. My Angels were the doorways into a community of trust. They were already icons in their own community. They offered me true love - acceptance of who I am and that I had a mission that they could help with.

Their own iconic role in the bike community carried with it a message - they trusted me, so I was trusted immediately by the community. I did not have to spend a lifetime trying to make my way in. being trusted, I got the attention of the rest of the community such as the bike shops owner that an outsider would never get. I was special and it felt that way. He could trust me too. He left off an item on the bill. I showed that he had undercharged me . Trust was reinforced on both sides. Now when I go into the shop, I enter as a family member. Quite a different experience.

Nor was I a "Wannabe". My motives for joining this community were selfish but about my true self. Was I going to have the guts to change how I lived my life was the deal. My angels and many other responded because they could see in me, their own struggle to be more real and more human. More complete.

So even before I got on the bus, I had found the community that I had longed for all my life. A group who accepted me up front as a frail man who was trying his best to do something difficult. I could be weak. I could be stupid. I could look like an idiot. They did not care. What they cared about was me. In seeing me, I could start to become me too and start to put away my pride and my shame of being me.

Real community, I am finding, is about allowing another to become themselves. The way is maybe a common cause. For you it may be sailing. But for me it was biking. But of course it was not about biking. It was about becoming human. What better motivation can you find that that?

The garden of gethsemane
Finally the big weekend. Ask me to speak on one day's notice to 1,000 people - no problem. Ask me to write a 20,000 word report in 5 days - no problem. But the physical world is an unknown to me. I live in my head. So in the bus on the way up with 45 strangers except for my two angels, I was quite frightened. Was I going to be able to do this and what price would I have to pay in harm to my self esteem and maybe to my poor old middle aged body? The most I had ever ridden in a day this year was 40 k and we were set to do nearly 300! All but one other couple were experienced bikers. I was scared. They were going to laugh at me. I was going to get hurt. I was going to feel that the whole thing was a grind.

But I had made a public commitment. I had asked many of you to support me with money and you had come through for me. My family expected me to get through this. My two angels had given so much. And most importantly I felt that I owed this to myself. How would I live with myself if I did not do my best. After all, for me this was about my chance to break the habits of a lifetime that had been literally killing me.

So I set out on a cold and blustery Friday with a bunch of strangers. Into the unknown and into part of my life that I knew the least and feared the most.

Next - The cross

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