Inspirations from Sierra Hot Springs Contact Dance Festival

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Just returning from 5 days of dancing and soaking and connecting with amazing people at the Sierra Contact Improvisational Dance Festival in Sierraville, Nevada.  The event was started by one of my favorite teachers of the form Karl Frost (www.bodyresearch.org) who has created a type of event that is beautiful blend of a structure and freedom to follow your own impulses and desires (which makes sense given that “improvisation” is the key word for what we are doing).  Every morning during the festival the whole group (around 40 of us) would gather for a facilitated movement warm up led by different facilitator each time. We gave each other body work, explored different degrees of contact with each other, and laughed and played into the second part of the morning: an open “Jam”.

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Above you see the tail end of the morning “jam” which in contact dance is a term referring to a full improvisational context for exploring dance.  Anything can happen; somedays I dance with one other person for nearly 45 minutes, other days I shifting from partner to partner or I’m in a trio for an extended period or some combination.  Every jam ends up being an adventure into the previously unknown ways of moving and relating to oneself and others.  Its deeply invigorating and fun and I always learn something new about myself.

The major aspect of the Festival was the Socializing.  I always get so much out of meeting and getting to know the people that are so passionate about such a courageous and creative practice.  Over the cours of my time there I cam to know a transportation planners, several performing artists, an anthropology and a math professor, and a paragliding instructor.  Its always so fascinating to me how they came to Contact Improv.

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I feel so grateful to have ended making this form a central part of a my life and I am looking forward to hosting events such as this at Full Bloom in the very near future!

 

 Siobhan Davies 

Food at Full Bloom

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Food is such as a wonderful way to a bring people together.  Its that time of the year where the abundance of our gardens and the local farms is erupting into the kitchen in the from of a amazingly diverse, colorful, and fresh meals.  After our community work day this past Saturday myself and my landmate Miceala prepared a huge salad with lettuce, fennel, carrots, beats, calendula flowers, and armenian cucumbers all freshly picked from our gardens here.

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Me and Micaela posing for a pic in the Full Bloom Commercial Kitchen before lunch on Saturday.

 

We also put together a cast iron frittata with 2 dozen local eggs from pastured hens, fresh basil, and a little bacon from the ranch down the road.  There’s something deeply satisfying about knowing where one’s food is coming from.  Its such an intimate experience, taking in food into our bodies and its a beautiful thing when we have the good fortune of that food being grown and prepared with love.

“Cooking is at once one of the simplest and most gratifying of the arts, but to cook well one must love and respect food.”
Craig Claiborne

 

 

The Art of Meeting

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For Full Bloom to continue to function, grow, and ideally thrive we (all the adult residents of Full Bloom which is currently 11) choose to have a community meeting once a week.  I thought I would share a little about how we structure our meetings so that they are both nourishing and effective.

We begin each meeting with 2 minutes of settling time.  This may be guided by the facilitatator (a position which rotates weekly) or may be simply time for each person to arrive and settle into being with this particular constellation of people for the next hour and a half.  We then move into engaging with each other using the Matrix Leadership model (www.matrixleaderhsip.org) of group facillitation.  In this model members of the group connect with another member directly in “the eyes and ears of the whole”.  This allows for connections to be fed that may have been underfed during the week.  The sharing from individual to individual may be an expression of gratitude for what the other has done or a “check-in” about what’s been going on emotionally for the person during the week.

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We intend to keep this heart connection as we move into the logistical portion of the meeting where we take agenda items from all the residents such as: Chore check-in, food garden planning, plan for upcoming party, work day, compost pile location etc.  As you can imagine it can be difficult to keep the group on topic and to move through a topic in a reasonable amount of time.  That’s where strong facilitation comes in.  It is an art and we are all learning it as our live unfold here together.

“The facilitator’s job is to support everyone to do their best thinking and practice. To do this, the facilitator encourages full participation, promotes mutual understanding and cultivates shared responsibility”  Sam Kaner et all “The Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision Making”

 

An Evening with Coenraad Rogmans: How to Create a Sense of Belonging through Natural Building

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A big piece of what we are about here at Full Bloom is creating a sense of belonging through how we design our buildings, our gardens, our lives in general.  Last month we were fortunate enough to host a talk given by our local natural building “guru” Coenraad Rogmans.  His talk a was entitled: “The Ten Principles of Natural Building”.  Ocean, our 8 year old resident artist was kind enough to put the title of the talk on our white board:

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It was an enlightening evening as Coenraad emphasized that natural building is much more than what material you use (cob, straw bale etc.) and more about how you design in such a way as to create a sense of beauty, connection, purpose, health, and belonging in the space you create.  Pointing out that real sustainability comes from people feeling at home, at ease, connnected with each other and the land they are living on or visiting.

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We all appreciated Coenraad’s humility and depth of perspective as the evening progressed.  I was left astounded by how important it is to consider all of these principles when designing a space and how they are often overlooked in contemporary architecture and design.  His site is www.housealive.org.  if you would like to learn more about him and his offerings.

“Everyone is aware that most of the built environment today lacks a natural order, an order which presents itself very strongly in places that were built centuries ago.”
Christopher Alexander