{"id":932,"date":"2016-06-11T19:10:27","date_gmt":"2016-06-12T02:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/?p=932"},"modified":"2016-07-29T16:31:44","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T23:31:44","slug":"home-a-confabulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/?p=932","title":{"rendered":"Home \u2013 a confabulation"},"content":{"rendered":"

A \u201cconfabulation\u201d provided one beginning point in a two-decade-long inquiry into what kind of space I want as a home and what relationship I’d like it to have\u00a0with other\u00a0people\u00a0and the larger world.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"9099<\/p>\n

\n

Confabulate<\/span><\/strong>: to talk informally; chat. [Latin confabulari: com-<\/em>together + fabula<\/em>, story, conversation]; informal, confab<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In June 1997 a group of friends received an invitation to a confab, a chance to spend up to a week together in a beautiful natural location an hour and a half outside the city to consider \u201cHome: Arrangements for living and aging.\u201d<\/p>\n

The invitation included this about the theme:<\/p>\n

\"Invite<\/p>\n

The confab was a chance not only to be part of discussions that could spin out from these ideas about home but also to simply try out our individual ideas by living them, together, in a cluster of small houses. Everyone invited was welcome to stay for all or some of the time to . . .<\/p>\n

talk together (the \u201cconfab\u201d part)
\n<\/em>have time for yourself
\n<\/em>share a few meals
\n<\/em>sing or play or hike or . . .<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Five cabins at Fort Worden State Park served as our home base. Located on Washington state\u2019s Olympic Peninsula on a high bluff overlooking Puget Sound, the park covers 434 acres with over two miles of saltwater shoreline. Originally designed as a military base in the early 1900s, it never saw active fire, and many of its historic buildings and battlements remain. In the early 1970s, it became a state park and a home for Centrum, a center for arts and education.<\/p>\n

\"FortWe occupied five of seven buildings that are collectively called, for reasons still mysterious to me, the \u201cSuds\u201d houses. Over the course of the week 21 people participated, including four children of participants. A few of us were able to stay the entire time, others were there for as many days as they could manage. I was given use of the houses as part of a deal I made with Centrum in exchange for services I\u2019d provided in planning and reshaping their artist residency program in the Suds.\"Fort<\/p>\n

A focused time for conversation was scheduled each day, with many of us taking turns identifying talking points. Our discussion ranged widely: the relationship between the place where you grew up and the place you make for yourself later in life;\u00a0balancing time alone and time with others; asking ourselves who we want to live with; distinctions between private and public space, or maybe better put, between private, public, and social or shared space. For some, work is an important part of \u201chome,\u201d as it is in artists\u2019 live\/work spaces. Would common spaces be too distracting for concentration? For some \u201ca shared space should begin with a stove!\u201d but others felt 50 years of experience would make sharing a kitchen really difficult. We need new language \u2013 \u201ccommune\u201d doesn\u2019t work; perhaps proximity rather than communal better describes the aim.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/p>\n

We considered city\/country and urban\/rural preferences and getting beyond the stereotypes; the importance of wildness; relationships between home and landscapes; the desire for a long view and<\/em> for close-up views and a sense of enclosure.<\/p>\n

Ideas about \u201ca place to age and keep on living\u201d from the invitation wove in and out as a theme (and we were 20 years younger then!): the anxiety about how we\u2019d sustain our lives after \u201cretirement;\u201d our dissatisfaction with the isolation of today\u2019s retirement communities; our role as the advance guard of the baby boom; the desire not to segregate ourselves according to our age; the value and importance of connections with the \u201clarger world;\u201d the importance of a place being \u201ckid friendly\u201d as well as questions about how a single person would fit in a multi-generational setting. We heard both of a desire not to be a burden to others as we age and also of the joy generated by caring for an older friend.<\/p>\n

We described individual fantasies about what this might look like: a lodge; a hotel as a place that\u2019s inviting not just to its residents but to outsiders; spas, resorts, and other escapes; sustainable eco-resorts; Buddhist retreats; taking over a whole city block that faces outward on the street fronts and inward into more private central spaces; W.S. Merwin\u2019s description of a region in southern France.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/p>\n

Specific examples and stories added to our ability to imagine the possibilities: the Western Front\u00a0in Vancouver, BC and its rural extension, Babyland; Chevy Chase on Discovery Bay; the Linger Longer Lodge in Quilcene; the Mountaineers\u2019 lodges; Project Row Houses in Houston; and examples from co-housing projects and Seattle\u2019s Anhalt apartments to clusters of homes built of a shipping containers.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the week we also shared at least one meal together each day. Notes from the week refer to: \u201ca wonderful dinner of David\u2019s fish soup,\u201d \u201ca special meal of Laura\u2019s cabbage rolls,\u201d \u201cLynn and Rita\u2019s salmon dinner,\u201d \u201cpasta from Jim,\u201d \u201csoup and sweet potatoes from Marcie,\u201d \u201cNorie\u2019s pasta and Anne\u2019s roasted vegetables,\u201d and pizza from a Port Townsend cafe. In addition to solitary walks, time for reading, and pick-up games on the lawn, shared experiences punctuated our time: \u201ca walk on the beach and sitting around a bonfire,\u201d \u201cHillela\u2019s banged up knee,\u201d \u201cTomo playing nearby on the beach as it got dark,\u201d \u201ca sunny morning at low tide and a rainy afternoon visiting Port Townsend\u2019s Secret Gardens.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of the week it felt as though we\u2019d only just begun. We didn\u2019t reach a conclusion about a specific future direction and didn\u2019t resolve the many, often contrasting thoughts and stories. The week\u2019s experience, however, did spawn more confabs that included more people and continued for four years until mid 2001. During\u00a0this time, interest in the idea spread, and my mailing list for notes from the confabs grew and stretched across the country.<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00ab\u00ab\u00ab\u00ab\u00ab\u2022\u00bb\u00bb\u00bb\u00bb\u00bb\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n

That first confab marked\u00a0the beginning of a\u00a0conscious exploration of the meaning of \u201chome\u201d \u2013 the particular configuration of physical, social, emotional, and creative space that altogether means home for me and for others. Deep in my interior somewhere, home has always been both a private and a social place, shaped as I was by the first home<\/a> I knew.<\/p>\n

\n

\"9099<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A \u201cconfabulation\u201d provided one beginning point in a two-decade-long inquiry into what kind of space I want as a home and what relationship I’d like it to have\u00a0with other\u00a0people\u00a0and the larger world. Confabulate: to talk informally; chat. [Latin confabulari: com-together + fabula, story, conversation]; informal, confab. In June 1997 a group of friends received an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home","category-eighth-decade"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7pXN0-f2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=932"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1175,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions\/1175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}