A New Phase Has Begun

(Written May 6, 2009)

As I am writing this I am waiting and wondering if the extremely intermittent internet service characteristic of Camphill Nottawasaga will come back on. It may be a day or two before I get to post this blog entry. I am sitting at my wall hung desk in the back of Avalanche, looking out at a pair of Camphill residents returning from work in the garden. It is nearly the exact experience from the days before Gabor and I left on the World Peace through Inclusion Tour during the week of Oct. 24, 2008 – a book end in time.

The World Peace through Inclusion Tour is finished. Well over but not entirely as there are bills to pay still. Essentially everyone involved has moved into a different mood and activity. Gabor will leave tomorrow to take up intensive preparation for the summer solstice festival, and to rest from his position as a personal assistant to me for seven weeks. Jason has been off for a week and will come back to work – double full time – tomorrow. I am establishing myself: hired a new staff person to spell off Jason, am completing the arrangements to hire my staff through CILT which will give me much greater flexibility, have made arrangements to live at Camphill Nottawasaga in Avalanche until October, and am preparing to move tomorrow to a campground in Toronto for three weeks to participate in the play “The Book of Judith” at the Workman Theatre until the end of May.

We came across the Canadian border on April 28. This moment culminated a truly intense three weeks of presentations given in and around Faribault, Minneapolis and Duluth, Minnesota. In a way the experience was like my giving the doctoral thesis defence that I have never untaken at a university. After decades of personal and professional research and reflection, and eight months of working with Gabor to discover and develop the model of Syncopated Transition we presented it to over twenty audiences. Our listeners were of very different groups, from city councillors and business leaders to musicians to school children. With one exception – a gathering of group home managers – Syncopated Transition sparked everything from interest to revelation – a true success.

Even at the very end two important realizations emerged. The first was that we knew what we were trying to learn at the very beginning. It was in awkwardly trying to describe the sort of process that with minimal resistance breaks down segregation
– what we are now calling a syncopated transition – that I first recognized what a valuable colleague Gabor Podor is. How archetypical is that – to only recognize that one has always known one’s home after a long journey away from its!

Secondly I realized how much in the presentations I was focusing on inclusion instead of peace. I had not freed myself from my identity as a professional advocate. In my last week in Minnesota I broke free of this and we focused our presentations on the potential of inclusion to create peaceful community.

A different sort of work lies ahead. We have decided to create the World Peace through Inclusion Foundation. Our next step is to invite a diverse working team to the Summer Inclusion Institute (www.inclusion.com/toronto2009.pdf) where participants will design the future of WPIF, expand our Syncopated Transition Model and map out its implementation. Out of this gathering will emerge an organization that will increase the body of research on Inclusion and Peace, create sustainable projects demonstrating Inclusion as a tool for peace and community making, and invent and pollinate a practical language of Inclusion to talk about community and diversity.

We are now inviting people and raising money for this July event.

I will also spend the bulk of the summer at Camphill Nottawasaga writing a book about this experience of nine months of preparation, travel and research. This blog will serve as notes in designing the themes of my next book.

We will continue this blog, but from this point on it is a body of work about the creation of the World Peace through Inclusion Foundation and the results of the work undertaken in this framework.
Judith