Choosing a Community: One Couple's Odyssey
by John Cronin and Jonelle Soeling

           Editor's note: The authors recount their six-month odyssey  which followed John's retirement. Their search for—and discoveries about—community began in the West African country of Ghana and concluded at an intergenerational cohousing community on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. John is a member of the Second Journey Board of Directors. 

“I need you to know the world is there.”
— Olafur Eliasson

John: I learned about cohousing through my involvement with Second Journey. However, I didn’t immediately consider it for myself, because I assumed it meant living only with other elders. As I prepared to step down from a long career leading a health care system, I was focused on what work to do next—not how to live in a fundamentally different way. Nonetheless, I spent hours poring over Internet sites having to do with cohousing, paying particular attention to intergenerational communities in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.

My intention after retirement was to continue our traditional lifestyle, financing it by doing consulting work in the area of facilitating groups such as Parker Palmer’s Courage to Teach circles. However, before embarking on this new path, Jonelle and I decided to spend two months in the West African country of Ghana, doing a month of volunteer work and a month of travel.

The compound where we lived was part of a middle-class neighborhood consisting of rudimentary concrete structures and thatched mud houses. In a climate of continuous extreme heat, Ghanaians lived in a way that we would consider a form of continuous camping: sleeping outside, walking to a pump to collect water, sweeping the sand in their courtyard every morning, washing clothes in aluminum buckets, and cooking over an outdoor charcoal stove. Partly because we shared the water pump in our compound, there was a constant stream of neighborhood women who came over during the day. Their children also visited for hours at a time, looking for volunteers who would play with them and provide access to things such as soccer balls and books. Without realizing it, Jonelle and I were being introduced to the idea of an intergenerational community where sharing of resources of various kinds was the rule.

We both observed how Ghanaians seemed to have a special richness in their connection with people, as well as contentment with their lives, despite what we would consider very limited possessions and economic opportunities. We received so much pleasure from the children who came to visit us at the compound and the warm greetings from adults in the town who always took the time to welcome us and have a conversation. We came away wondering at how the world had suddenly opened up to us—and so effortlessly. All we had to do was be there and be ourselves.

Jonelle: While John was still doing his job as CEO of a health care system, I had no thoughts of moving. John’s job was what brought us to our community of 8,000, and it had been a difficult adaptation for me. Without my consent, I had taken on a new identity, “wife of the hospital CEO,” and with it came unwanted scrutiny and unexpressed expectations. It took me years to sort myself out and discover people with whom I could be authentic. However, after ten years, I had created a nourishing community involving music and art that had very little overlap with John’s professional life.

On a kayaking trip off Vancouver Island in British Columbia shortly after John made the decision to leave his job, I spotted a small ad in a free alternative newspaper. It described a cohousing community in the nearby town of Nanaimo, and using the hotel’s computer, we were able to immediately get information and make an appointment to see it. Our kayak trip, meanwhile, took an unexpected turn. On the first night out, while camping on a rocky beach miles from our launch point, I became violently ill. I spent the entire night getting in and out of our tent, vomiting and dizzy, feeling as if I might actually die. Twice there was an interval of loud tail slapping and rhythmic breathing right off our campsite — seals and harbor porpoises, which I was sure had responded to my distress.

In the morning, we left the group and paddled back to our launch point. One of the guides mentioned that we might enjoy a yoga class given every week on neighboring Reade Island reachable only by boat. When we unexpectedly showed up at this very local venue that week, we were treated like unexpected but welcome friends. When a woman in the class observed John limping from a sprained ankle, she took us to an area where wild comfrey grew. Using her careful instructions, I made a poultice from the stalks and effectively treated John’s ankle. I believe that this experience was the beginning of my being able to envision some other kind of community—one where people were allowed to keep their authenticity and had useful things to offer.

There was another unexpected benefit of getting ill and missing out on the group kayak expedition. We had some long talks with Lannie, who normally works behind the scenes of the kayak company she owns with her husband. The two of them live off the grid on Reade Island and are active in the Green Party and environmental causes. Their solar shower, composting toilets, and wood-fired sauna are sometimes their kayak clients’ first exposure to a more sustainable, alternative life style.

Lannie listened to our stories about where we were in our lives, and she brainstormed with us about how we might reinvent ourselves in the area. She told us about how she and her husband had met and come to Reade Island to homestead when they were in their early twenties and knew nothing about what they were getting into. In talking over the Nanaimo cohousing project, Lannie suggested we also consider another cohousing project she had heard about in Courtenay, just an hour north of Nanaimo, on the east coast of Vancouver Island. So that’s how we found out about Creekside Commons.

John: I grew up in New Brunswick, a maritime province in eastern Canada, and moved to the U.S. with my family the summer before my senior year in high school. I maintained my Canadian citizenship, eventually becoming an American citizen as well. As Jonelle and I traveled to British Columbia for vacations, I felt a very strong connection to the land, lifestyle, and people. After our first trip, I found myself reading about the area, monitoring current events, and exploring the real estate market. After our second visit, I began to actively imagine living on Vancouver Island.

Jonelle: Since I moved from Seattle to Boston in 1978 to go to graduate school, I have felt that there was something in the eastern U.S. culture that made it more difficult to connect with people. Great stock was placed in what kind of work you did and how successful you were. On being introduced to people, I was sometimes asked to spell my last name and give its origin, seemingly to help people more readily understand who I was and how they should therefore treat me. No matter what my accomplishments were in my first career or in subsequent artistic ventures, I experienced a sense of not being able to claim success. During our travels last summer in British Columbia, I read about a Romanian artist, Sorel Etrog, who said that leaving Romania released personal energy in him and created a space “between the ego and one’s self” that made many things possible for him as an artist. That is what struck me as possible in our move to Canada.

Since leaving my own career in health care finance in 1993, I have been able to spend all day at home in my studio, pursuing my ever-changing music and artistic interests. While John worked long hours at the hospital, my life had virtually no distractions, seemingly ideal for creative activities. My primary social vehicle was picking up the mail at the post office and having a cup of tea at the one coffee shop in town. I would prolong my stay by writing in my journal, and many people recognized me as the woman who was always writing. Although I eventually came to be on speaking terms with a fair number of people, I always felt as if no one really knew me. Besides being lonely, my art suffered.

The Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson, expressed the essential role that community plays for him when he said that he makes things, but it takes somebody else to see them with him: “I look at an object on the table, and I have no empathy with it…. but then you come into the room and the object starts to glow. I need you to know the world is there…. it is why I have so many people working with me.”

During periods in my life where I have been in residence with other artists, I have found that conversations with other people who know me on some level have been of great value in making headway with whatever I was creating. I could go only so far on my own. I envision the Creekside Community as providing opportunities to interact with people, some of whom will be kindred spirits. I hope that I will find a variety of people who will make an object “start to glow,” who will accept my artistic offerings, and who will nourish my creative spirit.