Sylvia's Journal

It’s amazing how quickly I am used again to the cold after the warmth of Ethiopia, a testimony to the adaptability of our systems. It was bitter cold when I got up yesterday before dawn and it took awhile for the car to heat up. But that is why we have winter clothes.

With a good, fast and reliable internet connection again I can take advantage of the many webcasts that are offered for free. In the last two days I ‘attended’ two of them. One was a lecture about a history of AIDS in the US which was fascinating in content; the other one was fascinating in process. The designers of the latter created a community of 100 plus people that produced three ‘poems’ together while exploring modes of working together that was based on Ralph Stacey’s Managing the Unknowable, all in one hour. At the end I was sad to log off. People from all over the world had signed in to this amazing interactive session about human systems dynamics and collaboration.

I celebrated the resilience of our species with two colleagues at the end of the day in a restaurant that comes with many memories, happy and sad, in Somerville. Alison was the reason for us getting together. She is on a sort of bereavement sabbatical as she deals with the emotional and organizational aftermath of her father’s passing. We toasted to deep friendships and ate comfort foods that our resilient bodies took in without any form of protest.

Back home I found the living room disassembled and the fireplace lying outside in the snow. It was a fireplace that was no good and that we had had much too long. We could never light a fire during a storm or even the slightest wind because it would smoke up the house and then we’d have to open all the doors and windows and the fire alarms would go off…..all very much the opposite of the kind of ambiance we were trying to create. It was also an energy-deficient, sucking heat out of the house through the chimney and cooling off the house overnight while heating the air around the chimney outside.

About one half year ago Axel had gone out to do research about green fireplaces and ordered one. We still don’t have it but now we are at a point of no return, with a hole in the wall, a chimney dismantled and our living room furniture under wraps; just when Alison gave me a bag full of beautiful lamb’s wool that she found in the parental house clean up. It is good for a huge knitting project that will last the rest of the winter (and maybe include the next). But such a project requires a functioning fireplace and so I cannot get started quite yet.