Fire Family Council post-gathering meeting

Fire Family Council August 20, 2008

Post PF08

Golden moments

• People saying how much they liked the food
• Friday night ritual crew
• Coyote run in Thursday night ritual
• All night Friday’s fire
• Drumming was fantastic
• Sat. night à Sunday closing (Oliver’s face plant)
• Hearing people talk about community being important to them
• Doing healing work in the circle at the fire and it was ok
• Lots of laughter (kidney shake)
• Sunday staff dinner
• People taking care of each other
• Rituals

Things to remember for next year:

• Recycling still needed Sunday night
• Better communication about media fire. Not last minute. Could have been discussed on staff list in advance.
• Clarify what decisions are made by Council, which by CPT.
• Council needs radios for decisions on site
• Need on-site manager position, staff
• How to deal with people who don’t show up for shifts. Rethink the service group concept. Bathroom and kitchen groups have high no-show rate.
• Attention to newcomers (committee signed up at vision council, which Council member will liaison with them?)
• Orientation – not while eating. Attention to newcomers and returners. Make it entertaining.
• Evaluation form on site. (Shimmering Wolf and Morwen to deal with getting this year’s eval on line.)
• Rethink salons, eliminate?
• Don’t work crews in the heat of the day (especially fire circle team)
• Have media fire somewhere other than the main fire circle (Grove of Ancients if we stay at Cutter)
• 5 workshops at once is too many
• Workshops need to get posted in advance
• Need article earlier for marketing
• Start rebate earlier (if we do it)
• Emergen-C available (instead of Gatorade)
• If at Cutter, clear Fairy grotto first before fire circle break down. Leave water to end.
• Rethink prayer ties and portals, add art flags. What to do about prayer ties.
• “non-affinity groups,” family groups, group with assortment of people skilled in all modalities.
• List Council and staff in the program
• Silly to register stoves (but saying we would do so got the supervisor on our side)
• Need a shuttle to the dining hall for special needs people (especially since staff was driving)
• Discussion of where to draw the line for special needs
• Label food with ingredients
• Alcohol energy, educate about keeping it away from the fire
• How to deal with inappropriate behavior and conflict. The first step is to support one-on-one resolution as much as possible. But if people feel unsafe, the Council has to deal. Where’s the line? Possible responses include developing a protocol for magical work, having mediators available, or something like a “Peace Council” (like Dance New England), developing a statement of self-responsibility and respect for others.
• From post-gathering email: In the future, it makes much more sense to have the team leaders do the inventory before things are loaded and trucked off. The truck drivers don't necessarily know what should be there or where they should be going, and the team leaders should have a way of knowing where their stuff is being stored.

We had a discussion about what we choose to honor, inspired by the ritual for Harper in the fire circle on Saturday night, and Lover’s response. We spoke our personal opinions and feelings. Some of the points made that are relevant to planning for the future were:

• Honoring rites of passage is important for community. Babies, mothers, deaths, and more. Rites of passage are only meaningful when they are accompanied by a real status change in a real community.
• People wanting to do things in the fire circle should pass it by the Council. On further discussion, we amended that to say that a ritual team, not the Council, should manage the flow of ritual around the fire. Part of developing ritual protocol. But how does this affect people’s personal offerings? What’s the line between a “ritual” that stops the flow of the circle, and a personal offering that holds the attention of the circle?
• What’s amazing is that both things, Harper’s honoring by the Guardians, and Lover’s response, were held with love by the community. This is a testament to our intention to honor diversity. We decided to put a statement from the Council out to the list about this.

Discussion about site.

Jimi will call Regina about problems at Cutter

What specifically needs to be done to make Black Mountain workable? Who will do the work? What price can we negotiate?

There are concerns about campsites in sun, etc. If people can camp on the playa, they can deal with this, come with shade structures, etc. Need to find site for Oasis in shade.

Missy and James will call the camps they know of. Patrick will send Excel document to them with questions to ask.

Need to make a decision by end of September.

Next business:

Site decision

Self-evaluation: Is this still the right place for us?

(Morwen and Missy state intention to step down when term ends in February.)

Registrar

CPT

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