DON'T LAUGH AT ME

Our friend and lifetime member over at PLAN, Michelle MacDonald, shared this poem:

DON'T LAUGH AT ME
I'm a little boy with glasses
The one they call a geek
A little girl who never smiles
'Cause I have braces on my teeth
And I know how it feels to cry myself to sleep
I'm that kid on every playground
Who's always chosen last
A single teenage mother
Tryin' to overcome my past
You don't have to be my friend
But is it too much to ask
Don't laugh at me
Don't call me names
Don't get your pleasure from my pain
In God's eyes we're all the same
Someday we'll all have perfect wings
Don't laugh at me
I'm the beggar on the corner
You've passed me on the street
And I wouldn't be out here beggin'
If I had enough to eat
And don't think I don't notice
That our eyes never meet
Don't laugh at me
Don't call me names
Don't get your pleasure from my pain
In God's eyes we're all the same
Someday we'll all have perfect wings
Don't laugh at me
I'm fat, I'm thin, I'm short, I'm tall
I'm deaf, I'm blind, yes, I think in a way, we’re all
I’m black, I’m white and I am brown
I’m Christian, I’m Jewish, and I am Muslim
I’m gay, I’m lesbian, I’m American Indian
I’m very, very young, I’m quite aged
I’m very wealthy, I’m very, very poor
Don't laugh at me
Don't call me names
Don't get your pleasure from my pain
In God's eyes we're all the same
Someday we'll all have perfect wings
Don't laugh at me
BY

(Steve Seskin/Allen Shamblin)

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Appartenance - Belonging

Plan Institute, L'Arche Canada and L'Agora formally launched an inspirational body of thought and dialogue, in the form of a website, entitled Belonging - Living Ties.

The homepage hosts this quote from Jean Vanier, "The longer we journey on the road to inner healing and wholeness, the more the sense of belonging grows and deepens. The sense is not just one of belonging to others and to a community. It is a sense of belonging to the universe, to the earth, to the air, to the water, to everything that lives, to all humanity."

The opening of this new website is accompanied by timely blog posts by Jacques Dufresne, Al Etmanski and Nathan Ball.

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Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Here's a great blog post from According to the Cosmology of Reya:

WILD GEESE
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


The poem at the bottom [top] of the post is one I recited so often while doing initiations into Reclaiming that I finally memorized it. It is, in so many ways, a perfect poem, at least I think so.

Homo sapiens, as a species, is a social animal. We join forces more often than not. One of my great teachers used to talk about how adept we humans are at collecting ourselves into groups, communities, collectives, teams, crowds, and clubs.

There are so many forms of adoption among humans and other species, too. When we are feeling generous, we realize that we all do, in some way or another, belong to each other. Certainly here in the blog world we adopt each other, yes? I say yes.

I went to a party Friday night at which I realized just how much a part of the Capitol Hill community I have become over the years. Looking around I saw neighbors, clients and friends, and their kids, too, now grown up, who I knew when they were in junior high school. Wow. It was quite moving, feeling in my heart - knowing in my heart - that I don't have to always be the weirdo, the outsider, unless that's what I want. Indeed I used to play the outcast in my family, but the second I decided to abandon that role, I was welcomed in with warmth and enthusiasm.

Because I don't have kids or a partner or a nice house, I have assumed that here on the Hill I am somehow "other." According to the folks at the party, I'm one of them. That story I told myself for years, that I didn't belong? JUST A STORY.

Sweet, isn't it? I think so.

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Belonging, the doc

I'm excited to see this new documentary:

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Loneliness is a social disease, study finds

Albeit largely taboo in our society, this is important content for us to be talking about...

"Researchers find that lonely people that were surveyed ‘infected' remaining friends with the emotion before those relationships faltered..."

Here's the full article online at the Globe and Mail, the comments are also worth reading through.

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The Boy in the Moon, an interview with author Ian Brown

This fall, Random House published Ian Brown’s very beautiful, and to some, controversial, book The Boy in the Moon, about his journey with his son Walker, who is profoundly disabled by cardiofaciocutaneous syndrome (CFC), a rare genetic disorder.

Follow this link for current and back issues of A Human Future.

Authored/Prepared by: Beth Porter
Published by: L'Arche Canada
Date published: December 2009
Publication Type: Interview
Description: Walker Brown: Pool of Hope; Collective Work of Art; Teacher - An Interview with Ian Brown

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PLAN and Vancity present: A Celebration of Belonging

On Friday, November 20th, PLAN is celebrating it's 20th Anniversary with special guests John Ralston Saul, Union Gospel Choir and Vicki Gabereau. A few seats remain for this event of song, stories and friends. Click this flyer to find more details. For event information and to RSVP, please contact Alexandra Paproski by email at apaproski@plan.ca or by phone at 604.877.2211.

On Saturday, November 21st, Vancity in partnership with PLAN, Tyze, The Dalai Lama Centre and Plan Institute are hosting A Conversation About Belonging. Special guests for this breakfast gathering include John Ralston Saul, Cairine MacDonald, Tamara Vrooman, Vickie Cammack and Ric Matthews. This event is sold out, watch for an update to follow.

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Recommended Children's Literature: Zen Ties by Jon J. Muth

About This Book
Summer has arrived — and so has Koo, Stillwater's haiku-speaking young nephew. And when Stillwater encourages Koo, and his friends Addy, Michael, and Karl to help a grouchy old neighbor in need, their efforts are rewarded in unexpected ways.

Zen Ties is a disarming story of compassion and friendship that reaffirms the importance of our ties to one another.

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Vote For L’Arche Daybreak Today

L’Arche Daybreak just submitted an idea to the Aviva Community Fund, a competition that could result in a positive change for our community. We invite you to be part of our online funding efforts by accessing the Aviva Community Fund. If our idea receives enough votes, it will have a chance at sharing in $500,000 to bring our idea to life. Our submission is called Signs of Hope.

You can make a difference with your vote. Go to URL is [http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf3380]

This is a unique opportunity for Daybreak to enhance our communication by utilizing digital media in an endeavour to have people who believe in L’Arche vote online for our submission.

The Aviva Community Fund will only financially support those projects that receive the most online votes. Therefore, in the spirit of building community and spreading the message of Jean Vanier, we ask you to join us by voting online.

Our hope is to raise funds to provide a permanent program space for the Spirit Movers. This would in turn allow us to expand our one day educational retreat program to thousands more students each year.

Join us and let your vote count for something that will have significant impact on adults with intellectual disabilities and for thousands of high school students who come to experience L’Arche.

Please share this with your family and friends, who might also be interested in showing their support for our community in pushing our idea to the finals by voting at www.avivacommunityfund.org

You can make a difference with your vote. Go to URL is [http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf3380]

Voting closes on November 29, 2009.

Thank you in advance.

Remember you can use email, facebook or twitter to share this and get more votes!!

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Guidance on building a local sense of belonging

Plan Institute just put up a new poll asking readers, "Where do you get your strongest sense of belonging?"

Here is a report released in January 2009 called Guidance on building a local sense of belonging. It looks makes some interesting comments and recommendations about how to build a stronger sense of community in your neighbourhood.

Here's the Executive Summary:

• People have multiple parts to their identities, with different parts coming to the fore in different circumstances. This means that building up the part of identity which is a local sense of belonging will not be at the expense of other parts of identity
  

• People want to belong and can change elements of their identity more easily than in the past, providing the opportunity to increase local sense of belonging
  

• Building a local sense of belonging needs to focus on the things we have in common and so be inclusive, rather than place of birth or ethnicity, which are exclusive
  

• Local areas may wish to develop a local vision following consultation with the public and other key local stakeholders
  

• Local areas may also wish to undertake specific initiatives including:

1. Communicating the vision
2. Using history, key events in the past and local memories
3. Using geographical features and key buildings, parks and other symbols
4. Using symbolic events – celebrations, festival, carnivals
5. Using activities and shared interests – arts and culture, sport
6. Welcoming new residents
7. Using activities to promote empowerment.

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Belonging: A’Buntainn: Tilhøre

Health & Happiness in the Highlands (i.e. of Scotland) began in 1999 when a group of people got together to talk about how to make life healthier and happier for adults with a learning disability - known as experts - living in the Highlands.

They seem to be doing some very good work in the UK with community connectors not unlike the work that PLAN, Plan Institute and Tyze is doing. The Belonging Project seems to revolve around family histories. Here is the story about naming the project:

For the second session of the A’Chraobh project in Thurso, we finally decided on a name of our own. Highland Homecoming and A’Chraobh are the over-arching banners for the project, but who are we and what are we all about? We’re investigating who we are, where we come from, our families, our roots, the places that we call home. At its heart, our project is about ‘belonging.’

Belonging in English.

A’Buntainn in Gaelic.

But, Gaelic heritage can make for a controversial topic in Caithness. See here for a snippet of the Gaelic-road-signs-in-Caithness saga that’s been unfolding in the Groat over the past year. Many a Caithness person would claim stronger ties with our old Norse heritage than any Gaelic history, and would argue till blue in the face over it. Is opting for a gaelic term in a Caithness project asking for a stooshie? Or is it fair play, Gaelic heritage is a part of many of us as individuals regardless of your view of Caithness’s heritage…

So, what’s ‘belonging’ in Old Norse anyway? Doesn’t immediately trip off anyone’s tongue… But, after a lot of research and a lot of networking with learned academics, we’ve got ourselves a translation: Tilhøre. So this is our project:

Belonging: A’Buntainn: Tilhøre

The participants round the table had varied views on the languages of our heritage, and what terms we should use for the project. Some wanted just plain English, nice and easy for all to understand (and say!). Others wanted the other aspects of our heritage acknowledged. So we’ve opted for all three. At least now we have a name.

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Do It Myself Blog: Speeding with a little help from friends

Al Etmanski over at Plan Institute first sent me a heads up about a fellow blogger over at Do It Myself Blog, this is a great story about Glenda, her partner Darrell and their friends,

"While watching one race, Darrell mentioned that his dream was to ride in a NASCAR and to feel the speed.

For a guy who was heartbroken at 16 because he was not able to learn how to drive, even with hand controls available, because of his double vision and lack of depth perception, his dream had extra meaning.

I filed away that tidbit.

After three laps around the track, his expression was priceless…"

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'Vulnerability brings us together' He comes from an elite Canadian political family, but Jean Vanier shed his privilege and dedicated his life to crea

ELIZABETH RENZETTI
December 26, 2008 at 11:37 PM EST

TROSLY-BREUIL, FRANCE — There's no St. Christopher's medal to protect passengers on the dashboard of Jean Vanier's little red car, although perhaps there should be. With only its headlights and a full moon to light the way, the car creeps along the frosty country roads near Trosly-Breuil, an hour north of Paris, where he has lived for the past 44 years in the first of the many communities he has built for the disabled.

As Mr. Vanier inches along, various irate French motorists swerve past honking, but the 80-year-old at the wheel is supremely serene. At the age of 13, he crossed the Atlantic in mid-war, unaccompanied, and was later an officer on a Canadian aircraft carrier, and once nearly drowned. He has spent most of his life in the company of the pained and desperate. What's a little highway aggravation compared with that?

Finally, he spots his destination and pulls into the parking lot. This is La Petite Source, one of the foyers (group homes) that make up L'Arche (The Ark), the international network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities that Mr. Vanier founded in 1964.

Marie-Claire and Benjamin, two of the residents of La Petite Source, are waiting for him outside, coatless, in slippers. (The community prefers to keep members' surnames private.) Benjamin runs over to give Mr. Vanier a high five and tells him, in French, that although it's his free night — he could be visiting family, or another foyer — he decided to stay when he heard who was coming to dinner.
Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche - an international organization which creates communities for people with developmental disabilities.

Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche - an international organization which creates communities for people with developmental disabilities.

From the archives
* The Vanier Letters, Part I: Doing the work of the heart
* The Vanier Letters, Part II: 'Your questions come, I sense, from your loneliness'
* The Vanier Letters, Part III: After Morgentaler, Jean Vanier kept his Order of Canada. Why?
* Globe editorial: A great Canadian citizen of the world

Internet Links
* L'Arche Canada website

Mr. Vanier claps him on the back with a huge hand and laughs. "You have made a great sacrifice, Benjamin."

Inside, Fairuz, the Franco-Lebanese woman who has run this foyer for 22 years, brings a pot of vegetable soup to the table. At the heart of L'Arche is the notion that mentally handicapped people and volunteer caregivers live together. And at the heart of that is the sacrament of mealtime — it is France, after all.

There are three volunteers, a priest and six residents at dinner. They are intrigued to hear that Mr. Vanier has been chosen as the nation builder of the year by a newspaper halfway around the world because of the work he has done with people like them.

Mainly, though, there's village gossip, world news and good-natured jokes about who has a crush on whom. Mr. Vanier inquires after Jean-Francois's mother and hears, from the end of the table, that Michel would like to go to Berlin. He has known Michel for four decades and lived with him for some of those years, since removing him from a dire local psychiatric hospital.

"Do you know any German?" Mr. Vanier asks.

Michel pauses for a moment and says, "Danke schön."

Food is plentiful but reverence is in short supply for a man many regard — to his quiet but intense irritation — as a living saint. When Mr. Vanier pulls out an over-full date book in order to find time to meet with the priest, a volunteer named Stephanie begins to hum the theme from Mission: Impossible. Benjamin joins in.

After dinner, the entire household gathers to pray and read from a children's book of Bible stories — tonight, there is a passage about Jesus's love for "les faibles," the weak.

Later, as Mr. Vanier leaves, the residents gather outside to wave goodbye. He fears that one day the frailties of age might make his visits not a pleasure for them to anticipate but a burden for them to endure. But that's a worry for another day.

A SEED SPROUTS

From Mr. Vanier's tiny front yard, you can see where L'Arche began — the derelict house he bought at the age of 36 in order to live with Philippe Seux and Raphael Simi, two mentally handicapped men from a nearby institution.

A devout Roman Catholic, he had moved to Trosly-Breuil to be near his spiritual adviser, Rev. Thomas Philippe, a theologian and philosopher. Mr. Vanier knew little at that point except that his faith was leading him to share his life with the weak and dispossessed, to learn from them by living together.

But he also knew that he loved to travel, so he didn't want the community to contain more members than could fit in a car.

Now, there are nine foyers in Trosly-Breuil alone, with 29 more in Canada and 132 chapters of L'Arche worldwide, as well as more than 1,500 non-residential support groups in its sister network, Faith and Light. There are many more applicants for places in L'Arche homes than there are vacancies, especially in countries such as India and Haiti.

Could Mr. Vanier ever have imagined that the seed — as he likes to call the beginning of L'Arche — would have sprouted an entire sheltering forest?

"Not in my wildest dreams," he says.

He is folded into his favourite chair and even if he is a bit stooped, he is still much too tall for this little house. Some of his own bestselling books sit on the shelves, but otherwise there is no hint of the Order of Canada and the Legion d'honneur or that this is a man who has been put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are images of Mary and the infant Jesus on the walls, books of theology and philosophy stacked everywhere — and silence. No radio, no computer, no television. Even when Mr. Vanier is staying in a hotel, giving talks or travelling on L'Arche business, he's worried about being "seduced" by television's lazy embrace.

Not that he travels as much these days; he is officially retired, and not responsible for the day-to-day running of the foyers. "Now, I'm free to do what I like, and what I like is to announce the message: That people who are weak have something to bring us, that they are important people and it's important to listen to them. In some mysterious way, they change us. Being in a world of the strong and powerful, you collect attitudes of power and hardness and invulnerability."

Yet Mr. Vanier's own journey took him from the world of power and privilege to his discovery, as a young man with a spiritual thirst, that "it is vulnerability that brings us together."

He remembers watching the coronation parade of King George VI from the top of Canada House, where his father, Georges Vanier, was the second-in-command to the High Commissioner, Vincent Massey. It was Georges Vanier, along with his wife, Pauline, who installed in their five children a sense of public service, and an abiding faith.

SETTING SAIL

When Jean Vanier was 13, he persuaded his father, the future governor-general of Canada, to let him move to England and begin training at the Royal Navy College.

It was no small request: In 1941, one of five ships making the transatlantic crossing was sunk by German submarines. Georges Vanier, who had spent three years in the trenches and lost a leg in the First World War, took a deep breath and said yes.

His mother took a little more convincing. But Pauline Vanier was won over to her son's naval career in the same way that, eventually, she was won over to L'Arche: The pale stone house where she lived for almost 20 years, until her death in 1991, sits just down the road in Trosly-Breuil, surrounded by chestnut trees.

"She was the grandmother to all of L'Arche," her son recalls today.

Family, both real and metaphorical, is at the core of the community. Mr. Vanier has chosen to live a celibate life, unmarried and childless. Asked if he has ever regretted that decision, he shakes his big head slowly. The residents and the volunteers are his family. He is a central, patriarchal figure in their world.

"Although he's not a parent himself, he's a father figure to so many people," says Mary, an actress from London, who is attending a retreat at Trosly-Breuil where Mr. Vanier is speaking on one of his favourite topics, the Gospel of St. John. She and her husband have an autistic son; when they discovered Mr. Vanier's message about communion with the handicapped, "we were carried away by his thinking, very comforted by it."

But family can also be the seat of what Mr. Vanier calls "the central anguish," especially when one of its members is suffering and the others are incapable of providing consolation.

Recently, a couple came to him with their one-and-a-half-year-old son, who had an undiagnosed disorder and screamed incessantly. Mr. Vanier asked the mother how she was, and she muttered, "Okay." He asked the father, a military man, the same question. "Sometimes," the father said, "I want to throw him out the window."

Mr. Vanier leans forward in his chair. "And I said to him, 'I understand. I've lived the same thing.'"

He is referring to Lucien, a severely handicapped man who used to live with him and whose endless shrieking began with his mother's death and rarely stopped. Mr. Vanier often returns to Lucien in his writing: Suffering through that noise helped him understand not only his own limitations but what the families of disabled people must go through, isolated as they often are.

"It obviously penetrated through all my protective systems and awoke anguish, and I could see violence within me," he says. "If I hadn't been in a community, I don't know what I would have done."

Lucien died a few years ago; his screaming never ceased entirely. It is easy, when hearing this story, to understand why L'Arche is always facing a shortage of volunteers. Most people would find such a life too taxing to endure.

What Mr. Vanier finds surprising is that very often it's the volunteers' parents who don't want them to work at L'Arche.

"Parents will say, 'We gave you education, university, and now you want to live with these people?'"

This leads to one of the cornerstones of Mr. Vanier's philosophy, which is essentially that we've lost track of the different ways to measure a successful life. We have become hypnotized by competition and desire for material success.

"There's obviously a good aspect in competition — the development of the body, the mind, creativity," Mr. Vanier says. "But there's something where we can very quickly walk on people — I want to prove I'm better than you. How to find a world where the essential thing is to work for peace, to work to build something together?"

He notes that the United Nations has recommended that the study of non-violence be included on all school curricula.

"I'm amazed that this is not being done. What is more important is that I should go back home and show that I'm better than the others. … The pain of parents comes when children don't seem to be doing as well as others. Everything becomes competition."

What Mr. Vanier hopes the Nation Builder award will mean, perhaps, is that more young people will be compelled to work at L'Arche, "to come and live, and discover people with disabilities."

One of those who came and stayed was Cariosa Kilcommons. Disillusioned with her pre-med studies, Ms. Kilcommons dropped out of St. Francis Xavier University more than 20 years ago to live at the L'Arche home in Cape Breton. Four years later, she came to stay in Trosly; now, she returns to her family home in Pincher Creek, Alta., only for the occasional holiday.

"It was pretty radical," she says of her decision to make L'Arche her life. "But I was filled with inner certitude. It's true that a lot is asked of us here, but we get a lot back. The hours are long, but the experience is so rich."

Now, she lives with the residents at a foyer called Val Fleuri and, when she can grab him for 15 minutes, she has the duty — she would say the privilege — of cutting Mr. Vanier's shaggy hair. While she has him in the chair, they talk about many things: the residents, their faith and the future of L'Arche.

"Jean is very wise," she says, "because he knows when to give concrete support, but he also knows how to sit back and let us find our way."

THE NEXT GENERATION

Increasingly, it will mean watching others take the lead at L'Arche. Mr. Vanier says he is content to leave the community in the hands of the next generation. If he has worries, they have to do with what he calls "the pain of age" — that infirmity will rob him of his position in the community.

It happened to his friend Jacqueline d'Halluin, one of the co-founders of L'Arche, who has such severe Parkinson's that she can no longer live at a foyer. Mr. Vanier goes to sit with her, but he cannot understand what she says any more. "And I find that very painful."

For now, though, he is hearty, barring a bit of deafness. He is mobile, able to ponder issues as he travels between foyers and to forge life-preserving relationships wherever he goes.

The other day, riding the Metro in Paris, he found a young girl, wearing a head scarf, begging in the station. Perhaps she had been thrown out of her house or had run away. Mr. Vanier put a coin in her cup, then bent down, took her hand and asked her name. The girl looked up, surprised, and gave him a huge smile.

"What she was waiting for was someone to ask her name, for a relationship," he says. "I gave her a euro, but the smile she gave me was worth 300 euros. I carried her face all day."

Elizabeth Renzetti is a member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.

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The beckoning of lovely

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Belonging, Jean Vanier

My vision is that belonging should be at the heart of a fundamental discovery: that we all belong to a common humanity, the human race. We may be rooted in a specific family and culture but we come to this earth to open up to others, to serve them and receive the gifts they bring to us, as well as to all of humanity.

- Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, p. 36

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Community: The Structure of Belonging

I found this book review over at Curledup.com:

Peter Block is an inspirational thinker. To quote from his website, "Peter is the author of several bestselling books. The most widely known are Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (1st edition 1980, 2nd edition 1999), Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest (1993), and The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work (1987). Peter is the recipient of the first place 2004 Members' Choice Award by the Organization Development Network, which recognized Flawless Consulting as the most influential book for OD practitioners over the past 40 years." In this latest work, Block has taken the word "community" and kneaded, massaged and squeezed it into extreme flexibility, so that it can compact itself into the microcosm or expand to fill the whole world.

Reading this book took me back to my days as a community activist, when the rage was the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. I was glad to note that Freire's name still crops up from time to time, along with that of philosopher E.F. Schumacher, both icons of an earlier generation of change agents. I'm intrigued to see that community action has not changed - that is, it is still hard to motivate people, and calls for constant shifts of language and even room arrangement to keep the energy flowing. Block wisely refers to America's urban centers as "New Orleans without the flood" and urges us not to become complacent just because our own lives are proceeding according to plan. There are still people in our country who are suffering and who need the assistance of dedicated activists. The distress and chaos "out there" is our responsibility.

Community is a how-to (bearing in mind that "the answer to how is yes," according to Block). It allows the potential activist to do a lot of self-winnowing - asking him/herself such questions as "to what extent are you here by choice," "what is the yes you no longer mean," and "what promises are you willing to make." This sets up any planned meeting with a greater chance of success. Block makes practical suggestions for how to plan a meeting - invite decisionmakers, money-raisers and experts as well as marginalized people who bring important news from the field. He reminds us that we are all citizens of our country but also of our community, and we need to take that responsibility seriously. While many sincere people perceive needs and want to help, they will have to galvanize their vague aspirations and work with a collective gestalt in order to achieve concrete goals.

Here is one example of the radical way that Block approaches the issue of community building: "We need to tell people not to be helpful. Trying to be helpful and giving advice are really ways to control others. In community building we want to substitute curiosity for advice. No call to action." It is input like this that makes Block's work so groundbreaking and, among serious community workers, so popular.

In order to transform our communities, we have to be willing to transform ourselves. For some this will be relatively easy - a quick shift in inner orientation - and for others it will require more deep trenching. In a profound sense, aspiring to improve our environment and assist our neighbors requires that we improve ourselves. That is the challenge of community and the rallying cry of Community.


Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Barbara Bamberger Scott, 2008

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