Ms. Izuta will share more than 100 photos from her 218 mile hike last July.
John Muir Trail
She traveled the John Muir Trail from the Mist Trail in Yosemite Valley (elevation 4000 feet) to the top of Mt. Whitney (elevation 14,497 feet), the highest mountain in the continental United States.
The hike took 25 days, through the beautiful part of the high Sierra, which she did solo carrying only a tent, a sleeping bag and enough food to keep going.
Cynthia Chin-Lee, associate member of Mountain View Cohousing Community, will lead a panel on cohousing communities near Palo Alto. She will pose questions to panelists from two cohousing communities near Palo Alto.
Her panel will include: Raines Cohen, PatZy Boomer, Emily Rosen and Lee Daniel Erman.
Background of Speakers:
Cynthia Chin-Lee
Cynthia is a children’s book author and publications manager at Oracle. She spoke to the Humanist Community last year about her children’s book, “Operation Marriage,” which won a Moonbeam award for compassion. Based on a true story, the book shows marriage equality from a child’s point of view.
Cynthia Chin-Lee, Raines Cohen, PatZy Boomer, Emily Rosen, Lee Erman
Raines Cohen
Raines is a community organizer, co-founding and running Cohousing California network of regional umbrella groups, with over 2100 members in East Bay Cohousing alone. For the past decade, he and his wife and business partner Betsy Morris have lived at Berkeley Cohousing; he was an initial member-developer and homeowner for the first three years of Swan’s Market Cohousing in Oakland. He has served on the national nonprofit Cohousing Association and Fellowship for Intentional Community boards, and the Bay Area Community Land Trust; he now is on the Cohouseholding national advisory board, helping people find shared-living solutions. Raines works as a Cohousing Coach and has visited over 100 established cohousing neighborhoods and advised many, is Associate Producer of the shared-living documentary Within Reach, and author of the Aging in Community chapter in the book Audacious Aging.
By the time of the talk, I may be a Certified Senior Advisor as well – wish me luck!
PatZy Boomer Mountain View Cohousing Community
PatZy grew up in Palo Alto, next door to her husband Derk. They have three daughters, two grandchildren (with another on the way) and a holy terror of a Pomeranian named Bugs. They have enjoyed living in Mountain View for 15 years.
She earned a B.A. in Human Biology at Stanford and her career path has been anything but a straight line since. Following graduation, she spent five years working in restaurants in national parks all over the U.S. After that, she went into marketing for restaurants with Spectrum Foods of San Francisco and was later business manager of the Lark Creek Inn in Marin.
PatZy then decided she was done with Restaurants Forever, and embarked on a career in commercial interior design and space planning. 17 years later (a year and a half ago) she decided it was once again time to re-pot and commenced taking classes in the gerontology program at Foothill College. She also serves on the board of the California Council on Gerontology and Geriatrics.
She has no idea what she will do with this interest but retiring to 30 years of golf, which she does not play, is not in the least appealing.
She loves to travel and hits the road as often as she can. She adores lakes, rivers, and mountains, and has camped every summer for the last 20 years at her “sanity place” McCall, Idaho.
She joined MVCC in mid-2010. Patzy fondly remembers the camaraderie and sense of community from her days working in the national parks, which is one of the reasons she is looking forward to cohousing. She finds the suburbs to be a less than welcoming environment where neighbors are seldom seen and there are few interesting walking destinations. After watching her mother’s slow slide into Alzheimer’s after she stopped driving, PatZy believes that staying socially engaged and physically active are the keys to healthy aging. Rather than moving to any of the local “retirement communities” where a far-away corporate entity makes all the decisions, she is looking forward to being engaged on a grass roots level with people she respects and knows well.
Emily Rosen
Emily Rosen, a certified massage therapist and an enthusiastic member of Greenwave, a small diverse group of 15 adults and kids who live on an acre of land in East Palo Alto. She has lived at Geenwave for 3 years.
Emily Rosen has a background of living in small town communities (Sonoma County, and in Washington State), and she has also lived in several intentional communities, including the Ananda Community in Nevada City.
College training in liberal arts has been more for personal interest than a career path. She worked early on as an apprentice carpenter, a cook and manager of 2 small restaurants, a stint as overall dairy hand, and several other bucolic endeavors.
Emily has more recently had a private body therapy practice in the Palo Alto area for 20 plus years.
Her choices have leaned toward a hands-on, self-employed, personally involving and low key lifestyle. Emily has a great appreciation for natural beauty and wild places, growing things, and sharing her life with others. Living simply is a value she embraces, and she has ample experience of “living off the grid”. Her next pursuit will be learning to build cob and earthen landscape and garden structures.
Living in community has been a natural choice for mutual support, fun, and resource sharing. Community has also allowed Emily the freedom to indulge her hermit tendencies. A good balance.
Lee Daniel Erman Mountain View Cohousing Community
Lee Daniel Erman is a hospital-based massage therapist and former computer scientist. He and his wife have been intensively involved in creating the Mountain View Cohousing Community since 2009 and are eagerly anticipating moving in at its completion in 2014. For more info, see: http://www.mountainviewcohousing.org/ .
Although born and raised in Chicago, Lee has spent most of his adult life in California. With a PhD from Stanford, he had a 30-year career in computer science academia and industrial research from 1970 to 2000. Starting in 1992, his career shifted to bodywork and massage therapy, where he now works primarily with hospitalized patients in acute conditions. Lee’s interests include how compassionate touch can enhance the health of the individual and society, the use of technology to promote human interactions, and environmental issues and climate change.
Lee and his wife Esther have been together since 1994. Lee has two adult sons from a previous marriage and two grandchildren in England from Esther’s progeny. Lee and Esther joined MVCC in 2009 and have been heavily involved in its intense and extensive development process, including designing the physical entity, working the legal and regulatory issues, growing the membership, and evolving the values and rules for living in our community. Although we’ve only just broken ground and won’t be living together until mid-2014, this process has already forged us into a community.
Part of Lee’s cohousing vision: I see MVCC as a supportive, caring, and vital community – a kind of self-created, highly functional extended family – for the next stages of our lives. Hopefully these will be active and healthy years, but the community will be there for us even if we hit bumps along that road.
I also want MVCC to be a living experiment in intentional community, exploring a number of directions. One of these is how a community can live very lightly on the earth and simultaneously thrive greatly, with no sense of deprivation. Another direction is using technology to enhance the human aspects of community. I would also like MVCC to be a model for others in these and other areas, and a living legacy for future generations.
After working as an engineer for 25 years, Sudhanshu “Suds” Jain decided that the impending climate crisis was far more important than designing the next switch chip for computer networking. In 2008, he retired from Broadcom Corporation to become a “professional volunteer.” He will discuss the following topics:
1. Bill McKibben’s Gigaton limits (from Rolling Stone Article)
2. History of Climate Denialism going back to Tobacco Denialism
3. A little info on GeoEngineering projects
4. Carbon Free Palo Alto ideas for 100% renewable power
5. Need for a Carbon Tax
Jain is on the board at Acterra, and was in the pioneer class of their “Be The Change” leadership program; for the past three years, he has been doing free home energy audits with their “Green at Home” program. He has also installed solar panels on low income housing with Grid Alternatives, and been active with Citizen’s Climate Lobby, which advocates for a carbon tax with 100% revenue recycling (dividends to consumers). Since 2011, he has been teaching “climate change science” to middle school students at Discovery Charter School in San Jose.
To see the slides from this presentation, click here.
Kara’s mission is to provide grief support for children, teens, families and adults: those who are grieving a death as well as those coping with a terminal illness (their own or another’s). Kara offers a safe and caring environment where those coping with death and dying can express and normalize their feelings of grief.
Kara supports Camp Erin, a 3-day summer camp, for children 6 to 17. Children benefit enormously from being with others who are also grieving while, in the same environment, they are enjoying age-appropriate standard camp activities. For more information visit: http://www.kara-grief.org/camperin
Jim Mulvaney, Director of Training and Education for Kara, will describe the grief process, share insights into how to help someone who is grieving, and give us an overview of Kara’s services. Kara is located in Palo Alto, CA. More information is available at: http://www.kara-grief.org/
Laura Mappin, a Humanist Community member, will share her online website Our Taboo Museum which transforms taboos through crowd sourced conversation, art and products. She’ll also discuss the experiences in her life that drove her to create this collaborative place of straight talk with gobs of humor.
Her museum’s purpose is similar to the Humanist Community although discussions might be more personal and may cover a narrower set of topics. (String theory is not on the list.)
She will discuss her taboo taxonomy around which she organizes the site. It includes 14 groups, namely, Body, Aging, Death, Skin Color, Sex, Sexual Identity, Reproduction, Rape, Bigotry, Social Norms, Mental Health, Parenting, Money, Shame.
An egalitarian probably since birth, she grew up a sensitive kid with an angry father, experiencing misplaced violence which she of course misunderstood and folded into her opinion of herself. Then she spent almost 20 years in hi-tech, being exposed to near fatal amounts of left brain behavior. Being fired or laid off (who knows what that was) at the same time as going through an amicable and mutually desired but still security-shattering divorce, she clinched her date with the abyss.
All of these events fueled her passion to create this museum to talk about what holds humans back from acting more fully in our own interests. At least, that’s the theory.
Laura Mappin, a Humanist Community member, will share her online website Our Taboo Museum which transforms taboos through crowd sourced conversation, art and products. She’ll also discuss the experiences in her life that drove her to create this collaborative place of straight talk with gobs of humor.