What We Need Is Here

To know many songs by heart

From What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics by Adrienne Rich

"The passing on of living history is an essential ingredient of individual and communal self-knowledge . . . The loss can be a leak in history or a shrinking in the vitality of everyday life. Fewer and fewer people in this country entertain each other with verbal games, recitations, charades, singing, playing on instruments, doing anything as amateurs - people who are good at something because they enjoy it. To be good at talk, not pompously eloquent or didactic, but having a vivid tongue savoring turns of phrase  to sing on key and know many songs by heart - to play fiddle, banjo, mandolin, flute, accordion, harmonica - to write long letters - to draw pictures or whittle wood with some amount of skill - to do moderately and pleasingly well, in short, a variety of things without solemn investment or disenabling awe - these were common talents till recently, crossing class and racial lines. People used their human equipment - memory, image making, narrative, voice, hand, eye - unself-consciously, to engage with other people, and not as specialists or "artistes."

For ordinary people to sing or whistle used to be as common as breathing. I remember men whistling, briskly or hauntingly, women humming with deep-enclosed chest tones. Where did it go? A technology of "canned" music available through car radios, portable "boom boxes," and cassette players, programmed music piped into the workplace, has left people born in the 1950s and later largely alien to the experience of hearing or joining in casual mucsic making. . .

Part of the experience of casual singing was the undeliberate soaking up of many songs, many verses. Ballads, hymns, work songs, opera arias, folk songs, popular songs, labor songs, school-children's playground songs. And, of course, with the older songs words changed over time, new generations of singers mis-remembering or modifying. Tunes changed, too, as songs traveled: from England or Wales to Appalachia, from Africa to the Sea Islands, France to Quebec, and across the continent.

To ears accustomed to high-technology amplification and recording processes, the unamplified human voice, the voice not professionally trained, may sound accoustically lacking, even perhaps embarrassing. And so we're severed from a physical release and pleasure, whether in solitude or community - the use of breath to produce song. But breath is also Ruach, spirit, the human connection to the universe."

Partager un Potager : A Community Garden in Central Paris

There is a wonderful demonstration garden right in the center of Paris in front of the l'Hotel de Ville, a 15th century municipal building.  The closest space we have like this in Gainesville is probably City Hall, a plain 1960s building surrounded by concrete and former goldfish ponds. Normally, the area in front of the l'Hotel de Ville is a large paved plaza area with benches and a fountain - not so entirely different. But in early June, raised beds were created in wooden boxes and installed throughout the plaza along with information on "bio" (organic) methods of gardening in small places.

They have fine weather for gardening here in the summer - about twenty degrees cooler than our summers and a little more dry. The garden is beautiful and, everytime I pass it, full of people enjoying it - which is the idea. The word for vegetable garden in French is potager, and the word for sharing is partager, so this potager for partager is also a nice play on words that they use in the informational brochures.

I would love to do this in Gainesville: create a real public space for a garden that would offer education, inspiration, and beauty - things public spaces are meant for.

- Kelli, still in Paris

We need to destroy nature to enjoy it

I was at my parents’ house this past weekend, tucked away in the northwest corner of Georgia—a picturesque area of mountains, forests, lakes and streams. My parents live near the end of a dead end road, on the side of a mountain replete with pines and hardwoods, wild blackberry bushes and flowers of many colors. Their home is situated east to west, so from their back deck and thru the trees you get an extraordinary view of the sunset each evening, gently setting over lush green mountains in the distance.

But apparently, the view is not quite all that it could be. My folks explained to me how all of their neighbors are either cutting down their trees or lopping off the tops in order to get a better view of the sunset. (To my folks’ credit, they’ve refused to go along with this, despite pressure from the immediate neighbors who share the vista with them.)

The absurdity of this is striking (although apparently not to my parents’ neighbors). First, all of these people are transplants to this area of Georgia; no one is a native. They also have homes in Florida, or Atlanta, and elsewhere. Most, if not all, seem to come from intensely developed areas—the west coast of Florida for instance, fromTampa down to Naples. I imagine that one of the first impressions that drew them to want to live in the north Georgia mountains was the abundance of trees. I can picture them, couples recently retired, kids grown and out of the house, taking that first trip, looking around and exclaiming to each other how magnificent to see so many trees, how beautiful they are, how wonderful it would be to live in the woods, surrounded by nature.

After a few visits to the area, they decide to live here part-time, picking out a house on a mountainside, thick with beautiful trees. And sitting on their back decks, they watch the sun go down, filtered through those trees, an enchanting mixture of shadows and fading rays of light. For awhile, they really find it to be a delight.

But (cue the irony)… They start thinking about just how much more beautiful it would be if they thinned out some of those trees. They could get a better photo for the Christmas card next year, an unobstructed Georgia mountain sunset. And so the tractor and back-hoe come out, men with chainsaws and axes show up, and voila! Seemingly unaware of what denuding mountainsides has meant for Californians (think mudslides), the underbrush is gone, the trees have become firewood and the wine glasses clink sweetly, as they take in the bright pinks and faded oranges, light blues and dusky golds of that perfect mountain sunset.

As the tractor did its damage one morning on the property next to my parents’ home, this phrase—popularized as a slogan for all that was wrong with the war in Viet Nam—came to mind: “We have to destroy the village to save it.” Except here, a homeowner is saying to his guest, as they sit on his back deck watching that sunset, unburdened by trees: “We needed to destroy nature to enjoy it.”

Not exactly those words, of course.

- John

Founding Father

I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, December 19, 1776

The Patience of Ordinary Things

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or soles. How soles of feet know
Where they are supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

- Pat Schneider, from Another River: New and Selected Poems, 2005

Summer Gardening

I tried to chime in on the last post in response to Matthew's comment about growing things in the summer, but for some reason the comment section wouldn't allow it. Maybe I am too far away?

I feel very far away - in a totally different season really. Paris summers are much more like our springs, and I am very happy about that. I have learned to think of North Florida summers like folks think about winter in the north - a time to let the garden rest.  Even things that can survive the heat - eggplant, seminole pumpkins, some pole beans, peppers, cherry tomatoes, okra, and peanuts, for example - are better off planted in May, not June. 

It's best to use the summer for spreading manure, mulching, and building your compost pile. In addition, I would highly recommend perusing the seed catalogs, prefarably while floating down the Ichetuknee river or in one of our many beautiful springs.  Even better if you can also manage to balance a little bowl of muscadines or boiled peanuts on that tube. 

You can begin to start plants from seeds again in late August. This planting guide from the the University of Florida exension office is a great help and inspiration for next season's garden. Scroll down to Table 4 for times to plant.

Enjoy this season of harvest and rest!

Vegetables, yes, but sunflowers too

Whether you are into bio-regionalism, the locavore or local food movement, food security, sustainability or whatnot, gardening seems to be at the center. And the prime purpose of a garden, of course, is to be able to grow your own food. 

But I have a little confession to make. Behind the utilitarian value of it all, I’ve discovered that I am a bit of an aesthete as well.

Sunday, despite the ungodly high temperature (heat index over 110 degrees!), my son and I spent over two hours beautifying our little plot—picking up trash from around the vacant lot, rearranging the bags of leaves we use in our compost, cutting down the overgrown grass around the garden’s perimeter, and so on. We also managed to pick around 90 incredibly delicious cherry tomatoes, 175 pole beans, and various peppers, some okra and squash too. And even though the food is the main thing (and the little orange tomatoes were especially delicious), the best part of the day was stepping off a little ways away and taking in how beautiful the garden looked after our efforts. (And in the interest of full disclosure, it’s our friend Bob who has been doing the really hard work over the past weeks—weeding.)

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, spent quite a bit of ink on the subject of beauty. Her main thrust was that the need for beauty is universal among humans, and while yes, the hungry and poor need bread—they need roses too. Beauty is intimately intertwined with human dignity, and thus is an operating principle for us at the Gainesville Catholic Worker. Whether in how we keep the house or the presentation of the meal, we take beauty into consideration.

So back to the garden. When Kelli was planning out our garden, I have to admit that my main concern was not what good, practical and important food we would be growing, but whether she was planning to plant some flowers too. (She was. We did.)

I appreciate the vegetables very much, but it is the flowers which really move me and draw me to our garden. Zinnias and sunflowers dominate the front edge and the heart of it. When I see them through the wire fence at the back of our garden, or coming round the corner of the house that sits on the front of the lot, or from my car window as I drive slowly by along 2^nd Street, I get a catch in my throat. They’re beautiful. I’m kind of giddy as my eyes are drawn skyward to gaze on the new sunflower just opened; I am lighthearted and joyful when, after being gone a few days, I return to find a dozen multi-colored zinnias suddenly burst open during my absence.

So, with apologies to Dorothy and the immigrant women who first coined the slogan at the Lawrence Textile Strike in 1912: “I want vegetables, yes—but sunflowers too.”

-John

Kindness

Two kind friends

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

- Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian poet

Pass it on

This week, and several times a year usually, we have a group of high school or college students doing a "retreat" with us at the Gainesville Catholic Worker. The retreats are equal parts spirituality, service and education. But the goal is the same: to share something we’ve learned that we think is really important and essential to being human at this time and in this place.

 The spiritual, service-oriented and educational aspects of the retreat are all woven together to reinforce values which we believe in but which are not so readily affirmed or even taught in our larger culture. We try to model some degree of simplicity, trying to get these groups of young people to think about how little they really need in order to live well, as opposed to our culture’s call for excessive consumption. We talk about community and the benefits of living a life for others, with others and among others, intentionally—as opposed to our culture’s stark insistence on the preeminence of the individual, the overarching importance of “me” and “mine.” We also talk about and experience what it means to practice compassion and solidarity, to be accountable to others, to work with one’s own hands, and so forth.

Our own desire to live differently and to learn to live in the rhythms and cycles of a particular place are really only part of the challenge. A sense of self-reliance, an ethic of limitation and responsible use of resources, respect and compassion for others—all these things must also be passed on to the generation which follows us. Many of them are already way ahead of us compared to where we were at that age. But the lies and misrepresentations about what makes a “good life” are still being spun, with horrifying speed and incredible effectiveness, by our opponents on Madison Ave and Wall Street, in Hollywood and the halls of government. For those of us who no longer sway under the spells of Svengali or Rasputin, we have a responsibility to live in such a way that invites questions, that cries out “no more business as usual,” that does not make sense by the conventional measures of our society.

But more than this, we have a responsibility to our children and our grandchildren. When they come seeking, we need to make the time—and have the patience and willingness—to pass it on. 

-John

No one lives locally, alone

Our life at the Gainesville Catholic Worker might be best summed up by the word hospitality. Our meals often consist of 8, 12, 15, or even 30 or more people. Our doorbell rings a dozen (sometimes two or three times that) times a day, with friends or visitors looking for a place to sit out of the sun for awhile, a drink of water, asking to use the phone, and so on. And we regularly have people who have no other place to go staying with us overnight—29 different guests stayed with us this past year for a total of about 450 nights.

Hospitality is often defined by the work of mercy dictate “welcome the stranger.” But the phrase doesn’t quite capture what I think we do. For the most part, we “welcome our friends,” or even our “brothers and sisters.” Maybe you could dismiss it as semantics, but I don’t think that would be fair.

Perhaps one of the most countercultural and therefore difficult aspects of “learning to live locally” is the simple task of getting to know one’s neighbors. Colloquially, we may think of neighbors as those persons who live in proximity to us. My own faith tradition defines neighbors as those who treat others, especially those in need, with mercy. But our society functions to steer us away from the practice of “neighborliness,” which is just another word for hospitality. We learn to turn primarily inward, to be concerned for our own needs first, and the needs of those in our immediate family. As children, we’re taught to be suspicious of the stranger and we continue to operate out of that mentality even as adults. The most divisive voices among us—whether in the media or politics or economics or religion or culture—stir up our fear of each other, and frighten us into a world of “us and them,” with “us” being whittled down to ever smaller circles.

The truth is that if we are going to live locally, then we are going to have to learn to start seeing others as being “in the boat” with us. We’re going to have to learn to lend a hand and then also turn around and ask for help when needed. We’re going to have to learn to work together, sharing food and garden space and tools and maybe even our homes. We’re going to have to meet and talk with and get to know people very different than ourselves. And we’re going to have to figure out how to share what we do have, sometimes doing without or making a sacrifice so that what we have will go a little further to help our neighbor, our friend, our brother or sister in need.

Neighborliness, the practice of hospitality, is something every single one of us can do right now. We can think of that which we have as being not simply for us and our families, but, in the most honest sense, for others. Welcoming a guest to our table; sharing the produce from our garden with our neighbor next door or someone with whom we work; exploring how that extra bedroom no one ever sleeps in might be made available to someone who really needs a place to stay.

If we are to live locally, then we need to re-learn what it means to be a neighbor, as well learning the names and hearing the stories of our neighbors. The antidote for this economic collapse we’re experiencing now (and for the ones sure to come in the future) is not to draw the circle ever tighter and to protect what it is ours. The antidote is to reach out wider, to get to know one another, to care for each other. And to remember that we’re all in this together.

-John