What We Need Is Here

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

Forgiveness

We will feel forgiven for a past that was not all it should have been when we commit to a future which is what it should be. - John O'Donahue, Anam Cara

Good old spiderwort...

John is on a work-related trip to D.C. this week, so neither of us are being local... But I was delighted today to see one of my favorite local "weeds" growing on purpose in a formal French garden: Spiderwort!

I had heard that this maligned wildflower was coddled in cottage gardens in Britain; I was happy to find it in Paris as well. It's a bit paler and pinker than our robust local version, but it was lovely interplanted ith a bed of red roses. It lined the walkway of a portion of the 4.5 km "Promenade Plantée," - the beautiful linear garden planted along an ancient viaduct that begins less than a mile from my apartment and end at the Bastille. Seeing it today was like running into an old friend! (I'm a bit lonely.)

Mayor tells Parisians to clean out their attics...

I was amazed when I arrived in Paris on Saturday by all the people on the sidewalks dragging carts of household goods behind them. As I approached Joe's street, I saw why. Apparently the mayor of this particular area of Paris declared the day a "Grand Vide Grenier" or "Empty Your Attic" - a giant garage sale. All along both sides of the street and beneath the tents used for the weekly market, neighbors were spreading out their stuff. Besides being generally interested in what it is exactly that Parisians have in their closets and attics, I really enjoyed seeing the many backgrounds represented by the things Joe's diverse neighborhood was jetisoning. Plus I had forgotten socks (it is cooler than I expected), and I was asked to bring children's books home to a new French teacher I know. Score!

Of all the ways to get rid of excess things, my least favorite is the garage sale - so much trouble for so little return. And as much as we like to buy used things, you have to wonder if all the driving to get to them negates the other resources saved.

This seemed like a wonderful solution, and do-able at home too. Parking wouldn't be a problem because you could just stroll around your own neighborhood. It would be a way to formalize and streamline what neighbors have traditionally done in the past when we knew each other better - trade children's clothes for the next size up, exchange toys, share books, tools, etc. on a larger scale.  If the enconomy continues to slide, maybe there will be more folks willing to "empty their attics"at the neighborhood level.

Kickstand

There seems to be nothing bad that can be said about biking. At every level, no matter what facet you consider, biking seems to be an extraordinarily good thing: it’s a good form of exercise, there’s no gas involved and no pollution created, it’s a fairly inexpensive form of transportation, and it’s fun. What’s the drawback?

For myself, coming from a middle-class background, biking is a choice I make in terms of simple living, health and having a low impact on the environment. But for many of the folks with whom we work closely with at the Catholic Worker, having a bike is less about any of these things and more about opportunities for work, access to healthcare and social services, and finding a secluded and therefore safer place to live.

In Gainesville, we’re fortunate to have “The Kickstand,” a community bicycle project that provides free or inexpensive bicycle-related services to all persons without discrimination. The Kickstand’s mission statement reads:

“Since we believe that the bicycle represents the most affordable, healthy, and environmentally sound form of transportation and recreation, we seek to encourage people to learn to maintain a bicycle themselves and to use it in a responsible manner. We will provide assistance in acquiring a reliable bicycle and scheduled access to knowledgeable volunteers and quality tools. It is our belief that by providing these services we can help build neighborhood involvement and create greater paths for communication and cooperation.”

We’ve had occasion to refer some of our guests who don’t have the means to pay for repairs to their bikes to the Kickstand over the past year. This past weekend, a group of students, recent grads and others who have volunteered at the Catholic Worker over the past few years, arranged with the Kickstand to host a project aimed at refurbishing several dozen bicycles which they had obtained and wanted to make road-worthy for people who could really use a bike. For several hours, the skilled and the unskilled worked together with help from the Kickstand’s regular staff and volunteers to fix up the bikes. Six bikes were completed and more on the way. When Nam and Jacqueline brought the first group of bikes to the GCW, we already had two new owners waiting—one person who especially needed a bike to get to doctor’s appointments and another whose last bike had been stolen several weeks ago.

Sharon Astyk, the author of Depletion and Abundance, makes a strong case that the best thing everyone could do to make the world a better place is to plant and tend a garden. For good health—individually, communally and globally—I’m guessing that biking has to be up there at the top of the list as well. If you can, scope out an area within which any trip you make will be via bike. It doesn’t have to be big. My area is just about 10-12 blocks in any direction from my house. It’s good for me (health- and money-wise) and it’s good for us (environment-wise).

And if you have a bike you’re not using, whether it is in working condition or not, consider giving it to the good folks over at The Kickstand. They’ll find someone who needs a bike to work with them in fixing it up or using the parts to get another bike working. And someone who needs it will have a little more freedom and a little more opportunity.

- John