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."

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

Summertime! And the living is... different

Our household - May 2009

What a week! I have not been posting much because my mind has been in two places: here and France, where I will be heading tomorrow to live for two months. Many of you don't know me well enough to know that this is not a typical thing for me to do, although it seems to be this year. It is an opportunity that's presented itself at a time when it's both possible and very much appreciated. My son, Joe, has been studying there but will be in Togo(!) [every time I type this word I am compelled to follow it by an exclamation point] during part of June and July. So there's this empty apartment... That, and the fact that my beloved husband is kicking me out the door telling me to carpe diem, get some solitude, spend time writing and learn French. "When will you ever get to do this again?" he asks. Sometimes I feel like I am living my life backward; Having gotten started pretty early on family life, I am now getting to experience the freedom to "study abroad."

Life changes for most people during the summer in our region - especially for those with kids or those living in academic communities. Our town is so connected to University of Florida that we all tend to think in semesters. As a community, we start to slow it down in May and June and pretty much close the house for the summer during July. This is partly because we lose a lot of student volunteers during this time and also due to the cost of keeping the house comfortably cool enough during summer's heat and humidity to run the cafe and welcome groups of people. Just last week we pared down from eleven community members to six, by the end of the month we'll be down to three for a bit before we begin to rev back up again in August when the fall semester starts. 

John will be keeping the household going here while I'm away and is planning to take over some of the blog-writing as well. What a man! Seriously, I am so grateful for all of it.

Cold rain, warm soup

It has been raining for several days - and quite cool for this time of year. Inspired by the gloom and an abundance of potatoes, we made "Irish Cream of Potato Soup" today, served with fresh brown bread (a riff on an old Heidelberg Rye recipe but without the rye or the carraway). The meal turned out both hearty and cozy, and everyone says they like it.

They always say they like it. The kindest people come to the house for a free lunch on Wednesdays. They're tired and hungry and often in need of a dry or warm or cool place to be for a while - a place to be, period. We avoid the typical soup line and serve them at a table and hope that being allowed to sit and eat and relax for a bit will somehow help.

If you knew their stories... They're good people for the most part, in the grip of addiction or mental illness or a run of bad luck. Some have wound up with histories that could curl your hair. Each one has a story so singular that the words "homeless" or "hungry" can't come close to capturing it and begins to grate as just another label to be endured. Our guests today include an art teacher who's an alcoholic, a doctor who is an addict, a theology student with a debilitating mental illness, a former model, a street preacher, teachers, carpenters, musicians, and a host of others who have only shared a little of their past lives. Sometimes their stories keep me awake at night wondering what this life is all about anyway that so many struggle seemingly hopelessly to get by at all.

But at lunchtime we experience the happiness of friends who loves marmalade and declare the potato soup to be the best ever, and happily play with the dog under the table, and read magazines in the living room, and doze peacefully in the papasan. I hear the bits of conversation between the guests and the volunteers that sound like banter between good friends. There's a bit of guitar music, short bursts of laughter and teasing.  And this life seems a little wonderous - filled with people looking at it squarely, taking in the good and bad, and deciding to thank someone for the soup.

ELDERS: Shocking, yes, but you just may become one yourself someday

My dad with his great-grandson

If you are over 25, you’ve probably experienced a bout of the cognitive dissonance inherent to aging.  It comes with being able to remember decades – that you graduated from high school ten years ago, that it’s been twenty years since you were in elementary school. And it gets worse as you get older: “Wait, I’m fifty? But my mother is fifty!”  It’s hard to assimilate the fact of aging especially as you begin to approach the age of people you once thought of as “old” and, ummm . . . irrelevant.

Personally, I’ve always had an affinity for old folks.  In my early twenties, at home during the day with a new baby, I sometimes watched a public television show on aging called “Over Easy with Hugh Downs." It gave me some much needed perspective as I was in the process of being bumped up into the parenting phase of life.  Later I lived near my grandparents for a while and was amused when my maternal grandmother sometimes called me or one of my daughters by my mother’s name. She had had two little girls who had two little girls, and now one of them (me) had two little girls. It must have seemed to her at times as if life were recycling itself with slightly different faces – same make, different models. Being close to my grandparents helped soften me toward older people in general, even the slow-moving ones who would aggravate me when driving. I would imagine they were my grandparents experiencing their last years of independence and freedom before their license is taken away.  I have appreciated the older people in my life, and the grand arc of life in general, but I still have had plenty of youthful arrogance in my attitude toward their opinions and ways.

Now, true to form, in my “middle years” I am appreciating more the wisdom of elders - in part because I can actually imagine myself becoming one. But also because I have personally lost so many of them at this point in my own life. My grandparents’ generation of teenage flappers, depression parents and WWII workers and soldiers, watched their roaring 20s youth re-lived  in the free love of the sixties.  They’re almost all gone now.  With them goes their particular insight into youth and old age, patriotism and genocide, wealth, loss, family…  And now my own parents are going. My father was diagnosed last year with a terminal illness that affects his brain. One effect of his illness is a compulsion to tell stories, which flies in the face of his lifelong reserve.  It’s as if something in him knows his time is up and he wants us to remember him a certain way, to honor what he was and what made him who he is.

I ask myself what I have to tell, or will have to tell in my old age – and whether anyone will want to hear it.  Right now I feel particularly fortunate to have young adults in my day-to-day life.  They are dealing with so many of the same issues that I did when I was their age. I particularly appreciate the conversations with them about their parents and the struggle to separate from them, to grow up.  At my age now, it seems like yesterday that I was managing those same tensions -- discerning which of my parents' values would be useful to me, how to step out into my own life while still giving due respect to those who gave it to me, how to honor their values while tossing quite a few of them out.  But I also hear my younger friends’ struggles through the filter of being a parent myself – close in age to theirs.  I feel the loss and fear of having people you have loved since birth, and did your best for, begin to make their own decisions – some very contrary to your own.  There has got to be some value to this, some wisdom in holding both of those mindsets in one brain. I am reminded of something I heard once somewhere about our being not only the age we are, but all the ages we have been before. So I am 5, 10, 21, 30, 40, 50 . . .  What more will I be when I am 60 and 70 and beyond?  Like almost all adults of a certain age, I wish I had asked my grandparents a few more questions before they left.   “Remember” was the last word my grandmother said to me.  How much wisdom is out there in our own communities waiting to be heard, carefully sorted through, perhaps, but really listened to?

*****

Recently I came across a very sweet website about aging: Time Goes By: What It's Really Like to Get Older. It's smart and funny and honest (reminds me a little of good old "Over Easy") - a glimpse of the future that might someday become your present, if you work hard at it.

*****

And some more inspiration for you - from my young adult friend Kim: A little India Arie. Lovely.

You can't have it all

Last week when the students were here, I was asked a question I hear a lot, "How can you afford to buy locally when you can get things so much more cheaply at Wal-Mart?"

This is an umbrella question that covers several others: "How do you afford it?" "How do you justify it?" Why do you go to the bother?"

The last one, we talk about a lot. While it does add an additional - and sometimes burdensome - step to shopping decisions, we find buying locally worth the trouble. You know these goods already: keeping money in the local economy, knowing food producers so we can be assured that the food is healthy and grown in a sustainable way, supporting folks who are working hard to keep their local businesses thriving in a world of big box stores.

For us, the justification is fairly simple as well - although like all simple things, it's not always easy. We want our money to go toward supporting a just "system." Because we live with and near folks who live in poverty, we see first-hand and every day the downside of the economic and social system that we - John and I, and other middle class folks - have profited from. The larger the system, the more the parts become... just parts. A number of people we meet are treated as "expendable" - whether as former soldiers now living on the streets, laborers working for minimum wage, undocumented immigrants trying to support their families on less than minimum wage, or addicts and alcoholics who've been given up on. Go back a generation and a lot of these folks were from farm families and blue collar factory-working families. They weren't "living high" but they were making a decent living, raising thriving families, and enjoyed a certain amount of social stability. The farm crisis of the 80s and the slow death of manufacturing as jobs were shipped overseas to folks working way below minimum wage (so we could have more and cheaper stuff) destroyed a way of life for many people. Signing on with the military, seeking day labor work, migrating across borders, and seeking relief from drugs and alcohol isn't providing a substitute for the life that's gone. While we aren't under the illusion that our efforts to support small, local enterprises is solving this huge problem, we hope to be a part of a growing movement of people who can begin to turn things around. It simply doesn't make sense for us to be reaching out to the victims of our economic/social system while supporting the same system.

How can we actually afford it? In a nutshell, we decide what we can live without. Like our mamas told us: "You can't have it all." Personally, we can live without cable TV, meat, a very warm house in the winter ore a very cool house in the summer among other things. And we find we can live with eating lots of dried beans along with our farm-fresh veggies. Questions about what exactly one can live with or without are highly personal, but they're worth spending a lifetime pondering. Not to wax too philosophical, but the thrilling question at the core is "What do you want your life to be about?" For a long time, we as a people didn't ask the right questions and the not-asking sent us down a road most of us no longer want to be on. Living the questions (thank you, Rainer Maria Rilke) can begin to set us straight. You can't have it all. What do you want your life to be about?

De-cluttering update

This time last year I was about to sell my house and begin the process of downsizing - a physical chore with all kinds of psychological, emotional, and philosophical baggage attached to it. Sorting through the stuff in my brain took at least as much time as going through the accumulated stuff in the house. Now, almost nine months in, it's time to assess.

First, let me confess that I ended up cheating. I rented a storage unit in which to store a few things for a year - like the many boxes of books that belong to my son in grad school, the personal memorabilia of my other adult children (who are supposed to be going through it at some point...), and some furniture that I wasn't sure if we needed and hated to get rid of prematurely. Three more months.

That said, I don't really miss any of the things I gave away or sold, and I look around my living space here and think about how many other things I might give away. I like the spareness, and I like the fact that we use pretty much everything we have and that I know where it all is.

Still the "attachment issues" remain. Because we share our house with five other people regularly (and more on cold or rainy nights), I often find myself ridiculously bothered by people using my things, especially when they use them badly - scratching my dining table (not an heirloom, not expensive, and I only owned it a couple years before moving), using my grandmother's spring-form pan to hold leftovers, breaking the blender... These are all things I intentionally decided to share because I did not have any particular attachment to them. And now when I ponder my upset about them, I am flummoxed. Did I just transfer my old attachments to these things? Could it be that ownership is so ingrained in us that we're compelled to do it - a variety of animal territoriality?  Or is it that, regardless of how often we demanded it of our children, we really just don't like sharing very much? 

I have no idea. But I am learning. And what a good place to finally drive the lesson home.

The Importance of Being Earnest, but not insane

Oscar Wilde's grave in Paris

I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability. - Oscar Wilde

I was in France on New Years' Day vising my son who is going to school in Paris. I stayed for a whole month since I was there and had a place. It was a great change for me - a real vacation, time out of time to think of my own life from a different perspective. And to enjoy someone else's life a LOT.

It's always fun to spend time with Joe. He's smart and funny and our brains seem to be wired somewhat the same - so conversation comes easy and is usually interesting to us both. One of our topics of discussion was Henry Thoreau's observation that a "an unexamined life is not worth living." Joe wondered if an over-examined life was any better, and we both agreed that it didn't seem to be, that in fact it might be dangerous to one's mental health. How do you strike that balance between living intentionally - something our household in Gainesville has been striving to do - and being so earnest that you drive yourself (and others) crazy?

The only way to navigate those waters is to avoid taking yourself too seriously. This can be a challenge when part of what motivates you is the hope that your actions are - in some crucial way - important enough to make a difference. But it's just a fact that we're indelibly human; scratch the surface of any of our intense and earnest lives and you will find a confused bumbler doing his or her best to make some kind of sense of of it all.

So we carry on. In reflecting on last year's resolutions, I can say that we made good on our promise to eat an all-local meal at least once a day and for one full day each week. It was, honestly, really simple due to the delicious farm produce available at the farmers market and at Ward's. We plan to continue being intentional about this area in our lives and to share with you both sources of local food and recipes for putting it to good use.

We are definitely still a work in progress in other areas:

• Gardening: We have not been producing the amount of food we had hoped to. We were so busy with other Catholic Worker projects during the Fall that we only had time for a tiny garden at a community center. We hope to expand on that in the spring and maybe even add another larger garden. We're working on finding appropriate space.


• Preserving Food: We made some jams and jellies with local fruit and froze surpluses of veggies. Not having a large freezer and hesitant to add the additional electrical costs, we just bought a pressure canner. I'm looking forward to canning the abundance of vegetables available to us at certain times of the year - sweet potatoes, green beans, field peas, greens, corn... How wonderful to have these local vegetables available to us off-season!


• Fuel use: We sucked. We are still using the car much more often than I think would be necessary if we planned ahead and allowed for the extra time required to walk, bike, and wait for the city bus. It's tricky enough with the amount of shopping we have to do for cafes and breakfast brigades and trips we need to make to help our guests and friends who have emergency needs.  Adding kids who need to be picked up from baseball practice and friends' houses complicates things. Add human laziness and procrastination and we are as guilty as any other American family in our over-use of this resource. While some of it is just part of the work we do, the laziness and procrastination needs some attention.Starting this week, we are sharing our car with another family in our community. This should help a lot toward planning ahead and re-energizing ourselves for other forms of transportation.


• Buying New Things: As much as we wanted to buy used or make do, we bought some new things for the new place - lighting, for instance, the aforementioned pressure canner, some shelves we felt we couldn't wait on. We're looking forward to being a little more strict with ourselves here in the coming year.

So many of our "transgressions" are related to convenience. We have some bad habits. In addition, I think stress contributes to a need to make things easier on ourselves when we can, and we were busy moving and changing up our lives in ways that caused some additional wear and tear. Of course living your life in a way that doesn't reflect your own beliefs contributes to the stress eventually. This is where the acceptance of being an absurd human - a good dose of humor - helps. So, OY VEY. Time to move on with 2009 - a year of good intentions without being too intense about it, regular celebration and laughter, and the occasional mojito.

Gone Fishin'

I am out of town for a month's vacation, so not much to write about la vie locale... Blogging will begin again January 21. Happy 2009!