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

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

Sewing Blue House Pants and other things

It was fun getting the sewing machines out this spring and using them. The Blue House Pants project went great production-wise, although our opportunity to sell them at a regional conference fell through. We're hoping to add a little to our "inventory" and try again in the fall.

Several of us were inspired to venture beyond pants to sew other things: customized pants for ourselves and as gifts for family (Kendera, our resident artist led the way here), cloth napkins and tablecloths, a "slouch bag" for shopping, new kitchen curtains. It was particularly rewarding when we used re-purposed fabric donated to us - old sheets and curtains and some old clothes. Sewing is such a handy skill to have - and to pass on.

My mom taught me to sew like her mom taught her and I constantly hear her voice in my head reminding me that cutting accurately is the most important part, that basting is worth the time, to use the lighter color thread when faced with a choice between two that don't quite match.  I am also enjoying watching others who sew with us who work with a totally different set of rules - or apparently none at all. We've made some interesting stuff, beautiful to look at and made with love - or hope or patience or spunk or a number of other aspirations and emotions indicated on the homemade tags.

I'm inspire by the time and care put into each item. I'm also inspired by other folks for whom tougher economic times has been a spark for their creative fire.  Using it up, making it do, and wearing it out has never looked better, or at least more interesting... 

Kids pants from shirt sleeves

Rugs from old clothes

A skirt from a pillowcase

Pants from a tee-shirt

Just about anything from an old sweater

Clothesline-drying: If we can do it, anyone (with space) can

We have been hanging all our laundry - personal and house - since we moved in (unless it rains for days on end, which is pretty rare). We have a LOT of laundry - eleven people are living in our house and we have a busy kitchen that serves well over 150 people a week with cloth napkins, bread basket liners, tablecloths, etc. Add to that bath towels, bed linens, children/baby messes, and a sometimes weak-stomached dog and, like I said, we have a LOT of laundry.  Here's how we manage:

• We use a front-loading washer that spins the heck out of everything. Some things come out of that sweet washer almost dry.
• We have a five-line, retractable clothesline that's extended close to its full length of 34'.
• We keep it going all day. It only takes 3-4 hours at most for things to dry. During long summer days we can hang and dry three consecutive "batches" (a batch is what fits on the clothesline at one time - usually two loads, sometimes three.
• We're thoughtful about how we hang things up - avoiding folding things over the line if possible, hanging things vertically if they're short enough so they don't take up too much space. We even designed our new cloth napkins with this in mind. They're as long, but half as wide, so they take up less space on the clothesline.

It's so simple once you get the "hang" of it, and the time outside at the clothesline can be an island of quiet during pretty busy days.  Stuff comes off the line practically ironed (if you hung it right) and smelling fresh. 

Solar energy without the expensive solar panels! So simple.

It's getting hot in here

The next generation

It is your soul you need to change, not the climate. - Seneca

Every year around this time, I begin to contemplate how I am going to survive another summer of North Central Florida’s outstanding heat and humidity. I dread it with a passion. It confines me like I imagine winter cold does in other places; my days are ruled by avoidance - of being outdoors after 10am, of manual labor upstairs after 9, of vigorous exercise after 8. I feel imprisoned by the heat, and I hate it.  And every year I try to tell myself that it’s a matter of attitude (and a few trips to the springs and a lot of cold showers). Thus far I’ve survived quite a few summers.

But the quote above, read with a different emphasis, speaks to a much more serious topic: We need to change our souls so we don’t change the climate.  While I’m aware of the controversy, the sources that seem least self-interested predict serious climate change during this century if we keep going as we are. It’s going to get hotter and, while this thought fills me with dread at a most basic level, it calls me to greater action than heading north for the summer, or to the springs. Why is there still argument about this? Even if we’re not absolutely sure, if there is a possibility of preventing rising ocean levels, widespread famine, and mass die-offs of species by changing our lifestyles now, why wouldn’t we? Why don’t we?

The First Gulf War of the early nineties was my first war as an adult.  George Bush the Elder, in a moment of astonishing candor, called it a war in defense of our American lifestyle. This was the war where my friends were facing deployment (as opposed to this one where it’s the friends of my children), and I thought I would gladly give up my car and ride my bike every single day to save one of their lives.  It’s our grandchildren who will face the catastrophe of climate change.  Can’t we muster the gumption to change for them? My friend, Julie, says she has a recurring nightmare where her descendants ask her why she didn’t do something. 

Jan Phillips, co-founder of Syracuse Cultural Workers says this: “No matter what our attempts to inform, it is our ability to inspire that will turn the tides.”  I feel inspired by bike commuters who head out rain or shine and brave all kinds of inconvenience to avoid being “one more car,” and by folks counting food miles and travel miles, carbon footprints and the real cost of the “American Dream.” I’m inspired by those wonderful extremists who challenge themselves and others to “live simply so others can simply live.”

It’s getting hot, and I’m getting more and more uncomfortable. I need a change of soul.  

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?

Garden update - and growing through the economic crisis

We are so close to being able to start planting. Seven people working several hours each day has produced an almost weed-, brick-, rock-, broken glass-free, 20' X 35' area of awaiting soil. Almost.

We are fortunate that a group of young adults from the University of Cincinnati decided to join our household during their spring break - right at the time the empty lot became available for a garden. They are a joy to work with, and much needed labor!

I'm generally inclined to appreciate any person on an "alternative" spring break.  Being oriented toward something a little different, they seem particularly open-minded, and even enthusiastic about some of the goals we have around here. No one balked at flushing the toilets with gray water from the sinks and showers. And when I talked with some of them about our kitchen policy and "food theology" they asked good questions and seemed well-disposed overall toward the idea of eating more simply and with the well-being of others in mind. They seem to want something more, but not in a material sense. It gives me hope that these are some of the young adults next in line to take the reins.

Ironically, one morning while the students were gardening, I needed to step out for a while to talk to another young adult I know who had a problem he wanted to discuss with me: crippling credit card debt that had gotten completely out of control. He couldn't make the monthly payments anymore and wondered whether he should try to consolidate the debt through credit counseling or seek bankruptcy. On top of it, he was deeply ashamed and embarrassed to be in this situation. My first inclination was to encourage him by reminding him that he is not alone - that people all over the country (some with a lot more life experience than he has) are faced with debts they cannot pay, and to tell him that we could look together at the options for handling the debt. But there is so much more to say.

I tend to think of crises of all stripes as spiritual/moral ones, crossroads where you have to look hard at yourself and decide not only what you are going to do, but what kind of person you are going to be. But I want to talk about the economic crisis - both personal and national - in this context for very practical reasons; I think the other solutions - getting bailed out by the creditors or the government or a family friend - are not getting to the root of the problem. Surprisingly, my young friend didn't balk at this. He wanted to talk about his drive to prove himself to his family and friends by appearing successful, i.e. having and doing lots of stuff. He wanted to confess that he kept telling himself "his ship was about to come in" - graduation, the first job, the raise, the tax return, etc. - and would wipe the slate clean for him. His biggest worry was not his credit rating or even the problem of having a lot of worthless stuff that he was expected to pay for over the course of many years. His biggest worry was what people would think of him.

I think this is a burden so many in our country drag around - the need to prove our worth to others by the things we own, the places we can afford to vacation, even the degrees we were able to purchase with student loans.  We've had it driven into our heads for so long that happy or good or smart or successful people (choose your measure) must have certain things (an SUV or a Prius, an expensive dinner out or a concert experience, a cruise or a "green vacation"), that we've lost our ability to think what it is we value or need for ourselves. We've lost our (own) minds.

These crossroads appear in any life, but it is interesting when so many people arrive at the same one at the same time. What are we going to change? Who do we want to be? I'd much rather be having those conversations than just the ones about what size and type of bailout or stimulus will get us back to where we were the quickest.  Backwards is not the direction we need to be going, or leading our young toward. Fortunately, there's a lot of reason to hope in our young people, both the alternative types and the ones being forced to seek an alternative. We need to grow with them.

Blue House Pants™

family pants

I love it when resources and needs come together. So often it's the other way around: There's a need for a vacation, but no time or money. Or tons of seeds, but no garden space.  How about this: There's a need for fair-trade boxer shorts, and we have a lot of sheets.

We're hoping this may morph into a "cottage industry" for our Catholic Worker House; you can read more here. But we're also thinking it's a good way to help clothe a family. Re-using is time-honored for sure. Before the advent of shockingly cheap clothing (back when we used to manufacture clothing in the USA and labor laws forced us to offer fair hours and wages, safe working conditions, and adult labor), families saved money by handing down clothes, often re-made to fit the next in line.

Now we're looking at sheets and other large swaths of fabric with fresh eyes: I see embroidered baby pants from the sage green flannel sheets; I see skirts and pants from the floral curtains we no longer have windows for (uh oh, now I'm seeing the Trapp family on the Sound of Music - STOP!).

And I'm seeing "locally sewn" pants-making this Saturday in our dining room. If you know how to sew and can help, or if you want to learn how to sew (so you can help), stop by.

locally-sewn