The Stuff of Community

I belong to a group called CenterPeace that meets about every other week for prayer and supper, usually followed by a board game. We've been meeting in one anothers' homes for seven years now.

As we were gathering for supper last weekend at Lois' house in Minneapolis, I saw that she had set the table with a set of china that were familiar. Back in 1991 I had inherited the set from a friend who had died, but didn't really need them or have room to store them, so a few years back I gave them to Lois. It was nice to greet them again and see them being used.

As we were enjoying our meal, I began to think about all the things in my house that came from people in CenterPeace and elsewhere. There's a round coffeetable that came to me recently when Kathy moved. Several chairs and a loveseat arrived last summer when Monica was getting ready to go to minister in Uganda. There's a set of wood-cutting tools that used to belong to Roland, who died about 6 or 7 years ago, and a clear glass tea mug that Genevieve used at a meeting back in the late 80s. I never met Genevieve, but I've heard a lot about her. She was a sister in my community who died just before I joined. I also have a small rocking chair that belonged to Sister Mary Davida, another sister I never met. My nightstands belonged to Marilyn's mother. The pizza cutter and the watering can came from Phyllis' apartment after she died. The screen door was designed and built by Althea. The chairs around the picnic table used to live on my parents' back porch, and made the trip from Colorado stacked in the backseat of my car. Liz gave me a small bookshelf and one of the lamps in the computer room. The other lamp in there was a gift from my mother. There are three original paintings in the living room. Two of them were gifts from the artists. One was done by my grandmother. I fetched it from Missouri in a borrowed van about a year after she died.

Sometimes I see Joyce wearing clothes that I didn't need anymore, and Anne Joachim is still walking around in the Birkenstocks that were too narrow for my feet. I've lost count of the number of people who have peace lillies that I've given away whenever I repot my plants. Sue took the rectangular coffee table that never really worked in my living room when she moved last summer. I don't know who has my old kitchen table. I had put it out on the boulevard with a sign that said, "Free," and someone came by with a pickup truck to get it. Althea enjoys the Adirondack chairs I gave her all summer. They fit her (tall) better than they did me (short).

My motley collection of furniture and household stuff will never make the pages of any home and gardening magazine, but that's ok. Even though some of it is shabby and none of it matches, it's all interwoven with the people who make community here in this time and place. None of it is theoretical. It's all just real, tangible stuff, and mundane, daily actions.

Photograph of Lois' dog, Mosey, taken at a CenterPeace gathering on September 12, 2009.
All photographs by Baya Clare, CSJ unless otherwise noted.

Back Home Again

Boonville, Missouri: A surprising feature to find on the top of a Presbyterian church.

Rice County, Minnesota

Canoes at Myre-Big Island State Park, Minnesota.

A wind farm in northern Iowa.

Changing leaves in Rice Lake State Park, Minnesota.

After my meeting in St. Louis was finished, I picked my mom up at the airport and we headed west across Missouri. Along the way we visited the towns where my maternal grandmother was born and where she grew up. We also spent a couple of hours visiting with friends from our old church in Columbia, where I was born and lived till I was 10. The faces above are of some of the many people there who, along with my family, were among my first teachers about God and community and friendship.
Moving away from Columbia was a wrenching loss for me, and it took me many years to grieve it. But on the drive home to Minnesota yesterday, as I was grieving it a little more, I realized that that early experience of community is what makes community-building such an important ministry for me today. I know it's possible, because there it was. And so it is now again also, with different people in a different place, my dear sisters and friends. Having missed it for many years, I have come to understand what a rare, and yet essential gift it truly is.

Be Wary of Answers

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.

-Terry Tempest Williams, naturalist and author (b. 1955)

From an interview of Terry Tempest Williams by Scott London:

London: In An Unspoken Hunger you say, "Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home." What do you mean by that?

Williams: I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community, to include all life forms — plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings — then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are not home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put ... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation.
I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a place. And she sounded the alarm.

London: What do you think happens when we lose a sense of intimacy with the natural world around us?

Williams: I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other. What we perceive as non- human, outside of us, is actually in direct relationship with us.

London: You were talking about the concept of "community." What does that mean to you?

Williams: Community is extremely intimate. When we talk about humor, I love that you know when you're home because there is laughter in the room, there is humor, there is shorthand. That is about community. I think community is a shared history, it's a shared experience. It's not always agreement. In fact, I think that often it isn't. It's the commitment, again, to stay with something — to go the duration. You can't walk away. It's like a marriage, only I think it's more difficult to divorce yourself from community than it is to a human being because the strands are interconnected and so various...Read the whole interview here.

I've mentioned before in this blog my mid-life's great desire just to stay home, and not travel much. In the time I've lived in this house, especially, which is now three years, I've been very deliberate about connecting with my immediate surroundings. I keep up with the neighborhood news, I travel only 8 blocks to work, I sit out on a nice bench in our front yard when the weather permits, I watch and encourage a new tree in the yard; I shop nearby, I have friends over a lot, I pay attention to who's around and how we're all doing. I think I'm finally outgrowing the need to not be where I am, which is a pervasive temptation for intuitives, especially, and a temptation that is fostered and abetted in our particular culture as well. In practical terms, it also means my creative process is quite different than it was twenty years ago: it's much less urgent, much more grounded, much more joyful, more about beauty and prayer, less about personal expression, more about the common good. It comes from being at home and knowing where and who I am, I think, and where I am not, and who I am not, which may be just as important to know.

Anyway, in the service of being home, here's another bird movie, about some birds in the state park just two miles south of where I live. It's 2 1/2 minutes long. I had to take the sound off to get it down to a size where Blogger could accept it, but will upload a version with sound to YouTube soon. Meanwhile, enjoy!

Today I'm grateful for: the beauty of the birds, deer and trees at Fort Snelling State Park; David Sibley's bird books; the vast paradigm-subverting, collaborative creation that is the web; my community; my home, my friends; my Twitter buds; good health; the freedom and ability to be with some folks through difficult times when I can; people who help me through the hard stuff; Beth Kanter's good work in the world, and the good work it inspires in others.

Holding in prayer today: Community members and all recovering from surgeries and illnesses; a housemate who'll be having surgery tomorrow; a difficult relationship; J&J in their new marriage; ML, PC, SP, HC; Elaine; SG adjusting to a lot of changes; sisters traveling in Uganda; the suffering people of Burma and the suffering people of China; the people of the United States, esp. people working to make this nation less mean and more hospitable; Sisters of St. Joseph in Japan.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

I didn't get around to reading some of Sunday's St. Paul Pioneer Press until last evening, so I didn't see this interesting article about woman-centric housing design till then. The actual printed copy has a nice diagram of one design; alas, the link above has a big ol' honkin' photo of Don Imus instead. (No, he has nothing to
do with woman-centric housing design. Is this a surprise? It's an ad.) Anyway, in my blog entry for Sunday, I briefly discussed housing design tailored for women's religious communities, which is why I bring this up. Perhaps the need isn't so much
for something specific to a religious community, as it is for something that appeals to the way women live together, and/or the way small groups of unrelated, childless
adults live together with intention. This manner of living seems to be getting more
common, at least among people under about the age of 50, from where I sit and
look. I'll admit, I could be delusional, and my view is naturally limited, but when I look around at my friends, a good many of them, even the ones who are married, are living in groups rather than according to the nuclear model.
Anyway, these new woman-centric housing designs are organized around four basic
types of spaces: de-stressing (a master suite with, say, a sitting area), organizing
(larger pantries), flexible living (unfinished areas, optional bathroom arrangements)
and entertaining (kitchens opening to dining rooms and great rooms). They're
basically built so that the space fits the people rather than the other way around. The
laundry area is where the clothes are, instead of tucked into some otherwise unused
space, like the back entryway, for example.
So, I wonder about designing housing for small communities that would take into
account they way they live, and I think what if? What if we designed a house with about 10 medium-sized bedrooms, (12'x12'?) including several for guests, and laundry facilities in a separate wing on the south side that wouldn't have to be heated in the same way as the rest of the house, with one or two dorm-like bathrooms also in that wing?
In the main part of the house: big living room with no TV, kitchen and dining room big and seamless, small TV room elsewhere, library/computer room, art room, small chapel or meditation space, a porch opening out to the front of the house, everything pretty much on the same level, small yard close to kitchen, house insulated with something organic like straw and incorporating green technologies like water-saving toilets and showers, safe ways to light rooms without electricity, corn-burning stoves, etc.
Not knowing much about actual housing construction, some of this may not be all that realistic, I realize, but the basic design seems to me like it would work for a small community. I'm envisioning room for 7-8 people who'd be willing and able to live without a lot space for their own personal stuff. Some of what I've said will be familiar to people who've lived in convents, of course, except that in my experience they're usually bigger than 10 bedrooms, have two or more floors, lots of extra bathrooms, and often it seems they incorporate spaces that are entirely unused these days, like a housekeeper's apartment, one or two extra parlors, a small and large dining room, a pantry far away from the kitchen, and the like.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents' worth about community-centric housing design. I'd love
to get a conversation started on this.

Saturday Evening

I have resumed my monthly drop-in breakfasts, and today had four guests show up to drink tea, enjoy toast and egg bake, and visit with me and my kitty-boys. The amaryllis on my dining room table are in full, glorious bloom, and they were much celebrated.

I'm reading Bruce Chilton's book Rabbi Jesus. Highly recommended. I'm going to read his Rabbi Paul and Mary Magdalen next. I wonder if he has ever published his translations of scripture, which are much rougher and infinitely more informative than the usual, edited, literaturized fare. S. Maureen just dropped off the last Harry Potter book as well, which I'm enjoying, though not during my usual bedtime reading, as it's much too big and heavy for that.

I'm also re-reading Humphrey Carpenter's Inklings, about CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Charles Williams. For some reason the description of CS Lewis' rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, reminded me of a conversation I had with Annette McDermott, SSJ (Springfield) about 5 years ago. She remarked that research, surveys, (and ordinary conversation, for that matter,) suggest that many younger members of religious communities would prefer to live in groups of 4-7, but that it's hard to find living spaces that work well for that kind of a community. The old convent model doesn't quite do it, and the average single-family home doesn't really lend itself to such a group of unrelated adults either. She wanted to convene a conference of younger sisters, designers, architects and builders to see what kind of a dwelling could be designed to fit the bill. Don't quite know when that will ever happen, but in the meantime I made a few sketches last night, and will post them here if they amount to anything.