Category Archives: Community/Interconnectedness

Hello, badly-neglected blog. Remember me? I’ve been feverishly working like a crazy woman on the final, final draft of a book I’d love to finish before this summer. And so, per my usual, Can Only Do One Thing At A Time, have churlishly cast you aside. Please forgive me.

This month I’ve been (haphazardly)  mulling over Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self. So as a final, February posting—thank you, Leap Day!—get to tell one more story that I think illustrates Macy’s loving, embracing, grace-filled world-view, specifically her “greening of the self.” Which means, as she says, to  transcend “separateness, alienation, and fragmentation,” getting beyond “that skin-encapsulated ego.”

So: One Saturday night, recently, my husband and I got on the Green Line T after attending a chamber-music concert. Like all Saturday nights in downtown Boston, the subway was packed with loud, party-hearty college students. Just as we squeezed on the train, for example, a young woman seated near us let everyone in the car know that when she turned twenty-one, she’d downed, yup, twenty-one shots of tequila. Get the picture?

Two seats away from Tequila Girl sat a heavy, tired-looking African-American woman, perhaps the only other older person in the car besides my husband and me. Looking at her exhausted face, I’d felt so protective, so outraged on her behalf: She’s just coming back from work, I decided.  She doesn’t NEED to deal with these dumb, obnoxious, entitled kids!

But then I noticed something truly amazing. Seated between that tired woman and Tequila Girl was another young woman—she may have even been TG’s friend. And on Date Night USA, guess what that young woman had on her lap? A very well-used, well-loved anthology of Langston Hugh’s poetry!

Just imagining why that young woman was carrying that thick book, just contemplating how the poetry in her book, the woman patiently sitting beside her, and all of us on that car were connected in some deep, profound way allowed me to shed my own skin-encapsulated and incredibly judgmental ego. (Hope you’re sensing this skin-on-the-back-of-my-neck-raising moment at least a little!)

Extraordinary!

The one beloved becomes many, and the world itself is [my] lover. (Joanna Macy)

Maybe it’s like this:

A couple of years ago, I bought a beautiful, little area rug from a struggling Tibetan/Nepali shop around the corner from my house. This rug now graces my front hall. Given how lovely it is, I paid very little for this gem. Why? Because, as the woman in the store was good enough to show me, it had two, small worn spots on it. And then she threw herself ON the rug to demonstrate how those worn spots were the result of someone, many someones, maybe, kneeling in prayer!

Taken aback by her over-the-top demonstration, stymied by my complete lack of information—Nepali people pray on rugs? I thought only Muslims do that. I am so ignorant!—I was not able to really take in what she told me. Not really. But the other day, vacuuming that rug, I got it. And was filled with, yup, great love for both that agile saleswoman and all those unseen, only to be imagined knees!

[Good thing my New Year’s resolutions didn’t include posting more blogs, huh! Or I’d be feeling really guilty about now.]

Tomorrow afternoon, from 3 until 5, my husband and I are hosting a neighborhood coffee to talk about—well, the agenda is not the point.

The POINT is this: As any Patriots fan will tell you: Tomorrow afternoon is not a great time to host a meeting. (Seems there’s a game or something.)

So, yesterday, dropping another flyer for this coffee in neighbors’ mailboxes, stewed over the likelihood that very few people will show up. But since one agenda item, the controversy around affordable housing in Union Square*, is somewhat time-sensitive  (a community meeting on this issue is tentatively scheduled in a couple of weeks), decided to go ahead, anyway. Although I felt a little stupid about it. And reluctant to put much energy into something fated to be a total bust.

But, as so often happens as I trudge along somewhere, Something came to me: be faithful (or, in my case, practice being faithful). This coffee is a good idea. Be faithful to connecting people, sharing resources, creating community, etc. Just do it. Do it joyfully.

Okedoke.

* Many New England cities are organized around squares, i.e. commercial areas/transportation centers/where a bunch of streets come together.Our neighborhood’s part of Somerville’s Union Square.

New Year’s eve was mistily magical this year; streetlights, headlights, Christmas lights were surrounded by a glowing aura. Walking through Union Square that evening just as the last Market Basket customers exited the supermarket parking lot, my husband and I were approached by two men. One of them continued to walk in our direction, the other stopped and looked down at his sneakers for a couple of seconds. When we got close to him, he said to us, “Happy new year,” in a cheerful, heavily accented voice. We wished him the same.

“That’s why he’d stopped,” we decided. “He wanted to practice.”

Thus my new year began, with this tentative, warm expression, a reminder of our collective just-starting-out, our shared need to practice!

. . . and, by the way, their fashion-sense may differ from your own.

Today at our Meeting’s Forum—a 45-minute opportunity to listen to and ask questions about whatever various individuals or groups wish to impart—we learned about AFSC’s Clothing Room. Housed in the basement beneath our meetinghouse, the Clothing Room used to send donated clothing all over the world. Nowadays it services those in need  who, after they’d been recommended by a social worker or anti-poverty agency and had scheduled an appointment, arrive at the designated time to browse through the ton of donated stuff and take take whatever they need.

“But you need to park your ego at the door,” the presenter, who often volunteers in the Clothing Room, explained. “Like one time I saw a whole bunch of turtlenecks being recycled.” (Sometimes donated items are given to other agencies or, if absolutely unusable, thrown away.) “Perfectly good turtlenecks! So I protested. But was told, ‘ No one wants turtlenecks. So we don’t bother keeping them on our shelf.’ ”

Is it just me or is that one of most, ahem, telling stories you’ve  ever heard?’

*Matthew 26: 11.

I have a Bank of America Mastercard. Any day now, I can proudly say, “had.”

The last straw, of course, was B of A’s decision to charge a fee for debit card transactions. C’mon! That’s just mean. So while the mega-financial institution recently rescinded this exploitive scheme, it’s still, “So long, baby!”

The switch-over was incredibly easy. I contacted Joe Grafton, head of LocalFirst, a Somerville-based agency urging all of us to, ahem, shop local, and asked him who issued credit cards around here.

Answer: the CPCU Credit Union. Started in 1928, the Cambridge Portuguese Credit Union’s Somerville office is  a couple of blocks from my house. (I’ve been using their ATM for years.)

For $25, I became a member so am now eligible for a no-annual-fee Visa.

A couple of days after I made the switch, a green and white Door 2 Door van—a free service for local seniors—drove past. Guess what was painted on the side of the van? Yup.  An announcement that CPCU sponsored this most-needed service.

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. 
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. 
And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, 
is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle,
the subject and the object, are one.
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; 
but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson—

We’re all deeply interconnected: “Move the money.”

At a candid moment last month, in the thick of Hope and Kristian’s wedding celebrations, I blurted out: “I fear for my country.” And got a huge laugh from the crowd. A relieved sort of laugh. A “I am so glad you said that!” sort of laugh.

Sad, huh?

But yesterday, my fears were somewhat allayed at the opening ceremony for Honk! (Which always makes me cry.)

If, indeed, we are collectively witnessing “The American Autumn,” if, AT LAST, Americans are taking it to the streets to protest endless war and environmental degradation and “Wall Street,”* may American Autumn look and sound and feel like Honk:

In outlandish costume (as a guy on the 87 bus observed yesterday: “Once a year, Somerville looks like San Francisco!”). With brass bands. With much laughter and good humor and dancing. But (and this is what I so powerfully sensed at the opening ceremony) underneath all that joy pulses an absolute, steely, fundamental and profound understanding that we, the people, shall overcome.

So imagine my joy when later, hundreds of us got to sing an upbeat, peppy rendition of  “We shall overcome”  accompanied by trombones and cymbals! Definitely uplifting.

* An all-purpose term meaning, to me, any and all heinous ways $ is mismanaged in this country. Like Bank of America now requiring a monthly fee from its debit card customers. (Although, technically, B of A ain’t ON Wall Street, I’m guessing)

During a quiet moment this reflective weekend, had the opportunity to list in my journal how, ten years later, September 11, 2001 has forever changed me. Last night I added one more. I offer this brief list NOT because it’s unique. Just the opposite. At whatever latitude and longitude, let us mourn. Together.

How My Life Is Different Post 9/11:

1. Fear and sadness are the fabric of my life.

2. I know more about Islam and day-to-day Middle-Eastern life.

3. I know I am being watched/under surveillance.

4. TWO wars daily break my heart.

5. I better know the answer to “Why do they hate us so?”

And finally, # 6, which came to me after reading Thomas Friedman’s piece in the NYT and while walking on a broken, trash-strewn sidewalk along Somerville Avenue—and after seeing “Higher Ground”:

“This is it.” Broken, neglected infrastructure, the hopelessness and futility and rage expressed by this crap is How It Is, How It Will Be, I fear.

(Unless, of course, you and I . . . )

The day before Hurricane Irene was due, had been searching online for info I could relate to, i.e., simply gave just the facts, ma’am: no hysteria, no hype, no overblown videos. And discovered the National Weather Service’s no nonsense site.

Of course, the first thing the site wanted to know was: Where are you? So I typed in my zip code.

I’ve bookmarked that site; now, every morning I read “7-Day Forecast for Latitude, 42.39 degrees N and Longitude, 71.09 degrees W.” (AKA 02143. AKA Somerville, MA.)

So here’s an emerging spiritual exercise: To first take a few moments every morning to envision this precious planet, its globe-ness, its continents and seas, and then to take time to imagine carefully calibrated lines from earth’s poles and from above and below its middle and to feel where I am in relation to the equator and Greenwich, England.

“Ahh,” I think. “So that’s where I am!”

But there’s more to that Ahh than a mental acknowledgement of longitude and latitude, more to that profound sense of place. Here’s what else I contemplate while sipping my coffee: I’m—and you’re and we’re—in It and of It and It. The Soup. The Ball o’ Wax. The Whole Enchilada. Om/Aum. Within God. Deeply interconnected.

And whatever we do to the earth and to one another we do to ourselves and to The Divine.

(This Mindful stuff is exhausting!)

One of the things I love to do on the 4th—don’t know why, exactly—is to read the Declaration of Independence on The Boston Globe‘s editorial page. (Yup; they print it every year.) No longer a home subscriber (Yup; finally gave up), it took me a little while to actually find it online but eventually, there it was. (Yup; reading that lofty document online does give me that same mysterious thrill!)

Like other online articles, The Globe’s annual Independence Day offering included the opportunity for comments. And although an inward voice screamed, “Don’t do it, Patricia!” I did read a few. Not surprisingly, given the deep, deep divisions in the good ol’ US of A right now, many nasty, “vitriolic” comments were there to marvel over. (Apparently, Patriotism really means Freedom to Own Guns. I had no idea!)

One commenter, wasting a perfectly lovely summer day to sit at his/her computer arguing with another commenter at some length, used the words “Mirror-logic.” Which, I take it to mean, interpreting the world—or, in this case, an historical document—from one’s own (limited/flawed, all too human. . . ) perspective.

Loathe to waste a perfectly lovely summer morning sitting at my computer AND eager to address my residual fearfulness re riding my bike in the city (what better opportunity to get my bike mojo working than on a holiday when all the traffic’s on the Cape?!), I strapped on my helmut  and took to the bike lane on Somerville Avenue. And eventually to the bike path out of Davis Square. Final destination: Spy Pond.

Seeing my Somerville-Cambridge-Arlington world from my cushy seat ( a HUGE consideration when I’d bought my Trek Allant for my 65th birthday), I saw connections and patterns and features I would otherwise never be able to see.  How the wetlands near Alewife T Station relate to nearby ponds, for example. Or how a couple of co-housing developments celebrate their  bike path access.

And, I gotta say,  I thought I saw The Beginnings of Something Working Right. That in the current course of human events, when dependence on the automobile MUST be severed,  we are declaring our, well, not independence, but Getting Ready.

Huzzah!

Just got back from a wonderful family visit to Brooklyn where I spent sweet time with my grandson and grand-daughter and their terrific parents. And experienced my first Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.

Coney Island, classic Last Stop on a Subway Line—with attendant amusement park and miles of beach to attract weekend ridership—vigorously holds on to its tawdry past. Not with its crumbling buildings, freak show/side show attractions, cheap thrills, overpriced souvenirs, faded, iconic billboards , incessant noise. And, just to be clear, I’m not talking about the bare-breastiness of the Mermaid Parade. All these are, arguably, charming!

I’m talkin’ trash. On the face of it, aside from Nathan’s Famous, Coney Island’s business owners seem to have made a conscious decision: We will not provide trash cans. (Kinda skimped on adequate rest rooms, too.)

God knows, if you’re walking around holding an empty Styrofoam cup for blocks and blocks, you begin to really wonder: Should I have ordered that pistachio-chocolate swirl softserv in the first place? (Answer: maybe I should have ordered a cone!) God knows, if you’re seated in the outdoor seating area right next to a Nathan’s Famous trashcan so can observe how often a sweaty employee empties the thing, one’s awareness of the sheer magnitude of  disposable crap intensifies.

[BTW: Spectacle Island, one of Boston Harbor’s islands, has a no trash can policy: Visitors have to remove whatever crap they’d brought or bought from the island. AND THERE ARE SIGNS EXPLAINING THIS!]

But, hey. While I’m always overwhelmed by the Big Apple’s muchness, I am also always impressed by its Let’s Make This City Work energy. If NYC kids are currently reading comics starring The Green Lantern, comics which tout (hector?) responsible electricity usage—and they are—surely another Super Hero spouting Disposable! Recyclable! Bring Your Own Utensils! is already in the works.

Went to my 45th Wheelock College reunion last weekend—an abbreviated, spend a few hours on Saturday version.

Beside the fact that I live just miles from my alma mater (so going on a Duck Tour is not going to be the highlight of my reunion), my reasons for this abbreviated version are complicated and not worth going into here.

What, courtesy of the Internet, I would like to share is this:

Spending time listening to other women talk about their lives is fascinating. (Until it becomes so overwhelming that I gratefully hop on the T and go home!)

This year, I had two opportunities to listen: my class’s traditional, post-luncheon get-together, when the twenty or so of us go around the circle and share. And I also attended a workshop on “Transitions,” open to anyone attending her respective reunion, so the chance to listen to younger and older women was especially rich.

Because I want to respect privacy and confidentiality, I’m going to be a little elliptical: One woman talked about an incredibly difficult situation in her family and then said, in effect: “I, of course, would not have wished for this nightmare. But this horror has allowed me to be fully alive;  a fully present participant in what is really the human condition.”

See why I went?