Category Archives: Community/Interconnectedness

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. Van Gogh

Today I put an e-mail re Porchfest in my musician neighbor John’s mailbox.

Like many  greater-Bostonians, I received countless e-mails these past few days encouraging me to show up at the State House today in solidarity with the workers of Michigan—and, of course, in solidarity with that populist spirit so abundantly manifested all over the world right now.

I’d already made plans to meet up with a group of Somerville Quakers at 2:00 to bowl and eat pizza (?!) so had decided not to go. After all, just how much fun can an aging Quake expect to squeeze into one afternoon, huh? Besides: Gotta save my strength for candlepins and building community, I told myself.

But the voices of Lucy Stone and Alice Stone Blackwell and Julia Ward Howe and their compatriots, those indefatigable abolitionist/suffragette souls I’ve been reading about lately , urged me to “show up.” (Some might view my willingness to listen to those long-gone voices as guilt—certainly bizarre. Trust me, after you’ve read Alice Stone Blackwell’s biography of her mother, Lucy Stone, you’ll totally get it.)

So I did. But had a disquieting experience.

Just as I arrived at the rally, the Second Line Social Aid Pleasure Society Brass Band—from Cambridge—began playing. And not just any song. They played the song I danced to the night Obama was elected.

And for the rest of the time I was there, I couldn’t shake my sadness. How well I remember my euphoria that night (the linked video shows me ever so briefly with a shit-eating grin). Remembering that dancing, joyful me let me truly grasp how disappointed I am, today.

But, hey. Lucy et al had these moments, too, right?

Today’s musing/sheer fantasy is courtesy of two, seemingly random but inexorably-linked-in-mysterious-ways-that-we’ll- never-understand phenomena:

1. Oil is now  $100 a barrel.

2. The snow has melted sufficiently so that the city crap of the past three months is now blatantly, festeringly obvious.

So, today, walking to Inman Square and over and beside and around trash, trash, trash, I remembered during the Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1963) when the Chinese people were exhorted to build backyard furnaces to create steel for all the new and modern Leaps Forward that required steel. (This homemade steel turned out to be pretty shoddy goods. For many reasons, including bad luck with the weather, the GLF was a bust.) And I looked at all the trash in Union Square and along Webster Avenue, 95% of which was made of plastic—a petroleum product, soon to become, perhaps, prohibitively expensive? And fantasized about some miracle technology that could transform all the coffee cup lids and Pepsi caps and plastic bags and the rest of that crap into STUFF WE ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY NEED!

Wild, huh? And here’s where it gets even crazier: Since We the People would be collecting this stuff to be  somehow transformed, WE get to say how this suddenly valuable commodity is used!

Okay, that’s nuts. But here’s a little something re trash that’s true and profound: Now that the Egyptian people feel that their country is theirs, trash has become a political statement. When the Egyptian people felt hopeless, they threw their crap on the streets.With a growing, collective sense of ownership and empowerment, the Egyptian people are reminding one another to clean up their mess.

Hmm.

Last night at our Prison Fellowship meeting, we talked a little about how those working within the prison system, the guards, the administrators, the C.O.s, are just as much prisoners as the incarcerated. Today in this week’s New Yorker, I read an article by David Remnick, “The Dissenters, which makes much the same point. Only in this case, it’s what’s happening to Israelis’ souls because of The Occupation. And just now, I signed a petition distributed by The Color of Change. If you choose to watch their featured video—which is graphic—you’ll no doubt let go of the differentiation between “the bad guys” and “the good guys.”

Oppression poisons the oppressed AND the oppressor.

Friday, a woman I know left a message on my answering machine: “Guess I haven’t been in touch for a while,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

The last time she and I had talked had been five months ago, shortly after my father died. I’d been bereft, of course.

“What can I do?” she’d asked.

“Check in with me from time to time,” I’d requested.

So today, I prayed over this complicated and frustrating relationship. (This is not the first bumpy incident between us. Oh, no.)

I’m stuck, I realized. And have no idea what to do or say other than same ol’—which hasn’t worked, isn’t working for me.

Now, usually, moments like these are pretty devastating, when I’m feeling helpless and, can-you-believe-it, humbled by my cluelessness. But today, for some reason, my sudden realization that I had no idea what to do was tremendously exciting!

So I’ll wait. I’ll “trust the process” as my dear friend Anne advises. In the fullness of time, Something will happen.

Today, after an embarrassingly easy Mohs procedure, I took a walk to Porter Square to get surgical dressing stuff for the incision and, why not, flowers. A beautiful, warm, sunny day, the florist had the door to her shop open it was so warm and the two of us oohed and aahed about the balmy weather.

“You’re going to get some customers,” I promised. “Because I’m walking home and I’ll be carrying these flowers and I’ll have a big ol’ smile on my face.”

A couple of doors away from the florist shop, bearing my cobalt-blue flowers—sorry, don’t recall their name—I walked past two young men in tee shirts who were sitting on their front porch, drinking beer.  Catching one guy’s eye, I grinned; he returned my grin with an all-incompassing nod.

You’re an old lady with a big bandage on your cheek and carrying flowers, that nod said. And I’m a young hipster. But, hey, isn’t this fantastic? We’re both so grateful for this day. And, hey, isn’t this fantastic? Neither of us have to say a word!

My most honest thinking often happens when I vacuum. So today, after a complicated and expensive and seemingly 4-eva session at my dentist’s to get a new crown over a broken tooth, in anticipation for some minor surgery tomorrow and therefore being out of commission for a couple of days, and knowing my beloved daughter and her husband arrive Friday, I cleaned.

Hey, I realized, vacuuming. I am in a really foul mood. And maybe need to just take care of myself before tomorrow’s Mohs procedure?

So tonight, instead of going to the prison circle/trying to be sociable but feeling ornery, after I finally could feel my upper lip (it had been completely numb for over 4 hours), I ate leftovers. Including Ben & Jerry’s chocolate brownie ice cream.

I believe I did everyone a favor by doing so.

Readers to this blog know that this month is all about spiritual exercises: letting go, letting  . . . Something. For readers not living in Red Sox Nation, today’s posting may seem, well, weird. But for those of us who know the answer to the question: “What is a directional turn signal?” (Answer: “A sign of weakness.”),* you’ll completely get it.

Yesterday was Truck Day**. So all over New England, there was a collective sigh: Together we let go of our fears that winter will never end. Although sometimes a stern, Puritanical bunch, at about noon yesterday we allowed ourselves to imagine a hot summer day at Fenway Park, cold (incredibly overpriced) drink in hand and, maybe, Jacoby just stole a base. Or something equally thrilling.

Aaaahh.

*[I think this comes from  a Dunkin’ Donuts ad. Not sure, though.]

**[Truck Day is when a green moving truck carrying Red Sox equipment leaves Yawkey Way for Fort Myers, Florida, the first visible sign in Boston that spring training has begun.]

Today walking up sleety, icy College Avenue, I saw an older woman coming in the opposite direction slip and fall maybe 20 feet from me.

“Are you okay?” I asked as we walked closer together.

She brushed off her pants. “Some of these people,” she said, her voice trailing off. She looked behind her to the spot where she’d fallen—right in front of a church.

I nodded in sympathy, then showed off my YakTrax. Still smarting, still angry, she was not impressed. That she could buy something that would allow her NOT to be victimized by poorly maintained sidewalks wasn’t appealing; she wanted some one to pay!

Mentally acknowledging her anger—heh, such homeowner neglect makes me furious, too—I shifted gears: “Do you live in this neighborhood?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Then why don’t you call 311 and complain? You can tell the operator what happened to you. And give the exact address.”

She smiled.

I have a feeling she’ll call.

Today, walking down a slushy, snowy, side street, I walked past a guy in his car trying to get out of his driveway. But he was stuck. What did he do? He kept gunning his engine—literally, spinning his wheels. And even though it was obvious that his just-overpower-the-problem approach was not working, he continued to push his foot on the accelerator. Like maybe something magic would happen the two-hundred-twelfth time he tried it that hadn’t happened before?

Where does such stubborn inability to accept the obvious come from? My guess is that guy—middle-aged, white, flabby—doesn’t  have much experience with problem-solving without some machine being involved. Something comes up, something needs to be fixed or changed, he uses a computer, grabs a power tool. And, I’m also guessing, that means of problem-solving works for him so much of the time, the idea that he should give up on the mighty power of his car engine and do something low-tech like shoveling or throwing sand under his tires simply doesn’t occur to him.

Or maybe he just loves the smell of burning rubber.

So,  a housebound friend, in between reading good books today, has been listening to the news. She reports that because of the unrest in Egypt et al, oil supplies might be compromised and global markets are already reacting, shall we say skittishly?

“I’m telling you this because I know you’re interested in peak oil,” she told me.

This is NOT the scenario the “We must prepare for the end of cheap oil!” Cassandras have envisioned (Big surprise.).

Given the potential scariness, here, let me offer a prayer: Should, indeed, the violent unrest in so much of the Mideast seriously disrupt oil production and supply, let this momentous moment be a teaching moment for this planet. A dress rehearsal without bloodshed.

Oh. And this: May this moment, when a resource we have so heavily relied upon may be at risk for God knows how long, allow us to think deeply about all the resources we have been blessed with. To think long and hard about, as Buckminster Fuller enjoined us, how “to do more with less.” Let us look at the ways we squander resources. And, yes, certainly, may war-waging be the first thing we look at.