Girloutatexas

Lesson At The Grocery Store

I'm going to be 50 this year. 50! How did that happen?

I'm not extremely bothered by the turning of this page...at least it seems like I've got a pretty good chance of getting to that mark. But it does make me think more about my parents and where they are in the continuum of life.

They live in a moderately large city and since I came from that same moderately large city, I've always assumed it was "their community." Funny how a trip to the grocery store managed to change that assumption.

Here on the island, I have no blood relations nearby. But I have a strong sense of community. When I go to the grocery store, I spend 25% of my time there actually shopping, the other 75% is spent visiting with friends and neighbors who are there to pick out their dinner for the day. While we all have our favorite "checkers," we recognize each of them, and they recognize us, as do most of the other people in the store. Everyone expects that no matter how their day has gone, what their aches and pains might include, what challenges are being confronted, at the grocery store someone is going to ask them how they are, and they are going to be genuinely interested in the answer.

Having gone to my folks' grocery story, I don't feel the same is true for them.

My brother lives 5 hours away from Mom and Dad. I'm a 4 hour flight away, which really means 8-10 hours away from their door, if I'm lucky.

If we can't be there for them, and no one at their grocery store is genuinely concerned about them...who will be?

Who knew that a trip to the grocery story could be so thought provoking?

Perspective

There is nothing like family history to make you count each day as a miracle. I just spent a week down in Texas, working with my father on the footprint his great-grandfather made in this world. Although the stories and photographs are still coming in, here are a few...along with the reason they made me pause to think about my own life.

Clara, the little girl on the right, was born in 1908. She was the grand-daughter of my father's great-grandfather. And she died before her 4th birthday.

 

The little boy on the left is my grandfather :) He was born in 1915, to a Potawatomi woman in Kansas. He was adopted by a German family in Texas, and a nurse from Hamilton, Texas, went to get him. She also brought Henry, the little boy on the right.

My grandfather was forever exploring this life...buying, trading, changing jobs, taking care of his family but also having fun. He died at 77.

 

The little boy on the right is my father :) . Now 72, he's had his knee worked on, and has gone through two rounds of treatment for prostate cancer. He's a man focused on honor, respect, and a worldview that sees absolute right and wrong.

 

I've learned that life moves quickly. So I'd better pay attention and live every moment.

A New Year!

It's been so long! My life is wonderful, happy, stimulating, and well, obviously full! But the New Year has given me a good excuse to get back to this blog. Regular posts are right up there with "lose weight," "exercise more," "write more letters," "do more art," and other stereotypical new year resolutions. So here goes!

Spurred on by friends and co-workers, I'm working on a book this year.

There. I said it. Doesn't make it happen, necessarily, but makes it rather embarrassing to fall short of the mark.

The working title is "How It Showed Up Today: observations of democracy in a small community" and it is (will be) basically a compilation of stories that highlight the way individuals and groups work together on South Whidbey to create a democratic fabric.

This first week has provided a phenomenal string of conversations, and my formal observations are struggling to keep up. But it's nice to have a focus...a goal.

I hope you'll find it interesting. More than that, I hope you'll participate! Please add comments and story suggestions as the year progresses. Even if you don't live on South Whidbey, your input is important to me.

 

 

We Are So Funny

I’m working on two facilitation projects, and one potential civic engagement project. Besides living in a state of perpetual excitement, I’m growing more and more amused by our split personality regarding structure and independence.

 

On one hand, we want order. We want things to make sense across the spectrum of our communities. We want to know the rules, who enforces them, and the consequences for breaking them. We want to know how to move forward, and how to be good partners on projects that stand to benefit us individually (and sometimes even collectively). 

On the other hand, we want complete freedom to do what we want to do, when we want to do it. We want to be free of requirements to tell others what we are doing. We want to be able to move ourselves forward without paying for the services that make such motion possible.

 

We want “others” to make sense out of our complex social system, and make decisions for us so that we don’t have to be bothered. But we want them to decide in ways that support our individual opinions and biases – and the less informed we are, the more vehemently we call for this.

 

I think maybe it’s time for me to go back and review that text on polarity management!

Taking Pictures for Regretsy

Sunday

So much for a day of rest.

John is feverishly working on his Etsy page. I just finished typing up a year's worth of notes on family history. Soon I'll go to the grocery store to figure out how much meat, cheese and bread it takes to make sandwiches for 50 for our Soil Building Workshop tomorrow. After that, I need to design an evaluation for that workshop, and take the next steps on our Food System Asset map project.

In between, there is a pumpkin waiting to be carved, and laundry to be done for the week.  I need to work on my resume', just in case I get the chance to apply for the job I'm currently filling :)

Emma is the only one who seems to understand what "resting" means, and yet she gets so much of it, thanks to our busy schedules, that I'm sure she'd rather we take a turn at NOT WORKING so she could go for a long walk.

What is it about our lives that causes us to work so hard at filling up the spaces instead of leaving a few gaps?

Front Yard Hope

 

We are on the heels of the 4th of July weekend. A holiday that brings up some deeply mixed emotions for me as well as many others. I think my friend, Sarah Murphy-Kangas, put it best in her holiday entry on her blog:

On this 4th of July, I’m grateful to live in this country and content with my good life.  I’m mad about a lot of things, though–our horrible immigration policy, the torture of detainees after 9/11, the astronomical costs of healthcare, the millions of non-violent criminals locked up as a result of the war on drugs, a system that produces so many working poor folks.  So the 4th is a complicated holiday for me, and I suspect for many of you.  I’m going to celebrate, but I’m celebrating what this country can be, what’s possible.  I’m going to celebrate the (someday?) advent of Martin Luther King’s dream, that the triple evils of materialism, militarism, and racism will one day be toppled, that we will live in peace with one another.  I’m going to celebrate the possibility that we’ll stop discriminating on the basis of gender, race, religion, and every other identifier, and that the gap between rich and poor will disappear.  And I’m going to celebrate the part I have to play.

I thought about her words as friends and family visited in the front yard on Saturday. Between us, we represented a pretty wide swath of Americana, from formally educated to life educated, financially comfortable to financially fragile, old to young, conservative to progressive, military to civilian, religious to spiritual and everything in between, and more. We didn’t represent the traditional categories of diversity (race, ethnicity, etc.) but there were still any number of topics that could have divided us even as we sat next to each other.

Our front yard took on the symbolism of hope for me.

I need this hope, as there is one neighbor who has decided that he will not speak to me. Will not look at me. Will not come sit in our yard while I am there. One day we ate meals together and shared jokes and stories together. The next, he was done with me.

On the 4th, with people gathered in our front yard, he would come as far as the edge of his front yard, look around, then walk back into his house. He did this often enough for others to ask why he wasn’t joining us.

I know I played a role in this. So, I have work to do…within myself…to discover how to grow and shift and move beyond it. Not to “help” my neighbor, but to become more of who I am needing to be in this situation. This kind of chasm is precisely the kind of beginning buried beneath violence and hatred and I would rather not give it tinder. Yet it’s amazing how much ego, pride, and defensiveness comes up in me as I consider what to do.

As I spent a little time sorting through this today, I came upon a video put out by an organization called Compassionate Listening. It was as if a voice shifted from a whisper to a gentle conversational tone…

There is learning to be done. With hope. Front yard hope.

The Great Community Garage Sale: Desire, Anticipation and Anxiety

Garage Sales offer great alternatives to buying “new” stuff…a form of recycling, or community sharing. They are especially helpful to people during tough economic times. And when small efforts are combined into one large one, focused on raising money for community service projects, you end up with a spectacular social event to boot.

This is the case each summer in Coupeville. The Lions Club gathers used goods from hundreds of donors, organizes them into sections at the local elementary school parking lot and gym, sticks fantastic prices on them with masking tape. They hold excited buyers at bay, behind a yellow tape, until precisely 9am on a widely publicized Saturday. Then, with a short countdown and blast of a foghorn, everyone races to find their treasures!

Great fun, great buys, great times. And…

To increase interest in the sale, the Lions open it up for a “preview” the Friday before the sale. At that time, folks are welcomed to explore the amazing variety of stuff to see what they might be interested in. They are not allowed to touch anything (so you can’t move an item to a less visible place ☺) and not allowed to reserve or purchase anything.

What ends up happening is a form of strategic planning. Families come prepared with bits of paper on which they draw maps. Individuals snap photos so they can go home and mull over their priorities before the next morning. Kids find one toy or another that they “just have to have” and newcomers stake their hopes on a house full of “new” furniture.

And what happens next is fascinating. With desire established, anticipation sets in. And sometime before bedtime, anxiety will begin to creep into the psyches of garage sale goers.

In the morning, lining up behind that yellow tape, you’ll hear parents calmly but seriously telling their kids “remember, it’s just an object…if you don’t get it, that’s OK, you’ll find something else,” or couples talking themselves down a bit with “we already have plenty of stuff, so if we don’t get that chest of drawers, we’ll be OK.”

You’ll also hear families going over their plan of acquisition. “OK, honey, you run back to the BBQ’s and I’ll dash over to the china and flatware…kids, you run and jump on that green couch and give this $20 to one of the Lions so we can use it as a place to drop off all our stuff while we shop for the rest.”

The foghorn goes off, and people literally run! It’s not unusual to see little kids or fragile elders fall or get pushed off paths – fortunately in most cases, those nearby stop to get them out of harms way.

It’s intense. It’s an event that brings out both the most generous and the most greedy sides of our community. Luckily, I believe that the strength of our community allows us to experience this paradox with good humor and compassion. We can congratulate the person who snatched up the table saw right as our hand reached out for it, and offer to trade the remote controlled helicopter for the remote controlled corvette. We can say “I didn’t really need another sewing machine” and mean it, and can recognize the joy of finding something we hadn’t noticed the day before.

Humanity meets community. Definitely a glorious work in progress. And as evidenced by the Lions Garage Sale, one worth engaging in, for all it teaches us about ourselves.

How Will You Enjoy Your Life Today?

Last week, I walked down to The Little Brown Farm to get some feta for a big summer salad. When I arrived, Vicki warned me that she had only had 2 of her requisite 3 cups of coffee, and that she needed milk for her third cup before she would be safe to talk to.

First of all, I don't believe that to be true. I've never had a curt conversation with Vicki. Second of all, her method of adding milk to her coffee was exquisite!!!! You should have seen the thick foam that resulted!

I don't drink milk of any kind, and I don't have goats. But Vicki taught me something that morning. Even in the most routine of moments, we can choose to enjoy our life. We can have fun. We can laugh at ourselves and with others. And by paying attention, we can find little indulgences all around us.

So, how will you enjoy your life today?

Learning Something New