Bindweed

I have been thinking lately about my relationship to patriarchal images of God. I really don’t want to start a prayer with “Lord.” I recognize that it is really potent and important language for others, and that I very much respect that – it’s just too male and hierarchical for me. Those are my immediate associations, sans a background in Biblical languages and theology, and they are not cosmologies or ways of power that sustain me. I do not want to cultivate them with my life or my ministry.

I often have to remind myself of the other images of the divine that I have been given, in dreams, reverie, worship and artist-mind metaphor: the divine as a wise crone or old woman in the mountain, as a wild trickster in the woods, as a flow of living water.

(And, you know, as a force that likes to call on those of us at the margins, homeless babies, drunks, old ladies and shepherds, to be his prophets – there’s that too, let’s not forget.)

The remembering of these experiences, and the reclaiming and creative resistance to what does not sustain feels constant. It’s a big piece of the work I came to Pendle Hill to do, to begin.

And I’m a bit daunted. It's really exhausting work.

But as it often does, the garden gave me a really good way to understand this situation.

A lot of my time in the garden is spent pulling up weeds – some innocuous, sweet little annuals, but also a lot of bindweed. Given the opportunity, bindweed will twine around other plants, shading them from the sun (and probably choking the life out of them.) It’s is one of those weeds that re-grows if you leave even just a piece of the root in ground. You never get all of the roots. Bindweed has permanent residence in the garden along with the vegetables.

But if you know the weed – if you recognize it and name it, have a daily or regular practice of pulling it out and hemming it back, it makes space for other things to grow and become deeply rooted and strong.

That sounds like good spiritual practice to me. Thank you, garden. 

On the edge: lessons from the suburbs

As my time at Pendle Hill winds down, I have been catching up on my work-study in the garden. Since it’s founding in the 1930s, Pendle Hill has had a large vegetable gardens that provide food for the kitchen. The growing methods are organic, with elements of biointensive, permaculture and other sustainable techniques thrown in. 

Some of the beds I work in are probably decades old and their fertility has been carefully and respectfully maintained. Moving potatoes this afternoon the soil was dark, loamy, light, and rich - totally different from soil in a new, recently tilled bed.  It was enviable, soil that has obviously been well cared for. The whole garden has the well-earned patina of a place where humans regularly collaborate (joyfully, carefully, respectfully, sensually) with the divine. 

Right now the garden feels particularly alive. The asparagus has been up for a few weeks, the arugala and radishes are spicy and fresh, the blueberries are coming in, and the dark green of kale and potatoes is really exciting. There’s a robin nesting in the eaves of the greenhouse, where a lot of plants are still waiting to be put out, and the chatter of birds and bullfrogs is deafening at times. The birds especially make me feel like I live in a rain forest, and work in a garden at the edge of huge, healthy woods. 

The garden is steps from some woods (and Pendle Hill has many amazing trees), but it is is also steps, literally, from 476, the major intra-country highway that runs from I-95 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. From the pea and beet beds, through some trees and over the earthen sound barrier - and there it is. Four lanes? Many cars. 

The highway is loud, and makes conversations in the garden difficult. It is a constant background roar - and I, unlike some, can't seem to convince myself its the sound of a river.  

I remember when they built that highway. I was five or six, and the cutting down of all those trees was, I realize now, one of the most traumatic events of my early life. I have a memory of standing in the wood shop at the Arts Center (immediate neighbor to Pendle Hill), looking out through the courtyard door on a view of stumps to the horizon (I was little, so the horizon was pretty close, in actuality, the highway isn't all that wide.) 

My whole life I've hated that damn highway. It was a cornerstone of what I was fleeing when I quit the suburbs after college for the city and vowed never to come back. 

The highway, like strip malls and ugly housing developments, are a constant reminder to me of what we are ruining, what we do not value, and the ugliness we are capable of creating in the name of progress and convenience and class mobility. While the suburbs are about escaping the crush of the city (and "crush" could mean a variety of things, like crowdedness, pollution... or, oh, maybe racial diversity?), they are not, really, about being close to nature, though greenery seems to be prevalent. 

These are the lessons I learned growing up here:

The suburbs are about holding nature under our heel and making her do tricks. Not living at the edge of or with wildness, at the edge of a glorious unknown. They are not about wonder. They are not about stewardship. 

They are nature tainted and deeply damaged. We will keep cutting down the old mother trees that aren't protected because that's what you do with trees that are in the way.  Those lessons came back painfully when I first came to Pendle Hill in January, when it was hard to get away from the roar of the highway. (Notice I'm not even touch the lessons about community that the suburbs teach...that's another post.) 

But lately another lesson has been emerging.  

In the winter it did not take much to find huge magnificent trees. Now there are bullfrogs in the wetland pond - one of several ponds in this area that drain to the creek. You can hear the highway roar from the pond too. And there are clutches of trees everywhere - the triangle between road, creek, train. In protected little glades and forgotten stone gardens. Huge ones at train stations and in random back lots. 

I haven't read that book The World Without Us, but this winter and spring it became clear to me how quickly nature would reclaim everything if we were not around to stop her. The trees are waiting, patient. They've been here far longer than we, and they are not going to go any where. And they are pretty sneaky. 

There is a lesson here about closeness, about survival, and about cooperation. I find it in the organic  garden, which flourishes with life and wildness so close to the highway. And in the 300 year old beach tree that's also literally steps from the highway. The tree was growing when William Penn landed here and I like to think of it as our resident nature deity, so massive and powerful is its presence (and had Pendle Hill and Swarthmore residents not fought the original highway plan, it would likely have been destroyed, along with most of Pendle Hill).

The lesson is in the juxtaposition - strip malls and wetlands, highways and ancient trees - where we can see what we have made, what we are doing. When the highway is this close, it's hard to ignore. But when the garden, and so the potential for partnership, is this alive, and there are so many birds and amazing trees, that is also hard to ignore. We have to hold them both. The suburbs offer both. 

The lesson is to acknowledge that we have done profound damage by building our highways, strip malls, and cancer-cell housing developments. But that all is not lost - that that spirit still exists,  that we can find it, partner with it, and protect it. 

This thinking has changed how I understand the place that I'm from. 

I guess the suburbs could teach me something yet. 

working philosophy on education (spring '09)

I understand my role as a teacher/educator to be to invite people to knowledge and new experience,  to accompany them in their learning and growth as an ally and support person, and to actively acknowledge the whole, integrated person that each person is, even if I am teaching just one subject. 

Lately I have been thinking about how our culture often teaches, and how we insist that learner's (be they first graders or grad students) master certain tools. I am not so radical as to be ready to throw out all the old tools without trying them - I can get persnickety about grammar, group facilitation, and many other established ways of doing things. It's not that I'm beholden to the tools - I just think they might be useful, and we could be short changing ourselves by rejecting them. 

So, as a teacher I understand my job to be partly offering tools, but with a caveat "I offer this to you because it might be useful to you, and I want you to have useful things. If you discover that it is not useful, or that it is the wrong tool for the task, or more seriously that it detracts from the work and does not serve you, I will not be offended if you lay it down. If that happens, I very much encourage you to fashion new tools from the old ones (and to teach me how to use the new ones, old head that I am)." 

Three Quakers walk into a Safeway...

Cruising to the checkout at a Safeway in Silverton, Oregon, the cashier was surprised I didn’t have a frequent shopper card. Maybe my accent was also suspect. 

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “I’m from Philadelphia.” 

Her gaze meandered to my two friends, both Quakers, who were next to me in line. She took them in: a petite Latina woman and a very dark black man (who’s African - but I’m not sure whether or not that was obvious.) 

“Are they from Philadelphia too?” 

“No,” I answered (playing the talky American), “He’s from Kenya, she’s from Bolivia.” I didn’t give the “many branches of the Quaker church” explanation that I would employ later while hiking. 

She thought about this, looked a little befuddled, then said “Oh. Well I guess you’re all a long way from home.” 

Yes, I thought. We are. 

***

Waiting in the airport, Harriet (who is tall, blond, and English), is approached by a man who asks if John, our Kenyan Friend, is an “elite runner.”

“Usually,” the man says, “when you see someone like that accompanied by a young woman, he’s an elite runner and she’s his handler.” Harriet came back mildly disturbed from this conversation - John was a little amused. 

We suspect “like that” meant a young, well dressed, African man. Though Harriet was dressed way too casual to be anybody’s handler (and lacked a Blackberry).  

***

Working on the Quaker Youth Book Project has been a learning experience in many ways, and not all of the lessons have been explicitly Quaker. While we were at motion in the world together - particularly after the meeting, when five of us  hung out in the Portland area for a few days - I was aware of the double takes and blank stares that indicated it was odd for people like us - of diverse races and national origins -  to be together and have an easy way together. 

One thing I am working on understanding is how claiming spiritual Friends and brothers and sister in faith from around the world, and opening myself to the reality of their lives,  puts me directly in opposition to a racist, US-centric culture.

I encountered this culture in the double takes we inspired walking together through the woods, the Safeway, the airport.  Even when it is kind - as was the cashier - there is a subtext of those people shouldn’t be together, this is unusual.

I encounter it when I consider financial resources and, even though mine are scarce, realize how vast they are in comparison to what other Friends are working with. When I realize how inequitable the distribution of resources is among Friends worldwide, simply because the distribution of resources among people worldwide is fundamentally inequitable. 

Being part of such a diverse church also offers me a glimpse of the Kingdom, to use some explicitly Christian language: a glimpse of what we can be like when we lay down all of our weapons, even those of privilege that we were born with, and meet  each other face to face.

For our editorial board we (13 of, including family and elders) lived together in a house on the Oregon Coast for four days. I glimpsed the Kingdom when we cooked and ate together, minded a baby together, worked together, had the hard conversations where we named and honored our differences, and tried to live our lives (if only for four days) in respect and care for one another.

It was at times awkward, difficult and imperfect. It was alsoprofoundly beautiful and exciting.

A friend at QUIP, the organization sponsoring the QYBP, noted that our work is not only relevant to Quakers. Rather, the work we are doing and the questions we are wresting with are a microcosm of fissures running through society.* I have often thought this - that the work we do to live together as Friends when we engage our diversity enables us to better engage larger societal work of living together, but had not yet put it so eloquently. 

** 

Towards the end of our hike at Silver Creek Falls south of Portland, we ran into a family of two older parents and a college aged son. They wanted to know how long the 5 mile loop had taken us (I think they were a little unprepared), and while we were answering that they became curious about where we were all from and why we were all together - a native Oregonian, an East Coaster, a Brit, a Bolivian, a Kenyan. We explained then, each in our own eloquence (we’re writers and editors after all), and it was then that I muttered something about “Many branches of the Quaker church.” 

“God bless you,” the woman said as we parted. At the time, she didn’t seem like the type to say that - an incorrect judgement on my part -  and I was surprised.

But in retrospect, it was quite fitting. 

 

*Thanks to Terry Sorelle for putting words to this.