Out of Silence - Into Community?

by Lucy S.

I'm a little amused by a title that suggests that I've been silent for most of this year, as if I'd been quietly meditating somewhere, hardly communicating anything to anyone. Not the case at all... It's more that I've become diffused somehow, pulled in a thousand directions, unsure of what I myself want to write anymore. Well, and then I let weeks and months slip by without writing, and soon I just lost the habit.

I'm still teaching college. I taught two classes last spring and am just finishing two for fall semester. I only have one class set for the upcoming spring semester. Living in this semester has felt good - a healthy balance of work and other parts of life. Next semester should be even easier and give me some time to try some new things.

(Granted, that means living with an income that's under $16,000 for this academic year, but I'm lucky that I can make that work. And I'm tired of thinking about my low pay for the volumes of work I do, so I'm just going to NOT think about it.)

I want to experiment with new ways to build local community. I'm going to take two community art classes with my youngest son - one is painting; one is drawing. I'm thinking about starting a very local ESL group or even a language sharing group. Whatever we do, I want a significant part of it to be here in the city and even neighborhood where we live, rather than almost always going to the bigger cities nearby, the ones we're supposed to only be suburbs of. If I resist being defined as an adjunct - an appendage - why should I keep treating the very real places we live in as appendages? I'm sick of anything that reeks of snobbery, 'coolness' in the worst sense - anything that devalues most of us living our ordinary - and really, not so ordinary, if by that we mean same old or boring - lives. Or maybe that doesn't matter, either. Whether it's cool or uncool is beside the point. What I want are deeper relationships with the people who live around me. I want to learn with them, share what I know, go to each other's homes, grow food with them, work on our own answers to various problems, create together, and find what emerges from all of that. I want to find out who I and we can become.

I'm going to try to write more regularly here again. Writing, for me, is a necessary element for continual birth, I think (the obvious metaphor invoked in this blogsite's title). And I find that I need to write for others as part of a dialogue, and at the same time, that there is a certain amount of necessary space in writing with some anonymity. It allows me to write truer. So here I am.

More than a Goodbye to a Friend

by Lucy S.

My good friend Amir is moving away. I'll see him tonight when he reads his poetry and I'll see him tomorrow when we go see a movie and eat a meal together afterward. Then we'll say goodbye until who knows when, and he'll fly away early Tuesday morning.

I can write that I hate these endings of times that will never come back - the definitive, more noticeable cut-offs that make us see what we otherwise miss when our days seem to go on as if all is staying the same when in reality, everything is always in flux - something always ending, something always beginning.  But I don't know if "hate" is the right word. I wish he could go and have all the new adventures that he will have and we could still somehow meet at least a couple times a month for our relaxed hangouts that have no purpose beyond the joy of talking and being there together.

I can say I don't hate endings because endings bring people into our lives who we'd never know otherwise.  Moving here was an ending to the life Amir had before. Going back to finish my bachelor's degree - which placed me in the class where I met Amir - was an end to the life I'd had before, even if that ending was not as stark and obvious as geographical moves are.  Still, something gets lost even as something new is gained.

I've tried to understand the truth about these endings. Marcuse wrote that "there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time" (47).  And: "Actually it is not a question of the happy end; what is decisive is the work as a whole. It preserves the remembrance of things past" (48). This is the best I can figure out right now.  In whatever ways are possible, I try to make the endings not be total - make them and what comes after them be part of "the work as a whole" - this laboring creation - this story - that is a relationship and a whole life and a whole humanity.



Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.