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.