Drying Herbs
July 27th, 2010
We have been cutting and drying herbs at our place (oregano, lemon balm, tarragon), and though this is a time consuming undertaking, it is one of those mundane tasks that leave plenty of time for thinking and conversation, and I quite enjoy the labour of it, particularly when friends drop by, not quite unexpectedly, as Don Moore and his family did the other day. While the kids played in the back yard, Don began helping me prepare the herbs for hanging, and we talked, about the book that he is writing on post-9/11 film, about City of God, and about other things. These moments, when others are able to join the rhythm of the home, both practically and intellectually, gratify me very much. They affirm in practical ways the truths I hold most closely.
Walking Schools and Community
June 23rd, 2010
There is neighbourhood group centred around one of the parks near our house. It is not one of the city’s official neighbourhood groups, because there are too many limitations on these organizations. It is simply a group of neighbours who gather to make an icerink or have a community BBQ or run free soccer for kids, and it is by far the most active and functional neighbourhood group in the city.
My wife was talking to a member of this group at the park the other day, and he suggested that the neighbourhood around this park was so strong partially because its school is still exclusively a walking school, so that most of the parents in the area see each other twice a day, five days a week. He was explaining that this sense of community is what makes the school’s PTA so strong, but I think that it also goes a long way toward explaining why the city’s most active and most independent neighbourhood group is centred around the closest park. There are only two walking schools left in the city, both of them less than ten minutes walk from my front door, and I do not think it is any coincidence that both of them are also within easy walking distance of a strong and effective neighbourhood group.
It is not that there is anything especially magical about walking schools. They are merely what forces people in our area to walk through their neighbourhood, passing each other’s houses, meeting each other in the street, talking with each other on the school’s front lawn. This function could be performed by many things, by a church or a community centre or an employer, but it is a function that is no longer performed by anything in many of our communities. The walking schools bring otherwise isolated people into the street, makes it possible for them to encounter one another.
Even though my children do not attend the school, many students and parents pass by my house every day, where I am usually sitting on my front porch with a coffee, and I have come to know many of them over the last few years, some of them so well that they will beg a cup of coffee from me if they have not had the time to make their own. My children know them too, shouting and playing and arranging times to meet in the park. Once my eldest even put up a stand to give the kids free lemonade on their way home from school.
When people interact in this way, not occasionally, but continually, as a part of the way they live, the natural outcome is that a sense of community will develop. It will be impossible to avoid this development. It will lead us on the way community, however much we try to avoid it.
Reading, Reflection, Conversation
June 19th, 2010
People always want to begin with writing, but good writing is an ending before it is a beginning, a culmination before it is an inauguration. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, good writing is preceded by slow and careful reading, by thoughtful and patient reflection, and by learned and leisurely conversation. Writing that does not proceed from these things is deficient.
Slow and Careful Reading – It is better to read one book very well than to read many poorly. Being well-read should never be confused with being much-read. Many people read much without ever reading at all. There are fewer people who truly read well. Though they may perhaps read less, they are the readers who gain from their practice.
Good reading approaches the text slowly, attentively, with an openness to what might be thought through it, with an openness to being interrupted by reflection and by conversation. There is no substitute for this time and for this attention. It permits what is not us, what is other than us, to approach us through the text. The text is not itself of the greatest importance. It is the site through which we are encountered by what is of the greatest importance, and its value is in how well it provokes us to be so encountered.
Good reading leaves its mark on the text. It writes in the margins, and it turns the corners of pages, and it notes its favourite passages with bookmarks, even if it does these things only figuratively. A book that is well read is stained with fingerprints and coffee stains, even if only in metaphor. It is well used. It is a tool that has become worn to fit the mind that is reading it.
Thoughtful and Patient Reflection – It is necessary to reflect on reading whenever something calls through the text, whenever the text provokes, but also regularly, as a discipline. To reflect is to engage in the exercise of thinking as if it were a religious act, as if it was the rule of a monastic order, in order that it might sometimes become a spiritual act, beyond the rule of any order. It is to order one’s mind so that it might be prepared more fully for what will come to disorder it entirely.
Reflection is always accompanied by a writing that is not a writing, a secret and secretive writing, notes and jottings, incoherences and incomprehensibles, a writing that will never appear as a writing to be read, a writing that remains hidden and unread. It is a writing that is also a rereading, a returning to the places in the text that need mastication, rumination, regurgitation. This writing chews the text like a cow chews its cud, again and again. It digests the text, gains sustenance from the text, takes the text into itself, makes the text a part of itself.
Reflection is a wondering and a wandering. It follows the text to other texts and returns them to where they began. It takes its time as it wanders. It does not run or even walk. It strolls. It ambles. It perambulates. It wallows in its journey through the text, follows it wherever it leads. It is not concerned with a destination, at least not now, not yet. It leaves destinations to the future and reserves for the present a certain forgetfulness of what the future might demand. Its purpose is to see what might be encountered now on its path through the text, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, not to create a coherent text of its own.
This activity, this reflection, this meditation, is essential. It must not be hurried. It is not brainstorming or some other such technique. It is an openness to the text, a willingness to give the text time and space, a discipline of doing the text justice.
Learned and Leisurely Conversation – Conversation is not mere group discussion. It is not mere argument. It is not mere chatter. It is a coming together through the text, where the text becomes a site where we catch sight of one another. There are always too few of these opportunities to converse, always. They must be treasured when they arise, guarded jealously, so that they are not overwhelmed by the many things that are less important but more pressing.
Conversation involves a careful listening of one another. It considers what the other has to say. It considers what it will reply before it replies. It takes its time, so it is not afraid to pause. It is willing to say less and have it be meaningful than to say much and to have it be mere chatter. It knows that it is better to give things their proper time.
Conversation is being on the way together, is helping one another along the way. It turns us in the same direction, puts us shoulder to shoulder. Though we may turn our eyes to one another, our feet are always on the path together, following the same path together, so that we might draw nearer to what it is we are seeking. Whatever disagreements we may have between us, conversation always agrees, before all else, to walk the path together.
Conversation is also sitting at the table together, breaking bread together, recognizing what is other to us through the breaking of bread. It is the invitation to the table and the acceptance of the table. It is sitting face to face. It is having more between us than words. It is also having between us a giving, and a hospitality, and an invitation, and an acceptance. It allows us to digest each other’s words like bread and wine, to make each other’s words a part of us.
Conversation never ends. It is always being suspended for a time, but it is never ended, except by death.
Writing - Only in the context of these disciplines of reading and reflection and conversation, only in the context of these practices, that writing can begin. Indeed, these disciplines will produce writing, inevitably. Though this writing may take many forms, it will become a necessity in the one who reads and reflects and converses. It will become, not a task to be undertaken, not an ideal to be fulfilled, but a hunger to be satisfied, a thirst to be quenched, a lust to be satiated.
This is what there is to be learned. This is the learning that teaching must let be. This is the learning that teaching must let be learned.
On Conversation
April 7th, 2010
Most people no longer converse. At least, they no longer converse well.
They chat well, certainly, about the weather, about their favourite sports teams, about the newest entertainment news, about anything that will not reveal or involve them personally. Otherwise, they say very little, and when circumstances require them to go further than mere chatter, require them to say something meaningful about what they think, feel, and believe, they lack the practice, the experience, the tools, to say anything very coherent. Even those few who are willing to go beyond their chatter often fall short of real conversation as well, falling into mere argumentation, into alternating monologue, into self-absorbed verbiage.
Conversation, however, true conversation, is much more than mere chatter or argument. It is an exchange of words that is like an exchange of gifts. Those who converse approach each other ready to give and receive words as tokens of themselves, as tokens of their love for one another. They approach and receive each other as an act of hospitality, as an act of friendship, and their words are the gestures, the icons, the sacraments of this exchange. They give and receive themselves through their words, though this giving and receiving is nothing that they can determine or guarantee.
Conversation is never satisfied with idle chatter, even if it permits this kind of talk to take place and to perform its function. It does not do away with chatter, but neither is it satisfied with it, because conversation always desires something more, always desires to know the other more deeply in hospitality, in friendship, in love.
Neither is conversation ever satisfied with argument, even if this argument takes up questions of the profoundest significance, because conversation desires that words be exchanged like gifts, not that assent be compelled by force. Though conversation is open to disagreement, open to difference in thought and feeling and belief, it exchanges even this difference, especially this difference, within its economy of giving and hospitality and friendship. Difference, through the exchange of conversation, is made to strengthen rather than weaken the relation that is formed through the exchange of words.
Conversation is only satisfied, then, with words that give ourselves and receive others, with words that perform a continual hospitality, with words that are nothing except as they come to form a relation between us.
This is why a conversation does not end when a particular subject becomes exhausted, because the subject is secondary to the relation in any case. The conversation extends beyond any subject, beyond any occasion, even if the subject and the occasion inform it profoundly. The conversation extends also beyond any greeting and farewell, waiting always to be continued, extending itself across whole lives, passing from generation to generation.
This kind of conversation does not come without labour, however. Like anything worth doing, it must be cultivated. We must seek it out wherever it might be, give ourselves over to it when it is found, guard it against thoose things that would threaten it, because it is perhaps our profoundest human treasure.
Singing Along
February 19th, 2010
My friend Sandy Clipsham had a few of his guy friends over last night, to sing, of course, which is what guys most often do when they get together, or so I hear. I had never met any of the others, but they were an eclectic and interesting group, and we spent as much time talking about new media and alternative publishing and movies as we did singing. There were also homemade brownies, which is never a bad thing. The singing was good too, by which I mean that it was good to sing rather than that the singing was of any great quality, and it made me reflect on the diminishing opportunities to sing with one another in our culture and on the loss that I think this.
I have no data to support this supposition, but I would say that people in our culture listen to music more than those of any previous culture, but that they actually sing and play music with each other less and less. They have an insatiable appetite for professional music, for popular music, for music that accompanies and defines certain mediatized and commercialized lifestyles, but they are increasingly uncomfortable with making music together informally, as amateurs, as communities. They no longer sing along with one another. This phenomenon, I think, is partially to do with the diminishment of a certain kind of church culture, and also with the diminishment of things like summer camps and school choirs, all places where people once sung together regularly, but I it also has something to do with a culture that understands music as something to be produced and consumed like any other product rather than as something to be shared within a community. Although people who call themselves musicians, either by profession or by vocation, are often willing to do music with one another informally, the greater part of our culture is content to consume music, and so it never learns what it is to make music as a community, as amateurs, simply as an expression of community.
Yet, the cost of this inability to sing with each other is considerable. Anyone who has sung around a campfire, or in a church service, or even in a car with some friends and the radio, knows that there is something immensely cathartic about this kind of singing. It does not require us to be musicians. It does not require us to be vocalists. It does not require is to be songwriters. It requires us only to sing along with each other, and this singing produces an intimacy between us. There is a social risk in this kind of singing, certainly, because it is a breach of normal social decorum and because it creates a space in which different rules apply, but it is this very risk, shared between us, that opens us to each other.
So, last night, the five of us took this risk. We sang along with one another, informally, unprofessionally, without the benefit of practice, without really knowing each other, and we risked looking foolish, or at least sounding foolish, and we got through a few tunes that were none of our favourites but that were recognizable and easy to sing, and it was good. We sang “Cotton Fields“,” I’ll Fly Away“, “Five Hundred Miles“, “He Aint Heavy, He’s My Brother“, “If I Had a Hammer“, and “Down by the Riverside“, and I went home thinking that I need to sing along with people in this way more often.
Microfinancing Affordable Housing
January 27th, 2010
I have this idea. It may or not be original, and it may or may not even be viable, but I have it, so here it is.
I want to apply the principles of microcredit to the problem of affordable housing, which is a significant issue here in Guelph, and make loans available for people to convert their basements or attics or other spaces into legal apartments that would be set aside to be affordable housing. The loans would have no fixed repayment term, but the owner of the house would agree to rent the apartment at rates within affordable housing allowances and would also agree to have the full amount of this rent be applied to repay the loan until the full loan plus an additional amount, perhaps ten or fifteen percent, has been repaid. This money could then be used to finance future projects.
There would also be an expectation that the owner of the house would not just provide an apartment for those in need of affordable housing but would also provide community and social support to those who are renting, in whatever form this might need to take, whether helping new immigrants negotiate the governmental and legal system, or driving the physically disabled to their medical appointments, or visiting with the elderly, or providing childcare for a single parent, or whatever. Ideally, the owners and renters would even eat together regularly and share some of the tasks of the house.
The loans would probably be provided by a non-profit group like a church or like Habitat for Humanity, but it might also be possible to do this through private means.
I see the following benefits of this approach:
1. It provides affordable housing outside of government housing projects that, even in the best cases, turn into ghettos.
2. It provides people who are at financial risk with both a place to live and also the beginnings of a community and a social support network.
3. It encourages more efficient use of existing housing rather than requiring the construction of new housing.
4. It encourages communal and relational rather than governmental and institutional solutions to social problems.
5. It encourages mixed income neighbourhoods, which reduces overall crime rates.
6. It forces people to encounter and relate meaningfully to others who are not in their existing social circles.
There are probably other benefits that I am missing here, and I am probably willfully overlooking the potential difficulties, but I am interested to hear what others think about this proposal. It is exactly the kind of intervention that I think needs most to be made in the world, but I am not sure whether it is one that will appeal to anyone else. Any thoughts or comments that you might have would be appreciated.
The Century of Solitude
November 23rd, 2009
I read an interview with Werner Herzog in the Globe and Mail this morning. I love Herzog, not just his films, of which I have seen too few, but his persona as a director, and the interview provides some fabulous examples of this persona at work. For example, how many Hollywood directors are capable of an observation this articulate and this profound: “I see a rigorous correlation between the explosion of instruments of communication, cellphones, the Internet, virtual reality, and the amount of human solitude, existential solitude. I can’t fully explain it, I can only observe it. More people are withdrawn, and they are incapable of real dialogue. The 21st-century will be the century of solitude.” If more of our directors were capable of this kind of thoughtful reflection, if more of them were capable of articulating themselves half so well, perhaps we would have more films worth watching.
The True Meaning of Halloween
November 6th, 2009
I realized today why I do not love Halloween in the same way that I love some of the other holidays. The problem is, for me, that it is so difficult to make Halloween less commercial and more familial and neighbourly.
With Christmas, for example, our family has stopped giving gifts except to children. Instead, we put our money together and give it to charity, and we make homemade things for each other’s stockings, and we bake, and we cook, and we eat. By replacing the commercial aspects of the holiday with family traditions, our time together is less stressful and more celebratory. It becomes something we can truly anticipate as a family.
It is more difficult to avoid the commercial elements of Halloween, however, because they are driven by a question of safety. It is no longer possible to pass out homemade candy apples or popcorn balls rather than mass produced candy, and this is largely because we no longer know our neighbours well enough to trust them not to hurt us. The evening becomes reduced to strangers buying huge amounts of poor quality commercial candy to hand out to the children of other strangers who are handing the same candy out to your own children. It is a candy exchange program, where nobody wins except the candy manufacturers and the dentists.
So, I have decided to make Halloween a little more neighbourly and a little more homemade. I will, for the first time in decades, have candied apples for the children who know me, for the children who make up my neighbourhood. I will also have mulled cider for their parents. Of course, I will still need to have a bucket of candies for the kids who do not know me, but I will make our porch a reminder of what Halloween might actually be like if we took the time to know each other as a community.
Perhaps you can do so too.
Alina Carere
October 11th, 2009
My friend, Alina Carere, died last night.
She lived in a town not far from mine, and she used to attend highschool very near to me, so we saw each other now and again in her town or in mine, but I knew her mostly from camp, where we have been leaders together over the past few years.
It was at camp that I saw her last, only a few weeks ago. We were cleaning up the kitchen together after most people had gone home, and we were eating homemade asiago and artichoke dip as we worked. She was shocked when I double dipped my pita, and she threatened to stop eating it altogether, but it was too good, so she ate it anyway.
This memory is not very remarkable, I know, except it is the last that I will have of her, the last of the many memories, most of them just as unremarkable, that nevertheless made a remarkable life, a life of gentleness and generosity and willingness to serve. There will be no more such memories, and there are no words adequate to this loss.
There never are.
Youth in the Market
October 10th, 2009
I went to the Guelph Farmers’ Market today, as I almost always do on Saturday. One of the things that I love about the market is that it allows people to enter the local economy even if they do not have the capital or the inventory to open a store on a larger scale, and today I saw two examples that made me realize that this is an opportunity that the farmers’ market also offers to youth,
First, I was at my regular vegetable vendor, a very large and closely knit family, and I was served by the youngest child, a boy of maybe eight or nine years old. He found the twenty-odd things that I wanted, wrote the prices by hand in a notepad, added the total correctly, took my money, and gave my correct change, all without the help of an adult or a calculator. Most kids his age would simply not be capable of doing what he did, but then, most kids his age have never had the opportunity to try, because there are very few places where an eight-year old boy is allowed to do things in the real world. The farmers’ market offers him an opportunity to enter into the economy in a way that is safe, that is meaningful to him, and that allows him to be a part of his family’s business.
Second, there was another vendor, a boy of twelve or thirteen, who was selling handmade wooden swords as toys or as decorations. He has his own booth where he sits and carves and which he runs himself, though he is accompanied by his grandmother. There is no other place where a boy that young would be able to own and run his own business. It is only in the unique environment of the farmers’ market that he is able to participate in the economy in a way that is appropriate to his age and his ability.
If we really do want to encourage small and local businesses, as I think we should, then it seems to me that these kinds of opportunities are exactly those that we should be encouraging. We need to be encouraging young people to learn as they go, to experiment with what it means to make and sell a product within their communities, to try their hand in the family business ar at running businesses of their own. This, at least in my opinion, would be far more useful than all of the business schools and tax incentives put together.
From Word to Word by Jeremy Luke Hill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.