At the Heart of Common Ground
It's been a while since you heard from Bread and Stories...I think about this space daily, but free time has been hard to carve out from workaday life. As a freelancer with two separate areas of consulting, sometimes I have to keep many balls in the air while holding open a copy of Juggling for Dummies with my toes. I'm not complaining, though—at least not today. Recently when I kvetched to a retired friend, he shared how a friend had once helped him reframe the stressful demands of his work. She did it with a single sentence:
Look at what you get to do!
Look at what we get to do, down here in our shared gravity well—and pay the rent, too! What a gift. But the best gift this week is something I didn't do: this post by Cindy Lollar with her wife Greta's recipe for homemade dog food.
Cynthia Lollar
I met Cindy at a writing retreat a couple of years ago and felt moved by both her historical novel in progress and the kindness at the heart of her wit. (In one workshop I started crying while reading aloud a poem about a young friend in Gaza. While others critiqued metaphors, Cindy just gave me a hug.) She and Greta had recently retired to my small southern city, so I've gotten to hang out with them once in a while and visit their lovely home. It's full of art—much of it by Cindy's parents—and tokens of a long life together. Thanks to Greta's talents as a landscape architect and plant whisperer, it's also surrounded by beauty (and zucchini).
Speaking of cool things that people get to do, the stunning rock sculpture above graces the back wall of their house. It's the creation of a friend of theirs, the stone artist Marie Connor of Silver Spring, Maryland (where I was born). The project grew from the need to heal a gash left by demolished concrete stairs after the replacement of an unstable deck. I love the way the shape evokes different images from different angles (first I mistyped angels): it's a bird, it's a swirling sea, it's the evolution of a heart. I also love how the rocks spill out the bottom, uncontained.
No matter what we do, things will fall apart: "in sickness and in health" has been no small bargain for Cindy and Greta these days. Yet healing also happens—especially, they've shown me, when we make space for joy.
I've been developing materials for a high-school sociology course based on Rice University's openstax course. As a result, groups have been on my mind: in-groups, out-groups, and reference groups; stereotypes and conformity; alarming experiments like the Milgram Experiment in which participants delivered (fake) lethal shocks at the command of an authority figure, or the one in which subjects changed their answer about which line was longer than others because the people around them all gave a different (purposely false) answer. Good lord...sometimes I'm afraid to go to the grocery store.
Being an American human being is no small bargain these days as chasms between subgroups of "us" and "them" grow wider than ever. In our current situation, we may not be able to agree that 2+2=4, but I still believe we can heal the gashes in our trust. Why? Because there is really no more American thing to do than to find and share common ground.
For what it's worth, nearly every person I care for here on earth lives in the center of the diagram below. Look at what we get to do: make and eat good food, take care of each other and our critters, and keep making each other laugh.
Speaking of which, the other day my friend Janet Carty, a museum preparator who is also a remarkable artist and writer, told me about her yoga class at the Y. Her impression of the deeply southern teacher quoting Rumi had me in tears in the best way:
Out beyond ideas of wrong doin' and right doin', there's a field.
I’ll meet y'all there.
See youze guys at Food Lion.
