Something to live for
After all that's been taken from us, a focus on the joy that comes from community and anticipation
vol. 6 issue 8
During covid, the incessant messaging was that the heroic way to demonstrate our committment to one another was to isolate and cover (hide) our faces. I don’t know that we’ve fully registered, nor recovered from, the trauma of that.
Greetings,
It was a busy weekend in my little patch of Appalachia this weekend.
Friday night, just before the Chinese take-out place closed its kitchen, and just after meeting my new neighbor, a young policeman, who came out just as I was returning home from two weeks away, I reconnoitered and reflected on my recent sojourn.
I poured a whiskey, put my feet up, and tucked into my General Tso’s. I sorted through the mail (I still get some), and sat silent and happy, truly happy, to be home in my own little place, with all my own stuff, and in the Appalachian town near where I was born, the place where I finally ended up after all the sturm and drang.
The next morning, I finally got to moving my tomatoes, beans, and basil to the friendly farmer man who is allowing me to plant on his property since growing one’s own food is suddenly against code in my neighborhood. I’d actually taken my plants with me on my trip, keeping them in crates in the bed of my truck, so I could water and tend to them. Isn’t that weird, interstate tomato passengers?
One does what one must.
Pulling past the gate to the small farm, I noted how lush was the tiny mountain but actually called Big Mountain creating a curtain of green behind this homespun paradise of self sufficieny. It’s mapped as about 1440 feet above sea level, but probably only half of those feet are what you see from ground level.
As soon as I opened the passenger door of my truck, Esther, my dog, sprung out and made a beeline for the chicken coop, with a startled farmer and myself in hot pursuit.
With alacrity, he corralled my hunting beast, removed the pullet from her mouth (no harm done), and set her free, only to have her scamper off to find another fowl hiding in the berry patch. A storm of feathers burst out of the flowering raspberry bushes and off we ran again to restrain my pooch.
How the hell she even knew where the coop was, I can’t say. She’d never even been there before.
Saturday night, I headed over to the local music hang out to hear a friend and her husband sing and play some traditional songs from the region, but they were no-shows due to illness. Instead, a pick-up trio formed, and truly some of the finest fiddlin’ — such a smooth, sweet tone — I have heard around here came from a young woman who emerged from the crowd to play.
I’d say it’s a pub, but it’s not an ale house, so much as a venue with comfy but weathered settees, chairs, tables, and a few tufty arm chairs. There is a bar, however, and you can get beer in a bottle. I don’t know if there are blue laws still on the town books, but it was a dry town only until less than a year ago, and most shops are closed on Sundays.
I ordered a vodka and soda and I found a former neighbor of mine from the street where I lived for a few months when I first arrived in town. He was sitting alone on one of the couches and so joined him. We said how nice it was to see each other again.
I told him about my out-of-state landscaping adventures; not the truckin’ tomato plants, but actual landscaping work I have been doing for a friend and a few others. He introduced me to another fellow there who also does such things, and that turned out to be an invitation to work on something together.
On Sunday, Pentecost, it was the last day for our church choir, of which I am a member, to sing from the loft until after the summer. In the interim, those of us with any desire to perform can do so from the floor of the sanctuary. Some of us are talking about forming a little bluegrass gospel group.
I wasn’t as prepared as I would have liked to be, but being that I had missed three weeks of rehearsal, I did my top best to sight read the Haydn “Gloria” from Mass in a Time of War, and a gospel tune, Spirit Come Down. I am still blessed with high notes at my age, and honked ‘em out with gusto, which was satisfying and cleansing. Those who sing pray twice, one of the baritones commented afterward.
The highlight of my homecoming was an unexpected one. My friend and fellow choir member, had chosen to be baptized into the church that day, and would do so, along with another congregant, in the little creek that flows past the pastor’s house.
I will interrupt myself to say that I am not religious, nor do I actually think of myself as Christian so much as it is that I am an american (I downstyle that word for emphasis on our equal standing with one another) who has the moral infrastructure and appreciation for ritual that comes via the exposure to churchgoing and living in a land populated by children of Abraham, such as the majority of our citizenry consider themselves to be.
What I do profess to be however is a person seeking community, which I do find in some, not all, church environments. The church I attend here was founded in 1853 by an abolitionist who also established the local college, the South’s first higher learning institution to welcome students of all races, in 1855.
It is a quirky church, I think, in that it is fiercly progressive, and fiercely old timey in that it demands you take care of each other in the name of Jesus because that is your job. Which is to say, even though if and when anyone asks, including the pastor, I am up front about my personal views on all this (see above), I am accepted anyway.
And so, in the glow of being welcomed back by various folks, I felt that the anticipation for returning home that I’d built up while I was away — an anticipation about returning not just to my material possessions, but to my community — had been fulfilled.
With that as my mood, I attended my friend’s baptism. I had never been to such an event before. What struck me was the sheer joy undergirded by nervous anticipation she and her family bubbled with. I reckon that knowing you’re about to be dunked under cold, muddy, snakey waters will make you jittery. But for me, knowing that she had chosen not the baptismal font in the sanctuary, but the creek as her initiation into her desired family of her God made it more powerful, as it signaled her resolve to sacrifice her comfort for the sake of inclusion and committment.
And I think that is the essence of what community is: to sacrifice one’s self, not out of a mindset of depravation, but out of inclusion, for everyone. Your own desires will be no less important, but I see it as them being elevated and amplified by those who care about you being happy. I have grown keenly suspicious of any rhetoric that denounces community as a way to bury the individual in a socialist oblivion. True community is not a political statement.
During covid, the incessant messaging was that the heroic way to demonstrate our committment to one another was to isolate and cover (hide) our faces. I don’t know that we’ve fully registered, nor recovered from, the trauma of that.
We certainly don’t seem collectively to be counterbalancing it with a massive effort to re-establish community and togetherness. The media is fixated on war and violence. It’s up to us, then, as local communities, however small — preferably small and local — to remember and focus on the things that give us joy, bring us together, and make life worth living.
If community is where our greatest hopes and desires can be realized, then anticipation is the long tail of that joy. It carries us to the moment of our fondest wish being fulfilled, and resonates within us long after the moment has past. It is a thread that weaves us to others who love us and wish to love us, as it includes them in our moments of glory. Would those moments be as cherished if others were not included?
Update on the money v. abundance thing
In my reflections on desire, and on the role of money in happiness, I told readers last week about being on a job hunt. Well, I am now employed, and excited about nailing down the final, and biggest, piece of the starting-over puzzle I have been completing.
I am so lucky, and I mean that. I really have been so lucky in my life, it does ultimately offset the pain, but mostly, it just makes me realize how grateful I am for everything I have, not only that I have by my own wits, but by the many, many acts of generousity from others who have wanted me to be well. Thank you.
Update on the books and on Apocalypse Nowish
And with all the other stuff going on, I am still archiving and cataloging the past 5 years for two books, a best of, and the one I mentioned to you before, The Earth is My Bitch: Twelve Steps to Demoralizing Humans (and What Humans Can Do Instead).
The Apocalypse Nowish substack is created, but not published yet. I am thinking of making that a series of premium multi-media content that is adjacent to another publication that when I wrap up all the archives I will transition to, based on life in Appalachia which is truly living at the crossroads of many societal transitions, especially now that climate change is making where I live and a few other formerly not-so-populated places into targets of mass interstate migration. And of course with development comes gains for some and losses for others…
Anyway, all in good time. It’s happening, though. Just wanted you to know.
Peace (and love!),
Whitney
Esther. You named your dog Esther. I don't know why, but it's brilliant. xo
Can't wait for your next update! I'm new to your journey, but I admire your insight and grit