Defining hope

The rain comes down in slated sheets -- steady lines of falling water. I have put on a heavy cotton sweater to ward off the chill. It has been raining hard all day and I wonder if there will be flooding. People comment that it feels like October.

I read Alice Hoffman’s new book “Incantation” over the weekend. A book for young adults, it tells the story of a young Spanish teenager in 1500, who discovers that her family secretly practices Judaism by reading an edict issued by the government on how one can tell whether someone is secretly a Jew. In the subsequent chapters, her family is turned in by her best friend. Her grandfather is killed; her mother and brother are burned at the stake along with 50 other people.

The book jacket calls it a coming of age story, filled with hope.

I found the story and the description to be incongruent. At the same time, because the circumstances are not happy or the outcome desired, does it mean that the story is not hopeful? For what is hope, if not an emotion that overcomes difficulty?

My own sense of hope seems to be buried with uncertainty right now, but I do understand that I live a blessed life filled with a multitude of choices. And I see that we each have to make our own way, especially in the driving rain.

With purpose in mind

As I pulled into the library parking lot, I noticed that the door to the Tusten Theater was propped open. With checking the stage in preparation for a dance performance in October on my list of things to do, I headed into the darkened theater. There, I was greeted by a man in his 70s, rather formally dressed in a white shirt and black pants, struggling with a 20-foot wooden step ladder.

I told him that I was checking out the distance of the screen and the front of the stage and needed no help. He, on the other hand, had the ladder stuck between the seats and was in great need of assistance.

“Can I help you with that?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You are a Godsend.”

As a seminary student, I am always pleased when I am perceived as an instrument of God’s plan. Together, we maneuvered the ladder into place. There wasn’t enough space in between the rows for the metal guides to snap all the way down on both sides, but the ladder was firmly wedged, relatively straight and didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

He asked me if I had time to hold the ladder as he climbed up to hang two microphones down to do a sound check on the opera rehearsal that he would videotape in a couple of weeks.

“I’m a lawyer,” he said, “and I am not exactly sure why I do this videotaping. But when you’re videotaping, you have to know what the sound and the light will do.”

With that, he was up the ladder and I hung on as if his life depended on it. The ladder creaked and swayed as he heaved himself up, rung by rung, into the ceiling. I did not have the nerve to look up and contented myself to put my whole body into the job of stilling the ladder and my breath.

After a bit of a struggle and having to go up one step higher “then maybe I should,” he was able to jerry-rig the support bar that would take the microphone onto the lighting track. He slowly made his way down again, and I breathed a sigh of relief. As he limped to the back of the theater, shirt totally drenched with sweat, I marveled at his sense of life and work that propelled him to accomplish that which was amazingly rigorous and a little bit dangerous for a man his age.

“I don’t know what made me think I could do this without help,” he called over his shoulder on his way up to the tech booth on the second floor. I listened to his uneven steps on the stairs.

When he came back and tucked the German state-of-the-art microphones into his shirt pocket, he told me that when approaching that which is difficult it is best to take things very slowly and keep one’s wits about you. "When you hurry," he said, "that's when you run into trouble."

He said that he was doing this particular taping because he thought that the lead soprano was going to launch her career, which would end up with the Metropolitan Opera Company, with the singing of the role of “Norma” in the Delaware Valley Opera’s summer production. He was going to be the one who would capture that beginning. “I’m going to make a DVD, if she lets me,” he said.

I left him to the rest of his preparations, and the thought that at 10:00 p.m., he would be up that ladder again to retrieve his precious equipment. I was sure that there would be someone else who would make sure that the ladder was firm, and that when he finally ended his day, he would dream good dreams of a life well lived.

Musings on compost

Yesterday, I side dressed the plants in the garden that seemed yellow and struggling to thrive with rich compost. I dug the compost out of an old pile in a now untended herb garden that received kitchen scraps for years. Totally covered over with unkempt tarragon, a single tug on the tall plants yielded the dry black rich soil below.

Scooping it up with my hands, I filled a gallon flower pot and carried it to the vegetable garden. I pushed back the newspaper and hay mulch and surrounded each plant, peppers and basil in one bed, acorn squash in another, with what I consider good nutrition. I watered each plant, with the intention of providing a lubricant to send the nutrition to the root of the plant.

Today, I noticed that the tops of those treated plants are already showing green.

I wonder if we can effect positive change in our bodies and our physical world just as easily? Are those systems just a little more complicated and the change is not as quickly recognizable?

Is the fact that each one of our actions has an effect a secret, whose meaning we haven’t quite grasped? And if that is true, how can we side-dress our days with rich compost?

In search of community

E. and I sat talking after the public hearing for the Town of Tusten’s Comprehensive Plan. We both come to the meeting with our own agendas.

He was interested in speaking the truth and naming decisions that various boards historically have made that were beneficial to individuals and not the town as a whole. He wanted to make sure that those types of decisions wouldn’t be made in the future.

My agenda was a bit more complicated. Besides holding the planning and zoning board’s feet to the fire in terms of implementing the plan, I’m looking for a key to help communities counter the fragmentation and apathy.

“You know,” I said, “the history section of the plan was very interesting. It says that this room is used for dinners, dances and social events. There hasn’t been a dance here in years. The only thing that still happens is a couple of pancake breakfasts, and the turkey dinner on Election Day.”

He agreed and told me that Narrowsburg’s social life had revolved around a group of about 20 men who belonged to the Narrowsburg Fire Department back in the 40s, 50s and early 60s. Sharing a strong camaraderie and a love for the town, they had a hand in organizing all sorts of events.

I asked him if he knew whose job it was to create promote and protect a sense of community. Was it the job of the churches, the service organizations, the newspaper, the town government?

We found no answers.

Upon reflection, I realize that it's probably all of our jobs and that there is nothing that holds us together, except for the fact that we live here. We have all come to this place from many roads; we share physical proximity, the common interests of community safety and well-being, and the precious here and now.

We share a place to begin to actively form connections.

Where the wild raspberries grow

I donned a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, a hat, and heavy socks and shoes to pick the wild black raspberries that are growing beneath the collapsed apple tree in the front yard. There have never been any plants that have grown there in the past – although it wasn’t that long ago that I was mowing the grass there.

There's always been a few black raspberries around. My son, Zachary, always enjoyed grabbing a few succulent berries that grew by the mailbox. But amazingly, the plants under the apple tree have the potential for actually producing a harvest of fruit, and I contemplate whether I can organize their volunteer growth to make picking easier. I try to balance the lessons of leaving things to their own integrity and attempting to intervene and optimize the outcome.

I gathered almost a pint of the small berries and have a vision of fresh garden lettuce with a black raspberry vinaigrette dressing for dinner.

The garden is beginning to feed Stephen and I with harvests of Swiss chard, lettuce, beet greens, cilantro, green onions, parsley and basil. There are a couple of five-inch green hot peppers almost ready for picking and the pinky sized zucchini will be ready in a couple of days.

I watch the wild bees pollinate the tomatoes and I am aware that without their work, my own garden work would not be, quite literally, so fruitful. I wonder where their hive is and imagine it is filled with clover-tasting honey from the abundance of clover in the yard. I marvel at the beings of nature, which continue to function, just as we do, however burdened or stressed we become.

In this moment of time, we exist on a beautiful, interdependent planet that, without any human intervention, puts forth wild raspberries.