Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life - Posts Tagged "community"

My wife and I share an annual tradition on Saint Patrick’s Day with a friend of Irish-Polish descent. We open for the first time an Irish Red Ale brewed the previous fall while snacking on cheese and crackers, then watch children perform Irish stepdancing at a local pub. It is a fun way we celebrate the new season as the sleeping Earth awakens in the growing light.

Our friend and I worked together on community volunteering and activism. While she and I shared many common values, we also disagreed strongly on key approaches and issues—in my mind, I was the more mild one, our friend more outspoken, more aggressive in her approach.

As our community work evolved, I found that many of the people I had started working with took disagreements to heart. Some of my relationships were strained because of it. But even though our friend and I would disagree strongly, at the end of each argument I knew that our friend remained our friend. Our relationship was stronger than the disagreements and I am grateful for that.

To reaffirm our appreciation of each other, we began to meet each Saint Patrick’s Day, enjoying the home brewed beer and sharing community traditions that have stood the test of time. In doing so, we take part in a seasonal celebration that is as perennial as gardeners like us sowing our early crops in soil warming in the rapidly increasing sunlight. Just as these traditions have endured, we seek to strengthen our relationship with a celebration of what connects us.

Such small traditions may seem unimportant in the view of the problems of the larger human world, but it is in the smallness of our lives that we often find the greatest strength. Lasting communities survive because people put aside their differences and build relationships of mutual respect, trust and affection. Traditional Catholics, neo-pagan seekers, sober-minded puritans and secular thinkers may argue over whether Saint Patrick’s Day is a holy day, one taken from earlier traditions, a blasphemous excuse for drinking or a meaningless religious tradition without any merit, but the importance for communities is that people set aside differences and remain loyal to each other. Seeking to win an abstract argument will not perpetuate one’s values; building a lasting community based on those values will.

When I moved to our town over two decades ago, I started hosting potlucks for neighbors and volunteered for projects to strengthen the community. Over the years, my wife and I devoted a lot of time and money to volunteer work. My wife has also been a loyal friend to others, providing emotional support and companionship to many women throughout her life. As a result, we have become surrounded by a community of friends and neighbors.

We are told that acting for a higher good is an act of self-sacrifice that costs the person much and only gains intangible rewards in some other world. I have found that is far from the truth; rather, to receive I must give. As sensitive people, my wife and I have often felt compassion that calls us to help others. By following our natures we have the good fortune that a caring community has formed around us, following the old adage that what goes around comes around.

During this time, the warming Earth is re-awakening. Early spring flowers—yellow daffodils and forsythia, purple, red and white hyacinths and pale blue periwinkle—are arising from the cool Earth while eggs are being laid and hatched. On occasion, I lift up a stone or a large piece of thick bark and find tiny snakes, still wet with their embryonic fluid, sleeping in the dark, safe cover.

Local eggs, long scarce when the hens stop laying in the cold of winter, return to the market, bought by Easter egg shoppers with little knowledge of the cycles of life around us. Ramps, a green leaf with a tangy garlic flavor, spring up from the Earth as the first harvest from the ground. Adding milk from a local dairy and onions from our garden stored over the winter in our unheated basement, each spring we make an omelet to celebrate the new life emerging from the Earth.

My wife babysits a young child, the twenty-month old son of a friend of my wife’s daughter. My stepdaughter and the mom have known each other since before they can remember; from their view, they have always been part of each other’s life. My wife has likewise always been a presence in the young Mom’s life. When she was pregnant with her and her partner’s baby, the young Mom knew she wanted my wife to care for her young child.

Caring for the baby is a delight to my wife, who relishes time with young children and babies and has babysat for children of friends and neighbors for many years. I have also had the good fortune of sometimes caring for the young lives. The connections deepen our relationship with the families and the parents and my wife are mutually grateful for the opportunity.

Recently, the parents of the baby my wife currently cares for had us over for dinner and we found out that a neighbor of theirs, a blind older woman, sells eggs from hens she raises as a means to get a little more money. We asked our friends to get eggs for us from the woman, allowing us to both support local food and to aid a brave woman in need.

It is said that we reap what we sow; in modern terms, what we give energy to we bring into our lives. By caring for a close friend’s baby, my wife takes part in the sacred re-creation of life. By buying eggs locally, we get inexpensive, high quality eggs while providing a little aid to a woman with a disability. By living in a conscientious way, life can be full and meaningful even in our smallest of acts.

The sacred re-creation of life is part the flow of life through generations. By taking part in it, we receive strength and joy. My wife’s life is much more fulfilling because of her caring for young lives. Our family and community is strengthened by her caring for a child of a lifelong friend of her daughter, making the connections between the families thick and deep with generations of shared love.

Sensitive people’s love of beauty and life pulls us into the human and natural world and into life-affirming works; the compassion we feel for others strengthens our relationships once we learn the wisdom to guide it. Learning from experience, my wife and I have received insight through lessons of failure and foolishness, making our sensitivity a doorway into a fulfilling life. Even as we age, we continue to deepen our relationships with the natural and human worlds around us, moving us closer to the center of the river of life that flows for unimaginable eons of time on this hard and wonderful Earth.

Around Memorial Day, we begin our local food club season with deliciously sweet, melt-in-your-mouth strawberries and tender, buttery asparagus, plus flavorful lettuces, green onions and eggs. Several years ago, I began organizing the food club to support local produce by buying in bulk at a nearby produce auction. The club has grown over time; over the last five years it has provided fresh, healthy food at wholesale prices to sixty families and households each season.

In working with the club, I have met local food activists—quiet, humble and serious-minded people who devote years and sometimes decades to help support the “triple bottom line” of economy, community and ecology. Mixing high ideals with practical knowledge and hard work, local food activists seek to market local foods in competition with unsustainable but enormous global conglomerates aiming to monopolize the food market. The activists I work with are rebuilding the marketplaces that connect local growers to nearby consumers that we lost in the United States following World War II.

The volunteering I do helps their work of bringing low cost, healthy, fresh food to people in town while supporting growers in poorer areas outside of our town. Though I began my work solely to support the produce auction, I have built friendships with growers, activists, volunteers, and members of the club. For me and for others as well, the food club creates a hub for people to meet and build community.

The produce auction itself is a hub for the outlying communities and connects it with the more urban town. It is a place where neighbors and friends meet to enjoy each other’s company and to watch as the auction unfolds. It is also a place where local people from different backgrounds and subcultures meet. As a friend once said, the auction is one of only a few places where you can see an Appalachian person, an Amish person and a hippie in dreadlocks talking together in a friendly, welcoming way.

As I’ve expanded my volunteer work, our kitchen has been filled with inexpensive, high quality, fresh, healthy and delicious food. An open secret for most local food activists and workers is that our kitchens and pantries often brim over with tasty food, flowing from the earth like a river throughout the growing season. Many of us learn to store food in our basements to provide meals during the winter and into early spring. Just last week we had a great entree mainly composed of six-month-old potatoes and tomatoes we canned a year and a half ago.

The work of the food club allows me to flourish as a sensitive person, pursuing good works and the ideals of supporting the triple bottom line of economy, ecology and community. In a practical way, it helps move my family and many neighbors and friends toward improving our sustainability as a human community re-integrating itself into the natural world around us. In pursuing this work, we gain rewards of fresh, delicious food at low costs, a healthy lifestyle and relationships with idealistic and well-meaning people.

By pursuing these ideals in a practical, concrete way our lives are improved. As a sensitive person acting on my ideals, we receive a life filled with beauty, nature, sensuality, friendships and good health. Rather than the stereotype that pursuing our ideals will bring suffering, our lives and our community are better as a result. By caring for others, the ecology and the local economy, our ideals benefit our own lives.

During the summer season, the harvest from local growers is in full flush. Tomatoes, sweet corn, blueberries, peaches, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, onions and many other staples of summer meals are available, with much more to come. From early July through fall, our food club normally provides enough food to supply a small family with almost all the vegetables and fruit they can eat. Our most recent bounty included blueberries, fresh red potatoes, onions, cucumbers, cabbage and broccoli, provided to members at half the price they would pay at markets.

As I prepare for publishing Source for Sensitive People this fall, I am reflecting on our food club and our involvement in it. Source for Sensitive People is the first book in a set of three short books I call "Circle One: Empowering Oneself." In this trilogy, I focus on living a full, empowered life as a sensitive person.

Empowering oneself is first and foremost about caring for one’s needs as a sensitive person who has strong emotions, passions for peace, beauty and love, and ideals for a better human world. When I wrote this short book in the late 1990s, I outlined what I was learning about caring for and protecting myself as a sensitive person. A good portion of Source for Sensitive People is devoted to that topic and I spent many years during that time strengthening myself by following the notes I had made about emotionally nourishing myself, my family and people in my face-to-face community.

As we grew stronger and happier, my wife and I found ourselves moving out into our community, seeking to improve the personal world around us. It was important to us that we tried to work for the best interests of everyone involved, conflicting with people only when there seemed no other alternative. Empowering oneself is about empowering ourselves, and as time passed, we did a lot of work helping people around us achieve practical things they needed. This ranged from my wife babysitting and caring for other children to me leading work to hold town hall meetings and support local produce through our food club.

The food club is an example of how caring for our community has returned to us in abundance. Beginning when we became involved in the local food movement, we realized that bulk food prices at the local produce auction were very inexpensive for very high quality food. At the time, we could buy eight quarts of strawberries for sixteen dollars and forty medium watermelons for twelve dollars. But how could a single household use so much food?

The answer was to combine the purchases for several households, buy the bargains in bulk and split out the shares. After a couple of years of trying different schemes, we found a way to do this effectively and membership boomed. We grew from a handful of households in 2011 to around sixty or so in a few years. The produce auction flourished and so did our community, with individuals, couples and young families becoming the center of our club.

The food club has many benefits—it provides income to local growers and the local economy; healthy, fresh food to people in my town and cost savings to young families on a budget. It also supports our local produce auction in its mission of supporting local communities and providing healthy, inexpensive food to a region where there are only a few grocery stores providing produce. By providing local produce, it cuts the secondary carbon footprint of everyone in the club who would otherwise buy produce shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to stores in our community.

We’ve made friendships with local growers, been inspired by the hard work and ingenuity of idealistic food activists, and found ourselves the center of the club’s activities. Most tangibly, we’ve received an abundance of fresh, healthy, tasty and inexpensive food in our home for nearly a decade. Without the club, this would be much more difficult and expensive for my wife and I. Through our volunteer work, we flourish.

As our community benefits, our family, friends and neighbors benefit as well. While some would see volunteer work like this as self-sacrificing, I have learned it is like regular physical exercise—essential for my own well-being. By being a sensitive person, my desire to make the world a better place has moved my life and my family’s life into a better place, making our sensitivity and ideals a strength that gives back to us.

In the long days and heat of midsummer the local harvests are flowing into our lives like few other times of year. Tomatoes, sweet corn, potatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, peaches, early apples and much more appear in long rows at the produce auction, providing variety and abundance for us. This year with our local midsummer meal we will open an IPA brewed a few months ago, its crisp, light flavor especially satisfying in the heat of the day.

For years, I have gone into the woods to meditate in all seasons, allowing me to witness the wisdom of natural communities. One aspect of this is partnerships that foster life, such as in the lives of coneflowers, bees and birds.

At the height of summer, three foot tall orange coneflowers with pale purple petals bloom in our flower garden. As always, we will let them mature, grow seeds and become brown and dry, honoring the full life cycle of the plant. In doing this, we learned about how natural communities practice sustainability with an ease that out-of-balance humans find nearly impossible. During their midsummer blooming, the flowers are pollinated by bees and other insects gathering nectar. I imagine the insects gathering the nectar find it to be sensually delightful, since it is pleasant and sweet. Their bodies have been trained by time to find the sweet nectar and gather it for honey, and just as we find the taste of honey delightful, I imagine the bees find the nectar wonderful. While we use the honey for sensual pleasure, the bees’ sensuality is part of providing for themselves and the children of their hives, making their pleasure part of the sacred re-creation of life.

After the coneflowers mature and turn brown, beautiful yellow and black goldfinches gather on the stands and eat the seeds that the bees’ pollination have created. Like the bees, the goldfinches delight in eating the seeds and strengthen their bodies in doing so. Yet, there is something more in their digestion of the seeds.

Flying away from the coneflower stands, the goldfinches will naturally excrete the remnants of the seeds, including in some cases an intact core containing the beginning of a new coneflower. This new coneflower, delivered to the ground in a fertile packet that we find obnoxious, can start a new life and a new stand of flowers to feed future bees and birds, extending the community of all three. Through the simple and sensually indulgent acts of digestion, these partners in the re-recreation of life increase the sustainability of their species without conscious awareness, simply by seeking out their sensual pleasure—a sensual pleasure that is part of the sacred spiritual quest to re-create life through generations of time. Modern humans, out of balance with each other and nature, cannot match such ease of sacred re-creation of life.

In the woods, there are thick partnerships like these overlapping with each other, creating communities of mutual support that spread themselves outward in simple acts such as squirrels burying nuts in the ground. Life in nature can be difficult; wind can knock down nests with babes falling onto the ground and predators can strike without warning. The wisdom of the woods teaches that we die as individuals and families, but we sustain ourselves as communities of win-win partnerships re-creating ourselves in the river of life.

In the human world, partnerships like these exist through good works extended by people towards our families, friends, neighbors and coworkers. Good works, like the bees pollinating flowers while gathering life-giving nectar and birds spreading seeds while indulging themselves in eating, are the central gravity that connects lasting human communities. In a human and natural world, where what goes around comes around, doing good works that bring forth life sustains our communities, which is essential to sustaining our lives through future generations.

Delighting in caring for children, growing tasty food, sharing a good meal with family and friends, and other daily acts is both a celebration of life and centers us in the river of life flowing in our lives. We build a lasting community around us by our good works, making the future for the children of the community more secure and hopeful. It is by the sacred work to bring forth life that our lives become full while our futures and the future of our children become more secure through the community our work builds for us.

As the midsummer abundance of local food continues to flow into our lives, we are sharing the bounty with friends. A few nights ago, our friend from Saint Patrick’s Day hosted us with a meal including tomatoes from her garden with Feta cheese with a berry Balsamic vinegar dressing and a dessert of local peaches in cream. We brought our IPA, which we all enjoyed. After that, we hosted friends for a meal of pasta with our Pesto Genovese, canned tomatoes and other ingredients with a homemade garlic-rosemary spelt bread, a local salad with greens from our Farmer’s Market, heirloom tomatoes from our garden and other local foods, with a tart of local peaches for dessert.

At both meals, our friends discussed their childhood communities in cities a few hours from us. One talked, as she frequently does, of the urban parks that allowed her to spend her childhood playing in nature and later how she led a life close to the Earth surrounded by forests. Another friend spoke of her old community as seemingly empty to her emotionally and culturally; a place where it was difficult for her to feel truly connected to others. As sensitive people, our friends and we share a love of natural beauty, peace, close relationships and an emotional intimacy that often does not fit into the communities created by traditional Western culture.

Communities are essential to our lives and community building is common by proselytizing puritans, philanthropic money-chasers and violent men who “hate who they hate and love who they love.” While these qualities have virtues, they also perpetuate conflict by creating societies of victors and vanquished, rich and poor, exalted and hated. In these communities, sensitive people are often targets of ridicule because our love for peace, harmony, compassion and beauty often interferes with the goals of people dominated by the violent man-money-chaser-puritan aspects.

The failure of these conglomerates of traditional society—the puritans, the money-chasers and the violent men communities—to build peace with other communities and nations is one of the ongoing crises of human history. Communities of common people have held together in hamlets and villages while their larger societies have fought wars and oppressed people different from them for millennia. In perpetuating the traditional hatreds and imbalances of this tragic history, violent men, money-chasers and puritans fall victim of sending out negativity and, consequentially, receiving negativity back.

My childhood saw my sensitivity overlaid by trauma and a patriarchal, small Midwestern community viewing true manhood as aggressive and domineering. When I was twelve, I told a teacher that I planned to become a soldier and would need to be able to kill people to do that. By the time I turned fifteen, my sensitive nature had begun to emerge; I had read “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau and All Men are Brothers by Mohandas Gandhi. I announced I was a non-violent pacifist and became a vegetarian, not knowing anyone who was either one.

In the ten years that followed, I struggled with anger stemming from trauma, a patriarchal view that solving the world’s problems through “righteous” violence was an obligation of manhood and a sensitive inner self that could not endure living an angry and aggressive life. Through my good fortune and with the help of truly kind, compassionate people, my sensitive nature emerged and took over my life. A mysterious spiritual journey has since unfolded, as I’ve tried to live as a sensitive, compassionate man who is flawed and challenged by living in a human world where men are often encouraged and materially rewarded for being aggressive, domineering and violent.

As I learned, sensitive people’s depth of feelings and expansive sense of self does not fit well with the rules and lifestyles advocated by puritans, money-chasers and violent men. A violent man can reconcile risking his life and killing when his leaders tell him to; a money-chaser can live happily with personal wealth while others suffer from poverty and starvation; a puritan can proclaim his father’s books to be holy and believe that his deity condemns people of different traditions, even though he has no personal knowledge of them. These imbalances perpetuate conflicts between groups, which many puritans, money-chasers and violent men casually accept as inevitable and necessary.

Sensitive people experience profound suffering when considering these aspects of the human world and long for a world of peace, compassion and harmony. We experience empathy for people different from us and feel their suffering as our own. Violence sickens us, poverty of others moves us to charity, and judging others simply because they do not follow the traditions of our fathers feels false and hypocritical. Because sensitive people’s feelings and sense of self do not fit into the rules created by the traditional violent man-puritan-money-chaser culture, our sensitivity is often condemned as weakness. Yet, if sensitive people can live our ideals of compassion, peace, love, beauty and harmony, we can live a spiritual life that benefits others, even the violent men, puritans and money-chasers.

Source for Sensitive People sees not doing harm as a way of life. Unless controlled by trauma, sensitive people desire is to live peaceful lives in harmony with others and the Earth around us. Sensitive people often volunteer to help those in need, may become vegetarians or vegans, seek to preserve nature rather than destroy the Earth, tend to avoid people rather than have conflict with them, and are drawn toward lives of art, beauty, sensuality, love and reflection. Not doing harm is a desire of sensitive people and one of our greater virtues. It also has the potential to help us personally, because pairing good works with not doing harm allows our positive actions to return to us without generating conflict that interferes with the Covenant of Good Works.

Recognizing this key part of our nature, honoring it and seeking to reduce the harm we do is a key spiritual path for us, even as out-of-balance societies dominated by men lusting for power-over-others and wealth without regard for the consequences claim that violence and greed is human nature. As sensitive people, we can only excel if we attempt to make peace and live in harmony with the lives around us; it is self-destructive to us spiritually and physically to do otherwise. Seeing all life as sacred and recognizing that all harm sent out is likely to return, if not to us to our children and grandchildren, is central to freeing our lives from the perpetuation of suffering called history.

Most people have little real power in the larger human world, so it is important as sensitive people we seek to reduce the harm we do with the means we have. It is useful for us to consider how we as individuals can reach out and make peace with those who we are supposed to fear and hate; to liberate those who we have power over; to lessen our harmful impact on the natural world; and to care for ourselves, our families and our communities.

This especially means living with the understanding that as sensitive people we need to care for ourselves emotionally in ways that others may not. The face-to-face community that we live in must be supportive of our sensitivity, as the community I currently live in is. Not only must sensitive people serve our communities; in a human world dominated by violent men, money-chasers and puritans, we must find and strengthen communities that respect and honor our sensitive, life-loving natures. By doing this we strengthen our lives and the lives of those around us, as well as the future we all share.

Following almost two weeks of warmer weather, a flush of early spring flowers are blooming. Red and yellow Tulips, white-blue and purple Violets, Grape Hyacinths and some remaining Daffodils are abundant. Flowering trees are bursting into bloom, including white Star Magnolia, pinkish-white Cherries, White Bradford Pears and others. From our hollow, we are harvesting wild chives that grow as weeds throughout our community; from the woods, we are harvesting garlic-flavored Ramps to become part of an omelet with pieces of canned tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese and local eggs.

After a very rainy winter, March and April have been dry. With our unusually stable warm spell and nights without frost, Sugar Magnolia trees—usually burnt by frost in our community—are reaching full bloom. The moisture left in the ground and warm temperatures have done wonders to the garden, where lettuces, arugula, kale, spinach, mustard, turnips, beets, onions, carrots, garlic, peas and parsley are all flourishing with early growth.

After years of growing the garden, we’ve discovered that some vegetables do well, particularly greens, while crops that need more depth or greater fertility, like tubers, large radishes and cabbage, do poorly. Over the years of improving the soil with compost and manure and experimenting with different crops, we’ve learned what our garden likes to grow and what is presently outside its limits.

Just as we learned what is compatible with the Earth, I’ve learned what I’m compatible with as a sensitive person. Though I work with violent men, puritans and money-chasers, each in their own way are not compatible with my deeply felt emotions and desires for a peaceful, harmonious, sustainable and equitable world.

While I strive to see the good qualities of these individuals and to learn what I can from them, it is difficult to socialize with them—their emotions are simply too rough and callous for me; what they seem to want out of life and the life choices they make because of that make absolutely no sense to me.

As I explored the human world as a young adult, I found that the community my wife and I are now in was compatible with my sensitivity and ideals. This was an important lesson to apply to my life. When I returned decades ago after working elsewhere to rebuild my life economically, I found that not only did the community support my needs as a sensitive person, but it was also a refuge for artists, activists, seekers and others attempting to create a new way of life. Among these idealistic people was my wife, who I fortunately met in this colony of sensitive people.

As our lives passed in our community, I learned that some webs of life bring out our best, healthiest, happiest futures while others do not. This question—where and with whom we choose to live—is central to the fulfillment of our higher selves and, like the soil of the garden, is as important at the seeds of good works that we attempt to plant.

If we choose unwisely, partnerships and communities can become sources of hardship and crises, as commonly happens when addicted partiers or domineering and dependent people come together as partners. Just as I learned from a book given to me by a stepdaughter that companion planting of parsley and carrots near tomatoes fosters growth, human companionships and communities can help or hinder us. This is especially important for sensitive people, who are a minority in patriarchy and have needs that the mainstream culture ignores.

For sensitive people, recognizing where we fit and where people appreciate our good works is essential. A dependent person can waste years kowtowing to a domineering, ungrateful person; “social working” women, as my wife calls them, can spend years trying to save someone from their addictions and other self-created problems, only to find that their good will has been used to rob them of years of spiritual generosity. Giving up on relationships and communities that don’t work for us is crucial.

My own view of our present culture is shaped by the knowledge that as a man who is attempting to be sensitive and reach out toward the sacred Feminine that I no longer fit into the larger human world. Finding a community where I can thrive has been an extremely fortunate gift that I received even before I was conscious of my own sensitivity.

In the larger world, incompatible personalities, like partiers verses puritans and violent men verses sensitive people, have traditional rivalries spanning generations. The challenge for us is to learn from the better parts of these rival people while protecting ourselves from harm they might do.

For many, it is common to jump from one aspect to another as our lives progress. Many partiers become puritans to control addictions; some violent men have sensitive inner selves arise and react into pacifism or similar points of view; some money chasers become philanthropists or activists. In my life, the personality transformation beginning in my psychosis allowed my inner sensitivity to emerge, making the crises of that time one of the most important spiritual gifts of my life. Those perilous times led me to the family, community and life I have today.

For all our differences, each of us face deep spiritual challenges that are the true substance of our lives. Finding friends, families and communities that support our better selves is as crucial to us as the compost we put in the garden is to the seeds we plant. It is in our personal web of life that our most important choices—who we share our lives with—has the most powerful impact. Our lives may seem minor in the larger world, yet they are the place where we can apply our ideals and seek our dreams most directly. Consciously choosing who we share our lives with and how we can make each other’s lives better determines most of what we will harvest from our lives.

In our garden, Chinese Red and pink lilies, pinkish hollyhocks, golden and red marigolds, bright yellow coreopsis and golden Stella d’ Oro are blooming in abundance. The beautiful red lilies were a planted as a gift by my brusque, colorblind brother to our mother to beautify her yard two decades ago. When each of them passed on at young ages as part of a wave of deaths and illnesses over nearly fifteen years ago, I transplanted them into our garden and learned a lesson about how my brother expressed love.

Peas and lettuces have also been abundant, but heavy rains have delayed planting later crops. As June continued, our lettuce harvest changed from thinning of young plants, to harvesting full heads, to leaving the best heads to bolt and set seed. I have begun succession planting of tomatoes and basil in rows where arugula and spinach have bolted and set seeds, completing their lives by maturing the seeds I will use for next year. I have also sown Hutterite and John Allen Cut Short heirloom beans in the rows where the summer’s heat is slowly withering our Thomas Laxton heirloom peas. I have also saved overripe peas, especially those with many peas in a pod, to use as seed next year.

The Solstice marks a transition in our area from delicate, perishable crops such as lettuces, asparagus and peas to hardier, more lasting crops like beets, carrots, onions, tomatoes and kale. Replacing crops in succession planting and gathering seed from dying plants, along with my own life, has caused me reflect on transitions in my life from a larger lens.

Before the Summer Solstice, I conducted my ten day annual life review, a practice I started each June in 2015, to consider how I can improve. Looking over past notes, I saw that many of the issues that have affected our lives have been out of our control, but by pondering these aspects of fate I clarified what I do have some ability to affect. Ironically, though I think of myself as having free will, many of the things within myself that I wish to change are tenacious and appear in my annual reviews each year as works in progress.

Fortunately, many of the changes outside my control has been for the better, but there was a nearly constant wave of deaths, injuries and crises for a year and a half in our web of life. To our good fortune, this devastating wave was followed by a series of births of babies among friends and family. Like the garden, our lives are moving in succession, with young spirits replacing we who are incarnate now. Only when lives are lost young, with great suffering, or unnecessarily is the hardship of death not part of the flow of the sacred river of life of the Earth.

During my life review this year, I could see the unfolding of the streams of life of our families—our grandparents, our parents, ourselves, and the younger people in our blended family—along with the communities where we are living out our lives. From this intergenerational view, I could see that many of the events, for good or ill, have been part of inevitable flow of our family and community cultures. A slow motion flowering of the consequences of our histories and our own actions.

The good times have contained seeds of trouble and eventual crises that were overlooked at the time, like weeds in a garden that go unnoticed until they choke out the plants we have sown. During the crises, we struggled, cried and felt bitter remorse. During these hard times, I argued more with my wife and suffered from a lack of faith as we struggled to keep to a course that would maintain a happy, healthy family.

During these crises, we learned. We made different choices, sometimes out of bleak necessity, and focused our minds on managing events one by one. The wave of deaths, illnesses and crises brought to light my own failings and demanded solutions. Whether my choices during this wave were the best for my family will only be known in time.

As the wave of births and new lives took hold, joy returned from the shadow of death and our lives are now filled with the near-constant caring for young children who all-too-soon will venture away from their homes and into a human world not of their creation. They will succeed us, passing farther down the stream of life than we do, gaining from what we do right now, suffering from our mistakes.

For the most part, I have reacted poorly to the challenges. Yet, there has been a succession of good fortune and the bliss of new lives. If anything, most of the benefits that we have received have not been of my doing alone; rather they have been what skeptically-minded people would call luck or random chance and what—often in a self-serving way—some religious people would call grace.

In the larger human world, the dramas of princes and principalities have played out, as much out of the control of sensitive and ordinary people like me as the winds of the sky. For decades, my mind has been focused on the small human world around me—my family, community, and workplace—and I have put forth a lot of effort in that small world. It is in that small, precious world of loved ones and others who we share daily life with that I see my failures and good works have the greatest effect. It is in that world—where I have the greatest impact—that my annual life review focuses on.

In the larger human world of international trials and tribulations, the princes and principalities continue on, perpetuating mistakes and vainglory attempts to succeed through the Covenant of Bad Works. Like my own failings, whatever benefit these leaders seek through power-over-others will pass from them through the seeds of their own actions. The lesson in my personal world is the same: the more that I work to improve myself, to love in action those I care for, act with respect and consideration towards those in my community, pull my own weight at work and in my family, and to seek a sustainable relationship with the Earth, the more we all will prosper. The challenge is not in the saying; the challenge is in the doing.

As for my resolutions?—I have already failed in seeking to live according to them. Fortunately, I have the rest of the year to steer my course toward a better future for me and the loved ones who will succeed me in the sacred flow of life on Earth.

As mid-summer is passing, the season continues to be rainy. While some growers have been affected and sweet corn is still sparse at the Farmer’s Market, local growers appear to be resilient in the face of the challenging weather. Meanwhile, our garden has been flourishing, with harvests of beets with luxuriant greens, dark green Heirloom Lacinato kale and elephant garlic. At the same time, the produce auction has been abundant and between our garden and food from the club, our refrigerator has been filled to capacity. We’ve made a half dozen or more dishes in the last ten days--Ratatouille, Pinto Bean and Beet Green soup, Potato Salad, Cucumber-Tomato Sandwiches, Peach Tart, and Sweet Corn, plus Kale and Romaine salads—all using ingredients almost entirely from local sources.

We are freezing and preserving the abundant extras, including blueberries, extra soup, Korean-style Kim Chi, and Kale leaves for winter soups and looking forward to additional dishes—Beets, Greens and Onions with Tofu and Turnip, Greens, and Mushroom stir-fries, Borscht, and many other seasonal dishes.

Bright red Bee Balm mixed with white Queen Anne’s Lace, pale purple Coneflowers and coral-pink Swamp Milkweed in the waterway down the hill have begun to flower, bringing hummingbirds and butterflies. Pinkish Hollyhocks and Golden Coreopsis are continuing to bloom, all of which provide food to insects and birds in partnerships of life. The Earthly River of Life flows together in natural communities through generations, and in our area reaches an abundance in summer like few other times of the year.

Our good fortune in terms of healthy, abundance sources of local food cannot be measured. In a world where hunger, malnutrition, poverty and curable diseases run rampant, the abundance of the Earth around us gives the chance for a healthy and sensually satisfying life. The challenge is to provide this same abundance in a sustainable way for our family and community.

Part of this is to embrace the new generation of young lives that younger women in our family and community have brought forth, providing new hope in the face of our own aging lives. My wife, after losing our beloved mother-in-law, has fully embraced the new lives through babysitting several times a week, including for a boisterous baby in our family.

We had a family gathering recently where the eight-month-old girl was a delightful center of the time together. My wife and I brought potato salad and kale salad and made veggie burgers, with the meal timed with a brief nap for the toddler. Toward the end of the meal, the baby awoke and cried out for company.

The father brought her to the table and we watched her as she fully woke. She became lively and despite her young age began to move about, so we went to the living room where she crawled and walked around a coffee table, waving her hands, seeming to dance to music, beating the table with a hand and excitedly calling out with delight as the family watched her every move. For over three hours she delighted the young parents, her uncle and my wife and I, merely by being a young, beloved life learning to move about on her own. She herself was full of vigor and joy, exuberant in the love of life and the new abilities of her growing body. Seeing the child’s growth from a newborn only eight months ago into zestful, joyful and strong child as part of the sacred flow of Earthly life into eternity has been one of the most profound, joyous experiences of our family’s life.

After the gathering, my wife and I reflected on the wonderful day and I said that in my family babies of that age were set aside in playpens and cribs during family gatherings. Rather than spending three hours being entertained and delighted by the new lives, they were put out of the way while the adults—particularly the men—discussed their outer world focus. In my family, it would be news, politics, philosophy, education, business plans and sports as the main topics, all of which were seen as more important than “child’s play.” Yet, many of these outer world, patriarchal centers do little to move forward the sacred Earthly river of life and some make our families and communities less sustainable, damaging the future of the young lives who are—tragically—not the focus of our daily lives.

In our contemporary, patriarchal consciousness, we are trained to focus our attention away from the river of life that flows through our lives and onto temporary attainments—business, military, political, media and artistic successes; accumulating money, gaining power-over-others, becoming better known—much to our long-term loss. Part of the greatest challenge of our culture is that it is at best irrelevant to the needs of sustaining the Earthly river of life of family, community and Earth around us; at worst, it harms that sacred flow into eternity, moving us away from the joys that radiate from that center.

Whether one has children or not, there are many ways people contribute to the flow of life through eternity. Activists, community volunteers, good neighbors, child-care workers, philanthropists, healers, growers, and many others whose lives directly support a sustainable flow of Earthly life practice the essence of good works—to bring forth life in daily activity. This constant labor of life—which is oftentimes ignored yet given hollow, insincere praise by patriarchal leaders—is a center of the flow of life through eternity.

In a very real way, my own journey back to this wonderful center began when, in first seeking to practice feminism rather than claim to follow it, I began to help my Mom and Grandmother with holiday meals. I quickly discovered while oftentimes lazy men in the living room watched TV and pontificated on the way that the world should be, the women in the kitchen were sharing stories, catching up on family life, recalling family and community history and deepening their relationships while cooking a meal to feed our family. These first few ventures into the woman’s world began a decades-long quest toward that center of life that is the toddler walking around a table, exploring her growing abilities in her new world and delighting her family with the joy of abundant life. It is a journey of joy and love, still far from completion, towards a more sustainable family and community at peace with the human world.

As the summer stretches into mid-July, beautiful all white and fiery, rosy-red lilies my wife planted are in full bloom. Like the other flowers, pollinators are attracted by the sweet aroma and begin the process of new life for the flowers simply by the sensually-rich act of drinking the flowers’ nectar.

The flower seeds will become the food of birds and some animals, who are nourished by the digestion and carry the seeds to other locations, expanding the range of the flowers, pollinators and themselves. In their simple daily lives, the natural communities of plants, insects, birds and animals harmoniously build a better life for their children in a joyous re-creation of life.

These natural communities are essential to the individuals and families that are part of them. From years of observing life in the woods, I have learned that without communities, no individual or family can be sustained for more than a brief time. Our natural and human communities flow together through the river of life and largely determine the paths our individual and family lives will take, now and in the future.

When I moved back to the community that had saved me during my psychosis, I began to host potlucks to support the community. I had heard that the United States had weak communities compared to other countries and hosting potlucks was an easy way to give back to the web of life that had provided me with so much. I had been an outcast and a scapegoat for the puritan-money-chaser community I grew up in, so I had known hardship and yet could see the strength communities provided.

As our potlucks grew, our neighbors and my wife and I became friends and a small, face-to-face community formed around us. As time passed, a small but important piece of natural land next to our street came up for sale and we became concerned it would be developed, harming the natural area we took for granted and damaging our neighborhood with overcrowding, noise and short-term, disruptive and drunken student renters.

Our neighbors and we discussed buying the land collectively, but the attempt stalled and my wife and I, with another neighbor, explored buying the land ourselves, though we had little spare money.

During this hard time my mother passed and we knew we would receive a small inheritance. One day, a neighbor who knew we were interested in buying the land called me with word that a developer was very close to purchasing the land. He only needed approval of a couple of documents from the city to proceed.

Our neighbors and we faced the possibility of our quiet, enjoyable homes being inundated by noise, traffic, pollution and rowdy student partiers. We would either have to sell our home and move away or find a way to stop the sale. Emailing the city code office to discover what was going on and adding more and more neighbors and friends to the emails as we added one message to another, we realized that the only option would be to buy the land as soon as possible.

Committing the yet to be gained inheritance to pay a portion of the costs, my wife and I moved forward to buy the land and, by as much good luck as anything else, managed to buy the land a few days before the developer could complete the work he needed to finalize his deal.

In retrospect, I realized that my Mom’s untimely death had led to benefit for our family and community and, in that way, had served a tragic yet necessary purpose in the flow of life into the future. It did not make my sorrow less, but it provided greater understanding of the larger purpose of the death of elders, human, animal and otherwise, in our lives.

Being saved from a hard fate by our neighbor was also a lesson to me about the importance of human communities and the value of good works in building them. Intending to support our community through potlucks and parties to bring people together, that same community was essential in helping us protect our home by providing information and support during a crisis. Without it, the natural and human communities around the land would have been destroyed by money-chasers seeking wealth without regard to the consequences for the Earth and our community.

In a very important way, this lesson of the strength of good works taught me to have more faith in the workings of the spiritual world. I can see from events like these that good works are often rewarded in small, face-to-face webs of life, giving me hope that good works may extend pass my own mortal life.

To celebrate our good fortune, my wife and I began to host celebratory potlucks for neighbors, friends and family on the land every other year. Most years there have been around a hundred people, including children, in attendance, despite the potluck being held at the height of summer’s heat. We also let the neighborhood children play on the land, giving them woods to explore and a grassy area to play in during the summer and a steep slope to sled down when it snows in the winter. It has become a natural area for the community, akin to the Commons of centuries ago.

This year, we again celebrated our good fortune with about 120 people providing food and fellowship. Many who came were young families who are friends of the parents of the newborn in our family, giving our picnic the joy of ten children three years and younger with their parents and some grandparents with them. As the older children played on a slip ‘n’ slide and doused each other with cold water set in buckets for them, the adults gathered, ate, talked and shared fellowship. Many people thanked us for our work and said it was great to have a regular community gathering.

To be able to give is a tremendous gift to receive.