A dear friend from the Netherlands, Dr. Harrie van den Hout, arrived yesterday for a two week visit with family and particularly to celebrate my mother-in-law’s upcoming 90th Birthday. My In-laws and the Van den Houts met in Greece a good many years ago and for many good reasons a friendship was established. Harrie is the founder of the Poor People’s Fund in the Netherlands and still today at 82 years of age actively pursues its goals of health and education in Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania. He has been teaching medicine, establishing schools and clinics and providing education to orphans, off and on in Africa since the 1970’s. Harrie has been quite recently widowed, has suffered the loss of children and relatives to a rare genetic lung disease and after nursing his late wife until her early death has again taken up the work in Africa. I love to listen to his remarkable stories, but most of all I am inspired by this elderly gentleman doctor who has many reasons to be bitter and selfish and instead is anything but. He is filled with hope and generosity, keen insight into the human condition and is a joy to be around. He has permitted me to relate some of his remarkable stories that pour from him at the smallest prompting. What a gift.
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I’ve written before about corner grocery stores and the ritual of going to Pat’s Grocery with our grandsons when we are in Kingston. Several weeks before we went to Kingston this summer the boys announced to us that Pat’s Grocery had closed it doors for good. A sad day. I have so many stories and memories of these places from my own childhood. While we were in Kingston we found out about artist Heidi Mack’s photoart images of some of these passing Canadian icons. One of her images captures our son and daughter-in-law and our two grandsons crossing the street in front of the ‘Store Famous.’ I love that name, the Coke sign and what these places represent. I heard last week that since the conclave that elected him, Pope Francis has never lived in the papal residence, the Apostolic Palace that has been in use by popes for 110 years. Instead he is living in one of the suites in the Vatican guesthouse, Suite 201, a considerably more modest accommodation. He has chosen to live among the other permanent and part time guests who stay there, taking his meals in the common dining room, saying mass and choosing to live among his people. A spokesman for the pope said, “He is experimenting with this type of living arrangement, which is simple," but allows him "to live in community with others." This is quite a testimony to who this man is at heart. "I've remained living in the Casa Santa Marta, which is a residence which accommodates bishops, priests and lay people." There he feels "part of a family" he wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Clarin, an Argentinian daily. "I'm visible to people and I lead a normal life – a public Mass in the morning, I eat in the refectory with everyone else, et cetera. All this is good for me and prevents me from being isolated. "I'm trying to stay the same and to act as I did in Buenos Aires because if you change at my age you just look ridiculous." There are many leaders who do look ridiculous in the kind of ‘offices’ they have set up for themselves and they are isolated from the people whom they are there to serve. Suite 201 is a metaphor for leadership. National Catholic Reporter May 26, 2013 All day Saturday and all day Monday were roofing days for the new barn. It certainly is satisfying work but I’m feeling it in my bones today and I think Asher is as well, especially in his Achilles which gets stretched in ways its not used to being stretched given the angle of the roof that we are working on. We covered almost 3,000 square feet of roof in that time and put in over 5,000 screws to keep the whole thing in place. I was saying to the boys that it sure is a good thing that the latest portable drills have headlights on them because the last sheets were going on long after the mid September sun had set on a beautiful fall day. At one point in the early afternoon the barn swallows were playing around our heads, a young eagle was catching the updrafts and the geese were gathering as the light was failing just after dinner. I think there is a saying in football that goes, “The hay is in the barn,” which coaches say before a big game. In other words, we have done all the hard work, we’ve conditioned and practiced and now we have to deliver the winning game. We put the hay in the barn about two weeks ago and have been working hard to put a roof over the hay so that it would not get wet and mouldy. I feel good today. The hay is in the barn and it will stay dry and feed the cows this winter. Feels great!! Holocaust survivor Gerda Klein-Weissmann tells the story of her friend Ilse in her All But My Life: A Memoir. “Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the concentration camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf. Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend.” Ilse and Gerda were part of a forced march of some 2,000 inmates from a concentration camp as the allied forces were closing in. Fewer than 120 survived the march. Ilse died a week before the liberation but before she died she encouraged Gerda to go on for just one more week. She survived that week, at the end of which the group was met by the allied liberators. Gerda and Ilse were 15 years of age. When I think of the world we live in today I think how transformative these small but enormous acts of courage and self-sacrifice could be. I ran across this blog and TED Talk by journalist and columnist with the On Being Blog Courtney E. Martin. She has a new book coming out called The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream where she talks “about rejecting, or at the very least, examining some of our country's most dearly-held defaults.” Here is one of those beliefs and her comments. To be a leader, one has to be uncompromisingly focused on work. We need to remake workplaces for the 21st century, where both women and men have the responsibility and privilege of being workers and caregivers. That means more flexibility and paid family leave, among much else. But we also need to reimagine what leadership looks like in the 21st century. …[W]hy isn't anyone talking about the fact that being a leader, as we've conceived of it in so many sectors, practically requires neglecting everything outside of work? Is it possible to be a CEO (or school principal or nonprofit director or any other overworked, highly visible leader of an organization) and value and prioritize caretaking? And if the answer is "no," what does that say about the kinds of leaders we are cultivating in almost every one of our professional sectors? Many people are rejecting that paradigm of leadership because they refuse to believe that doing great things in the big, wide world should require missing out on so much great time with children, partners, neighbors, and friends. All I have to say about this is, Yes, so true. The last few days have been all about getting back into the rhythms of working in the yard, the garden, building the barn, moving the pig sty, moving a big pile of soil around to get the grade right for water run off and another dozen little ‘mindless’ jobs. By the late afternoon when it’s time to shower the water runs dirt brown down the drain. On Tuesday a friend forwarded this David Budbill poem to me, I imagine because she was thinking that my fall patterns had rearranged themselves over these past two years. And they have indeed, in ways that I have really come to love. The poem does express very much how I feel most days. This Shining Moment in the Now by David Budbill When I work outdoors all day, every day, as I do now, in the fall, getting ready for winter, tearing up the garden, digging potatoes, gathering the squash, cutting firewood, making kindling, repairing bridges over the brook, clearing trails in the woods, doing the last of the fall mowing, pruning apple trees, taking down the screens, putting up the storm windows, banking the house—all these things, as preparation for the coming cold… when I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds, the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees… when day after day I think of nothing but what the next chore is, when I go from clearing woods roads, to sharpening a chain saw, to changing the oil in a mower, to stacking wood, when I am all body and no mind… when I am only here and now and nowhere else—then, and only then, do I see the crippling power of mind, the curse of thought, and I pause and wonder why I so seldom find this shining moment in the now. Isn’t it so that we can often be so much in our minds that we lose the shining moment we are in the middle of living? Whenever we are perplexed or troubled we find it difficult to turn off the voices in our heads. When we have messed something up we push rewind on the story over and over again. May today be one of many shining moments,, in our work, with our children, with ourselves and with the good gifts offered today. I have enjoyed immensely the physical work that I have been doing since I left the teaching profession almost two years ago. Apart from the great physical well-being that comes from a more active life, I enjoy the learning that I have been able to do, working in the garden, in the workshop, building a barn and attempting to fix or build rather than hiring someone to do it. This has it limits of course and when I reach them I am happy to call up an expert who has the kind of knowledge that I don’t have. When we came home from visiting our children and grandchildren in Kingston this August we came home to a major water leak. Our neighbors assumed we were recklessly squandering good water during the dry spell, seeing it run in streams down the road from our property. For the better part of two weeks we could not find where that leak was and managed by filling buckets of water and turning the well pump off and on as needed. I had dug more holes than a mole, tore up drywall to look into the walls and crawled under the house and over the stiflingly hot rafters in order to solve the problem to no avail. As I often do when I am stumped like this, I call in Kevin to apply his wisdom. In our society we often elevate persons with numerous letters behind their names, etched on their business cards and framed on their walls and fail to appreciate the knowledge that someone has in their hands, knowledge that in many ways surpasses the knowing we elevate in many of our institutions. As school begins again we would do well to remember the old Hebrew meaning of knowledge that is more encompassing than what is in our heads. The kind of knowing that Kevin has is that older kind of knowing. So with my bumbling efforts and Kevin’s knowing, we have water again. And you can be assured that when Kevin is working on the problem it will eventually get solved and there will be lots of laughter. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.” ― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work Melancholy is sometimes defined as a feeling of ‘pensive sadness.’ Maybe that is a little of what I feel as the season turns and as a new school year begins. For me it means that two of our household go off to school and I return to some other rhythms as well. We lived closely with very good neighbors for many years when our children were small and the boys always said that, 'Nick goes to work and dad goes to school.' It’s kind of sad that summer is over and the days get shorter, cooler and wetter but it is also good. Maybe it’s the beginning of a more productive season, a season of harvest and completion, of storing up and preparedness. For me it will also be a return to some regular writing and posting. The change of the season, especially as it turns to autumn, is the reminder of the temporary nature of all things. Yes, we want to hang on to the last bloom of summer, another swim in the lake, another summer BBQ, another cold beer on the patio, but that is not the way of life here. But as I look to the last of summer's bold sunflowers I am already thinking that I need to collect enough seed for next Spring. Fall Song Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves, the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows, unmattering back from the particular island of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere except underfoot, moldering in that black subterranean castle of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds and the wanderings of water. This I try to remember when time's measure painfully chafes, for instance when autumn flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay - how everything lives, shifting from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures. Mary Oliver |
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