Category — Community Life

Eleanor, I am NOT a tease.  Vague, yes. Well intentioned and not following through. Sometimes.

(Pomo baskets were just a smidgen of research for the book, and Mary Ward was clickthrough clickthrough clickthrough from some more research.  Of the history of the automobile.)

And like Christine said in the comments, I do think Eleanor should get an award for best commenter. Because she writes poems.  Which is awesome.

Here is the video!  Just some background: you’ll see our kids, and also a friend of theirs, Kora, from Italy. Paola, I’d like to point out that homemade gnocchi features in this video.

Enough of that!  Chinua took a one-shot one afternoon, when he was chasing the kids with the camera, and I was inspired by the many small beautiful moments in it.

Here it is:

The Chase from Rae Ford on Vimeo.

Yesterday I went to the market on my scooter, in the town about forty-five minutes from where I live. I bought some fabric from a man who refused to let me pay my bill before he could give me tea.  He told me that next time I come, I must have a samosa, too.

While I was driving, many thoughts went through my head, as thoughts always do when I am traveling in the luxury of my own company.

Isn’t it amazing that a landscape can wind itself into you? How you may not have noticed every lovely detail when you were new and raw in your transition, but now, two years later, that lone magnolia tree in a field can bring you to tears? Or the egrets, the great white birds, friends of cows and water buffalos, winging over the emerald rice paddies, the egrets have you waving after them foolishly, able to do nothing more than put your hand up toward the sky as if you thought you could touch them.

How you love even the dustiness, the color of it, all the lonely dusty roads and fields, crisscrossing like veins over a vast country.

India is certainly majestic. But it is not mine, not really, because I am from somewhere else.

We are preparing to go back for a visit, soon, to Canada and the U.S. I am thoughtful and sorrowful and excited and over the moon. And scared. And happy. And thoughtful.

But what I wanted to talk about, on this rambling evening, is the shape our community takes. Christine’s question in the comments on the last post made me think that I take so much for granted, I’m never completely clear.  Actually, I’m never sure just how clear I should be, but I think I can tell you this.

Chinua and I have lived in community for all of our married lives, and for many years before. In fact, in the whole time we’ve been married, we’ve only spend five months out of intentional community.  We’ve lived in many different situations.  There was the big house in San Francisco, with people everywhere, in all the kitchens, falling down the stairs, spilling out of the windows.  That was fun.  There was the house in Arcata, always changing. For a while it was all boys and me, and then it was a few couples with newborns, and then we moved back to San Francisco to a largish flat with all our babies and had lots of crazy fun interspersed with whispered fights in the hallways. That was crazy. And then we lived at the Land. A couple of times. There’s lots to say about all of it, but what I will say is that I really love all those people I lived with, and I really believe in community.

This is the shape our community in Goa takes now.  There aren’t so many of us, really. There have been six of us (adults) committed to being here for six months of the year. We have three small houses close together and one a little farther away. Our courtyards touch.  We eat lunch together everyday. We take turns cooking, and we have a circle once a week to decide who will cook on what day.

We are a meditation community, and we are followers of Jesus.  We do daily meditation in the Christian and Judaic traditions, and we focus especially on the Divine Presence of God among us.  In our weekly circle we also decide who will guide each meditation.

The committed people in our community keep the structure running, but it is an open community, which means that we have a lot of visitors.  The meditations are open to whoever would like to experience this kind of meditation, and lunch is always an open invitation. It’s great, really, because we get the best of whoever is cooking; everyone can put their all into one or two meals a week. Lunch in my family is the biggest meal, and dinner is usually pretty snacky.  Sandwiches, or omelettes, or leftovers.

We live close together (the meditation space is on my rooftop) but Chinua and I and our family are the only ones living in our house. (Thank goodness, because we only have two bedrooms.) I love this. We run in and out of each other’s kitchens, but we can find our own space, too.

Sometimes the rhythm of it all (the lunches everyday, the other meetings we have) gets repetitive to me, since every other waking hour is filled with the restraints of family life, but I remind myself that if I can sigh into the structure of it, into the restraint (as a friend of mine once said) I will gain the freedom to learn to truly love.

Our vision is for a Jesus focused, creative community exploring art and music as well as the disciplines of meditation and prayer and worship, in an international hub. Goa is the place for us, right now.

We will be back here in October, for our third season. If you are interested in something like this, something rather crazy and fun, you can email me.

So.  I hope that clears things up.  If you’re interested, I can write more on meditation in the future.

This feels like a letter, somehow.

I’ll sign it,

Rae

We’ve been having a deep retreat, covering meditation and other practices for those of the Jesus Way. So far we’ve talked about community life, meditation, contemplation and intimate worship, the practice of singing together, and loads of other stuff. And then today it was time to run away to the gigantic banyan tree that is down the road aways.  We packed food for an evening picnic and loaded up the scooters and cars.

On the way.

It takes about two seconds after we arrive for them to be up a tree.

They’re looking up because the Superstar Husband is way up here:

Can you see him?  He’s right in the middle.

This one just stuffed bananas in his mouth.

This is a monkey I found in the tree.

And these are shenanigans:

This is a man from Holland who has many years of experience in Christian community and with meditation.  We invited him to come and share some of his wisdom with us. I’m not sure that he expected this kind of adventure, but he got it!

We like to stick our guests in trees.

Also our Leafy boys.

So what is it that we have been doing, that has kept me away from this computer for so long?

We have been coughing and blowing our noses, but that is not it. That is not all.

First, there were our gift projects.  I found some lovely cotton canvasy type fabric in the Mapusa market (I really must take you on a tour of the Mapusa market one of these days.  You won’t understand my life if you don’t come with me) and had cloth grocery bags made by my new fabulous tailors.

* A note on the tailors. I’ve had so much trouble with tailors over the last year that I’ve seriously considered just buying a sewing machine and making all the kids’ clothes myself, something I would LOVE to do if I had a clone who could finish my book and host all the people who come over everyday. If there were two of me maybe we could get it all done.  What I did instead was took a deep breath and walked into every Nepali shop that I’ve been avoiding here in my tourist town since I arrived.  I hate shopping. Remember? Loathe it.  And there is nothing that will frighten an anti-shopper like myself more than an overabundance of choice. So I took an afternoon and forced myself to go and talk to all the tailors.  I found some with a wide open space in the back of their shop, so they were practically outside, but with a shade cover.  Good working conditions. Check.  Polite, not smarmy. Check.  Understood what I meant. Check. Good stitching on the samples. Check.

I found my dream tailors and I have loved everything they’ve made. Wonderful, because the kids always need clothes and there are no thrift stores here and don’t even get me started on the horridness of things that are sold in the shops. *

So anyways, I had the bags made, and then the kids drew simple designs and embroidered them.

The gifts were a hit. We gave them to our neighbors and close friends.

We decorated our Christmas tree; this year a tiny spruce.

We got the rooftop ready for a Christmas party that we had on Christmas Eve.

And then we had the party.  It was so sweet. There was plenty of food, and the decorations were so peaceful and nice (the stars were made by Miriam and Johanna, members of our community from Germany and Switzerland.  Some are made of paper and some they made out of palm fronds) and I read the Christmas story while the kids acted it out. The child who played Mary had a bit of a nervous problem of picking her nose, so the video may prove to be an embarrassment one day.  We sang carols, with Chinua, Miriam and Johanna singing three parts, and Chinua performed his arrangement of the Little Drummer Boy, which never fails to bring me to tears. The guests went away happy and blessed, and we were all happy.

(Kid A took this photo at the party.)

Christmas day was beautiful and sweet, except for my sleep deprivation from going to Midnight Mass the night before. I may tell you about that at another time. (Mistake!)

Oh, the kids were so excited and Chinua and I made crepes together and then friends came over with hula hoops they had made for the kids, and then the other members of the Turbans (the band Chinua was in in the Himalayas) showed up (we haven’t seen them since we left the mountains) and then we went for a family swim.I’ve been worn out, lately, and missing my family, so this soft, sandy Christmas was just what I needed. God always knows, doesn’t he?  He always, always knows.

Beat up art supplies in the morning with a bowl full of marigolds.

“Mama! Take a picture of me!”

Some sort of interesting archaeology by the YaYa sister.  A paintbrush and a rock.  Brush brush brush.  Knock the dust off.  Brush brush brush.

Enough bananas and onions for everyone.

The opening of a neighborhood dance studio.

Renee’s lentil soup for lunch.

New friends.

Leftovers for dinner.

YaYa: “Come here little gecko.  I’ll put a star sticker on you if you’re really good and you come to me!” (Assuming that the gecko is dying for a star sticker.)

The light here.

Her hands.

I think that I have decided to join Schmutzie’s Grace in Small Things challenge.

I say I think because I am not so great at following through with thingy-ma-jigs that fall in sequence. But any number of days that I notice five positive things and write them down is better than no days, right?

And it might just jog me out of this blog apathy that is not really apathy, but a desire to say so many things and the fear that I won’t be able to say them. (Oh no, there I go with the fear again.)

*

So here goes: (The rules are: list five positive things every day. Simple, eh?)

1. I was having a stern talk with Kid A this morning about the need to be kind to his little brother, the Leafy Boy, and to think about his brother rather than just doing whatever he wants and ending up hurting him. All the while Leafy was piping in with, “Hugging is kind, right Mama? Kissing is kind, right?”

2. Tonight after I got the baby to sleep, my Superstar Husband put the kids to bed so that I could head back out on the scooter to join the girls at their favorite coffee shop. (The only coffee shop.)

3. While we were there, we were discussing the differences in age between siblings in my family, and I said that my younger sister and brother are exactly two years apart. My sister, the ever zesty Becca, shot me a look and said, “Two years and one day,” and then mouthed threateningly and absurdly, Not EXACTLY two years!

I collapsed in giggles, something I haven’t done in a while.

4. After our community lunch today a few of us sat and created some things together. I worked on a drawing and then wrote a letter to someone who is leaving tomorrow. The kids painted on paper, the floor, and themselves, Renee mixed colours and kept exclaiming, “I LOVE painting. I LOVE painting!” And we all just played and listened to music for a couple of hours. It was nice.

5. I didn’t make it down to the beach in time to dance, but I did watch the dancers with the late afternoon sun and the water behind them. The kids drew in the sand with sticks. I met some new people. I invited some people over for dinner tomorrow. I will make pesto and attempt to use cashews. We’ll see how it goes.

The good news is that it’s a baby tooth.

The bad news is that it will be three to five years before it grows back in.

The good news is that he’s cuter than ever.

But still… I have this wistfulness that comes from knowing that his appearance is changed permanently, now that there was pushing going on in the shower and he slipped and fell and he cried for about five minutes and then was better, now he will never look the same.  I wasn’t ready for that baby tooth to be gone yet.  Sigh.

***

I have added new layers of BUSY to busy.  We are beginning a meditation center in the Christian tradition, here in our village, and construction is commencing right now on our rooftop.  (Eventually we may get a building, but, as they say here in India, slowly slowly.)   The construction has nothing to do with me- Cate is designing and overseeing the building, but what DOES have to do with me is the week of teaching and workshops taking place right now.

Our friend has come to do some lectures and expand our knowledge of meditation: Eastern, Western, and all the middle bits.  He leads a monastic life with his wife, the type of life where one prays in a cell and builds buildings with rocks that one has quarried, and one bakes bread with wheat that one has not only ground, but grown, harvested, and threshed.  And one has no electricity.

His knowledge is of the doctorate variety, and his presence with us is of the fun and fresh variety.  We’re enjoying the lectures, the meditations, and the conversation.

(Kid A:  I had a conversation with Evan the other night.

Me: I noticed.  What did you talk about?

Kid A: Oh… almost grownup things.)

But we have been busy, meeting until almost eleven every night, and then starting over in the morning.  Yesterday everyone drove off to look at churches and ruins in Old Goa, and I stayed home because, as I told everyone, it wouldn’t be fun for them or us, to drag the kids around for the day.

Staying home looked like this:

Watering the garden. (I’m obsessed.  I touch and whisper to the new growth on our plants everyday.)

*

Walking to the painting for kids workshop.

(Me: If you can’t behave, Kid A, I won’t bring you back.

Kid A: That’s okay- I don’t really like painting.

It’s true- he never has.

Me: Sigh.

Kid A:  Do you know what my real job is? (Announcing to the class.)

Elaborate pause.

Kid A: STUDYING DOLPHINS.)

I refrained from telling the teacher that once upon a time I was a painter too.  I just let her tell me about colors and mixing and sat with my baby, laughing into his face, in my new life.

*

Bringing a friend home for the afternoon.  There is a coffee house here which is run by the friend of a friend, a man from Manali.  His daughter came to the painting workshop with us and then spent the day at our house, braving socially inept attempts to impress her by the boys.  (Kid A, painting on his face and spraying others with the spray bottle while at the workshop.)

*

Having a Belgian friend who is here studying massage give me a free TWO HOUR MASSAGE.  Wow.  It was the nicest thing that has happened to me in a long time.  What was happening with the kids?  Ratatouille.  The movie, not the food.

*

Eating the kimchi that our Korean friend made.  He is going to teach Chinua how to make it, and then I will be in heaven, sitting on the floor cross-legged, throwing it into my mouth.  I LOVE KIMCHI.

*

Having the surprise delight of Cate volunteering to sit with the kids after I put them to bed so that I could go to one of Chinua’s concerts.

I sat and dreamed of the day that I first heard those songs.  I watched his every move from the front row, singing along, clapping loudly.  His biggest fan.  It was wonderful.

The hand of an acquaintance may tremble and shake, but the grip of a friend is strong.

Ten friends may scatter when lice comes into the household, but the eleventh draws near.

(I made those proverbs up, by the way.  They’re not in the Bible.  Just so you know.)

Our friend is here!  Renee arrived on Thursday, and we have now had eight cups of chai together, sometimes with digestive biscuits, which are delicious.

Part of the process of deciding to come here was an attempt to relocate a little community to a place where there are many international travelers.  We were not trying to give up on community.  However, relocation of a community is more difficult than you may imagine, especially if you are leaving the known continent of North America and entering the unknown continent of Monsoon.  Or the subcontinent of India.  And since we’ve been here we’ve realized just how spoiled we’ve always been, with good friends living close to us and next door and in the house and spilling out of the windows.  We long for this enough that we fell on Renee’s neck weeping when she showed up.

(The monsoon is back.  It arrived with Renee and now we are submerged in water.  We are very wet.  Our sheets are wet, our towels never dry out, our pillowcases are wet, and I am dreaming about having a dryer, since we dry our clothes by hanging them in the kids’ room with the fan going at top speed.)

So anyways.  For now, this little community consists of the crazy short ones, AKA the kids, Chinua and I, and the brave, formidable, Renee.  Soon more friends will join us.  Because we all really, really like each other.

And to welcome Renee, on the first full day that she was here I brought her to the crazy surgeon’s office, to accompany me to my first Indian surgery.  (Minor- I’ll tell the whole story later on the other site.)

Not really the greatest welcome, Rae!  Hello!

She has already completely baffled me by claiming to be cold.  Cold!  My husband tells me that I’m the one who is hot all the time.  It’s true that I have a furnace attached to me, one that is fully engaged.  In birth speak, that means that the baby is in position and ready to come.  I’m thirty-seven weeks now, so it could happen any time.  However, my babies always seem to get ready waaaaay before they come.  And I have to walk like a cowboy, because there is a skull in my pelvis.

Now this little family hunkers down, waits for this baby, and tries to keep dry. (Ha!)

By the way, the lice are done and gone, thank goodness.  The kids never got them, which is amazing, but we have no sofa or soft chairs or stuff like that, so I guess it was just the Superstar Husband and myself, sharing them back and forth on our pillows.

To the people who have shared air with me, laughed, cried, been friends, been family, been iron against my iron. To the ones I’ve hurt, to the ones who have hurt me, to the ones who have given and given, to those who were enemies, to those who cut deeply, to those who offered their cupped hands filled with water, to those who gave sustenance, I want to tell you this:

*
I wish you nothing but good. The good that sustains you and is something you can lean against, like the tallest, thickest tree. The kind of good that feeds you when you can’t feed yourself. I wish you good.

I wish you kindness, the kindness that sends you a loving glance rather than a reproachful one. Someone to kiss your forehead when you are tired, and then to kiss you on that one spot on your cheekbone just because. I want someone to put their hands on either side of your face and tell you that you are so, so beautiful. That they will never leave you.

I wish you puddles of sunlight on wooden floors. Thick rugs. Tea or coffee with friends, or just by yourself, with a book, maybe a crossword puzzle. I wish you afghans to keep you warm, down comforters on the coldest days, hot water for your tired feet. I wish you calm and peace.

I wish you a clean home at the end of the day, firelight in deep winter, fields of flowers in the summer. I wish you wildness, the tangle of the ocean, hot sand and craggy rock formations. I wish you singing. I wish you dancing. I want to see laughter in your eyes, I want to think of you smiling.

I wish you small children who will pat your arm and smile up at you, or hug your knees really hard, grown children who will lean over you and kiss your head. I wish you warm rain that you can wade through with soaking clothes, I wish you flowering cacti in your deserts.

I pray that the good will keep you. That you will be safe in the midst of danger. That you are taller than you were yesterday, even if you are a bit scarred. I pray that your dark places are not lonely, that you feel sheltered, not stifled, that your legs will be strong from running. I pray that your tears are not bitter, that your heart is always soothed.

I wish you courage. I wish you home.

(A couple of people have commented that although this was not for them, they were encouraged.  If you are reading this, it is for you.  That’s all.)

To answer your questions:

When I’m talking about taxes I’m talking about tax forms and receipts for the non-profit I work for, not my personal taxes, which is why it takes me a long time, every January (should be January- this year it snuck into February). It’s actually not really that hard, just time-consuming and not my favorite snack.

And pictures, well… erm, pictures. I am ashamed to say that we ran out the door so fast that we didn’t actually get any pictures, so I will have to stage a costume re-enactment. Which shouldn’t be too hard, since they are, you know, costumes. What kid doesn’t love a costume? YaYa wore her cape all day yesterday.

And oh, by the way, the two most recent posts on the Burkina Faso trip are here and here.

So, I feel the need for some therapeutic writing. Bear with me. I have issues, as we always liked to say in my community. My friend would always say, “Graaaaave issues.” Or, if someone was being all nuts or whatever, we would say, “I-shhues,” because banter makes everything better.

But anyways. Oh dear, where do I begin?

I am afraid.

What I am afraid of, is people. I may have told you this before. ‘

Let me tell you what I am not afraid of. I am not afraid to travel. I am not afraid to meet a hundred new people in Burkina Faso and spend five days with them and attempt to make myself understood in a language I don’t speak.

I am not afraid of flying, I am not afraid of new and foreign food. I am not afraid of germs and sickness.

But I am deeply afraid of my responsibility toward people. I am afraid that people will ask more of me than I can give, and I will inevitably disappoint. This is a debilitating fear, when you live with the values and convictions and life work that I do.

Lately I’ve been living without this fear. It has felt very freeing, and I’ve been able to relax a little, pursue some interests, settle into myself, figure out what I really want out of life, and begin to make plans for projects and receive a slight hint of our future direction.

The difference has been that I am not doing what I normally do, which is accepting the stranger, offering hospitality, offering help to weary travelers.

Don’t get me wrong. It is all I want to do with my life. But it fills me with fear.

I realized that it still lives with me, slightly buried under an outer peace, last night. Someone who needed some help and friends to meet with called us up and asked if we could get together. We said “Of course!” and set up a time to have her over. And she was wonderful. It was a beautiful night, and we talked for hours, and we prayed together, and it was good.

And still? And still.

At the end of the night I was left questioning whether I had been enough, had done enough, whether I had disappointed. My fear was so great that my shoulders were hanging up by my ears, where they had been edging all evening, and my Superstar Husband was forced to sing me a little song about how I did a good job, to make me smile again.

It is a scenario that is all too common in my life.

Maybe it was exaggerated by the fact that I have been so alone, lately. (Not that I necessarily even want to be alone, I mostly want to be with people that I have deemed “safe”. They are the ones that I know won’t ask more of me than I am able to give.) People have tried to help and have asked me what I thought would “happen”, if I disappointed people. I have no answers for a question like that. It has nothing to do with what will “happen”. This anxiety is so deep rooted that I have no idea where the root lies. It really makes no sense. But it is still there.
But it made me fear the future, a little, which is never a good thing. Sometimes, someone with my temperament, my particular social anxiety, may retreat and just be an artist and a writer for a living. I’ve always known that this is not for me.

But, I realized, last night, that I am moving to India. Land of need. And there needs to be some kind of adjustment, man, some kind of healing, some kind of miracle.

Or maybe just day by day I will be moving through this incredible crippling fear, the fear that makes me dread the phone, the fear that makes me ask my husband to talk to people for me, and I will bit by bit overcome it, with the help of songs, with the help of a few inner prompts (sometimes I have to ask myself what I would tell someone in my situation) and with the help of Jesus, who is fairer, who is purer than every beautiful thing I have ever seen.

He is much more tender with me than I am with myself.