Stony Point Fall

With apologies, the following post is old; I started it over a month ago, intending to get back to it to finish and never did. Now that we are in the middle of Fall and the amazing color is drifting down from the trees to carpet the landscape in amber, gold and garnet. Here, is what I was doing six weeks ago:

It happened one warm morning in late summer as a small group of us gathered at 8:30 for morning prayer in the glass and wood beam meditation space. The door was open, as it often is during this half-hour shared by silence and Psalms. Suddenly the air began to rustle with the sound of gentle wind. Soon it built to robust gusting, then roaring currents of air pounded the large glass panels of our sanctuary. Just like that, Fall blew in.

The mornings are chill now as I walk up the path from the Gilmor Sloane to the meditation space. After morning prayer, my routine involves a brisk walk to the dining room to grab a light breakfast before the 8:00 to 9:00 buffet tables are cleared and the kitchen crew scramble to start preparations for lunch.

I feel the change to fall strongly, not only in the nippy morning and evening air, but because the children are back to school. A thing I love about living in community is that there have been children at play on the grounds. Their jangling laughter has plucked at my heart and nostalgic

images of my own children have flickered in my memory. Now, the day starts as the Stony Point children leave for school and the afternoon is punctuated by their return. There will be fewer of them now that the Gonzalez family have relocated to their own small rental dwelling. They have been living at Stony Point Center during the summer after they found themselves locked out of their home, all of their possessions taken. Since they are undocumented, they cannot go to the police. So Rick, after discussing it with the community, brought them in to the Center. Jose once had a visa, but it expired and he was afraid to try to get it renewed, fearing he would be sent back to El Salvador. His wife, Myra, is Guatemalan. She apparently has never had legal document. We have adopted this family and love them. Our frustration over the broken immigration system is heightened, as we see this family caught in its stranglehold.

The cohort, that mysterious process and rite of entrance into the Community of Living Traditions is about to start. More postings after I know what that will bring to the experience of living here.

Fading into Fall

Tomorrow is the 24th of July and there has been a let-up in the heat. After two solid days of rain and a third promised for tomorrow, coolness comes kissing face and arms with re-vitalizing freshness. At 61 degrees, tonight's evening cool reminds me of the Bay Area summer. It is light sweater weather! Since tomorrow I work in the hot, unairconditioned kitchen, I am greatly relieved by this respite from the Eastern summer hot and humid climate.

I have decided to make air conditioning for the kitchen a higher cause towards which to aspire; it may be my legacy when I leave a year from now. On the tables in the dining room we post signs which address eating and food as a moral issue. We grow some of our own produce. We care about eco-justice and so buy what we can't grow from local farmers. We care about justice for the workers in the growers fields. I have come to care about worker justice in our kitchen...a comfortable place for cooks and crews and dishwashers to labor on behalf of the hundreds who seat themselves at our tables each week. There are so many priorities at Stony Point competing for too few dollars. I am wondering how to become the anonymous kitchen angel!

July has swept along as group after group have come to stay in one or another of our lodges. The Gilmore Sloane where I live, host and clean has seen a different group every weekend, and a few groups in between. Memorable were the boys of the Chiku Awali Rites of Passage. They came with their parents, mostly their dads or surrogate and a woman organizer who has seen her eighth group of boys go through. These African American young men prepare and present an original story with a moral. It must have an African theme. Called from the Gilmore Sloane kitchen where I was doing some tidying, I was told that one of the judges had failed to arrive. Would I fill in? So I sat and listened to these timid presenters, evaluating them on the basis of projection, animation, clarity, use of body, originality, creativity, preparedness and African content. (Finally something to do that calls upon my background!) I strained to hear, sitting 8 feet from the presenters. Most stories seemed to focus on the importance of wearing appropriate attire for any given occasion. One amusing tale, not intended to amuse, was of a young African villager who went to the mall to buy a red tie for a job interview!

The point of the Chiku Awali Rites of Passage for Young Men is to prepare at risk, urban boys for success...to give them the message that they can be successful in the world and to equip them with some tools to help them along the way. The weekend sessions included drumming and dance, trying on African attire, life skills, a walk and a talk on the environment and our dependency on the earth. It included the mechanics of preparing for college and college life and it even included a mock graduation, complete with cap and gown, to the traditional pomp and circumstance. The boys marched around the long table in the large Gilmore Sloane dining room, beaming! This was a foretaste of a high school graduation, hopefully a reference point, should they falter along their way. But most poignant, most visceral for me was the presentation by the program leader to these tender young black boys of what to do when you are stopped by the police. This was the Chiku Awali boys rites of passage and they and their leaders carved a permanent place for themselves in my heart. More reminiscences from the season of summer in my next post.

Mystery Night at the Gilmor

July fades into August in this steamy season at Stony Point. And for the interfaith interns who came to live and learn together, the parting was sweet sorrow, indeed. They were 16 young adults, Christian, Jews and Muslims between the ages of 18 and 30. During their time at Stony Point, they became a family, vibrant in their passions for justice and their commitment to be part of the transformation of the world.

On Thursday night, prior to their Sunday diaspora, they had a costumed mystery night at the Gilmor. This was to be their final party. As I am the official host of this hospitable mansion, I got to be a part of it. Everyone was given a character and mine was "Jackie O", but I was told it could be any Jackie O. I was to be charming, friendly to all, and would serve as host, appropriate to my real role here. My best character-friends were indicated on a slip of white paper. I had an assigned "interest in garden tools." So the evening unfolded with twists and turns and the inevitable murder that had to be solved. There was a bloody foot by the water cooler that distressed the host, yours truly, but no one else seemed to be alarmed or interested after an initial scream. Ultimately, the mystery was solved: Mr. White in the kitchen with a shovel. The evening lasted two and a half hours in pursuit of the murderer and motive. It was a drama game extraordinaire and everyone got fully into character, including the Gilmor host; a party right up my dramatic alley!

Of course, the Gilmor Sloane House was the perfect place for a mystery game party. Two of the interns had identified the prospect the moment they visited the mansion on the third day of their arrival at Stony Point. And so I had been approached. Yes, of course, I would be thrilled to have this memorable event unfold under my roof. As one who had come to Stony Point expecting to be a part of the Community of Living Traditions and had then been disappointed by an unexpected change in process, there was a certain sweet justice in being invited into the center of this fun and festive culmination to the internship month here.

But even better than the party was their final closing ceremony to which I was also invited, the only resident of the Stony Point community to be included in a ceremony that celebrated what they had learned during their month together. They each made a prayerful, spiritual offering from their own traditions: the Christians their own version of the Lord's Prayer, the Muslims a reading from Rumi and the Jews, a wonderful line dance to traditional music in which we all took part. We watched a slide show that captured highlights of the internship. They did an affirmation circle, where each one of then sat in the center of a circle of stones while the group tossed words of affirmation and love showering down around the one seated in the center. And finally, we walked silently and by candle light into the field where they had labored hard and long throughout the month to clear, plough and plant a new garden as part of Stony Point's food justice program. There they made a circle and gave thanks to God for what they had learned from each other and how they had grown. By candlelight and moonlight, they said their good-byes. They had farmed the land to grow the spirit.

And I who likes to lead and direct had grown too. I had learned the holiness of watching. I had been given the gift of bearing witness. I looked around the circle at these young people and held each one of them close to my heart. Here was hope in this hopeless and desperate world. Here was beauty, purity and hope.

Walking back to the mansion, alone in the dark, a great sense of peace settled within me. For this one night, at least, the world was wholly good.

The Heat of the July Honeymoon

In the Bay Area that is home to me, our occasional heat waves generally are relieved after a few days when the cool, moist pacific fog rolls under the Golden Gate, spreads across the lap of the bay and billows up into the East Bay hills. Some have called this our regional air conditioning. I thought of it yesterday as I misted my face, head and neck with a spritzer bottle while working in the Stony Point kitchen. The AC units, of which there are two in the kitchen, are ancient and ineffective with almost zero impact on the overall temperature in that bustling place. If it is 90 outside, which it was yesterday, it had to be at least 100 where I stood making granola, peeling vegetables and fashioning unused cooked oatmeal into cake. My heart pounded rapidly in response to the unrelenting heat.

This is said to be one of New York's hottest Julys on record. But yesterday, late in the day and after my shift in the kitchen, there was a break: a torrential downpour of East Coast rain. The explosive thunder made the window glass in the old Gilmour Sloane mansion rattle and pellets of hale bounced like popcorn off the balustrade outside my bedroom window. But most dazzling of all were the fierce, jagged bolts of light that startled the evening sky. I watched this spectacle of weather in wide-eyed wonder. We have nothing to equal it on the West Coast. Today it is cooler, but the respite will be short-lived, because tomorrow's forecast assures us of another wave of searing heat and weighty humidity.

I have been here for three and a half weeks now; long enough to have my bearings. I know my way around the buildings and grounds. I have attended weekly meetings for this and that: the Volunteers meeting or "check in", the Program Team meeting whose members check the progress of various upcoming Stony Point events, and the Hospitality Team meeting for the people who are charged with the task of meeting and greeting the influx of guests and counting their heads and beds at the end of their stay, and the Resident's meeting.

The one meeting that I have not attended is the CLT team meeting, the Community of Living Traditions planning team, the group to which I applied and the primary reason I came to Stony Point. It is the interfaith team of folks who have given birth to the Internship program which is currently in progress during the month of July. While I applied to be a part of this program and thought that the "we'd love to have you come for a year" meant that I was accepted into this new and emerging part of the Stony Point community, that has not proven to be the case. I am disappointed.

There is a saying that Stony Pointers say here. It comes from a Latin American poem and counsels that,"the path is made by walking." As the directors and the CLT team have used that phrase to me, it seems to means that the program here is a work in progress. Nobody has done this before. The waters are totally uncharted. It is a trial and error process of moving along step by step to discover what works. It would seem that my arrival occasioned a new question to be answered: how do we receive new people into our teamwork in which we have carved out roles for ourselves and for which we have great pride of ownership? Indeed, I think the question may well have been, do we want anyone else coming into what we are creating...at this particular moment in time? What has emerged was articulated to me finally this morning: "we need a way to create a common culture." Fair enough.

In the Fall there will be a three-month program into which all newly arriving people, both short term and longer term, will be asked to participate. It will consist of classes, discussions and orientations of various sorts, to create common understanding and language around the core values of this community: peace & justice and non-violence from our three faith perspectives. Concerns for the environment will be woven into that. My previous background and training in these area was acknowleged, but does not contribute to the common culture. As it is being talked about by the leadership team, the two Stony Point co-directors and the two other faith elders, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and Rabia Terri Harris of the Muslim Peace Fellowship, members of the CLT team would be selected from these groups of entering people after they had shared the period of common training. So, from the time I applied and was accepted to the time I arrived, the criteria and the process for inclusion into the Community of Living Traditions has changed. The path is made by walking.

The unfolding nature of life at Stony Point poses a dilemma for me: half of my year here will be over before this newly conceived training and before I know how (or if) I am to be included in the program that attracted me in the first place. Is my particular experience, skill set of any use here at this embryonic stage and will there be any opportunity to make creative contributions to what is being pioneered? Will there be, when the hostess at the Gilmour Sloane has turned out the lights for the night and finished her kitchen shift of chopping veggies for pizza, anything that feeds her own creative appetite?

The honeymoon of the July entry is over. I wait in hope for what August may bring.

Continuing "Visits"

The oppressive heat that has sapped energy for writing (and almost anything else) has somewhat abated. It is muggy today, but with the gray overcast sky comes some relief from the penetrating heat. It is 90 degrees at 11:00 in the morning and thunderstorms are predicted for tomorrow. That must surely mean that it will be cooler still. Thank God!

My "visits" with other volunteers and staff continue. This morning I met with Kathryn, who spelled her name for me when she saw my note taking. Kathryn is a demure retired labor and employment attorney who is on her third volunteer gig at retreat centers. She spent a little over a year at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, 18 months at Meadowkirk in Virginia and will be leaving Stony Point in December, after being persuaded to extend her year-long commitment to a year and a half.

Kathryn's volunteer cycle of retreat centers was for personal discernment. She thought she might want to create or manage a retreat center of her own, focusing on women's issues. She reached a conclusion: she does not want to do that! First of all, she has learned that running a retreat center requires a LOT of work, an almost endless amount. More importantly, she has learned that constantly relating to people, which is integral to this line of work, can be very draining. Kathryn, while being a very warm and welcoming person, is also an introvert. Living in community involves giving up much of ones privacy and independence. She has come to realize that as a lifestyle, it is not the right "fit" for her.

Sitting at her desk, her salt and pepper hair streaming down her back, Kathryn spoke in a soft voice about the many years of her life spent as an activist for peace, justice and non-violence, the very values that are at the heart of life at Stony Point. Somewhat wistfully, she recalled her many years of protests and marches. However, Kathryn expressed that while she continues to hold these values close to her heart, she no longer has the "juice," as she referred to it, to live her life energetically in pursuit of them. She expressed this with some sadness. It causes her to feel a bit on the periphery of life at Stony Point and that, she laments, does not feel good. She will be ready when December comes to carve out the next chapter in her life.

Kathryn has enjoyed her volunteer job of being manager of the gift shop. She operates this aesthetically arrangement collection of art items and books , mostly ordered from the Ten Thousand Village fair trade system, with great efficiency. It is quiet, evenly paced work that she is good at and it suits her temperament. I am grateful that she stocks four different kinds of fair trade organic chocolate!

Listening to this soft-spoken lady reflect, I found myself hoping that some new level of self awareness awaits me in my Stony Point experience. I too have been a person staunchly independent. Inter-dependence is the operative word when you live in intentional community. This is something that I have emphasized in teaching about good ensemble theatre in my many years as teacher and director. However, creating the climate that sustains healthy inter-dependence for the duration of a production period and one that must be sustained for the ongoing health of community are very different demands.

We all need both time to experience the best of what community life has to offer and we also need time to be alone. We need moments of self-centeredness, in order to process our experiences. We need time to figure out how to encorporate each new insite, learning and understanding into who we are and who we are becoming. As long as we are living and breathing, we are constantly in the act of becoming. I have stayed in high gear all of my life, not giving myself very much time to process and reflect. Maybe that is the gift that awaits me in my year a Stony Point. So as I continue to "become", I pray that I become more self-aware, more spiritually grounded, more able to give of myself and more able to recognize the gifts that come by grace like the one I received this morning talking to a gentle volunteer named Kathryn.

Last night was a catastrophe! I was sitting at the skirted round table in my room busy checking email on my laptop. It was about nine o'clock. All at once I heard a piercing chirp. About 30 seconds later, I heard it again. The pattern repeated. I got up and went out into the hallway and listened. I was pretty sure that what I was hearing was the sound a smoke detector makes when its batteries are signalling that they are about to give up the ghost. With my door open, the sound was even more piercing. I looked up and saw where I thought the sound was coming from, the familiar round white apparatus hugging the ceiling. It's chirp at this closer range was almost painful. I went back inside my room and closed the door, imagining what it would be like to try to sleep, muffling the sound with ear plugs and a pillow.

This was the beginning of the long three-day fourth of July holiday weekend. I sat down to contemplate my situation, the chirping still vibrant through the door. I had to do something. There was no one but me staying in the Gilmor Sloane this weekend. All the regular staff, including the maintenance people had gone home and presumably would not be back on the property until Tuesday morning. I reached for my recently acquired directory of Center staff names and numbers. I remembered the maintenance man's name was Andy. I found his number and with apologies called, explaining my predicament. He said he would come in a half an hour. He lived about thirty miles away. Twenty minutes later the phone rang and I heard Pam's voice on the other end. Pam is a friend from my seminary days who pastors a nearby church part-time and also lives and volunteers at Stony Point. She had been working late in the front office and had picked up the ringing phone. Andy had called to say he would not be coming.

There was nothing to do but call Rick on his cell. I knew he and his wife, Kitty, had gone sailing. It was a rare time together for this busy couple on the night before Rick was to leave for General Assembly. Rick had called it a "date." I hated to call him, but with more apologies, I once again explained my situation. Forty minutes later, Rick arrived with ladder and batteries in hand. He immediately went to work, but he was unable to locate where the worn batteries were housed. The detector was hard wired to the ceiling. After several minutes of struggle, he managed to disassemble the lower part of the unit from the base, only to discover that it had no batteries! As he was trying to reassemble it and return it to its position on the ceiling, the fire alarm went off. We both scrambled, Rick to the control panel downstairs to turn the alarm off and I to my cell phone to try to call the fire department to stop them from coming. But I was too late. By the time I got a human voice on the other end of the phone, the trucks had been dispatched and there was no stopping them. So at 11:00 at night three fire trucks roared up to the darkened mansion at Stony Point Center.

The local chief was furious. Already edgy about fire on this Fourth of July weekend, he and his trucks had been called to Stony Point three times during this very week on false alarms triggered by dust during a construction project in one of the other houses. This was not how to build community relationships! I heard the angry chief's frustrated shouting and Rick's gentle cajoling and I wanted to disappear back to California!

It was finally calm in the grand old house by midnight. Rick and his ladder drove off after replacing batteries in a nearby carbon monoxide detector, which turned out to be the real culprit. I sat upright in my bed for several minutes in the quiet stillness before turning out the light. I slid down into the coolness of the sheets, smiled at the folly of it all and drifted off to sleep. Another day at Stony Point had passed.

Continuing with Entry

Tomorrow is Sunday and a week will have passed since my arrival here at the Stony Point Center. I know most of the names now of the other volunteers. Besides a week of meetings, (the residents meeting, the volunteer meeting, the program meeting, the hospitality meeting) I am spending time with the people who head up various different aspects of the community. Some are paid staff, others volunteer. This is a new plan being tested by director Rick, designed to help orient volunteers new to the Center.

On the first day of this orientation, I spent two hours with Donna, the Food Service Manager, who gave me the cooks tour, literally, of the Stony Point Kitchen. Donna is the friendly, smiling mother of four who additionally works full-time at Stony Point Center. She was quick to tell me how much she loves her work. Her well-stocked and orderly food pantries attest to the care she takes in feeding the many guests and residents at the Center. Typically, all meals have both meat and vegetarian entrees to accommodate the Jewish and Muslim members of the community. I am to spend 10 hours a week in the kitchen helping Donna and her crew as one of my volunteer assignments. I shipped ahead of me two boxes of theology books, books on social justice and non-violence, a myriad of volumes on interfaith dialog as well as worship resources of several different kinds from my now extensive library. What I wish I had sent was my collection of cook books!

Earlier in the day I had met with Geeta and Margarita. They are the head of housekeeping and
a housekeeping staff member respectively. Geeta is from Trinidad, but her grandparents are Indian, which is what I guessed her to be, judging from her appearance. Margarita is from the Dominican Republic. I quickly confirmed the opportunity to practice my Spanish. She let me know that I would find her Spanish diction quite relaxed from the Mexican Spanish I was used to hearing, which she regarded as more precise. None-the-less, I was pleased and the prospect of speaking to her in her native tongue. Geeta has been at Stony point for 16 years. She is the only full-time member of housekeeping, which Rick says is by necessity understaffed. Both of these women work extremely hard. While Margarita is part-time at Stony Point, she holds down another job elsewhere. She is, apparently, a single mother helping to support children. I will be working with these two women in my role as "host" at the Gilmor Sloane House.

When this role was first described to me, I saw myself daintily transporting forgotten tea cups from the sun room to the kitchen, but a truer picture includes a vacuum cleaner and a bottle of windex. I am to clean up after groups and sojourners have tarnished the pristine composure of the lower floor with all it's glistening glass paneled doors, table tops and marble mantles. This is the second of my four quarter-time assignments.

The third of my orienting "visits", as Rick calls them, was with Joyce and Gary Pratt. Joyce and Gary are little people, but there is nothing little about the personalities of either one of them. I spent an evening with them at the front desk. Gary, an unabashed extrovert, loves the frenzy of a group descending upon the registration desk. He delights in the role of welcoming people to the Center and the busier he is, the better he likes it. He and his wife Joyce operate as a team. Gary, navigates the best he can in his motorized chair, but mobility is a challenge. Joyce is legally blind and is never without her faithful seeing-eye dog, Kia. Kia, for all her well-trained attention and care of Joyce, of course, cannot read! So Gary is Joyce's reading eyes and she is his feet and legs and together they register guests with good humor, warmth and grace.

Next week the visits continue.