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.

...and the First Stony Point Night

While there are several ghost stories floating around about the Gilmor Sloan House, I had heard none of them as I mounted the steps to enter and spend my first night here. My daughter and I had joked about ghosts when we learned that I would be alone after my first gathering on this inaugural eve in the 18-room mansion. Actually, the house conjured images of Peter Pan more than Charles Adams. I was quite charmed by the house and being alone in it did not unsettle me.

My room is delightful. It is spacious, with a round, glass-top and skirted table and four chairs. They sit in front of bay type windows that are decorated with drapey valances at the top that match the peacock and floral print wallpaper. The colors are lusciously period: muted antique gold, cream, mauve and a deeper burgundy. The furniture, though mismatched, is also period or roughly so. There is a vanity with a mirror in a tall, carved frame, a dresser that reminds me of my grandfather's and a non-descript desk that appears to be made of the same dark-stained cherry wood. There is a high wing-back chair, suitably upholstered in colors that mirror the rest of the room. In it's own arched nook of the room, there is a large king-sized bed where I planned to sprawl expansively. I looked at it and felt the days exhaustion begin to creep into my bones.

I must unpack the rest of my things before I sleep. I was anxious to clear away the clutter that my boxes and suitcases had made. I wanted the aesthetic pleasure of crawling into my big bed in a room that had been perfectly tidied. I wanted to sit in the dimly lit space and breathe in contentment, satisfaction and peace. I could hardly wait!

It was already late, nearly eleven, and I had only a few more odds and ends that needed to be assigned placement. I had nearly completed the final tasks when I heard a noise that I thought sounded like it was coming from overhead. I froze and strained to listen. Nothing more. I reasoned that it must have been coming from outside. My hearing on my right side is poor. Since the extraction of the large meningioma brain tumor that had sent a tentacle snaking into my auditory canal, I can no longer tell where a sound is coming from. I resumed working, but soon I heard another sound...a sort of rustling noise. Was it a branch scraping the side of the house? The air was still. I saw no tree branches nodding in the wind. Once again I stood perfectly still to listen. This time I heard another noise followed shortly by a series of unapologetic footsteps. My heart began to pound and my breathing quickened. I didn't know what to do. I knew no one at the Center. There was nobody to call. I thought of the Directors, Kitty and Rick, but I knew they must have gone to bed. I haven't seen them since the Luke 6 meeting at their home and knew that Kitty was sick, trying to recover from sore throat and swollen glands. Their's was the only phone number I could access and the only names I could think of at that dark hour, but I dared not call them.

Then, with a burst of moxie, I pounced on my door and opened it into the hallway calling out in my gruffest, meanest voice,"HELLO?! "WHO'S THERE???" I heard shuffling feet move toward the top of the third floor stairway and stop. From my door, I could not see the now quiet feet at the top. I took a breath and moved boldly to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. There, looking meekly down at me was a timid-looking lady, somewhat younger than myself. "Ohhhhh" I said, with embarrassment. "I am the new host at the Gilmor Sloan House. It is my job to welcome guests!" She stared at me without comment. We just stood looking at one another. I had obviously scared her as much as she had frightened me. I stammered out an apology, explaining that this was my first night at Stony Point and that I had been told I would be alone in the house. A smile broke out on her face and her tense shoulders relaxed. "If I had been you," she said, "I think I would have been running out the back door!" We both had a good laugh, said good night and retired to our respective rooms.

Now I was really tired! The bed seemed to pull at me like a magnet. Hastily I brushed my teeth and surrendered myself to impending collapse. I tossed the large shammed pillows on a chair, pulled down the covers, folded back the sheets, preparing to sink into bed when I noticed stands of grey and black hairs all over the pillows. I threw open the bedding to reveal the full expanse of sheeting. The bedding was crumpled. There were the tell-tale signs that "some one's been sleeping in my bed!" Groaning, I rummaged around and found clean sheets in the bottom dresser drawer. So at midnight, the new volunteer recruit from Oakland, California changed her sheets and finally, exhausted went to bed. In the few seconds before sleep fully enveloped me, I took a quick inventory of my place in the universe at this moment of time. There were no sounds of exploding bombs or the whistle of missiles overhead, no bullets whizzing by. I was not swatting at life-threatening mosquitoes in sweltering nighttime heat. I did not feel a gnawing and relentless hollow in my belly or parching dryness in my throat. I did not hear my children crying in their sleep or wonder how I would feed them in the morning. So in gratitude for the blessings of this day, I said my thank you to God and slipped into slumber.

Tomorrow would be another good day.