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.
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