Joining the Losing Team

I came across this portion of a commencement speech today.  I thought it was an interesting way to phrase some of the choices that we make…

“Today, America is at a scary inflection point. Fear for the self is everywhere. We find it hard to care for the homeless when our mortgages are under water. Seniors fear they can’t afford to retire, the middle class worry about going on food stamps. The poor have no job security and too often no job. We divide ourselves by being part of the 1 percent or the 99 percent. The poor feel under attack, the middle class feel under attack, even the wealthy feel under attack.

Our team, the team that rallies us around the common good, that emphasizes self-sacrifice and altruism, is losing. Their team, the team that says “every man for himself,” that makes us turn our back on the poor, feel no empathy, that feeds off of our vulnerabilities, our insecurities, our personal demons and prejudices, is winning. Their team is winning, our team is losing, and yet I offer you a wondrous opportunity, to join the losing team. …

I know this opportunity sounds too good to be true. Yes, you can join the losing team, but not quite yet. You might need more seasoning. You see, it’s not easy to be on the losing team. You have to be careful. If you are not properly prepared, you will become a loser. We don’t want losers. We want winners who aren’t afraid to play on the losing team. I dare say that your preparation here is a good beginning, but you need more experience. It’s tougher than you think out here. There is evil out here. I’m not talking about some mystical, theoretical, hypothetical construct. I’m talking about the real thing: pain and suffering, despair and death.

So our team needs you. The other team offers you money, power, luxury cars, vacation homes, and stock options. Our team offers you challenge and struggle, a rich intellectual life, honesty as a guiding beacon and a good night’s sleep. Well, to be honest, their team offers a good night’s sleep also, but I just wanted to put it on our side. We seemed a little light on benefits.

But do you know why I offer you this opportunity to play on the losing side? Because in the end we are going to win. Because we are right. There is no way that our great democracy will continue to be a beacon to the free world if the rich hate the poor, and the poor hate the rich. If our middle class becomes a thing that your children will read about in their history books because it no longer exists, our country will decline. If we continue to have neighborhoods that the affluent are dying to get into, and the poor live in neighborhoods where they are just dying, we will have lost the promise of America.” -Geoffrey Canada, president of the Harlem Children’s Zone

Last week during our Wednesday night discussion, we talked about coming up with a name (and a group tattoo, which would be AWESOME!  Seriously guys, I am totally in).  People ask what we are called, but we don’t really have a defined name right now.  We have gone through Jezreel and Thundercroft, which each have their own stories.  Ultimately, I think we decided to hold off on coming up with a name.  It is difficult to think of a title that would define all of us.

Though we don’t have a name, according to this speech we are definitely playing on the losing team.  And sometimes it really feels like it.  I think that this speech is a good reminder that we are playing on this team because we are right.  That seems like a egotistical thing to say, but I think it is true.  I usually don’t feel comfortable saying what is right or wrong.  Things are relative, people are different, etc. etc etc.  However, rallying around the common good is right.  Go team losing!  Or something.  I shouldn’t try to write using sports metaphors.

Heather

 

Normal

We’ve resolved to write when we can, about what we can, plainly.  Otherwise, we won’t write at all, just like we haven’t.  I will also try not to self-edit too much.  That is what usually makes me not even bother.  I have always appreciated the way that Dorothy Day kept record of what was going on in her community.  Even if she only had a few spare moments to write what she did, read, or was thinking about, it all pieces together to create a picture of what life was like then and there.

On Saturday we had Open Shop at the bike shop.  Open shop is when people come in to repair their bicycles, purchase used parts, or volunteer to earn shop credit.  It is our busiest day.  We help more people during Open Shop than at any other time.  It also can be very stressful during warm weather, when it is full to the brim with people who need your help.  Often times it feels like we simply “get through” these hours, barely, and try not to let ourselves be overcome by frustration and stress so much that it controls us– our communication, our presence.  I felt overcome several times on Saturday.  I believe in Franklinton Cycleworks, I just don’t know how to get past this vast gap of homegrown volunteer project to non-profit that employs people.  We cannot do this much longer without receiving payment.  We are too financially poor, too stretched for time, and too tired.

There are not just complaints at all, though I will admit those usually come to my mind first about anything.  I am ashamed of that, truly.  Some days I have to meditate to find the meaning and joy. Once I do, it is like discovering a hidden room of gold and jewels– abundant and rich.  It requires intentionality, though.  When I lose track of this, I feel like I am in trouble, spiritually, mentally, and perhaps even in other regards.  Ryder is a great partner for me, it is not as difficult for him to see meaning.

I just made a small meal in the skillet of red potatoes, yellow peppers, and fresh rosemary.  It is delicious.

One night this weekend, Ryder, Jy and I went to the Milestone 229 patio. It was truly relaxing and with a beautiful view. They are almost finished constructing the Town Street bridge, which will connect Franklinton to Columbus.  This will be the third bridge between Columbus and its near west side.  We have been isolated for so long it has seemed, and I wonder what it will be like in our neighborhood to be so accessible.  Will it change things?  Things by the river are already changing.  Bars, warehouses, houses being renovated.  New people and cultures merging.  City says it is good.  Displacement of residents against their will is truly disappointing.  But when I am honest about my desires, I would like stores and bars in East Franklinton, or anywhere in Franklinton.  Too often we are leaving our neighborhood for things we need.  So I am also happy.  It is too bad that these places will not be run by Franklintonites.  How does one facilitate or participate in that transition?  Few to no residents could buy a property, renovate it, and offer to fill our neighborhood’s voids.  This is the conversation we have had over and over again for 4 years now.

My birthday was last week.  I am 25 now, which seems old, despite my being one of the youngest in our community.  I always thought, when I was younger, my life would look different at 25.  I am very thankful that it looks the way it does.  Looks like piles of front shoes by the door, piles of bikes in the foyer, mismatched burlap sacks sewn together as curtains, house plants.  These are just things of course, but what they say is:  We are all here together, engaging with each other and our surroundings, coming and going, using whatever resources we can piece together, working hard, and loving each other.

I signed Rosali’s birth certificate today.  One of our community’s newest members, and I was present at her birth.  Actually, Graciela and I were in the next room, telling stories to each other and trying to overcome fear of the unknown.  But then Mateo bumbled into the room, “Girl, girl, girl!”  I took Graciela’s hand and she bravely decided to enter the birthing room with me.  The Leahy family snuggled all together on the bed as the midwives wrote notes.  Then, forever passed, which also felt like no time at all, and the kids helped to cut the umbilical cord.  The placenta, all spread out on a cloth, captivated all of us.  I was blown away by how normal it all seemed, and yet also completely transformative.

Speaking of normal, time to switch the laundry and pay some bills.

 

Kelly

 

To bless the space between us

May you have the grace and wisdom

To act kindly, learning

To distinguish between what is

Personal and what is not.

May you be hospitable to criticism.

May you never put yourself at the center of things.

May you act not from arrogance but out of service.

May you work on yourself,

Building up and refining the ways of your mind.

May those who work for you know

You see and respect them.

May you learn to cultivate the art of presence

In order to engage with those who meet you.

When someone fails or disappoints you,

May the graciousness with which you engage

Be their stairway to renewal and refinement.

May you treasure the gifts of the mind

Through reading and creative thinking

So that you continue as a servant of the frontier

Where the new will draw its enrichment from the old,

And you never become a functionary.

May you know the wisdom of deep listening,

The healing of wholesome words,

The encouragement of the appreciative gaze,

The decorum of held dignity,

The springtime edge of the bleak question.

May you have a mind that loves frontiers

So that you can evoke the bright fields

That lie beyond the view of the regular eye.

May you have good friends

To mirror your blind spots.

May leadership be for you

A true adventure of growth.

resolution. or something of the sort.

This rush of spring has had us busy for sure.

I will try for a brief update…

Our beautiful friends Matt and Elisa had their 3rd kid a few weeks ago. They had her in the comfort of their own home and brought a beautiful baby girl into the world. Her name is Rosali. Kelly was able to be there with the other kids during the birth and moved by that experience. I am sure she will update on that at some point.

A few of us took a quick trip to Boston for a little rest and relaxation, visited Greg’s family, and enjoyed time away together. Will post pictures soon.

The landlord we have been protesting had another court date this past week. He was finally sentenced. Three people died in an unsafe home he was renting on christmas eve and we have been working since then to demand some sort of justice in this case. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail, a year and a half of house arrest (allowed to only leave to fix his rental properties), and 5 years of probation. If he has any code violation on any of his homes it will be a violation of his probation and he will go back to jail.

So there is that. It’s definitely not what the family members of those people who died needed. None of us really know how to feel about it. Feels like relief and resolution in one sense. Sadness through and through. I also feel proud of those of us that stuck with this and didn’t give up, despite our exhaustion. The outcome would have been different had we not worked to bring the city’s attention to it, this I know for sure. Sometimes causing a fuss is worth it.

Anyways, summer is fast approaching. Not quite ready for it yet.                              We are thankful to be together for yet another summer and I feel lucky as ever to be surrounded by such powerful, kind, loving, generous, and dedicated people. My life feels so rich.

ashley

Gentrification

Gentrification

by Sherman Alexie 

Let us remember the wasps

That hibernated in the walls

Of the house next door. Its walls

Bulged with twenty pounds of wasps

 

And nest, twenty pounds of black

Knots and buzzing fists. We slept

Unaware that the wasps slept

So near us. We slept in black

 

Comfort, wrapped in our cocoons,

While death’s familiars swarmed

Unto themselves, but could have swarmed

Unto us. Do not trust cocoons.

 

That’s the lesson of this poem.

Or this: Luck is beautiful.

So let us praise our beautiful

White neighbor. Let us write poems

 

For she who found that wasp nest

While remodeling the wreck.

But let us remember that wreck

Was, for five decades, the nest

 

For a black man and his father.

Both men were sick and neglected,

So they knew how to neglect.

But kind death stopped for the father

 

And cruelly left behind the son,

Whose siblings quickly sold the house

Because it was only a house.

For months, that drunk and displaced son

 

Appeared on our street like a ghost.

Distraught, he sat in his car and wept

Because nobody else had wept

Enough for his father, whose ghost

 

Took the form of ten thousand wasps.

That’s the lesson of this poem:

Grief is as dangerous and unpredictable

As a twenty-pound nest of wasps.

 

Or this: Houses are not haunted

By the dead. So let us pray

For the living. Let us pray

For the wasps and sons who haunt us.

 

Heather

Girl Sprout day out!

A few weeks ago we took our Sprouts on a day trip to an indoor pool! A very generous member of our church offered for us to come and enjoy his pool for the day so we packed up the girls and our swim suits and spent the whole day together.

We ate pizza, swam, played games, talked, laughed, and had such a good time getting to know our girls better.

They were great swimmers and great fun!

Here is to freedom as Sprouts and many more field trips!

ashley

The book of pilgrimage

All will come again into its strength:

the fields undivided, the waters undammed,

the trees towering and the walls built low.

And in the valleys, people as strong

and varied as the land.

 

And no churches where God

is imprisioned and lamented

like a trapped and wounded animal.

The houses welcoming all who knock

and a sense of boundless offering

in all relations, and in you and me.

 

No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,

no belittling of death,

but only longing for what belongs to us

and serving earth, lest we remain unused.

Rainer Maria Rilke

ashley