A Lesson in Living

Today I had lunch with a Real Change supporter who phoned the office to compare our use of over-sized 4x6 vendor IDs to the compulsory Jewish badge favored by the Nazis during the occupation of Europe.

His wasn't the only complaint, although it was the most extreme. The badge has since been downsized. We had pho. He paid.

Since I'd probably be annoyed if, after enjoying an innocent lunch, I found myself all over someones blog, identifying details are masked. He is an educated European who immigrated here a few decades ago to work in the sciences.

But here's a detail I can't resist sharing. His website has a much younger photo of himself, smiling broadly, leaning over two king crabs that sit in a standard bathtub.

"We had friends over for dinner," he said ruefully, "and there was too much crab. We decided to keep a few for the next day. Crabs are a salt water animal and we put them in fresh water. Of this I am not proud."

You have to love a man who, more than a decade later, still grows solemn over the unintended fate of a pair of crustaceans.

He was aware of Real Change for years before he found the time to stop and buy one. This, significantly, was after he found himself temporarily crippled and hospitalized for three months from a freak reaction to a routine vaccination.

He wasn't in a hurry anymore. He'd learned to live in the moment. To slow down. And so, he now loves Real Change. The relationships he has formed with our vendors have helped him to realize, in a small but very important way, a vision of community that is increasingly hard to find.

His neighborhood grocery store, he said, was bought by a QFC several years ago, and the staff that had come from his neighborhood and known everyone who shopped there was sacked. The new store offers only sterile, anonymous efficiency. Strictly transactional.

He used to talk to people at bus stops, but now they wear ear buds. He used to enjoy coffee shops, but since the advent of wi-fi, everyone sits alone, staring at their computers.

When panhandlers would ask him for a quarter, he said, he would give them five or ten dollars and try to strike up a conversation. "They never wanted to talk," he said. "They didn't trust me. And why should they? It was just a little money. There was no relationship."

Life has grown more impoverished. If community is the stuff of life, many of us are dying of starvation.

And so, he has taken to buying Real Change, and, after a time, getting to know the vendors. He offers advice. He has helped them to move things with his car. He set one up for a free session with his family dentist to fix a toothache. He'd like to do more. He'd like others to do more as well.

He thinks we should somehow facilitate that. I think he's right.

This is the sort of caring community that makes life worthwhile.

Confessions of a Quaker Camp Follower

Slowly, I'm finding that my life is populated by closet bloggers. There's the friend whose blog shall, at her urgent request, remain secret. I'm probably missing something. The magic wand thing didn't really phase me. I mean, we all do that.

It's actually a great metaphor for blogging itself. Or maybe it's a euphemism. I can't decide.

"Generally speaking, I blog at least once a day."

Another friend, Mary, just told me about her Beginners Mind blog. Her last entry inspired me to offer a few spiritual observations of my own.

I was raised Catholic, which means that I went to Catholic schools until they kicked me out and attended church when my mother made me. By the 4th grade, having declared myself an atheist, I scandalized the other kids at Saint Mary's School.

Despite this absence of enthusiasm, some of it stuck. As a grade schooler, I was steeped the social gospel of Vatican II. I remained struck by the Sermon on the Mount and was deeply affected by Jesus' radicalism.

In 1970 came Jesus Christ Superstar, which was blacklisted by the Catholic Daughters of America and, by extension, my mother. By listening to it over and over again in my friend's basement across the street, I committed the thing to memory — beginning to end — for the rest of my life. I was eleven.

My secondary religious influence was a half-assed mysticism that began with mail order lessons from the Rosecrucians at seventeen and culminated in my late-twenties with a mushroom inspired moment of universal insight.

I still regard this as my one authentic religious experience. The fact that I cheated doesn't matter to me in the least.

Buddhism, which is more of a practice than a religion, speaks to me as well. As they say, a watched mind never boils.

Finally, I married into the Quakers. I often accuse my wife of being the worst Quaker in the world, but that's not fair. She's probably about average.

George Fox, the barefoot nutcase, is the real deal, and the Letters of John Woolman are a remarkable document of the spiritually engaged life. The Quaker notion of "speaking to that of God in everyone" just works for me. It's something I try to live up to.

So I've been known to sit quietly through the occasional Quaker meeting, but I'm basically too shallow to be serious about it.

This makes me a Quaker camp follower, which is as close to organized religion as I care to come.

But I do have a theology.

Love, I have concluded, is the thing that keeps life from being a piece of shit. It is those sparks of divinity that we carry, drawn toward each other by a kind of cosmic magnetism, that are the glue of the universe. We can choose to abet this process or not, and this is what gives our lives meaning.

I don't need anyone to tell me this. I just know it, like I know that water, ice, and steam are all the same thing. It's an observable phenomenon.

Love, love, love. Love is all you need.