Joel Bartlett, one of PATB's founding members. Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot

In 1959, urban observer, writer, and activist Jane Jacobs visited Boston’s North End.  There, she was amazed that a community many dismissed as too far gone had revitalized without any outside financing or urban planning.  How had the North End built itself into a safe, well-groomed, healthy neighborhood?  Through neighbors voluntarily exchanging skilled work.

But that was in the 1950s.  Can the same types of exchanges — where time, not cash, is the currency — still build communities that ought to be?

Members of Pennsylvania’s Phoenixville Area Time Bank say yes, the free exchange of time can create cohesive, trusting, and beautiful neighborhoods, and they have seen it happen.

Time banks build on the age-old concept of swapping, and provide a web-based infrastructure that lets people bank hours instead of money.  Members contribute services like plumbing, tutoring, computer repair, respite care, driving, shopping, and childcare.  Logging service hours into a database means they’ve earned hours to “spend” by having any of the 170 Phoenixville Area Time Bank members provide a service for them.

And an hour means an hour, no matter what hourly rate the work could fetch elsewhere.  “Yes,” says board member Joel Bartlett, “my hour of architectural services is worth a disabled person’s hour of weeding!”  Also, the person served reimburses all expenses so that it is purely a time-for-time exchange.

Phoenixville Area Time Banker Kris Craig. Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot

New members receive a list of over 70 suggested services they might contribute or need.  “Exchanges can be as creative as anyone’s imagination,” says Judy Antipin, a Phoenixville Area Time Bank member since 2007.  Judy’s partner Diane recently returned from the hospital and about six PATB members gave her meals and rides and cleaned her house.  Member Richard Liston is banking time dollars to earn help with the fledgling Sphere College, a free college he founded for nontraditional students.  One member banked enough hours to have time dollars pay for a whole wedding.

But more is happening than the exchange of services, members insist.  “The transactional piece is a piece,” says member Carol Meerschaert, who recently discovered PATB on Meetup.com.  She pictures a time bank as a small village or an extended family.  Transactions forge trust and inspire responsiveness.  It takes trust to have a stranger pick you up from the airport, but members are accountable to each other.  There is a “kind of reverence we bring to each other,” says coordinator Margo Ketchum.  As people bank their time and meet each other, they begin to care about each other.

This is essential in Phoenixville, a gentrifying borough of 16,000 about 30 miles from Philadelphia, that, like many of Pennsylvania’s former iron towns, went from whirring with industry to decaying economically in the last century.  Like a lucky few, Phoenixville has begun rehabilitating with arts and business.  It features beacons of hipness such as creperies, cafés, bistros, and independent bookstores. Thrilling as these beacons are, changes of this sort have often, across America, turned ugly, territorial, and marginalizing when neighbors do not have each other’s best interests in mind.

PATB was not formed to help Phoenixville navigate its neighborhood renewal, but it does want to support a truly resilient community.  Time banks facilitate this because, as Bartlett puts it, “Exchanges are not exchanges.  They’re connections.”  If members connect with neighbors, they begin to realize what matters to their neighbors.   Meerschaert explains that this means that people care about crime, taxes, school budgets — the things that affect these neighbors whom they now know much better.

What’s remarkable about these connections is that they intentionally enfold

Mary Webb, Margaret Carman, and PATB coordinator Margo Ketchum discuss Phoenixville Area Time Bank's "2010 Project." Photo: Charles Bartholomew

vulnerable residents, who often get sidelined or used as leverage during gentrification.  Forty non-profits exist in Phoenixville and provide a spectrum of care for area residents. When Ketchum, her husband Joel Bartlett, and a number of others heard Time Banks USA founder Edgar S. Cahn speak at one of these non-profits, an idea was born for a time bank with a unique niche.

They observed that those who benefited from social service agencies were not encouraged to give back to Phoenixville.  Passive receiving was the usual model.  Those who worked for social service agencies, on the other hand, saw themselves as givers only and had a hard time accepting help.  Many time banks dedicate themselves to a cause, and this would be PATB’s.  For people in the helping professions, says Meerschaert, who is also the marketing and communications director for Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, this was “a way to say ‘I need help’ in a safe environment.”  In 2010, PATB has begun a “2010 Project” to focus even more on serving the disenfranchised, and twenty-five percent of their members are currently convalescent, unemployed, or otherwise vulnerable.

Time Banks level the playing field.  As the PATB vision statement says, they connect unmet needs with personal talents.

A Time Bank Social at Maysie's Farm, outside Phoenixville. Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot

Krishna Evans is a vivid example of this.  She had devoted so much energy and money to raising her children that she put off small repairs on her family’s home.  After joining the time bank two months ago, Evans engaged Bartlett to paint her fence and another member to fix “little annoying things around the house.”  Evans had unmet practical needs.  She also has talents that are invaluable to others.  She has a social work background, delights in spending time with seniors, and loves to garden.  So she earns hours by being a resource for the elderly, sharing a knack for gardening, and looking out for seniors’ needs.  Banking these hours leads to more possibilities.  She hopes to take piano lessons from another member.  “I never had the luxury to pay someone to teach me piano,” she says, bright-eyed.  “I’m expanding who I am.”

Time banks are expanding people’s options and Phoenixville’s possibilities.  But what about neighborhoods that do not yet have a time bank of their own?  PATB is currently following two small new time banks in the area and offering the umbrella of their infrastructure.  There are about 50 time banks nationwide and many in the United Kingdom, but for those who are not near one of these, the closest time bank may provide ways to link up with a few people nearby and establish an informal program.

From the Phoenixville group that urges those typically seen as “needy” to contribute, to the Brooklyn HMO that uses time dollars to cut seniors’ hospital bills, to the Oakland, California church that, according to Bartlett, used time dollars to set up a community watch system, time banks solve baffling problems.  Where neighborhood swaps may have happened spontaneously in the past, our culture of structured social networking calls for more coordinated forms of swapping.  And this structure is meeting not just  material needs, but also fundamental, intangible ones.

What happened next?  I did not seek another incarnation of you. Instead, I met your cousins, the Personal Essays.  They were enchanting, always touching my arm and pulling me aside to confide some story well worth my time through its hilarity or gravity.  My favorite of these cousins?  Bernard Cooper‘s “Winner Taking Nothing,” Adam Gopnik‘s “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli,” James Baldwin‘s “Notes of a Native Son,” Joan Didion‘s “Goodbye to All That,” and E.B. White‘s “Once More to the Lake.”

Then your sedate, worldly wise, and pondering cousins came to dinner.  These were the books of Literary Journalism.  How I liked meeting Tracy Kidder‘s Mountains Beyond Mountains and Old Friends, Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, the nonfiction sections of Joseph Mitchell‘s Up in the Old Hotel, and Anne Fadiman‘s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

Next to these sat their children, sun-burnt and bespectacled.  The Researched Essays.  They brought bug jars, binoculars, and yellowed biographies to the dinner table, and whatever our conversation topic, they had some trivia to toss us, or excused themselves and consulted Britannica.  They were brilliant and conversational; still, I chose favorites–Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small, David Foster Wallace‘s “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” Gay Talese‘s “New York is a City of Things Unnoticed,” and John McPhee‘s “The Search for Marvin Gardens.”

Halfway through dinner, in flowed your niece, the Lyric Essay, with emerald rings on her fingers and hair down to her waist.  I loved Lia Purpura‘s “Glaciology,” John D’Agata‘s “Notes Toward the Making of a Whole Human Being,” and Albert Goldbarth‘s “After Yitzl.”  After dinner, we sat in the guest room and I tried on her rings.

Your relatives were such good company that I forgot about you.  And when I turned back to you, I found we’d grown apart.

One day we grabbed coffee and you talked about yourself for hours.  At first, I was intrigued.  Your tale began with the promise that you’d make it artistic.  Or funny.  Or that if you talked about yourself long enough, we’d find a scrap or two in common.   I left that day thinking what you told me was kind of hollow. Your stories–of an abusive stepfather in Tobias Wolff‘s This Boy’s Life, or an impoverished upbringing in upstate New York in Sonja Livingston‘s Ghostbread–were just about you.  They never connected to something larger.

It was like Ander Monson said in Vanishing Point, his book of critical essays:

We can… fault the assumption that individual experience–sans connection to something larger, beauty or social action, for instance–is in itself interesting as a primary subject… Asserting the primacy of the I suggests that we should care about it because it is an I, because it has incurred slights at the hands of others, of the world.  And we should care.  Sure, I agree with that; everyone is special… and inhabiting their experience allows us to share it, know it… But I still don’t want to read what most people have to say about themselves if it’s just to tell their story.  I want it to be art…

You tried to make it art.  In Ghostbread, you gave me childhood experiences like a pile of Polaroids.  They were beautiful snapshots, but the pile did not make a whole.  In the end, it was just fragments of a life–people came and went and never mattered.

And your stories never got to the point where I felt like, “Yes!  This is what life feels like.”  I believe your stories were true, but they didn’t feel true.

It’s like an anecdote that Stephen King wrote about in The Green Mile. This, at least, is how I remember Steven King’s story.  This kid chopped his finger off and then went to a tent revival, a healing service.  Church folk prayed over the finger and the finger grew back.  And the Green Mile character believed the tale was true because the boy said his finger itched when it grew back.  That itch made the difference between credibility and dismissal.  These are the details I craved in your pages but did not find.

I always heard John Gardner quoted in creative writing workshops: fiction should be a “vivid and continuous dream.”  Memory is vivid but it isn’t continuous.  Maybe memory isn’t thick enough for what your pages ask of it–to create wallpapered, furnished dreams the reader can inhabit.

We met again.  We drank cafe au lait.  I read Dave Eggers‘s A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius, Oliver Sacks‘s Uncle Tungsten, Madeleine L’Engle‘s Two-Part Invention.

You began to win me back.

Dave Eggers disarmed me with his “Rules and suggestions for the enjoyment of this book” and his Acknowledgments section which acknowledged all the book’s conceivable flaws, including “the Self-Aggrandizement as Art Form Aspect.”  He did it, proved himself an “I” worth listening to.  And he was being so postmodern, so aware of the expectations of the form; this meant that even when Eggers was solipsistic, well, it was a commentary on being solipsistic.

Oliver Sacks stretched your possibilities because he told about his childhood without a trace of solipsism.  Maybe this is because he is Oliver Sacks and all parts of the world enchant him.  He can’t tell a scientific story without quoting Milton or Auden, much less tell his own story without praising what he was reading or learning from his relatives.  The world outside his head is fully and wonderfully present in Uncle Tungsten.  Is that something peculiar to Sacks, something not all your legion of writers can manage?  I hope not; a single “I” floating solo through life is flimsy.

Ander Monson corroborates:

I can’t see a way to stop… thinking about the I, examining myself… in text and thought.  Perhaps the answer… is in research, in listening, in exploring, in taking notes.  It’s harder, yes.  It’s finding, creating, or uncovering another subject–something else to rely on or parse beyond the self.

Madeleine L’Engle, too, did more than narrate her own experience, and this made you beautiful.  Two-part Invention was about her marriage, and marriage exists as something third, not fully one person or the other.  Throughout her journal-memoir, L’Engle’s version of first-person was inviting: honest without pedantry and revelatory without narcissism.  I felt like I was being offered her experiences, like she was saying, “I want you to know the real me, the way I’d be if you stopped by when my house was a wreck.”  This is a generous, self-giving narrator, who humbly gives herself in hope of connection.

Maybe this humility is your greatest possibility.

Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, and Ben Stiller in Greenberg.

But lest we be lulled by the misty sunlight and comically kind driver in the opening shots, the film soon hints that it won’t be all sunshine and smiles.  The unassuming Florence (Greta Gerwig) works as personal assistant for the Greenbergs, a wealthy Los Angeles family, and she is soon to meet the piranha.  Her employer’s brother Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) will be house-sitting while they are on vacation in Vietnam, and they’ve given him her phone number.  Oh and by the way, the Greenbergs tell her, Roger just got out of a mental hospital.

While Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale featured multiple self-absorbed characters, Greenberg proves it only takes one narcissist to elevate dialogue (the characters have to keep up with Roger Greenberg’s caustic intellect) and raise existential questions (they have to fight for their identities as Greenberg tries to make interactions all about himself).  In Greenberg, most of these existential questions stem from anxiety, and the characters’ successes–and the degree to which hope exists for them–hinge on their ability to win against fear.

Roger Greenberg’s fears are most noticeable; he has just suffered a nervous breakdown.  Baumbach and co-writer (and wife) Jennifer Jason Leigh leave this anxiety unspecified, but we know that it manifested in bodily disconnection.  One day, Greenberg couldn’t feel his legs.  Though he’s on meds and out of the hospital, he’s still paralyzed, even if not physically.  He’s unable to know who he is or what he is feeling.

This leaves him disconnected from why others feel the way they do, which in turn makes him a menace.  Fifteen years ago, not realizing that he had power to set his friends’ lives adrift as much as his own, he let his fear keep his band from signing a record deal.  Neither he nor his friends can let this mistake go.

He calls these old friends the minute he’s back  in his native L.A, but it’s more a ritualized restlessness than a desire to see them again.  In moments that ache on screen, he paces around the house practically shaking until he picks up the phone.  When one person isn’t around, he goes down his list until someone can meet him.  Even though he ruthlessly describes Florence as someone you’d only like if you worked in an office with her, he keeps calling her.  Sometimes one friend isn’t enough to make him feel like he’s not alone.  He calls Florence while out to dinner with former band-mate Ivan (Rys Ifans), and in a moment that clinches his schmuckiness, when Florence arrives he ducks out to call former girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to ask for a date.

When Greenberg is alone, he fears being alone, but when he is with people, his social skills are nil.  He asks for a drink the minute he steps into Florence’s apartment, the second time they have ever met each other.  Later, when he makes sexual advances to Florence, he is clumsy to the point of being harsh.  The combination of Florence’s sweet acquiescence and Greenberg’s headlong rush to assuage his loneliness makes this sex scene look so cold, awkward, and loveless it’s almost an assault.

Because Greenberg is disconnected from himself and others, it doesn’t dawn on him that Florence herself battles fear.  He sees millennials as brave.  “There’s a confidence in you guys that’s horrifying,” he tells twenty-year-olds at a party after snorting coke with them.  “I’m freaked out by you kids.”

Florence’s fear does not make her cruel – she is a sincere and lovely person – but it causes her pain.  In the film’s opening moments, she tells her insensitive employer that it’s okay; he doesn’t need to pay her right now.  It’s been three weeks, but it’s okay.  In the next scene, she borrows $40 from a friend.

Florence, who seems younger than twenty-five underneath her grandmother sweaters and old-fashioned name, is a new character type for Baumbach.  She provides a way for Greenberg to explore the relationship between Gen-X and millenials, one of this layered film’s many themes.  Florence’s eagerness to please keeps leading her to things she doesn’t want to do–especially casual sex when it’s clear she wants lasting connection.

Anxiety cuts these two characters off from each other.  They are both tormented not just by loneliness but also by the same cyclical fear:  they are doing nothing with their lives.  Florence tells someone that she’s been out of college as long as she’s been in, and nobody cares if she gets up in the morning.  Greenberg keeps telling people that he’s just doing nothing for awhile, but he justifies this to Florence: “You know I almost had a record deal when I got out of college.  I haven’t done nothing…I’m doing nothing deliberately.”

It’s a nervous cycle.  Fear of doing nothing produces anxiety and anxiety becomes debilitating.  This would keep the characters cut off from each other and keep the movie hopeless, if not for Ivan.  Greenberg’s friend Ivan offers the two an exit lane out of their fears.  They–particularly Greenberg–are presented with an exemplar.  Ivan has overcome.  Fifteen years ago, he was an addict.  Now, he drinks a blend of iced-tea and lemonade.  Hip but weary, Ivan stands on the spectrum between Greenberg’s narcissistic edginess and Florence’s people-pleasing fear.  Baumbach said he wanted Ivan’s character to have “a gentleness in him,” and he does.  Ivan is the only friend from the band who always picks up the phone and keeps coming over when Greenberg asks him.

Where Greenberg is alienated, Ivan is reconciling.  He’s been living in a motel since he and his wife separated, but later he tells Greenberg they’re going to give it one more go.  Ivan never thought he would be a family man, but he’s facing the difficulties of close relationships and embracing the life he never thought he would have.

Where Florence is compulsive about saying yes, Ivan is honest.  When Greenberg wants to start up the band again, Ivan tells it like it is – he has a job now; he can’t just do that.

There is hope for Florence and Greenberg, but the ending depends on the extent to which they have overcome fear.  In the final scenes, are we seeing Greenberg’s frenetic effort to get away from yet another situation he is in, or his true pursuit of the situation he is going to?  Does Florence want things the way they end up, or is she afraid of things being different?  The audience hopes the last scene is not the start of one more lonely cycle, and is given reasonable grounds for expecting it to be the start of something new.

“I guess we all, a lot of us, spend a lot of time keeping our Greenbergs at bay,” Rys Ifans reflected in an interview.  And I guess we all, plenty of us, spend plenty of energy keeping our Florence-like fears at bay, which makes these characters easy to relate to.  We hope that what is sincere and lovely can bring us into true connection.

Vic Chesnutt

Does sad music demand any ethical responsibilities of its listeners? Can we use sad music any way we see fit? Or does the disclosure of pain oblige us to think carefully about the way we listen?

This is why I ask. In June, I went to a Vic Chesnutt concert.  In the bustling bar, the 45-year-old singer-songwriter looked small. He sat in his wheelchair while two crew members hoisted him on stage.  His face looked sallow, and red where it should not have been red. He said incoherent things. The audience – mostly there for the next act – grew impatient and rude, having loud conversations in the middle of Chesnutt’s set. They whooped when he sang that Florida was “the redneck riviera” but talked over the ominous line, “I respect a man who goes to where he wants to be, even if he wants to be dead.”  While struggling to grip his guitar comfortably in the chair, Chesnutt poured out dark, plaintive songs. They were full of painful thoughts so few people can articulate with his precision, humor, and imagery. And most of the audience didn’t care.

The Empty Bottle, where he played, is a small venue, and I was able to meet Chesnutt afterward.  I only had to wait for one other person before I could say hello. I told him I really liked his song “Wallace Stevens.” He smiled and said “I’m really proud of that song.” I didn’t know what to say after that. I moved away. Chesnutt was left like a lonely guest at his own party.

The moment made me feel like the way I’d been listening to music up till then had been cheap. I’d spent college listening to the saddest music I could find. I hadn’t found really good sad music, though, so this mostly amounted to Counting Crows and a few emo bands I’m too embarrassed to name. I wept along with verses like “I need a phone call/I need a raincoat/I need a big love/I need a phone call” and carried them around with me all day. I thought about the music, not the musicians, as if their art was a Frisbee flung far and whose owner was unknown.

In the gray light of the Empty Bottle, the songwriter was there and was so very human. His pain was not this thing created to make a good song.

This was Chesnutt’s last tour. Christmas week, he overdosed on muscle relaxers and died. There is controversy over whether the overdose was intentional; Chesnutt had attempted suicide in the past.

Many artists who make sad music have been doled a more than average serving of tragedy. Take Eels (Mark Oliver Everett) for example. Within a few years, his father died suddenly, sister committed suicide, and mother died of lung cancer. Or consider outsider musician Daniel Johnston. His quirky music has been created out of severe bipolar disorder. Even Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz was diagnosed with a dissociative disorder. Vic Chesnutt was paralyzed in a car accident at 18 years old.  The list goes on.

Though an avid consumer of melancholy tunes, nothing too terrible happened to me in college. I was just moody. Is that okay? Is it okay to turn on the music of Elliot Smith, who suffered a drug addiction and died young, just because my day is in the tank? I mean, a break-up sucks, but it’s not the same as losing your whole family, being addicted to heroin, or losing use of your legs.

Clearly, one of art’s functions is to make people feel. Sometimes, it makes people feel miserable.  Like Bleeding Gums Murphy told Lisa Simpson, “The blues isn’t about feeling better, it’s about making other people feel worse.”

But does the fact that so many of these experiences are beyond what most of us have to deal with increase the average listener’s responsibility?

I think yes. Being confronted with other people’s pain requires a thoughtful response, and art should require the same. A melancholy album confronts the consumer with several options:

1) Listen in a way that keeps looping you back to your own mood. This is probably the least ethically sound way to listen to music. It’s not good for listener or artist. Here, music is valued based on how wretched it makes a person feel, not based on its own merit.

2) Don’t listen to depressing music at all. There’s a section in Augustine’s Confessions where Augustine regrets the time he wasted weeping over the death of Dido. “I was forced to learn the wanderings of one Aeneas,” wrote Augustine, “forgetful of my own, and to weep for dead Dido, because she killed herself for love; the while, with dry eyes, I endured my miserable self dying among these things, far from Thee, O God my life.” Time spent commiserating with artists could be used more profitable things.

There is a time to wallow, but there’s also a time to put away the Chunky Monkey ice cream and emo songs. Like the Microphones sing, “Get off the internet, we are the ones who are alive right now, so let’s start living.” Augustine says there is no place for using art as a way to avoid God. However, this view would also mean that people would be missing out on several positive ways to listen -

3) Look to music to reveal something that will resonate, and that, like an empathetic friend, will reveal something comforting and true about oneself and the world.

4) Appreciate the common humanity music expresses. Tolstoy says, “The activity of art is based on the fact that a man . . . is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.” If I feel moved when Elliot Smith sings “Needle in the Hay,” this doesn’t have to lead me back to myself. It can lead me to wonder. To wonder that through a well-crafted lyric, I feel something that could be similar to what Elliot Smith experienced when he wrote it.

5) Experience the music as being invited into something totally outside one’s own experience. I will never know what it is like to be Daniel Johnston, Nico, or Joni Mitchell, but their music invites me to experience not just commonality but difference. Even with our shared humanity, I can’t say I understand completely, but their music gives me a way to begin getting outside myself and trying.

Too often, listeners talk over the music; they superimpose the current clutter of their lives onto art. I’d like sad music to be more than that. I wonder if I’ll be able to take it.

My grandfather’s death absorbed a December ten years ago and cast a long shadow on Decembers to come. Because of this, “getting into the Christmas spirit” now requires me to reflect on death, and I suspect this is the case for many. It’s a fitting meditation for Advent because the birth and death of Christ, and our own death and sense of being made new, all twine together in Christians’ musings.

The long weeks my grandfather was dying let him communicate meaningfully with each of his children, grandchildren, and many of his friends. I say communicate, but he could no longer speak. He’d had surgery on a tumor in his throat. Watery coughs echoed through his trach tube. My mother bought him a clip board and he wrote messages in wobbly block letters. I still have many of them. When it was my turn, he wrote that I should find his spiritual journal. It would be in the bottom drawer of his office filing cabinet.

He died December 17, 1999. That week, midway through my senior year of high school, I hid in a rough polyester armchair in his office. My grandmother pulled papers out of his office closet and threw them away in grief-fueled frenzy. In the armchair, I paged through his journal. It was detailed and meticulous, like most things my grandfather did. Like masking tape labels he stuck on fans and tape-players to tell when they had been purchased and had batteries changed. Like financial records he kept or the way he arranged every detail of his funeral years earlier.

The journal – a “spiritual travelogue,” he dubbed it – began with a timeline of spiritual highlights, mingled with dates of his retirement, his brother’s cancer diagnosis, and other life markers. From there, it was more memoir than diary, complete with a title (JOURNAL OF MY JOURNEY IN FAITH), byline (George Hodges Soule), epigraph (a prayer of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s), and chapters.

It showed marks of many revisions: dates crossed-out and corrected, words circled with question marks, margin notes to explain connections between people or events. While he recovered from a knee replacement in 1996, he meant to type up a good copy and “use the inactivity… as a gift of uncommitted time to make some real headway,” but that’s where his journal ends.

Unpolished and unfinished, it is still one of the most influential things I’ve read.

To tell you why it’s so influential, I have to tell you something about my own spiritual travels that isn’t easy for me to confess. I come from a boisterous evangelical tradition where my friends and immediate family were always clamoring about “what God had done in our lives” lately. Not only were my grandparents from austere New England upbringing, but their generation had an expansive definition of what should be kept private. Faith was, for many, the most private. Not considering these powerful psychosocial pressures, I took my grandparents at face value when I was growing up. Christians talked about being Christians. All the time.

After college, when I spent a month at Southborough L’Abri, it dawned on me what sort of a Christian my grandfather had been. I had conversations at L’Abri about the value of a small but effective Christian life – one that lived out the command to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.” In Southborough, I attended a small Episcopal church, the same sort my grandparents attended. My last day there, the liturgy had us pray “that we may have grace to glorify Christ in our own day.”

Those two insights sketched my grandfather in front of me. He was a Christian in the public sphere, chugging away at the same Du Pont job for years, serving on a community college board, helping more people than he ever let on. The only time I ever remember him putting this faith into words was a time when I was homesick and he drew on rich reserves of personal, spiritual comfort in order to comfort me.

I’m not meaning to absolve my grandparents, or myself, from the need to lovingly communicate the beliefs that were defining them. Indeed, keeping mum about this reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s story “Greenleaf,” where Mrs. May muses that “the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.” Mrs. May believes the word “Jesus” should be kept private because she is “a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she does not, of course, believe that any of it was true.” My grandfather was quite far removed from this, but I had no paradigm for his quietness of faith. I value having such a paradigm and now I value the journal he left behind even more.

Sentences like, “God is present in the beauties and wonders of his creation where it is beautiful and wonderful, and in the challenge where it isn’t” come back to me even when the green binder is closed. Events he relates guide my decisions. They are matter-of-fact, yet vulnerable. He describes nourishing, clarifying weeks spent at a Jesuit retreat, and this eventually led me to pick up St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises. When he records how his psychologist challenged his depressive mid-life crisis, those words shake me: “If you’re so damned religious, what about the sacrament of your marriage?”

His journal is influential as a means of understanding him, but it’s also a way for one generation to understand the spiritual concerns of another. There is much to learn from another generation, even if that lesson is just to listen more closely.

My grandfather’s spiritual journal makes me wish for more conversations about this part of life we share. I know that I have his blood, because there are things I can put in writing that I could never say aloud. I’m certain this is why his journey of finding “the immanence and presence of God, day in and day out” is something he wanted me to discover while the rest of the family was eating cold cuts and wearing black, and to keep reading as his wife channeled her despair into wastebaskets full of shredded paper. He put it in writing and waited for his descendants to grow into it.

Photo Credit: Henry Bloomfield

The music of singer/songwriter/guitarist Jonathan Richman has been acclaimed not just for its influence on early punk, but also for its childlike and positive lyrics. Songs like “That Summer Feeling,” “Twilight in Boston,” and “Hey There Little Insect” take a close and cheery look at oft-missed parts of life.

Nonetheless, this was an artist I had to learn to love. There. Sounds grouchy, doesn’t it? Did I also have to learn to love pizza and sunny days? Whenever I heard his upbeat melodies, his nasal voice and slurred dictionannoyed me. His songs struck me as repetitive, some of them comprised of just one repeated lyric, like “Gail Loves Me.” And what kind of fluff was he singing about? In college, I judged music’s worth by the anguish it made me feel. Since then, I’ve tried to balance my tastes, but until this past June Jonathan Richman’s happy-go-lucky tunes still didn’t have a place on my spectrum.

In June, he played at one of my favorite Chicago venues, The Empty Bottle, with Vic Chesnutt, one of my favorite musicians. Richman and his drummer, Tommy Larkin, have just produced Chesnutt’s recent Skitter on Take Off - which, for me, has become another reason to love Jonathan Richman.

Anticipating the concert, I started spinning some Jonathan Richman albums. And, as often happens with good music when you give it a chance, I began to like what I heard.

On the small stage at the Empty Bottle, he held the guitar and danced twirling jigs. He smiled the entire time. With just Richman and Larkin on stage, the concert felt intimate. He sang about the same simple things I’d heard on earlier ventures into his music, but hearing it while seeing the smiling face made it all cohere. This guy really liked life.

He sang, “The lilies of the field just sway all day, oh, but no one is ever dressed quite their way,” assuring his listeners that “you and I don’t need to worry.” He captured a quandary I’ve felt myself: “I want the city but I want the country, too,” because, sang Richman, “I want to be with my friends by the fire and the starlight, but I want music, music in my life. I want a bar hoppin’ music scene, I want to pick from ten or fifteen.”

What ultimately won me over was the way Richman sang about women. I have to confess, going to a concert generally makes me feel about as self-conscious as a beach trip. Every type of music has an associated way to dress, which I can’t get right no matter how I try. But Richman sang about loving a woman who “don’t act cool, don’t act like a femme fatale… she laughs when she wants…she laughs when she laughs, she’s the breeze, she’s the natural…. Her mystery not of high heels and eyeshadow.”

I came back from the concert realizing how rare Jonathan Richman is. In a culture where it’s cool to half-close your lids and say, “that was so 2008,” his music revives wonder. The same year Woody Allen was belittling Annie Hall for using the word “neat,” Jonathan Richman was promoting Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers by writing: “Hi There! I’m Jonathan Richman and I’d just like to tell you that after all these months of waiting you can buy a record of me singing one of my favorite songs, ‘Roadrunner’… Neat, huh?”

A part of the nascent 70′s proto-punk movement, he slept on the Velvet Underground manager’s couch when he first moved to New York. He plunged into an era of exuberant ugliness and maintained his innocence, posing wide-eyed and smiling, singing about how he didn’t use drugs, and still looking carefully at life’s rarely-lauded beauties.

It’s Richman’s lack of snide irony that lets him indulge in wonder. In the liner notes to the Rhino release of Modern Lovers, his first album, the reviewer noted Richman’s “non-ironic affection for the trappings of modern American civilization and culture.”

When I moved to a city, I learned that wedging one’s way into artistic, cultured society can mean acquiring knowledge not for its own sake but for the sake of being able to reference it. And once one could make the cultural references, one could make ironic remarks about them.

This is enervating. If you really love something, you’re bound to look naive, even nerdy. This is the risk that Jonathan Richman takes with his ebullient, “Neat, huh?” and his songs about how much he likes “When Harpo Played His Harp” or how he loves moments of confrontation because he “get[s] this thrill out of saying what’s true.”

David Foster Wallace wrote that “irony, irreverence, and rebellion [have] come to be not liberating but enfeebling” in our culture. This is why artists like Richman are a breeze of relief. Loving the simple things in life may cause us to lose our ironic, critical prowess, but can it be worth it to live without loving everyday things and looking at them with rapt appreciation?

Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish in Bright Star

(This essay contains a few spoilers, but they’re not so bad if you already know Keats’s biography.)

A film about a Romantic poet’s romance could so easily be cringe-worthy. I surveyed the movie poster as I bought tickets. It flaunted Victorian script that glowed like a star, a couple about to kiss, and the tag line, “First Love Burns Brightest.” Was I about to experience media I would have to ‘fess up to liking, likeGilmore Girls, rather than a film I could proclaim as great cinema?

The emotional tale of a three-year courtship cut short by Keats’s death at 25 could have become sentimental goop. But I needn’t have feared. Jane Campion – whose films Sweetie and Angel at My Table are personal favorites, though it was The Piano that won three Oscars – made several deft moves in her writing and direction of Bright Star and created a solid film.

Her first smart move is that she grounds the chaste but impassioned love of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and John Keats (Ben Whishaw) in the midst of reality. That’s not to say that she portrayed the Keats-Brawne romance as mundane, measured, and reasonable. Romantic poetry is characterized by its delight in powerful, overflowing feelings rather than Enlightenment rationalism, and Campion captures the sentimental heights Brawne and Keats soared. For instance, in one snippet of Keats’s Romantic words to Brawne, he tells her, “I had such a dream last night. I was floating above the trees, with my lips connected to that of a beautiful figure.”

Keats may have floated above the trees, but Campion binds him to the earth. As Dan Persons writes in Huffington Post, “The film, in short, is sweet, sad, and moving but with Campion’s astringent edge keeping the proceedings from lapsing into sentimentality. And that makes all the difference.”

But how exactly does one do this?

Campion maneuvers away from sentimentality by showing Keats’s interactions with the Brawne family, and Fanny’s relationship with her family. Indeed, the first expressions of love in this film are not between Keats and Fanny Brawne at all. Instead, we see Fanny’s love for her very young sister, Toots, and Toots’s love for Fanny.

Toots demonstrates her love and trust when she and her brother Samuel walk into the bookstore to buy Endymion for Fanny. “My sister has met the author,” Toots tells the bookseller, “and she wants to read it for herself to know if he’s an idiot or not.” The fact that Fanny has entrusted them with this mission and that Toots feels like she can repeat anything Fanny says shows their close relationship.

The family’s interactions with each other are believable, with small bickerings, affectionate nicknames, “I love yous,” and resigned sighs. Keats becomes part of this family. Right after he declares his love for Fanny and they join the picnicking family, the couple play a game of “freezing” every time Toots turns around to look at them.

These touches make the film feel like you are watching the workings of the most fun and dynamic family you know, and this makes the film so human it’s impossible to cringe. (Okay, maybe it’s possible when characters read poetry aloud to each other. If you can’t suspend disbelief to watch a musical and pretend that people do burst into song mid-sentence, you’ll have a hard time imagining that people do quote poetry to each other from memory.)

The second smart move is that Bright Star seems aware of how silly Romanticism could appear to 2009′s viewers. The trailer describes Brawne as a realist, but once she and Keats are an item and he teaches her poetry, Brawne lazes about in ecstasy, cries, threatens to kill herself when she doesn’t hear from Keats, and in short, acts like a high school kid in love. As the three years progress, she demonstrates bravery, gravitas, and spunk along with her absorbing love for Keats, but at many points, she’s obsessed, and this creates humor and lets the audience observe Romanticism.

For example, after Keats wishes that the two of them were butterflies and could fill three days with pure delight, Fanny, Toots, and Samuel take the Romantic idea to the next level and start a butterfly farm in Fanny’s bedroom. Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox) walks into the “farm” bewildered, wanting to open windows, brushing the clinging butterflies off her dress, and sighing in disgust.

Campion crafts the juxtaposition well. On one hand, it’s ridiculous: keeping dozens of butterflies in a bedroom, shutting all the windows to create the warm environment the insects love, and not caring a hoot if they fly in your face. On the other hand, it’s cause for awe. The camera rests on jars of multi-colored butterflies, watches a blue-winged one flutter on a sliced orange, and looks at Toots caught up in the sight of them. Campion’s lens gazes wryly at the aspects of Romanticism that seem over-the-top to us today, but nevertheless appreciates the same beauty these poets held dear.

In Campion’s hands, Keats and Brawne’s relationship is a way to examine what makes all types of love meaningful, even love for the world itself. In Campion’s hands, it’s a film to proclaim as great cinema.

John Keats and Fanny Brawne dance in Bright Star

Half of a one week share from Home Grown Wisconsin

A few months ago, my husband Sean and I sat in our living room rummaging through crumbs and unwanted nuts at the bottom of a bowl of Chex mix. Sean pulled out a Brazil nut and stared at it. “Who ever even thought to eat that?” He asked. “It looks like a freakin’ piece of wood.”

This summer, Sean and I joined a Community Supported Agriculture program (or CSA) with our friends Catherine and Jarrett Knox. CSAs, increasingly popular among city-dwellers, are partnerships where local farmers sell food “shares” to support themselves before the harvest and then those who buy the shares pick up boxes of organic produce straight from the farm. Ours is coming to a close, having lasted about 20 weeks.

Since Sean and I tend to be fairly traditional in our food selections, I had never seen – or even heard of – some of the vegetables that appeared in our weekly share. So, this summer’s recurring question was this: How did anyone ever decide you could eat some of these vegetables, anyhow? I mean, kohlrabi? It looks like it wandered out of Monsters, Inc.!

Participating in a CSA this summer not only broadened my culinary horizons, it also taught me a thing or two about trust.

Joining a CSA immediately provided surprises. Catherine Knox received an email that gave the host’s address, phone number, and garage door code. The hosts were a family who opened their garage and let CSA subscribers grab their shares. Yes, we just traipsed into someone’s garage and helped ourselves to the farm-fresh wonders within: veggies, cheese, and eggs (depending on which we paid for). People don’t quiver about this kind of thing in Amish country, where I grew up, but in Chicago this is rare. “It’s a very good thing I have the Holy Spirit,” says Catherine. “Because taking all of those cheese shares was totally tempting.”

Soon I realized that the hosts weren’t the only ones for whom this was an act of faith. The Knoxes and Talbots spent $300 per couple, and we had little idea what sort of food we were getting. The amount and tastiness of the food would depend on the quality of growing conditions. And, Catherine pointed out, we would have to trust the farmers to be generous, since it would be easy to pretend the harvest had been weak and pull one over on the Chicagoans. It was like manna: we had to trust that good and nourishing food was waiting for us.

The day before each pickup, Home Grown Wisconsin, who ran our CSA, sent out a newsletter listing which veggies we would find under the drop cloth in the host’s garage. I’m used to planning the dishes I want to make, hopping online to sort recipes by rating, then rolling through the aisles to buy what I need. This was more like being a kid and not knowing what was for dinner till I smelled it cooking. I was handed food and hunted around on blogs to plan my meals around a few key vegetables. We ate less of our favorite meals this summer, but found some delectable zucchini and beet recipes that we would not have eaten otherwise. Melissa Garrett, who has subscribed to Chicago-area CSAs for the past four years, agrees, “We have discovered our love of leeks, parsnips, turnips, and kohlrabi from getting those veggies and having to figure out what the heck to do with them!”

Kohlrabi

It is kind of ironic that right after a summer in which I was given box after box of mystery vegetables, I was also handed a series of life events I wouldn’t have predicted, starting with my husband becoming very ill for a month-long stretch. So, that picture of walking home with a mixed bag of Swiss chard, rhubarb, raspberries, and cucumbers is one that stays with me. I like to make use of things; it hurts me that cauliflower is moldering in the crisper as I write. In some way, the events of this autumn will be nourishing, and if I learned what to do with kohlrabi, perhaps I can learn what to do with these changes. (Kohlrabi makes a lovely apple-slaw, incidentally, and it’s also good roasted.)

Aside from the lessons learned, now that CSA season in the Midwest is nearly through, I find myself wondering if I’ll partner with the local farmers in this way again next year. This makes me wonder – what circumstances would make a CSA worthwhile for someone? What factors would make it less desirable? Here’s what I’ve decided, with input from fellow CSA veterans Catherine Knox and Melissa Garrett.

CSAs are excellent if:

- You place great importance on receiving food from local sources. CSAs let you stay connected with local farms, and the money you pay up front helps them toward a solid harvest. Many CSAs send newsletters with articles about what each farm is like. One farm that supplied our food uses horses to avoid fossil fuels.

- You want to eat fruits and vegetables that are in season and learn to live off what the land provides.

- You love to try new foods and new recipes.

- You know trustworthy blogs with good seasonal recipes and you have time to experiment with recipes or already have good ones in your repertoire.

- You live in an area where it is hard to get local produce, but easy to find a CSA pick-up location.

- You have a family that feels adventurous about even the kookiest vegetables.

- You want to can and/or freeze so that nothing goes to waste, or you have people you can share any extra vegetables with.

- You are interested in seeing the farm that grows your food.

CSAs are not ideal if:

- You will only make use of a few kinds of vegetables. If this is the case, I suggest taking the $30/week you might spend on the CSA and heading to the farmer’s market, farm stand, or orchard. You are still supporting local farmers, though not giving them the cash before harvest.

- Your schedule is hectic and sawdust-crust frozen pizza usually sounds better than veggies.

- You live by yourself and don’t have folks in mind who would like your extra veggies, or who could share a meal with you.

- You live far away from the pickup location, or have to move.

- You’re going to waste food. (If there are, like, four pieces of penne left from our dinner, I’ll save them. So some weeks it depressed me that I never had time to look up a recipe, and thus kale become a pasty mush in the fridge.)

As farmers harvest the last CSA vegetables of the season right now, I am thankful to have purchased a share in local farms this summer. I’m unsure whether I’ll do it next year, though the bleak season to come may leave me craving freshness. Whatever happens, I am glad to have participated in a CSA this summer because I found new levels of trust in the city and in myself. I also learned that there are vegetables the color of newts I used to catch in the summer, back when I was far more in touch with the land.

Interested in CSAs? Check out Local Harvest to get started.

Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot; Graphic design: Chris Ware

In Chicago, a glimmer of the world that ought to be, in our midst: Elementary-age kids chatter, laugh, and hunch over their latest writing projects, jotting down what they know about superheroes. Tutors admire their writing or ask prodding questions. My Morning Jacket plays in the background. Then, the kids circle on a carpet and do some very painless literary analysis. They deconstruct a genre with giggles and exclamations, eager to contribute, since the genre happens to be superhero tales. Once they’ve grasped the basic elements of the genre – sidekicks, villains, fatal flaws – they’re ready to create their own characters. Some are gleefully gross (these are elementary school kids, after all), like a boy named Antonio’s “Armpit Hair Man,” who swings to the rescue from (yup. cringe.you guessed it) his armpit hair.

“We’re academic, but we’re also fun and academic,” says 826 CHI‘s Executive Director, Mara O’Brien, whose enthusiasm and welcoming presence shape this chapter of the 826 National writing and tutoring centers. O’Brien greets each Elementary Writing Camp participant, calling out, “Hello, Sweet Jocelyn!” or “Welcome, my friend!” She believes that 826 CHI’s mission is not just to improve students’ language skills, but also to introduce them to a community of adults who care about them.

At this tutoring center, caring means encouraging creativity, and that usually means thinking like a kid. “We try to trick them into writing,” O’Brien admits. O’Brien once had elementary students write narratives about imaginary vacations – reminiscent of Magic School Bus adventures – through space, inside the human body, or through Harry Potter’s world. O’Brien says that this subject matter inspired elementary kids to write one and a half pages and to tell their parents they didn’t want to leave yet – they were still writing.

The world 826 CHI creates might not otherwiseexist for Chicago students.Presently, says a June 2009 report from the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, researched by the University of Illinois at Chicago, about half of the students who attend Chicago public schools drop out or fail to graduate on time. Just yesterday, I listened as a mother interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered described Chicago’s selective enrollment schools as a “lifeboat” for students, implying how rough the ordinary school experience is. CPS has long been a troubled system, but it looks as if the state’s budget crisis will worsen its problems: the state board of education cut its budget by $180 million and slashed foreign language, arts, and agricultural programs.

Knowing the arts could be cut, three Americorps volunteers have been bringing West Garfield Park middle school boys to 826 CHI’s summer comics writing workshop. Yara Shadid, Gretchen Oorthuys, and Rachel Bernkopf marvel that the West Garfield Park kids are so creative, drawing on every flat surface and singing their own rap songs. Yet “their in-school time is very strict and regimented,” says Bernkopf. When the arts are cut in public schools, character development, originality, and the feeling of membership in the school all suffer, say the Americorps volunteers. Students will believe creativity has nothing to do with their future success.

Near where the kids circled to deconstruct superhero tales, a Chicago map shows the 157 schools that 826 CHI serves. This doesn’t just mean that kids from 157 schools are tutored at 826 CHI. It also means that teachers plan field trips to the center and that 826 CHI sends volunteers to Chicago public schools to provide extra one-on-one help. “We want to help area teachers get their students excited about writing,” says their website.

Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Store design: Chris Ware and Patrick Shaffner

Tutors’ help is especially valuable because if any place can remove the perception that creativity is unimportant, it’s this place. After all, 826 National was begun by Dave Eggers, author of six books including What is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and founder of McSweeney’s independent publishing house, which publishes McSweeney’s literary magazine, The Believer magazine, and Wholphin short-film DVDs.

At Chicago’s chapter, the advisory board reads like a who’s who of the local literary scene: Roger Ebert, Alex Kotlowitz, Audrey Niffeneger, Joe Meno, and many other well-known authors. These are people who’ve made their living being creative, and this is what their participation is about. For older kids, having contact with published authors who care about them must seem almost imaginary – as unreal as a superhero world. But this is the world that 826 CHI is able to create for students, and it is a reinforcing experience for would-be authors.

These connections to published authors also pave the way for young writers to see their own work in print.

Right in Front of Us is one recent example. Published in 2008, it was written entirely by CPS ninth-graders and edited by Alex Kotlowitz, author of There are No Children Here, Never a City So Real, and others. Reading the introduction, it’s easy to see Kotlowitz’s respect for these kids. “I picked up these stories one night,” wrote Kotlowitz, “sat down on my living room couch and didn’t rise until I was finished. I don’t know that I’ve read anything quite like this before.”

826 CHI keeps publishing student work. Most recently, 826 CHI published the first volume of their compendium, featuring work from students ranging from age 6 to 18. In 2007, 200 second through sixth graders wrote a hilarious guide to Chicago called A Sunday Afternoon Hotdog Meal. Publishing student work is an essential aspect of 826 National – which has also published the 826 Quarterly and sought student input for the Best American Non-required Reading anthologies.

At 826 CHI, kids join a circle where the arts have been crucial to success. Mara O’Brien says this shows the reality of what it is like to survive as a writer. Young writers see that even professional writers work many jobs to support themselves. Though earning success by your wits is hard work, 826 CHI is incredibly hip, and above all, the staff create an environment where it is cool to be academic.

Consider, for instance, that from the street, this doesn’t look like a tutoring center at all. Instead, the front of 826 CHI is The Boring Store, Chicago’s finest purveyor of secret agent supplies. When students come for tutoring, they pass through a portal that looks more like an art gallery than a store and sells such tongue-in-cheek items as a dropper-and-bottle called “Eve’s Dropper.”

The store has proved a good idea for many reasons. Not only does it sell quirky items and 826 National’s books, it takes away any stigma kids might feel about going to a “tutoring center.” It also brings in foot traffic. People wouldn’t walk off the street into “the place with all the tables,” says O’Brien, but they do come to The Boring Store, and this increases people’s familiarity with 826 CHI.

Though it’s been a benefit, Eggers didn’t plan it this way when he started 826 National. He simply wanted to start a tutoring center, but when he found the perfect place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the city told him, “That’s not zoned for tutoring; it’s zoned for retail.” As O’Brien tells it, Eggers replied, “Fine! I’m opening a pirate store.” And thus, Eggers began selling a whole lot of lard and tutoring centers came to be tucked into the backs of stores that sold anything you’d ever need for Space Travel, Bigfoot Research, Time Travel, or – of course – your secret job moonlighting as a superhero.

Places where creativity is free, rolicking, and communal may always be rare. But one such place exists at the corner of Milwaukee and Paulina here in Chicago, and it stands as a reminder of what ought to be – and a testimony to what can be.

“Iam a link in a chain,” John Henry Cardinal Newman famously mused, “a bond of connection between persons.” His meditation explores the idea that even in the midst of obscurity, insecurity, or even desolation, God is doing “some definite service” through His people. Even the smallest actions can mean that people are gaining strength from each other.Ruth Ann North, founder of jewelry company Refugee Beads, which sells jewelry handcrafted by refugees, exemplifies how exciting it is to be a link in a chain, a bond of connection.

Individually, the actions of jewelry-making are tiny and meticulous.Threading beads onto strings,gripping and twisting wires, sorting and selecting materials. If you’ve made jewelry, you might have suddenly felt like your fingers were gigantic.When the jewelry-making classes in Atlanta, Georgia lead to what North calls “Village Gatherings” in homes and churches in the city and beyond, these minuscule actions open out into the largeness of shared meals and stories, laughter, singing, prayer – as Newman would put it, “connection between persons.”

Refugee Beads began in March 2009. Two months before, Ruth Ann and her husband, Ian, left a particularly biting Chicago winter and moved to the three-mile circle of Atlanta known as the International Village, home to 145 different people groups and tens of thousands of refugees.There, through the North American Mission Board, they hope to demonstrate their belief that God’s redemption of humanity is powerful and complete by nurturing many facets of refugees’ lives – anything from helping adults with English and children with homework to driving kids to drama camps.

Refugee Beads’ goals fit the Norths’ conviction that the arts are a way to understand and heal the whole person. The women not only meet twice a week to learn the art of jewelry-making, but they also eat lunch together and often hike nearby Stone Mountain to continue spending time together.”Refugee Beads is a really encouraging community,” says North.

While jewelry-making sessions sound like a nurturing time – and, honestly, a whole lot of fun – North has pragmatic goals. She hopes to train women in the nuts and bolts of small business management. Selling jewelry allows them to supplement the income they earn working nights at a chicken factory nearly an hour from their homes. Soon, North hopes they will be able to give up this grueling labor.

Photo: Ruth Ann North

While there are many refugees North cares for and cares about in Atlanta, she pours her energy into these six women – refugees from Bhutan, Burma, Egypt, and Sudan – because they are all leaders among their people groups, and will be able to start their own businesses, support themselves, and train their communities in the art of jewelry-making. North hopes that in training and mentoring these women, she is starting a chain reaction.She wants to help them to be self-sufficient, since at this point, it is still daunting for them to walk into a store and communicate what they will need to buy.She hopes to remain a mentor even after they begin their own businesses.

When the women sell their handiwork, the Village Gatherings become a rich, communal experience.About once a month, North has been facilitating Village Gatherings wherever the women are invited. It might be someone’s church group, neighborhood, or work group (whatever the Americans consider their village, says North).These gatherings are one of the main opportunities for the refugees to sell their jewelry, but more than that, they are a chance for people to spend time together.

Realizing that “these women are such a gift to the American church,” North sees these gatherings as a way to connect cultures. Americans have so much to give the refugees – financial assistance, English practice, driving lessons, computer literacy – and she watches as giving flows in both directions. It is presumptuous, North insists, to think that if we are comfortable Americans, we have so much more to give. If anyone comes to a Village Gathering expecting to feel like the generous one, she’s in for a paradigm shift. The refugees bring meals they may have spent five hours cooking, sing in their native languages, pray for the Americans and ask the Americans to pray for them, and tell their stories. The value of these connections has been evident in both emotional and practical ways.Once, when a member of Refugee Beads asked a Village Gathering to pray for her sick child, the American women connected her with a clinic where her child was cared for.

Sharing stories is one way that the connection is particularly symbiotic.The refugees are relieved to tell their stories and be understood, and North listens as they add details and complexity to stories as their English improves. She realizes that there are so many facets of these women’s stories that she doesn’t know, and it may take a decade before the women can articulate the story completely. But for right now, “they need someone to hear this story,” says North. On the other end, listening to these stories allows Americans to learn what people around the world are facing, to step out of their own world and experience someone else’s story.

The first Village Gathering.
Photo: Charlene Hines

“We See Many Healing Power”

What are the stories these women share? The story of Purna, a Bhutanese member of Refugee Beads, is one example. Purna spent 17 years in a Nepali refugee camp.When she was quite young, the Southern Bhutanese, who were subsistence farmers, were forced to migrate, but not before some 2,000 were tortured, says the site Bhutaneserefugees.com. They found relative safety, though not a warm welcome, in Nepal, as the refugee population climbed to 105,000 by 2007. The Nepali government did not allow the Bhutanese to work outside the camps. Most days, says North, they ate less than what most Americans would feed their house cats.

Though Purna’s family faced hardship there, she also experienced something that many refugees have seen in their camps.Fellow Refugee Beads member Juli, of Burma, put it this way: “We see many healing power.” “Healing power” may fall beyond the limits of what many American Christians believe God will do, and yet Christian refugees insist on what they have seen.Purna experienced the healing of her sister, who suffered violent seizures.

It happened like this. Purna’s family required her to stay at home to watch her sister. This meant that her brother was the one to leave his Hindu family each day and walk miles away to visit a Christian pastor. Speaking with the pastor, Purna’s brother became convinced that God could heal their sister. “Let me ask the pastor to pray,” he said, and urged the pastor to visit their home. Though the family was skeptical, after the pastor’s visit and prayers, her sister gradually healed, and her whole family began to believe.

When Purna was 25, she said goodbye to her parents, doubting she would ever see them again, because when refugees are placed in other countries, there is more emphasis on getting them out than on keeping families intact.

Photo: Ruth Ann North

Symbolically Small

Contemplating the stories of refugees, it is easy to view any actions an ordinary person might take as tiny, a drop in the bucket. Perhaps it can be seen as symbolic, then, that the refugees sell something as intricate as daisy-patterned barrettes, made with beads nearly as small as flower seeds. The actions required to make this would be delicate and small, yet in a wooden bowl on a table at a Village Gathering, joined with other beadwork and jewelry, this small flower means that hope continues to bloom.

Refugee Beads jewelry is available online at refugeebeads.com, in Chicago at Novum Shop, and in Atlanta at the Atlantic Station Market. Want to get even more involved? Become a fan of Refugee Beads on Facebook, or contact Ruth Ann North (refugeebeads@gmail.com) to host a Village Gathering or send beads and other supplies.