cookies fix everything

It’s been a week full of surprises.

Wednesday morning at 6:57, my I heard my fellow Agape intern Kristen running up the stairs and, thinking she was going to hurry me to the morning meeting to help me keep from being late (again), I shut off my alarm for the third and final time and sped to meet her on the landing, to prove I was on my way down.

But instead of saying anything about my sleeping habits, she said “Rachel guess what? Michele is here!”

“What?” I was stupefied. Michele was a WOOOFer from Italy who had left the previous week to finish his vacation in America by going to Niagra Falls. What did she mean he was back?

Apparently that morning at 5:00, Suzanne had seen a car parked in the driveway, and someone sleeping inside it!

I could picture Suzanne and Kristen creeping up to the vehicle, peering cautiously in the window at the imposter, seeing only a striped hat, under which was… Michele!

He had gotten tired on his commute from Niagra back to Boston, and just decided to sleep in his car here. And he happened to come just in time to give Kristen a ride to Boston the next day. It was unthinkable timing.

All I could think was of the end of Chamber Singers’ tour this spring. We had said many emotional goodbyes to our tour guide, Luigi, and to Italy, and we were on the road. As we stood moping in the airport, feeling the hollowness that marks the end of every powerfully happy experience, a man walked over to us.

“LUIGI IS BACK!”

I was stupefied.

“What?!”

How could he be back?

He was going to be picking up his next tour group at the airport, and had decided to meet up with us, say a final goodbye, and help us get through the security/ baggage line faster (I don’t know how this happened, but Luigi can do anything.)

Now, “the time Luigi came back” has made the cannon of Sicily stories.

And the moral of the story: Italians always come back!

Maybe that’s why the word for “goodbye” in Italian is “Arrivederci”: “until we see each other again” because it’s never too long, be it in the airport or in a car in your driveway…

So Michele’s return was the first big surprise of my week. The second was a less welcome visitor.

At 2:30 Thursday morning, I awoke to a rustling and a vague sense of something hitting me. It took me a few moments to groggily awake and register that this was not a dream, roll out from under a tangle of blankets, turn on the light…

And there on my bed, stark and fearsome, was the silhouette of a squirrel, crouched in a frozen, about-to-jerk-away-and-run-like-wild posture.

So I did the most natural thing, ran out of my room and shut the door, swearing inaudibly and fighting the urge to scream. Thankfully Kristen (later compared to Miss Clavel from Madeline) was already awake (“Something is not right!), or else was a light enough sleeper to hear me and come out to calm me down.

So after a shower (mostly for psychological comfort) and a few cookies (again, for psychological comfort), we resolved to sleep in an empty room on the second floor instead. A happy resolution to a traumatizing night.

Or so I thought….

Until after a few peaceful moments in the darkness, I heard the faint insidious humming of a mosquito, hovering just outside my ear like an evil dwarf vacuum cleaner. Or something else evil and small that hums. Too tired to swat and not wanting to wake Kristen, I just tried to sleep with a sheet over my head. But eventually I had to breath. So life became a cycle of “stay under the sheet until you suffocate” and “listen to the mosquito until you want to suffocate something.” How do people sleep in the actually wilderness? I wondered. I’m inside a nice house!

Eventually I moved to the couch downstairs. It was like a triathlon, first event facing down a squirrel that apparently really wanted to sleep in my bed, second event the mosquito population of this room, third event finding a comfortable way to sleep on the couch. The last event was my favorite, but by that time I only had a few hours left to sleep before someone would wake up and make noise.

Ah well. All is well that ends well. I got to nap the next day a little, the squirrel tracker man was called, and now I have a funny story to tell.

a closer look

I saw a hummingbird today. While I was out working in the garden, watering rows of beans, all of a sudden there was this whirring object in front of me making a loud buzzing sound… and I thought it was a bee and almost sprayed the hose at it instinctively before I took a closer look and saw its colorful tiny body and black beady eyes, unreal looking like an animation. It stood in the air staring straight at me for a full five seconds before zooming over to a flower, and then off into the woods. Seeing it, I felt shivers of otherworldly ecstasy.

I have been in this place for a month now. And it’s surprising - the surprise of stopping, the surprise of sunlight, the surprise of an indefinable smell. The surprise as the wind gathers and rustles the semicircle of trees around the land and they all shake so violently it’s hard to believe the leaves don’t all fall down. And the surprise of remembering how we are all moved by so many unseen forces.

For those of you who do not know, I am working and living at the Agape Community in Hardwick, Ma this summer, which is a peace community with a focus on sustainability, established by ecumenical lay Catholics.

I feel like I must do a bad job of describing this place and the work that I’m doing, because after giving a brief description to friends or family, they still seem doubtful about how to reference my job “when you go back to your…. Camp?”… “your farm” …“your thing” …“that place”… “what is it you’re doing?”

I could try again to express the external features of this internship in more detail. The place was founded by a couple who wanted to live in a more holistic way, as peace activists and educators about waste and sustainability. That they grow much of their own food, own a grease car, have solar electricity, have connections with many high school, college, and grad school environmental and spiritual groups who come for workdays or education or retreats. That they host 9 major events throughout the year, one of which they once had Gandhi’s grandson come out to speak at. So the work is a combination of physical, active organic gardening, working with the people who come out, maintaining and building connections, helping with mailings… and so forth, and essentially just learning how a nonprofit community operates.

But beyond all of this, in some ways I feel like I am learning how to really live for the first time. In school, we trace the paths of philosophers with our fingers on a map to know where they have gone, but rarely follow them with our feet. There is too little time for that, too little silence for that.

Here, I’m only a long driveway away from civilization, but it feels like so much more. My first week here, my friend Monika stayed with me to check out the place, and I guess I did a bad job of describing what she should expect, as usual, so on our first day, when we took a walk, she looked at the neighbor’s house and paused in shock.

“Is that a ‘house house’?”

I looked at her, puzzled. “umm…. Yeah. And that’s a ‘car car’.” I said, and then realized that she had thought we were miles from the world of cell phone reception and lawn mowers and televisions. Nope! Just a driveway’s length.

I can’t believe that was over a month ago now. The details are still fresh and vibrant, like a charcoal drawing that I haven’t closed up to smudge in a sketchbook.

I remember the first week I was here, they held a poetry and arts evening here, and before anything had started, Suzanne asked the interns to share a little about our experiences. Which led to the retelling of the “house house” story and other funny moments:

Suzanne said, “Monika, tell them the funny thing that happened earlier today when we were cleaning”

“Oh” she answered, “You mean when Justin almost made me un-marriable?”

At this point in the conversation my mother, who was visiting for the event, turned to me in shock.

But Monika went on to explain that it’s a Croatian superstition that sweeping dirt on a person’s feet gives them bad luck for future marriage.

I’ve learned so much!

And I have so much more to learn. There is so much we never learn just in the conversations we fail to engage in with the people around us.

Since then, I have met recent grads from the Franciscan volunteer corps, new WOOFers, one from France, one coming tomorrow from Italy, the man whose restaurant supplies Brayton and Suzanne with their grease for the car, two high school groups, a retreat group of people from NYC with roots in the Dominican Republic (who made amazing plantains and did karaoke with us and even made me dance!)… and overall, I just have this feeling of being deeply settled and peaceful, of being in a place that my whole heart can respond to without corners of doubt, because the focus here is so practical and so clearly right on target. It feels like time has slowed down when I am here, like most every conversation has real meat in it (metaphorically speaking… they’re actually vegetarians, which is perfect for me).

I feel like my spirituality and creativity has been on passionless autopilot for a long time, feeling like I have less and less to say, to add, that hasn’t been said before…

Like, I’ve said before to people that I decided to become vegetarian for clear reasons when I was ten, but over the years, the convictions wane and all that’s left is the habit of not eating meat. I rarely thought about what led me to that conclusion anymore, the hatred I felt for the Factory Farm system, the cruelty and unhealthiness… At Agape, I feel like the passionate resolve I used to feel about so many things is slowly rising again, that I’m getting back in touch with the roots and the cause, and believing that moving out of all kinds of stagnancy is possible.

YAWN I’m so exhausted but I really want to at least start this so I will move out of the stagnancy of an empty blog! More thoughts to come.