Life Passages and Landscapes

In a week's time I was back in Lancaster County for three of life's passages: a wedding, a funeral, and a graduation party. Driving back to Lancaster County is like going back in time now, as well as space. Any time I go back, I return exhausted, as you imagine a time traveller would be. In the past week, I  revisited parts of my own life--my wedding, my various graduations, funerals of loved ones as well as participating in the events that were in real time. It made for a long week, but one filled with love and connection and reflection all taking place in familiar backdrops.

I come from a tradition in which religion plays a big part in these life passages. God is invoked. We pray for those who are transitioning from singled to marriage and from life to death. It is a comforting ritual, and yet it is something that is increasingly foreign to me. I don't look for the divine. I look to pattern. These days, I tend to reach for poetry and nature in these moments. Nature because it is always in flux. It mirrors the changes in my life back to me, and I am soothed by the way it resurrects itself at every turn--especially this time of year. Poetry,  for its rhythms. I have my favorites. Mary Oliver unites nature with poetry in a way that seamlessly joins my two supports. John O'Donohue is especially observant as he councils us to bless the changes with our attention to them. I access his book To Bless the Space Between Us the moment the wind starts to pick up in my life.

Years ago, I listened to an interview John O'Donohue gave with Krista Tippett's On Being in which he talked about physical and spiritual landscapes and the intertwining nature of the two. "What amazes me about landscape, landscape recalls you into a mindful mode of stillness, solitude, and silence where you can truly receive time." The interesting part was that I was listening to this interview while walking near my home in Reinholds. For those who have not been there, I lived in a place of rolling fields. The view changed with those hills, but on many points in my walks, I could look out and survey miles of farmland. I passed million dollar homes on my walks, shacks, a one-room Amish schoolhouse, four different breeds of cow, not to mention goats, chickens, and the occasional fox family. Where there are chickens, there too are foxes. Walking there was expansive. It freed my mind by making me small. The sky was endless.

The landscape is much different in my new home. I cherish my hikes in the woods. Here, in this setting, the woods embrace you. You are folded into nature, a secret part of it. Your eyes close in on the trail before your feet, so you don't trip over the terrain. If you see the sky, it is through peepholes atop the canopy. Some days I even have to speculate at the weather, because I can't see enough of the sky to see for myself. Walking is an interior thought process here. Sometimes that isn't enough of an escape because I am already wired for introspection. It is when I am too much in my head that I long for the wide view.

I never thought, with all the nature of Arden, that I would miss my previous walks, but I do. I miss the open landscape enough that I am homesick for it at times. Our hiking group helps with that. We do get to see some vastly different terrains on our walks. We even add the urban skyline and the ocean view to the mix.

In addition to marking time and ceremony in Arden, I will continue to travel back to Lancaster County to share in the life passages of family and friends that happen there. As I move between the two landscapes I am sure they will have an impact on how I experience these points of transition-- whether I take the wide sweeping view of life, seeing all the points that led me to this one, or if I choose to take up residence in the immediacy of situation. Either way, I am happy I get to project these landscapes over the screen in my mind and merge them with the moments in which I live.

Going Home Again

When we left Lancaster County we experienced a bit of a "good riddance" moment. We had felt trapped where we were for some time. We lived in a place with few amenities. The culture was conservative, which is fine, but it was so conservative that it didn't even seem to allow room for debate, much less conversation. Our family and friends were spread all over the county, and because we were the outliers in that far northern tip, it seemed that we were always the ones making an effort to journey to them. Perhaps I am being unfair in my last statement, but we were always running-- always burning gas in an effort to have social interaction. We also watched tons of Netflix movies during our tenure in Reinholds because we often didn't have the energy to make the hour plus commitment to the round trip commute with kids to do any of the things we wanted to do or see any of the people we wanted to see.

I won't go so far as to say we were miserable during those years in Reinholds. We were in the thick of childrearing and that accounts for some of the battle-weary look in our eyes, but it also accounts for much of the joy. Our kids, and their activities, were a focus in a way that they--mobile, graduated, and semi-self-sufficient--are not here in Arden. If you have been reading this blog, then I think it goes without saying how being in Arden has awakened us in ways we could not imagine. We are thriving here in Utopia.

So, when we have to make that hour-and-a-half drive back to Lancaster County, it sometimes feels as though we are being sucked back through a vortex to black-and-white Kansas after having been to the Emerald City. And we aren't as excited at the prospect of coming home as Dorothy is. The difference is that Dorothy wants to go home; home is her quest. We, on the other hand, get summoned back to the L.C. for events and gatherings that are not our call. Our son is there. Our parents are there. My sister's family. Mark's brother's family. Extended family. We are back for holidays, weddings, rites of passage.  Recently, I have had multiple friends take me to task for not making the effort to visit them and spend the day.  None of my friends seem to overlap. Girls' night out and the proverbial killing two birds with one stone is not really an option. Each friend wants a day to themselves. The problem is not that I don't go to Lancaster County. (I will be there four times this month.) It is that when I go, I have to rotate through all the people I want to see, have to see, and still not see everyone who is important to us.

And then there is the fact that I feel my energy change when I go back. Arden feeds me. Though I don't have the confines of a job, I am effective and I get lots of meaningful work done here.  Sometimes, I feel as though Lancaster County sucks the life right out of me.  We had some tough years there. I had some lonely years there, feeling isolated--socially, spiritually, and artistically. I am making the journey back a lot more often than I would like. I don't get a chance to miss the parts that were good when we were there. I often feel resentful, like someone who is being forced awake in the middle of a wonderful dream for something as mundane as a dentist appointment.  I wrestle with that feeling of dissatisfaction, because I do really want to see the people from our past. The one thing I don't respond well to is guilt, especially in its subtle forms. That shuts me down more completely than a bank on a national holiday. And I don't respond well to those who think I need to make the allowances because mine is the more flexible schedule. Those who think that have not seen my schedule. If I am coming to see you, I am taking a day off of my work, just as you would have to take a day off of your work to come see me.

I know it isn't realistic for friends and family to visit me in Arden all the time. I am happy that my son and my in-laws make the journey down as often as they do. That helps. Other friends have journeyed to see us, too, which gives us an indication of the strength of our bonds. It is very easy to take people off our list of must-see when we are back if they have never made the effort to come see us. If we have had a past association with you--believe me, you are welcome hither to our house in Arden at a moment's notice. We have practically pulled former church acquaintances into our home and forced them to sup when we found out they were coming down for a concert at the Arden Gild Hall.

I ask patience and empathy, and maybe a little forgiveness from our Lancaster County friends and family. We  are still working out the rhythms and politics, the emotions and dog logostics of our visits back to the home country. And Lancaster County for all its contradictions and complexities will always be our home country and our North Star. The place we come when the native tribe calls us back.

Color Me Privileged

Arden is a white neighborhood. While we do have socio-economic diversity, there is no getting around the fact that racially, we are homogenous. We have a Wilmington address, though plenty of people will designate the area we live in as North Wilmington. I am not sure how that figures into statistics of Wilmington as a city. Are we included? The city of Wilmington has a population of about 70,000 people. 58% African American, 33% white. Separated into neighborhoods. Our daughter went to a high school where white and black were about even in terms of numbers. Compare that to our son's high school in Denver, PA, where the population was 99% white.

I was glad that Maren was going to experience the mix, but I was naive about what that meant exactly. Just as the neighborhoods in Wilmington form around race lines, so do the cafeteria tables. Maren was able to navigate these lines and even cross over to an extent. She is a confident girl with crazy hair. She was often asked if she was mixed race. (We've had genetic testing for genealogy purposes--nothing in our background explains the hair.) Interestingly enough, it was always black students who asked her if she was mixed. Never the white. She has African American friends. Maren played the lead in Hairspray, the musical put on by her high school. A good choice considering the make-up of the student population. But even at cast dinners for a play about racial integration, the kids arranged themselves at tables by the color of their skin.

I am not comfortable writing about race, but I need to acknowledge the changes I have experienced since moving to Arden. While most all of my neighbors are white, I encounter people of color on a daily basis. I didn't before the move, with the exception being the Indian family that ran the Dunkin' Donuts. I don't think that seeing African Americans out in the world makes me confront their blackness as much as it makes me confront my whiteness. What does it mean to be a white woman? I never really had to consider it before.

I get that I can be friendly, say hello, make small talk with people of other races, but I sense a line I can't cross. Wilmington is murder capital of the country at the moment.  Murdertown USA is not a title any city wants. Newsweek sent reporters to profile us. I'm not scared. It isn't my neighborhood that is contentious. Does that mean I am free to look away? Our friend, Joe, recently rode along with Wilmington police to take photos in the different neighborhoods for an upcoming local magazine piece. He isn't sure what the magazine is going to say about the neighborhoods or in what ways his photos will be used. He recounted some of his experiences to us.  In some sections of the city, he was pretty much guaranteed that he would have been robbed if it he had not been under the protection of police for the photoshoot. Why? Because he would have stuck out as white and therefore a stranger, which is funny because Joe vehemently denies being white. He is coy about his actual heritage, preferring to blend in where he can and keep people guessing.

The problem affects the economy of Wilmington as some people won't even go to downtown to take a meeting, much less patronize a business. As I have said before, I am not afraid to venture downtown, even alone. We go to galleries First Friday or to see shows at the Queen. We have dined well in city restaurants. But I cannot say that we have been unaffected. In Arden, we have to lock our doors, not because of our neighbors who have our keys anyway, but because we fear being burgled by drug users from the city. Crime sprees happen here. Usually minor ones. We have a security system in our home. I never lived with a security system before, although I should note that my old neighborhood in Reinholds experienced break-ins soon after we moved out. I'm not even saying that the reason we need security system is because of race. But there is a world of haves and haves not, and living in Arden, I am aware of my privilege in a way I never have been before.

If you look back into Wilmington's history, you will find that from April 1968 until January 1969, the National Guard was a presence in the city to quell the potential for race-related rioting after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. It is the only such National Guard occupation in the history of this country. If you look deeper still you find a state that wasn't quite sure which side of the Civil War it was on. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, Delaware was a slave state in which slavery was dwindling to the point that it made little impact on the economy. It was a border state that was considered a Northern State by some because Delaware posed no risk of secession. Delaware sons fought on both sides of the Civil War. One hundred fifty years later, do we Delawareans identify as North or South? Food can tell the real story. We are both. Delaware aligns itself with the Mid-Atlantic (and my personal PA Dutch heritage) for its scrapple obsession, but Southern fried chicken is a thing here. Race and identification is just part of the story. Unemployment and family dynamics play their parts as well.

What all this means for me as someone who has moved in from lily white Lancaster County countryside is that I have to think about race for the first time. I am not always comfortable acknowledging the advantages of my skin color. And I shouldn't be. But I am a Delawarean now, and we are a people who live on the edge. Wilmington is desperately trying to figure out what will work to bring about change to those statistics nobody wants. It's going to involve a social inventory with its own fair share of discomfort.

Rate of Assimilation

We have heard from different sources that we have melded with the community of Arden at a faster than normal rate. Our friends and long-time residents have joked that we know more people in Arden than they do. We feel it, too. It was an immediate sense of belonging here. Not everyone who moves to the Ardens comes by that feeling so quickly. Some never do.

Sculpture by Rick Rothrock

Assimilation has two-tiered meaning. It can mean to take in--as in the community of Arden has taken us in. It can also mean to share similarity--to be congruent. I can't speak for Mark, but this is the first time I have felt this kind of belonging. In college, it took me until my third semester to find my footing. In Reinholds, I never really felt it. I felt like a foreigner in a county where my motherline runs deep. I recently traced my mother's mother's mother's... etc. lineage as far back as I could go. Eleven generations of women who all lived in Lancaster County. One would expect that I would have experienced assimilation in this, the land of my mothers, but I didn't.

I'll give another story to illustrate. Years ago, I was sitting and watching Maren's dance class with other parents. I saw a woman who was sitting off to the side with a pile of books. On top was a We'Moon Desk Calendar with a piece of blank paper, clipped to the front cover.  It was obvious that this was an attempt to obscure the book, so people didn't know what it was. Enough of the cover was still peeking out so that I could recognize it for what it was. For those that aren't familiar with We'Moon, it is (according to its website) "an empowering datebook and multicultural earth spirited calendar, We'Moon features art and writing by and about women: an exploration of women's experience and perspectives, a goddess-inspired creation from the growing edge of global women's culture." I leaned over to Lucinda, who I had met casually before, and said, "Oh, you have a We'Moon calendar."

She looked at me, startled. "You know what this is?"

"Sure," I said.

To which she replied, "Are you from around here?"

And it was true. It seemed that in Lancaster County, I almost had to speak in code to find other like-minded people, if I had the nerve to speak up at all. I had been taking my kids to the same babysitter every workday for six years before we discovered we had the same political leanings. Why? Because as a liberal in Lancaster County, you had to assume you were the odd woman out, politically. It wasn't always safe or easy to speak your truths. In my son's high school, Obama not only lost the mock election in 2012, he came in third to student write-in votes for Ron Paul. 

I am not saying that the whole of Arden is democrat. I will say that Arden has outspoken democrats, and for me, just that notion is very refreshing. Arden also has outspoken feminists. Active Unitarian Universalists. People who are open about the fact that they meditate.  People who are open about the fact that they talk to spirits. Then there are all the artists. Mark, too, has people with whom he can talk about the things most important to him: his projects, IT tech, beer making. He is also very curious about Georgist philosophy. We don't have commonality to everyone in Arden, but most people who live here are open to the things that make each individual unique. You are quirky? Arden embraces the peculiar. I've said it before. We found our tribe. Assimilation may have been quick, but it took us a long time to get here.

Sundials by Rick Rothrock

Yesterday, I got the message from sculptor Rick Rothrock to come over and watch as he calibrated his sundials in his sculpture garden for the spring equinox. I am deeply moved by Rick's work and will someday own one of his pieces. I've talked to Rick at length about his motivations and influences. Spirals. Vesica Pisces. Oculi. The play of changing light on the stone as the sun moves across the sky. I see Rick as a true shaman. He is speaking an ancient language with the medium of light and earth. What could be more ancient than charting the sun's movement across the sky through the day and the seasons? He showed me how each of his sundials marked the passing of time in different ways. Not fast or slow. It wasn't as if one of his sundials was five minutes fast. But they each played with the sun's light in a different way. 

We are coming up on two years that we have been casting our shadow in the Ardens. Were we fast-tracked into this community? I don't know. Time is a funny thing, as is our expression of it. We do what we can with the light we are given. And what is time but our relationship with the sun?