What Mary Saw.....

It’s Advent, just in time. We so need to remember what the Christmas story is all about: Justice. Peace. Compassion.

This need is held against a dark ground: Greed. Terrible inequality. Terror, war. Hunger. Homelessness.

The Christmas story starts nine months before Bethlehem with a girl and her unexpected pregnancy. My friend John Pitney tells the story in “Song for the Wise Ones:”

“Justice was born

In a barn full of hay

In wisdom it happened

To Mary that way

But how would she know,

She would never assume

What promise she bore

As it knit in her womb

“She pondered a free world,

The poor all redeemed

A world where economies

Served all she dreamed

Of land’s wealth divided,

No terror, no war,

All people satisfied,

hungry land no more.”

The Christmas story starts with Mary’s dream of a better world.

One morning, after reading Lindsay’s transportation audit (reported beautifully in last week’s front page article,) I woke with this cry: where is the outrage over our horribly misspent monies?

The focus seems to be held on whether or not the bad spending will make the city liable for repayment of state and federal funds (to the tune of almost $9,000,000 for the TCAG and home loan boondoggles alone.) This causes the city council consternation, but they seem to be holding their breaths, hoping the grants won’t be called by the funders and everything will be ok.

No one seems to be looking at the actual impoverishment of the city’s residents from all this money. There are the families who were not helped become home owners who the funds were for: the improvement of those families’ conditions would have trickled up through our local economy and helped stabilize home values, as well as their children’s educations. There are the neighborhoods whose roads have become so decrepit they ruin our cars and bring down property values, especially relative to the areas where the roads have been improved. And there’s the tax burden on all homeowners if and when the city’s liabilities come due.

What has happened in this city should be an outrage to every teacher who worries about the poorer kids in their classrooms, every health professional who sees people not getting the care they need, every clergyman whose congregation wants to help needy families this season. Every businessperson who dreamed of serving a revitalized community. Every citizen who feels a compulsion to stay.

My friend John finishes the verse above with this chorus:

Wise men, wise women,

Children and elders compassion unfurled

Sing a song for the wise ones

Who bear pangs of justice

To bring God’s Shalom

To a laboring world.

While singing the songs of Christmas this season, may we find our voices and begin speaking of justice in this laboring world we inhabit. And may we begin dreaming of a new Lindsay, where the land’s wealth works its way through the hands of our families and businesses, all people satisfied, hungry town no more.

Common Wealth....

commonwealth: n. 1. the people of a nation or state; body politic 2. a nation or state in which there is self-government; democracy or republic.

As we eat our turkey dinners, celebrating the first settlers’ survival, I’m thinking about the home they built for us on this continent. We’ve neglected this home in many ways, but opportunities abound to do better.

One example is our city park in Lindsay, scheduled for reconstruction beginning next month with a $500,000 grant from the State after the west half was demolished building the Aquatic Center.

I love this park. I love its plainness and soft edges, its ancient trees. I love the way you can drive into it, park and get out wherever you find a good place. I love the ways different people use it: old men gathering to play cards, multigenerational families holding birthday parties and picnics, cars emptying kids to swing and slide, couples sitting on the grass. I love the memories it holds for me. It is part of our common wealth here.

One memory is from Nov. ‘92, the funeral procession and ceremony to heal from the 1990 Freeze. Recently I found the unmarked gravesite where the horse-drawn caisson unloaded the coffin, where people left their written hopes and fears while dignitaries spoke of this town’s future.

With the $500K, the city will 1) eliminate all the old roads, including the one to the golf course cafe; 2) replace the arbors, picnic tables and playground equipment with new ones; 3) fill in the soccer field they dug during the construction of the aquatic center and replace it with a baseball diamond; and 4) pave curvaceous bicycle paths lined with new trees and bollard lights.

Parking will be along the extension of Sierra View Avenue, which will be constructed with Federal $1,250,000 loan. Sierra View will cut right between the park and Senior Center, obliterating the abandoned swimming pool where Lindsay Skimmers competed for decades. When I protested that this change will seriously impact those multi-generational families who need the park most, the staff explained to me that change is hard, but we just have to get with the future.

These plans have been made without any public input, although the park funds have stringent public participation requirements. What’s left of our city park could be restored to health much less expensively simply by not completing Sierra View Extension, which will indebt this town even further, and using the State funds to fix up what exists now.

At the Nov. 8 council meeting, I asked Council to put the plans on hold until more public input could be gained, with no response. This park is part of our common wealth, and we, its citizens, have the responsibility of protecting what belongs to us all. I ask you to contact our council members and tell them you want a say in the future of this park, as well as the town as a whole. Think of it as a Thanks-Giving act.

A Night at the Farm.....

One evening last week I went to the Visalia Friends Meetinghouse for a planning meeting about Quaker Oaks Farm.

The farm and the Meetinghouse are inseparable in my mind, and their history together is a point of light on Tulare County’s sometimes dark map. In the mid-1970’s, the 25-acre farm was purchased by Bill and Beth Lovett, one of the three or four couples who founded the Visalia Friends Meeting. The Lovett family developed Quaker Oaks Christmas Tree Farm there, where families from all over Tulare County have come for 20 years to cut their own tree, drink cider, and see Quakers living on the land just a little lighter and more appreciatively than most of us.

In the mid-1980’s, the Meetinghouse was built on a 2-acre parcel carved from the farm’s southwest corner, which sits at the end of the frontage road running east from Farmersville on the north side of Highway 198. The Meetinghouse was designed and built with the same loving care as the farm and is surrounded by it, lending the same beauty and peace. The Meetinghouse has been used by non-Quakers for weddings and funerals, day-long business meetings and staff retreats, a get-away only 15 minutes from downtown Visalia. Those who visit the site are usually stunned speechless, then become part of the place in some tiny space in their hearts.

I’m still stunned even though I’ve been going there since 2005. Mostly I go in the daytime, where its beauty is visible no matter the weather, from winter’s dense fogs to summer’s thickest days. But that night I saw another kind of beauty: the intimacy of the dark.

There’s something about night on a farm. Partly it’s perceiving the animals’ preparations for it as darkness deepens. It’s sensing things go quiet and watching things disappear into the dark. It’s discovering the path through your feet rather than your eyes.

And it’s a wonderful loss of identity, or self-centeredness, a melting of boundaries as the reality of your common animalness sinks in. I never realize how much of my self I’ve lost to lights until the lights are out and I’m returned to a sense of wholeness by the dark.

And after the meeting, I found myself not wanting to leave, wishing I could just stay the night and wake up there with the land and the birds and the gray fox we call "George" in honor of George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends. Most of the plans for the farm involve bringing groups of people in for various educational purposes. No one can argue the benefit of that - except perhaps the land and the birds and George.

Maybe a night at the farm could be part of its future, now that its Christmas Tree days are over. I’ll add it to the discussion. For now, anyway, we’ll keep the lights off for you.

Holding Lindsay’s Dirty Laundry.....

A few days ago I had one of those quotidian epiphanies, a homemade insight that caught my breath.

I bent over to pick up my basket of dirty laundry to take it where I could throw everything in a washing machine and be done in half an hour. It was mostly sheets and towels, a pair of overalls, some short sleeved t-shirts I won’t be needing for awhile now that it’s turned cold, and an odd assortment of socks and underwear. The underpants on the surface of the basket I tucked further down below a pillow case, hearing my mother’s voice saying something like "people don’t want to see your dirty underwear" even if it’s not very dirty. It’s just one of those unwritten rules some of us live by out of consideration for others and/or fear of being discounted by them for being crude.

As I hid the violators below the politically correct items, I saw a parallel violation in the way some of our citizens, including myself, have hung Lindsay’s dirty laundry out for everyone to see. There are some things that just aren’t done in a small town, and pointing fingers while shouting is one. But we’ve been doing that very thing, mostly from a sense of betrayal, but also from deep frustration. Some days it seems like there is no way to get our government to listen to, much less act on, the information and bad faith relations we’ve discovered, the supporting data for our concerns.

And some days, just holding that information feels overwhelming. The findings of the 2009-2010 audit, which included mistakes from several years prior that had not been identified by the previous auditor, were heavy enough. But then there’s the information from the whistleblowers the auditors couldn’t have caught, and the socio-cultural Mormon factor that no one dares identify, and the problems waiting to be caught in the 2010-2011 audit, and the steamroller plans that keep going forward as if Scot Townsend and Kenny Walker were still here (which, of course, they are, even if they’re not employed by the city any longer.) It’s as if you walked into your utility room and found that three other large families had been throwing their dirty laundry there for months, and they’re off playing golf. There’s barely room in the room to stand, much less to sort...

But standing there with my dirty laundry in my arms, I had a sudden sense of relief. I know what to do with dirty laundry: wash it, dry it, iron if necessary, fold or hang and then put it away. One load at a time. I can handle this situation. We all can handle this situation. It’s straight from Housecleaning 101. Sort. Wash in the proper temperature with the right detergent. Dry as recommended. Most important, put the clothes away where they won’t get dirty before you use them again.

I like the thought of our current council members tucked away somewhere, pressed and folded, saved for some other occasion than running our town. Don’t you?