18 members of the Craigville neighborhood gathered yesterday on an asphalt driveway adjacent to Red Lily Pond to share stories (some of us have lived on the banks of the pond for more than 70 years!), create beauty, and experience the joy of community. Avis Parke and Dick Delany planned the activities and Alice and I offered refreshments. It was a cool, sunny day with a crisp sea breeze from the Nantucket Sound, less than 100 yards down-gradient from the fresh water pond and herring run we are working to save (we counted 168 herring migrating in April—this may seem an insignificant number for a run that in the 1950s had many thousands of herring, but it was more than double the number last year—we’ve been working and advocating with policy makers and the public to stop the activities in the ocean that decimate herring stocks, and if we succeed, the State will restock herring in the upper pond). 

Once everyone had gathered and become comfortable (our new summer worship leader, Edward Dunard, a 24-year-old MDiv. student (he served Teach for America in Philadelphia for the last two years), from Wisconsin, who just came, with his wife, to live in Craigville on Thursday had not met most of the folks until this event), I read this quotation from Thomas Merton to gather the circle:

“Finding Our Place”

Humans have a responsibility to their own time,
not as if they could seem to stand outside it
and donate various spiritual and material benefits
to it from a position of compassionate distance.
Humans have a responsibility to find themselves
where they are, in their own proper time and place,
in the history to which they belong and
to which they must inevitably contribute
either their responses or their evasions,
either truth and act,
or mere slogan and gesture.
    —Thomas Merton

Dick Delaney described the seasons of human life and wildlife in the pond in every season, as he spent the winter here for the first time (previously a summer visitor). Avis’ 12 -year-old nephew, Jeremy, an enthusiastic environmentalist (a vegan at the age of 12 because of his love for animals) and a skilled practitioner or Origami, taught everyone how to make Origami birds—a whole variety—and everyone made one as we shared our stories. Then, Avis read your “Global Earth Exchange letter aloud and explained to everyone the philosophy behind radical Joy, and connected what we were doing to people all over the world. Then, Jeremy made a giant origami swan and set it on the surface of the pond for a moment, and we all circled round for a closing.

I’ve attached a few pictures. I’ll send some more from my mobile phone once it gets recharged. It was a wonderful day. If you’d like to see the context, check out the Youtube video which Josh Goudey, my “little brother” and I made at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqUUi76D7h4.