ebb and flow

These days, I often don't feel like I care very much. I think caring, like a lot else, is something that ebbs and flows. And I think at the tail end of winter, even in a temperate climate like this one, the end of winter is an ebbing time.

It was starting to bother me a few weeks ago, this caring less and less about all the "issues" my job brings me in contact with each day. I was just getting over a bad cold, and was heading out of the house for work for the first time in a while. I was going to a "volunteer in Palestine" fair, at a local university, representing CPT. I arrived at 9am, as requested, only to remember you should never trust students to voluntarily be anywhere before 10am.

Luckily, I'd toted along "Getting in the Way," a compilation of stories from CPT's 2o odd years of experience that they compiled a few years ago. So I sat in the grotty student lounge and read while I waited for the would-be-recruits to arrive. I only got as far as the first story. Jim Loney writes about the delegation to Iraq right before the war started, the delegation where George Weber was killed in a car accident.

That story shook me up. It reminded me not only why I want to be here, doing what I'm doing, but it reminded me about what it means to live fully. It was a moment for me where I reconnected with that bigger flowing.

At the fair my table was beside the International Solidarity Movement table. The man staffing the table had met CPT in Hebron, and had only the nicest things to say about them, though he found the religion side a turn off. When I had to leave early he offered to keep an eye on some literature, if I wanted to leave it behind. He said the good deed might help him cover his bases if he was wrong about the whole God thing. I told him, if he was wrong and I was right, he still didn't have to worry. That interaction was another little bit of flow.

Tuesday morning was the last session in a ten-week women's story-telling circle I've been a part of. The women in the group were a dream come true, in terms of "community cohesion" and "interfaith dialogue," a representative smattering of housewives and professionals from all the major backgrounds in the borough. At our closing presentation I was struck by a sense of real community. Not the high that comes from an intensive day of ivory-tower professional dialogue, but the long-term getting to know you, and finding oneself intrigued and not scared by our differences, and recognition that we call the same patch of ground "home." This was another time of flow for me.

Plus, we all got daffodils! Windfall! And as I journeyed home on the tube, I suspected everyone of coveting my lovely flowers. And I started wanting to share them. But there's very little scarier in my world than trying to connect with a total stranger. So I just held my little bouquet and thought a lot about the value of doing things that scare me. Just before my stop I got my courage together and offered a flower to the little girl across from me (starting with a child was strategic!) She was happy and her mom thanked me. I then offered one to the apathetic looking young person beside them, and he seemed happy too, in an apathetic young person way. No one else in my section of the car would take one, but it was worth the rejections to have had those two acceptances. That was definitely a time of flow.

I put the rest of my daffodils in a vase when I got home, and today all the closed buds have opened up, miraculously.