It takes a village


I used to do a regular Monday Morning Chat Over Coffee blog. The purpose was to replace having coffee physically with friends. It seemed many of my friends, especially in the summer, get too busy for coffee and all the coffee places get too busy with tourists. And then I got too busy for the blogs.

But coffee chats are an important part of community. It is where we catch up with the back story of our lives and it is where we gossip. Social anthropologists are now telling us that gossip serves an important bonding ritual and is beneficial to the community if not viscous or mean spirited. And who knows what is a glue in the fabric of a society

Chats over coffee are also where we re-establish our bonds by what we tell of ourselves and our friends, and what secrets we keep or do not keep. In rural communities chats over coffee are often replaced by what  I have come to call windshield time when you get together to do the weekly shopping in the next town over or run to Santa Fe for that special day away. Often a whole month of chit chat and gossip gets condensed into two hour drive or a day with the cameras or the shopping list.

I seem to have strayed off subject but not really. Up here in the highlands we think of ourselves as independent loners. We do from time to time call on friends to swap out some chore assistance or trade veggies from the garden but basically we feel very self-sufficient. But just recently I came across a circumstance where it seemed a large extended family or collective of friends or even a church fellowship would be of benefit. A collective you could call upon for help especially if your attendance had been religious. Frankly, I do not know anyone I want to see every Sunday, but then I am an air force brat.

See there it is. That tendency to label ourselves as belonging to a group or subgroup regardless of how loose or in the past that affiliation is now. And maybe it is because some genetic link within us knows we need help raising kids or stringing fence or bringing in the harvest or rounding up the cows or digging the grave. Or just someone to lend a shoulder so we can cry.

And yet our society today seems all about division. Rigid establishing of barriers we are not suppose to cross. Red and blue states, straight and gay, black and white, liberal and conservative. Those labels and many others like them do not tend to unify but divide because behind them is the unspoken I am right and you are wrong.

Sad. Very sad.

Comments

  1. The Blog of BeeJuly 12, 2013 at 7:54 PM

    I say that I do not go with the herd, that I am independent and when all is said and done, cane go it alone. But that's not the reality. My two lifelong friends live thousands of miles away - we connect but I haven't seen them in person for years - one for over 20 years the other not since 2006. i miss that dreadfully. I have people I know, people I interact with and I am supposedly part of a couple of groups that 'do good works' and another group that is art/theatre based. I know alot of people here but of all those people, there are only maybe two that would consider friends - and that's using the term loosely. I don't know that I could call on any of them in a dire emergency and God knows, I hope I never have to dind out.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I write for me but I care what my readers think. Please be polite and no scamming.

Popular posts from this blog

Polyethylene Packaging - a Dark Times Journal entry

Image
I was in the fourth grade when our family moved from El Paso, Texas to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We moved because I could not breathe the air there. I want to say they cracked petroleum there. But what did I know beyond the sky was sometimes yellow and I could not breathe. Mom was pregnant with Debbie, and Gary and I rode in the backseat separated by a round tank full of Dad's tropical fish. Dad had a job with Sealright, Inc which made paper milk cartons. Sealright was a polyethylene packing subsidiary of Phillips 66. The petroleum company. I was rather proud of myself for learning to say that, and to not laugh when adults would stare at me not knowing what to ask about that. Albuquerque smelled better. Then. Before all the freeways were built and the shape of the valley trapped the exhaust down near the ground in the winter months. We lived in the foothills. I could breathe. I learned that if I could see the air I could not. Still it was better than El Paso though I missed our trip...
Read more

Swimming

Image
For much of my college career my fitness workout was swimming on the B squad of the swim team. I remember it as the days before heated pools and women coaches. I also remember being so exhausted and cold I could only lean against the shower wall and throw up. Not exactly warm fuzzy images but I was in awesome shape. Needless to say it did not leave me with a overpowering desire to swim laps. Point of fact for years my swimming became really informal: Swimming to shore after the canoe tipped over, challenging my sister once a summer to across the lake and back, seeing how long I could back float without moving a muscle, and a scuba course. I also played around with other ways of staying fit: aerobics, bicycling, jogging, skiing and dance classes. All of which seem to be bad for the knees, back or feet. After my ski accident my physical therapist steered me back to the pool. Damn if I was going to swim laps! However, aqua fit was just getting rather seriously taken so I took it. It r...
Read more

The Pruning the Crown of Thorns

Image
Crown of Thorns Before I am a lover of Euphorbias . They are from the deserts of Southern Africa and Madagascar. They have evolved physical characteristics and forms similar to cacti of North and South America and are often incorrectly referred to as cacti. My big Crown of Thorns was one of my first of a growing collection of these succulents from the spurge family of Euphorbiaceae. I picked it up as a 6 inch plant in a New Iberia nursery when my sister and I were touring the northern gulf coast. I believe that was 15 years ago. I made an attempt at limiting its height a few years back to allow it to devote more energy to the new branches and make it a denser plant. That failed. And the height of the plant continued to challenge the window space and soon the long branches were leaning over and leaning against the window. I googled and found the proper way to prune this treasured plant. Still it was very difficult to cut off the four longer branches. Even with a plan. The f...
Read more