Peace

This morning when I walked into Quaker meeting, it was clear by the look on my friend Bill's face that his wife had died. Bill has a long white beard and a constant good humor, even last week when announcing that Lois Ann was back in the hospital. This was the first time I'd seen him look so exhausted.

We sat in silence for a long time. Surprisingly, the first person to speak didn't mention Lois Ann's death, but asked why the meeting hasn't done more work on peace and what we could be doing that we aren't. Over the course of the hour others stood and answered her: Lois Ann and Bill lived peace, because they embodied love. They were the kind of couple that makes me believe marriage as an institution really does work for some people despite all the people for whom it obviously doesn't work. Their love for each other and other people was clear wherever you saw them - in meeting, in the grocery store. He cared for her cheerfully during her last illness just as she waited cheerfully for him when he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in World War II.

I think college activists and old Quakers could learn a lot from each other. Lois Ann may not have been agitating for social change at age 89, but her very presence in the world was a step in the right direction. Your politics can be as radical as you please, but if you're an unpleasant person and don't genuinely care about the people around you, everything you do feels hollow to me.

Balance and swing

The problem with contra dances is that afterwards, I'm still too excited to sleep very much. Eight hours is a long time to not be awake and excited, particularly this week.

This is fantastic

I've discovered one of the best things in life is social gatherings for things that most people don't think to have gatherings for: singing rounds, reading picture books.

A game of duck-duck-goose this morning involving five undergraduates, a sociology professor, and his three-year-old twin daughters gave me a brilliant idea. Sometime soon by the creek behind my house, there's going to be a stone-skipping, creek-wading, and duck-duck-goose party. Dear weather: please cooperate.

Here I go with the dead authors again

Hafiz, if you were here
You would probably wink and say
I should keep reading poetry
Instead of writing
Papers.

If you weren't dead seven hundred years ago,
Tomorrow you could tell that to
My professor.

Librarian solidarity

Today's history nugget: I'm reading about Berkeley in the 1960s, which illuminates sides of academic life I hadn't even dreamed of. In 1969 a group of students held a strike that included storming the main library. The librarians, using a tactic they probably learned from protesters in the first place, linked arms around the card catalogue to protect it. Much as I sympathize with student protest in general, there's something very touching about this. If my card catalogue were threatened I probably would have done the same.

It's time.

The problem with any theme for a blog or website is that I get tired of it after four or five years. Hopefully this one will last a good while?

The photo on the left is a Bryn Mawr lantern. Each student has one to light on special occasions like May Day. On the right is an object peculiar to Scandinavian churches - a lysglobe or light-globe, studded with candles. This one is from Vor Frue Kirke in Copenhagen, a block from where I went to school.

The Emma Goldman quote is from a time when she was dancing at a party and another anarchist told her to stop because her frivolity would damage the Cause. The best-known quote attributed to her, which she didn't actually say, is in the same vein: "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution."

Here's to living your ideals - and to dancing as you go!