Back to earth

It's funny how a wedding shifts one's view of economy. For six months, you have to beat people off with a stick to keep them from giving you appliances. Jeff and I purposely didn't register anywhere and asked people to give to Oxfam instead, which worked very well. But there were still people who couldn't stand it and needed to give us those teflon pancake molds.

I think the Target website embodies the worst of the gift registry. No matter what you're looking at - a sofa, a video game, a lipstick - there's a button so you can add it to your wedding or baby registry. If there's anything you want, Target indicates, you can throw a party and ask your friends to buy it for you.

It's true. There's a brief frenzy during which people want to lavish attention and material goods on you. We even did some of it ourselves - last winter Jeff and I went to a pawn shop to get our wedding rings as Christmas presents for each other. At $75, my ring is probably the most expensive piece of jewelry I'll ever own.

And then . . . it's over. After living with Jeff's family for a year, we're now looking at flying the coop. As I tally up what we could take with us, I've realized how many of "our" things are actually borrowed. The things we do and don't own are sometimes laughable. We own:

An immersion blender but no saucepan.
A banjo, mandolin, guitar, stroh violin, bass, and maybe 6 whistles, but no CD player.
An oscilloscope but not a bed.
120 forks but no spoons.

How to balance this one?

For a long time my job strategy was to do something helpful. At a time when my best friend was depressed, I wanted to be a psychotherapist. After I started learning my third foreign language, I wanted to work with immigrants to the US. After my first class in the feminist and gender studies department, I wanted to work in a domestic violence shelter. Finally I wanted to travel to other countries and work in microfinance or some other kind of development.

And by now I've come to believe: my labor is not that useful to saving the world. I think the world's worst problems are not in the US, and I as an American am not particularly useful to solving them. Anyway, I seem to have gone through seventeen years of school without studying anything very practical.

So now I'm convinced that my money can actually do more good than my labor. For example, I could join the Peace Corps and spend a year learning a new language and the names of the people in my village, eventually maybe accomplishing some useful work during the second year. Or I could work a job I'm good at in the US and send my earnings to an organization in the village where people who actually know what they're doing can make their own decision about what they need most. (One thing I like about Oxfam is that they do most of their work by funding local partner organizations, rather than sending Americans zipping around the globe trying to fix things.)

There are some problems here:

1) not many people want to do good works, but lots of people want money. The competition for high-paying jobs is a lot higher than for directly useful jobs.

2) The thought of going into business, law, medicine, etc. makes me feel ill.

3) If money rather than work is going to be my primary contribution to the world, I don't know how much is enough. At our current cost of living, Jeff and I can easily get by on my $18,000 salary. (If that sounds low, please note that it's 25 times the median household income in Haiti). But since we keep more or less only what we need, we get no more benefit from a job that earns $80,000 than from one that earns $20,000. And I think most higher-paying jobs would result in me being less happy.

Usually I don't think money is a good goal. I think people are happier if they choose jobs they're good at and that leave them with free time and energy to spend doing other things. I'm distressed at the thought of measuring my life by it. And if I do something I'm actually interested in, like social work, I'm saving my sanity but abandoning people who don't have the basics they need.

Peanut curry

I've been having a tough time with the amount of meat my family eats. So it was time to bring out a really good vegan meal.

Peanut curry

Pour a little oil in a big skillet. Over medium heat, sauté:
a small onion, chopped

While that's cooking, get together some minced garlic and grated ginger. I grate the ginger right into the pan. Add those and sauté a little longer.

Spoon in:
a glob of peanut butter (crunchy is more interesting)
some lime juice
spicy stuff, if you live with people who will eat that.
soy sauce
some liquid to make it the right thickness - water, milk, or coconut milk
shredded coconut
chopped fresh basil leaves

Heat it through and it's done! I'm serving it with quinoa and steamed chard. Beautiful.

What is your money doing?

I'm pretty sure I want to get my master's degree in social work a few years from now. I've started saving money for tuition. Given that, I realized that it not only felt bad to leave my money sitting in a checking account with a huge multinational bank, but it made no sense.

So I started shopping for an ethical bank, and I've decided to open an account with ShoreBank. I'm satisfied with the ways it invests my money - small business loans in poor neighborhoods and environmental projects rather than giant corporations. And because their online savings accounts require so little overhead for them, the rate is quite good - much better than any account my old bank offered.

Are you happy with where your money is? You might read check out socially responsible investing and this list of socially responsible banks and credit unions.

Beginnings and ends

Today we went to the memorial service for a man from our Quaker meeting. It was my first Quaker memorial service, only a few months after my first Quaker wedding (mine). A Quaker memorial is much like a Quaker wedding: people gather in silent worship, with people standing to speak as they are moved.

His wife was sitting on the bench in front of me, her river of brown hair hanging in front of me. It seemed so unfair that Bill should be dead before his wife's hair has even turned gray. She sat on that bench in the beautiful old Cambridge meetinghouse twenty-some years ago at their wedding.

Quaker wedding seem especially intergenerational to me. Before you can get married under the care of a Quaker meeting, you meet with a clearness committee made up of experienced married people. It's pre-marital counseling in group form - their purpose is basically to ask, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Bill and his wife were on my clearness committee last fall. Together we talked about the various struggles Jeff and I were likely to have - money, children, how we function socially.

I was also remembering the novel I Take Thee, Serenity, a novel about two college students deciding to have a Quaker wedding. The author, Daisy Newman, had been a member of Cambridge Meeting, where we were today. Upstairs I found two illustrations from the book hanging on the wall. The book is pretty terrible as a story about young people - the author was clearly not as with it as she thought. But the book really shines when describing the old Quakers the young couple gets to know. As the pair is exploring the idea of marriage, they watch a husband care for his wife who has suffered a stroke. As community deals with the illness and eventual death of this character, the young pair sees what they are in for. To marry when they are young and impassioned means to care for each other when they are old and dying. The book is about the full cycle of marriage, not just the exciting beginning.

Today Bill's niece, a young woman round with pregnancy, rose and spoke about her uncle's legacy. She realized that her baby would never know this man, so it would be up to her to teach the child about the qualities she loved in him. His gentleness, his patience with difficult people, his humor. It seemed very right that in this hall where Bill's marriage started, we should be talking about how to continue him after his death. That's a kind of immortality I can believe in.

Dwelling on grace

I was reading about how meditation can change people's brains. There's some evidence that people who spend lots of time meditating, like Buddhist monks, have brains that actually function differently from those of non-meditating people. Particular parts of the brain grow far more active. I do believe that focusing on something makes it grow bigger in your life - I've seen myself dwell on small problems until they become medium or large problems. But I love the idea that you can actually change how your brain works by practice.

My attempts at meditation have not been very satisfying. I fall asleep, make lists, or get up and do something else. Most Sunday mornings in silent Quaker meeting for worship I start by trying to focus my mind, but I don't last more than a few minutes. The only meditation technique I ever learned was counting breaths until you reach ten and then starting over. I often do this for part of meeting, but I've never experienced anything that made me want to keep doing it. I don't feel refreshed or relaxed.

So today in meeting I tried something different. At Pendle Hill I was introduced to centering prayer, which is focusing on a single holy word and letting all other thoughts go. The method had more or less existed for a long time, but was popularized in the 1970s by Catholic monks who wanted a way to draw in people familiar with Eastern religion. I picked the word "grace".

People talked about grace a lot at Pendle Hill. I remember a woman standing up in meeting and saying with wonder in her voice, "I was thinking about oil spills. And then I thought, what about a grace spill? A spill of grace?" I imagined it flowing and pooling over land and water, coating animal and people like petroleum on seagulls. I think it was the most potent thing I ever heard in meeting. But I realized I didn't have a solid definition of the word.

Christianity defines grace basically as "Gifts from God that we don't deserve." I don't believe in God, but I do see lots of undeserved gifts flowing around, pooling and spilling.

I see grace in my mother-in-law all the time. I try to do chores before she gets to them, but I keep finding some way she's cheerfully done something for me - my laundry hung up, the crumbs I left on the counter wiped up. I tried to talk her out of it, feeling I was accumulating debt to her. But she's not keeping track.

Actually, grace seems a main requirement of parenting. When I see people dealing patiently with their fussy children or surly teenagers, I'm impressed with what they're able to give when they don't seem to be receiving much.

And Jeff's grace pools around me every day. He's steady when I'm fragile, generous when I'm needy, loving when I'm prickly.

I'm not sure if what I was doing in meeting was what the monks had in mind, or if it was reshaping my brain. But I hope that by dwelling on grace, it will come to dwell more in me.