Politics/Community Involvement

If I am not helping people I am figuring out a way to help people. If people tell me they need help I am helping them find resources.  That has been in my social justice work, my theater work, kind of a running theme in my life. I mean my grandma has a saying, “If you are not sleeping you are working, if you are not working you are sleeping,” that’s pretty much me, first one in, last one to leave. I am always working on something to enrich people’s lives and make the quality of their lives better which kind of leads me to my social justice/mission statement which is, “To be enriched by other people I interact with and hopefully to interact with them as well and continually make people’s lives better.”

What I do here dovetails perfectly with my life work. I am going to be one of those people, ninety years old volunteering somewhere, fighting for what is just, for what is equity. I will continue to do that.  And I look at it this way, whatever knowledge I have acquired in this life—and I have been very blessed—I have a torch and I refuse to pass that torch on, I really do. Because I want you to light from it and then someone lights from you and they keep lighting and lighting. Eventually what is going to happen, you are going to see all this light, all this light that is going to be fighting against oppression and inequities and injustice. So, I love what I do here, I love what I do in my life.

I think it’s an amazing time right now because I think that the playing field has really never been more level than it is right now.  I think there is just amazing opportunities that I don’t think were necessarily there 30, 40, 50 years ago for women to be just as successful as men traditionally have been in business. I think you are going to see more and more female COO’s, more and more female CFO’s, and more and more female CEO’s of companies, more and more women on the board of directors.  I think it’s a really exciting time.

I had  learned to live in a setting that was completely foreign, completely different to what I had grown up with. In the Peace Corps I was living in a mountain village with no electricity, no running water.  Went to bed with the sun, woke up with the sun, farmers all around me, learned to plant rice, walked to the school right down the rice paddy path to teach, hiked to the next school to teach.  So I knew the pace of life and I knew a little bit about the priorities, the things that are important to people who are living in that sort of setting in terms of getting food, making sure your children have food–not necessarily some of the things we would worry about in the Western world although people do worry about getting food definitely here, but in a different context.  So the skills of being able to sort of step outside of yourself and really be open to observing and to listening and to following what others around you are doing regardless of whether it is something you think is funny or awkward or different or just doing as they do. I think that's a life lesson that I think everybody could use [laughs] and it's hard to get that life lesson though unless you're thrown in a setting where people are different around you.  You don't get that and I think that's part of where some of the myopic views that we see in America come from, not just America, the Western world in general, the modern world, people who are around people like them all day long or they're avoiding the people that are around them that are different, actively avoiding them.  They don't ever have that understanding of the other and what the other is.

I am the co-founder of a lay Catholic community that’s ecumenical, interfaith, and open to all. No one is unwelcome here under any circumstances and so Brayton and I co-founded this community with two missionaries from Haiti and a priest. He’s a Melkite priest in the Eastern Rite, in 1982. So now I am part of this whole sustainable operation and we teach. We do courses here. We do programs here. We have hundreds of college students come here every year for the immersions. We started this community, Agape, but [first] in Brockton, sort of in the inner city of Brockton, with the idea that we would become more residential. People would come and live with us. We started a community with this family, but then we had this dream after five years that we really needed to reduce our lifestyle even more, grow our own food, not use fossil fuels, heat by wood. We drove a car that drove on vegetable oil, we had a grease car for a while. Now we have an electric car. So we really wanted to scale down even more so this afforded the opportunity to come to this land and we got interest-free loans and we got donations. By the time we moved here in 1987, people knew us fairly well. We had been at the peace issues or doing one thing or another with peace-making for about 15 years, so people knew us and people were willing to support donations.  ...... All of our protesting came out of our faith. So before we went anywhere and witnessed against anything, we said we would pray together. We said we would have long periods of prayer together. What is God calling us to?  How is God calling us? How is God touching our hearts?  Before we would act, and then we would act nonviolently.