Live Locally

Live Locally December 9, 2016

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I know people who have lived all their lives in one place. I’m not one of them. I’ve moved from one coast to the other and up and down California in my peregrinations, sometimes looking with envy at those who have done less packing and more planting. Either, of course can be “a path with a heart.”

The adage sometimes attributed to Confucius, “Wherever you go, there you are,” offers an oddly tautological reminder to pause regularly, look around, take stock, and engage with those we encounter—family or strangers. Be local. Be a neighbor. Wrench yourself away from the internet, take a walk, and find out what’s happening (including among non-human creatures), who’s making it happen, who’s being affected, how to help. That might mean reading the announcements in the church bulletin and showing up to pack lunches for the homeless. It might mean signing up to tutor reading at a school where kids are struggling. It might mean making your home a welcoming place for neighborhood meetings or cub scouts or a grief group. Or introducing yourself to those you encounter on a walk through the park. It might mean buying from local businesses and filling your bags at the local farmer’s market.

That last option has especially wide implications: eating local food contributes, meal by meal, to reducing our dependence on the “petroleum-drenched” food that travels an average of 1500 miles to our tables, leaving a large carbon footprint and perpetuating forms of farming that are by and large unsustainable. Eating locally means we can get to know some of the people who bring the food to our table, for whom we often pray as we begin a meal—so many of them—the CSA farmers who are quietly, laboriously expanding the market for sustainable, organic food–the sturdy folks who set up booths at markets on weekends and chat with customers, the people who introduce us to cherimoyas, kohlrabi and other vegetable outliers, the neighbors who bring free lemons to meetings or distribute zucchini to anyone who will take it at the end of summer.

Living locally means being aware of process, which, mostly, we aren’t. We don’t know the people who made our computers or pajamas or IKEA furniture. But we do know who made the brownies being sold at the school fund-raiser and the casseroles to which we add our own in homes where someone has recently died. And we know that person’s name. And can offer hugs to the one who is left, weeping. And we weep with them. Because their lives also belong to us, if we are their neighbors—a word whose biblical sense is deep and capacious. “Who is my neighbor” is one of the great, significant questions in the Gospels. If someone nearby were to ask it, the answer would surely have to be, “I am.”

Image by John McEntyre, mcentyreart.com


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