Hospitality
During the last few years of my mum’s life, she became desperately needy, her thoughts scattered like leaves on a windy fall day, unhinged from her left brain, running into deep anxiety. Occasionally she would come up for a surprise re-calibration and then slip back into the stranger I could not recognize. I was angry at her for getting unhinged. For letting my beloved mother morph into this frailty. I felt like our stalwart family matriarch was burrowing herself into a cave, succumbing willfully to the ravages of gravity, mental decay and loneliness. And I carried that anger and disappointment with me for some years after her death.
Lately though, with the completion of another seven year cycle, I am no longer troubled by her final years, and I notice one of her gifts expressing itself through me. We all embody the devotion of our nurturers, and I cant help noticing how some of her gifts bubble to the surface a generation on. It is a living memory, so alive that it is gradually engraved upon the beloved beings who descend from me.
This is how it works. Alex, the Mexican marvel who comes to help fix stuff that I have given up on gets coffee and jam-on-toast as soon as he unpacks his tools. Scott, the Centurylink guy who came over to hook up the trailer with WiFi, tells me he has his own lunch from home but might like a banana. Mike, the truck driver who delivered gravel for the new yurt, is happy for a soda but really has to get back to the pit.
The four families who live on my land come over for dinner and to play music at the firepit once a month. We are strangers living side by side, but we choose hospitality like an opening rose, and everything changes.
And thinking back on my mum, before her world closed in on her, her deepest calling in the world was hospitality. Giving people a place to be when they would otherwise be alone, making sure everyone has a place at the table in order to be nurtured and nourished and fed. How familiar the phrase...“You should eat!”
Offering any visiting journeyman, gardener, friend or stranger something to drink and eat. It was her antidote to othering and isolation. She ran tennis clubs and book clubs, parent meetings and synagogue volunteer circles always living into her belief that hospitality is the needle and thread that brings us together.
I wasn’t intending to write about my mum today. I was thinking about this all-school retreat at Camp Parsons on the Hood Canal we had last weekend. It is a camping kinda thing with everyone lending a hand somewhere along the way, cooking, gaming, cleaning, prepping, whatever is needed. Much as we aim to get to know one another, previous retreats have not helped me feel more connected. Could not quite find my place in the tumult.
This one was different in that as one of the few veteran retreat parents, I slid into a lead role. As I did so, I noticed my mum’s hospitality instinct take a hold. This is about leaving no one out, greeting one another by our actual names, inviting one another to play! However, this is not a game of cards with 3 friends on my deck. There were a lot of us, 400 or so. What to do?
What really brings us together? I think the very act of asking for help is a mitzvah. Really simple. It is the recipe as I see it for crocheting a community. Just ask for help. Whether it is the way Zann does it with our small minyan, or having my neighbors lay out chairs, or handing over the industrial kitchen to a team of parents and kids to make dinner best they can, the more I ask, the more everyone feels needed and connected. And the invitation to kindness is implicit in the ask. Is that not the calling of our true nature as social beings?
How comforting it is to choose to live in a world where kindness is intuitive, an easy choice and also our currency. That kindness pocket at your hips is as deep as you want it to be. And that hospitality gene, the desire to anchor a community in kindness, is indelible. Just ask me.
