Living In the Time of the “Both/And”

Dear Friends,

The staff from the Drueding Center are on site—laughing and calling to one another in front of the cheerful jingle of the Mr. Softee truck. During their improvised awards ceremony held in the labyrinth, I hear them announcing the certificates naming their colleagues’ gifts of spirit.  The staff admit they have had a hard time this year. Budget cuts, uncertainty, worry. Bernadette (Cranaleith’s Director of Strategic Partnerships) has been hosting their retreat, coordinating the day’s contemplative activities, shepherding their moments of joy, restoration and release.   

Later that afternoon, Sr. Mary and I sit on the porch of the historic house, enjoying the light, warm breeze. Mary has brought out a small picnic — seltzer water and protein bars. We laugh a bit at how much we enjoy snacks on a porch in summer. The goslings (seven this year!) wander near the driveway. Mary has been watching the Canadian geese from the porch this year and every year for over 60 years and shares with me her delight in again watching how the parents teach their young to fly by racing down the hill toward the pond, catching the lift in their feathers, flying a bit higher each time. She says it will be in just a few more weeks that they will take flight high into the sky, circle the house and the grounds, calling to one another, honking their loud farewells.  

We talk about community—how essential it is for the center, how lonely our work can sometimes feel, and how we are not separate from all that has been, all that is to come. It’s all connected, really—what happened then, what is happening now, what is still to be. 

In a recent New York Times interview, Ezra Klein spoke with author Kathryn Schulz about the emotional dissonance of our times. Klein describes looking at his phone and seeing “smoldering ruins in Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan,” then looking “up into a spring day.”  Schulz reflects on this tension as part of our resilience: “Do we dwell,” she asks, “on what is going well…or do we get mired in what has been done to us or ways that we’ve been wronged?”   

Here at Cranaleith, when we look up, it is this breathtakingly beautiful day in this place that has been here for so long. The Lenape who watered their horses at the pond, the suffragists who gathered in the living room of historic house, the twenty-five years of Cranaleith’s ongoing Mercy-filled retreats and contemplative programs—all experiences of joy and fun and laughter and tears and sorrow and regret and fear.

This is the time of the “both-and”—isn’t it?  Where here and there, then and now, you and me, hope and despair all collide.

Yesterday, the warm moist air smashed against the cold—and the storm scared us all. The swirling blue clouds, the wind that slammed against the house opened a little leak in the window on the third floor.   

But now I sit here on the porch of the house, laughing, watching the geese, discussing how to better support our ways of being community. Breathing in, breathing out. Nibbling on a snack cake. 

Can you picture the goslings flying first in circles around the house, then soaring straight into the sky? Let’s imagine it together. There’s always room on the porch. Come sit with us–and see.