service does that.

While a few desperate housewives may cheat as best they can to get their kids into colleges they think their children must have whether they've earned it or not and thus deprive them (their children) of choice and the system of universities of their legitimacy and fairness, the idea that all children must go away to college in order to find fulfillment is based on the idea that the only place success can be found will be in the larger world beyond the humdrum walls of our own communities.

If you actually look at small communities like my own, you find folks itching to serve one another and to actually make the world a better place. Service connects us with each other. That may not be known by those in northern cities where folks may itch to escape winter on the one hand or anomie on the other. Folks move around a lot and may never become fully connected. Corporate ladders do that. You may get yanked around one place to another and be happy about it because each step brings more money, power and glitz. Financial success can do that. You may have your eye on fresh and larger properties (the owning of which make you appear hot), or a place to go during the winter months (or summer for that matter). Getting the hell out or away has become a mark of success, whereas fitting into the ponderousness of small community life is not.

 Perhaps it is simply time to reassess. Take a fresh view. When you begin to realize that the hands themselves are not dull instruments, but are thoughtful creatures on their own, that can be listened to and trusted, you may place more attention on the small things that actually matter in the creation of a sense of place and appropriateness of place for the rest of you. You might find for a change that you fit and fit in. Service does that.

We have may have a terrible view of human culture at this point, if you look through the lens of the internet and through broadcast media. Life from that vantage point is about big, fast and glitz. In small towns like my own, folks work hard to be of use to each other. That, my friends, is what's called the fabric of human culture.

 The interesting thing that might happen from a fresh, hand-centric view would be that instead of home becoming the hell you hope to get the hell out of, home might become a better place. Perhaps we should take time to reinvest in each other and see what happens next.

I have a full day of classes planned at the Clear Spring School.

 Make, fix and create...