A Manifestation of Life without Debilitating Sacrifice

I’ve been seeing in my summer routine an unnerving parallel to my work with the Community School and I’m struggling to find a way to deal with both problems. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on the school--a lot of work that I am very conscious of. It is very tempting to simply put all other things aside and see to it all, but this would end up creating more problems than it solves for me on a personal level. One of the important goals of this project, in my mind, is to demonstrate that it is possible for such an endeavor to be successful without the need for the restrictive, detrimental sacrifices to our individual lives that people (read: *I*) often make for the sole reason that we don’t know how to moderate our many and varied efforts so that they may coexist in harmony with one another. To ignore habits of health, to use a personally relevant example, for the sake of creating this Community School, defeats the purpose of the project as a manifestation of what Buddhists see as the Eightfold Path.

[to be continued…]

Imagine

Imagine, for a moment, an average Wednesday morning. A house full of teenagers is busily engaged in the rituals of breakfast at 7:15. The kitchen is alive with the sound of spoons on bowls and the smell of oatmeal, tea and toast. Someone announces, from across the room, that the weather report is predicting rain in the morning. There are several competing conversations about school work, tonight’s community dinner and whose turn it is to the dishes. In what seems like only a matter of moments, though, the house has emptied; nearly everyone is on their way to some other part of the village for meetings, work study or formal classes. Only two students remain, both preparing for tutorial in the living room a short time later.

Imagine, now, the living room of this house later in the morning. A small group of five students sits on the couch, on the floor, at a small table. Each of them is writing in a journal. They have been talking about the concepts of justice and mercy from the book Les Misérables, and they are putting their thoughts on paper in preparation for a project in which they will create a drama offering their interpretations of these concepts in their own lives. Two of the students here have taken on the additional challenge of translating portions of this drama into French. They will meet later in another tutorial to work on that. In the background, there is the sound of someone practicing the guitar.

At lunch time, some students have returned home and, with the help of the house mother, are preparing one of the dishes the house will contribute to the community dinner this evening. The sun has come out, and preparations are underway to move tables outside to profit from the nicer weather. Other students have gone with the house father to talk to the owner of a nearby farm to negotiate for the right to set up a pair of research stations to collect data for a water quality study. Tomorrow, the entire house will get together to talk about this study. These students have been investigating whether the community’s water supply is more, or less, safe to drink than the wells from surrounding properties, and the house as a whole is responsible for presenting the findings of this study during Assembly next month.

At supper, the entire village has convened to share in a community meal, a potluck that houses can contribute to with food, music and a variety of games. Later, some people will organize a jam session where anyone can grab an instrument and join the fun. The fun won’t last too late, however. Everyone has an early day tomorrow, and homework to do before bed.


That's sort of the idea. What do you think?