Conversation

Yesterday, I visited the grounds where I will be staying to work on my manuscript. They showed me what my room looks like, helped me tour the grounds, which included a beautiful former mansion turned into a retreat center. There are beautiful places to write, swings overlooking hills with lots of trees and green grass. The best part was meeting everyone I will be seeing daily. I met some wonderfully kind people--most of them sisters, but a few staff members, as well.

I had to speak on a microphone at lunch to explain my project, my goals, my history. It's rather intimidating to have someone hand you a microphone and tell you to just tell the crowd a bit about yourself and your dream. I didn't know how detailed to get in my explanations. Luckily, they allowed for questions after I said a bit about myself. The nun who has graciously helped me make this connection and drove me there raised her hand first, asking me to further explain my experience working with oppressed children, between my summer job and experiences with volunteer work and service learning trips.

One of the sisters came up to me afterwords, telling me she used to live on a Navajo reservation after college. She explained how delighted she was that Native spirituality would be a part of my spiritual reflections. She also then revealed that she worked for many years as a social worker and that she knew the need for reflection on mental health and spirituality that goes beyond an evangelical approach. I've read a few books about how God saved people from depression, but when you are depressed and have trouble with faith and believing, it doesn't make you feel better when people tell you faith will save you. I even resented it a bit, because I was so ill that I wanted to ask how could anyone or anything with power just let this continue to happen.

I had many conversations--a nice combination of mentally stimulating and shallow talk. I don't mind shallow conversation when it is for a purpose, such as meeting people. Yesterday was an appropriate time for small talk. I mentioned to the woman who drove me down how the healthier I get, the more impatient I get with surface level conversation with people I love. She explained that she thinks it is just a way for someone to feel close to us when they don't have anything else to say. I agreed, but it was interesting because she complained about how terrible it is that we text people all the time, asking meaningless questions or giving them meaningless information. I applied what she said about small talk to texting, saying I agreed texting could be a waste of time and foolish, but that it helps me feel close to people, like Laura, who lives too far away for me to be apart of her daily life on ordinary circumstances. With texting, we can at least check in a bit and stay updated on what we are up to. Humans are social creatures, and it's interesting how we show this in a variety of ways.

My grandma came up to spend the day with me on Thursday and bring me home. We had a nice day and a lot of conversations we'd never engaged in before. It was a nice day, and she has even offered to give me a ride back Sunday so we can do it again. I don't want to be an inconvenience, but I might take her up on that offer, because it's my last week up there, and there's a poetry reading Monday that I don't want to miss. I'm off to jog. I've been sticking with jogging pretty well, but it's challenging some days.