Saturday, December 7, 2019

Standing in the Place Where I Work

A quick hello before I head out to help at a printmaker friend's annual studio sale.

Things are progressing well at work, after the overdose in the parking lot. A volunteer found an Opioid Education event being held in a couple weeks in our neighborhood, and I signed up Big Boss and me to go.
BB said he was very interested: "This is not like the crack epidemic I grew up in."

And the new cashier and I have been emailing about poverty and charity. I sent him the SVDP quote by Jean Anouilh, adding that while I love the quote, one thing I hate about the SVDP attitude is how it talks about "the poor" as if they're someone else–– as if "the poor" can't advocate for themselves or perform works of mercy.
(In fact, I see poor customers (and coworkers) helping one another out all the time. )


The new cashier emailed that he tries to find the absurd and the humorous sides of things. This helps me too.

I've been reading Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness. I have not once laughed, but it did help me to read that she differentiated between poverty and destitution.
Yes.

My earnings put me below the US federal poverty line, so technically I could be considered poor, but I am not destitute.

And this differentiation--between being a little lacking and being stripped bare––be applied to the spiritual, mental, and emotional plane too.
Dorothy Day, you know, advocated voluntary poverty, a richness that is the opposite of spiritual destitution.

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” --Dorothy Day

I sort of hate community--it's so annoying--but at work I seem to have found a place I can stand happily, at least for now.
Me, far left, with a couple coworkers

1 comment:

  1. Good to see working together, learning together.
    Hope the printmaker's sale goes well

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