News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
My email inbox is filling up with organizations telling me about special opportunities to get an early start on Giving Tuesday and make an impact to solve very important problems. FPR is an amateur organization in both senses of the word; since we're poor by necessity, we might as well make a virtue of poverty. But we are very grateful to those of you who have chipped in over the past year. Thanks to some generous help, we were able to host an excellent fall conference, and we're working on details for next year's gathering now. You won't be getting a special fundraising email from FPR--sorry to disappoint you--but we are grateful for the dedicated Porchers who read FPR, contribute essays, join us at conferences, contribute as they're able, and undertake the daily, often unnoticed work of tending the health of flawed yet precious places.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about home, thanksgiving, and mania.
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Alexandra O. Hudson commends the quiet but vital work of civility by pointing to several exemplary porchers: "'I’m Joanna Taft,' said the tall, socially fearless woman with a blond bobbed haircut and ready smile. She immediately reminded me of my mother, in more ways than one. 'Would you like to porch with us sometime?' she asked, as we chatted after church one August afternoon. This marked the first time I had heard the word 'porch' used as a verb."
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Isaac Wood considers how our limits and obligations might define our true freedom: "Wendell Berry's fiction shows what relationships look like with skin on—how real relationships are enacted between people. As the characters who inhabit the fictional town Port William interact, they demonstrate how individuals can either perpetuate or obstruct meaningful relationships. The lives of two characters in particular, Hannah and Burley Coulter, have a lot to teach us about relationships and liberty. Together, Hannah and Burley demonstrate how caring for people in committed relationships requires moving beyond personal liberty for the sake of the other."
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Dixie Dillon Lane describes the different ways that children learn to read and recommends curricula defined most of all by personal care: "Why does my third child, my little son whom I mention above, need me to be in physical contact with him while he reads? Because it helps him feel warm and safe, I imagine, and so he is not as afraid of making mistakes. Alternative educators recognized this in the classroom decades ago: that children read better with an adult’s arm around them, or while piled onto soft pillows with a couple of friends."
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Will Lyon reflects on the recent FPR conference and explains how his efforts to switch to a dumb phone were thwarted, at least for now: "I did some research with the help of a 'dumb phone finder' which told me the functions, network compatibilities, and reviews of the available flip phones and other simplicity-oriented devices. I identified one that was an acceptable price, was still able to run one or two of the apps that I actually do need, and was compatible with my network (or so I thought)."
Biking into work on these late fall or early winter mornings reminds me of Thoreau's enthusiasm for the morning. His encomiums for this hour of the day are certainly literal, but they also also praise morning in its more metaphorical sense. It strikes me that his aspiration to wakefulness is particularly appropriate as we embark on the season of Advent:
Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro