Person First

Just to save you the suspense, I'll begin with a screenshot of my calendar from early this semester:

The point is not that I didn't use Google calendar. It's that early this semester I was prioritizing things that don't fit there. Conversations with friends. Spontaneous cookies. Cuddling up in the couchboat¹ to chase the blues away. I was trying to "be a person first and a student second," and it wasn't working out so well:

I read this at 1:18 the day of my 1:30 lab.

I could have done it the night before if I'd checked. But instead Lindsey and I baked cookies shaped like hearts and squirrels, and wrote love letters for our friends in the throes of judicial action, and I hand fed my chicken a pear dipped in antibiotics.

Sometimes I feel cloistered here - safe and spiritually grounded, but disengaged from the problems all around me. Lately, for instance, I've worried a lot about food. Where does our cane sugar come from, anyway? Who died to sweeten my tea? Global problems — the abuse of people or the misuse of land — have a local home in my stomach. But without a sugar-beet farm or a team of investigators, there's not a lot I can do about it now.

How to fit the real world into Oberlin? That's something a lot of us struggle with. OSCA helps, in some ways: being part of our own food chain, eating as a community, deciding community standards for ourselves. But it can also be insular in a way a dorm is not. There's so much to talk about down in the couchboat. Why leave Harkness at all?

Campus jobs can be a slice of 'real life' too. Right now I have three: this one, of course; official printer/lab technician with the Center for Information Technology; and, as of this week, a job as a groundskeeper at the AJLC. The chickens are completely dependent on me; the printers, though less vocal, require just as much care. The time I spend working sometimes surprises me, but I consider it time well spent.

Of course, every student finds zir own balance, and most people I know are actively, vibrantly engaged in the community and the world. (Look here (Oregon: Alis Volat Propriis) and here (Saints and Sinners: Two Days in Altar) too just for starters.) I can't even scratch the surface of my friends' activities in the community, but the Bonner Center is a good place to start.

But there's just so much real life that I don't see — not because of Oberlin, but because of the world into which I was born. Last week I collected a few cups of white acorns and decided to roast them with honey. I imagined I'd need an hour or two to shell them, leach them, drizzle and toast them. Four hours later I was trying to scoop boiled acorns out of their shells while simultaneously mixing vegan chocolate cookie batter for Sam's Thursday meal. It's hard work to do the simplest things from scratch.

Imagine — as I mused to Sam with one hand on the cookie spoon and one hand opening the oven — making sugar cookies really from scratch. A plot of land and some seeds in a temperate zone. Okay, you can also have a cow (because you can't have a soymilk factory). Imagine growing the wheat and sugar beets, threshing and milling the grain, milking the cow. That's the life I want. It makes more sense to me than getting food in bags, even big, brown-paper bags with organic food in them.

But after a few weeks of angsting, I have settled back into campus life with a quiet and comfortable joy. There's no sense in declaring life less or more real — thus the addition of quotes around real world — and it helps to gain some perspective. Sometimes I worry about the fact that none of the money that is sending me here belongs to me. But lately I've realized more fully that none of the time does either. I've been trying to live my faith more fully, and part of that is utter dependence on God. If this is where I'm supposed to be right now, I'll embrace it. And I have. I love it here, and despite fantasies of living a little wilder and working for my sustenance, there's really no one place I'd rather be.

The last few weeks have been easier. Instead of building cages from my classes, I've thrown myself at them. There's time for goldenrod dyeing and walnut fermenting² and making knotweed flutes, but all those things come after chemistry study group. (Plus, the walnuts pretty much ferment themselves.) I've had time over Fall Break to put the garden to bed and make all the knotweed whistles I could want. But I'm also studying up on plant development and blood composition and thermo, because this universe amazes me, and I don't always have to be outside a classroom to learn about it all.

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