Editorial
I’ve been thinking about home and community a lot lately: how we create them, how we keep—or lose—them, how they change, how we change because of them. Why now? Maybe it’s because there’s so much turmoil in society. Maybe it’s because I’ve been experiencing the fragility of some of the communities of which I’m a part. Maybe it’s a yearning growing in the space created by an empty nest. Whatever the reason(s), I’ve been hungry for the steadiness home and community provides me.
In many ways, Rowe is a model of a community and a home that knows how to stay strong and to ride the waves of change. Eight and a half decades old, multigenerational, situated on the edge of a rural village, radiating a cosmic-politan sensibility, Rowe is fiercely committed to creating conditions for all of us, wherever we stand in its expanding circle, to enrich our inner lives while simultaneously urging us to agitate for social justice in the outer world—on behalf of our crazy, fragile, bloody, loving planet, and on behalf of ourselves and coming generations.
While most of us agree the Rowe community is not as diverse as we’d like, Rowe is working at it; it keeps evolving. Like a good shortstop, ready, balancing on the balls of her feet—poised to move at the crack of the bat. The energy of the young people who roll in to camps all summer long is like the ball coming off the bat—fast, spinning. These young people are smart, vulnerable, open, hungry. They help keep Rowe exciting and edgy, feelings that carry over once fall comes and the visionaries—the poets, the drummers, the trackers, the tricksters, the whole tribe of change agents—show up brandishing fistfuls of crimson, orange and dazzling red leaves of possibility. At Rowe, as the weather cools down, the community of truth tellers and heart seekers heats up.
Behind the scenes, a dedicated staff keeps it all flowing. If there’s one predominant sound coming out of the office, it’s laughter. The sound is as tantalizing to the ear as the aromas drifting out of the kitchen are to the nose, and both provide the fuel to the engine room of a community. Rowe staff carries the values, vision, and heart of what each of us shares when we’re here—and when we’re not—our highest selves in sync with our highest aspirations. The staff, and the interns, the one-timers, work-weekers, part timers—volunteers of all stripes—stretch the definition of community so, like kissin’ cousins, it brushes up against a definition of family. Not perfect by any stretch, but open in heart and mind.
I’ve been a part of the Rowe tribe for more than a quarter century. All four of my family’s (now adult) children were campers, CITs, and counselors. I first guest edited The Center Post the fall before we invaded Iraq, when executive director Doug Wilson went on sabbatical. (As you can see from this editorial, he’s hoodwinked me into doing it again.)
Beyond the decades of campers arriving each summer (beginning in 1924), Rowe, as a change agent, has been a treasured part on the Western Massachusetts social change and personal growth landscape for 35 years. Its impact is felt way beyond this deep blue pocket of the Bay State. It’s been an anchor for many of us when the waters were choppy and times were rough. A lot of people have grown emotionally, spiritually, and politically here, fueled, in part, by Rowe’s vision. From today’s perspective, it might be hard for some to imagine a chasm existing between social change activists and personal growth seekers. It did, though, a few decades back, but not at Rowe. Phrases like “Retreat, relax, reflect, relate, revitalize” and “Respect the intellect; honor the spirit; nourish the body; touch the soul” aren’t just taglines here—for the Rowe family they’re guideposts for living lives of meaning.
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Whether raising our voice in song, writing from the heart, dancing on our tears, challenging war and threats to the environment, or decrying the economic meltdown—the chiaroscuro of our socio-cultural landscape—the woods we walk in off Kings Highway Road, and the circles we stand in before we break bread together, all radiate with a communal spirit. They are a soundtrack for the soul, a powerful dharma talk, prayer flags blowing in the wind.
Despite bad news from the horrors befalling women in the Congo to health insurance scoundrels profiting on the misery of the sick at home, there is what longtime Rowe workshop leader Joanna Macy calls a “great turning” under way. You can see that turning everywhere—from the growing energy and environmental awareness more and more people are embracing proclaiming green trumps greed, to the Nobel committee awarding Barack Obama with its Peace Prize. That act, in many ways symbolic, demonstrates the powerful yearning much of the world feels, urging the country’s first African-American president to deliver on the promise of a United States that draws on its highest moral inclinations in its dealings on the world stage. The community at Rowe has been singing that hymn, agitating for that dream most of last century and all of this one.
Mother Teresa said, “We cannot expect to do great things, but to do small things well.” A powerful tenet to follow. At Rowe, person by person, workshop by workshop, camp by camp, that’s what keeps happening—people doing small things well. Leaving weekends feeling inspired, reinvigorated to face what’s next, exercising both muscles of compassion and action. A good combination, a necessary part of a strong foundation that any family, any community needs. Part of what makes Rowe feel like home.
Center Post Guest editor, Rob Okun is a justice of the peace and psychotherapist in Amherst, Mass. He is also editor and publisher of Voice Male magazine, a quarterly advocating for a new expression of masculinity (www.voicemalemagazine.org). You can write him at rob@voicemalemagazine.org.
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