Be the Rain

"Be the ocean when it meets the sky
Be the magic in the northern lights
Be the river as it rolls along
Be the rain you remember fallin'
Save the planet for another day
Be the river as it rolls along."

-- Neil Young, "Be the Rain"

Sometimes you need the rain. It can’t always be 76 degrees and sunny out all the time (sorry for the reality check, Southern Californians). Sometimes you need the raw wind to blow the feeling out of your nose, and sometimes you need the freezing rain to soak through your shoes, leaving your toes to do the penguin circle dance as they curl together to stay warm. As the weather unleashed a totally uncalled-for attack of miserableness upon Baltimore this weekend, the housemates and I caught a glimpse of a different side of being a JV in this city. No longer was the bright, sunny weekend that we all look forward to at the end of each work week, one where we can play Frisbee in the park and our two feet can pleasantly take us wherever we want to go.

In an effort to really commit ourselves to the four values of JVC (Pop quiz time! Ok, what are the four values of JVC? Write your answers down, and you'll find out if you are right later on later on…), the housemates and I came up with a number of challenges that we as a community would like to try this year (Answer! Simple living, Community, Spirituality, and Social Justice. If you got more than 3 wrong, go ahead and reread the previous material, and if you still need help, maybe I’ll call your parents). This past week, we decided to focus on the value of simple living, and we all tried to find ways in which we could take ourselves out of our own comfort zones throughout our daily lives. For some, this meant taking a sub-5 minute shower; for others, this meant taking a military shower (a word of caution for aspiring military shower-takers: it will be difficult to grip the knob to turn the water back on after you have lathered your hands with soap. I recommend using only one hand to handle all your soaping activities). We also set goals for limiting TV time, car-driving time, and personal computer time. By attempting to cut back on all these things, we taught ourselves a few lessons. First, we realized that, even by volunteer standards, we are lucky to have so many things at our disposal- i.e. a house with working heat, a hot shower, and food. Second, by removing the distractions that many of these things cause, we were able to focus and apply our selves to the here and now, both at our places of employment, and within our home.

This week we are taking on the challenge of buying only locally-made or sold groceries. This means no shopping at big supermarkets like Giant or Safeway. Therefore, the major source for food will come from a farmer’s market that operates once a week by our house. And on Saturday morning, that is where we were, ponchos and hoods on, perusing the produce, looking for the best price.

We spent a lot of money at the market, more than we usually spend during our trips to the Giant (20 dollars for 2 gallons of milk! But, I must admit, the glass bottles that they come in are really cool). But, as we walked back to our house that morning, we agreed that this is all part of the learning process. Though we spent a lot, we were still under our food budget for the week, and we were able to buy everything we needed from either a local grower or a local store. Though we will not be eating the meals we are accustomed to this week, we will get creative with what we can cook for dinner, bring for lunch, and eat for breakfast (it’s looking like no cereal this week, but on the flip side, we have about a million and a half English muffins). And, though we could not get everything we wanted, we came to decisions on what we did get as a group. And as we got back to the house, I felt good about how we dealt with this challenge, if not just a little cold from the rain.

In the end, this is why we are here. We’re not here to experience sunny weekends all the time; sometimes, it has to rain. For us, the real meaning lies within the rain. What will happen to me as an individual, and to us as a community, if we choose to deal with these restrictions and challenges, if we choose to let it rain on us? In a broader sense, that is what this whole year here is about. We could have all done the 9 to 5 job thing and come home each night to a warm, food-stocked house. But if we wanted that, we wouldn’t have sought out JVC. We make this commitment to live for a year because we want the challenges. We want to see how we will deal with them, and we need to see how they will affect us.

In a sense, we need the rain.