Going Once

In idle passing conversation on religion on the bus I realized that the whole affair, for me, has much less to do with a particular denomination or religion as it has to do with the particular faith community. It’s the people & what they are doing much more than idle beliefs and doctrines floating around in the nether regions of our brains. I think in many ways that is one thing life can be boiled down to – the communities we choose, or do not choose to exist in. Which raise the interesting question of what communities do I have now? Ya’ll are probably the closest I have now, here in training if only because you have all known me for at least some time. More tangibly are the other trainees, but we are all split up into clusters & don’t see each other that often. That & I’ve been surprised by the diversity of people I’ve found here. I keep looking for people somewhat like myself, not that I necessarily know what that would entail, but I guess people who can identify and relate to my reality. The ways in which I look at the world. I haven’t really found any here, which is a bit of a surprise. Maybe I just haven’t dug in to people enough to find out. A friend of mine who went to the Visayas and will be posted in Cebu City, Mike, might count, but he’s also a couple hundred miles away and might as well be in the States for the next four months before we can actually travel…
But life is about communities which I think Is one of the big reasons why this whole process is strange and makes me feel lost & literally floating through life at times. From an American viewpoint of individualistic freedom, even odder that at no time do I really ever choose my own community. I do get to pick which circles I run in at Mayoyao, but in a small barangay with the burdens of work and being a role model thrown in even that is fairly limited. None of this is necessarily bad, just different and will take some getting used to. I guess a taste of what life must be like for the other 95%…

“And it all seems so odd sometimes, & the odds all seem stacked…”
~Ani Difranco, Going Once