This will come as a shock to a few people, but last December I willingly went to church. It’s because of David, mostly. I would do anything for David. Not because he is good at talking me into things, but because I know that he would never lead me somewhere that I wouldn’t want to go– that he would never take me somewhere unsafe. David is a Protector of Peace– of his own, of mine, of yours, even if he’s never met you. He is a royal guardian of the stillness that makes us whole, and I would follow him to hell and back or even to church if he asked. David also happens to be a (somewhat) retired Episcopalian priest. So, in fact, he did ask. And I went, because that morning David was filling in and was preaching about love, and he knew that the topic was my specialty in song because we are kindred in the fact of Love. The New England meeting house was covered in snow, and the snow slid off in giant sheets from the roof as we approached and ducked in the doors, and continued to fall throughout the service with deep crashes. My Someone and I were greeted with the sound of the choir practicing when we entered, and so we waited in the foyer before David popped his head out and greeted us. We were welcome there. Not with an ulterior motive or hope of conversion, but because we adhere to the same principles of loving our neighbor. We were welcome not only to attend, but to take part, and to lead a song. The friendly faces of our community trickled in, and still David stood by us as the Protector of my Peace in a sanctuary that has not always represented a sanctuary to me. When it was time for David to speak, I sat and watched the bright winter gleaming through the windows shrouded with dark green wreaths and holly berries and I was overcome with Joy. The Joy bubbled until it was time for the congregation to share their Joys & Concerns, and my joy seemed that it fit the bill, and so I raised my hand and David called on me and I said, “This is my first time being in a church in thirty years where I feel safe and welcome.” And I thought I heard Catherine gasp, and I thought I saw Laurie tear up in the choir loft, and I thought of my friends who also sing songs, about the line they sing that always gets stuck in my head–

“Joy has not forgotten me.”
— Ordinary Elephant

David talked about love, and about the way into heaven, and how Jesus wasn’t the only way in. When it was time, I sang a song with my Someone from my heart to a congregation who not only heard me, but saw me. For a moment when I was singing so loud to let my Joy and my Sorrow out at once, I thought I saw my own voice in the rafters, and I felt whole in a place that has never before made me feel whole.

David’s husband Tim played the organ beautifully, and the service was over. Then Tim popped over to greet us with equal measure, because as David is a Protector of Peace, so Tim is a Creator of Joy, and he is entirely himself when he is passing that Joy to the people around him.

Afterwards, I ate gluten-free brownies and gluten-free crackers and cheese because David and Tim thought to bring them so that my Someone and I could fit in with the congregation and partake of the monthly birthday celebration that the church holds that commemorates all of the birthdays that take place in that month. I talked to Rowe for a time, and he said he was sad but that he had come to see David speak, and that by seeing David speak he would feel a bit better. And he did. But I still worried about him, so we packed up our instruments and said goodbye and drove down the road to Rowe & Laurie’s house.

At Rowe & Laurie’s house we talked about the morning, and about the things that were hurting our hearts, and Laurie listened intently because Laurie is a Practitioner of Patience. She can and will endure the drudgeries of our deepest, most selfish concerns and meet them with an open ear and heart and give no indication that she has heard it before, or that she has anywhere else to be. She will hurt anew alongside as you reopen an old wound just to peer inside of it and wonder at its bleeding. She pairs well with Rowe, as he is a Keeper of Kindness– that even if his darkness is getting the better of him, like all of our darknesses sometimes do, he will look up from it and thank you and ask if you are okay. He will smile gently and tell you that you are doing good work in the world, even if you have done nothing at all. He will say something unexpectedly generous into the space that needed extra lifting, even as he is as inconsolable as a kid who has just lost his baseball game.

I have learned a lot from these beating hearts.

David likes to say that we live in a little Haverhill Bubble up here– that somehow, some way we’ve all found ourselves together in the midst of the absolute tumult that is corroding our society, our government, our country out there. He says that it is no accident that we’ve found each other. I accepted this without considering it much, until we left Rowe & Laurie’s house that day. Because as we drove away, honking our horn and waving and feeling lighter, we looked to the top of the driveway and Rowe & Laurie linked arms and began swinging their legs in unison– right kick, left kick, right kick– like in a dance line. I have never seen them do that before. And I have never seen anyone else do that as a farewell before– except for two other very important people.

I was in my second December of grief without Tom. Ann, Tom’s widow and my friend, told me that it is not the first year that is hardest, but the second. In the first year, it’s all new– the first Christmas without him, the first birthday, anniversary, on and on and on. But the second year, that is when it is no longer a new unpleasant sensation. That is when it is simply the way things are. That the person you love is no longer just gone, but forever gone. I was feeling the weight of the goneness, of the emptiness Tom left behind when we drove away from Rowe & Laurie’s house. When I used to drive away from Ann & Tom’s house after my frequent visits, the two of them would link arms and kick their legs back and forth like in a dance line. It was a silly, adorable tradition I watched for two decades. I didn’t understand the starkness of the emptiness until our recent trip to see Ann, when she stood alone to continue the tradition. She smiled, but it hurt a bit to see only one half of what I was used to seeing.

Now, to see Rowe & Laurie continue a tradition they didn’t know in the bleak mid-Winter, where I felt my deepest sorrow, something became clear about David’s observation. That, in fact, it is no accident to be found together in this place. And it is not a stroke of luck, either. A thought emerged, like an indentation pressed into my skin–

You will find your people, and you will never lose them.

They may die, shift, move, transform, but they will never leave you. It is not a matter of one replacing another– that would be impossible. It’s more like this– that when you come to know your own heart, your heart opens. And in that openness, a signal is sent out, a magnetic force, that searches and finds the openness of others and draws them together in a series of seemingly unrelated events.

The heart thinks itself clever and mysterious, but in the fullness of itself, it slips up occasionally and bubbles over with the Joy of its own connections, and we see it working. Like in a silly goodbye dance routine at the top of a driveway. Those are the glimpses we catch of seeing our heartstrings vividly, tied to another’s.

So while people are never replaced, they are replenished. And it is in this way that once you find your people, you will never lose them.

I have always liked the Fruits of the Spirit from the Bible, because I like food metaphors, and also because I liked to figure out which one is the banana. Likely Joy. Even though the Bible is not a text I subscribe to, anymore, it does continue to pop up alongside other texts that can be categorized as helpful in processing the world around me. The way I have understood the Fruits of the Spirit before– love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control– were that they are something to aspire to, something to work on. If you aren’t being kind, you are not properly channeling the Holy Spirit, and should find what is blocking you from producing this tasty delicious fruit everyone likes so much. I know now that this is in fact the opposite of how they work. The fruit is not the goal, the fruit is the symptom. And these are not fruits in a fruit bowl plucked from different hemispheres and delivered in a refrigerated truck. They are, instead, fruit of the same tree. They’re all apples. Or bananas, if you’re feeling silly. And if one of your apples is sick, it is likely that all of your apples will soon be sick, as they are connected together and so collapse together. When someone steals your joy, you lose your patience, then your ability to be kind, you start to feel like a bad person, you lose your allegiances, you become hardened, and you lose your ever-loving mind at the first person who says something to you with “that tone.”

And so it is with my community. While they all contain these fruits, they also specialize each in one or another at different times. And when it is becoming apparent that even John is angry, or Laurie is impatient, or Tim is downtrodden, then our tree– even here in our Haverhill Bubble– is becoming sick. We must tend to it, or we will all become sick. And when we all become sick, we stop opening ourselves up. And when we stop opening ourselves up, we lose our people, and then ourselves.

Love is obviously the root, but I am increasingly convinced that second in line is Joy. Once Joy is stolen, the tree is done for. And these days, as the rights and jobs of our neighbors and our families and our fellow Americans are being needlessly and with gusto stripped away; as the sanctuaries of our National Parks and our literal sanctuaries are being denigrated with fear mongering and trash; as we watch a dangerous unfolding of how quickly dehumanization becomes contagious and gives license to the power hungry, it is rather difficult to rally the sounding bell for something as pitiful as Joy.

And still, we try.

Last Wednesday, Laurie marched us forward with aplomb to Trivia Night at the only open restaurant in town across the river to fortify our little tree, to save our fruit. There, we bought overpriced food and answered meaningless questions and got nervous for no reason other than the arbitrary rules we’d agreed to upon participation. I watched the mishmash of people who knew each other to varying degrees open, then open some more. We were on a winning streak. We began a signature clap each time our team got a right answer. David became a white noise machine to cover our discussion of answers. We frequently yelled wrong answers rooted in inside jokes as a cover. Joy had not forgotten me. The final question, and by golly it was a home run. Not a literal home run, as no one at our table knew anything about baseball. But we did know a lot about Harry Potter, and that was fortunately the final question. We were riding high on our win when a rumble broke out from another table. There was a technicality. There was pushback. There were a lot of very angry straight white dudes getting rowdy with drink and anger. Our table said nothing, but we did get quieter.

In that moment, the Bubble felt a bit broken. It was not lost on anyone the demographic who was angry, who was getting loud when they didn’t get what they wanted. The rules bent. An additional round would break a tie that wasn’t a tie. The last question was actually about baseball. Our team gave it a go, but we lost. The host was generous and dropped the prize bag at our table, anyway. Conversation picked back up, and we shook it off and paid our bills. On my way to use the restroom, I heard the dissenting table loudly call themselves the real winners. I heard them talk about how the system was against them. When I got back, our table had already moved on to talking about their plans for the weekend. As we bundled up and headed back to the car, we kicked around the uproar a bit. But then Tim turned up the music and David and Laurie taught my Someone how to vogue to Madonna and I found myself needing to forgive the other table back at the restaurant because my friends had long let it go, and I was still trying to bring them with me. And I was missing the Joy in the backseat by dragging a table full of disgruntled patrons whose names I don’t even know into the car with us.

I would lose my people right here with me if I let my Joy be stolen. No, not even stolen. Stolen implies intent, and I was freely giving it away in exchange for a rotten piece of fruit, bitter at its core. I gave away my Joy and I lost my patience, my gentleness, my belief in the goodness of myself and others.

The point, again, is not to attain the fruit. If my purpose was to attain Joy without tending to the tree, I’d find a fake– toxic positivity at best, an artificial poinsettia with that weird bad texture on the petals that’s both scratchy and flammable. Contrived Self-Control has a fast expiration date. Peace has never been successfully replicated. The purpose of the fruit is to know how to care for the tree.

I am going away soon. I am hopping on a plane, alone, and going across an ocean and taking a class on an isle in the UK wherein I gather driftwood from the beach and learn how to bind it into a book. It’s been on my list for a very long time, but fear and timing and finances have made it impossible. But the greatest of these was fear. After years of putting it off, I finally became sick with my own fear and bought the plane ticket and the room. I am determined not to become someone who is afraid of a people or land on the mere fact of having never been there or met them. I feel myself in my youthful aging already becoming set in my spine of the way I do things. I have not navigated the world on my own in over a decade, let alone travel across an ocean to do so, and I am becoming decrepit in my adventure skills, and judgmental in my initial approach to other lands. I am determined to break the growing and binding fascia that is building around the way that I understand the world so that I do not succumb to those muscles only working one way and becoming inflexible. That is to say, I am trying to be open.

I have been packed for a week, and still have two weeks before I leave. I am happy to be nervous to try something new, but I also acknowledge that my bedroom has been overtaken with packing and has evicted my Someone and I to the guest room for the last two weeks. He is ever patient, a growing apple on his tree, and says he likes it better this way.

I wrote to my bookbinding teacher at the end of last week to ask questions about the minutia of what to bring, and evidently after a week submerged in the news was feeling particularly vulnerable and included the phrase, It’s been a bit bleak around here. I may never come home.

The response came after the time change allowed, forthright and calm– Dear Mallory, You have much empathy and support here! Very looking forward to giving you some respite.

The recurring chorus began again– You will find your people, and you will never lose them.

Calling across the ocean, I opened myself up, and back came the fruit of my teacher– a Guidance of Gentleness to bring me back to myself. My people are everywhere. Perhaps even in a rowdy, drunk table of Trivia attendees if I am patient enough.

My teacher’s response gave me heart, yes, but she also gave me a desire to share. This is the obvious part of the fruit metaphor that I have overlooked. Fruit isn’t simply consumed at the end of the line. It contains seeds– it regenerates. It is not replaced, it is replenished.

After I reread her words a few more times, consuming all of the Gentleness I could take, I was compelled to share, to somehow package up this hope for my little tree, for the tree of my Bubble, and also somehow send the nutrients through the root system to everyone else’s tree, too. Love begets Love. Kindness begets Kindness. Joy begets Joy. On and on and on and on.

I am still fighting feelings of helplessness as the headlines roll in. The answer is still what it always is– small steps. I will water my tree. Sometimes that means, as is the recurring advice of Anne Lamott, to take a beat by sitting down and drinking a glass of water. I will also water the trees of my friends and my strangers in hopes that they all become my people. I will stay open.

“In All-Under-Heaven
Nothing is
Softer & Gentler
Than Water.
And yet it Prevails over
The Hard and Strong,
It is invincible.
Nothing Prevails
With such Ease,
Gentle over Strong,
Soft over Hard.”
–Lao-Tzu

And if that fails, I can always chuck some rotten fruit at the bastards.