Keeping on Keeping on
March 6, 2025
Rufus Jones, a Quaker born in South China, Maine in the midst of the Civil War, said something which cheers me up in these perilous times in our country and in the world:
“I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles, in which vital and transforming events take place.”
It was 1937 when he said it, and Jones, who died at 85, would live through both World Wars. There was much to despair about.
Yesterday, on NPR, a young researcher who had gotten her dream job with the CDC only to have it abruptly terminated in one of the many purges of the Trump administration, was interviewed. About three weeks after her termination, during which she found a new job and an apartment in a new city and a new state, she got another, anonymous email telling her she was welcome to return to the CDC. She likened her experience to being in an abusive relationship where nothing is predictable and the rules keep changing. In the end she chose to go to the new job.
Her story reminded me how lucky I am to be in my retirement years. I am outraged and sad every day as I watch the dismantling of policies, laws and institutions that have helped ordinary people, not to mention very poor people around the globe, get on with their lives or stay alive at all.
But Rufus Jones’s advice is inspirational. What are the quiet processes and small circles in my own life that I can hold onto and contribute to?
One of them is each and every interaction with people I love, another is taking long solitary walks in the woods, a third is writing, a fourth making music with others. Recently, a cellist with whom I play piano quartets, recommended Year of Wonder, a book of daily suggestions for music to listen to, put together by Clemency Burton-Hill. Here’s the one for February 8th:
The composer is Stefano Landi (1587-1639) and his text, “Man flees like a shadow,” is strangely comforting. “We die singing, we die playing . . . yet die we must. We die dancing, drinking, eating . . . yet die we must”
It starts very quietly, the quietest of processes, just a single player, not even a circle, just a line. But then more and more instruments and percussion and voices join in and it becomes exuberant until one by one, each player falls silent. At the very end there’s a just a wisp of sound, utter silence, then the audience’s delight.