Ordinary Conversations

Part of the small-l-liberal tradition says that for one's life to go well, one must have freedom to live by standards one chooses, standards one believes in.

In the process of respecting one another, of living peaceably together, we need to have ordinary conversations in the public square where we respect each individual's basic right to live by his/her chosen standards. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher, says that the trouble is that, partly because of our present way of using communications technology, we tend to have millions of private squares instead of a public square. We must interact with people we disagree with and simultaneously get along with each other.

Where and how do we meet? What shall I do?

I believe I will continue to talk to neighbors and family with whom I know I differ politically. I will have ordinary conversations that sometimes go deep. Have conversations. Hold peace in my own heart and mouth. Know in my gut that just because you are right does not mean I am wrong. And vice versa.

I, for one, notice and converse about the weather and my immediate experience with the natural world. Last night we had warm rain, and this morning the overarching sky is smooth, medium gray; the air is warm and heavy; the light is muted, shadowless.

Do you remember discovering your shadow when you were a small child? Did you run, try to step on your shadow head? Did you laugh when you got tall and twig-thin at dawn or dusk?

I walked down the old lane to the mail box, picked up today's Baltimore Sun, walked along the road in the open, non-wooded world, to our new lane. Horses graze so peacefully in the meadows the neighbors mowed just last week. Did they shelter during the actual rain fall? Perhaps, but they don't always. They seem impervious to the kind of easy rain we got last night, sometimes even seem to enjoy it. I can't say for sure, of course, for I don't know these horses well, we only have the most surface, casual, silent conversations, observing one another. I pay more attention to them than they pay to me.

I can not forget the terrible, brown and dying vegetation I saw on July 24 in western Berks County. I know we are blessed with rain, clouds and shadowless skies, and I am thankful.