Porch, Cafe, Yeshiva

B"H

Arwen has gone philosophical on us. I empathize with her blues, down to the details, but I have my own today. The early spring restlessness has set in. As I observed to Aviel, I've always been restless -- since before I was born -- but I don't mind spending a lot of my life sitting (which I do, of necessity). It all depends on the quality of the sitting. There is dynamic sitting and dull sitting. In the dark maw of Winter, dull sitting has some kind of comfort. It's a kind of hibernation, I think. But when the sun comes back, it brings too much energy to bear comfortably in dull sitting, so I need a shift to something more interactive.

If my sitting doesn't shift with the season, I'm afraid I'm going to become very restless and cranky. (It's sure happened before.) Here's the catch: I need a good place to sit. You can't do dynamic sitting just anywhere.

Every healthy creative society has been built on a good place sit -- the front porch, the cafe, the coffeeshop, the yeshiva (literally the "sitting"). One of my most encouraging discoveries at Point Roberts has been the abundance of large front porches, especially in the older eastern blocks (see for yourself), indicating that this may be a good place to sit.

One of the weaknesses of our shul is that it does not provide any very good places to sit; consequently, people are generally not inclined to stick around with each other there, and the community gels less than it would. I have designed a way to rearrange the furniture already available to create a small beyt midrash/lounge alcove facing a large window onto the street. B'ezrat haShem (and certain other powers that be), I may put that plan into motion this week, and then we can see what kind of a difference it makes.

This is a start, but, as it is, I don't think the shul regulars represent the social critical mass that it will take to feed this beast. In general, Mishkaneering requires a kind of maximazation of the dynamic potential of our sitting. So we need to figure out what really makes a great place to sit.

To begin with, examples -- some of my most joyful times spent sitting were in: music rehearsal, audience to artistic performance, a good coffeeshop, the sidewalk in front of a good coffeeshop on an interesting street, a Shabbos table with two to four other people, learning in chavruta or a small group, my home or someone else's if I'm having a really great conversation there. Now, situations like this can be found readily, why not just go to them more? Well, that is the ideal situation; but the choice of a place to sit is one that defines one's chevre. In the process, as we are, of trying to build one, the investment of our sitting energies (as with other energies) is needed in the emergent community's domain, not that of some other collective, as much as possible. The trick is, dependence on the domain of a community-in-building to provide the setting for your life ends up sapping a lot of energy. Even just organizing dinner parties and melava malkas and other events, in order to create that space for good sitting, grows tiring after a while.

A great sitting place, ultimately, must sustain its own location. You can depend on it being there, without need for reinvention or reinvocation, every time you need it.

What else characterizes such a place? Here are some rules I can think of:

• It is physically comfortable
• It is in some way intimate and safe.
• Life can be heard in the background
• The life that can be heard in the background isn't so loud that it overpowers my attention to what I am doing.
• I can alternate between doing something by myself and doing something interactive with another person.
• I can expect a random, serendipitous encounter with someone of importance to me.
• I can get lost in conversation, for hours if need be.

What else?