E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many, One

Sometimes I look at the lives around me in the depths of reality today, the depths that come from the places I walk, I hear something quieter than the breeze. I hear a heartbeat that beats on a day that takes its place in a string of years and seasons that have created me to help shape the experience of today. I see the inspiration that struck wonder as it filled my eyes as a child and feel the shiver of joy that life is greater than my own experience. It sometimes shapes the spirit of the experience of a team, a country, a family, a friendship, that together we are one, and together we can be alive and make the future out of this. A future that can be harmonious if we dream and act together, if we hear the heartbeat of our neighbors and trust them to hear our own.

The trust and vulnerability in connection from community to friendship is fragile, yet precious as we feel or begin to sense the togetherness that helps us feel our embrace. It is difficult to know this depth even imagine when we have often known fear, despair, loneliness that has been bred from disappointment, discouragement, and exclusion. We know that exposure may take us further down the road of pain that we've known. So how can my life and your touch a life where we may see the hint of a smile? How can we build community and friendships when we have only been disappointed?

I think hope and heart can be grown from vision and feeling. Feeling that life isn't always the sunshine of smiles and laughter, but sometimes the numbness of past trauma haunting our present. Sometimes it is the continuous rainfall that floods our feelings and overwhelms us with discouragement and washes out the work we have done together. When a tragedy caused by human hands shatters our community, does it fracture everyone irreparably, or does it give birth to healing?
Healing that creates a scar to help us remember what we have gained, what we have grown, and taught by one life who's ripples still touch our lives as the memory of a life is carried always. We can sing and hold those close to us, and even those we have just met, to continue to build on memory and what we have.

These are the roots that can hold the soil where we grow together. Roots are the friendship and connection where we grow. Tears of remembrances and sunshine of continued hope and an embrace grow and help enrich the community that has blossomed from shared memory. Fear is real, but hope is true, where we hear the voices we have together. Voices from the soul that we feel growing from scars and wounds, and also from new beginnings, from forgiveness and from our lives shared with friends. There, barefoot, we can feel and hear the melody with the rhythm of our heartbeat join in community. The spirit of unity begins with one heart, one friendship that is shared over a lifetime, and one collective experience of unique perspectives and beginnings that are always the continuation of our growth.

Gathering Together

People have gathered together to share the goodness from their lives for as long as people have been around to harvest of the fruits of their hopes and dreams. These hopes and dreams are often visions of community and prosperity; a sense of well being and home. This has allowed them to see and imagine what shapes their interactions, and to form community based on their common needs and experiences.  As a way of coming together to discover and encounter community, home, food,farmers markets are created to form a community full of aromas and sounds, sights and satisfied taste buds, and also the salutations to the new experiences greeting our sense of touch.

Within these avenues of samples, scintillations appear in people's eyes as they meander slowly among neighbors and through the cascade of tents and booths  looking for the finds that will nourish and delight them for sale by neighbors near and far. Life is formed by the stories we tell, the laughter from our hearts, and the smiles as life is made by the hands that grow it.  I feel alive a part of this interaction as important as the labors shared have become our memory that is always an important part of our lives. We fill our senses with flowers and coffee beans and the days loaves from the bakery as music fills the air from radios and performers. It is here we create community, experience our lives and begin our stroll along the hopes of our neighbors.


The day at the market is a day to join with neighbors and strangers, people from abroad, and from our home. To live with the fruition of our lives, to experience with our senses, to know the energy that is raw and creative flowing from our hearts, our tastes, our moments. At the Rochester Public Market in Rochester, New York, gatherings form on Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays to bring the ingredients together that yield smiles and joy, a time shared, a friend made, a voter registered, and a community built. The markets near you, and the markets near me are in my understanding the connection of the experience we together have in the building of today and tomorrow from the common dreams of yesterday.

Sights at the Rochester Public Market on a Saturday in June.