Last Wednesday evening I drove to Elkhart. I went to the Roosevelt Center, which was the elementary school I attended in the early 1980s.

I sat in a chair on the hardwood floor of the gym where I played basketball with kids from the neighborhood. I listened to a conversation between current residents of this neighborhood and Dr. Vincent Harding.

Dr. Harding was a close friend of and worker with Dr. Martin Luther King, and helped to write some of the most important words King spoke.

For a while I listened for Dr. Harding to say something that would tie this conversation about human dignity to the struggle for ecological consciousness here and around the world. But as I became aware of how remarkable this conversation was on its own merits, and how life-giving this small moment in the night in the middle of the week in the middle of the winter, I stopped trying to fit it into the lens of green ethics.

Young Latinas, recent high school graduates, were talking about their efforts to make it possible for undocumented immigrant children to access colleges in Indiana. Black and white men were talking about their work to keep people in their homes and at their jobs. Other women talked about the superhuman efforts of poor people to survive daily life.



To each of these, Dr. Harding responded quietly, carefully and with a lot of love.

He affirmed the work and diligence of all these people. He didn’t seek to relate the stories of these people to his own experiences, so much as to tie all of these stories together.

Slowly, over the course of the evening, what emerged was a feeling that all of these people mattered — those who talked, as well as those who didn’t.

I know it’s trite and cryptic to say that everyone matters. None of us in that old gym have ever worked with someone like MLK to whom is attributed so much courage and vision and fundamental change — and probably none of us ever will. And yet, what Dr. Harding was able to communicate was that each tiny effort toward the good of other people benefits all people.



It’s hard to believe, or know, or notice that small amounts of energy play any significant role. It takes a lot of patience, and it can take a lot of practice — also known as hard work — to even bear witness to the slow piling up of will to the point that it affects the surrounding world.

This is what trees do, year after year, layering on more wood, transforming themselves from something as vulnerable as a blade of grass into the strongest, largest, longest-lived organisms on land.



As I sat there listening to this wise old man and to earnest local residents I looked around me. I ran and shouted in this space when I was a little boy.

When I was 6, 8, 10, 12 years old, I was here with my friends, playing tag, dodgeball and kickball.

When I was so young, I sat here on this floor, and watched the janitor’s band perform. I remember Christmas programs, the gym crammed with kids and parents and friends, lights turned out except for the stage where we stood together in front of everyone and sang with the piano.

On the coldest mornings in winter they brought us in here, off of the playground before classes started. I and my friends won the city basketball tournament for the Rough Riders on this floor, and I dreamt of being as good a player as my older brother. I was so young then, with no way to imagine who I am now.



People and place are an accumulation of experiences. Those experiences inform so much of who we are — who I am — and how we feel about our lives.

Referring to the experience of three distinct ethnic groups — Latino, African American, white — living closely together in the Roosevelt neighborhood, and acknowledging the tension that this can create, Dr. Harding said simply, “Maybe there is a reason you all are here.”

This statement is a challenge to apathy and disconnection, and to the poor notion that the places we live in are happenstance. The places we live in, and maybe even hold dear — Roosevelt, Elkhart, Goshen — hold all of us in turn, giving us the opportunity to know each other and the deep world beneath our feet.

We, a diverse gathering of people in northern Indiana, also layer on the living wood year by year, becoming something distinct, drawn out of the native distinctness of our place and out of all who make this place home.

There is a reason we all are here.



Contact Aaron at aaronkingsley@maplenet.net or 537-0986.