Weave Real Connections

By Alicia Forde, Spiritual Director.

Marge Piercy ends her poem “The Seven of Pentacles” with the following two stanzas:

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

This summer, I encountered peach trees in my neighborhood. They were everywhere and abundant with gorgeous round fruit. On impulse during one of my walks, I rang one neighbor’s doorbell and waited patiently for someone to answer. After about three minutes, an elderly gentleman opened the door. “May I pick some of your peaches?” I inquired. He was delighted to share. He told us the story of the tree, how it never bore fruit until his neighbor – a plant specialist – gave it lots of love of the kind it needed. Now it was laden with fruit, and he felt compelled to give it away. “Pick these by the stairs,” he invited “I keep hitting my head on them.”

My partner, our friend, and I, not having carried any bags, filled our t-shirts with peaches. We walked home amazed by our haul and the man’s generosity. It doesn’t happen every day, or even often, that I ring a stranger’s doorbell. In our current socio-political context, there seems to be much more for me (Black, queer, cis woman) to fear than not. And yet, this memory remains one of my sweetest of the summer. There we were: Humans being present to each other on a warm summer’s day under a peach tree lavish with its bounty. 

The moment was brief. The connection was real and, in its own way, enduring.

Weave real connections, Piercy says in her poem. Live a life you can endure. Make love that is loving. It all sounds so time consuming and difficult. Yet, in these tense days, I keep returning to the image of my neighbor reaching for me as I reached for him (and the peaches on his tree!). Such a small gesture, as if he were saying “take, eat – this fruit is the gift of the soil, the sun, the air, grace, and many hands. This tree’s bountiful harvest is for sharing.” I know we can’t all live with hands wide open in this way. But. What if—at least once a week—we did two things: 

lived as if we liked ourselves 

and, from that place, reached out to another living being—human or more-than-human—and wove a moment of micro connection? 

What if those micro connections helped us make visible the reality that our lives are tangled, interconnected, and that small moments of tending can offer rich communion in our otherwise tumultuous world?

This, I think, is how we need to live: moment by intentional moment. Not always, because some days, we just can’t. And. When we can, may we choose to make love that is loving by reaching out to another and hope that they—in turn—reach back.

Journalist Derek Thompson recently named this the Anti-Social Century. Americans are spending more and more time alone. Our “aloneness” is reshaping our realities. It is certainly changing our ministry contexts. Throughout this year, LeaderWise writers will share their outlooks on our Anti-Social Century and what we can do to build a culture of connection.

Interested in other articles on the Culture of Connection?

2025 Resolution Against Loneliness by Mary Kay DuChene

Ingredients for Connection: Solitude & Connectedness by Becca Fletcher

Creating Time for Connection by Cindy Halvorson

Am I Safe Here? From LeaderWise’s Leadership Team

It’s Not Easy Being New by emilie boggis

The Best Scones You Ever Tasted by Stephanie Hoover

Who Do You Know? by Laura Beth Buchleiter

Starting from Scratch by emilie boggis

One Room at a Time by Mike Hotz