We are searching for the boats we forgot to build

We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.

–Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“Why Boats? It has to do with the ritual of involving the community in building something that has part of them in it. All these planks somehow go together and make a boat. And that boat somehow can hold us, take us all on a voyage. The voyage of a busted-up community to a better, more hopeful future.”– Colin Macleod, Gal Gael Trust

Home.

“The place,” Robert Frost once wrote, “where they have to take you in.” A place, hopefully, where you’re welcomed, accepted, valued, safe.

In meetings over the past few weeks, I have listened to wise, capable, resilient, accomplished people become disoriented and overwhelmed. I’ve heard community builders express feelings of despair and helplessness. Vulnerable people among us–friends, neighbors, coworkers, family–are being seriously threatened. In the call to resist the barrage of assaults on human dignity and well-being, many of us are experiencing a lack of resources, wavering stamina, an absence of communal bonds.

Where is safety? Where is home? Where is the place of our deeper capacities for compassion, creativity, resiliency, and human connection?

In a document entitled “My Parting Prescription for America,” outgoing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy states the medicine we desperately need right now is community.

“Community is a powerful source of life satisfaction and life expectancy. It’s where we know each other, help each other, and find purpose in contributing to each other’s lives. The decline of civic institutions has made knowing where to go for community harder. And underneath these trends, the pendulum of self-reliance has swung so far to one end that needing others is seen as a sign of weakness, leading to a vicious cycle of stress, isolation, and more stress. The fracturing of community in America is driving a deeper spiritual crisis that threatens our fundamental well-being. It is fueling not only illness and despair on an individual level, but also pessimism and distrust across society which have all made it painfully difficult to rise together in response to common challenges.”

Many oppressive and destructive systems throughout history have helped shape this present moment. To turn the tide, we need to rebuild our social infrastructure from the ground up, beginning with small, diverse groups of people willing to craft little boats of care and friendship and community.

True and lasting community happens as a result of doing something meaningful with others. It happens as a byproduct of service. It happens along the way, while serving something greater than our individual desires. We need a direction, a purpose, a common commitment beyond ourselves to weave us into relationship.

In 2008, I was speaking at a retreat for young adults just outside of Glasgow, Scotland. Over the course of several days, many young adults confessed their struggles to the group—alcoholism, acts of self-harm, suicide attempts and other deep traumas and sufferings. Over lunch one day I told one of the retreat volunteers that I was feeling overwhelmed by the level of pain. She smiled compassionately and said, “Come with me.” We got in her car and headed deep into the city of Glasgow, into the industrial ruins, to a rough building within a vacant lot. Inside the workshop were twenty to thirty people working on what looked like a large wooden, Nordic boat–the kind you see in Viking movies. The workers were using antiquated hand tools to notch and shape the wood. Some were carving images on paddles and face plates. I was introduced to an older man in worn jeans and a sweatshirt who was directing the workers. In a lilting Scottish brogue, he proceeded to tell me about the project.

He talked of a man named Colin Macleod, who had grown up in the Govan section of Glasgow where there were high rates of addiction, poverty, and crime. Macleod tried to organize people in Govan to form communities of resistance, to protect parklands and advocate for better housing. Most of his projects failed. In the early 90’s he left Scotland and became a forester in Canada and South Dakota where he befriended the Abenaki and Lakota tribes. Among those native communities he witnessed an indigenous people’s struggle to re-inhabit their native language and traditions. He witnessed addiction recovery and youth programs focused on traditional craft and woodwork. Colin was inspired and a vision for his own homeland began to emerge. When he returned to Glasgow in the late 90s, Colin led the formation of the Gal Gael Trust for the purpose of, what he called, ‘reconvening peoplehood.’ Gal Gael was a traditional name for the ethnic mix of Celts and other foreign groups who lived together in the Glasgow region.

The first project Colin organized was to build a boat modeled after the historic vessels built in Galway during ancient times. Without any money, Colin collected wood and workers and constructed the timber-frame workshop. In 1998, he went on a local radio broadcast requesting that trees blown down in a recent winter storm be collected so that locals could use them for carving and boat-building. Colin recruited out-of-work veterans, youth from addiction recovery programs, gang members, and homeless folks to build a twelve-foot birlinn–a wooden vessel propelled by sail and oar, used extensively in the Hebrides and West Highlands of Scotland from the Middle Ages on.

The boat-building was a success, inspiring Colin to dream bigger. He wanted the Gal Gael to build a full-size, thirty-foot birlinn. This vessel would not only be physical testimony to their growing skill and confidence; it would also symbolize cultural pride and a reconnection with lost roots. After two years of work, using traditional tools, the ship was finished in the summer of 2002. The men and women who constructed the boat learned from nautical historians how to row and sail the ancient craft. Under Colin’s guidance, the workers sailed the vessel to the island of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides and a year later, all the way to Ireland. As this motley crew recreated voyages of their forebears, a new sense of belonging and self-esteem developed among the workers and spread throughout the community.

Colin Macleod sadly died from a heart attack at the age of 39, leaving behind a wife and two children–but his dream lived on. A youth program was developed in which former gang members received mentorship in building a series of 23-foot galleys. A timber Gaelic-Norse longhouse based on images from 10th century tombstones were built by homeless veterans. The timber workshop became a bustling community center with working gardens. A 70-foot birlinn was later built and sailed around Scotland, promoting community and ecological regeneration.

All of this was told to me amidst the smell of woodchips and sawdust, and the sounds of hammering and carving. I spent an hour or so talking to recovering addicts, Iraq war veterans, people struggling with mental illness, and young adults who had found purpose and friendship in creative, physical labor. During a break, over tea, amidst a hubbub of jokes and laughter, I asked what it was like to sail and row one of the ancient boats to Ireland. The group quieted and then a large bearded man in a knit cap looked at me with watery eyes. He said, “It was a joy I didn’t think I’d be allowed in this life. Everything for me had fallen apart. Everything. But this work. With these folks here. And then to sail the old pathways of our ancestors. Well, it was home. It was home.”

During these turbulent times, may we all look for spaces to reconvene our peoplehood, discover our greater purpose, and make our way home.

[Over the next four years, The Hearth will be developing and promoting story circles to help individuals and communities heal relational poverty. Stay tuned.]