My name is John Gibson.

My tiny little two word Instagram bio says I am:

Question Askerer.

I only have one question for y’all tonight. It comes at the very end. 

I’d like to look with you at a brand new thing, just barely begun, a six-month-old grassroots group called the Reynoldstown Rangers. Pretend we’re looking at a sonogram, a blurry bubbly picture of something in the process of coming into being. Maybe that’s a foot, but it’s hard to tell. Instead of saying what, exactly, Reynoldstown Rangers will be when it grows up, I’m gonna talk with you instead about how it started, how it’s grown, and what we hope for. 

A snapshot of a thing before the thing:

It’s March 18, 2020. 

The global big ugly is just now really real. I wake up with a bright idea. (This, my husband says, this is often where trouble begins.)
I take a stack of poetry books out onto our front porch, and start asking every person who walks by this simple question: 

“May I Read You A Poem?”. 

For the next 6 weeks, every day, I treat “May I Read You a Poem?” like it’s my job. Three out of four people who actually hear the question (there’s a lot of earbuds out there) say yes. We, together, then have a surprising human moment, when those are in very short supply. In six weeks, I read over 500 poems.

I’ve asked the right question.

A tiny seed got planted then, one that took three years to germinate. It came to me when a friend said, “I could never do what you’re doing. I’d feel like a total idiot.” Without thinking, I replied, “Yeah, but there’s lots of ways a village knows itself, and one of those ways is by its idiots.” I didn’t mind looking like an idiot and spouting off to complete strangers (as tonight proves again), in service of something larger. If all that people took from our exchange was, “Some idiot over there is reading poems”, they at least had something to tell someone else. A new landmark -- head toward it, or away from it, but something over there is notable. Particular. Not the same.

My actual point, though, is not about landmarks, or poetry, or idiots. It’s about villages:

That there are many ways a village can know itself. 
These ways can be easy to overlook, or hiding in plain sight. 
They can be history or infrastructure, nature or architecture. 
They can be public or private, animal, vegetable, or mineral. 
They can also be at risk. Eroding. Untended.
And--
Maybe--
Just maybe:
They can be made from scratch. Nurtured. Revived and reinvented. 

So.

Fast forward three years.

Three years of sitting on our front porch, and saying ‘hey, y’all’ to strangers. 
Of following the news, as our democracy, and our fellow citizens, and our collective mental health take a beating. 
Of longing for the actual over the virtual, the local over the global, the tangible over the theoretical. 

Here’s what became clear across these three years:

Many of the world’s problems were, in terms of complexity or scale, beyond my grasp.

And--

Many of the world’s problems had in common a well-documented and sharp decline in stores of social capital.

And--

That my entire life, which seemed, in other ways, completely random, snapped into sharp focus when seen through the lens of social capital. 

This.
This was actually something I knew a lot about.

Briefly, just now, as an aside: 
a definition of what social capital is, and what it is not. 

It is the secret glue, the sticky web of permissions, norms, obligations, boundaries, kindnesses, and recognitions that hold groups together. Large groups like nations. Small groups like villages. 

Social capital is not the same as networking. My proof: 

Imagine with me that your car is broken down by the side of the road. 
You need help, and you have to call someone.
Someone you only know from LinkedIn. 

Good luck.

Meanwhile, back at that front porch-- 

Let’s skip over notebooks full of notes, tons of reading, over leaps into the dark and dead ends. 

Let’s not skip over, but touch fast and deep just how it is that two people became three and then six, and now ten. 

I did two things: I risked and I asked. I risked looking like an idiot, not knowing, going out on a limb, and I asked.

But then. The amazing part, the important part-- what they did, the ‘askee’, they did this thing that chokes me up just thinking about it. Person after person, sitting there with me on that porch-- what they did was say ‘yes’. 

This. 

This is how things grow, how ‘I’ becomes ‘we’. Some ‘one’ has to be the idiot, the askerer. Then, because ‘we’ is what we’re wired to be, and all us idiots want villages, and ‘no’ is safe yet small, but ‘yes’ is strong and vast--

Someone else says ‘yes’.

Risk.
Ask.
Yes.
Village.

Things we believe, here in our brand new, six-month-old village:

That paying attention leads to compassion and compassion is the gateway to community.

That building reserves of social capital is a community’s version of having beans in the pantry, gas in the tank, and muscle when you gotta hustle.

That Margaret Mead was speaking directly to us when she said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."

So, then-- what is this change? What might the Rangers be when we grow up? Put in extremely dangerous terms-- what do we hope? 

We hope the Reynoldstown Rangers will shape and share the tools that people need to build resilient communities, to explore and create common ground. We trust that in doing this work and sharing this space, that people will grow to rely on one another. With mapping and making and marking as our metaphors for human connection in the real world, we believe that sidewalks can become classrooms, and strangers can become teams.

Cartography and craft, curiosity and compassion -- these are our signposts.

They point us onward, toward beloved communities.

In our first six months the Rangers have taken on structural things like a website, mailing lists and fiscal sponsorship. We’ve found the precise geographic center of our neighborhood, and we’ve counted its households (3,661, as of today) then loaded that data onto openstreetmaps.org. We’ve done inspirational things like baking a hundred dozen cookies for Thanksgiving baskets, and helping to revive the Reynoldstown Quilters, after a two decade gap. 

We’ve also followed our curiosity. 

We walked out the front door of Home grown, and looked off to our right. We wondered what, now that our good neighbors at Reid’s Auto Body had closed up shop, what was going to happen to their block-long swath of bright orange cosmos flowers, grown up in their chain link fence for decades. Bulldozers were coming for this thing that meant ‘summer in Reynoldstown’-- you are right here and it is right now. Our friend the botanist, told us that cosmos are fantastic hosts, pollinating widely, and that they want marginal conditions. We mapped out 40 places in Reynoldstown where they’d thrive-- terrible soil, blazing sun, pavement cracks. Then month after month, July through October, we painstakingly gathered their seeds, 500 precious grams, particular to this place, and its collective memory. This month we launch a program we call Reid’s Seeds, a network of newly planted sites. A new neighborhood icon, a map and a marker, grown from seeds of attention and connection. 

What we haven’t done yet is nail our elevator pitch, wrap up who we are, real tight. It should take us ten words. I’m coming up on ten minutes. So, thank you for your patience, which I’ve surely tested, and as we head into the home stretch, one last thing:

What began as 'The Reynoldstown Rangers’ will seek nonprofit status under the name ‘The Neighborhood Rangers,’ on the hunch that we’ll go many places, making neighbors out of strangers, helping people pay attention, together, over time.

Questions and attention and time-- our super powers.

So now, at the very limits of your time and your attention, here is that single question I promised you, back at the start:

You-- yes, you right there--May I Read You a Poem?

Instructions for Living a Life
by Mary Oliver

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Leave it to late and great Mary to do in seven words what I could not in many, many more.

I’m astonished by your kind attention.

Thank you for it, and for your time.

Now--

Go be idiots. Your villages need you.