Raw materials

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 13, 2006

Holding a hand-held computer more often than holding a child's hand helps to delete the smile from the child's face. If you wish to keep the smile on a child's face, reach out and take that child's hand.

BARBARA DUFFY

Bernardsville, N.J.,

I am raw material, in more ways than one. Over the last year or so, I've been undergoing some serious changes in my life, and they've left me in a state of rawness. The beginning of it all was a health-related problem. It was a difficult time, when my body was out of control and subjecting me to suffering, exhaustion and loss of sleep for reasons I couldn't fathom. After six months, I was diagnosed with and treated for a hyperactive thyroid and things began to look up. Or so I thought.

You would think having a problem I'd lived with for so long taken care of would finally bring me peace, but I ended up in a spiral of anxiety and depression. A therapist I began seeing suggested that the thyroid problem may have just been the straw that broke the camel's back, and after hearing about my unhappy work situation and the personal issues I've wrestled with my whole life, she said that this meltdown was coming, thyroid or not. My anxiety level was sky-high; I wasn't sleeping and I was experiencing physical numbness and pain like I'd never had before. Months of therapy and examination of my life has done wonders, though. I started looking hard at my job situation and realizing there were other things in my life I'd rather be doing, and I started learning how to manage and accept my anxiety as something I can experience but not be controlled by.

I'm still in the same job; I know I want to do something else, like play music or write, but I haven't figured out what to do. I feel like unmolded clay--raw material. Also, I felt like I was having setbacks in the anxiety department, but my therapist reminded me that, after all I've been through, I'm going to be more prone to anxiety right now. Much like sunburned skin, I'm very sensitive. Raw material.

TIM TAORMINO

Baltimore

My childhood, my memories, my experiences: These are my raw materials. Just as a sculptor uses clay and a painter uses paints, my writing comes from my experiences. My childhood home, an old 1800s farmhouse in the center of a New England town--that is raw material. My experiences as a visiting nurse in rural Maine, where children were entertained by their father shooting a litter of kittens in the backyard, and a four-generation family survived poverty, elder abuse and the suicide of a family member--that is raw material. My family's experience of moving back to care for my 90-year-old parents--that is raw material. My many and varied friendships, some going back to my preschool years--those are raw material.

My experiences are rich. To an outsider, they may seem ordinary. But to me, they are my life. They are what make me who I am and how I respond to the world.

DEB LAMBERT-HUBER

Southampton, Mass.

The development of the Clementwood Spiritual Life Center in Rutland, Vt., has been a labor of love. One could say that the raw materials of the center are the boards, paint and nails used to create the structure. Those are the raw materials of any building, like a building that houses a church, for instance. My belief, though, is that the building that houses the church is not the church at all.