I've been invited to attend a ceremony at which we are expected to dress as though we came from somewhere.

To wear clothing with a story. Not from the mall. Or the internet. Or a sweatshop. From the hands of a people whose handwork keeps them tethered to those who came before them. 

Stephen Jenkinson has defined craft as "where everything you know can appear in the world."

I make virtually nothing with my hands. The calligraphy skills I began to develop in college have atrophied as I've typed on tinier and tinier keypads. I was too impatient and distracted as a kid to learn the sewing, gardening, and home repair skills of my mother. She, before me, was shamed by wearing the clothes hand-sewn by her immigrant mother, especially when she arrived at an elite college where her classmates referred to their outfits by name (I think I'll wear my Christian Dior tonight).

I spent some time bewildered by this question of what to wear, bereaved by my own disassociation with the handwork of my ancestors. My mother wondered if some shreds remained in our family of a traditional Waldensian costume - the clothes worn for centuries by the Pre-Reformation Protestant sect of Italians from whom we descend. I wrote last year about my attempts to follow a trail of bread crumbs back to some connection with the people and the place left behind when my grandparents immigrated to America on the eve of WWII.

No such remnants surfaced but an internet search brought me to a bilingual blog on Waldensian culture that mentioned a seamstress located on a tiny square in a Northern Italian town, a square named in memory of my grandfather's brother, Willy Jervis, executed by the retreating Nazis for his work in the resistance. I found an Italian cousin willing to seek out this craftswoman to obtain a hand-made shawl for me.

The needlework is exquisite, you can scarcely tell the front from the back. I recognize the flowers from our two weeks in those high mountain valleys last May. The fringe is hand-knotted - how many hours of work?

This project of what to wear led me to a local designer and dressmaker here in Portland for something befitting the shawl. It led me to the depths of my linen closet for the tablecloths and napkins hand-embroidered by my great and great-great grandmothers, to study their craft and imagine what my own hands might make. And it inspired another of my American cousins to search out a Waldensian shawl for his teenaged daughter, that she might know something more of the story of our people.

This week I participated in two ceremonies to celebrate new spaces, each a home for innovative organizational endeavors. 

I wasn't able to attend the building dedication ceremony for the Wayfinding Academy, a new college opening next week in Portland's St. Johns neighborhood - but their plan captured my imagination and inspired me to support the celebration with a donation.
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After renovating an old YMCA building, the Wayfinding Academy issued an invitation to the community: "Help us make our house a home." 

Rather than repeating the tired old model of having VIPs cut a ribbon over the threshold, and offering naming rights to only the highest donors, Wayfinding set out to "fill our building with the names of supporters. That way, our students will be reminded every day that there is a community of hundreds of people who believed that they are worth supporting, that this community made the Wayfinding experience possible for them. We want to envelop them with community."

Their donation program offers "rooms and doorways and appliances and toilets (yes, those too)" for donors to claim and name - I funded a light switch! At the dedication celebration, donors signified their commitment by cutting ribbons throughout the building.  As they prepare to welcome their first class of students, they're still a few thousand dollars short of their fundraising goal. Check out this great opportunity to support a community-based model of learning.

The second space-warming ceremony, one I led for a friend's new workspace, was more intimate. Their social change mission requires both an external orientation - to the conditions they seek to change, to the constraints and partnerships of the communities they serve and engage - and an internal focus on their creative process and their life as a team.

As the team stood facing outwards, I asked them to identify a core condition in the external world that affected their work. Turning back to each other, they wrote these words on rocks I'd brought - from racism and poverty to naysayers and devices that distract. Then I asked them to assemble the rocks into two cairns. These cairns can function as a touchstone, a way to keep themselves always oriented to the external context for their work.

Then, turning inward, I passed around a bag of ceramic hearts made by the 18h Avenue Peace House's cottage industry Grief Watch. I invited the team to bring to mind a quality or condition they wanted to foster within their new work space. Each person named a quality they were committed to embodying as they passed their heart to the person next to them. We closed with a round of rose water lemonade toasts and a poem offered in tribute to their work.