Building Community: Answering Kennedy’s Call by Harlan Russell Green.
Writing a memoir can be tricky. It poses several complex questions: What do I include? What do I leave out? What do I lean on most to best capture the sense of my identity-in-formation? Am I remembering accurately? Harlan’s engaging biography of his life-long call to service finds a fine balance to the questions above. It also reveals through particular instances that transformed his life, the call of a soul to a context and to a contract with himself and with something larger than himself; it propels his myth forward as well as recollects it in hindsight.
Close in age to Harlan, I related to his call to serve after he graduated from Berkeley and joined the fledgling Peace Corps. His decision took him to a remote village in Turkey, Ismet Pasha. These life-changing years were followed by working for the Environmental Protection Agency; he also found himself assisting with and filming the plights of farm workers that Cesar Chavez helped to organize for safer and more equitable working conditions.
As a film maker, he found creative ways to migrate the suffering of marginalized people and communities into national consciousness. One of his most recent ventures was to spearhead efforts to raise the city of Goleta to the status of a city, but only after working on and organizing many groups with the capacity to tackle multiple deficiencies in its boundaries before it could be considered sustainable. Everyone of Harlan’s callings reveals the workings of his own soul-scape that were reflected in his efforts to improve livability standards, a soul-work-in-depth. One of the many mantras Harlan has lived by is “finding ways” as a central path he spiraled back to repeatedly. When he hit a dead-end, he found a way.
His memoir follows the deep grooves of so many written before his. Memoirs are mythic utterances wherein the author retraces their living vision revealed in the many particulars of a recollected plot. What surfaces is the creative genius of the person in accord with life’s circumstances that often appear as mysteries on the path of submission. These events appear to the memoirist as hungers or yearnings of the soul to be satisfied in living by a code of meaning and purpose; for Harlan it was centrally to make the lives of others more livable by transforming their daily circumstances into places of safety and equity—in short, social justice.
In such a template, a memoir like Harlan’s is a form of recreation. By that I mean a form of re-creation, wherein his creative muses nudged him from one series of life’s opportunities to another; he would eventually return home to work on Santa Barbara’s nearby relative, the city of Goleta, where my wife and I lived for 12 years and where we saw so many of these improvements Harlan organized and brought to fruition in that developing city.
What he tracks so admirably in his series of recollections is the interior changes in himself as he organizes positive and humane changes in the lives of others. At times, he will insert one of his poems to give aesthetic voice to a dramatic moment on his journey. As I read it, I realized once again that our interior lives are often expressed in what we do in the external world that mirrors one’s interior landscape. I can hear him asking, along with “What is a Livable City?” another question: “What is a Livable Life?” His memoir italicizes that there is no real space, no gap, between these questions and their responses.
I found his writing eloquent, impassioned, poetic and revelatory as he unfolded his own myth that was churning below the plotline of his achievements. For me, the greatest triumph is the quality of life so well-lived, guided by the perennial motto: “Service Above Self.” Harlan gets it: the path to the Self is in fact the same path to Serving Others.