Clermont (FL) City Council Meeting
24 July 2018
Cynthia Lodyga (400 words - 3:35)

This is the first invocation at the City of Clermont. The entire transcript of this and dozens more secular invocations are available at www.cflfreethought.org/invocations.

Good evening, Mayor Ash, council members, staff, and citizens.

Our country is in the midst of ideological polarization the likes we haven’t seen in fifty years. This can lead us to focus on our differences and allow cynicism and negative emotions to take over pulling us further and further apart from one another.

Now more than ever we must make the conscious to rise above our differences, serve one another with empathy and compassion, accept and learn from our mistakes, be humble in our victories, honest in our defeats, make decisions based on reason and logic leveraging the best knowledge we have, and embrace this human condition that we all share.

The power to solve our problems, to find common ground, to adjudicate ideas equally regardless of where they come from lies within us, within you.

Council members and mayor, as you move into the work of governance this evening, allow me to share with you the words of a contemporary American poet, Marge Piercy, in honor of the work you do for our community.

The people I love best jump into work headfirst without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves like an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who stand in a line and haul in their places, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in and the fire must be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched it smears the hands and crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphora for wine and oil, hokey vases that held corn are put in museums but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real. Thank you.