Alumni Spotlight: Meredith Clark

Name and pronouns: Meredith Clark, she/they

Cohort year: 2017-2019 (two years)

Where are you living now? New Haven, CT

What are you doing now? I’m a leather worker under the name Beacon Craft Studio. I am also co-founder of the New Haven Crafters of Color collective.

Website: https://beaconcraftstudio.square.site/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/BeaconCraftStudio/

How has Life Together impacted your life?

I stayed full-time at my host site, I Have A Future, for two years after Life Together. My time as a Life Together fellow and later Lead Organizer continues to shape my orientation to the world. The clearest example is the New Haven Crafters of Color collective—the fruition of the community oriented justice work that I learned in my time in Life Together. It’s not always easy, but we have put on about 10 free pop-ups for artists of color in New Haven who struggle to break into the art scene. Our group is entirely POC of all races, and the majority make under 50% of the average median income for our area. We believe that work and dedication are no less valuable than financial deposits, and seek to lift each other up together. One event I’m particularly proud of is our recent fundraiser for Palestine, in which we raised almost $3,500 for Medical Aid for Palestine and Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund through artist donations that were raffled and auctioned off. I am under no illusion that Gazans can access aid during the onslaught of bombing, but it is a way to help along with contacting legislators and shutting down business as usually. It was also a beautiful way to experience solidarity with other people who believe in Palestinian life. All of us as artists have all faced repercussions like shadowbanning for our pro-Palestinian, anti-war advocacy, but we believe that our relative privilege as Americans means we have a responsibility to the artists of color in Palestine as well.

In a less obvious but spiritually meaningful way, I also turn to chant-songs as my preferred form of prayer. I also lived with Mer Wade, my LT housemate, from 2019-2023 and count my cohort-mates Mer and Hannah as two of my closest friends to this day.

Alumni Spotlight: Lydia Strand

Name and pronouns: Lydia Strand (she/they)

Cohort years: 2013-2015

Where are you living now? I’ve been in Boston since Life Together and live in Jamaica Plain with my partner, Cicia Lee (2014).

What are you doing now?

I’m working part time with Life Together as the Prayer and Wellness Partner – supporting the fellows and their community as they navigate their lives through the program year! I’ve enjoyed re-steeping in some of the core material and commitments of Life Together’s to a life of community, prayer, and action–and learning about how the program and fellows over the last several years have developed and evolved conversations about each of these pillars.

And, I’m also working with a project born out of the “Nuns & Nones” group that is building an interfaith and interspiritual community of people across the country committed to shared study, prayer, action, and celebration. It draws inspiration from relationships with communities of women religious–nuns in monasteries across the US. In some ways, there are similarities to the Life Together program in that it’s an attempt to build an alternative lifestyle in which spiritual practice, justice, and relationship is at the center.

How has Life Together impacted your life?

The greatest impact that Life Together has had on my life is through the relationships and friendships that have shaped the last decade of my life. I’ve been in community with people who have been so creative with seeking lives of spiritual community, of social change, and of self-knowing. From building various informal intentional communities, to pursuing contemplative retreats, and trying out learning the various crafts of community organizing and political action, the people I’ve met through Life Together have helped me keep open the call and dream of a life full of Spirit-led connectedness and transformation. I’ll soon age out of the identity of ‘young adult,’ but the experience that was seeded in Life Together of a life of prayer and action has been nourished and strengthened through these relationships. I’m not done with the experiment!

And, I hope it is a lifelong one. I was introduced to Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk and Christian meditation teacher, by Ethel Fraga, a mindfulness and contemplative practice teacher who taught with Life Together about a decade ago. He writes:

“It is a real challenge to find a new way to express our Christian life. It is so easy to get into rules and organization and so to narrow the freedom of the Spirit. The essential thing that Jesus left the church was the Spirit. It is by learning really to trust the Spirit, in our prayer and meditation, and to share this trust with one another that a new language will gradually form.” -- Bede Griffiths, from The New Creation in Christ: Christian Meditation and Community.

I hope to keep deepening in awareness of the always-evolving leading of the Spirit–in and through new and old experiments in living into the transformative and redemptive teachings of Jesus.