Meeting People is Easy

08/12/10 Moon in Libra

Today was a day. Took Cyd to the DMV and he took his driver test with my car, therefore getting one of his needs met with one of my assets. He can now cross a need off of his list and that’s pretty exciting! After we got back from the DMV, our energy got a little deflated because of e-mail correspondence with the person from the Richmond Neighborhood Association that was supposed to write us a letter of support. Even though the board had already voted that they were willing to write the letter of support, it has turned into a very slow and conflict laden process because of an individual. You can’t do much about that, but we’re hoping that the problem is resolved soon.

Because of the low ebb of energy, Cyd and I canvassed together today. We basically did our callbacks from the last few days and were able to talk to a few more great neighbors. The highlight was a really awesome person associated with urbanedibles.org who really engaged in the process and was not only willing to volunteer, but was willing to open her space to the community. She has hay-bales that act as archery targets and I thought that was one of the coolest things I’ve seen so far in the neighborhood. But more than that, she had a lot of ideas about how to make the community better, one of which was a community sauna. Obviously, for that to happen, someone in the neighborhood would have to want to use their land to make it possible.

Towards the end of the night, we met Aaron, a person that I first met at the Village Building Convergence this year. He was randomly riding his bike through the neighborhood and he stopped when we saw him. We three held an impromptu conference on 44th and talked about some of the big, scary issues that we face nowadays. It came down to whether humanity has the capacity to transform towards sustainability fast enough to avoid the forced change of crises piled upon crises. I believe we do, but only if we are able to make common cause with each other and strengthen our communities. That’s just one citizen’s opinion, but I think more and more people are realizing the strange fruits we are harvesting because of a life out of balance.