Toward the end of July last year it seemed that I was running out of steam trying to stay engaged in some sort of meaningful work or project in Seattle. Yes I was doing a little community development work for Sustainable Seattle but I was starving for real action, and preferably for something closer to 'home'...ideally my own neighborhood of Capitol Hill.
I had been poking around as usual, going to community meetings, various open houses, meetings of arts organizations, developers, architects and city planning groups only to find myself feeling more and more beat down by what seemed the shear inevitability of what these people were all up to. This sense of 'powers that be' along with my inability to find any kind of 'voice' in the face of them, to find some way to contribute, be some small part of the solution, was getting to me...
Finally at the end of one of these many meetings (what a bore so many of them were) a conversation with what happened to be a neighbor and our shared frustration of this mechanized beast of progress lead us to follow up with more discussion over coffee somewhere. We tried a couple of times to meet until I raised the stakes for the both of us by suggesting we bring our chairs and our own coffee to a street corner in the neighborhood.
The simplicity and obviousness of this act sparked not only further meetings at that corner but also an active invitation for others to engage...to join in matters that only our local community had the wisdom to come up with any adequate answers or solutions to.
This social setting that we created for two or more hours at a time, once, twice or more times a week at that corner sparked enough interest among people either walking by or being invited, to develop into a facebook group that we called 'stories from the corner' that went on through to the end of that summer.
Simple, obvious and yet revolutionary for those of us who continued to show up for this cause with no name.
I had been poking around as usual, going to community meetings, various open houses, meetings of arts organizations, developers, architects and city planning groups only to find myself feeling more and more beat down by what seemed the shear inevitability of what these people were all up to. This sense of 'powers that be' along with my inability to find any kind of 'voice' in the face of them, to find some way to contribute, be some small part of the solution, was getting to me...
Finally at the end of one of these many meetings (what a bore so many of them were) a conversation with what happened to be a neighbor and our shared frustration of this mechanized beast of progress lead us to follow up with more discussion over coffee somewhere. We tried a couple of times to meet until I raised the stakes for the both of us by suggesting we bring our chairs and our own coffee to a street corner in the neighborhood.
The simplicity and obviousness of this act sparked not only further meetings at that corner but also an active invitation for others to engage...to join in matters that only our local community had the wisdom to come up with any adequate answers or solutions to.
This social setting that we created for two or more hours at a time, once, twice or more times a week at that corner sparked enough interest among people either walking by or being invited, to develop into a facebook group that we called 'stories from the corner' that went on through to the end of that summer.
Simple, obvious and yet revolutionary for those of us who continued to show up for this cause with no name.
2 comments:
Well done. Wondering if you would like to tell one or more story of what came up in this conversations that touched you the most or that is most significant for you.
In hope we'll bring a table in the street tomorrow, and have meaningful conversation, in Paris :-)
Rémi
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