I am often overwhelmed.
Lately, I have been a giant crocheted bag swinging around the skyline of my life… a soft wrecking ball. The stitch on my bag is loose enough to allow several versions of me to stick their arms out the holes to grab at the stuff that seems always to be falling out. There’s also the other attractive and shiny debris that needs to be in my bag so, one of me will pick that stuff up too. Also, one of me is making sure to keep stitching the bag to make room for all of me and my important life stuff. And we keep zooming through time and space.
Last week, I swung through Washington D.C. and Baltimore for a week-long training session in Social Organizing.* It really is true about the East Coast trees in fall…utterly stunning. I got a lot of eye-rolling from the local types when I so typically remarked after the scenery… “yeah, yeah, it’s pretty,” they’d say. Really!? Is it actually possible to be so ‘over’ such miraculous surroundings? The red and the orange and the yellow against the weirdly luminous gray sky! my god! “yeah, yeah”!? And then I wondered if it was possible that I, myself, am guilty of that attitude towards the charms of my own city?
I woke up this morning and walked out the front door only to be stunned. There is something so specific about how LA sunlight seems to coat stuff. It soaks in to stuff. The sidewalks are two-inch sponges full and squishy with sunlight and dirt and shoe marks. The sides of buildings are the same way, they could become so sun-logged by afternoon, they’d melt and expose second-story dwellers in their socks and undies. And, though this has yet to happen, the possibility that the city will get too full of sun and dirt and shoe marks is what makes it miraculous at the moment.
Pretty overwhelming.
*Held at the Maritime Institute of Technology in a sweetly insular and pastoral zone adjacent to one of the major ‘Beltways’, like the city has a belly, our sessions went from 9am to 9pm Monday through Friday. I ate lunch and dinner in a ‘dining hall’, like the food hadn’t come straight out of the freezer, and spent twelve hours interacting with varied activists and organizers. It was probably one of the most important things I’ve done recently. More on this later.