Home for Fall

Good Evening -

I'm just now getting to this because it's been a busy, busy day. We got up early this morning and spent a few hours walking our neighborhood doing Obama canvassing, which was good, but also relatively uneventful because I think most of the people on our roll had celebrated last night and weren't opening the door to us.

I signed us up for the canvassing for two reasons. First - I have to feel like, come Tuesday, I've done everything in my power to get better blood into the White House. I can't have another post-election "What?!" and need to feel like I've done what I can rather than sitting by and hoping without acting on that hope.

The other reason I signed us up today was because I wanted to get to know our neighborhood better. The area we live in is historically African-American and not one I knew growing up. While I was out of the state for the last ten years, some gentrification has gone on, which has taken care of some of the safety challenges in the area, but also priced out the people who have lived here for a long time and changed the demographics of the area some.

I have some internal tension around this - sorting out messages of racism from my youth that formed my ideas of the area from awareness of the crime that was very real here from the understanding that the families that were living surrounded by that crime don't necessarily now get to experience the alleviation of it because they've been priced out.

There's a lot of good history to the area that I don't know about and I wanted to start my learning today by spending some time walking around and talking to folks. The walking happened, the talking didn't (really - everyone was still asleep as we canvassed from 9 - 1), but I got to see the tension here in the neighborhood and deepen my understanding of it's impact (side note: I walked past a construction trailer here the other day with a bill board poster on the side advertising some new brownstones that are getting ready to go up. Someone had written in sharpie over the image "Gentrification is War!" I had such a clear image of the young, outside, white activist who felt as if that action was going to make a big change but that it didn't reflect any sort of collaboration with the people in the neighborhood experiencing the pricing out.).

After a lunch in a local restaurant in which we watched the contract transit security guards (Wackenhut - for-profit prison builders (similar to Blackwater in the realm of contract security and the laxness towards general human rights that come with contract status) profile young African-American men riding the light rail and checking to make sure they had purchased tickets (the whole light rail is a giant honor system because there isn't a system to submit a ticket to enter or exit the train and lots of people abuse that system but the guards at the Five Points station were only looking at certain riders...), we walked back home and headed over to the Art Museum for free day (first Saturday of each month).

After a few hours of that, we drove around looking at some neighborhoods we might like to move to in April when our lease is up (I know - I was just talking about taking time to get to know this neighborhood. Our search for places to live has to do with not wanting to stay in our 4-plex, shared yard space past our lease and questioning how much we want to participate in the neighborhood demographic shift), and then met some friends at a sushi place down by DU for dinner before seeing a film at the University about LGBT actions around reclaiming spirituality and working to reframe the conversation that Dr. Dobbs and Focus on the Family have corrupted and dominated for too long.

So - just now getting to the blog.

The Virgen is simple enough - I need a home in a place with trees that experience fall. I need tall trees that have leaves that shade and leaves that turn colors when it gets cold and leaves that fall to the ground to make great humus.

What I will give to these fantastic trees is love and care and an investment in their ability to grow to their full potential.

Here's to that. Here's to growth. Here's to unlearning ideas about areas that no longer feel true. Here's to change, here's to hope, and here's to change driven by hope in a better, better tomorrow.