Being in the world

even when it's an impossible place

I was interviewing an old friend of mine last week about a little health center we started in a warehouse a big group of punks and activists rented to house all our different projects back in 2002. There was our women and trans health project that turned into a clinic for a little while, a bike library, a reading room where people would meet up to talk about and plan for upcoming actions around the country. There was a prison books project, a free school, and something called Bountiful Cities, I can’t even remember what else. It was a beautiful, messy, problematic space, up against all the usual activist questions of who makes decisions and how. Endless meetings, issues with misogyny, drinking too much, landlord problems, but it was so beautiful too

My friend was like “remember the advice you gave to leave your house in the morning, every day, even just to go out on the front stoop and look around. And the ‘walk around’ advice ‘If you think of something that’s bothering you, write it down and then the next time you think of it you can say ‘I don’t have to think about that, I have it written down.’ I told someone about those just the other day. Those things remain so helpful.”

On Monday, M’s car broke down on the way to our bi-weekly thrift store excursion. I had something I had to get home for, so M stayed behind to wait for the tow truck, and I walked home. I thought about getting a bus or calling a friend or getting a ride, but it was only a 2 hour walk, and I haven’t walked like that since R left town.

I always thought it was strange how people will go to the gym and spend a couple hours there, but people tend not to walk places if they’re more than a few blocks away. I started from way up on the top of one of those Pittsburgh hills, in a neighborhood called Arlington, and headed down steep hillsides, decaying staircases, railroad tracks and bridges. The usual Pittsburgh topography. Looking at the ways people make beauty and meaning in their lives.

I’ve been thinking about our history, the history of me and my friends and our time, but also about the way history is told. I’m working on a book with 2 old friends of mine about this warehouse space I mentioned. I’ve only done a couple interviews so far, but it’s interesting. I think there’s a tendency in American culture to aggrandize activist history, but the people I talk to (and myself) are always like “I don’t know, that’s just what we did. That’s how we lived life. We created the spaces we wanted to see in the world.”

I was helping my friend L build shelves in her new apartment yesterday, and she was telling me about letting her garlic turn perennial, so it would grow back every year, and her plans to plant some nut trees, and what a sanctuary it could be for someone 100 years from now.

I was talking to C a few days ago, my friend who started doing boat rescue on the Mediterranean after listening to a NPR program about it, and, because he’s an electrician and the boats need electrician volunteers, was like “here is something I can do.” We were talking about how beautiful it is to raise bees, which is something he does now. Talking about how you have to really calm your nervous system down to approach bee hives, and how if you’re able to do that consistently for long enough, the bees start to know you and you will become a safe person in their lives. You don’t even have to put on equipment to reach into the hive. We were talking about whether he was going to go to Palestine, as he had planned, now that Rafah is being decimated and Israel is no longer allowing the minimal aid worker to coordinate aid. It is radio silence.

Last week, M brought home a fledgling they had found in the street, a big baby robin (not the ones above). We tried to put it up in the robin nest that is active in one of our trees, but the parents freaked out and the fledgling jumped down to the ground. They all yelled at each other for a while, the displaced fledgling and the adult robins, until after about 20 minutes, they reached some kind of understanding, and the adults started feeding the fledgling worms. All day, they just kept feeding and feeding him, and at nightfall we put him back up by the nest that holds their babies, and they let him stay. He was there in the morning, and by afternoon, he had his strength back and had been able to fly for the first time, take to his wings.