HoopPath California: Day One
April 11th, 2008
Nothing much to report at this point. I’m 30,000 miles above the heartland, speeding towards my most aggressive workshop trip so far. In the next ten days, Ann and I will be teaching in Santa Cruz, Ojai, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I have never been to Santa Cruz or Ojai, so I’m excited to see these two new places. Everyone who has been to these two cities tells me that both are very beautiful cities. I sure that they are. Everywhere that I have been in California has been tremendously rich with beauty. Even in Los Angeles, I am struck by the visual power of the landscape on top of which this sprawling city has been built.
In the South, our mountains are many hours from our beaches. In North Carolina, there are beach communities and there are mountain communities. On California’s coast, there are both within one community. It’s a type of topographical integration that seems to me to set a tone for all the cities I have visited there so far. Racially, economically, culturally, and musically there is an integration that just isn’t present, at least with the same force and vitality, in my home state of North Carolina. I’m not making a judgement here, it is what it is, but traveling to California provides an opportunity for me to be reminded just how some of America truly is. I find it refreshing and, at an almost cellular level, I find it replenishing.
In this way, my perception of California and its struggle to be diverse, but not divided, reminds of me of the HoopPath Community and Tribe and issues we will face as our flock grows in number.
We are a group of many individuals who (until now) have never joined groups. Indeed, most of us have avoided groups just because they are.. well.. groups. There are as many reasons for this as raindrops, but I think for many of us, we avoid groups in order to avoid homogeny and the freedoms of expression it inevitably strips away. Though our HP tenets are yet to be written, one tenet has clearly been formulated over the last three years: We are a group of Individuals. We respect each others boundaries, opinions, and Ways. As the Maidan would say, We are all birds in flight: each with our own relation to the Sky above and the Earth below. When we gather together, we fly as one flock, casting our one shadow on the ground beneath until that time when our own, individual flights, once again, take us in directions away from each other. We are always who we are whether it be as one or as many.
As we descend into SFO, I am reminded to be true to this spirit.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
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