A Crazy Week

I just have a few moments for a quick update...

My week at Ailantus Community House has been quite nice. If last week at Blaine St. was peaceful and restful, this week was active and social.

The first few days of the week we were living in a tent in a park downtown as part of a rally. There was a major business summit of some sort going on, and so a bunch of Leftists decided to have a People's Summit in tents. It was quite an interesting experience. It was a kind of "Bailout the people, not the banks!" and "Moratorium on foreclosures NOW!" type rally. Jesse Jackson was there speaking for a while. I wasn't too much a fan of the solutions that were being offered (seemed like they were complaining about the greed of CEOs but were motivated by greed themselves), but I can't really judge. Many of the people protesting had lost their jobs and homes. The best part of the experience for me was connecting a bit with the homeless community that hangs out and sleeps in the same park area that our tent city was set up in. I missed hanging out with the homeless guys at Dimitri House in Rochester, so this was almost refreshing, in some ways.

I've been writing more poetry... mostly as a result of living with fairly artsy people. They have "sharing circle" every Wed. during their potluck, where people are free to share any sort of artistic expression, so there were lots of readings and poems and stories. I wrote two new ones that I'll try to post here soon... don't have them with me at the library.

This is my first time at the main library. It's large, and beautiful. I love libraries.

Last night I drove out to Jackson, MI with three of the Ailanthus folks to see a band called the Illalogical Spoons. They were fantastic. The lead singer and guitarist also plays with the Psalters.

I've been learning a lot about gardening. The entire backyard of the Ailanthus House is a beautiful and quite impressive vegetable garden. There's something very cool about growing your own food. It reduces waste of transportation, and it's much fresher. Detroit is leading the country in urban agriculture initiatives, mostly because you could fit San Fransisco in all the empty space in the city. Urban prairies like whoa. They have pheasants and coyotes living within the city limits now.