Summer Newsletter Continued

Some of you may be familiar with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. For those who are not, let me put it briefly.
Plato describes prisoners chained inside a cave, facing a wall, watching shadows cast by a fire burning behind them. They mistake those shadows for reality because those shadows are all they have ever known. They do not experience them as shadows.


They experience them as the world.


The shadows become their orientation. Their lens. The filter through which everything else is perceived and understood.


It is not that the prisoners lack intelligence, imagination, or care to know more. It is that their capacity to see has been shaped entirely by what they have been given to look at.


And then, in Plato’s telling, one prisoner is freed.


Unchained from the wall. Hauled toward the mouth of the cave and pulled out into the sunlight.
And he feels agony.


Plato writes that his eyes burn. He is disoriented. Destabilized. Everything familiar becomes strange. The shadows he once knew dissolve into a brightness that feels assaulting – because his entire perceptual world has been undone.


This is the heart of the story.


What Plato understood is that re-attunement to light after a long habituation to shadow is painful.
The prisoner does not walk out of the cave into clarity.
He walks out into confusion.


And the work – the real work – is staying in that confusion long enough for the eyes to adjust. For a new orientation to form. For what is actually real to come slowly into focus.


Would you sit with that image for a moment… in the context of what we are living through together in our cities right now.


We walk our streets, take transit, shop for groceries, drop off our kids – and we see suffering. Daily. Accumulated. Unrelenting. Bodies in doorways. People in crisis. We bear witness, again and again, to the very visible, public decompensation of our unhoused neighbors. And it is heartbreaking.
Something happens to us when we witness the shadow side of our society for that long.
Our eyes adjust.
Not to light.
To shadow.

We, here at Sacred Streets, believe that adjustment has cost us something.


Our hearts have slowly been calcifying and our spirits tipping towards cynicism. NOT because we stopped caring. We re-oriented. Our lens shifted. And in that shifting – slowly- we have lost access to something we cannot afford to lose: The gift of difference. The generosity that is already present. The abundance that is not upstream, not waiting on policy to change or a political term to end or funding to be made right.
It is here. It is now. It is alive in the small and unheroic moments of genuine encounter that we walk past a hundred times a day.


Despair is not the absence of abundance.
It is the inability to perceive it.


It is eyes so long adjusted to shadow that the light can feel like an assault.
And that inability – that slow foreclosing of the heart – does not only diminish us. It diminishes our world. Because when we foreclose, we stop being available. We stop turning toward. We stop receiving the gift of one another across difference, and we stop offering ourselves in return. We become smaller than we were made to be. And our neighborhoods become smaller with us.
This is what is at stake: our hearts.


Without our hearts, we have nothing. And we will keep doing what people do in caves: naming the shadows, managing the shadows, arguing about the shadows – while the fire burns behind us and the real world waits outside.


The Colombian thinker Adolfo Albán Achinte gave us a name for what we believe we are being invited into:
He called it the politics of re-existence.
Not resistance – though resistance has its place.
Re-existence.
The practices by which communities pushed to the margins refuse the terms of their erasure. Not by organizing themselves around the dominant order’s definitions of what is real and possible, but by creating and enacting forms of life that the dominant order cannot account for.


Albán Achinte understood that our policy frameworks often do not:
The substance of re-existence is not primarily legislative.
It is art.

Food.

Ritual.

Ceremony.

Oral tradition.

The cultivation of land.

The tending of relationship.
These are not ornamental.
They are the political act itself.


What we are practicing – in our neighborhoods, in our ordinary encounters and in our decision(s) to know and be known on our own street corners – is re-existence.
It is the daily refusal of our city’s cultural despair that insists shadow is all there is.
It is the reclaiming of our hearts’ full capacity: for love in action, for encounter, for resonance, for the full alive experience of being human together.


What we believe at Sacred Streets, after decades of practicing this into being on the edges of our city:
This work does not stay at the edges.


When people begin to do the uncomfortable, sometimes painful work of perception change – when they practice their way into a new attunement – something happens. Not just to them. To the whole.


Each person who learns to see again, who turns toward instead of away, who receives the gift of difference rather than foreclosing against it – that person begins to animate something in the people around them. A movement populates. Not through campaign or program, but through the contagion of genuine encounter. Through the demonstration that abundance is not a future condition. That it is already here.


This is how the floodgates open – not upstream first, but here, at the edges, in the ordinary, in the turning toward. Love practiced at the margins of our city does not stay at the margins. It widens. It gathers. It restores what despair has narrowed.


Dear people-we are not bereft.
There is more than enough.
We need not wait for conditions to be right.
So tend to your heart. Keep it soft and open. And as you tend to your own wholeness, you are tending to the wholeness of your village.


We alchemize our despair into presence. Into encounter. Into the daily, defiant, abundant act of belonging.
The shadows on the wall are not the whole story.
They never were.
This is our medicine.
And this is our work to do. The challenge of the day is to stay porous. To remain available – to complexity, to ambiguity, to the person in front of you whose life will not reduce to a category or a case number or a shadow on the wall.

We leave you with this:

Do whatever it takes to keep yourself soft and open – there is much around us beckoning us down a path of despair. We believe the alternative is to practice, embody our shared path into being with our own feet. Begin small, simple and attentive to the minute particulars within your midst and then allow (by believing they do!) these small practices to ripple out slowly – because if and when we all give ourselves over to the deep time work of our attention and presence, then and only then will we know and act as though the table is long, there are many chairs, vote for change and invest in our shared belonging for all.

Let us begin at the edges.

This is our hope for a new dawn.

JOIN US!

We have a goal of partnering with and training as many Faith Communities as possible in King County! Reach out and let’s connect!

FORWARD TOGETHER!

Love, Sparrow and Sacred Streets

For general inquiries: sparrow@oursacredstreets.org or hayden@oursacredstreets.org

To schedule a companionship training: liz@oursacredstreets.org

Wild Waves and the Politics of Imagination

Going to a waterpark is not typically my idea of a utopia; waiting in lines, chomping on Fritos covered in chili sauce in the bag whilst slipping along shoeless on slimy surfaces where (I confess) I imagine clumps of hair or certain kinds of venereal diseases (I kid! I kid!)—well, you get my point. But this past week, I had promised my son that he could spend the day there with his best friend. So, on a certain hot day, I joined the masses, packed into the parking lot, and found myself a spot of shade at Wild Waves.

After I bid the kids farewell, I laid my blanket out, having to place it in a way that fit within the growing patchwork of ground coverings that was spreading out under the tree. I set up my chair, readied my books and snacks for the day, and sat. In my view is the walkway circling the pond with a fountain. Above it, the zipline and, set up around it, the games and a shaved ice truck. In my ears is the easily recognizable 106.1 FM—my teenagers’ radio station and now our soundtrack for the day. As I begin to settle, I pull out my book: How to Fall in Love with the Future, and I begin to read…

“The colonization of time, this widespread adoption of a model of time designed to serve capital and markets, lies behind many of the forces that reduce humanity’s capacity to connect to positive futures.”1

I hear the laughter and howl of a small child and look up to see her flying—hands spread wide like a bird—overhead. As my eyes look down, they rest on the tree canopy in front of me, and there I am greeted by a small sparrow. I think to myself: “How dainty this one is. I don’t know if I have ever seen one so small. Nor do I know this tree—what kind of tree is this?” As I look around, I notice a family with a baby and two toddlers looking for shade. I invite them to join me on my blanket—my son is out and about and certainly will not use it. They thank me and hunker down alongside me. The mom and dad begin to speak to one another in a language I don’t know. Maybe Swahili?

As I return to my book, get lost in it again, I begin to hear chatter above my head in Spanish. I see a family trying to help their elderly mom sit down in the grass underneath the tree. The grass is a bit sloped and bumpy in areas, so I offer my chair to them. They gladly receive it. We work together, in the small area in front of my blanket, to secure the chair while the woman is carefully lowered down.

I go back to sitting on my blanket now, a little dimpled pile of dirt underneath my bum, a cute little baby to my right—with a mom—on a Zoom call to a friend, speaking in some African language I do not know, and a family now settled in front of me.

All of a sudden, I am lost in thought. I don’t know for how long, but I find myself tearing up—a quote comes upon me:

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”2

A group of adult women literally skip down the hill together on my right, and one proclaims, “Oh no—be careful—skipping might actually be fun! Don’t try it!” They all laugh and skip along. A dad walks by holding the hand of a solemn-looking teenage girl who begins to smile as they talk. I see a woman in a wheelchair with no legs buying shaved ice, her friend helping her navigate the syrups on top. I hear kids squeal with joy, and a man wondering aloud with his mom where his cigarettes are as she says, “I told you to put them in the pink bag, this isn’t my fault.” He says, “I know, Mom.”

I’ve known for a while that this is Wild Waves’ last season—didn’t think much of it. But now I find myself actively beginning to grieve it, and I know that true grief can only come from a certain level of knowing and of needing. I jokingly say under my breath what my kids would say to me (I do confess I am a mystic): “It’s not that deep.”

I pick up my book again:

“Everyday utopian moments are when the present overflows with the not-yet…There’s something deeply democratic about the idea of utopian moments, which are available to all of us. They may afford sudden glimpses that the world could be quite different from the way it is, that there are certain things that may even be in our world, that point to a different kind of place, where we would like to live, where we would like to be.” 3

Sorry kids…

Mama’s going deep.

I write in my journal something that I have written before but am reminded of now: 

Imagination is political.

I did not expect to write today about Wild Waves.

Hours pass, and I dip in and out of my book; the African family packs up, says farewell—the older woman decides to retire from my chair and lean against the tree for a while. A random woman comes up to tell me that my son was being rude in line. I kindly tell her that that is not my son. I do not know that child. Ah—the wild, flavor-filled soup of humanity!

Later in the day—my son and his best friend—return. It’s time to pack up and take the train into the Mariners game (can we say hello to this kid’s dream day!). I genuinely find myself sad to leave.

As we find our seat on the train, we are alone for a bit until we get to Renton. Folks pile in then, and a man sits down in front of us. He pulls up his phone, and until he disembarks in Beacon Hill, he watches a video of a crew of women twerking on a stage—the camera going in close as butt cheeks flap, then backing up every so often.

I search online myself: what will Wild Waves become after it closes…

A one-story industrial warehouse spanning roughly 1,035,000 square feet with office space, truck docks, and trailer storage.4

I wish I was surprised. I am not.

I close my eyes and begin to imagine driving down I-5 in a few months, as we bear witness to the demolition of rides, of slides—of memories—and see it replaced with a warehouse, trucks, and storage. The doldrums of it all create an ache in my heart and bring a tear to my eye. Why does this feel so personal?

            There is a field out beyond time and reason- I’ll meet you there.4

To what do we measure the success of a city? Is the rubric one of economic development—then tear it down, let’s place our bets on what we know will work.

But where will I find that tree in our city?

Where will I hear squeals of joy from above and share a blanket and a chair with neighbors across difference? Have adult women be caught up in the magic of a skip, or have a random woman scold me for not raising my imaginary son right?

What happens when our places of imagination become parking lots and warehouses?

What does that do to our hearts, to our ability to imagine a just and equitable society where all people flourish?

What does this do to our collective memory and our collective hopes?

And what about communal joy?

Imagination is political.

Imagination is Democracy.

Imagination is deep time in a system that works hard to give its citizens none.

Imagination is a place that we go to have hope, to find reprieve, and to practice utopia into being.

And these spaces and places are for all people. They must be.

This is not a eulogy for Wild Waves. It’s for what her existence and our experience of her, reminds us all of.

This is call and response to what she showed me and what she has held for those who have saved up their hard-earned pennies to give their kids a dream—and to the millionaire who steps into the park and has to share a blanket, or a seat, with a refugee for the first time.

Our future is shared, and it is up to us to cultivate the places and spaces where we all, together, want to run towards and not away.

It’s places like Wild Waves that remind us of beloved community.

As it’s torn down… we can honor her memory by committing to practicing her little slice of utopia into being across Seattle.

Wild Waves, may your memory make us more foolish, generous, imaginative, and connected than ever.

1 Hopkins, Rob. How to fall in love with the Future. P. 129

2 Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

3 Hopkins, Rob. How to fall in love with the Future. P.135-136

4 King5.com

4 Rumi, A great Wagon.

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