saved

I don't usually do the email forwarding or posting of cute animal pictures. However, check out Dozer, the new arrival at Catskill Animal Sanctuary. I haven't met Dozer, but this video reminds of Dylan, who I met, fed with a baby bottle, and played with like a dog at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. These boys are rescued veal calves. I was vegan many years before getting to know the personalities of various animals, but since I have, I can't explain how amazing it is to meet pigs enjoying tomatoes and chickens roosting in trees and giddy goats, and to play tag with a calf. After you've visited a sanctuary, you won't be able to tell me why Dozer is different from your dog.

merit badge - hospitality

abovegroundpool's most recent merit badge goes to The Common Ground Restaurant in Brattleboro, VT. It's gonna sound crazy to you that we're awarding a restaurant with an activist award, but that's only until you hear that the fresh, organic, vegetarian food at this worker-run spot is free.

That's not a typo.

Common Ground was opened in 1971 with serve-yourself soup and salad for a few cents, displays of original artwork, and performances. It's struggled a few times, set low, flexible prices on food at times, even closed it's doors a couple of times, but mostly it persists, with tasty tempeh dishes and a donation jar. I couldn't believe it when I first heard about it (free? are you sure?), but have made it a regular stop when I'm tooling around the Northeast.

I love Common Ground for reasons similar to why I love Food Not Bombs: They believe there is enough for everyone, that everyone deserves nourishment, and they don't use handing you a plate of food as an excuse to preach. They've made sharing and trust work for 37 years. Bless 'em!

See other merit badge winners here.

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Animal architecture is fascinating. As autumn begins, the cocoons of moths impress, and prolific spiders build complicated funnel webs. All the spinning and weaving makes me think of another wonderful fiber artist, Magdalena Abakanowicz.

A Russian-Pole who lived under first Nazi rule then the Soviet Occupation, Abakanowicz bristled in art school when forced to reiterate Stalin's socialist-realist aesthetic values. Later, without the academy to please, she gathered abandoned ship ropes from the shores of the Vistula River, split them into sisal string, and wove huge, abstract cloaks, that double as safe cocoons or blankets and death shrouds or stripped animal hides. She needed to make flexible work to fit in her tiny apartment. These enormous bodies came forth from her cramped life in Warsaw.

Abakanowicz always works in multiples, mobs, swarms. She refers to unique qualities appearing within herds, even when the "brainless entity" takes over. Because of the drone and press of crowds, she says she prefers solitude, at the same time being acutely aware of needing to belong to a tribe.

When I was an impatient 18 year old in a weaving class, I was completely taken with Abakanowicz's work, slowed, made thoughtful. I still am made silent by it. I can see wanting to be enveloped in it, then feeling smothered by it. Both comforted and aware of some kind of violence, trapped.

pedestrian

Yesterday, in Newburgh, NY, I saw a man get stopped by the police for walking down the street. Sirens, lights, the works. He was walking on the shoulder of a road at an intersection where 5 years ago there was farmland, and now there are strip malls: "essential" things like B&Ns, Lowe's, Mobil stations, Chili's. It was illegal for him to be walking down this road because there is no sidewalk (like most roads these days), and, I'm guessing here, because it is considered a highway by the town of Newburgh. On an already hot and sweaty afternoon, in a landscape covered with black asphalt, this man wasn't allowed to walk home from work. (The Talking Heads song Nothing But Flowers comes to mind here.)

I was flabbergasted, and feel that, for me, this felt like the beginning of the end. I saw all this happen from a car, no surprise, but was so horrified, it makes me want to want to walk and ride my bike exclusively. I'm so repulsed by a culture that makes it illegal to walk in this place that has so recently been taken away from people, and handed to corporations. Sickened by this class crap, that tries to require people to have cars by not funding public transportation.

I'm inspired to give my friend John Francis, of the organization Planetwalk and the book Planetwalker, another read. John didn't ride in cars for twenty-two years to protest oil industry abuses, and has many an interesting story to tell from his journeys. And, bonus, he's another banjo player!

the sound of long island

Ran away camping and to the beach for a few days, which was wonderful and relaxing. There's always something to jar you out the peacefulness, however, whether it be another camper killing squirrels and birds with a bb gun in the campground (right there, in a state park!), fisherpeople hooking and killing fish, and leaving their hooks and line lying around to injure anyone else who comes by, or people removing rocks from the beach by the barrel full (are they selling them to Pier 1?).

Checking out the area yielded some charm, and we stumbled upon two of those old structures that are shaped like what they sell. The first was a duck, thankfully now selling trinkets instead of ducks and eggs, and the second, the more benign ear of corn. People on Long Island take their gardens seriously, and there were many, many beautiful outdoor spaces. There was the pleasure of living simply for a few days. And, of course, there was the never ending lulling of the beautiful ocean.

happy as pigs in straw

Pigs who've been swimming in the midwest floodwaters are desperate for a dry place to rest. That's why, after needing to lay on the floor after seeing images of pigs swimming and drowning in the midwest floods, I'm relieved to see the "after" pictures coming from Farm Sanctuary. If you, like me, are grateful to those who get in there and do something when animals escape from factory farms, struggle to overcome natural disasters, and then are shot on levees or captured and sent to slaughter houses, you'll be thrilled to look at the midwest flood pig rescue blog. They need safe pig homes and $, if you have either of those things available.

i heart the high school pool

There's nothing political about this, except for trying to keep my head straight and my feet on the ground by swimming. Yeah, and my skin smelling like evil chlorine. There's no public pool in my town, and I can't afford the fancy gyms. The high school kids may not really appreciate this beautiful pool, but I sure do.

meditation

Still reflective, and spending the afternoon with the ocean. This is Roni Horn, Vija Clemins and me.

restore

I've just spent a weekend at a yoga retreat, and am thinking about the incredible importance of having places to escape to, to reflect and refresh and remember, to hide in, and find oneself in.

Beach Pods of Turks and Caicos, originally uploaded by cosmo-girl.

birth

The senior member of my queer family, my friend, died this winter. While I'm crawling around looking for buds or other signs of early spring, two baby girls, twins, were born into that family. They're so tiny, still, as to barely have caused a ripple; tiny squirrels, a few pounds, wrapped like burritos.

The missing I have for Bob Kohler aches more with the appearance of these tiny girls. He would have had something to say about their birth. He may have been grouchy about queers feeling a need to have kids. But I bet a nickel he would have been interested in them, felt tender, wondered what good parts of each of us their presence might reveal.

Bob had many careers, one of which was running a store. The Loft was on Christopher Street, the "gay strip" of New York's West Village, where Bob also lived for 50 of his 81 years. He fought for queers, for kids, for animals, for people of color, for the homeless, for the HIV+ and disenfranchised people of all sorts for all of those years. The Loft had a sign that Bob liked to reminisce about. It said, "straights welcome, if they behave." It's funny, but he was serious about the store being a sanctuary, safe for the queerest of the queer. That it be theirs. Ours.

I birth abovegroundpool in Bob's activist spirit. I picture him at the helm in his New Year's sequined vest. Fabulous.