Engaging with Our World - Locally in Everyday Ramblings

Another fall glamor shot. This was a few days ago and the leaves are truly almost all on the ground now. With the rains coming back it is a big slippery mess. Someone was saying that we have more trees here than pretty much any comparably sized city in America and I believe it. That is a lot of leaf mulch. Tons of it.

Mrs. Sherlock is organizing her second memorial service at church this week today and is a bit overwhelmed by it. We won’t be walking together. The remembrance midweek was a huge big deal. It was for this extraordinary man who made an impression on basically every religious organization in the city. He was ecumenical in his reaching out for support and resources. He lived rough. But he was canny.

He went to Quaker meetings, a Buddhist Community, a Synagogue and to our church for food and support. Our Unitarian church hosted representatives from all these organizations and even some local city government envoys to express condolences and memories of him. I’ll hear more about it all when we walk again.

It was kind of like a stray cat that goes around and gets food from everyone in the neighborhood thinking they are the only ones feeding him.

This whole thing, this commitment to organize the food for these services, (there will be three total) has exhausted and stressed her out. The cognitive problems she admits to having are getting worse. I hope with the stress of this commitment relieved she can focus on what she needs to. To see if these are stress related problems or a baseline thing. For a retired nurse manager, whose whole self-perception is based on competence this is a deep challenge for her.

And that brings us to the quote by George Bernard Shaw that was the prompt for our coffee group discussion this week. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

We normally don’t have prompts, but Walt was traveling this week with the film. (He texted us a picture from a train station in Montana yesterday.) It is hard to summarize this wide-ranging and rich discussion other than to say I came away with things to ponder. The most interesting take away was that men like to talk about free will and women could care less. (Yes, I know this is a gross generalization, okay?).

I have never in my life had a conversation with another woman about free will. What comes closest is the idea of as a person, having agency. But I don’t know a woman who isn’t like, excuse me, I have obligations, even free-spirited women, while the men go on refining and explaining free will. La la la.

Notes from the conversation: Nurture vs. nature. Hedonism. Our relationships with our fathers. Our father’s relationship with the world. The constraints we use as artists to make our work. Where do those constraints come from and who gets to decide what they are. Meter and rhyme and rhythm.

That last bit was interesting as we are all creative in different ways, photography, writing, producing, painting, crafts, poetry, music, and theater. Everyone said though that they start with some restraints.

And on a completely different note, I spent two hours yesterday in a meeting with a team of professional and enthusiastic people who make up our city’s urban development department to hear about what they are doing and how they are doing it through Tax Increment Financing Districts. (TIF’s)

“Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is a public financing method that uses taxes on future property value increases to fund public and private projects. TIFs are authorized by state law in almost all 50 states.
TIFs are used to:
• Subsidize redevelopment
• Pay for infrastructure improvements
• Encourage new development
• Pay for public improvements, such as streets, sidewalks, sewer, and water
TIFs can help relieve some of the risk burden of development, but they can be challenging and aren’t guaranteed to lead to success.”

I know you were dying to know about this, right? This stuff is at the heart of democracy though. They said sidewalks are ridiculously expensive.

The stuff we take for granted out in the world… Amazing.

Last updated November 19, 2023