A Global Network for Enlightening Peace Activism - Humanity Unites Brilliance
Progress report from New Orleans - October 19, 2007
I have been back in New Orleans for exactly one week, after spending three weeks visiting my family in Boston. I want to force myself to write a progress report here once a week, to document my attempts to find a peace movement in New Orleans.
It is Friday morning, I woke up at 8 a.m. with the same anxiety I feel every morning. Not knowing where to go or what to do with myself, I took my laptop to an internet cafe and watched Democracy Now...as usual, it is the only thing I can do in the mornings to make this horrible lonliness and confusion go away. Every day is the same struggle. The first steps of the day are always the hardest for me.
The goal I am working towards in my head is to develop a communal breakfast for peace activists, homeless activists, homeless people, and homeless allies. This is a dream that I've had for a long time, which I think about on mornings such as this. But the logistics of creating such a gathering are really tricky...there are lots of obstacles that must be overcome first. But necessity is the mother of invention, so I'm told. And so I try to cultivate this daily anguish and confusion and heartsickness and to use it to clarify my goals and strategies, and to set a clear intention for the day.
"And so we follow our wandering paths, and the very darkness shall be our guide, and our very doubts shall serve to reassure us." - 18th Centuy Jesuit Priest
(This is a quotation that I found many years ago in a book of quotes by C.S. Lewis and his friends that has been an inspiration to me on mornings like this.)
I am having a hard time focusing this morning, and so I need to write quickly. I have been living in a squat in the seventh ward, in an abandoned house that was taken over by my friends with permission of the former owners. Now that summer is over, there are hundreds of young rowdy travelling hobo musicians flooding back to the city in time for Halloween, and my house has become infested with them. And the electricity to the house has recently been shut off. And so my living situation has gotten pretty uncomfortable. I spent a few days building myself a nice quiet little room in the basement, but I am kept awake all night by mosquitos biting my arms and face and a bunch of rats scurrying around me making scary noises. And so it's obvious that I need a new sleeping situation. Yesterday I borrowed a bike cart and picked up my old tent, which I lived in for months when I first got to town. I tried to set it up in the backyard, only to find that there was a huge slash in it, making it useless for now.
I am not simply looking for a place to sleep...I am looking for a room that I can retreat to when I need to be alone, and when I need stillness. But still, I am happy to be a part of that house, lonely as I feel there.
Most of my energy in New Orleans has been directed towards building a free music school here, largely inspired by the travelling street musicians that I met while working with Food Not Bombs when I lived in Berkeley. I believe that to sustain a life in a peace movement, it is up to each of us to develop a 'trade' for ourselves. And so I made up my mind that I wanted to be a music teacher for peace. To develop a foundation for a real peace movement in this country means to build the foundation for a 'social economy'. This requires social capital, and it requires social entrepreneurship. One of the single most important things each one of us can do to help build a real peace movement is to find something that we love to do, and to give it away for free. I love to teach music...it is something that I am good at. I love working with travelling hobo musicians, because of their passion for learning music and sharing it with each other freely. And so I have a lot of support from lots of street musicians around the country, and my the idea for my project is rapidly spreading...but there is something missing...there is a dimension of the project that most of the street musicians I work with don't get. My goal is to get street musicians to see the unique contributions the could make to homeless organizing and peace organizing, and to organizing a grassroots community education movement. My goal is to get them to see the role that they have to play in building a social economy...of how street music can be used to transform public space.
On Tuesday, I tried organizing a music gathering and circus skillshare in Washington Square Park, to try reviving the circus gatherings that were held there every Tuesday and Thursday last Spring. But something about it just didn't feel right to me...it felt like I was trying to artificially recreate something that evolved organically over time last year. It felt like conditions were no longer right to make it work. It felt irrelevant. And so I am giving up that project for now. Most of the time here it feels like I am going against the natural flow of things. I never want to force anything to happen. I always want to look for places where conditions are ripe for something to happen. Last spring, those conditions were there. Right now, they aren't.
I spent Wednesday fixing up my piano classroom at the Arc. I set up a little refrigerator and bought a box of cereal and a bottle of orange juice and some soy milk, and set up a little kitchen table and ate breakfast by myself while watching Democracy Now. I felt pleased with myself...I felt a moment's peace, like I had made one more meaningful step towards the communal breakfast for peace activists that I had imagined. But on Thursday evening I returned there to find that the building manager had removed the fridge and left my food on the table..a clear sign that I had overstepped my bounds there, and that I should watch myself.
Wednesday was the night of the annual board meeting of the New Orleans Food Coop. In the afternoon I hastily wrote out a two page proposal, containing four different projects that I wanted to work on, and then I skateboarded to the community center in mid-city where the meeting and pot luck were being held. The Food Coop is one of the few new things here that I am really excited about. It was really exciting to observe how the meeting was run. I have become so sick of going to "consensus" run meetings for different anarchist collectives, where people pay lip-service to the principles of consensus, while using the rhetoric of consensus to mask personal animosities and power struggles. There were no such pretensions at this meeting. It was run by standard, old-fashioned parlimentary procedure, and people were respectful and civil and open to one another's ideas. It gave me a vision of an organization that truly practiced direct democracy, rather than just merely preaching it, like the dozens of stupid anarchist organizations I've tried to work with over the years.
Also, on Wednesday, I finnally wrote an email to Grupo Maculele New Orleans, which is the main capoeira school in New Orleans. Capoeira is an afro-brazillian martial art that combines dancing and singing and music and ritualized fighting. While living in Berkeley, I did work trade at a capoeira school that allowed me to take classes for free, and it was a big part of keeping me feeling healthy and balanced and positive. I have a strong belief that capoeira is an art form that many peace activists can benefit from, because it requires intensive personal training and it develops great self-discipline and calmness of mind and it gives you insight into the nature of inter-personal conflict. Capoeira is one of the biggest things missing from my life in New Orleans, just like breakfast. I have a fantasy of building a service-learning network for capoeira students aroudn the world called "capoeristas for peace." And so on Wednesday, I emailled the school, telling them about my situation and asking them for some flexibility. It was an email that had been building up in me for many months, and I was proud of myself for finally having the guts to send it. But my heart sank on Thursday when I got a discouraging impersonal response back from one of the organizers of the school, basically saying that their payment policy was non-negotioable, and they wouldn't make any exceptions for me, no matter what my circumstances were. So, now I have to decide what steps to take next with that. I still know for certain that capoeira is something I need in my life here in order to be healthy. I just don't know how practical or possible it will be though.
And so that is how my first week went. I feel lonely and discouraged and worn out, but I draw strength from knowing that I really tried my best this week. Having this place to write helps me calm my mind a great deal, and helps me feel less alone.
And now...Just for the sake of keeping a personal record, here is the text of the proposal that I sent to the New Orleans Food Coop:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: The New Orleans Food Coop
From: Tim Roust
Date: Otober 17, 2007
Hello all. I am writing this quick last-minute check-in to give you all a sumary of the main projects that I would like to organize with the suport of the New Orleans Food Coop. My name is Tim Roust, I have been living in New Orleans since January. Before moving here, I was living in the Oakland/Berkeley area, where I volunteered with East Bay Food Not Bombs. I am a street musician with a strong interest in homeless activism, and I am very much interested in the connection between free food and free music. I am interested in developing creative strategies to empower homeless people to have access to healthy food. I am interested in the social aspects of food. In addition to coming up with ways for food to be purchased collectivley, I would like the New Orleans Food Coop to also focus on coming up with ways for food to be PREPARED collectivley and SHARED collectivley.
I am very supportive of the work that the New Orleans Food Coop has done so far, but I believe that in order for it to grow and reach out to new people, it needs to develop a way of constantly growing and changing and ADAPTING to the needs of it's members. I feel the key to doing this is to develop a grassroots media system that allows Food Coop members to communicate with one another and share their needs and to come up with creative new ways of solving those needs collectivley. And I am particularly interested in making the New Orleans Food Coop accessible to homeless people and marginaly homeless people. Here is a quick summary of four projects tha I'd like to develop. (In order of importance)
1) PROPOSAL FOR A MONTHLY FOOD-COOP NEWSLETTER
I would like to form a working group of people interested in collaborating on a monthly newsletter for the New Orleans Food Coop, which could be distributed as a PDF file through the website, and which could be printed out and distributed every month on th esame day as the monthly food distribution.
2) PROPOSAL FOR CREATING A SOCIAL NETWORK FOR THE NEW ORLEANS FOOD COOP ON NING.COM
Ning.com is the latest generation of social networking sites on the web. It could be thought of as a collaborative blog. I would like for myself or someone more experienced with the Coop to bcome the moderator of a site for the New Orleans Food Coop on ning.com. The address could be "newolreansfoodcoop.ning.com",nd it could be linked to from the main website. This could be a plce for people to form different working groups, discuss new ideas about how the food coop could grow, and keep a running archive of meeting notes. It would also add a greater level of transparency and openness o the decision making process. Currently, there is a dicussion list-serv in place, but it is hard to join, and it is hard to viewthe archive. Using ning.com is easier and morea ccessible than using traditional email lists, and allows information to be shared in a way that is impossible with a traditional mailing list. (This website could also be used as a way to generate content for the newsletter that I proposed above.)
3) PLANS FOR ORGANIZING "STONE SOUP" MUSIC GATHERINGS FOR MUSIC STUDENTS
I have been organizing a free music school, based largely around songs collected from travelling street musicians. While living in Oakland/Berkeley, I experimented with organizing a new sort of Food Not Bombs meal which I called "Stone Soup" meals, which would combine group music lessons with group preparation of food. Instead of paying oy for classes, peoplecould bring fod to share or produce to add to a collective soup pot. I would like to start organizing similar gatherings at different households in New Orleans, and to use these gatherings as a way of making the benefits of the buying club and the New Orleans Food Coop accessible to travelling street musicians. (To learn more about the music program I'm building, visit http://songbook.ning.com)
4) PLANS FOR A BICYCLE CART FOD DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM
(This is a more long term project that I want to begin to develop.) I have been talking to my friends about organizing a bike cart parade every month to coincide with the food distribution date. I am building a bike cart mainanance shop in the basement of the house I'm currently staying at, and I already have access to four or five bikecrts. I imagine having a distribution route, where we can bike around to different neighborhood spots and deliver people's orders, while at the same time distribuiting the lates issue of the monthly newsletter. This idea emphasizes the social aspect of the New Orleans Food Coop, and it could help transform the monthly food distribution into a critical-mass style social outing.
Okay, those are the main points I wanted to get accross. I hope to develop these ideas further over time. I welcome all comments and criticism.
Thanks for listening.
Tim Roust
It is Friday morning, I woke up at 8 a.m. with the same anxiety I feel every morning. Not knowing where to go or what to do with myself, I took my laptop to an internet cafe and watched Democracy Now...as usual, it is the only thing I can do in the mornings to make this horrible lonliness and confusion go away. Every day is the same struggle. The first steps of the day are always the hardest for me.
The goal I am working towards in my head is to develop a communal breakfast for peace activists, homeless activists, homeless people, and homeless allies. This is a dream that I've had for a long time, which I think about on mornings such as this. But the logistics of creating such a gathering are really tricky...there are lots of obstacles that must be overcome first. But necessity is the mother of invention, so I'm told. And so I try to cultivate this daily anguish and confusion and heartsickness and to use it to clarify my goals and strategies, and to set a clear intention for the day.
"And so we follow our wandering paths, and the very darkness shall be our guide, and our very doubts shall serve to reassure us." - 18th Centuy Jesuit Priest
(This is a quotation that I found many years ago in a book of quotes by C.S. Lewis and his friends that has been an inspiration to me on mornings like this.)
I am having a hard time focusing this morning, and so I need to write quickly. I have been living in a squat in the seventh ward, in an abandoned house that was taken over by my friends with permission of the former owners. Now that summer is over, there are hundreds of young rowdy travelling hobo musicians flooding back to the city in time for Halloween, and my house has become infested with them. And the electricity to the house has recently been shut off. And so my living situation has gotten pretty uncomfortable. I spent a few days building myself a nice quiet little room in the basement, but I am kept awake all night by mosquitos biting my arms and face and a bunch of rats scurrying around me making scary noises. And so it's obvious that I need a new sleeping situation. Yesterday I borrowed a bike cart and picked up my old tent, which I lived in for months when I first got to town. I tried to set it up in the backyard, only to find that there was a huge slash in it, making it useless for now.
I am not simply looking for a place to sleep...I am looking for a room that I can retreat to when I need to be alone, and when I need stillness. But still, I am happy to be a part of that house, lonely as I feel there.
Most of my energy in New Orleans has been directed towards building a free music school here, largely inspired by the travelling street musicians that I met while working with Food Not Bombs when I lived in Berkeley. I believe that to sustain a life in a peace movement, it is up to each of us to develop a 'trade' for ourselves. And so I made up my mind that I wanted to be a music teacher for peace. To develop a foundation for a real peace movement in this country means to build the foundation for a 'social economy'. This requires social capital, and it requires social entrepreneurship. One of the single most important things each one of us can do to help build a real peace movement is to find something that we love to do, and to give it away for free. I love to teach music...it is something that I am good at. I love working with travelling hobo musicians, because of their passion for learning music and sharing it with each other freely. And so I have a lot of support from lots of street musicians around the country, and my the idea for my project is rapidly spreading...but there is something missing...there is a dimension of the project that most of the street musicians I work with don't get. My goal is to get street musicians to see the unique contributions the could make to homeless organizing and peace organizing, and to organizing a grassroots community education movement. My goal is to get them to see the role that they have to play in building a social economy...of how street music can be used to transform public space.
On Tuesday, I tried organizing a music gathering and circus skillshare in Washington Square Park, to try reviving the circus gatherings that were held there every Tuesday and Thursday last Spring. But something about it just didn't feel right to me...it felt like I was trying to artificially recreate something that evolved organically over time last year. It felt like conditions were no longer right to make it work. It felt irrelevant. And so I am giving up that project for now. Most of the time here it feels like I am going against the natural flow of things. I never want to force anything to happen. I always want to look for places where conditions are ripe for something to happen. Last spring, those conditions were there. Right now, they aren't.
I spent Wednesday fixing up my piano classroom at the Arc. I set up a little refrigerator and bought a box of cereal and a bottle of orange juice and some soy milk, and set up a little kitchen table and ate breakfast by myself while watching Democracy Now. I felt pleased with myself...I felt a moment's peace, like I had made one more meaningful step towards the communal breakfast for peace activists that I had imagined. But on Thursday evening I returned there to find that the building manager had removed the fridge and left my food on the table..a clear sign that I had overstepped my bounds there, and that I should watch myself.
Wednesday was the night of the annual board meeting of the New Orleans Food Coop. In the afternoon I hastily wrote out a two page proposal, containing four different projects that I wanted to work on, and then I skateboarded to the community center in mid-city where the meeting and pot luck were being held. The Food Coop is one of the few new things here that I am really excited about. It was really exciting to observe how the meeting was run. I have become so sick of going to "consensus" run meetings for different anarchist collectives, where people pay lip-service to the principles of consensus, while using the rhetoric of consensus to mask personal animosities and power struggles. There were no such pretensions at this meeting. It was run by standard, old-fashioned parlimentary procedure, and people were respectful and civil and open to one another's ideas. It gave me a vision of an organization that truly practiced direct democracy, rather than just merely preaching it, like the dozens of stupid anarchist organizations I've tried to work with over the years.
Also, on Wednesday, I finnally wrote an email to Grupo Maculele New Orleans, which is the main capoeira school in New Orleans. Capoeira is an afro-brazillian martial art that combines dancing and singing and music and ritualized fighting. While living in Berkeley, I did work trade at a capoeira school that allowed me to take classes for free, and it was a big part of keeping me feeling healthy and balanced and positive. I have a strong belief that capoeira is an art form that many peace activists can benefit from, because it requires intensive personal training and it develops great self-discipline and calmness of mind and it gives you insight into the nature of inter-personal conflict. Capoeira is one of the biggest things missing from my life in New Orleans, just like breakfast. I have a fantasy of building a service-learning network for capoeira students aroudn the world called "capoeristas for peace." And so on Wednesday, I emailled the school, telling them about my situation and asking them for some flexibility. It was an email that had been building up in me for many months, and I was proud of myself for finally having the guts to send it. But my heart sank on Thursday when I got a discouraging impersonal response back from one of the organizers of the school, basically saying that their payment policy was non-negotioable, and they wouldn't make any exceptions for me, no matter what my circumstances were. So, now I have to decide what steps to take next with that. I still know for certain that capoeira is something I need in my life here in order to be healthy. I just don't know how practical or possible it will be though.
And so that is how my first week went. I feel lonely and discouraged and worn out, but I draw strength from knowing that I really tried my best this week. Having this place to write helps me calm my mind a great deal, and helps me feel less alone.
And now...Just for the sake of keeping a personal record, here is the text of the proposal that I sent to the New Orleans Food Coop:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: The New Orleans Food Coop
From: Tim Roust
Date: Otober 17, 2007
Hello all. I am writing this quick last-minute check-in to give you all a sumary of the main projects that I would like to organize with the suport of the New Orleans Food Coop. My name is Tim Roust, I have been living in New Orleans since January. Before moving here, I was living in the Oakland/Berkeley area, where I volunteered with East Bay Food Not Bombs. I am a street musician with a strong interest in homeless activism, and I am very much interested in the connection between free food and free music. I am interested in developing creative strategies to empower homeless people to have access to healthy food. I am interested in the social aspects of food. In addition to coming up with ways for food to be purchased collectivley, I would like the New Orleans Food Coop to also focus on coming up with ways for food to be PREPARED collectivley and SHARED collectivley.
I am very supportive of the work that the New Orleans Food Coop has done so far, but I believe that in order for it to grow and reach out to new people, it needs to develop a way of constantly growing and changing and ADAPTING to the needs of it's members. I feel the key to doing this is to develop a grassroots media system that allows Food Coop members to communicate with one another and share their needs and to come up with creative new ways of solving those needs collectivley. And I am particularly interested in making the New Orleans Food Coop accessible to homeless people and marginaly homeless people. Here is a quick summary of four projects tha I'd like to develop. (In order of importance)
1) PROPOSAL FOR A MONTHLY FOOD-COOP NEWSLETTER
I would like to form a working group of people interested in collaborating on a monthly newsletter for the New Orleans Food Coop, which could be distributed as a PDF file through the website, and which could be printed out and distributed every month on th esame day as the monthly food distribution.
2) PROPOSAL FOR CREATING A SOCIAL NETWORK FOR THE NEW ORLEANS FOOD COOP ON NING.COM
Ning.com is the latest generation of social networking sites on the web. It could be thought of as a collaborative blog. I would like for myself or someone more experienced with the Coop to bcome the moderator of a site for the New Orleans Food Coop on ning.com. The address could be "newolreansfoodcoop.ning.com",nd it could be linked to from the main website. This could be a plce for people to form different working groups, discuss new ideas about how the food coop could grow, and keep a running archive of meeting notes. It would also add a greater level of transparency and openness o the decision making process. Currently, there is a dicussion list-serv in place, but it is hard to join, and it is hard to viewthe archive. Using ning.com is easier and morea ccessible than using traditional email lists, and allows information to be shared in a way that is impossible with a traditional mailing list. (This website could also be used as a way to generate content for the newsletter that I proposed above.)
3) PLANS FOR ORGANIZING "STONE SOUP" MUSIC GATHERINGS FOR MUSIC STUDENTS
I have been organizing a free music school, based largely around songs collected from travelling street musicians. While living in Oakland/Berkeley, I experimented with organizing a new sort of Food Not Bombs meal which I called "Stone Soup" meals, which would combine group music lessons with group preparation of food. Instead of paying oy for classes, peoplecould bring fod to share or produce to add to a collective soup pot. I would like to start organizing similar gatherings at different households in New Orleans, and to use these gatherings as a way of making the benefits of the buying club and the New Orleans Food Coop accessible to travelling street musicians. (To learn more about the music program I'm building, visit http://songbook.ning.com)
4) PLANS FOR A BICYCLE CART FOD DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM
(This is a more long term project that I want to begin to develop.) I have been talking to my friends about organizing a bike cart parade every month to coincide with the food distribution date. I am building a bike cart mainanance shop in the basement of the house I'm currently staying at, and I already have access to four or five bikecrts. I imagine having a distribution route, where we can bike around to different neighborhood spots and deliver people's orders, while at the same time distribuiting the lates issue of the monthly newsletter. This idea emphasizes the social aspect of the New Orleans Food Coop, and it could help transform the monthly food distribution into a critical-mass style social outing.
Okay, those are the main points I wanted to get accross. I hope to develop these ideas further over time. I welcome all comments and criticism.
Thanks for listening.
Tim Roust
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1 Comment
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Comment by Alana Lea on October 21, 2007 at 2:29am -
Hi Tim,
It's 2am and I just had to read your newest entry before I can sleep tonight. It sounds like you've got a great deal of creative energy and determination, I really admire that in you.
I hope you can find some more material to inspire and uplift your spirits and mind as you create your new life, and find peace within yourself so that it will overflow to others. We can't force that either...
I'd like to think of you as sleeping somewhere comfortable, waking up to a breakfast you enjoy and looking at yourself in the mirror and smiling for starters, each day.... that would give you the energy you need to do your projects of service that New Orleans doubtless needs. I hope you'll find a way to practice Capoeira . You know, Nathanel (from Israel) is also into that art. Perhaps you can start "capoeristas for peace" right here, with photos!
Take good care of yourself Tim. Thanks for writing here.
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