What are we doing here?
The West Oakland Reconciliation and Social Healing Project (WORSHP) house is an intentional spiritual community for students of love. Brought together from diverse places, we long to find an alternative to the loneliness, meaninglessness, numbness, despair, and general "meanness" of modern life, which we see as tied to problems like racism and classism. We seek to be transformed by our engagements with each other, with our neighbors, and with the Spirit of Life (which we understand in different ways, and very imperfectly), as well as to be of service in the community.
100 Things?
Many of us are thinking hard about what it means to let go of consumerism. I've been captivated by the "100 Thing Challenge" - paring down to owning only 100 things. I don't think I'm quite ready for that yet, but in spending the afternoon cleaning up my room, and finally organizing, and unpacking the last box (well, the second to last box,) I realize that there are so many things that I own (that I bought with all good intention) that just sit, and I haven't looked at or used or worn in months (or longer.)
Notes on My Experiences at the Downtown Oakland Protest of the Johannes Mehserle Involuntary Manslaughter Verdict
Notes on My Experiences at the Downtown Oakland Protest of the Johannes Mehserle Involuntary Manslaughter Verdict, Thursday, July 8, 2010.
I arrived at Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland at about 5:10 and there were maybe one or two hundred people gathered in the plaza at the corner of 14th and Broadway. A young man had a bullhorn with detachable microphone and different people were expressing their opinions to the crowd—whoever felt like saying anything. I saw a few people arguing back and forth about whether it was time to use violent protest.
Beginnings
Well, here we are, somewhere between four weeks and three months--depending upon who you are--into this adventure in intentional communal living and good neighboring. I thought it might be useful to kick off our in-house blog by capturing a bit of the history of how we came to be here and what the first couple months have been like. I hope others will also add their recollections!
I first experienced a call to West Oakland more than two years ago when, along with a handful of others, I looked at a big five-bedroom place over on Magnolia Street at 12th, just a few blocks from here. My imagination captured by the wild mix of characters we saw out on the street as we looked at the house, I started researching the neighborhood and learned about West Oakland's incredible history as the location of the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, home to some of the West Coast's most significant blues and jazz clubs, and birthplace of the Black Panthers. I also learned how the neighborhood had declined as a result of freeway and BART construction, so-called "urban renewal" programs, redlining of mortgages, environmental racism, and the crack cocaine epidemic. I don't know how to describe it except to say that I fell in love with this sunny, resilient, broken place.
