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In-Person Creative Community Time
Hello Braided Bridge Community! Let’s come together in person for creative time, and kick it off by rescheduling the potluck we had to postpone earlier this summer.
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We will begin with the potluck on Sept 28th, and continue with regular studio time on 2nd and 4th Sundays of each month for personal projects open to all skill levels. Kim or Michelle will be on hand to teach or support projects. The Vandercook letterpress, Griffin etching press, and other equipment are available for printmaking and bookmaking. The studio is also suitable for various drawing and painting techniques and collage. Michelle's skills as an experienced paper maker and textile artist can be tapped. Our Internet connection is available for media projects. Does your creative work take some other form? Come anyway and show us! Bring ideas or just explore!
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POTLUCK: Sunday, Sept 28th, 1-4 pm pacific
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CREATIVE COMMUNITY WORKSHOPS
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2nd & 4th Sundays Ongoing 1-4 pm pacific
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RSVP to receive Kim's phone number to use if the gate is closed when you arrive. If you already have the number, RSVP is appreciated but not required.
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There is no fee for community workshops. We work on a gift economy basis, and hope you'll support us in ways that feel right for you, whether financial, participatory, or both.
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Court Watch Drawings
Michelle has begun a series of visits to the immigration court in San Francisco, where cameras are not allowed, to draw the proceedings. She is careful to protect the identities of the respondents, but is there as an observer, and offers us a glimpse into the experiences taking place in this setting. She chose to focus on juvenile court, and described seeing a pile of toys on the floor of the courtroom to keep them occupied or offer comfort. The children wear earphones to hear the translator. Sometimes there is a lawyer for them and sometimes there isn't.
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We feel it is so important to share these drawings, that we will include a couple beside this paragraph, but close this email with a number of them so you can take them in. Please reach out if you would like to know more, or to find out about being a court watcher. Your presence is helpful even if you don't draw –most observers don't.
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Drawings continue at the end. Please scroll down.
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What's Been Happening?
Below is a short update of things people in the Braided Bridge community have been doing. If you'd like to share a project or happening please reach out!
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Welcome Barbara! Our newest Braided Bridge member is a long time part of our Homebridge Connect team. Barbara collects donations of clothing and treasures from brings them to people who need them, or uses them to raise funds to support others.
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Melissa is in Hawaii this week for the International Street Medicine Institute Symposium. She was invited to join the board of this group back when she was on the Tiburcio Vasquez street medicine team, and remains there now, as founder of RISE. She brings her years of lived experience of homelessness, and her skill in advocacy.
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Bill has not let his 80+ years nor severe back pain stop him from joining rallies in Portland, and writing poetry on our present times and response to authoritarianism. He is also putting a letterpress book of poems together for his children.
Michelle has been carving linoleum blocks for postcard mailing (see below). Join us at our Sunday Creative Community Workshops to help with printing and mailing or create your own! See also the post above about her drawings from immigration court.
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Dee has been planning legal clinics for unhoused people in San Jose and Gilroy. She will soon be bringing popup legal clinics to unhoused communities in Oakland and San Leandro with support from Braided Bridge. We could use some help with supplies. See our wish list in the donation section below on how you can help.
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Kim has been continuing with the Active Love writing and zines. She also was a semifinalist working on a public art proposal for the Mission Boulevard corridor in Cherryland, but was not selected. The proposal focused on community abundance.
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Jared shares that his work on healing has had many twists and turns but he feels he is approaching a safe harbor and getting back into the groove of things. He's looking forward to helping more with the Braided Bridge website!
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The Testimony Project is a series of very short stories, describing what has been witnessed by people offering support and advocacy for houseless people, or by the people themselves who have been unhoused.
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Why Can't We Care for Our Neighbors?
Alameda County Healthcare for the Homeless obtained a grant to supply water to unhoused people over the summer. The grant is likely running out in a couple of weeks unless additional funding has been secured. The distribution is handled by enlisting community groups to each collect up to 10 cases of water per week and bring it to people on the streets. I've been bringing water to three communities in West Oakland. People are very thankful for the water, but often hungry and ask hopefully if I have food. Sometimes I do, but often I don't. I've met people who are hoping to be allowed to move to the transitional site described in our last mailing, where participants were not allowed a refrigerator, microwave, or any kind of cooking facilities in their rooms, nor are these in the community areas, nor are the residents provided with a sustaining amount of food to eat. Some housed people are fond of saying that people are unhoused because they want to be. That you need to arrest them to force them to receive housing. And yet I know most people feel trapped, without meaningful help available. One man I spoke to wanted to move into the site with little food so he would have enough stability to be able to work again. He's an electrician. I hope he'll be accepted but there is certainly no guarantee he will be.
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There is a policy change going before the Oakland City Council this month that will increase the pain inflicted on the unhoused population. The City calls it the "Encampment Abatement Policy," as though the humans being targeted are rats or insects. Any time dehumanizing language is used to refer to a group of people, it's to make it easier to harm them, to bring about their demise. This is no different. Already Oakland, and many other communities have pursued a policies that spend large sums of money on ineffective sweeps, destabilizing people who don't have reasonable options to go to, sucking up the funds that could be used to provide food, water, and to build actual permanent affordable housing. The community is told the people are offered help, but very few receive any, and often the political lines about help offered are completely fabricated. This "Encampment Abatement Policy" appears to remove any pretense of offering help, and simply destroys. If someone is living in an RV, this policy removes the RV and leaves them living on the street with nothing at all. Money is spent pushing people around from place to place until they lose so much they drop dead. We have learned of so many deaths this summer alone.
This week, I received a donation to bread. When I brought it to one of the communities where I take the water, where people are also hungry, they showed me they had been posted. A sweep is coming. When the City came to post the signs, there was no mention of available shelter.
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If you are willing to help stop this cycle, here are some things you can do:
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- Sign this petition
- Call or email the Oakland Council Members and ask them to vote NO on the "Encampment Abatement Policy" (Consider contacting even if you are not an Oakland resident. Let them know eyes are on them far and wide.)
- Attend public comment period at the Sept 10th Public Safety Committee meeting. Public safety should not exclude safety for people who are poor!
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Winding Path
Braided Bridge invites sharing of people's varied spiritual practices and experiences. This will span the faith traditions and lives of people in our community. Michelle shares this reflection:
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After my assault, the first time I felt connected to myself again was making a Pomo style basket in a workshop with Corinne Pearce (https://corinepearce.com/). It’s notable to me that these crafts – cordage, basketweaving, all crafts to make something to carry and connect – also begin with something turning, or spinning asymmetrically to make symmetry. These processes also helped this out of balance rape survivor return to my center.
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Recently, I was spending time at a skillshare gathering hosted by Steph Rue (https://www.stephrue.com/fieldnotes/cordage-gathering), where she and friend Tanya Lieberman shared methods of spinning cordage from tule fiber in the Wintu style, and spinning hangi (Korean handmade paper) to make cords for jisueng (Korean paper weaving).
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Steph later shared in a post to social media about writing a letter to her grandmother, and spinning the paper upon which the letter was written into a cord which she wore on her wrist.
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Enchanted by this idea, I set out to something similar. I set out to write a letter to the man who raped me, but as I began to write it turned into a letter to myself. I wrote it on handmade paper.
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Part of what I wrote read:
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I remember feeling so cut off from myself, so lost, disconnected and I couldn’t see a way to return to myself. It felt impossible. Now, I cannot imagine not trying, that returning to myself has been a blessing, to be home again in my own soul. Yet I remember how distant and impossible it had felt-and that feeling was an additional kind of suffering. I can’t explain it, such a psychic wound of mammoth proportions, in which I still stood on my own feet, while the ground beneath felt as if it was constantly shaking.
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I want to say this to anyone who needs to hear it – it is possible to return to yourself. It is not easy. I had to do the work, to face everything that made me uncomfortable or sad within myself. I had to look into my own darkness. I had to let my body feel the anger and grief for as long as it needed to.
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But by letting myself feel these emotions, by embodying them, making space for them to be within me, slowly, led to them easing. They did not depart, but they lost their power over me. This was my winding path back to myself.
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And as I followed this path, I reached a point where I could say to myself, Welcome home, body, mind, soul. It felt like such a relief. (Read More & See Pictures)...
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Active Love: A Change in Operating System
Guiding Principles 1-3
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(...continued) The core principle of this practice is that the Law is Love. The guiding principles provide direction in what is meant by that.
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1. Love Is Based in Relationship
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An environment that is peaceful, that exists in a state of justice, is one in which beings of that environment are in healthy relationship with each other
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2. Violence Separates Relationship
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Violence encompasses physical harm as well as condemnation, accusation, and includes even words that separate people from each other or from living from their core selves. It includes systemic divisions within communities, and building fear towards a being or group. Violence is addressed in ways that attempt to support healthier relationships.
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3. Restoration Heals Violence
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Injustice, or violence, is fundamentally a tearing in relationship, that then must be mended, reconciled. The practices of restorative justice, including self-opening, witnessing, truth-telling, accountability, compassion for all beings, reparation, and reconciliation are some of our most important tools for justice and peace.
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Studio Use, Joining In, Supporting
Studio rental time is available. Reply to this email to make arrangements. If you'd like to join our work, reply to this email to let us know. If you'd like to contribute financially to keeping this work going, you can use the button below. We are a 501c3 organization and are deeply grateful for your support.
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Wish List for Pop Up Legal Clinic
We are in the process of planning pop up legal clinics for unhoused people. We will be bringing these clinics to the streets where people are living. Can you help us with some supplies? Either new or used is fine: We need:
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- Folding tables (4-5)
- Folding chairs (8-10)
- Canopies (2)
- portable printer
- hot spot
- clip boards
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Court Watch Drawings (Continued)
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Recipients of this new mailing include past donors and workshop participants, members of Braided Bridge, participants of Homebridge Connect, people familiar with the starting of Braided Bridge, and a couple of close friends. If you are on this list and didn't want to be, please do feel welcome to unsubscribe and accept my sincere apologies. –Kim
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