People's Park on Earth Day

For Earth Day, I took Nick over to People's Park to help serve with the Food Not Bombs East Bay organization.

Food Not Bombs is activism, not charity. The East Bay FNB gets food donated from organic grocers, bakers, and even the folks at Scharfenberger's Chocolate. They prepare (typically) vegetarian meals and serve it to homeless people. In some areas of the country, they get arrested for feeding the homeless.

People's Park was celebrating its anniversary. On stage, spoken word performers worked to hold our attention as well as the music bands did. I spent time chopping vegies for stir fry, Nick played Frisbee and then helped. Later he worked on scraping and cleaning the pan that had potatoes burnt to the bottom.

I continue to be the most well-connected "outsider." I recognized one of the principle activists as a neighbor, but she couldn't quite place me. My friend Kait showed up with all the ingredients to make seed balls; she had all the leftover seeds from the Ecology Center's recent seed swap. She had a bunch of news for me from the local Permaculture world. Darryl deBoer is designing a bamboo structure of some sort for the local group. She told me more; I don't recall what.

The stage noise and the rambunctiousness of everyone celebrating in the park gave me sensory overload. I came back from the brink twice; the third time, I was looking for Nick so I could leave, He found me, standing numb on a hill top. I went home and didn't exactly nap, but cetainly closed myself into a small dark space until I recovered.

Nick got to do some contact juggling, some helping, some play, and he scored a Food Not Bombs T-shirt which is wearing very proudly. He's probably telling his classmates all about it today.