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This recent article, linked here, appears in the current issue of Concrete Wave Magazine. CW is one of the world's leading longboard and skate culture publications. The article looks at the subject of spirituality in relation to skateboarding. This installment is the first of two.
The work weaves several voices of varying experience and perspective, speaking on a range of topics. Included in the mix is local skate enthusiast and advocate, B. Lane. The piece was written by the magazine's founder and publisher, Michael Brooke.
The skaters responded to a pre-set list of questions:
1. What drew you to longboarding in the first place?
2. If you believe that longboarding is connected to your spirituality, what are some of the ways this is manifested.
3. Does longboarding help clear your mind, refocus your thoughts, give you insights?
4. Do you skate alone? Do you skate with a group? Do you do little bit of both? Describe the feelings this brings you.
5. Longboarding is about balance. Balance can reflect harmony. Therefore longboarding can promote a harmonious life. Agree or disagree? Why or why not?
6. What is the relationship between your religious beliefs and your spirituality?
7. Has longboarding helped you attain inner peace? If so, how? If not, do you think it ever will.
8. What do others feel about your spirituality as it relates to longboarding (assuming it does relate to longboarding)
9. Has longboarding led to other areas of exploration for you? (ie The Spirit Molecule, mysticism, yoga)
While the terrain of longboarding is more the road than the park, there is a significant overlap of forms, skaters, and venues.
As Brattleboro is still riddled with how to accomodate skating, and has a distance to go before it will be a functionally skate-friendly habitat, it seems worth taking a look at some accepting and progressive horizons already realized in other places.
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for an article about spirituality, is not ethereal, but rather very practical,
and focused on the moment.
It passed with little note that Vermont recently was named the most
pedestrian friendly state. Yet to my perception, Brattleboro is terrible for
pedestrians, a veritable hazard zone.
Item #1 - Today's Reformer Editorial- Watch Your Step
http://www.reformer.com/reformereditorials/ci_19873552
Item #2- Is from the editor's blurb from a book: Fighting Traffic.
"Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse
and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most
streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not
belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In
Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles,
the American city required not only a physical change but also a social
one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its
streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists
belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and
sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users
struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines
developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the
1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled
motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts"
or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians,
police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown
businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the
solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and
parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and
downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency."
Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the
streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in
the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of
the automotive city in America and how social groups shape
technological change."
It seems to me, whether we are talking about longboarding, or bicycling,
or the threat to walkers, there is a clear recognition of a problem, but a
dearth of action.
In light of the recent tragic loss of life, and knowing well how dangerous the
situation here is for human powered transport…we should, and can do much
more…i.e….simple steps..Los Angeles paints the bike lanes a BRIGHT green.
Mostly it's about focus and priorities. If a municipality can't see the
value as an environmental step, or a health initiative....at least we should
move beyond lip-service, into effecting change as a public safety and quality-
of-life measure.
That is spirituality in action.