First, Purgatory Lane is not for the squeamish, overly conservative, or those incapable of being surprised on a daily basis by a dearth of odd events and sights. On one little block we have the TYPICAL ASHEVILLE EARTH FAMILY (or TAEF) with their goats who follow them down the sidewalk and half-clad children jumping on an immense trampoline. They nicely juxtapose THE WALL CREW across the street comprised of “Trudy,” the block gossip-keeper and one of my mainstays of neighborhood information; “Tom,” who has more injuries due to insobriety than I can count yet still makes it a personal goal to drink at all hours on, beside, or behind the wall as well as entertain folks with doing somersaults and cartwheels in the road even though he only has one leg and no feet; and a woman who I’ll just call cigarette butt-finder because she constantly shuffles along the sidewalk with her head down looking for used tobacco treasure.

Down from THE WALL CREW are the CELL PHONE SCREAMERS, who between fighting loudly enough so that the whole block can hear about who slept with who’s girlfriend, thumping the block’s residents with rap music at all hours, and getting yelled at by angry grandma, find the time to wheel out the basketball goal and play a pick-up game, which by the way is really fun to watch from my front porch, especially when the goats are out too. It makes me think of what Cuba must be like. 

Then there’s THE ASHEVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT PARKING LOT,  where “Mr. Whaler” and his nephew “Dave” live, an address often visited by Asheville’s finest–rarely by just one of them and frequently by more than 5 (hence the parking lot metaphor). It’s really Dave who makes Westwood PURGATORY. He is by all accounts our most interesting character and our most dubious one, too. On first look, he’s just another obnoxious and loud redneck with doleful brown eyes and lots of tattoos. On second look he’s really a criminal, having been in and out of jail a half dozen/dozen times, and has people yelling threats at him in the middle of the morning such as, “What, you want the fist, too?”  In fact it was the day that I discovered from Trudy of THE WALL CREW that the man yelling this specific threat in a loud, Dixie-gay voice was not Dave’s taller, flamboyant and certainly courageous cousin, as I had first thought, but his boyfriend, that I first had the idea for a reality TV show.

Add to these denizens, the Shambhala Buddhist Center down the block (which is why we aren’t completely in HELL, thank you Chogyam Trungpa),  Asheville’s oldest school of herblism, the Gas-Up, Steebo’s toy dump-truck garden and The Rocket Club, and well, there you have it. The perfect setting for a modern Asheville-Russian-Dickensian novel. If only I could legitimately include The Admiral, the 100 block of Westwood might just swing towards HEAVEN. Too bad. So how do I fit in all this? You tell me, I’m the one who’s writing about it, after all!

But also cool is our not knowing. Just a different kind of fun. After all, it’s the roll of the dice that draws people to Vegas. And so it is with all of life’s little (and big) decisions. I heard this morning that we should approach each moment like it’s Christmas Day, full of presents — and PRESENCE — not to shake in speculation, but to enjoy.

Happy Holly Days.

Let me know about your community. What do you value about it? How did you create or come to be a part of it? What keeps your community going? What challenges and triumphs do you have together? Who would you be without your community?

Thanks for responding!

I am grateful for the people in my life who really show up and thus, prompt me to do the same. I am equally grateful for all those who choose not to show up, thus prompting me to show up. I am grateful for all those who don’t know what the heck I’m writing about because they prompt me to show up too. I am grateful for the myriad experiences I’ve had, the woven tapestry of people, places, and events that give me plenty of opportunity to stretch, smile, and grow. May all people everywhere be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.

If you find yourself struggling because you’re feeling jealous or insecure, do this: pray for your love’s highest happiness, even if that happiness is ultimately found with someone else–anybody besides you. Imagine him or her so happy they radiate. Do you remember how you first felt when you saw your loved one truly happy? How you wanted the world for them and would draw down the moon, if that’s what it took? And did you feel that way with strings attached, saying to yourself, “well yeah, I’ll draw down the moon if…”? Hopefully not!

Love is transformational, supportive, and freeing–for you and for the one you love. Jealousy tears us all up from the inside out, and causes us to forget our true selves and our true capacity to love another.

Life is too short to spend on keeping our love small.

Our brains start to “learn” how to think abstractly when we’re teenagers, or so I’ve heard. The idea of ‘consequences’ for the things we do doesn’t quite sink in until we’re past adolescence. But I have to wonder about the veractiy of this. I do things all the time that I know aren’t good for me. I can beat myself up internally, I can say “I can’t” when I very well know that I can, I cut corners and then pay the price later. So how much do we really hear and pay attention to ourselves and all the things we say upstairs, in our heads, in the dark, or even outloud for everyone to hear? How dark or how light would our prison walls be?

We are in for a lot of wind, my sources say. Much of how we withstand it comes from how we will percieve it. It can destroy, uproot, disrupt, defoliate, rip, tear, and kill. It can also pollinate, transform, remove, brush clean, scrub, reveal, and fluff!