i just finished a great book, all about love. in concluding both the book and a story about the bible’s jacob, bell hooks (who is also from kentucky: represent!) quotes two other writers who address the way we can stay peaceful in the midst of strife:

in that calmness we begin to understand that peace is not the opposite of challenge and hardship. we understand that the presence of light is not a result of darkness ending. peace is found no in the absence of challenge but in our own capacity to be with hardship without judgment, prejudice, and resistance. we discover that we have the energy and the faith to heal ourselves, and the world, through openheartedness in this movement.

this, from soul food: stories to nourish the spirit and the heart, by jack kornfield and christina feldman.

’tis the season to remember these words, eh?

so i learned last night how to customize my google home page, which was almost as exciting as when i found napster in the 90s. i was totally psyched, too, when, with two clicks from me, igoogle placed bart simpson’s and albert einstein’s daily quotes next to one another.

einstein’s quote for today inspired me to blog, and to let you know that i’ll be talking tonight at boundless yoga about the practice of yoga, 730-9 pm, for $10. we teach non-attachment in yoga, but especially as young, hoarding westerns, it’s hard for us sometimes to imagine ourselves not in possession of all the things we’ve accumulated, including our own intellectual “property.”

so the great man’s statement, “the search for truth is more important than its possessions,” provided me an instant, humble reminder of why i became a yoga teacher in the first place. i hope you can join me tonight. and, thank you, igoogle. you’re so cool!

thanks to the new york times article last week, i’ve reconnected with several old friends. one, from my hometown of louisville, reminded me of some conversations we had at least 10 years ago about getting to know a place. at the time, we contemplated what it would be like to stay in a place for a long time, versus traveling a lot of places to live, or stay, for only a brief while.

we can look at this concept in asanas. while my friend suggests the idea is to stay put, to look around, really, and to understand the climate, topography, and personalities of a place, my idea was that traveling was so important: how can you know anything if you don’t expose yourself, physically, mentally, emotionally, to a lot?

now i see the merit in both approaches. since the body is the only landscape we’ll ever know, why not try traveling through it quickly, alighting with the mind to experience a place–the abdominals, the calves? then, in your practice or through the classes you choose, stay for a while in a pose. try a forward fold for, like, five minutes and see what happens.

it’s this comparative, internal experience that we have right here inside us that offers myriad lessons, easily extrapolated to the outside experience. and once we realize that neither experience is actualy different from the other in the end, we begin to understand yoga, union, oneness.

i found this blog post on the wall street journal today describing several methods scientists could potentially use to control the climate. why not install huge solar mirrors to divert solar radiation, some are asking? please, yes, let’s spend money to send thousands of crop-dusting airplanes to blanket the arctic with engineed “particles,” others say.

the salient issue in any yoga or meditation class always comes back to control: what is in your sphere of influence, and what is not. one of the practices of raja yoga (the yoga we do in studios, the yoga of the mind) is to consider all possibilities. maybe crop-dusting planes in the artic is actually the answer. perhaps the long view is that this practice will save the earth.

i’ll be honest, though: it’s when i get to this level of justification–save the earth–that i have to stop and ask myself what we’re really considering here. what are we doing, and what are we reacting to?

the sudden hype over global climate change is obviously justified; only the diehards at this point are calling the rest of us chicken littles. but the question is: what are we trying to change and why? does anyone seriously think that a 4.5 billion year old rock won’t balance itself out, even if that means destroying everything on the planet that we–its squatters, effectively–call life?

crop-dusting the arctic is like taping the sprained ankle of a basketball player and telling him to get back on the court. as any fan has watched, this star might still be able to play and, position depending, will block, defend, and/or shoot for the rest of the game. but playing will in fact make that ankle worse, which in turn will lengthen the icing, xrays, and rehab when the game is over.

it isn’t even that our short-term, scientific solutions won’t help–the player with the sprained ankle might win the game. it’s rather that these scientific forays, and indeed the money and resources backing them, run the risk of diverting the attention from the real issue, which is where we actually are now. as a collective group of 5 billion people, and certainly the billions before us, we have created this.

the questions, then, are: what human practices have directly caused this problem? how do we stop them? how do we all accept responsibility for the fact that “developing” to this point has necessarily been derived of selfish, greedy, short-sighted, and in fact quite brilliant behavior and decisions? most important, is it possible for us to let go of the hubris of control, and to recognize that the 100 years we’re here, and any decision we make during that time, is not really going to impact the 4.5 billion more years this rock might keep spinning around the sun?

the point i’m making is that looking outward and upward is not always the place to go. the weather problems we are experiencing, and will continue to “suffer through,” are nothing more than a slap from earth, like any of our moms disciplining us as children because we reached for too many cookies at once. mom had a point: eat too many cookies, and you’ll get sick.

“CAM,” or Complementary and Alternative Modalities, is a healthcare movement trying to get your attention. Lobbyists and other interested parties are right now encouraging the submission of comments to the FDA regarding a “guidance” that the FDA will use, effectively, to make herbs, vitamins, and minerals “medicine.” from what i can tell on first glance, this means that our access to these earth-based (as in, naturally occurring) materials will be significantly restricted (and drive the price higher). a full copy of the proposal from the FDA is here.

i don’t understand the issue completely, but several of the emails i’ve received in the last 24 hours point to this site as an important read if you are interested in whether or not pharmaceutical companies exert a strong level of control over the FDA.

there’s also a lot on this site, including the option to send your signature on a petition to stop the FDA. to comment to the FDA directly, go here.

if you know anything more about this issue and care to explain it on this site, i am very interested. i will do more reading and post the same.

so we (boundless teachers and staff) are finalizing our agreement on boundless’s values. we’ve got the mission down (see right if you are reading this on the home page), but we have been debating and discussing the values. they will be up this week.

if you can vote or give me info on this piece; i think it’s an important thing to reflect on:

• honoring the body as our first home, and trusting it at all times

versus

• honoring the body as our first home, and keeping it safe at all times

because sometimes we need to feel a little unsafe in order to effect
change, right? surely a butterfly emerging from its cocoon doesn’t feel
totally SAFE, but i would suggest that it feels TRUST. when we are facing
our demons in meditation, or handstand, or in a deep backbend, playing the
edge of safety is, in effect, deepening your TRUST in the fact that it’s
all good.

the purpose of this bullet is to identify the importance of rooting into
the first chakra, or (in a combined first/second chakra) MOTHER EARTH. i
don’t think we feel SAFE in a hailstorm, but we have to TRUST that she’s
throwing ice down on us for a reason.

so i was at a restaurant/bar friday night and had an experience worth relating in a yoga context. the place was crowded and there were few places to sit, but it appeared otherwise in pockets across the bar. smokers leaving their posts to go outside for a few minutes created the appearance of vacant spots.

not yet having made the connection between vacant seats and smokers outside, my girl friends spotted a long table manned by four guys. the table was long enough to seat 8-10. i walked up to the table and asked if we could share the table, offering to sit at one end while they sat at the other. one of the guys (who were all straight) immediately said no, we actually have people here; they are just outside for a few minutes.

as we then stood nearby this relatively empty table and then watched the smoker-guys (no women) return, my friends and i reflected on how interesting it is that people go out to meet people–but when given the opportunity to do so, they often stick to what they know. we agreed that this felt like a dc, or perhaps more broadly, an east-coast phenomenon. in our respective hometowns, for example, we felt the men would have been friendlier in this case. as in, three small women sharing a long table with a bunch of guys could actually have been fun.

the ego-rejection part of this story is uninteresting to me, because rejection happens all the time (it always hurts, though, right? rejection, an act, has suffering, a feeling, on speed dial). what’s more interesting to me is how strong the feeling of separate-ness i feel, observe, and hear from other people in dc all the time. are we all so tired from our jobs, lonely from having moved so far away from home, anxious about being rejected ourselves, that we can’t just be friendly and offer up a little bit of space?

do we feel we have fought so hard for personal space that we find it difficult to share?

here are some solutions i’ve come up with: look everyone in the eye that i talk to now. listen and see more. in the wake of experiences like this bar-based one over the weekend (and to debunk the myth: yes, yoginis go to bars and drink sometimes), my intention is to examine how i respond to someone i don’t know, whether it’s on the metro, at boundless, at a parking spot i’m giving up. whatever. i just want to be nicer, and meet nicer people.

last week i said i’d be posting until the end of the month on which classes were right for you. i’ve elected to cancel tonight’s challenge class because george bush is giving his annual state of the union; the other time i canceled this class was in 2003, the night he announced our invasion of iraq. as i reconnect with my own physical practice, which i lost for much of 2006, i’ve remembered an important lesson from yoga. doing the asanas (poses), especially the basic ones once you’ve done them repetitively for a while, is like riding a bike. going through the motions is easy; your body has muscular memory associated with triangle poses, tree pose, and so on.

what’s difficult to to do, when you’re actively involved in deepening your practice, is to walk that fine line between physical and mental challenge. as the boundless teachers and i discussed at a staff meeting over the weekend, physical and mental challenge are often inversely correlated. in other words, to feel physically challenged is sometimes to be mentally checked out of what the body is really experiencing–and that’s actually very natural, since the brain deals with pain and discomfort in myriad ways. ask anyone who works in an ER: the variations between people’s perception of their own pain is astonishingly great.

therefore, as you introduce what the mind considers “pain” or “discomfort” to the body, the brain, trying to be a good muscle like all the others, assists the situation in the best way it knows how. the trick is to use your own powers of observation–this process of seeing, sensing, experiencing the moment is not the brain, but the greater awareness we all have access to, all the time. it is a much larger picture than the brain is actually capable of giving you.

so in my challenge yoga class, which i’m converting April 3 to an intensive evening class every tuesday 7-930 p, i ask the students to perform more “challenging” poses, but with a deepening knowledge of their own body in space and time. that means that the poses are just the means through which the students observe their mind. this is difficult at the end of a 10-minute headstand. it’s challenging when attempting to observe the finer details of triangle pose. it’s particularly tough in savasana (corpse pose).

but yet, there we are, taking it up a notch through the spirit of the practice, and not because we’ve become better gymnasts. flexibility and strength in a yoga pose are nothing more than a reflection of a flexible and strong mind. to be sure, i entered yoga in 1995 so inflexible that teachers would pull me off to the side during forward folds. today, i have grown so flexible that i need to get some of that unbending-ness back! it is the practice of yoga to accept that my body can swing dramatically from one extreme to the other if i let it go. then, it is my duty, and very much in my own self interest, to manage those vacillations with equanimity.

in practical terms, for challenge yoga, you need to be able to turn upside down with little fear. that means headstand, handstand, shoulderstand, forearm balance. and wheel pose. though these poses are external metaphors of internal energy, they are also practical applications of a deepening practice.

in day-to-day terms, i am canceling tonight’s class because it is the job of the yogini to observe her mind at all times. tonight’s speech, and the energy in the country (or at least in DC), is an opportunity to experience social behavior observation (yamas) and self-reflection (niyamas) that buttress the practice of yoga. if you plan on watching the state of the union as a yoga practitioner, reflect on these words before, during, and after: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, moderation, non-hoarding, purity, contentment, discipline, self-education, surrender to god.

my practice blows. i decided that last night as i was taking a yoga class: the stresses of running a small business, in particular, and to a lesser degree my own conditioned response to take on more than i can chew, have prevented me from having a real asana (pose) practice over the past year. i have been incapable of developing space in my life to practice yoga on my own, in a way because it’s so lonely to practice that way. (therefore) i have come up with scores of other things to do, daily, other than go to my yoga room and stay there for a little bit.

like all boundless students, i am electing now to pay for what i could do, on my own, for free. i am doing this in order to practice in a community, and to put myself under the tutelage of someone who knows more than i do.

it is such a relief. i am so grateful to give myself over to two teachers (two classes a week, one in herndon, one in bethesda) who a) know what they are talking about, b) want to help me, and c) attract a group of like-minded people desiring to learn in the same way i want to learn.

in savasana (corpse pose, the last pose of class), as i struggled to be quiet and still, i was reminded of how difficult it is to relax. of course i know this–intellectually we all do. but to lie there with 30 other people and feel the whole room careen into softness, well, that’s why i titled this blog post “yoga trust.” it is critical that you feel safe in a yoga class, that your yoga teacher have the capacity to create a space in which you can, in fact, attempt to relax, and that during the more physically-based moments (learning to stand correctly, experiencing an arm balance for the first time, letting go of your self-criticisms in a forward fold) you are cared for. this caretaking might not come the way you want it; and it is up to you to determine whether the teacher is knowledgeable, ego-aware, and compassionate.

the thing is, at the end of the experience, as you relax into undoubtedly the hardest pose in the class (again, savasana), you need to feel a level of trust — that you’re in the right place, at the right time, and that it’s all good.

so i’m back in the saddle after living out of a suitcase for a month. i’ve found that traveling is oppositionally correlated to sustaining a regular blog. this is an interesting first chakra issue: when you are not grounded (and can you be, traveling? that is my question to the energy practitioners out there.), it is difficult to manifest anything, especially from your creative source.

this entry, and the ones coming up for the rest of the month, are devoted to explaining not just the types of classes we have at boundless, but our teachers and their approach. and mine. i will first start with the types of classes to answer the many questions we always receive at the beginning of every year: how should i get into yoga? how many times a week should i practice? what should i wear? what type of yoga do you teach at boundless? should i do the intro to yoga series or the beginning classes? what, in god’s name, is a “challenge” class, and how do i know if i’m up for that? can i do an open hatha class if i am a beginner? and so on.

i am recounting questions our front-desk sirens, teachers, and i have received. i’m sure there are more. start posting, start asking, and i’ll respond daily (or every other day, as i continue to unpack the suitcase) with answers explaining what class is right for you at boundless.

we are grateful and excited to introduce all these new classes to the studio starting this week! yogilates, yoga for guys, wake-up vinyasa, restorative yoga series, pranayama breath series, and more! call us or email with any questions.

as arbitrary as time is, the beginning of a new year causes reflection. to envision a more positive 2007 for your self and community is a helpful act. envisioning reality, as both quantum physics and yoga teach, is at least half the reality occurring outside you. in other words, being clear about what you want, how you want it, and what you do with it once it happens, helps to influence the events in your immediate vicinity, if not also those farther away.

that’s why i can’t help but mention the hanging of saddam hussein. it could just be me, fascinated by the immediacy of my experience of his murder. it’s everywhere, all over the web, in hard-copy newspapers, on radio, on TV. most people i know have participated on some level in his death. thanks to modern media, everyone has witnessed this event in a place, or in a way, intimate to them.

it is difficult to answer this question: how do we pursue joy when there is this much suffering? when yoga is the science of uniting the ego self with the larger, uninterrupted, universal self (in other words: saddam is in all of us), it is yogic to honor, if not also mourn, the death of this murderous dictator. and those he killed. and those still dying and suffering.

so here we are (or at least i am, and you reading this blog), contemplating self-improvement for the new year. there is joy in life, but how do we experience it? as the adage goes, happiness is not the goal, but the path. to set your own expecations and visions for a new year, which is nothing more than a mental label for a new chapter of your own experience, you dig in, look at your response to the world around you, and decide how you want to change it.

i was driving back from vacation in upstate new york last night and i thought it was a joke. i’d been on 15 north most of the time; it’s a road that takes you through neighborhoods, strip malls, and, the other half of the time, a pseudo-highway. i quite like it, because most of the time it feels homey.

it was late, around 11 pm, by the time i hit I-270. all of a sudden, as though a switch had been turned on, every car on the road was hurtling past me at 20 miles over the speed limit. i was already speeding — my self-justified, cop-friendly, nine-miles-an-hour-in-excess — so i, too, was one of these speeders. but as perhaps is the underlying debate on drunk yoga, it seemed a matter of degrees. we were all still going very fast, and as we all know high speeds in any car at any time are dangerous, but the shock of being passed by court-worthy speeders was an interesting experience.

at 11 pm at night, our bodies are designed to rest. having spent a week away from this city, to then be introduced to it at a time when the sun had been down for a good six hours, was a jolt.

it got me thinking: just how out of balance are we? when there is that much movement, so unremitting and close to you, how closed can you be from it? at this particular moment, i noticed my heart beat increase, my palms sweaty, and my brow slightly furrowed. perhaps because i practice yoga, perhaps because i’d been away, or perhaps because you just can if you want to because it’s really not that hard, i slowed everything down: my mind, my heart, my car.

it was in the moment i felt tremendous gratitude for the ability to recognize how i felt, and for the tools to get down off the ledge — one that shows up as though you’re in a video game — out of nowhere.

one of my intentions for the new year is to slow down and, in doing so, notice if i can actually be present in my body more often. i plan to do this because i think it is healthier, and though i’m not sure how long i will live, i want to do so well.

the winter solstice is dark, literally and figuratively. it’s strange that we (is it only america?) have created such hustle and bustle during the quietest time of the year. the days are as short as they are going to be for another 365 days, and the nights as long. it is time to stay in bed longer, hug loved ones longer, and stay warm as the earth around us freezes. it’s time to contemplate what, of your daytime, out-there, yang persona, you want to bury in the cold ground.

tori is doing a vigorous practice friday, in a very american approach to the solstice. indomitable optimism is what i like to call it: she will challenge everyone to as many sun salutes as they can hack. it’s a donation class, and it starts at 415 p. the idea behind the class is that, at the moment of the solstice, you can experience the actual energy of the earth heading toward more sunlight.

and then you can go out and get drunk.

there is a fundamental flaw in the job drug companies have to sell us drugs.

publicly-traded drug companies are necessarily beholden to their stockholders, who have loaned a certain sum of money to the company with the expectation that they will get more money back at a later date.

because the first (and many would suggest only) job of a company is to make money, drug companies have to make money selling drugs. A big way a publicly-traded company increases its value and pays off its debt is by developing an economy of scale, i.e., the lipitor market, the celebrex market.

this means any drug company can’t make a drug that is only right for me. rather, that company has to know that the millions of dollars it spends on R&D, thus taking money away from the bottom line that gets paid out to stockholders, will be recovered and a profit made.

So it is in pfizer’s, and its shareholders’ interest, to sell you lipitor and celebrex. Whether you actually need these drugs is not, necessarily, a concern of Pfizer because the more lipitor Pfizer sells, the happier its employees (year-end bonuses), and the more gratified the stockholders (increased stock price, more money in junior’s college fund). It is only natural that the leaders of this company would want more money than employees, and, possibly, shareholders, because they are the ones steering the ship, paying the bills on time, and keeping their own little corner of the free market churning.

the answers to this issue are not easy, but we have to talk about them. to start, several ideas come to my mind:

1) you are the only person who will ever know what you need. Knowing what you need, including exactly what you need to heal (it could be relearning the breath, it could be celebrex), is power.

you need to work with trained people whose single intention is to help you, to determine what you need to heal, because you cannot do it alone. to this end, pfizer (eg) can be viewed as a helper, but not, i would argue, an advisor in any way.

2) The relationship that you, as a consumer, have with a publicly-traded drug company is inherently disempowering. Desire for more money in the free market is arguably insatiable, and the expectation of pfizer’s stockholders for more money is driving that company’s efforts to sell you drugs. From a yogic point of view, it is important to have this information when you make a decision to take any prescribed drug.

3) There was a time when individual communities, small ones all over the globe, had local healers who worked in service of healing the ailments of that community. At this time people were not living past 40 years of age. It is clear we will never go back to that time, but we all could stand an increase in community-based healers to balance the “power” of free-market drug peddling, which is our reality today.

so i was driving to the studio today to meet a client, and i was wending with the car through side streets in order to avoid any major traffic lights. love that about dc.

suddenly, as i hit the gas and drove away from a four-way stop i had just paused at (one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two), a car came barreling down the street perpendicular to mine, the driver oblivious to the stop sign she was about to run. there i was, suddenly in her line of vision and right in the middle of the crossing. she slammed on her brakes, already through her stop sign she’d just run, inches from hitting my car.

the whole thing was lucky: having my barely-accelerating car hit by another one going 30+ miles an hour would probably have sucked. i am grateful for the fact that she looked up! so, in the mini-moments i spend processing — “oh my god, what is she doing? oh my god, she is going to hit me! oh my god! she is such an idiot for driving so fast and ignoring basic traffic rules!” — i find it fascinating that i arrived at the conclusion that she was an idiot.

just before the moment that her car’s nose stopped at my car’s side, i had thrown my hand up in the air as through to stop her with my special yogic superpowers. as i began to process my anger toward her, which arose from the fear i experienced at nearly being side-swiped, i used that upraised hand to gesture at her and mouth, “what are you doing?! that’s a stop sign!” i pointed to the stop sign, reminding her of what she’d obviously already figured out; my face was in a scowl, and i’m sure i looked as afraid and angry as i felt. her face scowled back, as though it was my fault the stop sign was there.

in all, the situation was great because neither of us was physically hurt, but sucky because we both drove away with no contact, pissed at the other. how many of us have forgotten about a stop sign or nearly side-swiped someone? all of us. how many of us have almost been hit, or almost hit someone? all of us. but there this woman and i were, looking all mean at each other in a moment that arose from mindlessness, fear, and therefore anger. i drove on, and she drove on, both of us feeling bad, not least because we’d put that energy out there.

my question is: how could i have processed my fear and anger, using my powers of observation and clarity, and actually forgiven her in that moment instead of shaking an angry fist at an unwitting stop sign, and giving her the frowny-face that, at that moment, i felt sure she deserved? surely there is a better way than the character assassination that inevitably follows commuter situations such as these.

[Origin: 1350–1400; ME (< MF consumer) < L consūmere, equiv. to con- con- + sūmere to take up (perh. < *suzm- < *subzm- < *subs-(e)m-, equiv. to subs-, var. of sub- sub- + emere to take, buy)]

—Synonyms 1. exhaust, deplete. 4. squander, dissipate.

i am more interested in dictionary.com’s synonyms than etymology. it sounds like “to consume” is not good. is it or not? particulary for this week ahead of us, i humbly suggest we contemplate this question.

so we’re going to restart the boundless book club with the bloody chamber, a book of fairy tales rewritten by brit angela carter. we’ll meet the first monday of december. email me directly to get more information and address.

after yesterday’s post, i decided it’s a good idea to distinguish in these posts between the yoga of the internal world, and that of the external experience. discussions on politics, society, living in dc or wherever, is an exploration of yoga, the uniting of the lower and higher selves, outside of us. the yoga that takes place in the classroom, on your own mat, and, inside you in any situation really, is an exploration of the inner world of yoga.

i believe we will see that the two are the same, but depending on who and where you are spiritually, physically, and emotionally, you might be more interested in one or the other.

in other news, following are good poses for a hangover:

1) child’s pose, laying on several blankets to support the belly and increase attention to breath in that area

2) pigeon pose, ditto on blankets

3) exhaling through mouth. it takes the heat out of the system and, as i’ve been taught, 70% of the body’s toxicity (i want to do more research on this because i’ve learned this 70% business in the yoga world but haven’t seen it anywhere else).

4) a lot of corpse pose, savasana

is that it’s an identity shift for some in washington and, depending on a few thousand people in virginia and montana, a bigger one than most of us expected a few weeks ago.

it reminds me of a conversation i had last night watching results in a bar filled with periodic outbursts of applause and cheering when one or the other team scored a point. the cnn set, i noticed, was set up like a sports show and jeopardy combined.

over the noise, i was talk-shouting with a former washingtonian who observed that my living here longer than a few years was atypical, since most people don’t want to do it. he said that, to him, dc had no soul, that it was unclear which neighborhood you were ever in (as compared with new york city, where he lives now), and that’s why he couldn’t live here for very long. my inference is that he felt dis-identified here, unincluded and a little lost, wandering around and wondering, on some level, where his peeps, his real community, actually were.

my conversation with this nice guy, whose intention wasn’t to slam dc, got me thinking. my first reaction in that moment in the bar was to feel a pit in my stomach, as though i were dc and also have no soul. i felt terrible then, because i desperately want to believe i have a soul, and i don’t want to acknowledge a soulless reality in myself.

in that moment of reaction, i allowed the objective experience of dc (dc is just a thing, a concept in our minds) to influence my subjective experience of it. i thought, oh, you’re right, dc has no soul and i therefore have no soul because i live here and the soullessness of dc has become part of me. as important, my yucky feeling smacked of my own denial that his observation, in fact, does have some truth. in yoga, all observations have truth, and it was damn difficult yogic work to feel a connection not just with him but with all experiences of soullessness in dc. Or anywhere.

in the light of a rainy day, i thought about three things:

1) holy (indian) cow! i have self-confidence issues!

2) my free-radical theory of dc. i believe there are pockets of very interesting, soulful, and mindful people floating all over town, but their groups either aren’t big enough, or soulfully connected enough (!), or something, which prevents them from finding each other and discovering and believing in their own ability to gather some girth and influence as it does in fact happen in culture and community all over the world. Many people remain free-radicals blobbing around in an extremely interesting, educated, and well-meaning small, east-coast town. And then they move.

3) black residents of dc. i wondered what they would say about this soulless business.

Talk about perspective, right?