The Senior City Center

When I entered the City Senior Center with my Open Mic proposal to increase resilience and decrease apartheid dissonance I could hear no music, see no dancing. The quilting room and the game room, even the pool tables, were as quiet as the library, which at least held four contemplative people scattered in their own secluded spaces. Like visiting a sad monastery, without tai chi, chi gong, walking meditation, and/or yoga classes filled with abundant creaky grace. Back then The Senior Center felt like a sad retirement home, day care for some, a reprieve from unmitigated loneliness away from an empty nest, a dusty divorce, tiring widow weeds, snarky dark separations, untimely and unwanted departures. A place to avoid risks of dying unhappily in sequestered marginalized 24/7 isolation More anxious now than anticipating long weekday evenings dark nights and bleak winter weekends Where no outside kindness for aching bones and sinus cavities could be found in one's private old age tomb. Fading failing irrelevant uncherished rooms feel frightening, sometimes angry waiting to die stations for prisoners of neglect Victims of systemic trauma aging alone in a retiring and not repurposing silent place. Now returning, as we cooperatively rebuild our Senior Wisdom Center, former inmates remember ourselves as guilty criminals, blaming and shaming and judging our sins of lacking compassion Throwing our humbled lot in with all those Otherers accused of Earth Matricide Smothering our organic Center with extractive plunder Abortion of our regenerative Planet, HOME plant exploited for anthroprivileged economic and short-term apartisan gain. I couldn't feel much active hope for multi-regenerative communion For sacred transmutation of bad and mad and sad becoming win/win cooperatively owned and managed root systemic glad Back before we became a Senior Wisdom Center conjoined with the City Arts Center exploring neighborhood after-school and weekend Open Mic and Community SingAlong Dances and Flash Mob WellBeing Engagement events. This switch from segregated Senior Center and unhoused lack of any Youth Center to Senior Wisdom Center supporting neighborhood MusEcology Skill Centers Began with cooperatively engaging healthy CrownChakra songs while dancing wealthy RootChakra cooperatively co-invested rhythms Dipolar co-arising mind/body patterns, win/win indigenous governance systems more friendly to universal health care minds seeking resonant co-redemption opportunities through unitarian wealth care bodies drawn away from risky win/lose trauma repurposing toward resilient win/win co-passionate engagement.