Coffee chaff

I took my dog-eared pages of my almost-done proposal to Moonbean this morning to read and edit and scribble on the little patio outside with my usual fair-trade americano. While I was reading, a shaking of little ... flakes.. of some kind, brittle little organic leaf-like fragments... kept sweeping over me. In my hair, into my coffee, over my papers, my shoulders. Allan roasts his own beans, and this is apparently the chaff from the beans, flying out through the vents, covering all of the coffee drinkers, readers, chatters, smokers, neighbourhood gazers. Birds build their nests from it, Allan claims.

Being covered in periodic shakings of coffee chaff is just one of the odd, serendipitous, surprising moments of what it means to live in the market. Counter-culture in so many ways. There's the overt, active pushing at some edges -- the aggressive anti-car activism, claiming of the streets for street theatre, people, human scale movement, direct confrontation of the pot laws. Crack heads in the same park as the squealing little kids in the wading pools, all part of the same system. And there's more organic flowing texture into other cultural edges -- the woman who came into Moonbean today dressed in full Heidi garb, a blue and white checked gingham dirndl, big blond braids with giant blue delphiniums perched on the top of each braid; the out of shape middle aged man riding a bike down the street whistling "if you could read my mind" in perfect pitch, the topsy turvy melange of caribbean, asian, european and african food and garb, the countless pierc-ed would be artists, dancers, writers.

There's so much here about benign coexistence that I'm not sure how to make meaning of. It's more than cross-cultural appreciation. There's a chippiness to the more political elements of it, a hefty dose of the mushy minded left conspiracy theory/anti car crowd combined with some pretty sharp-edged anarchism -- but there's also, somewhere in there, a real accommodation of a system that is fundamentally about people and their differences and a sort of dynamic self-reliance.

Not sure yet how to understand my place here, what drew me here. But locating myself in it is a constant question mark about how we can coexist without othering.