A Celebration of New Docs

John Ruffaine, the owner of Giovanni’s Pizza is glad for the student-led medical clinic across the street.

From Brooklyn, John has had many friends and family living in the middle of the New York pandemic crisis.

Perhaps for this reason, John is welcoming a curbside art show in May. This show, sponsored by Open Sky Market, celebrates and benefits the efforts of the small weekend health clinic. Housed next to the Safe Credit Union that can be seen in the background of the photograph, the Paul Hom clinic is run by student doctors-in-training from the U.C. Davis Medical Center campus.

Tentatively scheduled for early May, the art show will consist of 30 or more pieces of art from the studios of local artists. All income from sales will go directly to the clinic, which operates independently from the U.C. Regents.

The art show will include three tall scaffoldings between the large sign in the picture and a nearby bike rack.

For exact dates and times, stay tuned to this blog for more information.

Around Meditation

The taker of this photo, the Rev. Linda Flatley, calls her shot: Sand, Sea, Snow and Sun. The picture beats a pathway around a sense of mindfulness. There may be no easy words that can hold the four sibilant elements of the picture’s title in the palm of one hand. And yet here they are in a single frame?

There is also a log that has been partially washed ashore. I had a friend who use to meditate on an old seed log in a similar quandary. He wondered mindfully if the log was to be washed ashore or was to be washed out to sea as it wallowed back and forth in the water. And yet here is this log also locked between a freezing cold season and perhaps a warmer season.

The rows of waves (five, six, a million?) stretching out to sea are a tempting lack of focus. I try to recall the formula of wave periodicity, or the experience of watching a slow pond ripple that caught a line of moonlight.

Thanks to Pastor Linda Flatley for this photograph. I hope someone leaves a comment on this blog for this image.

National Nutrition Month

Like our Earth, an apple is a little lopsided. If you think of our ethereal blue lithosphere as a skin, our planet also has a skin. Some day, as well, our planet will hopefully grow its leaf: a fully functional renewable energy system analogous to nature’s green solar collectors that are pre-integrated into the fruit’s DNA.

Ginny Day, a college teacher and nutritionist, is a prominent supporter of National Nutrition Month. March is officially National Nutrition Month.

Ginny is active in reminding people that good nutrition keeps the Dr. away (although she is married to a wonderful pediatrician).

Ginny is also a great advocate for the notion that nutrition and a green climate (some apples are green) are indeed justice issues. The issue of justice in environmentalism lies in a basic fact: those nations that “create the least greenhouse gasses will be most impacted by climate change.” In other words, non industrialized countries and poor communities have contributed very little to global pollution, but stand to bear the brunt of the disastrous repercussions of global man-made warming.