I lived in San Francisco for almost nine years from 1977 to 1986. I didn’t own a car for almost six years during that time and I loved it! I lived and worked and went to school in San Francisco, taking street cars, light rail, electric buses and diesel buses all over The City. I could stay out late, get home in the middle of the night and still be able to catch a bus. I visited S.F. for a few days this fall and rediscovered how creative San Francisco is, how much of a “can do!” kind of spirit is still alive. This is cool and totally awesome!

I was visiting S.F. and was staying at my brother-in-law’s house in the Bernal Heights area and had taken the public transportation to that area many times in past years. The bus to that part of town was previously a diesel bus that strained to get up the steep hill to that neighborhood after winding its way through other areas such as the Fillmore, Western Addition, the Castro and Noe Valley, and down to Bayshore Blvd. These latter neighborhoods have fairly narrow streets, some steep hills–very tough on fueled buses. Turns out that S.F. decided to convert the diesel bus line to an electric trolley line–no easy task as I will describe.

An electric trolley bus in San Francisco typically has a set of poles attached to the roof of the bus. Each pole is connected to the rear of the bus via a cable on a reel. (I don’t know the terminology, please bear with me.) Both poles connect to a pair of wires running overhead that provide a connection to the electricity necessary to generate the power for the electric bus. The overhead wires are supported by guides and tracks around corners and intersections with other electric vehicles. The electric trolleys are quiet and clean running. They are quiet inside for passengers and quiet outside for residents of the neighborhoods the trolleys pass through. You hear the wires singing as the bus approaches and occasionally the wires rattling and shaking as the bus passes by. No diesel fumes in the air. No loud diesel engine grinding by while straining up a hill. The electric trolley bus is powerful: a bus full of people and it just plows its way up a hill–piece of cake! Can of corn! Easy as pie! More pictures and descriptions of the history of these buses in San Francisco found here and a great article on Wikipedia here.

So, the city of San Francisco decided to retrofit this bus line with electricity and run the trolley through the narrow streets of the neighborhoods. This is sheer gumption! Someone had a huge set of cajones, let me tell you. It is quite a feat of engineering to design the system for this trolley, string up all the wires and support guides, connect all the tracks through the intersections so the bus can pass through and not loose its source of electrical power from the overhead wires. Brilliant! If San Francisco can overcome all of the obstacles in its path and put a clean running, quiet, environmentally sound bus line in place, why the hell can’t a city like Tucson do the same?

Tucson has these ridiculously wide streets for almost all of its arterial surface streets to carry all the cars commuting to work with single passengers. (Look at the lines of cars flying by and count how many of the them have more than one person in the car: 85%? 90%? 95%?) Most of these streets (Broadway, Speedway, 22nd St., Oracle, to name a few) have an existing right lane that is usually marked as a bus lane. How simple it would be to engineer the supports for the wires, string up the electrical system, put a bunch of new, clean buses on those lines. Tucson would have to have the vision of a city with fewer cars on the city streets, a city with a conscience: using less fossil fuels for private citizens to go between home and work. Tucson would have to promote the hell out of a project like this to get an increase in ridership, get people out of their cars for their commute.

So, where is the electrical power coming from? Yeah, Tucson does recover methane gases from the landfills and then uses the methane to be burned and power the turbines that produce electricity. That’s one way. How about passive solar array panels in “fields” around the city or drawing power from the Springerville solar project in the White Mountains that Tucson Electric Power owns.

Of course, there will be the whiners and nay-sayers who state that they will loose their views of the surrounding mountains if all these overhead wires are in place. (Like they ever get out of their cars long enough to look for the mountains!) My response to this is: will you be able to see your mountains in a couple of years when all the smog produced by the increasing hordes of cars obscures the view?

What about the stress of driving in traffic? The wear-and-tear on your car taking you to/from work? The expense of your gassing up the car each week (well, hopefully only once a week–you are driving a car that gets over 30 MPG in the city, aren’t you?)

If enough buses are on the street, you won’t wait long for your connection. I lived on 29th Street, off a street car line (the J Church line–ran past the St. Paul’s Catholic church and school shown in the Whoopie Goldberg movie, “Sister Act”.) I had to wait 4-6 minutes during commute hours in the morning for the next streetcar to come along. The trip home at night was the same. Since I was downtown, other street cars for the other lines distributed throughout the city would come by every 2-3 minutes. Traveling was easy: I could read, look out the window, listen to my headphones. I was never accosted on any ride at any time in the years in which I took mass transit in San Francisco.

I voted for and totally supported Steve Farley, our Arizona state representative, who has had a vision to have light rail vehicles in a few lines around Tucson. I say, that’s not bold enough! Tucson needs more and Tucson can do more! I have faith. The people have to hear about this and they have to want this: they have to understand the benefits, they have to understand how their quality of life will improve with fewer cars on the road, how they will meet more of their neighbors while riding the buses, appreciate their city and all it has to offer.

That’s my vision. I haven’t been locked up for it, yet…

Here’s a brief run-down of the story and the legislation that has passed in both the Arizona state House and Senate:

The bill would require a woman to wait at least 24 hours between the time she first sees a doctor and the time she actually can get an abortion. It also establishes a series of procedures that must be followed in that time.

At the first meeting, the doctor who will perform the abortion must discuss the risks and alternatives to the procedure, as well as the probable “anatomical and physiological characteristics of the unborn child at the time the abortion is to be performed.”
It also requires someone at the clinic — it would not have to be the doctor — tell the woman that medical assistance benefits may be available if she decides to keep the child, that public and private agencies and services are available to assist during pregnancy and after childbirth, and that the father is liable for child support even if he agrees to pay for an abortion.

PHB 2564, which was approved on a 16-12 vote. Here are the two bills listed on the Arizona State Legislature web site:

http://www.azleg.gov/DocumentsForBill.asp?Bill_Number=HB2564
http://www.azleg.gov/DocumentsForBill.asp?Bill_Number=SB1206

In separate action Tuesday, the Senate voted 20-8 to adopt a new — and presumably legal — state statute banning “partial-birth” abortions.
Arizona outlawed the procedure in 1997. But that law was struck down by a federal judge.
HB 2400, which also has passed the House, mirrors a federal law that bans the procedure, a law that the U.S. Supreme Court declared legal.

http://www.azleg.gov/DocumentsForBill.asp?Bill_Number=HB2400

Here’s what I wrote to Governor Jan Brewer:

Governor Brewer,
I respectfully request that you veto the House Bills HB2564 and HB2400 and the Senate Bill SB1206 as they come to your desk.
I completely agree with the sentiments issued by State Senator Linda Lopez as quoted in the Tucson Arizona Daily Star http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/298320.php :

(Lopez) called the measure an improper government intervention into a private decision.
“It assumes that this Legislature knows what’s best for a woman who’s making one of the most difficult decisions of her life,”
“It puts this Legislature squarely between a woman and her physician, and between a woman and her family,” Lopez continued. “This Legislature has no business in either place.”
Please help to keep abortion available and stop the criminalization of physicians who perform abortions. Please help Arizona be a state that supports and respects its female population: lets give women credit that they can make sound decisions about what happens to their bodies!
Please don’t castigate women who are raped — please help them with continued access to the so-called “morning after” pills. Please don’t let pharmacists dictate what a woman can or cannot do. Please help keep religion out of pharmacy.
Please keep laws out of women’s bodies and please help Arizona lower its national ranking of the state with the highest teen pregnancy rate and female teen school drop-out rate.
We want to affect change in our state, please help to end the idiocy that is “abstinence-only” sex education in our public schools. If we are at the top of the national list in teen pregnancies, then we are also opening our teens up to STDs including HIV.
I am a registered Democrat and I am reaching out to you as our Governor to please do the right thing for the women of Arizona. Please veto the above bills as they cross your desk.
Thank you for your time and consideration in these matters.

(Well, I hope I submitted that to the Governor’s office. Their CAPTCHA script on their email form submission page kept converting my entries to lowercase when they should have all been uppercase. Its a conspiracy, I tell ya!)

Please take a few moments and access the Feedback page/form on the Contact Us page and respectfully request that Governor Brewer veto any present and future anti-women’s rights/anti-female legislation that crosses her desk. Well… we can hope, right?

Where do I begin? What attracted me to Buddhism? What drew me to continuing my study of the Dharma? Well, maybe a bit of personal history/background would provide a foundation for more historical info.

I come from a Catholic upbringing, the last of six kids, baptized as a Catholic, attended Catholic parochial schools until the end of my freshman year of high school. I was an altar boy during my 6th, 7th, and 8th grade years and was never molested! Imagine that! I must be in the minority. So, never a squeal session under the cassock. I even had thoughts of becoming a Maryknoll missionary, going off to Africa (or some such) and being a priest. I went so far as to receive the Maryknoll’s propaganda magazines and attend some of the local seminary altar boy picnics. How exciting those were! Not! Imagine if you will… a bunch of pubescent, goody-goody boys running around playing softball, eating watermelon with priests and brothers. Zow! Ahh… the Age of Innocence.

Move forward to 8th grade graduation… I am awarded the “Most Religious” award from the pastor of the local church. His words to me as I accepted the little medal, “This is only the beginning.” A bit ominous, but true in many ways. What did he see in me?

In a word, warped! Not especially broken, but slightly bent, a little twisted. I went to an all-male Catholic college prep high school for my freshman year. One year was enough! Too damned much testosterone for my tastes. I stopped attending Catholic services my sophomore year of high school and rarely ever set foot in a Catholic church since then.

I grew up during the Viet Nam war and was vehemently against the killing and destruction happening every day. My older brother was shipped off to ‘Nam and served during 1968-1969 year. I requested that a prayer be said for him and for his safety every day during my 8th grade school year. It was a horrible time. (He survived and returned physcially unharmed.) I was classified 1-H in my senior year of high school. The 1-H classification is a “holding” category, my number would be up and I would have been put between a rock and a hard place, having to make a decision of serving (not freakin’ likely) or taking a little road trip to Canada.

My first real encounter with any teachings that was outside Catholic doctrine was when I read “Be Here Now” and “Grist For The Mill” by Ram Dass (Richard Alpert.) This was circa 1974. I was a little afraid of what I was reading, mostly concerned that Ram Dass’ words were somehow sacrilegious, I had no real previous exposure to teachings outside the scope of accepted Catholic doctrine. Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t a total innocent nor completely clueless. I had read Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” in 8th grade–the nuns were a little taken aback! I had attended anti-war demonstrations in my little home town, had numerous incidents of being chemically altered during my sophomore year in high school. I was deeply touched with Ram Dass’ obvious spirituality, how in touch he was with his connection to humanity; my lack of being totally cynical put me in a space where I was able to see the truth of his words. Ram Dass wrote beautifully and touched my heart, but I didn’t discern that he was providing any methods or practices I could use to make sense of my life and my place in the world.

A little side trip that was a real life-altering experience: my older brother, Michael, had AIDS and was seriously ill from AIDS-related opportunistic diseases. His partner received help with day-to-day caretaking from a local San Francisco AIDS-support organization known as Shanti. I helped with respite care for my brother on a number of weekends and my heart was opened again, I rediscovered my compassion (or metta as it is known in Buddhism.)

I bring up Shanti because I later went through their volunteer/HIV-AIDS support training in my home town around 1992. This training was another vehicle that helped to open my heart, see beyond myself. I finished the training (one weekend of a Friday night, all-day Saturday, and the majority of a Sunday, and then an additional training session each week for eight weeks) and was chosen to be a volunteer. I was assigned my first HIV/AIDS client shortly thereafter. I worked with my client, Bo, being a listener, being an advocate for his health care, helping with errands, and finally being present while he died. My presence with Bo while he died was why I trained: he would have died alone.

I put my training to use again a year later when my mother was diagnosed with lymphoma and ended up in a coma in the hospital. She passed away right as I passed her a rosary: she closed her hand around the rosary and took her last breath and expired. I was fortunate to be with her and to help her move along.

Flash forward about two years… I picked up a small book by this Buddhist monk/teacher from Viet Nam named Thich Nhat Hanh. I found a great introduction to Buddhism and mindfulness in his “The Long Road Turns to Joy” guide to walking meditation.

Putting the Buddha's discovery into practice is no quick fix. It can take years. The most important qualification at the beginning is a strong desire to change your life by adopting new habits and learning to see the world anew.

    –Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
        Tricycle Fall 2001

Right now we have the ability to receive teachings and practice the Dharma. Isn't this the right time? Wouldn't that be better than continuing to act like an animal, concentrating only on eating and sleeping and letting time run out? Why not take your future into your own hands?

    –Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
       Tricycle, Fall 2001

"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." conveys the message that no teacher can do our work for us and that extreme reverence for a teacher or a set of beliefs may keep us from reaching our own truth.

    –Sandy Boucher  
        Opening The Lotus, pg 9

Offering your body and mind to emptiness, or in other words, to the pure sense of human action.

    –Dainin Katagiri, Roshi
        Returning To Silence (pg 9)

If you study Buddhism thinking that it will help you, that means that you use Buddhism for your ego, for selfishness. No matter how long you do this, it is egocentric practice. If you continue to practice like this you will never be satisfied, because desire is endless.

    –Dainin Katagiri, Roshi
        Returning To Silence (pg 9)

…Do not use Buddhism for yourself. Offer your body and mind to the Buddha-dharma. Buddha is not divine. Buddha is your daily life.

    –Dainin Katagiri, Roshi
        Returning To Silence (pg 9)

Certainty is our lens to interpret what's going on, and, as long as our explanations work, we feel a sense of stability and security. But in a changing world, certainty doesn't give us stability; it actually creates more chaos. As we stay locked in our position and refuse to adapt, the things we'd hoped would stay together fall apart. …By holding on, we destroy what we hope to preserve; by letting go, we feel secure in accepting what is.

    –Margaret Wheatley
        Shambhala Sun, Nov. 2001, pg 17

The nature of ignorance is to lack deep communication with nature or with the universe. It is to separate, to isolate, to create discrimination and differences, so that finally we cannot communicate as a harmonious whole. These differences we create appear as fighting, anger, hatred, and war.

    –Dainin Katagiri, Roshi
        Returning To Silence (pg 17)

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.

    –William Feather

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

    –Martin Luther King, Jr.
        Good Earth tea

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

    –Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

    –Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

Renunciation does not have to be regarded as negative. I was taught that it has to do with letting go of holding back. What one is renouncing is closing down and shutting off from life. You coud say that renunciation is the same thing as opening to the teachings of the present moment.

    –Pema Chodron
        Tricycle Fall '91 (pg 50)

Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited, petty world is insane.

    –Pema Chodron
        Tricycle Fall '91 (pg 50)

"When I am accused of something that I didn't do, I bow in acknowledgement of all the things that I did do."

    –quote attributed to R. H. Blythe         Tricycle, Fall '91, (pg. 69)