Sweet Places
This week my partner and I are in Moab, Utah. It is a small town with one main drag, in the middle of a grand desert of red sandstone.
It is also just so dang wholesome to a visitor's eye. There are certain small towns that feel like this. It's the art gallery and the small coffee shop, the used bookstore, and the coop grocery with the wacky community bulletin board.
In Moab there is in fact, a community grocery store which in all its essentials from the bulk spices and herbal remedies to the honey sticks at the counter reminded of my beloved childhood store Country Sun in Palo Alto which had much tie-dye and organic whole wheat tortillas.
At the coop in Moab we picked up a copy of "Moab Happenings", a local community paper. I use the word paper rather than newspaper, because it's not really meant to be informative about the larger world, nor would it carry hard-hitting investigations into local politics. Instead, it's a mostly feel good summary of what's going on in town that month along with advertisements from local businesses.
Highlights include:
Nature happenings Which describes signs of the coming spring, including wildflower identification and which local and migratory birds to look out for.
Astrology happenings Which informs me that I should have been wary on Valentine's Day. (Actually that hit later, but points anyway)
Geology happenings In which a local "rock nerd" describes how the Colorado plateau was formed and how its tectonic movements contributed to the local landscape.
There is so much I adore here. There's visual language of the graphic design with soft desert colors and headers in an approachable almost hand-writing esque sans-serif. There's the extreme localness of some of the announcements: "who won the local art fair" and invitations to line dancing lessons. There's the bios of the contributors like the locla astrologer Dianna King who "has dedicated her life to exploring the transformative power of bringing the spirit to the Earth Plane."
I was very engrossed in the newspaper over a dinner of burger and fries when my partner looked at me with a laugh and said "so this is the kind of world you want, huh?"
And it is! I love that there is a place where a local rock nerd has the time and energy to share their passion about plate tectonics and the local museum's tagline is "Small Museum, Big Stories". It feels just so incredibly humane.
It reminds me of this quote by Rebecca Solnit:
"I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”
A place like this is one which feels like it operates at [[human speed]] (a concept maybe coined by Ilona?)
Of course, it's got to be more complicated than that. Moab has its own history of settlement and Uranium mining. It's not clear to me, how money flows into the town now beyond tourism.
What makes the difference between a cute town with three art galleries and a local book store like Moab or Bolinas and a rundown place where the industry left and the spirit went with it? I'm not sure.
But for today, I'm grateful for community papers and the people who make them happen.