Ode to Santa Cruz  
 
On the Edge of Life as We Know It
by Peggy Pollard and friends
(written in honor of the great Garrison Keillor)

They come from over-the-hill and over-the-seas, seeking to be transformed, coming to the edge of Life as they know it, standing on cliffs of sandstone, iceplant and decision...seeking truth, love, spiritual awakening, listening to waves, to their spirits, to the universe.

And we are here for them. We Santa Cruz locals are their lighthouses, beaming through the fog...
beacons of light, to their next steps...to who they can become.

Santa Cruz welcomes them to our magical city of becoming, where all dreams are possible...but the trash still needs to be picked up.
Everyone here is from everywhere else. Whales.Migrant farmworkers, and international professors raise babies on the organic kefir of harmony in our city. The intellectual elite, the hungry of the nations, drink deeply of academic pleasures, of the chilly depths of edge of human knowledge, creating laser vision, robotic legs, economic policies that rescue humankind from our weakness.

And they marvel at our Oh-So--laid-back vibes. Our Spiritual temples of kelp forests and Banana Slug Redwood cathedrals, and organic Farmer's Markets altars.
Sea lions, otters and Soul surfers curl themselves in kelp around the salty inner peace of mother ocean.

We art more Quirky than Thou, our politicians chant, offering marijuana tokes from city hall steps, while banning cigarettes from public parks. Churches and Cub Scouts are oppressed minorities. Nuclear free, hate free, dog-leash-free. But the poop remains.

Liberal protesters fight off globalization of humanization, Keep out tourists, don't widen Highway 17, while our front yards are sanctuary for the silent invading army of flourescent yellow weeds.

In Santa Cruz the exotic becomes ordinary. The ordinary becomes intolerable. Peace evaporates with the salty fog, as do our hopes and fears. Our hopes become our reality, our dreams become ourselves.
We celebrate our diversity, until a perceived intolerance becomes intolerable. Keep out, O strange thoughts of conformity! Light up the tokes, ban the commonality of banal cigarettes. Let the dogs run leash-free forever in Lighthouse Field because they tell their masters so.

We celebrate our Arts, our Santa Cruz treasures, Nat’s domination of the waves, Rene’s Sunday sermons, Wallace’s essays on the meaning of our movies and our lives, Shmuel portraits in light, and the Ukelele club’s comraderie of plucking.

We creep closer, closer to the edge of the cliffs, squishing our toes into the iceplant’s healing juices, leaning over the edge. Is this really a cliff? How firm is this sandstone anyway, how close can I come to becoming someone else, stepping into the unknown, it’s a long way to those rocks down there.

Then we back up, away back to our safe lives, comfortable if boring relationships, finding the asphalt path to be a more manageable adventure. Back to our triangle universe of shopping: Trader Joe's soy milk, Costco muffins and Safeway dishwasher powder. But with the dreams of what we could become here still curling like tangled kelp around our hearts.