Neighborhoods in Profile: Bernal Heights

With my moon in Taurus, I continue to end up in the most comfortable digs. Case in point is this past week's house sitting for a lawyer in Bernal Heights. Much like earthy-crunchy Jamaica Plain, Bernal Heights is San Francisco's village for independent shops, dog-owners, gardening and a large lesbian population. Sitting just south of the Mission, it is a neighborhood marked by a nearly bald, golden hill and leggo-like density of pastel homes. Public Transportation here isn't stellar (although the trudging 24 bus will take you right to Market and Castro) but its isolation is part of its charm. Cortland Avenue, the much less busier version of Centre Street, has a small independent grocery store called Good Life and a few coffee shops like Progressive Grounds. One of my favorite bookstores in the city is called Red Hill Books named after the fact that Bernal Heights sheltered many working-class families and anti-war activists during the Vietnam War. The geology too of this SF corner is marked by red franciscan chert, a copper-colored collection of petrified remains of ocean biomass.





So all week long I got to hang out with Ollie, the goldendoodle of my lawyer friend. Trickle-down economics does work but only to a certain extent. The jobs provided are menial, service-oriented ones. Many folks in San Francisco are either tending bar, waiting tables, walking dogs and doing their art/passion on the side. And then there are a number of folks in the tech industry. But for the very rich, I'm not actually sure what they do. And I think they prefer that we be kept in the dark.

 

Walking dogs is the cutest (and dirtiest) part-time job I've ever had. It's ironic because I've been hearing a lot about "habit energy" in lectures and literature. Habit energy is one of the biggest obstacles in Buddha-dharma or "sitting" practice, in the sense that human beings do things in a faulty way because they are accustomed to doing things in a faulty way. The past is its own pull. We rarely give ourselves permission to do things in a novel manner. Dogs especially are very habit-oriented and outside of the Western World do not get much respect. Animals in general, according to more sophisticated Buddhist ideology, are unfit for enlightenment because they cannot see past their circumstances. I beg to differ with this anthrocentric viewpoint (have you ever seen a bird just completely enjoy flying for its own sake?). Human beings however, according to the Buddhists, are very fortunate because we have a real opportunity to come to know nirvana. We can let go completely or at least shape our karma. I don't know what would be a clean, opposing term to habit energy. Discipline energy? Mindfulness energy?








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