Room to Breathe

It was summer at its best. Grilled chicken, watermelon, second cousins, fireworks, a toddler belly-flopping off the dock… and traffic, the unsung Independence Day tradition!

On our way home from the cottage, my family was logjammed for over an hour passing through Grand Haven. We were struck by how many people on bikes were crossing the river on the gravelly shoulder of US-31 – many of them children, most without lights, and all without protection from the crazies trying to fly around the traffic jam.

The whole city seemed to be at a standstill…

… and it brought this visual to mind.

Can you imagine what it would be like in our cities if we had more room to breathe?

image courtesy Copenhagenize Design Co.

Announcing… BIKES IN HOLLAND!!!

It give me great pleasure to announce this year’s spring event:

I could hardly be more excited.

This spring, Professor Lee Hardy of Calvin College (my alma mater) will take us on a fascinating ride through the streets of Amsterdam and Copenhagen, two of the world’s leading cities for bicycling.

Professor Hardy

Professor Hardy’s inspiring multimedia presentation demonstrates how these cities make way for people on bikes and help them get around in a way that’s fun, easy, and affordable – for everyone!

After he answers your questions, we’ll turn our attention to our own community here in Holland, Michigan. Elisa Hoekwater, author of the greater Holland region’s new non-motorized plan, will offer a brief update on where things stand around here. Your input is welcome!

Delicious cookies and coffee from Simpatico Coffee will be available for you to enjoy.

The event will be held in Fourteenth Street Christian Reformed Church’s brand-spanking-new fellowship room. It’s cozy in the best kind of way, and you’re going to love it.

Join us on Saturday, May 10 at 7:00 p.m. to celebrate Bikes in Holland!

Tickets are $10 and are available online now!

Few things are ever accomplished by one person working alone.

I need YOUR help! Here’s what you can do:

E-mail a friend today. Take just a second right now to copy this link – http://wp.me/p2MikN-BQ – and send it to a friend. It will bring them to this page, so they can read about this great event for themselves.

Join the Event Team. There’s still plenty to do, from publicity to event set-up to considering ways to help these ideas gain traction in our community.

Put us in contact with potential sponsors. I would still like to have a few more sponsors to help underwrite this event. Our primary sponsorship levels range from $50 to $250, and we also have a low-cost ticket sponsorship option.

And of course, buy your own tickets right away! Here’s the link again:

Contact me at tulip.lane@outlook.com with any questions or for more information. This is going to be so much fun – I hope to see you there!

Why the Winter Bird Sings and How You Can Too

Sometimes all we need is a reminder of just how free we are.

It’s early on the second day back to normal, after that endless streak of snow days at the beginning of the year.

“Mom, can we go to the playground?”

The playground…In the dead of winter?

Well, I guess I could blog about it. Sure, let’s go.

We go potty (or “go potty”) and don 27 pieces of outerwear (I count), some more than once, before crunching down to the end of the block. The temperature is in the mid-twenties, which feels unbearable in November but by January makes hats and mittens seem overdone. I can feel the beginnings of sweat at my hairline as I pull Mae across the squeaky snow and over the street-edge snowbanks in her bright new sled. I tell the five-year-old who doesn’t like to walk, the child who requested this trip, that when I was her age I walked to school every day all by myself.

She isn’t impressed.

The park we are going to is right in our neighborhood, only four or five blocks away. It takes up most of one city block and has a playground, a gazebo, a big open field and a ball diamond. After fighting the shifty sidewalk snow and a recalcitrant preschooler all the way here, my legs are ready for a break. I breathe a sigh of relief as we walk up…

…and see that, of course, the sidewalks in the park haven’t been cleared. Wearily I gaze across the field of unbroken snow and contemplate turning right back around to go home.

I’ve been hooked by the idea of winter cities, places that embrace their climate and celebrate life through every season. I can picture a miniature sledding hill in the middle of this park, sidewalks shoveled to the playground, kids playing on the playground and making snowy igloos in the baseball diamond.

Someday. Today is… different than that.

Abigail is suddenly inspired and leads the way, powering her way through the snow with her strong little legs. She stops in the gazebo, where the snow is shallower, and lays down for a minute before plowing on to the playground.

In the meantime, I have Mae in the sled and am trying to stay upright as I gracelessly drag her through this impenetrable snow bog. I’m scarcely twenty feet off the sidewalk and am beginning to wonder if we’ll even make it to the playground at all.

“WANT OUT! WANT WALK!”

Ignoring her requests is ineffective as she attempts to launch herself out of her wee chariot. So out she comes..

But the snow is “doo deep.”

“WANT UP!”

What have I done? What am I doing here? It’s the middle of winter and we walked to the playground?? What kind of crazy was this? I’m plowing through knee-deep snow carrying a two-year-old who has ever been in the 98th percentile for both height and weight, dragging the sled in which she now refuses to ride. Those prickles of sweat at my hairline have turned to droplets in a hurry. I stop and take a breather.

The sky is feathery gray and blue and has that heavy, steely look it does in winter. It’s like its colors have been put on mute for the season. There are birds flittering around the tree beside me. I can’t tell what they are, but I hear a bluejay across the park.

I pause. You can’t see the birds in this photo but a flock has hidden itself in these trees, dancing through the branches and singing their little hearts out in the middle of this Narnian season, free birds who “leap on the back of the wind,” however cold it may be.*

Their song baffles me. Don’t they know how cold it is? Don’t they long for the spring, iwth its gentle breezes and plentiful food? I think that I might sit huddled on a branch, waiting for the season to change.

And I wonder… am I waiting for an easier season, too? Don’t I wish there were fewer clothes to put on, fewer mittens to find, beautiful clear sidewalks to walk down? Don’t I wish for fewer dishes to wash, fewer early-morning wakings, beautiful little rooms that stay clean once I clean them?

Have you ever put your life on pause until spring? I have.

Maybe life is just too HARD right now. We lower our heads and hunker down, wishing for the storm to pass and waiting for an easier season to venture out.

But there’s beauty in the storm.

How much do we miss if we confine our dancing, confine our singing, to the days when the sun shines warm on our faces? How much of life passes us by if we flee indoors to escape the blowing snow that needles our cheeks?

Abandoning the sled in the gazebo I press on, feet sinking deep into the dense snow.

The playground was amazing. The slide that the girls normally fly off at top speed, landing on the hard ground in a crying crumple, is nearly snowed in. They slide down and then off the end on an invented luge run that extends the ride by a good fast four feet. Abigail faces her nemesis, the monkey bars, now plopping painlessly into the snow when she loses her grip. Every snowdrift is a little fort, piled up around slides and stairs, ready for hideouts and playing bad guys.

Getting there was arduous, but oh, was the journey worth it.

So much of this life is in how we face it. Whether it’s a dark night of the soul, the winter of our discontent, or a polar vortex, we’re birds in a cage with an open door. And sometimes it takes some doing, but gathering our courage and being willing to endure discomfort can make all the difference in how we experience this cold season.

The trip back goes faster. We’ve already broken the trail out to the playground, so getting back to the sidewalk is much more manageable. Over the snowbanks we clamber, cheerfully kicking aside snowplow-flung chunks of ice to arrive back home, to the favored lunch of hot tomato soup and Sunbutter sandwiches.

That thing you’ve been waiting to begin, that thing you’ve been waiting to be over with… will you settle into it this week? Take a little leap into the storm, put on a coat and find a spot of beauty in it? Will you decide this week to sing a song of freedom?*

I’d love to hear. Feel free, as always, to leave a comment or email me at tulip.lane@outlook.com. And stay tuned for an exciting announcement about an event that you will LOVE coming up next week!

Because livable places are better.

*I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

You’ve Earned a Break, Friend. It’s for Democracy.

The day was long enough to warrant a walk that was even longer. After a day or three alone in a house with sweetly intense small people, my home had indeed begun to feel like a “vortex of isolation.”* You’ve had those too, I know.

Fourteen blocks along shifty, snowy sidewalks, my feet are skittish at their inability to find a firm spot to land. I grump over hip-high snowbanks, then feel simultaneously guilty and grateful – guilty for my gripey discontent, grateful that our town’s sidewalk plow has allowed me any path at all through this deep midwinter night.

Although the shop windows are dark, the sidewalks downtown are busy: a neon rainbow of runners, dogs bouncing and whining their wish to make friends, other women who have fled their homes to walk away the day.

Is there something inherently welcoming in a coffee shop, or is it just that this place has become my sanctuary of evening escape? It’s a relief to take in the range of people at the tables around me. Some stare seriously at the white pages in front of them. There is a woman who leans in to a quiet conversation, tilts her head and laughs in an easy, familiar way. A brown-haired girl moves her hand uncertainly along her necklace and purses her lips as her companion explains something to her. These nameless people aren’t my tribe, but their presence is comforting.

I stand at the counter, decided in my choice of jasmine tea and pretending that a whole milk mocha piled high with whipped cream isn’t even an option. As the barista walks up, I sigh. And what I mean is that I SIGH, an another-polar-vortex-is-moving-in sigh, a watch-out-we’re-deflating-a-hot-air-balloon sigh. “Oops. That wasn’t supposed to come out!” I said. She laughs. “Oh, I know that sigh! My seven-year-old stayed home sick from school and fought with his brother the whole day. I was so glad to get to come to work tonight!” We make small talk about the fine art of surviving one’s blessings as she rings up my order.

This lighthearted conversation was exactly what I needed. It’s something we all need, as it turns out. Although we desperately need deep and dependable friendships, we also need these passing connections to help us feel like we’re part of something bigger than our own skin. If you’ve ever said, “ugh, I just need to get out!” (and you have said that, right?) you already know this somewhere in your bones.

Urban sociologist Ray Oldenberg argues that a “third place – a place that’s not home, and not work, but a neutral place where all are welcome – is more than just a place to relax: It’s a cornerstone of thriving democracy.

Again and again we hear about how polarized our political climate has become and how we’re migrating further to the ends of the ideological spectrum by the stand-alone opinions of talking heads. Interacting with real people – our neighbors, especially – has a moderating effect on us. We enjoy going out because we’re human, but in the process we reinforce the foundation of civil society.

I’m not thinking about protecting democracy on this night, though. I lean back in my chair allow myself the space to feel grateful for, well, for this SPACE and for the people who fill it. They’re not the ones I’ll call when my kids are sick or when the very thought of moderating one more sibling dispute is enough to send me off the rails, but they are my neighbors. And tonight, being surrounded by their anonymous selves is just what I need.

As you go out and about your week, will you consider meeting a friend in some third space? Of course you have cabin fever, and let’s face it, the way this winter has gone you have most certainly earned a break. But it’s bigger than that. It’s for democracy!

If you decide you’re willing to serve your country in this way, leave a comment or shoot me an email at tulip.lane@outlook.com. I’d love to hear about it.

*This phrase from Charles Montgomery’s Happy City: Transforming Our Lives through Urban Design, which I highly, highly recommend. (That’s an affiliate link, so I’ll get a small cut of your purchase if you click through that link. Thanks!)

Listen

I’m sitting in my kitchen on the millionth snow day of the year, Christmas CD turned high enough to drown the sound of the child who will NOT accept that quiet time is part of her life. The snow on the garage over the fence is piled in drifts, swirling off the peak like a vanishing aura. The paint is white, and green, and peeling. It looks like it used to be pretty.

Peeling paint. Broken roads. So much to be done, so few resources. I look around my own house – at the dishes, at the laundry, at the children – and hardly know where to start. Multiply that a thousand times over and we’re looking at a community that’s beginning to crumble. Just a bit. It’s still a great place; better than ever in some ways. But what the tourist can’t see, we can.

So where do we start?

Got me.

I have a million and one ideas. But are they the right ones? Will they work? How do we know?

Listen.

This year, Traversing Tulip Lane will strive to be a collector of voices.

We’ll be listening to the guy on the bus wearing the old Pistons jacket, and the smiling brown-haired lady who works at the hospital and gets off at my stop. To the family whose street was just widened and the dad in the pick-up line as exasperated as I am with so much reckless drivers around the school. To small business owners and decision-makers and the guy I passed in a snowbank this week walking his malamutes before bed. To writers and talking heads and experts of all stripes.

To you.

If you’d like to participate or have someone in mind you think I should talk to, please leave a comment below or e-mail me at tulip dot lane at outlook dot com.

I Love Having Options

This is the way the morning started: with a fried battery.

This was not the plan.

One of the problems with auto-oriented development is that we’ve lost resilience. In our old suburban home, a dead car – especially in the winter – meant I was housebound.

But here’s the great thing! We live in town now, so I have options. I could walk or ride my bike downtown and to the library to run my errands – even if it was a chilly 22F, the streets are clear and I can find most of what I need within a mile. Or I could catch the bus – there’s a stop right across the street from our house. Now that we walk CJ to school, we’ve (thankfully!) lost some of that pressing panic of figuring out how to switch up our schedules at the last minute to get her where she needs to be.

I ended up deciding to take the bus up to my meeting… and then I walked outside and saw my husband standing next to a car that was now running. Oh well! I took the bus anyway, now feeling a little bit indulgent for the time it would take.

It does take extra time to take the bus using this small-town transit system. But it was easy, the drivers were pleasant, the bus was warm – and most importantly, it got me where I needed to go. And if there are still people out there grousing that the buses are always empty, I can definitively say that was not my experience. All the buses I was on were full or nearly so – and this in the middle of the day.

Plus, I wrote this whole post while someone else was driving me around. Maybe not such a useless use of time after all!

Options. I can’t say enough good things about them.

Today we begin our holiday hiatus. May you have a wonderful, blessed time with family and friends. I’ll see you back here in 2014 with an exciting new series answering the question of why we should bother changing the status quo!

We’re Not Even Trying

The housing inspector was going to be at our house at 9:00 a.m. sharp today, and my husband was gone for an early meeting. That meant that I had to make sure all three girls were ready for their day and out the door at 7:40 a.m. Sticking to the timetable was crucial.

In the swirl of

WHERE ARE YOUR SHOES???
and
HOW IS YOUR HAIR NOT COMBED YET??

I decided that it would make best sense to drive the three blocks to school today so I could do my other two drop-offs directly from there. For five minutes I sat in the driveway, pulling forward and back as walkers passed down the sidewalk, waiting for traffic to clear. Once we were finally on our way, we passed a dad walking his pink-fleeced little girl to school. For five more minutes I worked my minivan through the traffic snarl outside the school to get to the elementary school drop-off line. As I clicked open the door, the dad and his little girl walked up to the kindergarten classroom.

For crying out loud, WE’RE NOT EVEN TRYING HERE. Walking this journey is obviously more efficient than driving, but some days it’s scary as hell. All those cars I was tangled in are in a HURRY, and trying to walk through an intersection with no crosswalk and no crossing guard and no anything at all but raw courage and a teeny flame of anger that we are so freaking uncivilized takes a lot of energy and a certain amount of disregard for one’s own mortality. And half the reason everyone’s in a car to begin with is that most of us don’t really want to contemplate death first thing on a Thursday morning, before we’ve even finished our morning coffee.

I’m tired of pretending that this is working for us.

I watched the video below first thing this morning. It’s an almost surreal foil to my maddening morning drop-off experience and I just can’t shake the contrast; it’s been on constant replay in my head all morning.

It brings you to the bike route that passes beneath the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where you can take in Gothic architecture and modern art and street performers playing Bach on your way to school. Take a look at all the different types of people – especially families – on all the different bikes passing through. And imagine – imagine! – if there were anywhere in America where you could have this kind of experience during your morning commute.

(If you don’t have a lot of time, consider clicking to the middle of the video – it’ll give you a good sense of what it’s about. You can read the original post by Mark Wagenbuur of Bicycle Dutch here.)

The Netherlands hasn’t always been a beautiful place to get around by bike. In the 1970s, they were every bit as auto-centric as we are now. They decided that it wasn’t in their national interests to continue down that path and made a change.

We can, too.

But we have to try.

So today I’m feeling all frustrated and ragey and like it is all futile, all of it, whatever it is. And so what I’m looking for from you is just this – your wisdom. What do YOU do when you feel like the mountain that stands before you is just too big?

A Place for Everything (Wednesday’s Words)

Our recent move has me feeling this little proverb pretty acutely. Since we’re planning to move again in a few months, we’ve limited ourselves to unpacking our frequently-used stuff. That has mostly worked, but a few times a week I find myself working myself into a frenzy trying to figure out where I stashed that seldom-used credit card or fuzzy wool socks.

This morning I saw mention on Facebook of another person running killed by a person driving. And it got me thinking about how this proverb, which we usually apply to order in our homes, is also applicable to order in our towns. Not knowing where things are creates chaos in my personal life; not having a place for all of our people in all their different ways of getting around creates chaos in a community.

When there are no sidewalks, no crosswalks, no bike lanes, everyone is jumbled up together like a junk drawer the size of your stock pot. Chaos is always aggravating. Sometimes, it’s fatal.

Lord, have mercy.

How to Get Healthy and Lose Weight

Fall. The first visit to the apple orchard collides with the first confrontation with unforgiving blue jeans. Penance for the indiscretions of the summer diet – the campfire s’mores, the samples on the wine trail, the perfectly grilled burgers – comes swiftly.

Here in Michigan, we are the fifth-heaviest people in the country. (I don’t think they’ve highlighted that in the Pure Michigan campaign yet.) Overweight isn’t unique to our fair state, of course: Less than 30% of the American population maintains a healthy weight. There are plenty of reasons for this, but we’re going to focus on just one today.

We’re building our communities to make good health hard.

If your own blue jeans confrontation leads you to join the Weight Watchers program, you’ll find yourself invited to attend bonus sessions after the first two meetings. One focuses on your daily routines, the other on your physical spaces. These two things – routines and spaces – are a constant refrain at meetings. So what is it about the spaces that we find ourselves in that concerns the nation’s leading weight-loss program so much?

“Setting up your environment for success, wherever you are, is a really powerful tool” (here). (Tweet that.)

Tips for adjusting your spaces at home to be more amenable to weight loss include things like putting tempting food on a top shelf so it’s out of sight and pre-cutting fruits and veggies to make them easier to grab. It’s no magic bullet, but it’s about making desirable outcomes easier and undesirable ones harder.

When it comes to good health, the spaces outside our home are every bit as important as the spaces inside.

Experts say that the top barrier to getting enough exercise is finding time (here). So let’s take a look at a couple different options for getting 30 minutes of daily exercise.

10 minutes: walk child to school
10 minutes: walk home
5 minutes: walk to neighborhood coffee shop/work/grocery store
5 minutes: walk home

A thirty minute time commitment for thirty minutes of exercise.

10 minutes: drive to gym
10 minutes: get inside, get changed, get to equipment
30 minutes: exercise
20 minutes: shower, change, do hair and make-up again (guys, subtract 10 minutes)
10 minutes: drive home

Eighty minutes total time commitment for thirty minutes of exercise – in my experience that’s about right for a trip to the gym. And although we can exercise without going to the gym, all intentional exercise has the same weakness: each and every one of them involves going out of our way to make it happen. Which makes it all to easy to blow off on a rough day.

Interestingly enough, according to a study conducted by several researchers at the University of Utah women in walkable neighborhoods weigh an average of 6 pounds less than those in sprawling ones, and men an average of 10 pounds less.

Depending on your weight, that could be a pant size.

So what do we do?

Here are two ideas I’ve tried.

1. Have a bias toward walkability.

Regardless of where we live, we can take advantage of the walkable neighborhoods we pass through.

Thanks to the housing downtown, I’ve spent the past six years living in a decidedly suburban neighborhood. During this time, I’ve chosen to do something that’s like the “parking in the furthest space from the entrance to get more steps in” drill taken to the next level.

Here’s one example of what this looks like. CJ’s school is in a walkable neighborhood. When I pick her up, I act like I live there. We may walk to the park, or to the tienda two blocks away to pick up dinner. I park once, then walk where we need to go.

Do you have a place you normally go where you could walk or ride your bike? Think of a good possibility, then commit to trying it three times. Was it what you expected? Easier? Harder? Regardless, if you got some exercise it’s a win.

2. Move house.

Yup, this is extreme. It’s also what we call a big win. By choosing a home base in a walkable neighborhood, we can forever make every single decision to get somewhere by active transportation easier.

We’re in the process of doing this right now, and are evaluating neighborhoods based on walk/bike time to school, church, coffee shops (as you may have gathered, that’s a big one for me), the library, and parks. We’re also considering traffic speeds on various city streets, amount of truck traffic, and how easy (or difficult) important streets are to cross. If our city had bike lanes, that would be a big factor, too. We’ve found Walkscore to be a good tool to start with, but some of our biggest revelations have been in conversations at the park and walks through the neighborhoods ourselves.

The way we build our communities has an affect on many facets of our lives, and good health is one of them.

How do the spaces in your neighborhood affect your life – and what can you do to make them work for you? Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail me at tulip dot lane at outlook dot com. And if you’d like to see more like this, remember to sign up at the top of the page to have posts delivered by e-mail, or like our Facebook page!

You may also like: Ten Reasons for Your Child to Walk to School.

An Unexpected Lesson from Beautiful Egypt

In the fall of 1997 – days after the death of Princess Diana and before the death Mother Theresa – I waved to my apprehensive parents, boarded an airplane and embarked on my first journey overseas.

For seven hours I sat on the left-hand side of that plane, surrounded by soon-to-be-friends that I’d met just hours before. As the plane banked to land I looked out the window and saw… sand. Lots and lots and lots of sand. The first profound thought to cross my mind was, “Whoa… this is a desert!” Because somehow, in all the preparations and decisions that had preceded this day, that had escaped my attention before?

The airport that met me was filled with voices speaking strange words in a strange language, as we followed a strange man who we could only hope was really there to help us through customs and not selling us to a traveling caravan. I boarded a minibus and looked out the window at square apartment blocks, and street vendors, and traffic unlike anything I’d ever seen – people, donkeys, carts, scooters, CARS.

And so I met Cairo.

Al-Qahira. Home of the Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza, seat of the medieval Fatimid caliphate, an ancient, modern civilization with dusty streets and the most gracious people in the world. I lived on Zamalek, an island in the middle of the Nile – less than two miles from Tahrir Square, home of the protests that have rocked this beautiful city.

It would be difficult to overstate how profoundly this semester affected me. As the weeks passed, it became increasingly clear that what I perceived as my own college-student poverty was actually wealth on a scale that only a few of the richest citizens of this metropolis of 20 million could even comprehend. The paltry $70 I had to my name at the end of the semester – not quite enough to pay for the much-hoped-for trip to Petra, in nearby Jordan – was nonetheless a princely sum in Egypt, two months’ salary for most. I’ve never felt poor since coming home from Egypt.

Yet when I think of Egypt and her people, it’s laughter that I think of. Oh, I remember the smells of Garbage City, and the ickiness of men getting a little too touchy-feely on the street, but those things have been papered over in my mind with time. Instead, I think of friendly faces, and offers of sweet hot tea in a perfume shop. I think of my homestay mother stuffing me so full of food that I couldn’t eat for three days afterward. Egypt, for me, is defined by true hospitality and a cheerful, indomitable spirit. And in spite of all the cards stacked against this beautiful country, that gives me hope for her future.

In the midst of all these big things, there was also a little thing that Cairo opened my eyes to.

Zamalek was the first walkable neighborhood I’d lived in since my early elementary days. And although public transportation wasn’t an option for me as a woman and a fair-haired foreigner, taxicabs were also cheap (for me) and plentiful. For the first time, I didn’t have to bum a ride off someone if I wanted to go shopping or to the library. I enjoyed the volunteer work my classmates and I did with young girls in Garbage City, and thought I’d like to do something similar when I returned to the States. I was enjoying real mobility for the first time in my adult life.

And although I struggle with this sometimes – that I encountered poverty and came away from it advocating for walkable neighborhoods – mobility is powerful in a way that we can’t quite realize when we’re accustomed to it. Corny as it sounds, I felt an internal flowering, an opening up of possibilities with the knowledge that I could go anywhere. While it may not compete with stopping human trafficking or bringing an end to poverty itself, it matters. Being able to fully participate in our communities – this is a thing that matters. It’s a thing that’s worth working for, and a thing I’m thankful to have learned in Egypt.