Dear Neighbors,
After decompressing from my legal battle with U.S. Bank, I refocused my attention to my immediate community through the Sebastopol Downtown Association where I offered a motion that was approved unanimously. It's called the "Community Moment" whereby every Friday at Noon, all of the Main Street Sebastopol and downtown core business owners, employees, and any other citizens or customers who want to participate step outside their respective businesses and wave to and smile at one another, and to the persons passing by or stopped in traffic.
The idea is that we are all having a "me" experience, each one of us under different situations and different circumstances but what we all share in common is that at Noon on Friday, we are all having our "me" experiences in the same geographical location at the same time. So we take that moment to set aside the "me" experience to recognize the greater "we."
To date, we have shared two Fridays of our "Community Moment" together and the number of participants has doubled in size. The feeling that everyone experiences is one of genuine community similar to what we experience when there is tragedy except that this time, we are not coming out of our businesses to see what the emergency or police activities are in town but rather, we are coming together to share a friendly, happy wave and to smile at one another. It's really pretty cool and everyone has reported feeling great afterward even though our shared moment literally lasts only about a minute or two, and then everyone returns to their businesses to go about their day. We are kind of like Cuckoo Birds in a Cuckoo Clock.
If our "Community Moment" continues to grow, we hope to incorporate the entire citizenry of Sebastopol expanding outward to the whole of Sonoma County, then all of California, and beyond...
Everybody is invited to join us.
Friendly regards:
Michael A. Carnacchi