The character for room in Chinese has embedded within it that word for direction. But this afternoon, we had another lesson in experiential learning. Unlike any other capitalistic venture in this city, one doesn't need to think about paying to enter these urban camps. The faces there are anything but hostile; how unlike what one encounters riding some of the city bus routes. Here, the directions appear to be pointing inwards (beckoning visitors) and upwards (towards the open sky over spaceship Earth).

One thing that has impressed me repeatedly are that the campers at Occupy DC or at Freedom Plaza are more likely to be college-educated, with day jobs or having taken time off to travel, and civic-minded citizens. These volunteers are hardy and take one back to the pioneer days, when citizen groups presided over counties by common-law. They were this country's model citizens, particularly as self-sacrificing patriots.

Thus, the standoff today appeared to have been planned and conducted with all the leisure of days of deliberation, of civil disobedience with an intent to attract media, but also to widen the discourse between one group---and the world at large.

The spark of the standoff appears to be a winter housing project that includes a wood framed house, whose makeshift foundation qualifies it as temporary, but for the same reason, attracted the authorities because the permit makes it unsafe to clamber on the roof. For some reason, the activists of concern were crowing from their footholds.

When I arrived on the scene around mid-afternoon, the police had already blocked off the streets surrounding three sides of the park. Horses stood at attention across from the frame house, and Occupy residents and visitors looked on as the police seemed to be trying to make up their minds what to do. More squad cars and TV news vans appeared to be arriving every fifteen minutes.

No one was in any hurry. The campers, who had been there for days, seemed to have grown antennae that extended upwards towards the galaxies, to possess a starry nonchalance and fortitude that most urban dwellers--enclosed within their wired concrete cell blocks within the great city--lack.

During this unseasonably mild winter, it is a blessing to be able to visit with these campers some of whom have come from as far away as Florida, Kentucky, and Vermont to stay at McPherson Square. Today, I noticed that one of the residents had several paintings outside his shelter.

"They are beautiful," murmured a passing tourist, "simply beautiful!"

Unfortunately, such an adjective is not quite specific for judging art critically. Yet, what did I see which struck me? I shared with the artist (he called himself Ray) my appreciation of the hues in his study of sunflowers. Each of his paintings came with a separate background story; this teacher of art, who had taken the Fall semester off to travel, regaled me with the composition of one painting with a gull hovering over the piers of a restful dock; seen from the perspective of another flying gull.

"You'll have to paint another scene with country flowers to replace this one," I announced as I bent over to select my acrylic take away.

"That?" he said, "It would only take me forty minutes."

With such a masterly touch, I did not doubt it would only take an hour's time. Guarded by the park's tall trees whose wintry branches glimmered against the late afternoon sun with crinkled rust colored leaves--and orange colored--I also did not doubt that standoff or none, he will profit from his unusual living.

--photo and report by chriswong (blu-geese.org)