Coastline Pilot
16 October 2009

Chasing the Muse
Catharine Cooper

Smoothing the edges of discourse

Turquoise sea glass. A found treasure that carried me into the day.

The sea glass, smoothly polished and paled to the lightest of blues, was lodged next to a rock on the beach. I slipped it like a jewel into the palm of my hand, rubbing its sand-tossed surface between my thumb and two fingers and wondered. How long it had been in the water? Where did it come from? Where did it start its journey? How long did it take to be transformed from a sharply edged broken piece to its now rounded corners?

It was the “edge” question that lodged most deeply in my thoughts. I found myself considering how edginess has crept into so many of our interchanges. Some of the graciousness that I experienced from and with my grandparents has given way to a level of self-righteousness that is difficult to swallow.

Discourse or conversation in so many ways has been replaced with shouting matches and/or declarations that if one does not agree with a particular point of view, then …


Well, the “then” takes on many disparate forms. In the back of my mind I hear options such as stupid, uniformed, uneducated, not-in-touch, blind to what is really going on.

It’s easy to hold our own positions. After all, we’ve spent our entire lives forming them. But what if, for just one or two moments, we let them go? Put them down and actually opened our ears to a point of view that is different from our own. Might then, discussions about solutions to homelessness, rancor over development in proximity to “our” property, permits for specific businesses, the blank-blank village entrance all gain some traction, instead of being mired in rancor.

It’s not simple to let go. We know what we know, and for the most part, we are sticking to it! Sometimes it is wealth or power that fuels our belief that our course is the correct one. Sometimes it is a sense of enlightened social consciousness, i.e, speaking for the greater good. Sometimes it is religion-based, i.e., a prescribed path with little room for alterations.

How do we come to the table and treat one another as equals? Have we become so busy that we do not allow ourselves an opening?

I wasn’t part of the Vision Laguna process, but the project was thorough, with street fair dialoguing and strategy meetings. When I sat as chairwoman of the now kaput Open Space Committee, many of the principles set down in the Vision Document guided our direction, re: trail mapping and acquisitions. In fact, it fell to our committee to define the means and ways to create the current Environmental Committee — our replacement.

While I’m not a big fan of any plan that purports to know what is good for us in 30 years, I’d like to see the kind of process that spawned the final Vision document utilized as an on-going tool for community involvement. It’s great the council meetings are televised and that the microphone is open for comments, but that’s a different situation than one in which citizens sit down to openly discuss, plot and plan a course for the shifting nature of life.

We didn’t plan on economic meltdown. We didn’t plan on empty storefronts for months on end. But they are here, now, and need to be addressed.

I again rub the edges of the sea glass with my fingers, and this time my gaze turns toward the sea. Lucky, I remind myself, to live and work and play in this beautiful seaside village. Lucky to have a voice and be able to speak my thoughts.

And for just a moment, I think about those who have never seen the ocean. And then I think … What would that kind of life be like?