The Rambling Brink Mirage

slog along towards the brink; "just over the hill now". Through the footsteps in the wilderness. Towards "I am what I am to be". Formation of energy- solid grip of sand.

"That is safe, there must be a meticulous foundation, so much wasted time, how depressing, what a scandalous thought."

"What is scandalous is your envy of freedom and reliance."

"oh is that so? You mean reliance on God? You have no idea my tests!"

"Sorry, I didn't mean..."

"No, I can be a little dramatic, and...I'm sorry too. It's just that..."

"What?"

"Well, I hope this doesn't sound pretentious, but they are a very peculiar"

"Your talking about tests?"

"Yea, I have never known anybody else who has had them. I suffered almost as much from, you know, the lack of understanding, um...the misguided diagnoses, the cross-eyed looks, as I did from, from the test itself."

"I take it by your use of the past tense that these tests are past?"

"Well, sort of, ok. My original plan was, and I know this sounds cliche, but it was synergy. There were no details, but I knew that the world would bend to the spirit that I was tapped into. That's it. Now when the tests came, and the particular situation circumstance of these were not important, though I did think so at the time, it was more like what I can describe as a conceptual catch 22 way of addressing the moment...of which any circumstance could be the culprit. Anyway, I prayed and prayed, screamed, and when others were around, inside. It was really the only hopeless time I have felt in my life."

"Was anybody aware of what, or, how you were doing?"

"Well again, either I couldn't verbalise, or it just wasn't like other...um...I have never really heard of being stuck in competing conceptual, um, mindsets when being just in a regular circumstance, does that make any sense?"

"Sort of. Your descriptions are kind of vague, I wish it made more. "

"So do I. Thank you for listening to me, I wanted to answer your original question about still being tested, um we were talking about reliance on God and tests in relation to freedom. I got over this test by accepting that I couldn't apply my enlightenment to the world how I had thought. I think it was a prayer by the Ba'b that did it. I forgot which one, or what exactly it was about, but I got from it that I needed to let go of my need for synergy and freedom."

"That seems kind of counter-intuitive. It seems like those are things you would want"

"Well, I know. It was more like, I needed to accept my limitations, build within them, and somehow leverage them for my long term growth. I felt that maybe I could, well, I realized that I couldn't act with the freedom and spirit, even charisma, that I might have wanted, but I could do the things that don't require that so much. More things to do with patience and diligence. Such as reading, studying, planning, and these naturally applied to what I pursue now, from going through school, to being available, maybe not effective, but available and present, for faith activities, to carry out the plan. I think getting married is a part of that. It allows me to be more comfortable, and time, to be myself, to share with someone, and to love someone beyond the remote ideal of love for mankind."

"And to be loved."

"yes. Absolutely...I want to say that how you approach life is very inspiring to me."

"Thanks"

"I am sorry for my condescending tone earlier. Part of it I think is jealousy. I seem to have developed a lack of patience for those attitudes that I have resigned to be, well what I think is not possible for myself. I think that this mode I have been in, now I am near the brink. Soon I can be the final definition of what I have settled for desperately. But now I think, why settle. It has almost become too easy to fall back on the crutch of what God has ordained, in my view, that I cannot do, and that I can. I don't feel that I am ready to form."

"Hmm, I am glad you are realizing this, though I am not totally clear on what you are talking about exactly, a lot of your descriptions are kind of vague."

"I know, they were more for me to better understand this brink that I am supposedly standing on. Thank you for listening, for drawing me out and asking questions. It is not always easy...Some people can easily express themselves. I need people to ask questions, to dig deeper."

"I didn't do very much."

"But you did. You listened, and I don't know where this torrent came from."

"I am not quite sure what you mean by 'being on the brink of form."

"It doesn't exist, it is a mirage."

Moment

Awake...again...but from where? The gray skies, the muddy memories. What have I done now, at this moment (the only one that matters), to deserve the events drawing me into these warm blankets. What does it mean, standing here, eyes fixed in the mirror, this flesh is still so young, someday old with rot. He couldn't understand. The mold in the corner. How every indication of age and growth all boiled down to the single moment. Now cold, damp, alone. Alive, terribly. Exhilarating sadness.

Research Proposal and Lit Review

I have completed a draft of my Research Proposal and Literature Review which I will present soon to my thesis committee. If you would like to scan it, I have made a link to it under (Thesis Proposal). I am interested in any feedback...

Also, I couldn't get the images to show up, but they aren't very important.

Written a while ago

Things Fall Away...

I was only a boy; I was impressionable; I greatly desired true acceptance which was never fully given to me except for periodic moments, out of time experience. The more I tried, the more I was embarrassed. I'd study the people who I thought could give me this gift. I sang and danced for their amusement; they hated me, laughed at me, they were determined to create the conditions of my everlasting banishment...

...Things fall away when your not even trying. Things fall away so easily that we have to bring them back, remember our suffering. The more we push things away, the more they become our reality. The more we fight them, the more they devour us. Pain is an illusion, created at the first morn of human consciousness. We love our pain. When it begins to fall away, when we stop fighting it, we are frightened. We fear the nakedness of our banal understanding; we fear the exigency to be nothing. humiliation incarnate.vulnerability incarnate.creativity incarnate.

Home

Family - Father Cousin Aunt Wife

















The Rio Grande Gorge

The Morphology of Landscape

This weekend I had the chance to bike ride a trail that runs along the East Side of the Rio Grande. On Friday, Sjona and I rode way down into the South Valley, and today I rode way up into the North Valley


The trip was exactly what I needed. I have been so immersed in academia, that I need to realize again what it is I study. Why I study
Geography. A study of landscape. Humans in their landscape
Nature, a prisoner of its landscape.

Humans in the landscape. Are we prisoners?
Humans changing their landscape. Is this an expression of culture? Free will? Our we prisoners of our own devices? Derivatives of a landscape we left behind so long ago?
Don't forget the human spirit...
Human destruction...
Human civilization...
To reach beyond our own prisons...
Into a fairytale. The mysterious path...
The endless labyrinth...
The illusion of freedom...
What is beyond?
a glimpse here or there...
back to reality, the human landscape...
The natural landscape...sort of.
Camel transplants. What is this new landscape to them? Are they overwhelmed with a sense of liberation?
The fabric of human beings. Humans being. Grasping.

Day by day, in real time...
All but a moment...
timeless.



As children we think so much about being grown up. As adults, our pursuit of happiness is a proxy for ceaseless nostalgia...tied up in the landscape, the gatekeeper of childhood, the gatekeeper of mystery, the gatekeeper of death.

The morphology of landscape

sponge

assumption.

universal.
objective.
language.

the assumption of meaning.
words.
unconscious.

the assumption that the explorer is being found.
the direction of insight.
the assumption that absorption is.
a two way street.
unconscious.

conscious of a narrative.
tangential.
offspring.

acquired.
sponge.

lucidity clouded in narrative.
projection.
vault.

subjective.
subjection.

please.
inquire.
squeeze.

Initial Thesis Proposal

I am interested in hearing feedback on this. My ideas are still in development

Research Proposal

Background:

Poor diet is the cause of many adverse health effects, such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and many others (Must et al. 1999). There is a growing body of literature linking the lack of accessibility to healthy, diverse, and cheap food with bad dietary habits and food insecurity (Morland et al. 2002, Cummins and Macintyre 2002). Low accessibility areas, often coined “food deserts”, have been defined as areas that are both far from suitable retail food outlets, and are inhabited by those without suitable access to transportation, often those with low income, minorities, and the elderly (Apparicio et al. 2007, Zenk et al. 2005). There has been a growing social concern over the existence of food deserts in the last decade, as large supermarkets have moved out into the suburbs (Clark et al 2002), leaving many inner city and low income areas reliant on small independent stores (Eisenhauer 2001), many of which lack healthy food and are more expensive (MacDonald and Nelson 1991, Chung and Myers 1999).

Various indicators have been developed over the years to study the spatial variability in access to food retailers. These include simple provision indicators, accessibility indicators, and model-based indicators. An example of a simple provision indicator is retail grocery square feet per household. The more sophisticated model-based indicators attempt to investigate the level of population-store interaction by estimating the demand and supply of a given area (Clark et al. 2002). Spatial accessibility has most commonly applied to hospital access, and consequently this application is where many of the more advanced measurement techniques have been developed. These have been simplified into four general categories as “provider-to-population ratios, distance to nearest provider, average distance to a set of providers, and gravitational models of provider influence” (Guagliardo 2004). It has been observed that results can vary significantly depending on the measurement being used. This has prompted a recent study in Montreal that combines 3 different measurements, proximity, diversity, and variety, to measure spatial accessibility to food. Proximity is derived by using network shortest path distance, diversity is derived by measuring the total number of supermarkets within a walkable distance, and variety is derived by measuring mean distance to three different supermarket chains. The authors then go on to correlate this combined measure to a social depravation index using five variables to identify food deserts. These variables, based on percentage of the total population, include income, single parent families, unemployment, education, and immigration (Apparicio et al. 2007).

To my knowledge, there have been no studies locating the existence of food deserts in Albuquerque. It is an open question whether even the most sophisticated methodologies, particularly the recent Montreal study, would apply to Albuquerque in all respects. Albuquerque is a historically agricultural area, even though it has almost ceased to be a source of primary income for most farmers, especially the younger generation (Friends of Albuquerque 2006). Nevertheless, there is still an abundance of food sold in farmers markets and neighborhood food stands. Many of these agricultural neighborhoods might also be those that fit the common criteria as being food deserts.

Statement of Problem:

I want to contribute to the methodologies of identifying ‘food deserts’ by testing the common assumption that supermarket chains are the only indicator of healthy, cheap, and diverse food, especially for places similar in character to Albuquerque.

Objectives:

1.) I want to replicate the Montreal study, which appears to be the most sophisticated in assessing food accessibility, in Albuquerque.

2.) I want to revise/improve this methodology to reflect local agriculture by surveying where people get their food in areas that would be considered ‘food deserts’.

3.) I would then develop a set of metrics to reflect differences in diversity, health, and price between local and supermarket food retailers.

4.) I would use these metrics to possibly redefine ‘food desert’ boundaries in Albuquerque.

Method and Data Considerations:

1.) In identifying supermarkets, I will need to get access to a licensed database of food stores and geocode them into a map. I would also need to do some field checks to test the quality of the information.

2.) I will be relying heavily on census information to create a social depravity index in similar fashion to the Montreal study.

3.) I will need to develop a stratified random sample in order to survey the areas identified as food deserts.

4.) I need to do some more research on developing the metrics necessary for comparing the food characteristics of different food retailers. This is where I might need to get a committee member with a background in economics.

Discussion:

I hypothesize that in Albuquerque, the assumption that supermarkets are the only provider of food accessibility will be true regarding food diversity, but not always true regarding food health and price. If this is the case, then I believe that this study can help to more accurately define food deserts in Albuquerque and other urban environments that have similar characteristics. It might also contribute to the debate about how to alleviate food deserts. A few studies have pointed out the location of supermarkets in food deserts might actually exacerbate the problem, by putting many of the local vendors out of business and creating ‘micro-food deserts’ for those that cannot travel to shop, such as retirees, mothers with children, and the disabled (Clark et al. 2002). Although it might be outside the scope of my research, future research might investigate the possibility that a policy of supporting the creation of local farmers markets in ‘food deserts’ provides better food accessibility in some areas than that of attracting large supermarkets.

References:

1. Apparicio P, Cloutier M, Shearmur R: The case of Montreal’s missing food deserts: Evaluation of accessibility to food supermarkets. International Journal of Health Geographics 2007, 6:4.

2. Chung C, Myers S: Do the poor pay more for food? An analysis of grocery store availability and food price disparities. Journal of Consumer Affairs 1999, 33(2):276-296

3. Clarke G, Eyre H, Guy C: Deriving indicators of access to food retail provision in British cities: studies of Cardiff, Leeds and Bradford. Urban Studies 2002, 39(11):2041-2060.

4. Cummins S, Macintyre S: A systematic study of an urban foodscape: The price and availability of food in Greater Glasgow. Urban Stud 2002, 39(11):2115-2130.

5. Eisenhauer E: In poor health: Supermarket redlining and urban nutrition. Geojournal 2001, 53:125-134

6. Friends of Albuquerque: Friends of Albuquerque’s environmental story 2006

http://www.cabq.gov/aes/s2sv.html

7. Guagliardo, M: Spatial accessibility of primary care: concepts, methods, and challenges. International Journal of Health Geographics 2004, 3(3).

8. MacDonald J, Nelson P: Do the poor still payer more? Food price variations in large metropolitan areas. Journal of Urban Economics 1991, 30(3):344-359

9. Morland K, Wing S, Roux A, Poole C: Neighborhood Characteristics associated with the location of food stores and food service places. American Journal of Preventative Medicine 2002, 22(1):23-29

10. Must A, Spadano J, Coakley EH, Field A, Colditz, and Dietz WH: The disease burden associated with overweight and obesity. Journal of the American Medical Association 1999, 282:1523-29.

11. Smoyer-Tomic K, Spence J, Amrheim C: Food Deserts in the Prairies? Supermarket accessibility and neighborhood need in Edmonton, Canada. The Professional Geographer 2006, 58(3):307-326

12. Zenk S, Shulz A, Israel B, James S, Bao S, Wilson M: Neighborhood racial composition, neighborhood poverty, and the spatial accessibility of supermarkets in metropolitan Detroit. American Journal of Public Health 2005, 95(4):660-667.

This and that

Life is good.

Lately I have taken an interest in teaching. It started this summer when I started helping out (meaning sitting there) with children's classes, something that I had vowed never to do. I never thought that it was my path of service, but really it is, it should be everybody's path. Now I have become more confident to teach on my own, and it has really opened things up for me. It has given me a much greater vision of how Bahai's can transform the world. It is so easy to start a class, in any neighborhood, and especially apartment complexes. It is the portal to engaging the whole family, within a framework that allows us to serve them in all dimensions, and then for them to serve other families in the same way.

The teaching has also started in the university, the labs for two classes in my graduate department, Intro to Geographic Information Technology, and Intro to Geographic Information Systems. Going in I thought I would be much more nervous than I was. The greatest challenge has been to bridge the gap between those that are way ahead of the curve and those that have some catching up to do. I enjoy working one-on-one, I love feeling that I am making a difference in somebody else's learning.

Just recently I have decided to do a thesis, again. For a while I thought I wouldn't because the previous idea flopped after putting in a lot of energy. I think, partly due to lack of support from the faculty, I was naive in the feasibility of my vision. Now a new faculty member has come that has changed my world. He embodies everything I want to learn and more. With his help I hope to develop a thesis proposal within the next few weeks. I have taken an interest in modeling spatial accessibility. Common applications of this include determining the accessibility (meaning how long does it take people to get there based upon their type of transportation within a given transportation network) of health services, and analyzing ways to efficiently extend the outreach. My thesis probably won't be related to health care since it has been thoroughly studied. Instead I am thinking in terms of job and service accessibility, especially for people without vehicles.

My Crazy Summer

My dad and I in his back yard in Taos


Sjona in Portland

Sjona's uncle, his girlfriend, and Sjona's grandmother in Northern California

Sjona and her mom in Taos


I love Taos!!!


Sjona's mom, my dad, and me


Sjona and I with our new bikes at our house


Sjona' mom and me in Taos


Love in Taos


Daniel, Leila, and Sjona

Leila and Sjona in Central California.


Needles, California/Arizona border. We made it out of the Mohave desert alive!!


Sjona and her grandmother


Pretending to be pensive in Monterey, California

Monterey is beautiful, so is my wife.


My aunt and grandmother at our family reunion in Oregon

A very spoiled dear in somebodies yard in Ashland, Oregon


Sjona's Uncle at a nice swimming hole in Northern California


My mom is so cool!!!


Coastal Oregon

My mother and grandparents


Sjona is silly


My mom and her husband, Steve


The two lovebirds at Devil's Churn


Alsea Falls


I wish


Steve, he is such a great human being

Checking out a bald eagle in some wetlands in Oregon



A cute plant nursery


I love my mom


Sjona's hairpin

Some cool youth in Philometh Oregon




Chris and Mona at the Frontier!!!

Ryan and me near the river-walk in Corvalis

The three stooges