The Coop

The People's Coop is a warm inviting place, for some a reading and meditation and arts practice and performance space, for others a place to ride sleek bicycles with self-and-other improvement book racks while peddling energy into the cooperative Grid, sheltered by solar panel roof and natural wood graffiti walls spun and sung with Mohammad's Sufi Wind Turbinators. Original coop founders had been mural painters and finger and toenail designers, hair braiders and community garden canners and preservers, soup and smoothie makers and child-care cooperative providers and home school teachers, as well as the original upstairs apartment residents, and those living next door, working in the kitchen, serving organic soup and bread in winter, juice smoothies and fair-trade mocha freezes to readers and talkers with listeners during warmer sun-drenched months relaxing on teak chairs surrounding umbrella tables in our outdoor street cafe. The guy with a hot dog and bagel cart joined The Coop and invested each lunch hour outside then went inside to offer yoga and chi gong classes in the reading and quiet arts room. Meanwhile, more robust and rhythmic, the kitchen and juice bar shares open space with a performance stage bearing diverse drums, a grand piano, an accordion, rather strangely popular, and a karaoke machine, lights and sound, open mic days and nights for comedy and poetry, story-telling and rapping, tapping and beating and full gospel choir singing, depending on who shows cooperatively up to turn out rather than in over on the quiet side of the all bells, but no disdaining whistles, Coop. Coop peak periods include rainy and cold afternoons when street performers come inside, finish their soup, put out their hats and share a set, then join juice and coffee and tea bar tables and sometimes even take a turn on hooked-up bikes and rowing machines to operate the lights and mics and blenders, but not the mud and straw pizza oven out back, fired with cedar and mesquite producing organic vege and goat cheese on whole wheat crust for a light supper, or multigrain scones with herbal high tea, depending on where you came from before you found The Coop. If you remember the incense and hope of 1960s Head Shops, the heady roar and multi-racing of 1920s historic speaking stops, then you may come to see The Coop is a further evolution co-founded with 2020 PolyCultural ReVision, exclusively of and for those who are gay and straight and especially everyone in-between dead and new-born friendly, cooperatively owning and organizing allies for renewable multigenerational futures. The Coop coinvestors of and for reforesting each coop business and community as organically WinWin county and province and parish solidarity for healthy game strategics and nutritional performance and cooperative outcome producing places where poverty of spirit and vulnerability of nature's self-organizing politics is The Coop's greatest strength of faith, gratitude for Earth's multiculturally abundant natural-spiritual nondual healthy grace place space, faces of polypathic Planet Earth Cooperative.