Sunday Morning Reflections: On the 20th Anniversary of Tire Tracks, and Gentrification

A still frame from the 2006 documentary film "Tire Tracks"

directed and created by John Steed, produced by

Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House

Twenty years ago a short local film titled “Tire Tracks” was released in Stonington to local and regional acclaim.

“Tire Tracks” captures without judgment the voices and stories of those who delight in the local/rural practice of “burning rubber” – i.e., using the tools at their disposal to leave their marks on the world.

The creation of the film was a direct response to public complaints by new downtown Stonington residents of noise and disturbance in our hard working commercial fishing village. The film is a cultural response to gentrification: the changing of property ownership and ultimately local culture and decision making toward those with more money, often from other places, increasing property values and taxes and pricing out working, lower income residents.

The film was made by a young, first-time filmmaker from Stonington, John Steed. It was the first in a local series of documentaries commissioned and produced by the Imagination Project, a public digital media studio component of Opera House Arts (OHA) at the Stonington Opera House’s community-based programming. As founding Executive Director/Producer role at OHA, I remain proud to have commissioned, participated in the making of, and presented this film.

I believe it to be one of the most important works we created during my 17-year tenure with the Opera House. Living in coastal Maine, I think a great deal about the impacts of gentrification. I think we all need to. Continuing to financially push our fishermen and working people away from the shore doesn’t serve any of us well.

Are there ways our local communities can stem the losses of our authentic, commercial, working fishing communities to "destination housing" and too-short seasonal tourism? Are there actions, policies and investments we can all make together to better support our working waterfronts and year round workers/businesses/commerce? Or do we continue to allow "market forces" their own agency without balancing them against the common needs of a whole community, including those with less money (and therefore power/voice)?

When we made “Tire Tracks” our beautiful, remote coastal communities, in the aftermath of 9/11 just as after the pandemic, had experienced a surge of migration by those trying to escape urban life: a different type of “refugee.” Current migrations are often spurred by climate changes, with people relocating to Maine in attempts to escape locations of regular and severe fire, floods, or extreme temperatures.

In 2001-2006, I was a pretty new resident here myself, having moved from New York City to help restore and reactivate the Opera House. From that prominent Main Street corner, we had a front seat for and also a conscious role in the changes and conflicts happening in town. And we observed as many other new downtown residents didn't appreciate the noise of the commercial fishery (trucks going and coming in the middle of the night) or of rural young people with not many options.

They especially didn't like that our young people were hanging out together in their downtown and on its commercial piers, making all the sounds groups of young people make, getting into some of the types of adolescent trouble that groups of young people do, and -- burning their tires going off the fish pier and up the hill (past the Opera House, in more than one instance causing us to scramble to be sure our stage lighting had not caught fire!).

These new residents wrote letters to the paper and attended municipal meetings to advocate for the “relocation” of our young people from downtown. Of course, when we developed and released “Tire Tracks” we learned that it is not only "young people" who enjoy the art, practice, and opportunity of using their vehicles to leave their marks on our roads.

And it's not only young people who like to gather downtown -- and perhaps when in larger groups, to make music and other noise.

I could go on with reasons why this film was and remains both important and popular, and the most critical of these is simply that it gives visibility, voice, and pride to ways of living that middle-class and wealthy America would like to make invisible and erase.

The resentments defining our current political era, the accusations of elitism, are not without basis.

Working to balance these types of economic trends is a very tricky line to walk thanks to the famous “unseen hand” of market forces which makes many changes feel unintentional to individual participants.

Most of us want increased investment, prosperity, safety and opportunity in our communities. We strive for the "tide that lifts all boats."

The challenge is to achieve an equitable prosperity, one that doesn't continue to drive up property values and rents and displace our generational, lower-income residents. How do we prioritize our working waterfront and year-round commercial downtowns over a market that demands our beautiful coast for high-end housing?

The tricky line is further complicated by the fact that property owners relocating to rural, less developed areas from other places too often believe that success/wealth/education in and from those other places makes us "right." We arrive with confidence and credentials, even when our public positions might only represent a prioritization of self-interest. Wealthy property owners don't hesitate to use their resources to get their way, often costing our very small towns and taxpayers thousands in unanticipated legal fees.

Our communities need and want the resources of money and expertise new residents offer to be channeled more thoughtfully. We are very grateful for those seasonal residents, visitors, and “transplants” who listen, learn and understand the need for their capacity to invest in solutions for year-round housing, business development, education and more.

Living in close community, like a downtown area, can be tough: an understanding we hope those of us like myself who have lived in very dense places such as New York City bring along with us. You live alongside and with others not like you. They are fishermen, or drummers, or tire track artists, or young vibrant families with screaming children. You accept the arrival of new businesses, such as boat engine repair shops, because in the most thriving neighborhoods -- as acclaimed author Jane Jacobs noted -- the mix of commercial and residential properties is what keeps places alive and lively.

And if you believe you are moving to a rural community "to get away from it all” (as my father, a campground manager, liked to say) then we hope you use your privilege to buy a place on a point or in the woods; listen to the generations preceding your arrival; and contribute generously to your community's year-round survival by learning and respecting local culture, paying higher taxes, volunteering, and making other financial investments and/or charitable contributions.

Long live “Tire Tracks,” its stars and its window into a hard working, energetic, loud and smelly world of fishermen and their trucks. Let's celebrate and use its 20th anniversary to step forward together.

The DVD cover for Tire Tracks

Sunday Morning Reflections: When Seeking Forgiveness Trumps Individualism

At our best, humans press forward toward "the common good:" goals shared between us as community members to best care for everyone in our midst.

It has taken a lot of activism and change to even get us to the imperfect point we are today as a nation.

And it will continue to take activism and change to get us to a better place, as the forces of individualism and greed work to erode the very values on which the nation was founded.

For women to have a vote we had to fight for and in 1920 pass the 19th Amendment. And it wasn't until 1964-65 that we passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The 1990's (!) saw the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Let's believe and act in support of not that America or any one leader is great and should be held above the rest, but rather in people striving together for continuous improvement and the desire to work for and live in a nation that serves everybody equitably, leaving no one behind.

If you're not outraged by the level of individual graft, corruption, and self dealing of the current administration, and the way it is harming you, me, and others around the world every day, then I hope you will reflect again. There is no justification for the self-harm being inflicted on this nation and on our partners globally in the name of advancement of the sitting president and his supporters. None.

Our most successful schools hold the continuous improvement of each student as a primary goal. My parents and my faith both encourage me to understand that no one is perfect, we are all flawed, we all make mistakes, we all need to ask for and offer forgiveness.

This is the way we continuously improve. These are the ways we become a truly great nation.

Give what you can even when what you have seems too little. Provide food, shelter, and comfort to those in need. Do what needs to be done to discourage and even outlaw the accumulation of great wealth.

There is no one on the planet who "deserves" what they have, especially when it means so many others have so much less.

We have been given everything when we were given life on this planet and are entitled to nothing more. The "American" belief that we are is perhaps our gravest cultural sin.

Feel free to disagree. Nothing better than being in dialogue! Our conversations, our listening, is the means by which we advance. There is for sure error in my own ways, always to be corrected.

“No nation, no society, and no international order can call itself just and humane if it measures its success solely by power or prosperity while neglecting those who live at the margins.”

- Pope Leo XIV

Sunday Morning Reflections: Gendered Assumptions in the Political Realm

Sunday Morning Reflections!

Politics remains full to overflowing with our culture's unconscious gendering of authority. It is mind blowing, after so many years of feminist and queer activism and so much perceived change -- but true.

People, women especially, want to argue that they favor a male candidate over more accomplished females because of what he HAS succeeded in.

Yeah, OK. Anyone running for office has some successes.

But do we stop to really hold claims of success up against others? Do we stop to QUALIFY them? Do we stop to ask how those successes really came to be?

Rarely.

We rarely credit the small victories behind the scenes that make the larger ones possible; or the cross-the-aisle victories that are so crucial right now; or the way the people around us are treated, especially women who make up the bulk of administrative staffs; or the ability to build new coalitions and represent true community interests rather than platforms or the mere rhetoric of "change."

And at the end of the day, the male voices continue to carry more weight than the female. As an extroverted culture, we remain attuned to visible attributes of depth + size = authority.

We are attuned to a gendered world of power in ways we still do not question enough, despite the best efforts of the queer and trans worlds.

So when a big, rough, tough man speaks -- too many voters follow. We think only a man and his old fashioned ways of doing things can win in certain areas. We think "rough and tough" = working class values and progressive change. It doesn't take looking further than our last presidential election to see how superficial characteristics are ruling our elections.

It is past time that voters, and especially women, and especially white women, begin to question ourselves and what makes us feel comfortable and secure, own that, and move on -- even when we do not want to. Or when an accounting for these motives surprises us. Or when we realize the power of our unconscious assumptions, and it makes us uncomfortable.

We have to get to deeper levels of change.

The survival of our planet itself -- and the future generations it supports -- is at stake.

Let's together move beyond our comfort zones, move beyond traditional thinking -- because it is that thinking -- "only so-and-so [male] can win in this location" -- that keeps the status quo the status quo.

And just because you favor one candidate doesn't mean you eat their full table of platform and endorsements. Every candidate is compromised by something because we are all people -- we are all flawed.

Look carefully, listen harder, and choose your flaws with independence and an eye toward the future in which you want your children and grandchildren to live.

The world has changed in the last 50 years -- just not yet enough. Many of our female candidates have had many more success, and at less cost to the humans, communities, and planet around them, than the men against whom they are running.

We just need the courage to believe in ourselves: to see ourselves in women leaders, without cringing or doubting, and believe that women are the stronger, more persistent leaders of the real, lasting, systemic change we need so badly.

Loving Lent: The Desert Is Itself the Spring We Need

Me circa 1975 as referenced below.

The Heart Sutra is one of the most foundational Mahayana Buddhist texts, often called the essence of Buddhism. It gives us that religion’s central tenets, emphasizing the achievement of enlightenment to liberate all beings rather than solely oneself – in poetry that we chant.

“Form is not separate from boundlessness, boundlessness is not separate from form / form is not other than boundlessness boundlessness is not other than form / the same is true of feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness…” 

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I love the Lenten season. And most especially that it starts with Jesus intentionally going into the desert not only to face temptations but to lose his self – to fast, pray, and realize his own boundlessness in the relentless emptiness of his surroundings.

Maybe it is because I am Catholic, or maybe as a person long in love with the notion of “radical,” or going to the root of things, I hunger to enter the desert of both discernment and repentance.

I yearn for every one of us to have opportunities for metanoia – the Greek concept for fundamental change of mind – in which repentance is rooted.

Repentance represents a total reversal of direction from sin toward God, acknowledging not only what we have done but what we have failed to do. What I, and we, fail to do every day. A shift from the self-justifications of our ego-selves to a heartbreak named God that produces not the self-centered, useless emotion of guilt, but rather an actual change in our behaviors and actions.

Repentance is humbling, and this humility is the pre-condition for asking for and receiving forgiveness.

From my perspective, we need a lot more repentance, forgiveness, and mercy in our dominant, white U.S. culture.

And not just from or for those who use their powers to treat others badly.

We need forgiveness from and for each other, who in our quests for comfort, convenience, and a sense of security fail to do enough.

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Boundlessness describes the reality that we are all the same cells, all breathing the same air; that these impermanent physical forms we currently take are, as Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck might say, “nothing special,” no-thing. Just here, now, for our particular purposes.

In its lack of distractions, we recognize the desert’s boundlessness and hopefully our own, wishing as we do at times, especially when ill or otherwise circumscribed by our bodies, that like Shakespeare’s Hamlet this “too too solid flesh would melt.”

The Desert is Itself the Spring We Need.

Here in the U.S., our culture of consumption seems often to have swallowed up our very understanding of the model and teachings of the Christ. We are encumbered by our attachments to so many things, to so much STUFF – as well as to the notion that we are entitled to it all as long as we “work hard.”

We need to do some spiritual Swedish death cleaning, as it were, to make conscious – to discern – our true purposes here and to change our actions.

We need the desert just as Jesus did, for fasting and praying, to burn away all that is unnecessary and get to what is real. Not individual egos but god’s beloved sons, god’s beloved daughters, god’s beloved children, each with our purpose here.

Here in the desert’s boundlessness we realize our dream of a better world, where there is no separation between you and me, between me and that blade of grass, between me and that piano – or between us and god.

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When I was 14 in 1975, I first cast myself into the desert of exile.

I received my confirmation from the Catholic Bishop of Norwich, CT, then promptly stopped attending church. 

I already knew that as a young queer woman I was exiled by this church, in which women could not be leaders and homosexuals were condemned sinners – but I wanted the choice to be my own.

My mother cried. My godmother rejected me.

I was still too young, then, to understand that living gracefully and mercifully with suffering and contradictions is the heart of Jesus’s messages and actions.

And neither my family nor our weekly CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) classes did anything to help me better understand Jesus’s complex lessons.

As young Catholics, we were taught only to obey the rules, and to follow. 

But follow what?

Had I better understood Matthew 4:1-11, in which the baptismal spirit leads Jesus into the desert wilderness to overcome the temptations of his suffering, I might have grown more productively within my own exile.

But I was a white U.S. teenager. I suffered in isolation, surliness and – rebellion.

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Father Richard Rohr recently quoted professor Rachel Wheeler on the desert: “The desert occupies a powerful place at the heart of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spiritual traditions. Simultaneously, the desert is a place of resistance, refuge, and revelation…Many men and women, who came to be known as desert fathers and mothers, experienced the wilderness as a refuge from an empire increasingly inhospitable to them…. Its association with the powerful and wealthy was inconsistent with how many desert mothers and fathers believed they ought to live out their Christian calling.”

We go to the desert to peel away the layers of abundance that cloud our minds and hearts. To step to the side, to allow god to lead.

The world’s suffering, and our suffering with and for it, is our “desert” only when it causes us to step away from our selves, away from abundance and comfort, to ask for forgiveness for all we have done, for all we have failed to do – and then to act.

How do we take up our crosses?

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I was a radical lesbian feminist living as a writer and editor in New York City in the midst of the AIDS holocaust of the 1980’s and 1990’s.

My friends, peers, and colleagues were becoming horribly sick and dying around me, every day.

The Reagan Administration refused to acknowledge the AIDS crisis.

We were again cast into an unmerciful and deadly exile.

Silence = Death.

In the midst of this I followed some of my fellow feminist activists from the streets of ACT UP and into a simultaneous Zen practice.

Sitting on the cushion, I learned to identify the stories to which my mind was attracted and attached, and then practiced letting those go. This has helped me to have compassion for those who would deny our existence, as well as the courage and love to act with purpose.

Mercy for those whose words and actions would kill us. Action to change it.

I was still very angry. I am still very angry. And again, not only at failed leadership. 

My anger burns for how so many of us, myself included, choose daily to participate in a culture that robs so many of their basic human dignity.

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My mom at the rehab center with our dog Jack.

Once a year, my mother would take the train from Mystic to the city to visit me for Mothers’ Day.

My mom was born in 1923 and was defined by growing up in a family of Bohemian and German immigrants through the Great Depression. She had a high school education, multiple eye operations and a full hysterectomy at age 17. When she finally met and was accepted by my functionally deaf, first generation father, they adopted me. She was already 39. 

She gifted her Catholic faith and values to me. It took me two decades to go back to church, to face the institution that, similarly to the Reagan administration, was determined that a woman like me could not exist.

Very few of us wish to venture where we are not wanted.

But Zen had taught me how to enter into my own boundlessness.

And entering into that boundlessness, I was at last able to understand the Old Testament’s prophets and the lived example of Jesus.

During one visit, my mom and I were passing by a beautiful Catholic church on 6th Avenue in Park Slope. I had poked my head in – I missed the magical smells and sounds and silences of my youth – and discovered it to be the worship home of Haitian refugees.

I told my mom I had tentatively started to return to Mass.

She was quiet until we reached the corner by the bodega whose cafe con leches and plantanos I craved.

I don’t go any more, she said softly.

Remembering how tortured I had felt in my youth, being awakened early to get to Mass and forced into religious education classes with priests I actively considered assholes, I was pretty sure I had misheard her. I asked her to repeat herself.

I don’t go any more, she said. You’re right, in what you write. The church is just made by men, men who change the rules. Whether or not to wear a hat. Whether or not to eat meat on Friday’s. Those are men’s rules, not god’s.

God is in my raspberry patch. 

We stood there on the Brooklyn sidewalk, the current of languages and colors swirling around us. 

Together, my mom and I were able to step aside from the rules of men and re-connect with the profound faith and humility with which she had always lived.

Connect to an understanding that we do our best work when we are able to step to the side, centering not our selves, but boundlessness.

Connect to a faith that god is best found in our raspberry patches, because we ourselves are no different from that thorny bush, or that delicious fruit.

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My beautiful wall-eyed mother.

It is actually not that difficult to practice both Catholicism and Zen Buddhism as they share an important core paradox: that we must live in and through suffering to find heaven.

As Christians, we know this as Jesus dying on the cross and then rising to new life.

As Buddhists, we know that trying to escape from inconvenience, discomfort, accumulated habits and assumptions, conflict, exile and death only deepens suffering.

In our boundlessness, there is no separation between suffering and love.

This Lent, how are we each entering and embracing the desert that makes discernment possible? What actions are we taking to de-center ourselves and our own experiences?

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Zen master Shunryu Suzuki famously said: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few."

I am writing this in part during the eclipse of the full blood moon, with coyotes howling along our shore.

Boundlessness – including the boundlessness of the desert – is the place from which all arises.

The desert itself was Jesus’s spring, as it is ours.

In barrenness, in self-imposed hunger and solitude, Jesus experienced his boundlessness and was able to resist the very human temptations that cause us to harm others – which is to sin.

In our boundlessness, we do not live on bread alone. We are more than these physical forms.

In our boundlessness, we do not need to prove our power by testing god.

In our boundlessness, everything is of god and nothing is more important.

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My Gram with her girls:
my mother at left, godmother at right

The “wisdom beyond wisdom” of the Heart Sutra is realized in the boundlessness of the desert, in which we are nothing special.

As many of you know, when I left New York City more than 25 years ago to return to Maine, I did so to work first in the nonprofit and now in the public sector.

There are always differences of opinion on how to reach shared goals. Always conflict. Always opposition. Too often negativity.

My hope is always, always, to find and serve our common good.

I try to bring my mother’s values – of faith in the interconnection of all things, in humility, in not knowing – into my work and fail more often than not.

As Roshi Joan Halifax has said, “Suffering and failure bring us to practice and teach us about our strengths and our interconnectedness with all beings. Our failures can become transformed into understanding and compassion.”

And so we just keep trying.

The desert is itself the spring we need.

Taxes. Basketball. Spring -- and Hopes Eternal

With Town Meeting swiftly approaching on the first Monday of March, there are three topics on all our minds: Taxes. Basketball. Spring.

Let’s be hopeful about all three – and read on for four suggested strategies you can use to better impact local budgets and taxes.

On Monday, February 9 the Town of Stonington held a public meeting to walk residents through the local budget items up for approval as warrant articles at this year’s Town Meeting. The week before, the Town held a public hearing to hear from the nonprofits whose “third party requests” make up approximately $80,000, or 2%, of this budget.

The local tax bill you receive is made up of these and also the Hancock County tax assessment, by which residents pay for county services including but not limited to sheriff, jail, courthouse, and transportation services; as well as the consolidated school district (CSD) budget.

This year’s estimated county tax bill for Stonington has been assessed at $240,000, or about 5% of your total bill.

The school district operates on a July 1 - June 30 fiscal year so are just beginning their budgeting process. School costs annually make up approximately 45% or more of your tax bill. Deer Isle-Stonington is known as a “low receiver” of state education funds due to our high coastal property valuations: the state does not cover 55% of our school costs as it does in other areas of the state. Our small towns are annually responsible for the bulk of an almost $8 million school budget on our own; if school funding formulas worked for towns like Stonington, we would be responsible for less than half that total.

#1 strategy for taxpayers seeking lower local costs: attend school and municipal budget meetings.

The Town’s proposed operating budget makes up the final half of your taxes. This year’s proposed budget is $2,299,781, which represents a $106,981, or 4.88%, increase over 2025.

However: the selectmen have offset that increase by appropriating funds from surplus to make the local share flat this year, causing no increase to your tax bill.

The only increases, therefore, that Stonington residents will see to property taxes are from school and county budgets.

The Select Board’s decision is based on their knowledge of the relationship between property taxes and year round housing for our work force to keep Stonington a vital, year-round community.

Thanks to our beautiful coastal properties we are a “high valuation” (and thus “low receiver” for school funds) community. As property taxation, school funding and local revenue sharing are structured in the state constitution the Town is prohibited from accessing much of that value without harming local workers: we cannot levy targeted local taxes, or differentiate the tax rate between seasonal and year round residents.

#2 strategy for taxpayers seeking lower local costs: advocate for changes to state tax policies through your local legislators.

Despite our isolated location and small population, Stonington, thanks to our standing as Maine’s #1 lobster port, functions as a service center for our fisheries and marine economies. With our commercial fish pier, public doc, three working waterfronts, access to Acadia National Park and public utilities, Stonington is more of a “tiny city” than an ordinary coastal village. Unlike many surrounding communities, the Town, thanks in large part to its former population density, manages a public water company and sanitary district. These are real assets that make Stonington the envy of many towns, as housing development costs within these public utility districts are lower than outside of them. Sadly, during the real estate rush of the pandemic, year round residents lost control of over 50% of this historic housing stock. Now the Town is working on a number of strategies to make it possible to invite and encourage year round residents to live downtown again. The Town succeeds in its required operations thanks to dedicated grant seeking, writing, and awards totalling in the millions of dollars of investments to infrastructure and other improvements.

#3 strategy for year-round residents to lower taxes is to be signed up to receive the state’s Homestead Exemption reduction. Recently, we became aware of citizens who mistakenly believed this exemption is only for elderly residents. The Homestead Exemption provides a reduction of up to $25,000 in the value of your home for property tax purposes for all permanent residents of Maine whose property is your primary residence. Because the exemption applies to any residential property assessed as real property, it also covers mobile homes even if they are on rented lots. To qualify, file an application on or before April 1 with the municipality with the Town. And let’s advocate with our state legislators for getting that exemption amount increased! And P.S.: if you have sufficient assets to pay your taxes without this exemption – please don’t apply for it. All property tax exemptions like this and including those for nonprofit properties erode the overall tax base and thereby increase costs for your neighbors.

Finally, the transfer station is the second largest cost center for the Town. The millions of pounds of waste we ship out daily cost taxpayers dearly. You can help to reduce these by following the updated recycling and waste reduction instructions available at the transfer station.

#4 strategy: the more we reduce material waste, the more we can also reduce the costs of removing it.

The Town is here to help and your questions, ideas and actions are important. Please connect with us via email at econdev@stoningtonmaine.org; by stopping by the Town office; or by calling 207-367-2351.