Photo of the Day: Julia Gabriel People’s Garden, Morningside Heights, NYC

Late this past summer, after meeting for lunch old friends from Columbia University, I walked around the Morningside Heights neighborhood and came across this small garden at the intersection of West 111^th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

(With temperatures dropping in the Northeast these last few days, I experience vicarious warmth just looking at this picture I took then.)

The volunteer-run Julia Gabriel People’s Garden is named for an area resident who saved the garden and its adjacent apartment buildings in the 1960s and 1970s—a victory over redevelopment by no means assured in that era.

Quote of the Day (Henrik Ibsen, on ‘These Heroes of Finance’)

“It’s such sport with these heroes of finance; they’re like beads on a string—when one slips off, all the rest follow.” —Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), The League of Youth, translated by William Archer (1869)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (bell hooks, on Fear and ‘Cultures of Domination’)

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In its rhetoric such a society makes much of love and little of the pervasiveness of fear. Yet we are all so terribly afraid most of the time. Fear is the prevailing culture force that upholds structures of domination.  Fear promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies with sameness, then difference will appear as a threat.” — Author, academic, feminist and social activist bell hooks, “Love’s Alchemy,” in Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, edited by Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke (1997)

The image of bell hooks accompanying this post was taken Nov. 1, 2009, by Cmongirl.