Manhattan Street Scene: Think Coffee Bleecker & Bowery

January 8, 2012 / cat / No comments

Originally published at Luma Blog

Outside very cool coffee shop Think Coffee: Bleecker & Bowery.

In addition to being fair trade, Think’s blends are organic & shade grown (bird friendly; conserves biodiversity) offering the perfect triumvirate in conscious coffee ideals! There’s artwork featured on the shop walls and the coffee shop functions as a mini-gallery, with art receptions periodically. I’ve frequented the Think location at Mercer and W. 3rd Streets, near Washington Square Park, the most. You can catch music and writers reading their work there some evenings. (Note: The Mercer Street location is also very much an NYU hangout but hey! there’s free wifi and an easy going vibe.)

This photo captures where Bleecker meets Bowery, a moment in time, on a Sunday afternoon in July. The third (and only other – at this moment!) Think Coffee location is the newest & I wasn’t even aware it existed til I started writing this post! It’s near Union Square – Fourth Avenue between E. 12th and E. 13th Streets.

Photo: Cathryn

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The Magic of Aromatherapy: Roses

January 7, 2012 / cat / No comments

From Cathryn’s World:
I’ve considered essential oils magical from the minute I learned of aromatherapy. In fact, one of the first books I ever read on the practice was called Magical Aromatherapy by Scott Cunningham. The book acts as “a guide to utilizing essential oils and aromatic plants to create changes in our lives.” He writes: “By correctly selecting the fragrance and inhaling it with visualization, true magic occurs.” I loved that then. I still do.

When I created B-girl, my aromatherapy line, the idea for the use of the oils (blends of essential oils in a carrier oil, packaged in small vials) jumped off of Cunningham’s belief. The aromas were created to be used for our own self-empowerment. Carry them with you wherever you go! I wrote initially. Use them as your secret source when you need empowering.

Here’s more about how aromatherapy works:

The part of the brain that most directly responds to olfactory stimulus is the limbic system, which corresponds to our feelings, memories, stored learned responses, and emotions. When aromatic messages reach the limbic system, they are processed instantly and instinctively. – Susan and Valerie Ann Worwood, Essential Aromatherapy

It’s important to note that as wonderful and powerful as aromatherapy is, as Patricia Davis writes in Subtle Aromatherapy, “Oils are not magic spells … [they] do not replace inner efforts. Growth can be hard work.” Still, they can be our inner cheerleaders, moving us forward a bit.

One of the most perfect scents to work with is with roses – especially with Valentine’s Day right around the corner.

The smell of roses is uplifting, can heighten creativity, curb depression, helps heal grief and trauma, and is great for your love life (because of everything mentioned plus it acts as an aphrodisiac). Rose essential oil is excellent in skin care because it soothes and helps revive any type skin but is particularly good for mature skin and wrinkles.

Rose essential oil – rose otto (steam distilled) or rose absolute (solvent extracted) – is very expensive (thousands of pounds of rose petals make up a pound of the essential oil) but, if you can swing it, it’s worth it.

While I’ve been Ms. activist/blogger/writer and finishing the B-girl Guide (my book, update to be posted here shortly!), I ‘do’ B-girl biz in a low-key way. Yet I must say Valentine’s Day is a great time for Love & Bliss oil. It is made with the oil of organic roses from Bulgaria! — plus citrus, jasmine & more. The formula is hand crafted, all organic in a jojoba oil base. If you are in NYC, Manhattan or Brooklyn, we can hand deliver to you this weekend. It’s lovely any time of year however! It’s also great to give a friend or for yourself.

Whether we have a significant ‘other’ or not, recognizing that Valentine’s Day has become such a major greeting card-candy biz attraction, we can distance ourselves from the commercialization of it all. We associate roses with luxury and exquisiteness and love and we appreciate them because of their grace and uniqueness. How about reclaiming it and making it a day to appreciate all of that within ourselves too?

Originally published February 11, 2011

Photo: Bahman Farzad

B-girl Love & Bliss oil

Category: cathryn's world blog /

Alice in Wonderland and Losing Your Muchness

September 22, 2011 / cat / No comments

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“…one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

(This Lewis Carroll quote may be my favorite.)

Recently, I was reading an interview with actress Anne Hathaway in the NY Daily News. I came across a part in the interview in which she said, “There’s a great line in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where the Hatter says to Alice, ‘You’ve lost your muchness‘. And I feel like I am the age where I’m more able to easily identify what my muchness is and be more fierce about protecting it.”

I stopped reading. I was not familiar with that line at all, and needed to find out more about it immediately. It has been a long time since I read the Lewis Carroll stories; the copy I have is beat up. I set about finding the books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (two stories comprise what we often just refer to as Alice in Wonderland).

With new copy in hand, I scour it diligently, relishing the opportunity to read the stories again. I see a reference to “muchness” but not that line. I go back to my old beaten up copy to see if it might be there. Nothing. Feeling like I’ve gone down the rabbit hole myself, at last, through online sleuthing, I realize that the line is only in the Tim Burton film which (I did not know and had not seen) is a newly written story. It picks up with Alice at an older age. (I also learned that screenwriter Linda Woolverton was not thought highly of in some quarters for tinkering with Carroll’s story.)

I then set about to watch the film on Netflix. The line Hathaway (who plays The White Queen) quoted appears in the scene in which The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), encountering Alice six years after they first met when she was 13, says,”You’re not the same as you were before. You were much more…muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.” What a perfect way to express something so seemingly hard to define!

Sometimes I feel that way. As if I have worn too many identities – publicist. aroma biz creator. activist. blogger. writer. blog designer. – to fit one person! Each one has been uniquely enriching but it can get a bit, uh, confusing. Then again, maybe the harder part is being so much more aware now of how troubled our world is – for people, places, animals, the ecosystem. Taking on issues and needing to be so logical so much of the time.

“It’s a terrible kind of memory that only works backwards.” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Growing up, I won a prize for best costume as Alice in Wonderland in our town’s Halloween parade. Somewhere a picture exists of me, elementary school age, standing, beaming, on the front brick steps of our white split level house; its red door visible behind me. Clearly, costumes were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are now. No matter, my makeshift Alice costume usurped whatever existed as my competition. My brown hair, made to replicate Alice’s blond mane was covered by what appears to be a mop-like wig; most likely comprised of thick strands of yellow – or was it white? – yarn. I remember my smile at this point more than my hair.

There is no doubt that I felt my muchness at that moment! – and of course have many times since. I think maybe that’s the point of it all – to be sure we are living up to our muchness potential.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” - Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I’m hoping to finish The B-girl Guide shortly (full progress update forthcoming!), it includes stories of my experiences in these different worlds, information on topics that I think are important to rethinking the way we live - in relation to people, places, the environment, animals and ourselves. Illustrated with images of the (to be updated) B-girl!

So, you see, I certainly need my muchness to complete it, don’t I?

How do we not lose our muchness in today’s world? Remain serious about things going on and yet retain a sense of the whimsical? Lewis Carroll purposefully sprinkled whimsy throughout the stories of Alice’s Adventures. Personally, I want to embrace the feeling that the world will change and that six impossible things are possible before breakfast.

Originally published at Cathryn’s World Blog on February 18th, 2011.

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WikiCity – How Citizens Can Improve Their Cities & On Washington Square

September 22, 2011 / cat / No comments

Mexico City

Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Following in that spirit is the WikiCity movement, which, I just learned, is happening in cities across the world. At the end of this piece, I address how this relates back to Washington Square Park and its redesign.

From the Sustainable Cities Collective:

When governments don’t build infrastructure, citizens usually complain, but can’t do much about it. They pressure public officials and protest against proposed projects, but that’s as far as citizen participation in city building usually goes. It’s reactive, not proactive.

However, this model of citizen participation is being rethought by citizens around the world. They are taking control over what happens in their cities. … Local groups all around the world are taking the initiative and are building the infrastructure that governments refuse or are slow to do. …

In Los Angeles, several different groups have tried to address the lack of seating in the streets. They designed the SignBench and the SignChair that can be attached to existing street furniture to provide a place to sit. Another group designed a whole set of wood benches and planters for a bus stop that lacked any kind of street furniture. …

However, what is most important about this actions is that they open a discussion that hadn’t existed previously about who owns the city and who can improve it. This actions empower citizens to think about their environment and act on it, and that is ultimately more meaningful than the mere creation of infrastructure.

And this can go beyond infrastructure, as this piece, “Welcome to the City of Voice” by Tekijä Roope Mokka illustrates:

UN estimates that by 2050 half of the world’s population will live in “self-built cities” – informal settlements, slums. I hope they’re wrong. I hope we all live in cities that we design and create ourselves. If slums can be built by people with access to almost no resources, imagine what we in the developed world could do. …

There is tons of research into why some people feel happier than others. In the all the answers one thing keeps coming up: the ability to guide your own life. We are happy if we feel that we have power over our lives, if we have a voice. Our greatest urban problem is not spiraling property prices, nor the ageing population nor safety. It is not zero tolerance, queues for clubs and bars, it’s not chain restaurants nor is it ugly buildings or clone towns. These are merely symptoms.

The core issue is that cities no longer enable us to live out our dreams. We have changed, but the cities haven’t. They remain the final bastions of modernistic design where users are seen as the masses and individuals are an obstacle. Even suburbia (on the surface a tasteless, mundane, hypermarket-bound high-carbon lifestyle) offers more potential for self-expression. That is why we fleeing cities.

To lure us back we need cities that give us a voice. We need to take democracy to the next level, where it recognises our individual needs and dreams.

How this relates to Washington Square Park:

The problem with Washington Square Park’s redesign is that it’s an example of a city that had a concept that totally negated the value of park users’ and community input. There was a Parks Commissioner, as directed by the city’s Mayor, who pretended that having “listening sessions” was the same thing AS listening.

The problem with Washington Square Park Redesign Phase II isn’t that it doesn’t look nice. As commenter Angela wrote: “the park looks pretty and all but rather generic and bland.”

The problem is that everything about the previous design that the community very much liked was obliterated. It was the ultimate in a slap in the face, a statement: ‘we don’t care what you think,’ we want this park to represent the Bloomberg model, to be homogenized, and to reflect the city WE envision, not the one you want, not the one you loved.’ By their actions, city officials were blatantly saying, ‘this isn’t the ’60s or even the ’70s and we WILL prevail.’ Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. The park will always be special. It’s just a bit tainted now. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get around that fact.

I think that there will be a way, one day in the future, for people to reclaim what was lost at Washington Square or create something new within the design, as people are doing in WikiCity movements, which will provide the lost “voice” in the process. That there will be a way to somehow right what was done and build a new model of governance for the future; a future where the Bloomberg model, in which real estate, Wall Street and corporate interests reign, will be looked upon with disdain, and people will say “This is ours. Don’t mess with this.”

Originally published at Washington Square Park Blog here.

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