Home After Vacation Away – Part 2

The Tiled Steps 

You see everything with amazing clarity.  Alexandra Stoddard

I close my eyes in meditation this morning and I see that view. And my heart dances.  – Journal, September 26, 2013, Oakland, CA

 

Once again, my fellow flaneuse, Ann Cromey, and I struck gold right in our home town. We had both read about these tiled steps, located on 16^th and Moraga, deep in the Inner Sunset of San Francisco. We had been waiting to see these steps all summer but we both had vacations to get out of the way first. (Vacations away, that is!)

The 16^th Street tiled steps project was a neighborhood effort to create 163 mosaic panels, completed in August, 2005. (8 years ago and I never even knew they were there.) Artists Aileen Barr and Collette Crutcher were joined by over 500 fellow tile creators and sponsors with the support of Golden Gate Heights Neighborhood Association and the San Francisco Parks Trust. What a vision come true - these steps are glorious!

www.tiledsteps.org

I am still a bit, (a lot) I-Phone map challenged, so while I fiddled with MapQuest, Google Maps and Waze, the good Ann drove us there; navigating through the maze of streets and neighborhoods, all the way from the Bart at 16^th and Mission to the foggy Inner Sunset. By the time I had finally gotten the nice lady at Waze to talk to us, she had already spotted the steps. Driving through the neighborhood, you would never know such an unexpected jewel would be located in between the quiet houses.

 

They were every bit as magnificent as promised by the Chronicle. After surveying the whole of them soaring up to seeming eternity, we slowly made our way up, studying each fish-filled, flower decorated tile. There was even a tile for Crepevine, one of my favorite restaurants in the East Bay! Arizmendi, cooperative bakery, too! How cool is that?!?

 

About half way up Ann pointed silently to three women dressed as colorfully as the tiles; full long skirts, emblazoned with fiery flowers in oranges, reds and electric blues; one of them even sported a orange hoodie on top of her skirt! It turns out they were from India, a proud family visiting their daughter finishing her first year at Stanford. (Ann is very good at striking up conversations and getting this type of information.)

We ambled up a few more flights and then settled in the middle, tucked to one side, with our lunches (the same ones described in an earlier posting) and talked and talked as we ate and surveyed the glorious view. The view encircled us fully, held all of us on those steps in our humanity, lifted us to the heavens and will forever be imprinted in our consciousness, sustaining us through the week.

Friends, go find a view! Take a drive up to Skyline in the Oakland Hills one day after work this week, go sit by the tiered pools at Joaquin Miller, or go to the top of the Drake Hotel in Union Square and have a drink in the Starlight Room this weekend.

We need that wide-open, spacious perspective. Dear God, bring us out into a broad place! (Psalm 18:19)