The power curve in any city or municipality is always reflective of the oppositional relationship of status quo dogmatism and advanced or avant-garde thought and expression. Bureaucracies, even as edifices of more advanced ideas, ultimately—at the rules and precept levels— work toward maintaining the status quo. Ideation struggles are always journeys not destinations. We win some, we lose some.

The City of Prescott blew it from the beginning, the left hand not knowing what the right hand was up to (mixed messaging), ostensibly okaying (verbal), but not officially approving the bench, until the proverbial "buck stops here person" (Debbie Horton, Deputy Director of Parks, Recreation) laid out the problem. Regardless of what had been said or gone on before regarding the bench, it did not, in its final form, comply with park regulations. From there, the only compromise possible was to modify the bench to compliance or be denied permission to maintain it on park grounds. At that point, the choice for supporters was clear: accept compliance with regulations for altering the bench or wage a protest of public opinion to persuade park officials to make an exception. The latter option always carried the risk of losing the fight over creative free-expression, spontaneous demonstrations of love, heart, and soul, or the organic manifestation of some mystical intangibilities.

The exception was not granted, and while it can be argued because of prejudice and coordinated behind-the-scene pressure, exceptions to regulations on the book are only asterisks, not permanent change.

We won the Miller Valley Elementary School muriel fight, because the old guard-status quo had no regulatory fallback position to support their obvious bias and prejudices. All the I's dotted and T's crossed. That's the difference with this disappointment—notwithstanding our legitimate outrage at the underhanded, in the middle of the night demolition of the bench.

The only thing we can permanently occupy toward an enlightened society is enlightened personal consciousness, and the first step to doing that is to get clear on one simple truth: Wisdom is a journey unfolding moment to moment. Everything in between is momentary: life, people, and politics. Between what was and what will be is what IS: spontaneously arising clear light beyond form and time. The bench is gone, but not the pouring of light into the mold of consciousness it represented.

Carl