We're open!

As of, oh, about five minutes ago, Local Economy is open at 6028 College Ave. Going forward, we'll be open from 11 to 4, Wednesday to Saturday (and for our whole slate of events).

We could not be more excited.

You can find delicious coffee from Painted Leopard, and a small retail shop featuring local makers and goods for resilience—personal and collective. We’ve also got dozens of events coming up, which you can find at thelocaleconomy.com. If you're already on the member waitlist, we're hoping to start letting more folks in soon (maybe even at the end of this week!). If you want to join it, here's the link.

We open our doors with two questions in mind, routed to us from Helen and Newton Harrison via the artist Lauren Bon:

"How long is now? And how big is here?"

Local Economy is an experiment in community, an enlarging of our personal-familial here, but also an invitation to a collective exploration of that here.

Here is a superposition of so many places and systems, from Claremont Creek (where our water comes from) running in pipes past the shop down College to the Mokelumne River (where our water also comes from) to the Pacific Ocean (where our water also comes from) to the wall we had to cut open in the back room to install a sink (where our water also comes from). Here is a node in a logistics network. Here is a community space. Here is an old building on a ghost streetcar line. Here, to your microbiome, is you. And all these heres are not stacked like dolls, but connected together by complex and often mysterious piping. There's so much to learn about here.

Now is the rushing narrows that contains all of our histories, ancestries, genealogies. It's the point at which we can nudge the trajectory of the world. Now is an X-millisecond slice of perception, as a neuroscientist might say. And now is also the product of 3.8 billion years of life reproducing itself in an unbroken chain. "You’re actually just an object that’s very large in time," says astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker. So, perhaps, we could also ask, "How big is now? How long is here?"

Now is also Wednesday morning, in a shop that is about to bustle for the first time. We're nervous! We're excited to meet members, neighbors, new friends. Local Economy is a small storefront at 6028 College Avenue, and it is also all of you spread across greater Oakland, which is very large in space.

See you soon.