Today's open thread begins as travelogue then moves toward an exhortation.

Grožnjan is a tiny village, perched on a hill, with a view of the Adriatic. It's been around for 900 years, surviving under the Venetians, the Austrians, the Italians, Tito and now Croatia.

During one of those transitions, from defeated Italy to Tito, there was a mass exodus of ethnically Italian folks, so Tito made Grožnjan an arts village, giving some of the houses to visual artists from the area and some to a music council that would come to sponsor a summer jazz festival.

Artists live in one section of their building, use another section for a studio, and devote a third part to a gallery accessible to the public.

Obviously, it's a tourist town, but one that serves its creative residents rather well. People from all over Europe visit Grožnjan; just check out how many languages have a Grožnjan Wiki. That stream of visitors provides the resident artists with a reliable income.

Cleveland has an area known as "Hessler Street" that has some similarities. In the 60s, a group of bohemians and hippies occupied some old houses on Hessler Street, a small residential area situated next to Case Western Reserve University in the University Circle area of Cleveland. As universities are wont to do, CWRU wanted to demolish the Hessler Street houses and build dormitories to house the influx of Boomer students. The Hessler residents resisted by forming a neighborhood association and holding a fair/party to raise money for an effort to have the street designated an historic landmark, thus preventing demolition and redevelopment.

Their efforts were a success, and the area and its creative, bohemian atmosphere was preserved. Now the springtime Hessler Street Fair is a huge Cleveland event that still raises money for the neighborhood association while providing a little income boost for the residents, many of whom are artists and musicians.

Two "villages," thousands of miles apart, one created "from above" and the other "from below," but both provide stable homes for creative people. While I've never lived in Grožnjan (though I could once see it from my porch) nor Hessler Street, these two place provide models for what I'd like to see happen in my neighborhood.

Now for the exhortation part:

We're living in those interesting times that the sages talk about. Wrenching changes have emptied out not tiny villages but large sections of megalopolises. Large institutions loom over us, threatening to gobble up all that we hold dear. Grožnjan and Hessler Street were responses to their own interesting times that focused on the local, one street at a time, and on people and the quality of their lives, not the most important or powerful people, but valuable human beings, as we are all valuable and worthy of being cherished and nurtured.

One way to survive and even flourish in interesting times is to focus our efforts on people just one street at a time, using our talents and time to make things a little better for ourselves, our families, our neighbors, our fellow citizens in an expanding circle that starts small but has an amazing capacity for growth. New worlds don't ever spring complete and universal in some magic moment. As the Jewish sage said, they begin as a tiny seed that grows into a beautiful shade tree.

So I invite you again to think small and local.

Do you have a dream about something that you could do, perhaps in concert with a few others, that would improve life for yourself, your family, your neighborhood?

Do you have a vision for the place where you live? What would life be like there? How can you get from here to there?

This exhortation is not limited to your responses to this Open Thread. I encourage all C99%-ers to write about their "little" dreams and hopes, mustard seeds that could grow into sheltering shade for many others.