Turf.

This week there was a deliberate act of vandalism/intimidation against one of my community members. Word on the street trickled back to us that it was a reprisal for summoning the police (which we do for the safety and security of our guests.) A few weeks ago Joann said about Chinatown, "You gotta remember where you're at, you're not in Sunday School." For sure. Violence is an aspect of life here-- from the prison culture mindset and threats, to little scuffles, to beatings, and deaths. There's a sense  from some guests that inside is our alcove of safe space, but the street is a jungle. We closed the dayroom for a day and held community meetings with our volunteer corps and then the general public. One person said, "The cut wasn't to the tires, the cut was to our body."  Another said, "We need to build bridges with the dealers so we can respect each others boundaries. We need to be good neighbors." People make a lot of assumptions about people that are experiencing homelessness. My community is full of wise, beautiful, ordinary people. Chinatown was created, it was planned to hold the undesirable away from downtown and the marginalized are pushed there... another volunteer whose been around 20yrs said, "First they built a wall and we broke it down, then they built a fence, they corral us in."  Dorothy Day said, "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."

And the truth is, the dealers often are respectful to us. There's a spectrum: users (who may sell just to support their addiction), 'thugs' (who are more like gangs), and dealers (who operate with a business mentality). The police here are also really trying to work with the situation in new and creative ways and partner with us. There's a lot of philosophical head-butting. I am inclined to resist increased surveillance and trust that - slowly -- even years down the road -- that community can create accountability, that the street does indeed belong to the people who live there, not to those who exercise violence to control. Their presence won't decrease unless the demand decreases, which is a arduous symptom to fight against. 

A co-worker said, "If a person gets off drugs but re-adjust to the "American way of life" are they any more free?" 

"Where you invest your love is where you invest your life."

Life here is very full and there is always more to do. I've decided to make Thursdays blogging day because I usually start to write and then feel overwhelmed at all the things I'd like to talk about. Today, sitting in a community meeting with the Surviving Sisters of Soledad, the watch-commander, Franciscan workers, property holders, and other stakeholders in Chinatown I felt a twinge of ownership. Two months have passed here already and this place is sneakily entwining itself in my heart. 

I wrote to Larisa recently, "I think there is something unique about our situations of work as living in a community-- a quality of inseparability, wholeness, and exhaustiveness-- work feeding into living, living feeding into work. I've been going to zazen meditation most weekdays... there is this concept of 'practice' and whether you are meditating, eating, walking, etc. all form different aspects of your practice. That is how I feel about work here-- whether I am technically at work at  Dorothy's or on weekend, the people of Chinatown are my community."  Sometimes the inseparability is straining, but I think it's also exciting. I am not working for people, I am sharing my whole self. I celebrate and mourn with this community, I laugh and I hold people while they cry, I talk about relationships and de-escalation and violence and dreams and zodiac signs and prayer and histories. Today was the 2nd week of the newly formed Writers Group, we wrote about where we'd been and where we're going and a time we were afraid. "I am afraid every day of being vulnerable... but I believe its the only way to be fully human." 

The House of Peace is an incredible experiment. The Surviving Sisters of Soledad refills me (with hope and caffeine.) The women are organizing themselves, La Perla is the manifestation of their voices, their power-- and it is exciting. The beauty and pain lie so closely together. There are so many days I feel angry here-- especially at the system (but just as often at people and at myself for my expectations and short-sightedness.) Since I have been here there have been at least six cases of elderly people being released from the hospital and "dumped" at Dorothy's (via taxi from the hospital usually)-- there's no money for senior care/housing yet we can spend billions on 'national defense offense'. (But that is a rant for another day.) I've begun to do more advocacy and have been surprised by the situationally homeless (vs. the chronically homeless who often have experienced intense trauma and might have substance abuse or mental health issues.) A lot of people in this economy have lost their job, their car, their house and simply didn't have a network to fall back on. I am shocked by how some of these people are just like me, as I said to a friend, "I guess that just proves how I am still stepping out of my stereotypes of homelessness."

So many days I feel frustrated, confused, tired, happy, close to tears, isolated, part of something, stressed, peaceful, joyful, energized. The street community cares for each other and preys upon each other. The alley is full of people shooting up, arguing, fighting, sharing, watching out for each other. (I'm learning about non-dualities.) I went to hear Dolores Huerta (Co-Founder of the United Farm Workers) and wow-- what a life she has lived, the struggle of it-- "We will win if we do not quit." And the fight is long. And dark. And the end is unsure. Perhaps the greatest struggle of all is to retain hope. 

Tonight Natalie said, "Meg is a community organizer." And I felt excited for that to become true. I'm just beginning to learn for sure. 

Karma.

Yesterday a woman insisted on giving me 79 cents.

Today I was short 3 quarters for the bus and remembered the coins in my pocket.

Life has this curious way of unfolding.

Community & Love

Living in community is never easy. "As long as we are on the earth the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because love is the resetting of a body of broken bones" (Merton). Chinatown is the current residency of my heart and energy, but I am also part of this interfaith community and wondering what that means in our daily living together. What practices can bind us together while strengthening our personal traditions? Lately, I have been doing zazen (seated meditation) and for now it is the most natural and nurturing ritual for my faith.

The other day Kate said to me, "People are always saying Jesus loves you. Why don't they just say I love you?" and in that way begin to embody the radical love of Jesus, instead of projecting the difficulty of loving away from the self? Love as a word has lost nearly all its meaning in our language. Love isn't simply pleasant, love is a crown of thorns. It requires the work of opening up to vulnerability (including negative emotions) and learning to face our shadow sides, to sit with the deep, deep still, to speak honestly and bravely, to remain humble. As David Foster Wallace said, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” 


We are all unskilled, messy lovers and I am finding that living in this community is bringing to surface my own lack of understanding of what it means to love others and challenging me to struggle, to live by my own small-deaths. I am asking myself again and again, "what does it mean to love?" (to love my community on Soledad street, to love the people I live with, to love my scattered-lovers, to love God, myself, my environment.) Mm. 

(Reflections on Love: "Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition.")

Contrast / Sight.

Most days when the earth begins to spin my horizon away from the sun, I sit drinking tea or debriefing the day with Jimmy and Roy at our table beneath the cherry and palm trees. Our neighbors have a lemon tree (that always makes me think of Palestine and the MRI gang) they often sit outside too, music and Spanish spilling across the street. Yesterday I  played tag with the neighbor kids until dark when we stumbled through a spanglish game of charades and another neighbor leaned on the fence watching in amusement till their mothers called them home. I like my neighborhood. 


And these piercing moments of beauty and life sustain me because my heart is blurred by the vastness of evils and goods. Sometimes the news (our posturing towards Iran, Syria..., SOPA) or memory, or stories (of migrants dying in the desert- and even there, women raped, of isolation, betrayals, of relapses into drugs)-- it can ache so deeply I feel like abandoning all faith. Darkness rushing in (with all the agonies and personal tragedies and brokenness of Soledad Street that seem to seep into the tiniest cracks of light and absorb them, the reminders of all the seeds of monstrosity I carry inside myself, the complexity of how we don't set out to hurt each other and yet we so often do, over and over-- in obscure and infinitesimal, obvious and subtle ways-- and heal each other the same way.)  


There are so many people in my community that I admire and am surprised by. Yesterday, I sat next to Sandra outside La Perla and she told me about how her favorite job was running a body shop, particularly the process of stripping down a car all the way to its bare metal frame (the death of it, its skeleton laying in the lot) then rebuilding it piece by piece, bringing it back to life. I was struck by how redemptive-toned the language she used was, perhaps there is something inside us that it drawn by those metaphors. Remy taught Tony and I some watercolors today and he played us a harmonica song. Later we took a walk down to the community garden and Javier gave us a tour. Watching people on the street take care of each gives me hope.


But the situation is still complex, there are politics and fights and scuffles and rudeness and exasperation and failures. Beauty. Terror. These things don't balance each other, they merely provide contrast. Perhaps that is how life shapes a landscape inside us-- chiseling through a million winds, storms, floods, flashes of light. Perhaps that is the feeling of being alive, to constantly hold the tension of the sorrow and the beating, strength of joy, of our desire to live.


One of Larisa's friends commented on her most recent post (which is something I want to reflect on and relate to my own work-Read Her Thoughts): The most important person I am with is the person I am with now. And the most important task for me in this moment is to do good to this person."  This is the philosophy of personalism that the Catholic Worker encourages.  I am trying to challenge myself to be reflective in my practice, to see both the individual person and the long haul. It's difficult... the complexity of the street, the slowness of change, the excitement of seeing the women organize. I feel overwhelmed by all I have to learn (by all that is leftover or could be done), but then there are simple interactions: I remembered someone's name, sought her out to let her know she had mail (a small thing), yet twice later she brought up how I had remembered, how I'd even remembered her last name, how she'd told her boyfriend how I remembered. -- so often, the deepest desire is just to be seen. 


Sipaj. 

Community Development in the US of A.

There's an exhaustive amount of questions and theory and living to dissect in my head. I miss sitting in Common Grounds and being able to discuss these issues.

Today a member of my community, a favorite of mine-- a 70yr. old man with bright blue eyes and weathered skin who I helped build a shelter for, gave me the first 20 pages of his biography to read. It's actually pretty well-written and fascinating. Moving here has shattered misconceptions I had about "the homeless" (and made me think about how often we use adjectives about people's situations to classify them versus returning to the fact of humanity. They are homeless people. Undocumented people. Migrant-worker people. Drug-using people. etc.). Many of my new friends are kind, smart, & strong-willed but for whatever reason (bad-decisions, bad habits, lack of ability to adapt, or lack of skills in stress/conflict management, social ability, etc.) have fallen out of what is defined as "normal" society. How do I accompany them in the unique struggles of their community and in their individual stories? It's frustrating to see people who are very capable and intelligent but lack the resources or social skills or coping abilities to function. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about "mutually liberating partnerships" and meaningful work. One exciting thing I'm working with is a woman's group, Bill-- a co-worker of mine and an amazing community organizer, has helped them establish a reading room and coffee shop micro-enterprise that is in the beginning stages but its amazing to see the women finding their voice and learning how to organize, communicate, and make their imagined futures a reality. 

[Excerpts from a letter to a friend] I've been thinking about land right's a lot. I think we hear about it as an issue in the third-world more with peasants or whatever but I've been surprised to see how it's an issue in the US too. In the coming weeks the police are planning a sweep of the homeless encampment where lots of my new friends live and we have a weekly community forum where someone asked, "where is there a place I am allowed to sleep?" The PD has said they don't want to criminalize homelessness, but it does in effect become criminalized where it is illegal to camp just about anywhere. I have been thinking about private property and how even "public" places forbid camping (or sleeping)... or with the Occupy Movement-- sleeping bags, lying down, etc. It seems like the system always benefits those who have property to protect and defend. 

Parallels that come to mind as I think of what you're doing and would love to hear your take on-- ownership/agency despite the potential of transitory. Your community faces violence, outbreaks of fighting or threatening. My community also faces violence, I've been to two memorial services in the past two weeks. They face intervention because they don't own their land. Some of my community has little investment in their surroundings besides trying to secure a place to sleep-- they are given disposable objects and get new donations rather than hold unto things (which is also understandable because it's hard to be homeless and have to lug things around but it can become a cycle.) So how have you worked on increasing ownership or desire to participate in your own community there? 

... everything that moves, loves and is afraid. (Defrees)

What I would call church: Tramping along behind Aaron, starring into tide-pools- eyes wide- as an entire world reveals itself in the pooled remnants of crashed waves: bullwhip kelp, sea anemone, hermit crabs, snails, crimson and purple starfish, egrets, seagulls, oyster catchers with tangerine beaks and amber ringed eyes. Aaron calls out scientific names and describes systems and life cycles while I squeal at the sticky tentacles harpooning my finger as the oral disc of an anemone closes. 


Life. Ineffable. Holy. Silly. Unexpected. 


Dorothy's can be a high stress environment because of the struggles and reality of life on the street, of trauma, of exhaustion, of the lack of ability to control ones environment/situation. The people I've met have quickly become friends whose well-being and community I care about. I have been thinking about my work in the day room and what it means to interact with someone in a way that empowers and brings dignity. 

stray thoughts

Power structures. Trauma healing. Self-care. Secondary-trauma. Coping mechanisms. Human needs. Living in situations of high stress.

hmm.

Oh.

Before I left Addie sent me these words of wisdom, "I don't know if they re-invent us as much as they re-arrange us. And breathe new things in to us. I worry (that using re-invent) might make you view all that is inside of you, all that has happened to you, your past, your history, your memory, your love and life... might make you miss how solid and true all of that will be forever. ... Those versions will only re-arrange, shift, transform, grow deeper and more honest."

That was a much truer picture I think. Now to be here, after so much time, I am overwhelmed (in a non-negative way) at all of the newness, the sensory overload of sorts. It will take me time to begin to explain in this blog but some beginning thoughts I've been processing.

What does it mean to treat someone with dignity? What does it look like to accompany others toward empowerment? How can we create an environment that helps give people agency, helps them search for meaning, and space to express themselves?

I am humbled by the beauty of the people I've been interacting with, both guests to Dorothy's Place & Kitchen, other volunteers, other companions, the board. This is a community that is dwelling in both brokeness and beauty. One board member said, "working with the poor is a unique way to experience our humanity." There is a quote on the wall of my home, "as long as we are in the world the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because love is the resetting of a body of broken bones."

word.

"It is not easy to hang out on the street with Christ, but the consolation is you get to hang out on the street with Christ."

love/hate

I have an exhausting relationship to church.

spirit animals

I'm moving in a week and I feel kind of terrified. Moving is a form of reienvention, a way of recreating myself with less and more of the things that shape me. I wonder at how much of who I've become in mennoland will remain with me, and I want it too. I miss my home already, MAMA house, and living with a fox, cheetah, and meadow lark.

My mad for life list so far...
1. be less abstract
2. don't oversleep
3. take public transit adventures
4. wear heels every now and then
5. try a new athletic pursuit/extreme sport

2012

Bless constellations.
Bless the blackness of the river at night, railways, and silhouettes of the blanket-capped.
Bless face paint.
Bless the smoke-like rapids, tumbling and dissipating endlessly.
Bless shapeshifting waters.
"Bless strength that does not exclude softness."

And curse fear-- its root in all our self-destructiveness,
our selfishness, and the games we play with others.

And appreciate others more.
Appreciate this moment more.
Appreciate our fragility more.

those impulsive winter blues

Mama House. Mooncats. A week of avoiding saying goodbye while drinking tea and coffee with people I've grown to love. Shenandoah Valley... a place that more than any where else in the world (which is saying a lot) has become: home. The last thing I wrote on mine and Addie's prayer wall was: Oh God, I'm scared, a fitting beginning.


Thia left a note in my suitcase that says:
Keep being afraid.
Keep being brave.
Keep trusting.
Love, love, love.


I have been thinking about this Simone Weil quote Addie remembered me reading last Spring, "For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer the truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms." (pg. 16)

language.

I should've been born in a small mountain town. I might've been able to remain there.

My hair is growing long again. I want to write about woman's studies, Nietzsche and our prayer wall, Raising Abel, the circles I burn into the middle of pages in my journal, to explain the pages of the mixtapes Em and I made, all the conversations and questions that repeat in my head as I try to sleep ... but, maybe its all this, one of the best words in the English language: (Addie's favorite.)

in·ef·fa·ble/inˈefəbəl/

Adjective:

Too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words: "ineffable beauty". Too sacred to be uttered. Defined by Claire:  1. the wheaty hilltop sunset in West Virginia or the amber-gold blackening the trees up in the hill pasture, or that paragraph about memory and loss

these gray mornings

Grey windows tease with the idea of snow. Addie and I stayed in bed till 11:11a.m., I am going to miss conversations drifting into sleep and waking to tell our night dreams. This week realizing I am leaving, and not certain of any returning to this little town that has been so much, I feel like a gatherer of details trying to memorize the light rods hovering just above the grass, the crunch of my shoes in the mulch of Parkwoods, the intricacy of the branches outside my Shenandoah St. window.

We have torn through each
others veils with our talons,
birds of prey seeking the
meaty flesh of living. We
shredded each others
defenses-- we have tousled,
swooped, destroyed the separations.
      We share our earth-bodies
bit by bit-- a touch, a tare, a
sigh, a silence.We mingle elements
dying and reborn in shared language,
a linking of the eyes.
            Our living has been a
collision, a wounded leaping
the art of molting has been our
soaring. We have given to life
our bodies, our entire existence
shedding our deathstyles.
Sucking the bone, feasting
on  the gristle, the muscle, the meat
and patiently spitting out
what could not be swallowed,
what could not give sustenance.
We have devoured our living
with a ferocious will to loving, to
sacrifice everything to the terrible
beauty of a communion which bears all.

madness

"If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

Winter Bones

Who knows where a beginning begins? Did it layer over me like a film of dust filtering through sunlight on the train ride between Oregon and California? I didn't image this summer that the West Coast would be coming back to me so soon. Here I am, returning, departing. I thought graduation would be the consummation of my wandering, but it's always different then you think. Roots can be tattooed around your arm, planted down into the soil of your heart-- and transient as ever.  Maybe what I was chasing these past six years was to come to rest internally. So much has healed, and in the healing life branches out, evolving, emerging. I am always, and never, home.

Advent

"Come, Lord Jesus," the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment.  Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now.  This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves.  This is exactly what it means to be "awake," as the Gospel urges us!  We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert, awake are all appropriate!  Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and a forewarning about the high price of consciousness.

When we demand satisfaction of one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or any dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were, "Why weren't you this for me?  Why didn't life do that for me?" we are refusing to say, "Come, Lord Jesus."  We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always given by God.

"Come, Lord Jesus" is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope.  The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.  We are able to trust that he will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world.  Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and "Come, Lord Jesus" is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope.  

Richard Rohr