Tzununa

A month has passed. Blogging is not a discipline I’ve developed well. So many stories…

I spent a week in Chukmuk Dos, a community of families displaced by Hurricane Stan and spent afternoons dusty and sweaty from games of futbol, basketball, and chasing my host brothers and cousins around the yard.  In transition I spent a few days in Panajachel and danced with a drunken man in the deserted plaza while my trio of amigos/hostel-neighbors played Old Crow Medicine Show on the violin, harmonica, and guitar. Jim’s wisdom: “It’s a lot easier to distinguish where you’ve been then where you’re going. That’s for damn sure.”

The past few weeks, I’ve been WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) in the tiny village of Tzununa. I am staying at a small hostel with the other woofers and we walk up the mountain to the farm each morning. The shower is buckets of cold water over a stone floor (and I always inhale sharply and involuntarily at the first splash.)

      “There’s not much there,” I said to a Guatemalan friend.
      “There’s nothing there,” he corrected.

There are churches.  At night, it sounds like the worship services are happening in my room. The nearest church is 100ft behind, but the speakers seem to project the vibrations of keyboard notes and prayers straight through the thin wood panels of my room. The prayers of the leader (and maybe tongues) are chanted in repetitions with an eerie yet alluring undertone of response or simultaneous prayer, “ayudame espirita sancta.” In YWAM we used to call this “Korean style” (everyone praying aloud at once.)  

       The farm consists of terraces of vegetables, a permaculture food forest, goats, chickens, straggly paths, and orchards… and occasionally scorpions. Nicholas found three in the rock pile we were moving and held the third out to me after cutting off the stinger.  (The knowledge of their presence has given me a not completely irrational fear of stepping anywhere in the dark.)  

 Shad, the farmer, is full of knowledge, passion, and humility. He often says, ‘I should have…” recounting the lessons of this land he’s gained through mistakes.  Explaining his permaculture system he talked of how what excite him are the unexpected things that happen in the in-between spaces, the borders—the things that grow in the space between the terraces and the future-pond space, between the goat house and the orchard. “You have to let the land unfold itself. It’s a patient process.”  It made me think of my own fascination with borderlands, on the crossings that create unexpected things in our selves. Bonhoffer wrote, “I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to live by faith.”  I’ve been milking goats, making cheese and yogurt, picking coffee, planting/transplanting, and weeding.  These tasks are like praying the rosary I think, quiet and repetitive, the mind growing quieter. It is the body’s way of listening for God.

        I walk thirty minutes into San Marcos most afternoons to buy vegetables or drink café. Kyle and Kayley, the two servers at Cafe Fe are like old friends. After it rains the air is pressed with the scent of herbs and flowers. Over the past month, I’ve made a group of Guatemalan friends in San Marcos and explored, gone to grand openings, celebrated Halloween, and crashed on the floor of stranger-friends. Yesterday, a group of teenage boys riding in the back of a truck shouted a comment about my tattoo, then their truck rattled to a stop and I followed their motioning to scurry over the tailgate for a ride home. Their Spanish is rapid and I listen first for the verbs, still piecing together my sentences but it is becoming easier. I am surprised how I find similar souls no matter where I go, find conversations flowing towards issues that lay on my heart. It's going to be strange to say goodbye to these pueblos that have grown so familiar over the past five weeks.

Solo

Descending the hair-pin turns entering Lago Atitlan, the rain was flowing in a steady muddied stream over the road and cascading down the hillside. Freddie, an older man from Vancouver who said, “we’re going to be family for the next few hours”  keeps up a lively banter with the driver while I sit up straighter and straighter to peer out the windshield (I am thinking of what I will cling to when we go careening off because there are no seat belts).  We have been sharing this bus with five other students headed to San Pedro -- everyone is growing tense as it grows darker and the rain grows heavier.  We worry about our deadlines (to catch other buses, boats, meet our host families, or find a place to stay). I arranged to be picked up at the airport but a miscommunication left me to the kindness of strangers who lent me a phone and communicated with the school to make an alternative plan. We arrive in the dark but everyone manages to get shuttled off in the right direction. The clerk at the tourism office calls my host family and I wait only a few minutes before Hector emerges with an umbrella and leads me on a one minute walk to my new home.  I sleep almost immediately feeling a slight panic of aloneness, newness, and stress.  

In the morning, I wake up to a soft light through the sheet-strung-curtains and open the window to the balcony.  Past the rooftops, the lake spreads out in a placid sheet of gun-metal gray beneath the lush vertical slopes of the volcanic range.  I feel a bit of relief, though I am still having a strange fear of this hillside town. Wide, flat spaces seem easier to comprehend.  There is no map. 

My host mom, Flores, walks me to the school’s office early in the morning—it is a path through cobblestone streets and narrow alleyways.  Before my first class, I explore a little, stopping in an Israeli owned hotel for a smoothie. There are a lot of Israeli’s in San Pedro—at the small juice stand near my house the menu is in Spanish and Hebrew.  I joke with my maestro, Clarita, that I may not remember my way home. Turns out it’s not a joke.  First I panic, then I just laugh. Another student walking home says, “It happens.” After turning around a few times I remember the sign for the “Burrito Factory” and find my way. 

Yesterday walking home at night after a conferencia, all the lights go out. This is a frequent occurrence during the rain and usually last only half a minute before they flicker back on.  I can’t see anything but the completeness of the darkness is somehow calming.  I continue walking.  

There is no map for my time here either and I remind myself to be gentle with myself, to get lost, to ask questions, to walk in the darkness.

Arrived.

The view from my window.

love of the temporary

Yesterday, I had to escape from procrastinating from packing by taking a walk. Home is always seductively comfortable (never mind that if I stay here a month without a plan I grow stagnate and restless, verging on insanity). On the corner of Green's Lane that stone house I always admire stuck out from the younger homes with ugly siding-- homes I secretly played in the foundations of during construction. Across the patio of the old house white nightgowns and garments were strung to dry, it looked so quintessential and out of place in Randallstown, it was only five but the house was dark and invented a lovely old lady already gone to sleep. 

I usually go to the elementary school playground at odd hours of the night and I was shocked to find it has a life of its own at dusk. Two teenaged guys rolled past me on their bikes showing off, a few kids were occupying the basketball courts for a wild game of soccer, and I actually had company on the swing set. Outside the air vents of the school, a cloud of bats was spiraling like the outline of a smoke curl. I kept watching the moon pass between layers of clouds and smiling at the people around me. My neighborhood always seems newer and more interesting when I am leaving it. I feel nostalgic about home and anxious about my upcoming travel. Lately I've been telling myself, I need to find a place to settle. ... and yet, here I am ready (well, I would be if I weren't writing to procrastinate actually packing) to leave again.

Is it only the quality of the temporal that makes a thing enticing? How do we remain in love with the familiar? David Foster Wallace wrote, "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." I wonder if the same is true about place and what the equilibrium between exploration and home is, what the meeting ground of wandering and being located is.

Three years ago, trying to settle into Harrisonburg, I wrote: "The untied knots can be redone. He spoke with conviction of 'a covenant with the land: eventually one must come home, one must come to rest and mix their blood and sweat with earth.'" ... and a few weeks later, "I went up the hill till the cold reached through the ground into my bones. Always aching to be discovered, always hide away. I went to the hill to pray, city glittering beneath me, stars speeding away. The universe is growing too, so maybe it understands my little girl heart. I was born into longing, a heart of dreams. Tonight I was thinking of desire in the newborn quiet between those golden orbs, of the spaces immeasurable, vast empties, my heart craves for its own expanding- pressing outward since my birth..." The human being is made of some many contrary desires.

Bouldering

 

These photos made me think of albums I've seen of cool people I know actually climbing/ a Portlandia-esque montage of how I would pretend to know things about climbing...

Shot 1: Steep angle to establish the precariousness and incredible-ness of the climb.

Shot 2: Set the scale and undaunted/exhilarated stance of climbers.

 Shot 3: Wardrobe is really everything.

                                                    Shot 4/5:  Beginning Pitches (Notice our fabulous finger-holding technique and great use of legs.)

                                                           Shot 6: The Reach

                                                    Shot 7: Some rewarding teamwork.

                              Shot 8: Re-establish the extreme height and daring of our climb (and relative ease despite clinging to a cliff face = bonus cool points.)

                                  Shot 9:  Looking down after 'owning' our climb and jamming... and crimping... and uh... this reminds me of when I try to make fun of my genius brother and end up getting stumped by my lack of mathmatical engineering language.

Anyway. We're pretty cool. We can climb rocks in dresses.

Come Autumn

The season turned this past week, chilly mornings consuming summer's heat. I've followed my migratory path homeward from Harrisonburg to the familiar oaks and the winding Patapsco river.

I miss mornings walking to work in Chinatown, not so much approaching that corner where the sharp acidity of urine would swell into my nostrils, but the call and response of "Goodmorning" and "Buenas Dias" or Mama Lupita saying in Spanish, "Where is our boyfriend? Only you and me.We'll fight the other woman." Or Ellie and her dancing as she sang out, "cha-cha-cha." I miss the unpredictability of those days. Papa T. playing blue grass on his harmonica and telling me of his dreams to someday return to Tennessee or Kentucky.

I haven't written poetry for a long time, but visiting Emily and Thia is always a good excuse to-- we filled our glass bottle mugs with spicy mocha concoctions and headed up the hill to draw out words. Two coffee stained pages later I discovered my insides are coated with anger, guilt, longing, helplessness, and love. I've been re-reading Louise Glück's Matins and this is a rough response:

If you care so much then, God

you will have to speak up.

She passed the year in that

classroom never correcting

her mispronounced name

wondering if she fully existed,

while they said it does not matter

if he assaulted women, he is

a brilliant theologian. 

He dressed his biases in the 

blood of Christ once and 

ordered a friend to be engulfed

in flames: laughter and bone 

licked clean, carbon & black silt,

and did he weep on the cool stones

or did he praise You?

If you are so merciful, let us forget You.

What I know is I am not ashamed,

we embraced once,
later we only shook.

Speak up then, if it is not Your name.

Surprises

September 4th was a crazy day in my life. I arrived home from a 72 hour train ride to surprise my mama -- which included 1) a phone conversation with Claire in DC that went like: "I'm on 1st and Constitution now, where are you? ... Wait you're on First street now, too?... Is that building to your left and behind you now? ... what can you see?" whilst pulling my suitcase around and holding my pillow.  2) Parking behind my front yard bushes, running through the backyard ducking beneath the bushes, opening the back door without drawing the attention of our usually alert dogs, and sneaking up the kitchen stairs. 3) My mother screaming and waving her hands frantically while simultaneously recognizing me and shouting, "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie." Quite worth it.

This scene was shortly followed by me screaming frantically and dancing around the kitchen between moments of running back to the computer screen to make sure I was reading real words-- my reaction to being accepted as a Glimpse correspondent. (I thought the decisions had been announced in mid-August so a few weeks earlier I'd thought the opportunity had passed and had been chastising myself for how I could've done a better application. Ha!)

Glimpse is supported by the Matador Network. It features stories by young people living abroad and their company's mission: "We envision a world in which all young people go abroad, seek out meaningful cultural experiences, and share their stories with peers. We believe that powerful stories will inspire new generations to engage with people from other cultures and to be responsible global citizens." I'll get to work with a professional editor, take Matador Univ. travel journalism class, and publish my stories from abroad.

I am (needless to say) extremely excited and nervous and feel incredibly blessed. I'll be heading to Guatemala at the end of September where I'll begin my Spanish immersion program and writing.

Momento

I mysteriously received this e-mail from myself, so it must be true. Oh dear.

* * *
Dear Self,

You recently discovered that you have SMRA (Sporadic Memory Replacement Amnesia), which causes you to forget things, as well as create new false memories in your past.  Do not delete this email.  Here are some of your most recent symptoms of SMRA:

1.  Belief:  Last night, you purchased a train ticket to Harrisonburg, VA.

Truth:  Not only did you not purchase said ticket, but you promised your best friend Claire that you would not leave the state for the entirety of your visit home.

2.  Belief:  You have friends in Harrisonburg, VA.

Truth:  Harrisonburg does not exist.  The names of your friends are the names of pets you had as a child.

3.  Belief:  You won a writing fellowship to travel to Guatemala.

Truth:  You like guacemole, and you will stay home and be Claire's life coach and feed her guacemole.

Keep this email at hand, so that you know what is real.  This is crucial.  Make Claire a sandwich.

--Megan Brauckmann 

Small moments

Walking  is one of favorite parts of the day.  Every walk through my neighborhood or to work makes me appreciate the connectedness I have in this little realm where my life is oriented around a 3 mile locality-- I find friends at the park, have guests from Dorothy's and neighbors over for backyard campfires, am greeted by Jose from his balcony as I walk to work, and know the clerks at Young's and the bakery.  Yesterday,  I  stopped to buy fruit at Mi Rancho Market, an open market on my way to work and there were Palestinian flags over the counter. Later, I saw the clerk and ducked in to say, "Salaam `Alaykum." He was so surprised, "How do you know Arabic!!?"  I told him my sister had studied in Egypt and we talked about Palestine. Now whenever I pass he greets me or waves if I am walking on the other side of the street. Living here reminds me of what the word neighborhoods mean. (Of course, there's always the unwanted side of this hood too, where people stop thinking I'm a prostitute walking to Chinatown. ha.)

The past two weeks we have been watching the Olympics at the day shelter. It is so fun to share the energy of a worldwide event with my Chinatown community-- whether sitting next to an enthusiast or the "I could do that blindfolded with a hand tied behind my back" crowd, it is always amusing. Today two friends S. and J. and I planned Chinatown Olympics and shared outrage over the controversy of Caster Semenya's gender testing (without her consent) and the ruling that high levels of testosterone in female athletes may be disqualifying in the future. How will they defend what testosterone equals female so only "real" women can compete? Ah, gender!
 
The past week I participated in the Alternatives to Violence program-- this usually is usually done inside prisons, but this was a community program. There was such a diverse group of people there-- some who had done time and were on parole, some who worked at other shelters, etc. It was beautiful to hear people's stories and share moments of vulnerability with them, even with my co-workers there is a deeper level of questions that we don't often have time to ask whilst running the day shelter.

Then Caitlin came to visit and she and I met with some restorative justice folks in San Francisco-- mostly Sunny Schwarz, and also got to sit in on a Violent Offenders support group (it's like AA for people who have committed violent crimes and they support each other and talk about their triggers and anger and what they need)-- again it was so beautiful and amazing to see the work towards changing and transformation they are doing and how they are taking responsibility for their actions. If only all prisons would work on these principles. The RSVP (Resolve to Stop Violence Program) requires participants to go to therapy and/or get an education as well as hearing victim statements and becoming accountable for their actions. Something horrible like 90% of the people who are in prison never got their GED!

We visited the women resource center for women re-entering society from prison. (We even got mistaken for recent paroles, that's a first.)  they teach life skills, empowerment, basic education/GED, computer, and yoga classes. (It all made me excited about the sorts of restorative opportunities there are to remind people of their own (and others) humanity and dignity and worth. It's so crazy to see men who have been in prison that we're taught to see as dangerous or evil or something crying and discussing people who loved them and how they hope to give their children more alternatives then they saw. Some of them are third generation incarcarated families... which is terrible-- imagine-- a father in prison who has a son who grows up to go to prison who has a son who grows up... there is a saying from indigenous people that when someone breaks a relationship in a community by  harm or violence the whole community has a responsibility in that. And I think that's true because you can see in these groups that the majority of people in prison grew up as low-income minorities (systems and communities and families are failing them on their way to getting to places where they break laws or use violence, though it does come down to their choices.)

Caitlin asked Sunny and Sunny returned the question, "How do you define accountability?" which led C. and I to a discussion about the loss of a language for sin in our culture (which I'd been thinking about reading the wonderful book  Ellie bought me: Blessings of the Flesh, Sins of the Spirit by Mathew Fox.) To me, sin is not breaking a rule but harming or breaking our relationship to God, ourselves, others, or the earth. It is not the law but the connection that can be sinned against.

god talk

. I just read an article about how the liberal church is dying the phrase: "perhaps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world." I think that is the question I have been trying to articulate and understand about my relationship to Christ.

There is a Thomas Merton writing:
"Lady, the night has got us by the heart.
The whole wide world is tumbling down.
Words turn to ice in my dry throat
Praying for a land without prayer,

Walking to you on water all winter
In a year that wants more war."

For some reason I resonate deeply with that prayer-- the imagery, the thirst, the desire. I do believe that there is something uncompromisingly unique in the message of Jesus if we can look at it fully, look at it with eyes that value others and this earth... I do think there is no salvation under any other name than Love (and that love that is not the cliche, consumed offering of desire to be loved-- but a self-sacrificing, forgiving, relentlessly and radically hospitable love... I know that the symbol of Jesus has formed me, has led me to healing, to reconciliation, to forgiveness, has even led me to my body. But, it is so so tangled in misuse. I need Jesus, as a symbol outside of myself that reminds me that God is with us, that the sacred is incarnated, that we must learn to love greater than our fears. But what does that mean? Because the message is also irrelevant if it doesn't recognize the context and history of the church, of excluded voices, etc. We need both to be critical and wise and merciful (serpents and doves) towards ourselves (as the Church) and towards others-- as equally valid and loved vessels of the divine.

Mercy. Mercy.

Returning

We live in a culture of violence, yearning for alternatives we cannot yet speak of, language lagging behind experience, experiencing undefined without language. Returning, I realized how much I have missed the chaotic liveliness of Chinatown. The peach tree ripened in my absence and on these cool mornings I snatch a dangling fruit as I walk to work. Everything continues, and I revolve through my roles: friend, advocate, mailman, janitor, listener, conflict manager.

Today we met to process the recent homicide on the corner of our home street. During the meeting, R.'s niece arrived to inform us R. had passed away. In these short six months, there's been two shootings on J. street and this will be the fifth death among my Chinatown community.  Life on the streets does not get easier, and I chose to return, to remain, but others don't have that luxury. The culture of violence permeates everything-- economic, structural, systemic violence, personal, emotional, physical violence. The violence that lies in my own breast and lashes out- white-hot in my own tiredness, lack of control, unmet desires, or sense of attack. Wonderful, wild, R. -- so many mornings of coaxing her, trying to remain patient while she nagged and harassed and sometimes laughed her wild delicious laugh. We were all mad about R. even though she was a handful.

Thinking of the three victims who were shot walking home from church, I wonder about their stories, how their families and communities will grieve, how they will deal with their loss, how the survivors will accept their life in the face of lost friends. Every act of violence continues. It is frustrating to see the media wrangle out more viewers from the callousness and drama of a death. Where do we begin to live into the alternatives? Steph picked roses from our bush and left them on the corner. Every act of love is a small resistance. How do we continue to hope in the face of systems and cycles that create and fuel violence? Gangs, substance abuse, racism, lack of funding for healthcare, for education... returning to the same faces on Soledad, some who have been on the streets for years. The interchange between sorrow and joy is so subtle. Millions of people kissed today, laughed today, were delighted, shared stories, shared meals, played... millions were fearful, hurt, hungry, hurting, dying. Every act of love is a small resistance.

I don't have answers for most of my questions. I do not always know how to make sense of the rage, sorrow, and joy I feel (in quick successions.) I know that I desire to live deep awake and that sometimes to remain awake, to listen to others, is costly, exhausting, and painful. But this is life.

"Look at the names carved into us
Look at the days when they were lit up
Brushing my head and I feel their rage
Years of radiance, years of rain

And the world stops spinnin’ when you stop spinnin’
Sighs when you sigh when you sigh
I’m coming home so leave the light on for me
I’m drawing over the moon on this fell
When I’ll get in I will see you all there
I’m drawing on the great exhale
I'm soaring on the great exhale."  - Great Lake Swimmers

Things Forgotten

Her spine is a tree that branches

around her heart, holds
the tent of her skin taunt
as a drum off which
the rhythm of the world

must form a beat

she shapes the song, she bends,

she bends. 

What would she carry in her pocket

if she knew the fast would end tomorrow?

Would she break the darkness open

like a loaf? Or crack the neon egg that

shivers over the jagged scoop of Mt. Toro,
slurp it down whole and quivering?

She bends, she bends.

Trees.

Death is happening all of time.

I forget that. I am reminded. This month I attended the third funeral since I've arrived here and today I went to pick up my friend and Zen priest from the airport from his step father's funeral. In downtown San Jose, I stood before a mural of 1, 300+ pictures of trees. Their story: they are the trees of an orchard in Silicon Valley. As the city grew up among them, one devoted man nurtured these trees for the past thirty years. Eventually the business that owned the orchard sold out to another business that couldn't afford to keep the orchard or water the trees. The man still went though. He watched the cherry trees with shallow roots begin to die first, watched trees fall in storms, and slowly even the deep-rooted oaks begin to dry. He watered two by hand. I don't know why two, maybe that was what he had strength to do-- he'd grown old with the trees. The photographer met the trees once earlier in his life and was drawn back to them. He took each trees portrait during the winter. It was a stirring display... both celebratory, like proud family portraits proclaiming a history in a hallway, and also the photography of a cemetery. It made me cry. We live in a beautiful world. We live in an ugly world. And it is so good and difficult to be born human.

When I talked to Rick about how to the hold the stories of the people who crack their lives open for me he said simply, "Grieve."

I asked Ellie today what had become clearer to him lately (thank you, Larisa for that question). He said, "That the world is evil..." The system, the injustice of it... the grossness of our ignorance to how our lifestyles effect others. "...but fighting may not be the best response." I asked him what was better and he said maybe openness, to be vulnerable.  Hmm.

 The Sea of Vulnerability: Fred Luskin

in the realm of hungry ghosts

 My small act of insurrection this month is getting food stamps, which I qualify for, but is also a means of there being less government money for the insanity of the US military complex. And! Roy and I did our grocery shopping at Trader Joe's... (Brookster, in your honor I am devouring a box of Barbara's shredded oats which I'd forgotten about since HA.) Delicious nutritious Food Not bombs!

Community life is really hard. Some days I want to escape from being around everyone. When my superiority/ego/ideals rise to the surface... which is more often then I'd like... I am reminded of how a true community is not easy work. In order to create beauty in Chinatown we have to cultivate an atmosphere of contagious love (something like what must've been happening among 1st century Christians) but that love comes at a very high price-- all of us working on ourselves, building friendships where we learn to truly trust and sacrifice for each other. It requires incredible patience, and willingness to see people without holding on to my idea of them (or their motivations)-- allowing people to change not binding them to a version of their self. It requires noticing the constricting of my heart, the narrowing, enduring together, sharing (the material and immaterial things of life.) Love reaches past the tit-for-tat of reciprocity and asks for a life of dying to the self so love can be reborn over and over. How much am I actually committed to that? How invested in honesty, in learning to walk uncomfortably until the way becomes clearer am I? How willing am I to admit to failures, to take responsibility for my action, to not delegate the difficulties of communicating uneasy things off on others?

Today I went with Rick & Roy to the Buddhist Temple for Buddha's birthday.  The dharma talk was thought-provoking.  He talked about how difficult it is to be born in human form, but how the celebration of the birth reminds us how miraculous our own life is, that we are here to become human. There are six or seven realms in their cosmology (though its metaphorical)... something like hell, then the realm of the hungry ghosts, and animals, and titans/warriors, then humans, and heavenly... (the titans or warriors are people who by being obsessed with power are lacking full humanity or something like that) and the heavenly can also be negative in the sense of being so spirit-minded we sit in a content bliss while others suffer... but the uniqueness of being human, of a realm where is suffering and birthing-- is a beautiful thing-- the only realm where we can learn to be conscious and awakened. To often we live in the other realms, live hellishly, live as wandering, hungry ghosts, searching, live as warriors consumed with lust for power.  

Rick wrote a poem that I've been dwelling on that contains these lines... "You smile at me and say: Love is the sweetest of all paths! I turn on you a stern glance and ask: how much pain are you prepared to endure? ... we would rather crucify Love than walk this world under Love's burden of pain." Many days I do not desire Love at all. To follow Jesus is more difficult than any endeavor. Recently I have been asking myself how I can survive the stories I carry... how to be faithful to the vulnerability of others-- to remain open, to keep baring my heart to the moment... when that looks like talking to a 20-yr old pregnant heroin addict about parenting, or helping an ill and drunk woman clean shit off her shoes and scrubbing the bathroom floor while she tells me how she was molested for years of her childhood, or a woman showing me the scar that runs down her neck where a jealous boyfriend cut her? Love is a tricky thing-- accompanying myself and others through the different realms.

 There is a 'dharma gate' called "the intuitive tolerance of the complete incomprehensibility of all things." Yes. Yes.

Money is not wealth.

 This morning I have been thinking about foreclosure  and alternative economies (though the scent of fresh jasmine from the Chinatown community garden, the bamboo wind-chimes and songbirds are distracting deep thought). Last night I was at a campfire discussing what a foreign policy with Iran would look like if it took into consideration our history of imperialism. It reminded me of Lisa Schirch's work to see development and diplomacy as acts of our national defense. It is difficult to watch the way the system works against healing and progress in people's lives.
   On Thursday our writing group wrote about 'the color of hunger.' One guest wrote (in Spanish), "Only you know the color of your hunger."  There are so many struggles in my community-- struggles to re-enter against the stigma of felony, of past-drug use, struggles to maintain homes, to find work, to find a place to sleep at night. Recently there have been more guests (and even volunteers) who are facing foreclosure and the loss of their homes.

"The anti-foreclosure and right-to-housing movements are among the most consistent in our nation’s history of activism—a constant necessity in a country where private property is a right but a family’s basic shelter, security, and safety is a privilege." Occupy Moves to Front Lawns

I can not fully understand what a terrifying place to be in that is for them. And what is happening here is just a tiny sliver of the struggle across the United States- the struggle which I hope is the birth-pangs of awakening to the unsustainable way of American life.  Having just finished my third cup of coffee this morning I can't articulate the urgency, passion, despair, and hope I feel about this... but I am recalling the power of the human microphone at Occupy Wall Street last October and the sense of embodying others words and speaking for and with them to be heard. We must take our power for each other, from each other, together with each other. We must not forget that money is not wealth. And we must challenge the systems that prevent us from being human with each other.

[David Korten]

The devastation created by Wall Street’s failure affirms three truths that are the foundation on which millions of people are at work building a New Economy:

1. Our individual and collective well-being depends on acting with concern for the well-being of others. We all do better when we look out for one another.
2. Money is not wealth. It is just numbers. Sacrificing the health and happiness of billions of people to grow numbers on computer hard drives to improve one’s score on the Forbes Magazine list of the world’s richest people is immoral. Managing a society’s economy to facilitate this immoral competition at the expense of people and nature is an act of collective insanity. 
3. The proper purpose of the economy and the enterprises that comprise it is to provide good jobs and quality goods and services beneficial to the health and happiness of people, community and nature. A modest financial profit is essential to a firm’s viability, but is not its proper purpose. 

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oh Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in You.

"I just wanted some change, so I wouldn't have to sell this" she says near tears, motioning to her crotch and before I can speak up she's whirled away. I had to stop and breathe for a moment because "Molly" breaks my heart. She's an artist, and mentally-ill, and childlike, and sometimes uses and is very broken by the traumas that have occurred in her life. Last week while I was trying to coax her along, she was telling herself a personal narrative in third person (interrupting herself with the waving of an American flag- she was a "military brat"), "Why didn't "Molly" get to go on vacation? My sisters did. I know they had to send me away because they didn't know how to deal with me... one day she's gonna be the first person from Chinatown whose dual-diagnosed and not on medications... red, white, and blue, red white, and blue...  and a user... to graduate from college with an art degree..." she went on for awhile and then her voice breaking she said in a summary that revealed so much, "and then her family will be proud of her."

"Molly"... ugh. Somedays I do not want to open my heart fully to life where grief and beauty lay entwined in each others arms. It is too much. I often feel so raw here, agitated, sorrowful, angry, ecstatic, calm-- all my emotions nearer the surface. It isn't easy to be here, the other day after a frustrating meeting I went to Rick's office and I could feel the emotion in my quavering voice and I realized how I needed to stop and breathe. Serving others can be an illness, a monster of ego and need to do becoming more important than the individual-- then the unsexy, gross, painful agony of loving broken-selves (my self included.) There is also rage... the ghettoizing of the poor, the way Chinatown was created to distance the un-desirableness of people experiencing homelessness from downtown, the way our society can discard the elderly... it is awful. 

Greg asked me the other day, "how do you pray?" and I find that lately they are mostly quietness (like meditation)- a sense of God being present with me, "dialogues with silence" I am beginning to understand that.  In response to Mark recently I wrote, "I am anchored by the desire to live through my own eyes, to be witness to my own experience of the world and what it means for me to encounter God and others in this life. I think of the symbol in the womb of my woman ring-- it represents both Spirit and Encounter. I am me... its hard to articulate this but that anchors me-- to respond to my own nature and to communicate with God so that I can be my self without the distortions of my limited perspective, my sins, my insecurities, etc.) I feel held. I do not know how to say it... but I get this sense sometimes of concentrated being, of a solidity... I feel held, held by a Love that is expanding, that is leading me from the deceptions and distortions that destroy me, and it is slow, painful, devastating. This is still true, "God will break your heart." God will break your heart. And yet, there is always and yet...I think this is the feeling of salvation, of redemption, of earth's own desiring pulling inside me like a tide. The conviction that "all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Trust. Slowly it emerges, tender and yet the roots dig, dig... it is not love that rescues us but Love, maybe loving... learning how to die, learning over and over how to undress our death-styles. I have faith in this: that we survive by our small deaths; being reborn.


Fromm wrote, "The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.... all of life, every little and every important action, is devoted to the the knowledge of God, but a knowledge not in right thought, but in right action... the religious task of man... is not to think right, but to act right, and to become one with the One" ... "the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of loving." 

Meister Eckhart: "If therefore I am changed into God and He makes me one with Himself, then, by the living god, there is no distinction between us... Some people imagine that they are going to see God, that they are going to see God as if he were standing yonder, and they here- but it is not to be so. God and I: we are one. By knowing God I take him to myself. By loving God, I penetrate him."


 

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.