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. 

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.