Purpose at a Picnic Table

I passed a man reading today.
A tattered man with a mole-freckled face and a sideways gut.
Usually, he carries life in a single bursting black trash bag, which sags behind him through his 50-block urban homeless hell called Skid Row.
Usually, there is no place to read. When you are homeless on the Row, a $6 million police force, which guzzles more funding than all the homeless services in the city combined, threatens to cite you with an unpayable trespassing ticket, or else incarcerate you, if you dare sit down on public sidewalks during daylight hours.
Not that you would read if you were allowed to sit down. Smells and screams and substance abuse lurk too closely to warrant an escape into pure imagination. A more real escape is necessary.
And so on three separate Fridays every year, the LA Catholic Worker, where I'm an earnest and clueless newbie, rents a bus and takes 50 Row residents on a picnic. We don't do it to convert souls. Merely to give our selves in other bodies a well-deserved rests. (Me in another body. That's all you are.)
We serve hamburgers, watermelon, and ice cream sandwiches (which were processed by child-labor maniac Nestle, to the abomination of some of our guests) on the banks of a green lake in Whittier, CA. Anyone who lives in the suburbs would be less-than-impressed with the location. It smells like algae and duck-poop and is surrounded by power plants.
But when sewer-stained concrete has been your playground, your bedroom, for a few months or years, any patch of grass exhales liberation.
And so my tattered friend reads.
I am struck subtly and resonantly that watching him read is the pinnacle of my life. A realization, not like a golden trumpet blast, but like a river rippling its transformation upon receiving a smooth stone.
This is true, lasting, weightless happiness. No true love's first bloom nor sweeping green cliff's majesty, however symphonic, could stir such music in me as the sound of broken chains. No matter whom they tether. Because the truth is, when we cross far enough through the fear on the lids of our mind's eye, we realize something my favorite author says better than I...

"In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether that buoys the rest, that gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned."

-Annie Dillard

Two Days' Quotes at the LA Catholic Worker

The Los Angeles Catholic Worker (LACW) community is where I'm spending at least the next six weeks of my life. I am attempting to capture the indescribable by writing a few quotes I've heard during only three days with this radical community.

"You're only smiling because no one in your family has died."
-a Skid Row immigrant from Pakistan whose wife was killed by US troops

"I ain't never been afraid of nothing. Except all white people. Haha."
-Jesse Love (that is his legitimate middle name), former Skid Row resident, now a community member who has been married 10+ years to a white CW

"We had a free medical clinic on Skid Row. But we had to close it due to overflow. Folks were coming from Mexico to use it."
-Catherine Morris, co-head of LACW, wife of Jeff Dietrich

"I came to the United States because my three-year-old daughter had cancer and there was no way to help her at home. But I didn't make enough money here, so she died. One time she saw me crying and said, 'Mamita, no llores por mi. (Don't cry for me)' I pretended I had been cutting onions. But she knew I was lying."
-Maria, a Mexican immigrant and guest at LACW

"Of course I'm scared to be homeless again. But I am excited to get away from bad influences and start fresh. Yeah, I'm getting a good vibe."
-Chad, whom I met on the Greyhound bus from Portland to LA, who is attempting to leave his alcoholic past and start over in SoCal

"Today's young people have lost beauty to technology. Music is angry and contrived. Women are no longer blessed vessels of life. They are 'sexy' or unimportant."
-Chris, a guest at the LACW, formerly homeless, who speaks four languages and plays classical piano

"I feel guilty when I'm not hospitable, even when it's stretched thin. My Southern mother's fault."
-Jeff Dietrich, co-head of LACW (a house of hospitality), husband of Catherine Morris, when I asked him how "he handles it all," like not spitting back at people when they spit at him

"Thank you for smiling and saying hi to me."
"You're welcome. So...did you like the cake served at the kitchen yesterday?"
"Yes, but I shouldn't have eaten it. That stuff is poisonous."
"Then why did you eat it?"
"Good question. You do crazy things when you're hungry."
-(Me with) James, a 20-something Skid Row resident who used to work in micro-brews in Oregon

"Never believe that what you're doing doesn't change anything."
-Skid Row resident, after waiting an hour for a bowl of oatmeal and an orange

Strawberries, and Other Implosions

Nothing could be more normal.

We were preparing for a family barbecue on a Saturday afternoon. The cooler bulged with local brew and lemonade for the kids, the tofu was steamed and the deck and driveway swept. I stood hunched at the steel sink with a Ginsu knife, completing a checklist—cutting the tops off strawberries.

Sound familiar?

I had switched to auto-pilot that morning in order to play hostess. I didn’t think, I acted. I didn’t feel, I plugged in.

And suddenly, while cutting strawberries, my father’s seamless jabber and my aunt’s commanding giggle and the sound of sports radio zoomed into nothingness, and I was left alone, panicking, to the simple rhythm of strawberry tops falling into a colander.

They’re just strawberries. Nothing could be more normal. Why do you suddenly want to scream?

I then realized that this panic marked the first moment I had recognized my re-assimilation into my birth culture.

Reintegration issues are common for volunteers and expats who spend a significant length of time immersed in a culture different from their own, particularly when they significantly change their lifestyles. What I mean by that is, entitled estadounidenses can live quite familiarly these days in almost any country in the world. Plenty of expats in Nicaragua (yours truly included, a veces), invest in technologies and comforts that make the “exotic” a little less threatening.

But if you eliminate television, air conditioners, driving, purchasing food in boxes at supermarkets and the like for two years of cross-cultural living, and then return “home,” a term that becomes as complex and misunderstood and fluid as “immigrant,” chances are you’ll find yourself gawking at the existence of a strawberry. And furthermore, gawking at your numbness to it.

At that moment my first breakfast back in the United States crash-landed in my vision. December 15, 8am. A perfect bowl, dishwasher-gleaming, with milk, local blueberries, and honeyed cereal. From a box.

I remember staring at that breakfast like it was an imploded collusion of heaven and hell.

I ate it in slow motion. The fact that outside was a frozen vivid wonderland and I had just come from dusty greenless Managua did not help steady my spoon. Nor did the fact that I hadn’t eaten in 36 hours, having refused to buy a $9 sandwich in the airport.

That first morning, possibly for the first time in my life, I noticed every bite of my meal, and with every crunch, a child from El Recreo came to mind.

Crunch Denika crunch Madeline swallow Richard. Children who ate one meal a day, always some variation of rice and beans, given to them by the comedor near the library where I worked.

Every swallow, delectable and privileged, guilty.

And here I was, chopping the tops off strawberries—it cannot be overstated what backbreaking labor and oil-fueled industry goes into harvesting this luxury crop (see for yourself)—as if Nicaragua had never welcomed me.

This has been happening more frequently as I approach the end of six months of being returned.  I watch movies. Sometimes twice in 24 hours. I spend money from a bank account. I speak English outside my home. Heck, I live at (a) home. Under a roof.

My own increasingly seamless adherence to cultural “norms” is raising a flag. To what degree should I allow re-assimilation to take its course? As the JV guidebook says, I can never erase privilege or culture. But to what degree should I continue to resist? At the very least least, how much should I strive to reflect on the delicate, improbable miracle that is a strawberry?

The problem is, in a culture increasingly driven by efficiency and consumption, and not by presence or reality, the extraordinary becomes mundane. Life becomes habit.

I am reminded of comedian Louis CK’s interview with Conan O’Brien, a segment called “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy,” which notices how unfairly whiny people are on airplanes, when boarding is delayed or high-speed internet fails. “Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, ‘OH MY GOD! WOW!’ You’re sitting on a chair in the sky.”

As these strawberries and their plummeting tops became new in the steel sink, I realized my shoulders had relaxed, my brow had softened, and my mind was squarely in the present. Suddenly I wasn’t light-speeding through chores, I was noticing the universe in my hands. I felt sorrowful and joyful all at once. Such a gift, to awake from numbness.

The Painter: A Wwoofer's Reflection

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

-Rumi

The following is my reflection after spending two weeks wwoofing at this farm in Southern Oregon. Wish I had a better quality camera, but cameras, in the end, don't capture much. Neither will these words. Nevertheless...

 

Your lover’s unbroken glow, wrapped in a wool blanket by a fire. A sisterhood of sweating trees interrupted with marble temples. A cliff, red and vast and angry, convinced of its girth and immortality, even as it dies into a blue and vaster and dancing sea.

Take a moment to recall those times you really sunk into the vibrant pulse of what surrounded you and remembered there may be such a thing as God.

Did you wish everyone, regardless of the boxes of our births, could share in the privileged surrender of that recollection?

There is a hill in Southern Oregon, six miles from the misnamed Pacific as the crow flies, where I sat at sunset to connect to you and to everyone, and recall what I knew before I was born.

Follow the Rogue River to Kimball Hill Road and weave higher until words fail and you realize you are wonderfully, horribly alone, and always have been.

Before you there is a painting made of real life. The pines and firs cling to the Earth’s scalp and to each other. Are they afraid of you, or are you the guest of honor at their fest noz? The horizon exhales a white wall—it can breathe like us, no, but they’re only clouds—that leaves only the river’s mirage unblanketed. A steel bridge at the delta gives way to hundred-ton rock arches that giants left behind, but from this hill, from your moment above and truly aware of them, they are smaller than you will ever be.

Apart from the occasional busy fly, whose self-importance reminds you of the you who scurries through the days; the only sound is far-away wind, carressing each pine needle like an orphan found. Hundreds shiver for and whistle in love. There is more than enough to go around and still reach embraceable you.

At the end of all things, this is the most perfect sound. It is the alpha-omega whisper of everyone’s Mother, leaning in to your soul through your ears, which have turned purple from screaming that everything is just too bright. This tree wind is her liquid soul expressed and she does not need to stop for breath. She is breath. Its resonance with your remembered soul massages the questions out of your pores with gentle fire. 

“Shhhhhhh…just listen. Listen to nothing. At the heart of it you and I are together, Beloved.”

 

I sat on God’s hill and wanted to hear that purr forever, a purr accompanying the painting around me, the moment chosen for me.

Some day all I think I know will end. When it does, I want to see it sung before me like a painting. Everything that mattered and didn’t will unroll before me like the Rogue River Valley. If I have labored to love and live like a creator, the tears that have carved red hollows into my skin and bones will evaporate into blue blurs, pines, firs, giant’s stones, which in turn collapse just as gladly into the hint of an immortal horizon. And I will no longer be a gasping, grasping pine needle, a self-important fly. I will be a painter on a hill with gold in her veins.

And all I will feel the impulse to turn my head slightly and realize you are silently beside  me, and we are awake together as never before.

And all we will hear as we melt is shhhhhhh…….

Things You Give Up

Greetings from an organic farm overlooking the Rogue River in Curry County, Oregon. I am happy to be here, and to have my heart with me. I can honestly say my heart and mind are with me in the present. I wouldn't rather be anywhere else right now, and worries, fears, guilt is minimized. What a gift.
(I'll put up a picture ASAP...can't use plug-ins at this library computer)

What do you give up to live a loving life, a life in harmony with the rest of the world?
Are you a travel-holic who decides to forgo the airplane and take a bus?
Are you a mother who gives all of her time to her children?
Are you a father who listens when he wants most to talk?
Are you a partner who sacrifices her dreams and freedom to be with the one who loves her, who needs her?

How are these things loving?

In this post-Nica life of mine, I have discovered the necessity to explore a life without the following things, however much or little the cost of that sacrifice. I invite you to reflect on them with me.

A porcelain toilet that uses water to flush
Keeping up with birthdays
Health insurance and retirement benefits
Living in an accessible, plush place
Using a car daily
Staying dry
Consistent internet access
Television
Food in bags, boxes, plastic
Keeping clean
Bananas in Oregon in January

I suppose the real question, though, is not what I give up, it's what I gain. Why does it matter, to live a life that questions the "need" for these things?
I can't yet name that.
I can, however, name the following.

1. I will never be satisfied with the estadounidense status quo. I will forever question what and who is beneath comfort, security, and privilege. I will not give them up, not completely. But I will always wonder.
2. It feels so right, to wake up in a solar-powered house, dig up weeds and plant radishes that we will pull from the Earth and consume two weeks from now, and finally, tired and smiling, watch the sun go down over the Pacific.

Thank you for the things you give up, for the ways you love.