I Am a Buddhist Geek - Published Today

An excerpt from my article, which has been published by the wonderful podcast/magazine BuddhistGeeks.com today:

I have taken many lessons from Bernie Glassman’s extensive work with the homeless. Glassman’s street retreats, in which people live outside, beg for money, eat in soup kitchens, and sleep out or in shelter beds, have helped thousands of participants generate wisdom and compassion, the kind that only direct experience can spark. The first precept of Glassman’s Zen Peacemakers Order is “not-knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe.” Working as a socially engaged Buddhist has made me rethink many of the notions I once held, nested within my desire to help “others.” As I was busily considering them as “others,” I was looking down from a mountain of separation. Certainly I have always felt compassion for the homeless, but that issued forth from a secure position of being housed and “feeling sorry” for their “lesser fortunes.”

But as I practiced the Zen Peacemakers’ tenet, the notion of merely doing service work transformed into recognizing a truth of Buddhism: nondualism. I began to realize that, despite the illusion of separation, the boundary between “subject” and “object” is unreal. Like the Jungian use of figurines in sandplay therapy, perhaps our minds have dualistically projected the separateness of others as a way to explore concepts we could not have experienced within the closed loop of a mind.

Glassman states that not-knowing should be “a state of open presence without separation.” Yet if one has never experienced homelessness and is frightened by both the beggar’s mask and the fear of possibly being in his shoes, it is an act of courage to merge with the person on the street. It takes guts to truly own the times when we have felt homeless, not had a safe place to occupy, felt discomfort in our own skin, and dissolve into pure awareness that in essence we are all there, all the time. Whatever props we use to build security around ourselves, homelessness is our natural state. And the often intimidating manifestations of fear and other emotions that we witness in the homeless are states we have all experienced. Cold, hunger, rejection, being turned out—we’ve all known those conditions, too. And at the end of the day, we all have kindred goals: to be safe, to be loved, to be sheltered, to be fed, to be understood.

To read the entire piece, please see:
http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/01/of-nondualism-and-cooking-for-the-homeless/

Feeding the Homeless Self

Yesterday, at an impromptu meeting about our homeless meal, our office manager suggested the importance of ensuring that our clients “gave back” by volunteering. I agreed with her, but I view it in a slightly different context. I believe we need to do anything we can to blur the hard contours between server and served. The times the meal runs best are when we have “clients” and volunteers working side-by-side and a hierarchy is less present. I am not serving you—we are all serving each other.

Many of us working in this field have connected with our own internal sense of homelessness, and at the very least have empathy for the people who walk through our doors due to our own experiences—internal and external—of homelessness. But I’m talking about something deeper. I believe this is discussed in the Buddhist tradition as “no boundary,” a space in which self and not-self merge, almost as the ultimate in empathy—yet empathy still implies a subject and object. And an inherent greater/lesser distinction. E.g., “I feel sorry for you.”

One of the most profound moments at our meal comes when the volunteers and staff sit down with the attendees and eat dinner. When I first arrived in town several years ago, it felt very natural for me to do this and, while I felt the usual trepidation when sitting down in a group of strangers, I never felt fear. I have since been told that many people are afraid to undertake this sort of intimate contact. I’m not sure what they fear, but they would rather express their generosity from afar. To me this seems as frustrating as writing a check to a charity and never getting to meet the people to whom it provides benefit. Sending money into the void has never felt very satisfying to me.

As humans, we spend a lot of time constructing false boundaries. People whose lives on the surface appear different from ours are often construed as scary. This “smoke detector” is mostly likely hardwired into our brains, a survival mechanism that may have outlived its usefulness. Depending on our feelings of internal security, we may have hair-trigger alarms, which get flipped at the slightest provocation. Person has different-colored skin. BRRRRNNNGGGGG!! I cannot imagine begging on a street corner. BRRRRNNNGGGG!!

So, we go off a lot.

But if we can take a minute, breathe, and try to imagine a connection instead of a wall, the brain can absorb some new information.

If we can find it in ourselves to sit down and share a meal with others whose lives are externally different from ours, we come to realize that we all have very similar goals: to be safe, to be loved, to be sheltered, to be fed, to be understood. And to take it a step further, we understand that even those of us who are fortunate enough to have four walls sheltering us are still homeless in an ultimate sense, that the fortifications we see as solid can only protect us from so much. And though the whole carefully engineered, painstakingly constructed bank vault we may have built around us seems pretty solid in the moment, as those who have survived natural disasters can attest, no one is exempt from the truth of life's impermanence.

It is good to understand how to survive without a home. It is good to realize that we already do.

Homeless Meal

It is a damp, frigid evening in Oregon, the kind that generally makes me pray for the warmth and protection of the homeless people I cook for every Tuesday night at Ashland’s Methodist Church. I worry about them on a regular basis, yet sometimes I think I should not, as they are a hardy, resourceful, and seemingly resilient lot. Survivors though they appear, I know their lives are often incredibly difficult, especially in the colder months, when any romanticized notions of  “camping,” or “sleeping under the stars” get quickly subsumed by subfreezing temperatures and constant precipitation.

Last Tuesday seemed a dividing line, as folks walked in heads down, dirty clothes tucked under big worn parkas, greasy-haired, scowling, in no mood. As I tried to catch their eyes--eyes that too often don’t get met—most appeared lost in a world far away. And while this crowd is generally happy, grateful, even animated, that night it seemed that the reality of the long, cold, dark days ahead had settled into their bones.

Oftentimes, the lines between me and them blur. When I’m done serving, I stand on line with my plate and we sit together at big tables in the church hall and eat our meal. Last week I sat with a 6-year-old girl named Lotus, her parents and surrogate family. Homeless kids always slay me. I watched as people urged her to eat her meal, goaded her on, teased her, smiled at her. And I thought to myself, She may be OK. This is a damn sight better than some kids with homes are getting.

Last year, a social worker paid us all a visit as we were eating, and as I was seated at the table, she interviewed me as a homeless person. She was a youngster, really. A kid just out of grad school, mid-20s soaking wet. Before she got to me, I watched her quizzing my tablemates. Asking questions with great diligence, she worked hard to try and get it right. But there was a difference, very real as she perceived it, between herself and us. And, nice as she was, that made her hold her body stiff and away. Play with her hair and wiggle her glasses a lot.

I picked up a hard-boiled egg and began to peel it, bit by bit, sometimes popping it in my mouth and edging the shell with the tip of my tooth. Then pulling it out and flaying more skin, till just the soft white underbelly was exposed. I could see her watching me from the corner of her eye as she spoke with the man to my right, a 60ish fellow with a grey dreadlocked beard and knocked-out teeth who looked like he’d just walked away from Captain Ahab on a whaling boat. He said to her, “I can’t stand the feeling of being in an enclosed building. I’ve tried it, and I can’t do it. The only time I feel at home is when I’m sleeping outside. So does that make me homeless—or suitably housed?” He broke into gales of laughter. She tried to laugh along in a forced, choked, scared sort of way that sounded like she was attempting to be both politely amused and genuinely amused but not really laughing at him but then again not exactly getting what he meant. I guess, when designing her survey, she hadn’t bargained for a street-smart Plato.

She then turned to me and pushed a questionnaire about quality of life for the Ashland homeless population in my general direction. Then she began quizzing me about my life. I glanced down at my old T-shirt and faded jeans with the hole in the knee, and realized I looked the part. I had become one of the faces of homelessness in her study. A specimen. Someone whose life she seemed both frightened of and trying to improve.

I picked up the egg again and continued to work it. Because I wanted to seem a little more threatening than I was. I wanted her to know that I was, perhaps, a little bit crazy, and that’s what had landed me on the streets to begin with. That I wasn’t particularly concerned with food-handling manners...and might just smash this hard-soft object into her cranium should she provoke me by asking the wrong question.

I was rather hard-boiled in my soft-boiled plot. But the way she was fidgeting as she spoke with me, I knew I’d made my point.

“How often have you been homeless in the last 18 months?” “Do you generally make use of the local shelters, when available?” “Do you receive public assistance or food stamps?” As her questions mounted, I felt myself begin to feel more and more identified with my toughness and resiliency as a homeless person...and see her increasingly as a tan windbreaker-clad nelly who was merely dabbling in the field of social work to introduce vicarious thrills into her tedious life. Maybe to have something to go home and talk about with her banker fiancé, Herbert. When I asked her a question about one of the items on her survey, the tone in her perhaps-25-year-old voice became almost singsong, like a 4th-grade teacher enlightening a student. Somewhere in the space between us hung a pile of judgment—if I was homeless, I must somehow be stupid. If she wasn’t, she must know more.

Condescension. She wasn’t trying to be condescending, but there it was. Inherent in the difference between she and me in that moment. Draped into the folds of her skirt, into the rope of her pearls, into the band of her Seiko.

I had just about stripped the egg bare and considered mashing it between my fingers and smearing it on the wall, on the table, across the front of my T-shirt, branding me as rotten. Instead, when she turned her back, I shoved it whole in the pocket of her windbreaker.

Suddenly feeling like I had a little tiny bit of power, I strode confidently to the front of the hall--and asked for a second helping.