under siege

Do you ever have thoughts attack you, waylay you, nearly asphyxiate you with their constant proximity and weight? James 2. That's the one that finds me.


When I travel downtown.


Or to the grocery store.


On the way to school.


In city parks.


If I happen to catch a glimpse of the news.


When I see old photos, tell certain stories, or hold memories above the chasm of forgetfulness.


Words I innocently memorized in middle school to appease a teacher who never could have imagined how I would be tormented for what is turning into the rest of my life come back in torrents to flood a mind that is struggling to be made up.


What good is faith that has no deeds?
And again: If you say "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?


How is one supposed to function with words with weight like that pounding, throbbing... burning inside?


It does not matter how I choose to cope with whatever rhythm that pounding creates because the bottom line remains: I am not doing enough. My well-intended words exit my mouth only for those same phrases that always find me to take up residency in the space left over. What good is it...when you do nothing? 


It does not matter that I do not know what to do because those are hollow excuses and I have been burning with the weight of this challenge long enough now. Long enough to feel the urgency and long enough to be friends with despair as she echoes you aren't big enough and there is no way for you to be big enough.


I feel with sudden but thorough certainty the edges of the rabbit hole I stand above. There is a whole world down there; and, if I let myself fall, I may never come back. I will never be who I am right now and my eyes will never be able to see the world the way they do right now. And it is not a fear of being too small and too weak to handle the change (I am both of those for sure), but the knowledge that the way is shut once I enter. 


Did Alice ever really leave Wonderland entirely behind? Or did she take it with her everyday just behind her eyes like a filter or perhaps a buffer that used to exist between her and the world until everything changed?


It is knowing that I have absolutely no control who this will make me if I keep following my white rabbit. But the change is sure to be real, permanent, and terrifying. Oh yes, and I think good. But it is not the only rabbit hole I could choose to fall down. How do I know *THIS* is the one I want? Do I even get that choice? If I don't like it, can I choose another? All of that to say: how much do I give myself to homeless ministry? 


I already know the answers to all of those questions. Respectively: because it's bigger than me. Yes, but no: I already chose a long time ago. Yes and no again: it wont leave me the same even if I leave it. As much as I am allowed for as long as the season stays.


Somehow, these do not bring the comfort that we always expect of answers we do not yet have.

What to do, what to do?

The world feels awfully big today. Body hurts. Soul hurts. Soul hurts for all the hurting souls. Big. Heavy. World.

I spent last night talking to (primarily) homeless people with a fantastic group that exchanges a hot dog for a story. Any story. Preferably, true, but they will listen regardless. It is amazing the secrets that people will tell. Many of them like to start at the beginning and tell us how they got to where they are. Now, the human condition is all I can see and hear and feel. Too many ladies walking the same streets over and over. Too many men medicating. Too many people without hope and direction and any idea that it doesn't have to be this way. So many lonely, lonely people.

As usual, there is no easy solution or cure for the human condition; and it is this weight that is going to spare my bit of virtual space from more philosophizing about home and context as I get ready to head to Montana for a spell.

and we come back to the human condition, since I cannot escape. I went to a small time poetry slam downtown a week or two ago. It was fascinating. I am convinced I will never find more exquisite people watching if I search over and through half the globe.

I swear, nobody feels comfortable until they are the most outrageous form of weird here. You would think that abnormal people would feel at home in such a crowd, but I think they felt like they've been displaced, one-upped, and turned out. It is not a gathering of idiosyncrasies but a parade that somehow became a pageant of sorts. Oh, Portland. Competitive over quirks. Brazen and bold but not yet confidant. Everybody has to keep moving before you see too much of them.

And the poetry. Oh yes. I was surprised to find two categories: sex and questions. Sex, sure. It's Portland. Questions. Really? But it is the questioning and the uncertainty and the doubts and the... lost feeling that everyone connects with, writes about, shares in. I guess. And words are apparently the answers. The very words that may or may not have any meaning to begin with are the tools that the slammers go about looking for answers.

And I get it. Of course the poets will go to their art, their trade, their comfort for the answers. But I don't get how time after time words themselves were said to be the answers. Go no further. Are words it? Is there a language so universal that it actually fills the holes that beg questions of honesty? Have I been making all of my life entirely too complicated? I need to search the words themselves for my answers. Truly, I am lost here.

Perhaps, it is the feeling of not knowing that is terrifying. If you can describe it, then you have nothing to fear. If you can tack words to it, stuff it full... If you find the right words... If the words fit and fall and paint a picture bright enough... the terrifying unknown becomes familiar and is tamed. Then the feeling of falling finally goes away. Maybe. Ug. I wish. But it will take more than words to fill the heart of man, to make it knowable, and to give us hope.

Our emotions and our fear keep us honest enough to keep looking... but I do not like them today. I want to bind up the hurt and the hopelessness and carry it to the sun. Maybe that is a fire hot enough to consume them.

Coby? Koby? Colby? ...

Coby was still drunk when we met him. We may have woken him up as we stood by the car talking about lunch and passing off the responsibility to make decisions and plans. He had spent the night in a doorway not far from our church, passed out. He was strangely pleasant, though a bit bewildered by the fact that someone had stolen his shoes. I understood then that he had not been homeless in Portland for long.

We have so many homeless people and the competition between them only increases in the dry (drier) summers when the more transient population comes in and passes through. It is worse here than in a lot of cities I think. More than that, in the two years I have been here, the corners and bridges seem to be filling up steadily with an increasing population. Portland is simultaneously an easy city to be homeless in and a difficult one.

It is true more often than not what they teach you if you volunteer with homeless people for long, "everyone is from somewhere else." And everyone almost always is. It is part of the process. And so I have a habit of asking where they are from. He said Seattle. In fact, this was his first night in Portland. And someone stole his shoes. He said he had never walked outside without shoes before and that it hurt. (I didn't know what to do with that...but I hate wearing shoes. It is a luxury I have though to take my shoes off and know that they will still be in my closet when I decide I need them.) We found him some water in the church and asked around for some shoes. No luck. Nobody was even the right size.

Eventually we decided to drive Kolby to the Rescue Mission to look for shoes and to get him connected. Hopefully, to get him into a recovery program...but he would have to want it. And I am not sure he did. If my hasty judgments were correct, he was chronically homeless and chronically in and out of prison with a host of prison tattoos to show. I wonder how it all started. And I wonder if he even knows how it started. But that is not the point.

Colby wasn't shy or reserved like so many people tend to be. There was no way Betty would have ever gotten in my car, especially since there were so many of us when I met her. And it's not just her, there is a common thread of mistrust among people who are reduced to hourly survival. Admittedly, Koby was less than sober, but still. It surprised me.

So I wonder. I wonder why he let us take him anywhere. And I wonder if he really wanted help or if he just wanted us to feel good so he could go live his own form of life. I wonder if he was puzzled by us or if he had met us church people before and knew exactly what he had to do to make us feel like we may had made a difference so we could continue on to home and lunch and all of the constructs of a life that either he has no appreciation for or which had no appreciation for him at some pivotal point. School. Work. Bills. Family. Friends. Dinner. Get stuff. Get rid of stuff.

I cannot help but wonder if all of my intentions were misread for naivety, which would be true in part. (I have more curiosity and enthusiasm than I do experience.) Or if there was no reading into things at all and he just took things as they came. I want so badly to know, though, how it all looked through his blurry eyes.

onward! to life and living! ...

The last two weeks have been simultaneously so full of deeply good and beautiful things with people that I don't know how to tell that they bless me...that they really are the brothers and sisters that I tell them they are, each for a different reason....

And yet these two weeks have been so full of questions and hard things. Things that I do not *want* to rouse myself to do or think about. I know that I can, but that hardly seems to matter. These, among other unbeautiful things.

I have been having a sort of mid-college crisis just wondering if what I am doing is actually going to get me to where I hope to be. And every time God gives me just enough to go on. At this point, I am just trusting that I was in a better place holistically when I made the decisions that I did...and that God did not mislead me.

When I was talking to him on the beach, He just kept asking me what I really want. Honestly, all that I want is to fly, have a little sunshine, and never leave His sight...disregarding the impossibility of successfully leaving His sight because that is not the point. The point is that as long as He can see me, I will be ok. Because He is good. And I can build on that. I can trust that. Everything else works out after that.

I keep telling myself that. And I know it. And I believe it. But it doesn't take away the aches and metaphysical soreness that I want so badly to be rid of. I find myself chaffing against time and longing for eternity. So I made cookies. Goodbye cookies, specifically. Because home really is where the heart is and my heart is on a train that is leaving me mercilessly mile by mile and minute by minute. And I do not know when it will return. Maybe in August, if the stars align. Maybe for Christmas. Maybe. Or maybe it will be longer, but I do not want to think on that.

Restlessness pricks

then scratches

then gnaws at my feet

until I am walking.

walking. walking.

I set out

to pace the whole world

over and back

over and back

and back again.

I cannot be trusted

to come home

when I do not know

where home has gone to.

Moreover,

I am missing all my anchors

that may have fought

against these restless winds.

My sails are full of discontentment

My vessel has a ready crew

That has long been listening

To the songs the wind sings

To children and kites and birds.

But, ironically,

my heart is just not in it

my dear.

And that, is only

because you hold it.

Scott

I met Scott on the max Saturday. He was homeless and travelling to I'm-not-really-sure-where. I was meeting up with friends. He made a bit of small talk in the slightly-less-than-stable way that homeless men tend to though he managed coherency.

He greeted me and made a quip about the space in the tram (which really wasn't crowded). When I smiled and responded, he began talking about how he still has his sense of humor if nothing else. His words were hurried as if he were afraid that his time in my attention had already run out and I would soon become mindful of this and turn away. A few seconds of silence passed as he squatted down in the bike zone near the wall opposite me. He complimented my eyes and my sunglasses. He liked the way they were accentuated without being exposed, like a mystery.

And then shame.

He became quick to tell me he was too old (56 years) to think of me that way, that I did not have to worry. He just meant to compliment me. I reassured him that I was not freaked out and I watched as all of him relaxed. I asked his name and he looked up at me to say, "Scott" and then ask mine. We filled the space that followed with mutually believed commentary on how Americans are too stand-off when they travel and do not know how to have time for the people around them. (I am pretty sure that we bewildered the people around us to pieces, he and I.) He thanked me for my time and told me he was tired of talking to himself, that he missed conversation. He expounded on the dichotomy of security and freedom saying that if we never take any risks we lose our freedom. And again, when we seek security over freedom, we lose both.

And I listened. Through my aviators, across the max, I listened for the whole of maybe 5 or 10 minutes. And then he did what almost every homeless man I talk to does.

Scott told me that he liked my confidence. He likes the way I carry myself boldly, comfortably but not offensively. As he was talking, I passed my stop so I went over to shake his hand. He continued complimenting and encouraging me gently but firmly, not rushed to let all of his words fall out like he was when we first met ten minutes prior. Scott said that I shouldn't worry, I have a lot more figured out than I think I do, I've just got to keep the faith.

I do not feel that I really know what it is that he and Mike and Dave and Richard see in me. And I do not know why they all tell me the same things: confidence. faith. don't worry. i'm headed in a good direction. Always. And always men around the age of 55. And almost always, homeless. It is like they know that I do not trust myself in the least on my bad days.

In some unconventional way, we need each other. People like me and people like Scott. We need to have someone hand us back our humanity from whatever dark place it has been cast and let us rest awhile in friendly conversation. We cannot waste time because we only have 4 or so max stops for our familiarity to mature. I would have gladly spent more time with him to hear about the family he alluded to and just to watch him become more human.

Some of us are more visibly and more desperately clinging to our humanity than others. Scott is one of them. Too many people will never give him a real name...just labels and titles and shadows to live in. They wont remember seeing him. They are likely to be offended if he spoke to them. He is on the streets because he is alone. For whatever reason, he has lost or severed all the ties that might have caught him. I cannot help but use people like him to measure society against because the heart of a nation can be seen in how they treat their outcasts.

We are offended by them. We do not understand them and we do not have the time to. And it breaks me. I saw so many other people that same day. A homeless woman through the window yelling and crying in the corner of a building. A beggar working the St. Patrick's crowd. A woman and her pimp. Stories writhing without pages.

I had been told that the most meaningful things you can give to a homeless person, should reason and security allow, are an identity and a little human contact. And it is funny the way can you know something that has been told to you and still be blown away by it in real and living life. He never asked for money. He just wanted to talk, to remember, and to be without being alone. And he did not take my time even, because he gave too. I am bewildered by what he said to me, but I treasure it too. And I hope to understand.

Betty

I met you, and you asked for money. I'm not the sort of citizen to fall for that. I offered lunch, and you showed me your ratty clothes and told me of the cold. I wasn't blind. I could see all of that and more. And I know all of the things I should do. I am practiced at looking out for myself. As you know, no one is going to do it for you.

But you knew what you needed and you knew I had the money to spare, relatively speaking at least. I gave you $7 and asked your name. Betty.

And then you hugged me.

And I don't really know what to do with that. Not because I was offended or even that surprised. Maybe a little surprised.

You didn't merely cut through my defenses. You stole them.

It has been two days, and I still haven't found them. I suppose you've taken them to line your coat and keep you warm. I can tell you right now, they don't keep the wind out.

Maybe I am better off without them.

Actually, I know I am. But it's hard to get used to the lightness that comes with vulnerability. It's hard to remember that I care about all the things I used to, but I haven't done as much caring as I have talking. And even the talking lately has been little, if that is any indication of the other.

I hope to see you again, Betty. I will look for you. And though I expect to find you, I know I never will. I'm still not one to believe that the world works that way. Still, all my love and prayers and thanks.

Concept Art

I have been obsessing about a particular project which requires me to learn how to spray paint hands pulling starlight. These are the earliest attempts, which I am sure I will quickly grow ashamed of. I have also made notes on the box about what I learned that day. It is super exciting, but it feels just a little tedious. Hopefully the finished product is worth it all.

Due to my living situation, I have to go to the park to paint. This is always an adventure in and of itself. The park is known for its activity that is well past questionable. Day time is the only time I'm 'allowed' to venture there. On a particularly warm Sunday, I decided I needed to go over and learn how to paint.


I met three homeless men while I was there. I did not have a pen to take notes, so I asked them if they did. We had been attempting to act as if we were ignoring each other while discovering the nature of each other's activities since I had entered the pavilion. I honestly did not think they would have a pen, and I do not think they thought they would either. However, I had been enjoying their music that was streaming from their radio, and not felt comfortable enough to engage them.

The first man, Mike as I would later find out, looked at me like I was a little crazy for talking to them before he said, "You are asking the wrong sort of people." He came over to my side of the pavilion about 5 minutes later, proudly bearing a red pen. From there, our interaction was kept to a minimum.


When I had finished, I returned the pen. They made small talk, introduced themselves. Mike, Michael, and the third...seemed a little unsure of his identity. His name might be Mario. It might also be Toby. He couldn't really decide, which did not incite the alarm inside of me that it probably should have. None of them appeared to have a single whole tooth, except for Michael who was African American and much younger than the other two who were white. As I turned to leave, I was informed by Mike that I would go places. I asked him why he said that and he laughed half-heartedly and asked why I wouldn't. The other two were quick to back him up.

I'm not sure what to take from that since I saw at least two empty bottles of what looked like Saki. (Really guys, rice wine? That's a little too far outside of your stereotype.) According to three displaced men in a park pavilion, I am destined for success.