comrades, not clients

A week ago I put in my notice at CRC. I don’t have a next step as far as making money goes. I’m still in the struggle, but the energy and skills I put toward community organizing projects (like Just Housing) are not for sale.

Which is to say, I no longer wish to work in the social service/nonprofit industry. And yes, regardless of the ‘good work’ done in social service, the nonprofit-industrial complex is a real thing, operating to perpetuate itself rather than create a world of true equality and freedom and justice, where so-called “social services” aren’t needed anymore.

I work with the people I do because I love them, because I look up to them, because we share the community and the earth. A community and earth in dire need of defense. As far as I am concerned, they’re my comrades, not my “clients.” Leaving my job, I hope, makes that more clear.

Looking for something part-time, repetitive, soothing. A leap of faith is a little scary, but I feel lighter already.

Canaries: a personal essay

 

“I can’t run no more / with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud”
-Leonard Cohen

I’m praying because it’s all I have left.

Friends, I have almost completely lost hope.*

I’m not in dire straits financially or physically. And let me say clearly: I’m not suicidal.

It’s just that emotionally and intuitively and spiritually and to my core I am
Angry, depressed, freaked out and sickened
by the way
this heartless system fails to accord people basic safety, love, respect and dignity.

And I don’t want to talk myself down from this sad and angry place
anymore.

All I want to do is break windows and the law
and occupy warm, empty buildings. Less and less
can I open up when someone asks me “How are you?”
I don’t want to bring down unsuspecting people.
More and more I find myself sobbing, any place, any hour
shivering for no reason.

(And yes, thank you, I am “practicing good self-care.”)

Our people are dying. Our young people are dying.

People I love are dying, and intensely suffering, living in constant fear, and there is no reason.

People I love are dying, and intensely suffering, living in constant fear.
And there is no reason.

A woman in my spiritual community said last week something I can’t get out of my head. She said, “There’s no complacency in consciousness.” Once you see, you can’t turn away.

Part of the complacency in many hearts is the myth of the “undeserving poor.” That is, the myth that poor/homeless people only have themselves to blame (rather than a rotten empire dependent on exploitation) and therefore do not deserve mercy, compassion, humanity, justice, or basic aid.

Show me “the undeserving poor” and I’ll show you my teacher.

Whether they know it or not, the people I’ve met who are out, have given me a free education on the state-sponsored violence happening all around us. Believe me when I say I am more comfortable visiting with homeless criminal drug-users, canaries like me, than I am sitting through a city council meeting.

We need to build a new world, and everyone needs a place. That’s a place to start.

I second Meg Martin’s call for pilot projects at the city and county to improve people’s lives, such as:

* safe and legal camping lots
* converting vacant motels, houses and other buildings into shelters, hostels, and permanent, supportive, low-rent housing
* local housing levies for affordable housing

So how do we get this?

How do we make it a priority for local policymakers and those with the power of the purse?

How do we stoke their courage and humanity, so they stop giving in to fears about “liability” and “risk management” while people we love are dying, and intensely suffering, living in constant fear?

How do we get them to see that there is literally no effin’ way that allowing basic sanctuary could make things worse?

I work with a grassroots group called Just Housing and we’re trying to figure that out. Our unofficial tagline is: We’re all under the same roof. At the center are the voices and experiences of people currently or formerly living house-less.

If you feel a deep pain like a dark dirge, perhaps it is the part of you that connects to other people.
To all our relations.
To spirit.
To the only things besides water and sunlight that keep our species alive.

I believe this is what Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement called “the long loneliness,” and like sister Dorothy, I believe the only cure for this long loneliness is “love, and that love comes with community.”

I write because I know there are others who’ve almost completely lost hope, silently, alone, feeling ashamed of their despair. Canaries like me, yes, but we aren’t in a cage. Maybe we can encourage each other. Maybe we can build this new world.

I’m inviting you to join Just Housing. We don’t have a plan, we just have each other. We meet at PiPE’s Purple House on Mondays at 3pm and usually go ‘til the whistle blows at 5. The Purple House is at 408 7th Ave SE, off Adams Street, across from the train tunnel downtown.

People, it’s hard not to love you.

(*Any hope I have comes from Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, and other communities organizing for life and truth and justice, in a system that would deny them.)

Terry canary

Today would have been my aunt/godmother Terry’s 61st birthday. She has no final profile picture, there is no “Remembering Terry” facebook page, but I remember her every August 12th: the consummate Leo who loved the Perseids, God, Jerry Garcia, chocolate and Sobe drinks. The tender heart who ran and climbed and danced until multiple car accidents changed the way she moved. It was another kind of accident that killed her though, an accidental overdose, prescription pain medication.

 

It’s just in this last year, people have started telling me I look like her

when i’m driving and my hair is down and wild and everywhere

and I’m wearing shades and the music is loud and i’m smiling so big and happy

(a smile you’ll never see in any selfies because it’s just not the look i’m going for)

 

I’m not sure what’s changed in the last year, or in the eight years

since we lost her, except

I’ve seen a lot more

canaries dying

 

https://youtu.be/R53nvY-E8ho

Go

A few things are meaningful to me:

1. Pokemon Go has taken over in a way few things have

2. Concurrently a domestic military killed a clearly skilled sniper with a robot bomb.

3. People in my circles
Love that Go gets them
moving around outside. They
have an easier time
talking to
people
(less anxiety)
and they learn cool things about their community.

4. In other words it counters isolation alienation stasis complacency.

5. “Everybody needs a place to rest / everybody wants to have a home / Don’t make no difference what nobody says / ain’t nobody like to be alone.” – Bruce Springsteen

6. Any tool can be used for evil (surveillance oppression corporatization death) or for good (#fun / #healing / #beloved / #community)

7. When the tinder is dry, all it takes are a few determined sparks.

8. And then you need kindling, and fuel wood, and air.

9. And vigilance.

10. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” – Audre Lorde

 

It’s really fun to watch people having fun.

how about a floor

“Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
–Frederick Buechner, American writer/theologian

 

The nature of my work is to be with people at perhaps some of the lowest points in their lives.

This has an effect on my perspective. In some sense it’s accurate to say “it takes a toll,” because bearing witness to suffering is overwhelming, and is itself one more kind of suffering.

But isolation from the suffering of others is suffering as well. The true toll would come from not being there.

It’s important for me to see reality. No, reality isn’t as low as all that for all people, and not all the time for anyone.

Reality is, we have a system and way of life with serious structural problems. Namely, there doesn’t appear to be a floor. People always talk about a roof over our head. But how about a floor under our feet? How about some ground to stand on? How about a surface to rest upon? How about a loving net of woven hands to catch us when we fall.

Because we fall. We suffer. It’s bound up even in joy.

There will always be sadness, dis-ease, disappointment, doubt, hurt, lack, and unwelcome surprise. No death, no life. No mud, no lotus.

But for God’s sake, it doesn’t have to be a bottomless pit. It doesn’t have to mean abject poverty, homelessness, ostracization, marginalization. It doesn’t have to mean indignity.

It is the way of things now, but it won’t be forever.

Reality is, we’re all under the same roof, and we all need a merciful place to rest.

 

to understand

Let it be said that I was thoughtful, and emotional. That my greatest wish was to love and understand others, and to see them loved and understood. And that I always wished I was better at listening to my gut.

American rug

“It can’t go on this way forever,” I said. “I just don’t know when it’s going to change.”

These words could’ve come forth almost any day, I say them so often, but last night it was in conversation with a front desk clerk at Drexel House, a housing project of Catholic Community Services. The topic: the system that denies humanity and commonality and life, thus creating the reality of homelessness as we know it.

Our situation today is not “normal” but it is the natural result of this county’s founding practices. The powers that be have always displaced those considered Other.

“We sweep people under the rug,” the Drexel clerk said. “And well, we’re running out of rug.”

For Those Who Are Drowning

a prayer

For those who are drowning
For those who’ve lost a child
For those facing financial hardship, and instability
For those who need prayer, always, every day
For those under emotional distress
For those living with mental dis-ease
For those going through a new and necessary challenge for the first time
For those who are crying
For those whose loved ones are crying
For those who say yes
For those in need of health, a home, shelter, nourishment, family
For those parts of ourselves steeped in discontent, uncertainty and pain

May our suffering be transformed through meaning, connection and faith in our common spirit, vast as the very ocean.

May our sea of suffering join us with others who drift, and keep afloat our love of justice for all.

May we, together, hold even our woes in kind regard, tender as a breaking bud in spring.

fare well

If you were leaving on a train and I might
not ever see you again, I’d say
Take it easy on yourself.

Yeah;
yeah.

I’d try to help you recall, with burning
eucalyptus leaves,
the day with purple sun hair
First time (since learning words) where a thought came
and went and didn’t need
them,
couldn’t use them.

I’d use my big toe to draw in the mud flats for you
the young crescent moon
the tender, vulnerable moon
holding up the rest of the moon.

Maybe with you on the platform I could explain the rest of why
I just couldn’t listen to the teatender telling me about the Kumaon region where they pick the rare spring tea, just as the plant begins
to stir.

seeds like that

Today at the Mission I ran into someone I knew from Occupy Olympia, a man probably 10 or 15 years old than I am. He was part of the encampment in 2011 but wasn’t homeless—just another activist like me who envisioned a different way of living. Someone who could read the writing on the wall, the writing on the Great Wall of this distended empire, spread like a fine plastic sheet over the land, over the fish, over our mouths and nostrils also.

I’ve seen him around a couple times since then, but not here. His eyes were red when they met mine.

“Avery?” I said.

We engaged in some small talk and then, since I was doing my job, I asked him if this was his first time out. His eyes started to fill as he nodded.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said, but he was barely getting the words out. “None of this makes sense.”

His eyes and his words as they were, there was no information that could help right then, nothing else to do but offer a hug—a reassurance that despite everything, we are still human. He collapsed and sobbed, with all the world in that Mission around us.

“You’ll get through this,” I said. “You’ll get through this.”

“It’s just so hard,” he whispered between sobs. “And I’m so afraid.”

“The fear,” he said.

Less than five years ago, Avery* was putting his energy a world where this scenario won’t happen anymore—to him or anyone else. And he will continue to do so. Believe me when I say, seeds like that don’t just die. But for now, he is one more letter spelling out a message on a crumbling imperial wall, hidden in plain sight.

 

*name changed, naturally