from here to peace

The right have an advantage at the moment. It's not at all tough for them to embody their values. Among their confreres, they can support big business, war, anti abortion laws, lie, cheat, and commit all kinds of crimes against justice for profit and the sake of all that makes money for them. The left has to represent all that is humanitarian and positive. In the world of modern politics such virtues seem laughable, the naive liberal environmentalist geek, no head for business, no heart for the real issues or stamina for the tough challenges of our nasty world. The core of the left is non agressive. Love may not force but is inevitably irresistable in the relief and limitless power it restores. I often say, we don't even know what we can do

There are people attracted to the right for very noble reasons. My oil man for instance I look up to for deeply good human values. Recently he admitted to me that he supports the Bush adminstration whole heartedly. This man supplies heavy duty oil to a cross section of my community, gets knee deep in this very unhealthy substance for us probably often 7 days a week , took over for his dad I bet twenty years ago or more. Is used to making big compromises, endangering his health for the sake of his family and community. He and I used to chat happily til this recent revelation; I'm betting he's been duking it out over the past eight years with those much tougher than me, God forbid including (I'm only imagining) close family members. Anyway, he doesn't want to engage anymore, and I'm heart broken, such is the climate now vis a vis adherance to one or another political train of thought. But soon it will come down to very basic human survival , and my friendly oilman will not be able to be fooled any longer. Soon the veil of rhetoric will lift, the fog of war blow out to sea and all will stand or fall on the side of their effectiveness. Are they life affirming? Do they promote health and happiness? Security? Unity? Wellbeing? Confidence? Go from there. If some key inventions of the last hundred years had been allowed to flourish, my oilman would have been involving himself in nontoxic energy solutions.

The left could be alot more confident. For instance when the right claims the left has no ideas, the correct response is, the left has all the ideas. The right only parrots the ideas of the left to seem to care about the same things, health care, children's rights and education, economic growth and stability, the environment, world stability and cultural harmony, global synergy, a game in which the left would do well to stop playing stooge. We need to brazenly publicize all the things those who wave the banner of the fool do: all the strange technology, networks of crazy operatives, undercover beaurocracies, just to name a few ill represented possibilities purveyed by those who need to mask their campaign to subourne all human intuition and instinct to maintain an exclusive, callous, brutal value system that empowers and pays them lavishly. The left needs to show up at the threshholds of their borders and bear witness openly to the entire scope of the shinanigans, the whole truth, nothing omitted, expose the skeleton and fingernails, platform shoes, tupees and dentures, micro chips and steroids, the entirety, the bulk of the matter, so the extravagantly enormous effort they're bringing to bear to sustain so much unecessary pain can be fully appreciated.

Finally, the very best and only way to bring around those caught up in the whirl of false magesty is to embody constructive values, the continuous revelation of the power of life, that illdefined requisite, love, and it's companions compassion and forgiveness, humility and truth. They are so essential, the rewards so great, no challenge will ever meet or overshadow them. They are the basis for all illusions, all addictions, they are our ultimate goal. Unselfishness, simplicity, innocence, purity, honesty are our natural impulses, the thwarting of which is at the root of all madness. They live in the sigh of relief at the return to loved ones, those who think highly of us, understand us, forgive us, want to be kind to us, encourage, heal and teach us. Those we trust. These returns can be world wide. I pray often that those of us in goverment and other positions of power be touched by the spirit of the creator so that none can ever again think of another without empathy, never look at a wilderness and think, I can make so much money off this valley or mountain top, or riverbed regardless of the expense to all natural life there. Never choose dollars over sense. Never make a move without consulting the heart. Include the creator in all policies and actions, not in a religious way but a deeply personal way. The result I am confident will be astonishingly, envigoratingly beautiful and abundant beyond our wildest dreams.

on being homeless and homelessness

It's a funny dynamic that my own experiences of homelessness and the subject of homelessness separate, as they must for so many or things would be so much better for those going through such celebrated challenges. There has been a homelessness problem in our midst for oh just thousands of years. Someone to kick and look down on, the straights of survival having obscured our natural inclinations of compassion and made us petty and bitter. With notable exceptions. When Sitting Bull went to Washington he was impressed with the buildings and number of people but was horrified by the number of ill clad, starving homeless, the Souix would never let one of theirs go unsheltered or hungry. The Amish take care of their own. But we consider ourselves superior to such unsophisticated or primitive societies, find them impossible to emulate. Eventually, I know we will find a way to honor all our people, realize that some are truly buried alive in trauma or responsibilty or circumstances and deserve our confidence and help. Meanwhile, there's big trouble in paradise.

The reason for the separation of the two sides for me is not that I forget my own experiences when dealing with the needs of those going through homelesness, but that my empathy and understanding create an intensity of devotion and feeling that is it seems very hard to deal with for others who have never been through such unpleasant preassures and conditions. I don't deal well with dilettantes and do-gooders, which is extremely unfortunate because they make up most of the helpout community. Precious few of the exhomeless want to go back and serve those who are currently at risk so horrendous are the terrors of this predicament, so daunting the threat of return, they can't spare a moment of new won selfsufficiency to look back, don't want to go back.

New Haven spends more than all the rest of Connecticut put together, but in the last several years, since 2002, there has been a wavering, a testing of the limits of the system that has served so many for some decades now. A young woman of color but not much experience took over the Department of Social Services and things began to grow dark for our most desperate. A limited stay policy was installed when she found out that some shelter residents had incomes. But the 90 day policy they passed doesn't target just those who have money coming in, it targets everybody. I went to a meeting by the Homeless Advisory Board, a committee of beaurocrats, politicians, students and one handpicked homeless person who decide on policy for the city, where a shelter administrator proundly described throwing out over twenty men for their inability to find adequate housing in three months or have the necessary requirements needed for extentions. I spoke up forthrightly saying that it was wicked, so much for my future application to join the board. Often social workers, the frontline interface for all programs of rescue, are not emotionally cut out for the work; so burdensome is the case load, difficult the strategies, and unstable the clients it becomes a nightmare for many, intensifying the already intolerable stresses for their clients already undergoing extreme trauma more often than not. Kids from impossible family situations, vets, battered husbands and wives, life sends us reeling and then provides little in the way of restoration institutionally. That there is a success rate is miraculous and bespeaks the tremendous ingenuity of our species. It seems we are going through a time of image over substance. Our town fathers don't appear to want to be the city who takes care of the bedraggled indigent anymore. The shelters have become impossible or closed, and once outside, the evicted many get rounded up in the Spring and Fall, pushed out of sight of the parents of the incoming classes of Yale, Albertus Magnus, Quinnapiac, and Southern Connecticut University, are vulnerable to all kinds of vagrancy laws, no public bathrooms, on and on. Local hospitals the ER waiting rooms of which were refuges of long standing in bad weather have become hostile over the last several years and chase people out now during freezing and wet days and nights. If all could see that such bad treatment only exacerbates the problems in every way. Give people your best and they will respond in kind. How can it be good to further brutalize our most damaged lives?

When I cooked for the Edge of the Woods soup kitchen and later a soup kitchen some of us organized to cover a two week summer vacation of a church organization usually providing lunch five days a week, I used all my expertise of diet and culinary nuance and the tiny budgets, donated food, my foodstamps and small allowance, or from Edge some of a $45 wk salary to serve up the most sumptuous of soups, salads, main dishes and deserts. In 2000 I was introduced to an activist who was selfless beyond all reason, but he left for Providence and from there Chicago leaving behind a very shakey deteriorating group of illfitting locals in search of a leader. Three groups initiated by him, Respectline, that two week soup kitchen and Inside at Night: non exsistent, non exsistent and just barely alive, respectively; all so embedded with Yale and the student version of activism, they drove me out. Inside at Night which attempts to raise the $240,000 6 month budget for The Overflow Shelter, housing 100 men, only functions within the timelimits of the very busy lives of the two men who remain.

I can't figure out how it is intelligent people arrange things so badly. There just can't be a personal perspective operating. I spoke to a woman who was living in a family shelter with her son. She worked and had to be at her job early, had to feed and deliver her son to school early enough to get to work, but shelter policy required her to follow rules that made her life impossible. She wasn't allowed to miss daily meetings during the day, not allowed to leave the building early enought to make her bus, was being threatened with expulsion. Huh?

Often at meetings for Respect Line, a group organized to air grievances and support the causes of shelter residents, people said they prefered jail to shelters as they couldn't be expelled from jail. Just a few years ago, a woman with a heart condition was asked to leave because she had to go out to obtain heart medication which literally kept her alive, after some heated discussion, she was permitted to stay, then the next day was thrown out. She died of exposure while sleeping in a cemetary that night. Staff are not known for their compassion, or accepting the obvious seriousness of their responsibility. Shelters are the bottom line, everything should be considered before throwing someone into the out of doors, especially an older woman in very poor health. But the attitudes are oppressive, often insulting.

I avoided shelters at all costs. As it happens, the New Haven shelters don't take pets, I always had animals so they weren't really an option anyway. Though I remember peoople advising me to "get rid" of my dogs and cats so to be more accomodatable, I couldn't go there, losing my home was bad enough, but to destroy my family too was unthinkable. I would do what ever I needed to do to keep us together and alive. Not always so possible. Once after a violent eviction, I had many cats and dogs and finally bought a dilapidated 12' trailer and lived in it for almost 6 months, leaving a trail of cats as we were asked to leave precipitously from here and there. That ended very badly with a lovely intervention by the police and courts for no real reason. Staying with friends or family can be extremely hairy especially with animals. The only advantage is the incipient attitude; shelters put you in an extremely low category, your friends won't place you quite that low, low none the less. No matter who takes you in the seismic register is always high, the possibility of eviction always prevalent. The shelter, however, must take you back after a short time, your friends or family usually won't. During the 6 month seige, I begged the New Haven Zen Center for help. We had 6 puppies with us by then. Even though I had given my life's blood to that group for years, they allowed me only 2 days and 2 nights sanctuary, and they had lots of very protected space to park, but lots! They loved the little ones, but decided for some reason to punish me. Though most of the people I know are what you might call "liberal", they aren't as a rule generous with their homes or property.

There is a campaign these days to build 10,000 units of public housing in the state, I think it's 1,000,000 units country wide, the Bush administration's version of ending homelessness. But they are locating the housing outside of cities, suburbians being so not into people in dire economic straights, didn't they move away from such unpleasant reminders of want and need? Of course housing is key, but it must meet the needs of the people it hopes to serve. If these 1,000,000 units of public housing are created with real living human beings in mind, it will work; if it is a project to build enough units to get unwanted people of the streets, out of sight, it won't. It needs to be understood that the homeless are us, valuable individuals, our relatives and friends, so much can be accomplished with this one adjustment. Homelessness is a circumstance, the cure for which is a change of heart, a redirection of attitude. The old phrase, "There but for the grace of God go I" needs to be widely resurrected. We are so distracted by our needs to succeed, efforts to ward off all avenues of disaster. Why is it not clear that the only way to ensure true security is to provide a beautiful, failsafe net for states of need, real help in times of loss and injury. Then what could frighten us?

poetry, 2007

3 new ones


Outside the coffee shop my friend's face contorted in
agony of anticipation, hearing funeral instead of a few new,
and immediately I strove to write a funeral poem
that might cheer him up.
So I thought

what about the funeral for hate?
The death of fear and loss, deception and ambition,
what about the funeral for pain and vanity and want,
need and humiliation; the deaths of disease and loneliness
and worry, trauma and torture and rape.
I thought it might be good and nice to imagine the deaths of
confusion and dispair and jealousy and isolation.
The end ceremonies for ignorance and dicotomy and pride.
I was guided to think of a funeral for darkness and destruction,
treachery and conceit. Funerals for extortion and waste and murder

Here lies our old friend
murder
Good by Good by Good by
farewell and thanks for all
the great thrillers and episodes
legends and poetry

Death, you old phoney
by by and thanks for the threats and nightmares
and panic, now I can look forward to the funeral for war,
your child and colleague, cause and result.


But those things will never have funerals, to be gone,
they must needs have been forgotten.


*******************


I am sitting here at my alter in the woods trying to
prepare myself for the arrivals of those who never have
nor can really know or appreciate me and wish I could take
this air and wind and light forever with me. Wish the love of
my buried friends could follow and comfort me into
my frightening ceremonials, my lonely night.

At least I know the feeling of kind acceptance, can come back
to love.


*********************

Long ago, when I loved a man and he left me for a younger woman,
I called after him and a man who chose to help with my humiliation
cautioned me that I should not lose my dignity. I was wretched and
hot and lost and threatened, choking in my unwanted solitude. He
burned me with the word. But now I marvel at my courage and bold
emotional array as I spewed and rankled and gasped in the hideous
wake of their sexual desperation. I was explicitly wounded. I hurled
the essence of my torture and sought refuge in actual spirits. I found
an honest pain. How is this not dignified?