Reflecting on Homelessness
I enjoy reading books on self-improvement. I’m not talking about books telling me how to look great, get rich, or win friends and influence people. If I had to narrow my interest in self-improvement to one particular aspect, it would be understanding consciousness. After all, isn’t that where everything we experience in life begins and ends? For instance, if you’re a Christian who takes to heart Jesus’ saying that the kingdom of God is within you, how do you propose to access that kingdom other than through consciousness?
I may not be an authority on the kingdom of God, but I have a clue as to what prevents us from accessing it. It is fear. Here’s how Michael Singer describes it in his book, The Untethered Soul:
“Every day we bear a burden that we should not be bearing. We fear that we are not good enough or that we will fail. We experience insecurity, anxiety, and self-consciousness. We fear that people will turn on us, take advantage of us, or stop loving us. All of these things burden us tremendously. As we try to have open and loving relationships, and as we try to succeed and express ourselves, there is an inner weight that we carry. This weight is the fear of experiencing pain, anguish, or sorrow. Every day we are either feeling it, or we are protecting ourselves from feeling it. It is such a core influence that we don’t even realize how prevalent it is.”
According to Singer, we can overcome these fears by giving up the ingrained habit of expecting our minds to fix what is wrong with us:
“That is the core, the root of it all. Your mind is not the guilty party. In fact, your mind is innocent. The mind is simply a computer, a tool. It can be used to ponder great thoughts, solve scientific problems, and serve humanity. But you, in your lost state, told it to spend its time conjuring up outer solutions for your very personal inner problems…You are not the thinking mind. You are the consciousness that is behind the mind and is aware of the thoughts.”
When I read Singer’s book, his analysis made perfect sense to me. Specifically, the distinction between the seat of awareness and the constant disturbance generated by the mind. Anxiety and stress naturally occur when we get caught up in the thoughts and emotions generated by a noisy mind. When we really and truly understand the difference, we can assure ourselves that we are not the disturbance. We are only witnessing the disturbance.
As I said, Singer’s book made sense to me, and it still does. But only from my perspective—that of a homeowner with a bank account who gets together with friends for coffee at least once a week. Friends who, by the way, are also homeowners with bank accounts. Lately, I’ve considered Singer’s analysis from the point of view of the homeless. Consider the following passage from Singer’s book:
“You are capable of ceasing the absurdity of listening to the perpetual problems of your psyche. You can put an end to it. You can wake up in the morning, look forward to the day, and not worry about what will happen. Your daily life can be like a vacation. Work can be fun; family can be fun; you can just enjoy all of it. That does not mean you don’t do your best; you just have fun doing your best. Then, at night when you go to sleep, you let it all go. You just live your life without getting uptight and worrying about it. You actually live life instead of fearing or fighting it.”
I do wake up around three or four in the morning looking forward to the day without worrying about what will happen. I enjoy writing. I do my best, and I have fun doing my best. I enjoy the company of my wife. At precisely 9 o’clock every night I go to bed and get a peaceful night’s sleep for 6 or 7 hours. In short, I live life without fearing or fighting it.
I can’t imagine telling a homeless person that their daily life can feel like a vacation if they would only straighten out their thinking. “Listen, pal, tonight, when you lie down to go to sleep on your cardboard bed under the overpass, let it all go. Oh, somebody ripped off your backpack? Come on, man! That’s nothing to get uptight about.” What Singer glibly disregards as fear that people will turn on us, take advantage of us, or stop loving us is the grim reality of day-to-day life on the streets. I’ll agree with Singer on one point. Experiencing insecurity, anxiety, and self-consciousness is a burden that no one should be bearing.
Until recently, I never gave much thought to homelessness. And if I did think of the homeless, it was limited to the image of a person standing on a street corner holding a sign, begging for money. That was one of many misconceptions I held about the homeless. As one authority on homelessness wrote, “For every visibly homeless person, there are 10 or maybe 20 less visible homeless persons.” Admittedly, I was as guilty as the next guy in my failure to give the plight of homelessness the serious attention it deserves. That changed after meeting James, a homeless man in Columbia, Missouri.
I had cataract surgery on my left eye that morning at the VA hospital. Before Marissa could drive us back home, I was required to return to the hospital for a follow-up exam late that afternoon. Knowing this was the plan, I had brought along our backgammon board. We found a table in a downtown park to sit, drink coffee, and play some backgammon. That’s where we met James. He was a tall, thin black man wearing jeans and a white tee shirt. He was walking by and stopped when he noticed what we were doing.
“Hey! Backgammon! I haven’t seen that played in a long time,” he said, to which I replied, “Yeah, it’s not as popular as it used to be.” He walked on but returned about five minutes later. He saw me smoking my (tobacco) pipe.
“Hey! A pipe smoker. Now that fits in with the image of a backgammon player,” he said, laughing. He asked if he could join us. I said, “Of course, have a seat. My name’s Gary, this is my wife, Marissa.” He told us his name was James. We shook hands and chatted while Marissa and I continued playing our game. After one of my moves, James said to Marissa, “Uh, Oh. I think he’s got you beat,” to which she replied, “I think you’re right.”
I didn’t ask James a lot of personal questions. He volunteered that he was 50, homeless, and an alcoholic. When he mentioned that he was a good cook I asked how he got into cooking. He told us he grew up in Chicago and that his mother died when she was only 35. “After that, I had to do all the cooking,” he said.
On our way home, Marissa remarked that she expected James to ask us for money. I replied that I did not expect him to because of something he said just before we left the park. He said, “I appreciate you letting me sit down and visit with you folks. I don’t get to talk with ‘regular’ folks much.” Engaging in our brief interaction was, for James, more valuable than a handout. In his book, Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women, Elliot Liebow observed, “Homelessness in general puts a premium on the ‘little things.’ A small gesture of friendship, a nice day, a bus token, or a little courtesy that most of us take for granted.”
I’ve tried to imagine being homeless. My immediate impulse was to compare it to the fifteen months I spent as a Marine in Vietnam, most of which were spent out in the field—or, as we would say—out in the bush. Given the frequent occurrence of ambushes, firefights, snipers, mortar rounds, mines, and booby traps, life in the bush was, generally speaking, far more dangerous than being homeless in America.
That said, the most significant difference is the fact that I was surrounded by brothers who had my back. Each of us was willing to risk our life for the others. At night we would dig fighting holes, two men to a hole. We would take turns—one of us getting some sleep while the other stood watch. That strikes me as preferable to trying to sleep knowing that you are vulnerable to a sudden attack, someone stealing everything you own, or getting roused and hassled by cops.
“The single most difficult part of being homeless is loneliness,” writes Alan Graham, author of Welcome Homeless. “No one knowing your name. The way people look at you. Dying on the street and both your life and death going wholly unnoticed.”
We were never alone out in the bush. However, what Graham has described here goes much deeper than simply being physically alone. What he is describing is hopelessness. In the combat zone, my entire being was devoted to one thing and one thing only, and that was survival—motivated by hope, based on the knowledge that if I got out alive, a better life was waiting for me back home. I had a mother and a father praying that I would not return home in a coffin. Unlike the homeless person estranged from his or her family with no hope for a brighter future, had I died 10,000 miles from home, my life and death would not have gone wholly unnoticed.
Graham goes on to say, “If you believe in mitigating homelessness and bringing palliative relief to those suffering on the streets, then you believe in the power of relation, not transaction. You believe in friendship, not funds. You believe in love as ultimate shelter. If we want to alleviate the pain associated with suffering, we have to become intimate with the suffering individual.”
As hundreds of homeless individuals in Springfield, Missouri will attest, Dr. David Brown, a retired orthopedic surgeon, and his wife, Linda, a retired nurse who is now a realtor, have demonstrated a profound belief in the power of relation.
In 2010 the Browns sold their suburban home and moved into a loft in downtown Springfield, where they encountered a sizeable number of homeless people. Rather than responding to them in the typical manner—avoidance—they made friends with the people Linda now refers to as “our homeless friends.” The more they learned about them, the more they wanted to help them in some way. They leased a building to create a drop-in center for the homeless. They called it The Gathering Tree, a place where their homeless friends (at least 150 a night) could enjoy a meal, drink coffee, play games, sing karaoke, use computers, take a shower, and receive clothing, personal care items, and survival gear.
In 2016, six years after the opening of the Gathering Tree, the Browns envisioned a plan that would take their help a step further. They purchased land for what would be called Eden Village, a gated community of tiny homes for single adults who are chronically homeless, defined as having lived on the streets for over a year.
In 2017, the first house was purchased, brought on-site, set up, and decorated. A formal open house was held along with a blessing by the bishop of the local Catholic Diocese. Since then, that village has been full of houses and two more villages have been constructed in Springfield. Each village has a community center where the residents meet, have coffee, and receive medical care.
Being a realtor with access to a website for realtors nationwide, Linda Brown spread the word about what she and her husband were doing, resulting in Eden Villages being established in Kansas City, Tulsa, Wilmington, North Carolina, Mountain Home, Arkansas, and Phoenix, Arizona. Another dozen cities are in the process of establishing their own Eden Village.
I’ve spread the word about Eden Village to organizations in Columbia that help the homeless. Nothing would make me happier than to know that James is sleeping in his own bed and cooking food in his own kitchen.