Tag Archives: homelessness

Drowning in the raging torrents of homelessness.

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We are waiting for a street light to turn green when my daughter says, “Oh dear, I hope that man is okay.”

A truck is blocking my view of the man she is referring to. When it passes I see the man. He is lying in the doorway of a building on the other side of the street. Half-in. Half-out. His legs on the stair above him. His head resting on the sidewalk.

We cross the road, pass two business men deep in conversation and approach the man where he lies just behind them.

“Sir? Sir? Are you okay,” my daughter asks him.

His legs are twisted where they lay on the step above him. He spills out onto the sidewalk like a slinky running down the stairs.

He opens his eyes. Befuddled. Confused. The braid of his long grey streaked black hair lays at a right angle to his head. His clothes are tattered and worn. His boots are untied.

“What happened?” he asks.

We’re not sure but we tell him it looks like he has fallen on the street.

“How can we help?” my daughter asks.

“Help me sit up. Please.” he says.

Both my daughter and I think we should call 911. What if he hurt himself when he fell.

No. No. He insists. I just need to sit up.

“We need to make sure you can move before we help you sit up,” I tell him. “Can you show us that you can move your legs?”

He wiggles his feet. I sense a bit of a mischievous smile as he does it. There is something engaging in his nature, even as he lays on the ground at our feet.

Alexis and I help him sit up.

“How can we help?” we ask again.

“If you have some spare change I can go get a cup of tea,” he says.

“I’d rather you not move just yet,” I tell him. He seems disoriented. Weak and oh so vulnerable. “I’ll go get you some tea.”

And I cross back over the street to the fast food deli on the corner while Alexis stays and chats with him.

His name is Frank she tells me when I return with tea and cookies. I tell him my name. He thanks us profusely.

The two business men on the corner finish their conversation and move off. We stay and sit with Frank and chat for a little longer. We give him money for fried chicken and chips from the ‘joint’ just up the street. His favourite he says. He promises me he will not use the money for more booze. I tell him I trust him. He smiles, and there’s that glimmer of endearing mischief again. He tells me I have no choice.

Alexis and I leave him sitting there with his tea and cookies. We discover the building just down the street is a Drop-In Centre. We go in and let the woman at the desk know about Frank’s condition, his fall and our fear he may have hit his head harder than he imagined.

She goes out to help him and after stopping at the deli on the corner further down the block for a bowl of soup, we see that Frank is no longer sitting in the doorway where we’d left him.

We hope the worker has taken him into the Drop-In Centre to keep an eye on him.

We have done what we can.

As we continue our walk towards downtown, Alexis tells me that Frank has told her he is 70 years old. I drink a lot, he said. What else do I have to do with my life?

His words sit heavily in my heart.

The latest Vancouver Point-in-Time Count of Homelessness found 1,847 people experiencing homelessness. 539 of those people are unsheltered.

It is everywhere in this city. Homelessness.

There are people ensconced in sleeping bags lying at the corners of almost every busy intersection in the downtown core. There are youth. Men. Women. Dogs too.

They sit, their cardboard signs telling the same story. Asking for the same thing. Hungry. Grateful for any help.

The cost of living in this beautiful city by the ocean is spiralling upward and upward. And people are falling faster and faster through the cracks. It feels like a heavy and daunting task — to end homelessness. To make sure everyone has a home.

Alexis and I met a man named Frank. His body lay sprawled across the street. We could not end the homelessness that has swept him up in its mighty torrent. We do not have that kind of super human strength just as he does not have the super human strength he needs to pull himself out of the waging waters.

As a society, we must find our collective strength to make the choices needed to stop the flow of humanity falling into the raging waters of homelessness.

We must find ways to build bridges so people can find their way safely to the other side before being dragged under homelessness’ turbulent depths.

 

 

 

 

Intersections.

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I am walking out of the building where I work to go next door to the convenience store for a bottle of Pellegrino. A tall man walks towards me, smiles. I smile back. I don’t want to make assumptions, but I think it is possible he is homeless.

He stops and says, “Excuse me…”

I stop and turn to look at him. “Yes?”

“I don’t want money” he says immediately. “But, I’m kinda stuck here. I just got out of emergency and I’m really hungry.” And he shows me the cut on his foot. “Would you be able to help me out with lunch?”

I look at him. Consider my options and say, “I could buy you some lunch here.” And I point to the little take-out restaurant on the other side of our office doors.

“I’d rather go to Mac’s,” he says.

“I don’t have time to go to Mac’s,” I tell him. “I’ll gladly buy you lunch right here.”

He considers it for a moment, thanks me and we walk into the restaurant where he orders lunch.

As we wait for the server to tally up the bill, I ask him if he has a place to stay.

“I’m kinda couch-surfing right now,” he tells me.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Hobbema or as I call it, Hellbema.” He laughs. Shrugs a shoulder. “I don’t like it there.”

“I know a number of people from Maskwachees,” I tell him, using the Indigenous name. “They are working very hard to create positive change.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But all my people there, they just judge me. Make me feel bad about myself.”

“Do you feel bad about yourself?” I ask.

Again, a nervous laugh. A shrug of the shoulder. “Yeah. Pretty well all the time. Life’s not easy.”

“I would have to say that for your people it has been very, very hard.”

He nods his head up and down. Looks me in the eyes. “You’re a good lady.” And he leans over and gives me an awkward, sideways hug.

I return the hug.

“How come you know people from Maskwachees?”

“I’m involved in a program called Choices,” I tell him. “I’ve met them through it.”

His face lights up. “Hey! My cousin went to Choices. When he came back, all he wanted to do was hug everybody! He loved it.”

This time, he gives me a full on hug. Laughing as he does so.

Laughing, I hug him back.

The server has my bill ready. I pay. I wish him well and tell him he could check with his band about going to Choices. “It might help you feel less bad about yourself.”

“I’d have to go back. I don’t want to go back there.”

“Sometimes, going back is the only place to find the way forward,” I reply.

He nods his head, side to side as if weighing my words.

I tell him I have to go. He thanks me for lunch and as I’m about to open the door to leave he calls out, “Hey wait! Don’t forget. We gotta hug!”

And I turn and we hug and I leave. I go to the convenience store next door to buy my Pellegrino and he waits for his lunch.

And life flows onward.

And both of us move on carrying the memory of a hug where our paths intersected.

 

What if we change the story?

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I watch three men, sitting alone at the bar watching the hockey game on TV. They don’t look at anyone. They don’t chat with the bartender. They don’t look at each other. They eat, sip their beer, watch the game on the screen in front of them.

I am witnessing these human stories at a pub where I have joined C.C. for dinner until his buddy arrives to watch what they hoped would be the last game of the Stanley Cup.

“Do you think those men are lonely?” I ask my husband of the 3 men at the bar.

“I don’t know,” he replies.

“In the story I make up about them, they are,” I tell him. “See their rounded shoulders. The way they never look at anyone. The way one sits huddled over his food, one arm on the bar’s counter, swooping out and around his plate as though he’s protecting it. Maybe he came from a large family where people grabbed for food and you had to fight for everything you got.

In the story I am writing about the man at the end of the bar, he feels lost, his marriage is broken down, his kids are grown up and he feels like life is avoiding him just as he avoids it.”

I am always making up stories of people’s lives. C.C. smiles and says nothing.

There was a man at the shelter where I used to work. He was like those men at the bar. Lonely. Depressed. His marriage had fallen apart. His kids were grown, their relationship with their father strained. He’d sit at the bar by his condo every night just to feel human connections around him, even though he did his best to avoid them.

One day, a stranger came in and sat beside him. They struck up a conversation. They became friends. A few days later, the stranger whispered into his ear, “You know. I’ve got something in my car that will make you feel way better than that Scotch you’re drinking.” And the man decided to try it. His friend was giving it to him for free. His friend would never hurt him.

That man had a Masters Degree in Education, worked as a High School Counsellor. And still, his loneliness drove him into taking the risk. It wasn’t long before he lost everything, including all connection with his family. He did gain a criminal record. He carries it with him today along with the scars of that five year period of his life when, at 60 years of age, he was so lost he gave up on fighting for himself and gave into the despair of homelessness.

Today, that man’s story is one of loss and hope. Of sadness and possibility.

Everyday we pass people on the street who have stories we have never heard, yet about whom we make up stories based on what we believe homelessness to be all about.

Drugs. Addiction. Crime. Loss. Abuse. Hopelessness. More crime. More drugs.

Yesterday, as I took a walk at noon, I passed a couple sitting on a concrete barrier lining the sidewalk. They were visibly homeless. Pan-handling for change. A woman in front of me stopped, handed them a bag with two sandwiches. She smiled and said, Enjoy! and walked away.

What’s her story I wondered? Did she buy the sandwiches to give away? Would she have to stop again to get one for herself and her boss or co-worker? Does she have a loved one who is lost to the street and this is her way of giving back, of making a difference.

What is the couple’s story? Where do they sleep at night? What brought them to the street?

What’s the story we tell about panhandling? People are just asking for money so they can buy drugs? Why don’t they get a job instead? What’s their problem?

What if we change that story?

What if every outstretched hand was viewed as being extended for help, not money?

What if we view our role as a response to someone asking for help?

What if the stories we told changed everything? What if instead of despair we read hope. Instead of loss, possibility. Instead of homeless, humanity.

What if we stopped believing the stories we think we know and lean into the stories of our hearts where truth is written beneath the wounds we carry. Where truth is known beneath the fears we believe are real.

What if the stories we tell are the stories of our shared human condition? The stories of what make us one humanity, not separate human beings.

Would you change your story if you could see all humanity as you? Would you write a different ending for a world desperately asking for help?

Namaste.

 

 

#tbt Gratitude in a glass of water

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FullSizeRender (91)It’s #throwbackthursday – the following post has been edited from where it originally appeared on Recover Your Joy  May 19th, 2007.

Last night [May 18, 2007] we held a dinner for client volunteers at the shelter where I work. Client volunteers are individuals who are using the facility and who volunteer while staying there. In the course of a year, using a base salary rate of $10/hour, client volunteers provide the shelter with about $600,000 in service.

The dinner was attended by over 60 people. The tables were covered with linen tablecloths and serviettes. China and silverware was at each place setting and the room was lit by the soft glow of candlelight. A big difference from the chaotic and noisy dining room on the second floor of the building where dinner is served to over 600 people a sitting.

As I was greeting guests last night I was struck by the gratitude each person expressed as they walked into room. “Hey. This is nice!” “Haven’t had a candlelit dinner in years.” “This is for me? Wow.” “Cool.” The comments were simple. Appreciative and reflective. Each guest felt part of a moment in time away from the rigors and fears of homelessness. The meal was a scrumptious buffet of salads, roasted chicken and potatoes or lasagne, a cheese plate with fruit, delectable delights and coffee.

As the guests were arriving and getting settled, someone came up to me and asked, “Is it okay if I pour myself a glass of water?” “Of course,” I replied. A few moments later someone else asked, “May I pour myself a cup of coffee?” “Help yourself,” I replied.

After about the third or fourth person came up and asked if they could help themselves to water or coffee, I decided to take action. I picked up a jug and walked around the tables offering people water. As I went, I reminded them that there was coffee to which they could help themsleves on a side table.

This may not seem like a big issue to you, but to someone who is homeless, who must wait in line for just about everything, who must wake up when told, go to bed when told, cannot just pour themselves a glass of water at will or make a cup of coffee when they want, being able to simply stand up and help themselves to a cup of coffee is a big thing.

What struck me even more, however, was the hesitancy with which people asked if it was okay to help themselves to something so simple as water. The night before we’d had a dinner for corporate volunteers, and no one asked if they could get water or coffee. They just did it.

For the client volunteers, conditioned to having to ask for the simplest things, having an entire evening dedicated to them was refreshing and sad all in one. It reminded them of all that they have lost. And yet, over and above the reminders of the past, there was one single attitude that overrode everything.

Gratitude.

There is so much in my life I take for granted. A cup of coffee I brew myself every morning. A piece of toast made when I want. A computer to work on when I need it. The house a temperature I decide because I have control of the thermostat.

As I listened to the people gathered in the room, there was no difference between their behaviour and the behaviour of community volunteers served the night before. They all knew what a fork and knife was and how to use them. They all put their serviettes on their laps. They chatted and laughed and told jokes with those sitting at the table with them.

What was different was none of them took anything about last night’s dinner for granted. Not even a glass of water.

Next time you pick up a glass of water, think about what it means to be able to pour it at will.

You are blessed.

May we all have the blessing of not having to stand in line for everything we need today.

To get out of the basement, you gotta get to higher ground.

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Years ago, I met a man named Collin who wanted nothing more than to be a role model for his sons and the youth in his community on a Reserve in Saskatchewan.

He told me this while taking a course on self-esteem I was teaching at the homeless shelter where I used to work.

“I don’t get it, Louise,” he said as we were discussing the concept of ‘balcony people’ versus ‘basement dwellers’. “I’ve been sober for 3 months and all my friends here want me to do is go drink with them. Why can’t they be happy for me? Why do they want me to get drunk again?”

Collin had spent many, many years in a drunken stupor. He’d left his wife and sons behind and followed the path that almost killed him until one day he realized he couldn’t do it anymore.

“I didn’t want to be that drunken Indian people saw lying on the sidewalk. But I didn’t know how to get up,” he said. And then in Rehab for yet another time, light slipped through the cracks of his despair. He realized he couldn’t show his sons, as well as the youth on the Reserve from where he came, what it meant to walk the path of honour and pride unless he got sober.

It was his dream. To return to his Reserve and teach his sons, and all the youth, what it meant to walk with your head held high, proud of your heritage, proud of your People.

Collin found his balcony and he wasn’t coming off of it.

The challenge was, he still had a lot of people around him who were scared of looking up. Scared of reaching up from the gutter where they drifted through every day, their senses dulled by drugs and alcohol.

“What if you’re already doing what you dreamt of right where you are?” I asked Collin.

“What do you mean?” he replied. The lines around his deep black eyes crinkled up, deep furrows appeared in his brow. He shoved the tip of the white cowboy hat he always wore back from his forehead.

“What if your getting sober shows them that it is possible. That no matter how often they tell themselves they can’t do it, the path of sobriety is open for them too.”

“Then why don’t they just get on with it?” he asked. He smiled when he said it. He knew the answer. “Because it’s not that simple. Right? I was one of the basement dwellers too.”

He sat quietly for a few moments before sharing the rest of his thoughts. “If I’m in the basement living in the dark, it’s hard to see there’s a path leading towards the light, not just deeper into the dark.”

And that’s when the truth of his position hit him. “I couldn’t see in the basement because I was surrounded by people who were just as scared and lost as me. And they’re no different. They can’t see the beauty of the view I see from up on the balcony because they’re down there living in the dark. I can’t go back to the basement, but I can keep standing on my balcony showing them what’s possible.”

Climbing out of the basement is not an easy task. We want to cling to the darkness, hold onto the familiar, stick with what we know. And if it includes using drugs and alcohol to keep us numbed in that place, it can be even scarier to step up.

The only way out is to let go of what’s holding us down.

Staying out of the familiarity of the basement can be even harder when we are surrounded by those we knew ‘back there’. In their fear of what is ‘out here’ they want us to come back and help them feel safe in the dark.

 

Collin never got to show his sons what it meant to live a proud man. He died of a heart attack three months after our conversation.

But he did get to show those around him who feared the path out of the basement that it was okay to step into the light. He never gave up on his sobriety in those final months. He never let go of standing on his balcony and telling others about the beauty of the view he saw from up above.

I like to think he died with a proud heart. That even as it beat the final drum note of his life, he was standing tall, standing proud on his balcony surveying the wide expanse of the universe around him knowing that in walking the path out of the darkness, he was showing his People how not to be afraid of the light.

 

 

 

The story in our hands.

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Hands. To hold. To carry. To touch. To feel.

Hands. They tell a story, our story, our past. They bridge the space between us, they reach within, they stretch beyond.

Hands.

Yesterday, I met a woman whose hands told the story of her life on the streets. Hard. Calloused. Strong. Her hands held mine in their vice-like grip as she poured out her grief, her sorrow, her frustration, her anger.

Her hands pushed the hair back from her face, they sliced the air as she told the story of fighting for every breath she takes. Of fighting for a space to call her own, of reaching for one small piece of comfort, ease, truth, acceptance.

And in her story-telling, she held out her hands towards me and showed me her cracked palms and insisted, You couldn’t imagine what it’s like. You just couldn’t imagine.

What I hear is your life is hard, very hard, I said to her.

And she bowed her head as tears flowed from her eyes. And then, with a shrug, she straightened up, angrily wiped away her tears with one hand and replied, It’s the life I’ve got. I gotta deal with it.

A few years ago, I sat at the bedside of a man from the shelter where I worked as he transitioned from this life to whatever lay beyond. I held his calloused hand in mine and felt the story of his life unravel in my palms.

I knew him well. He was one of the first people to come to the art program I’d started at the shelter. James had a love of photography and used whatever money he earned shovelling snow, working temp or picking bottles to purchase a camera, computer, software and other photography related tools that would help him improve his art.

It’s my retirement program, he’d laugh.

Retirement never came.

He’d been homeless for years and though alcohol had been a driving force in the tearing apart of his former life, he no longer drank. He mostly just kept to himself, did his work, took his photos and offered them for sale at our various art shows.

He was gifted. And passionate. His hands held his camera steady, guiding his eyes to the story beyond the picture he was taking.

And they never failed. They always found the beauty in the mundane, the unique angle in the light, the poignant story in a window.

His were steady hands. Hard-working. Strong.

As the cancer that gripped his body began to eat away at his life, his hands grew softer. Quiet. Until the final night when I sat with him in a room at a hospice just outside the city and heard his final indrawn breath and felt the last touch of warmth leave his body. For a moment, his hands lay still in mine until I had no choice but to let go. His hands were cold and I could not warm them.

Yesterday, a woman gripped my hands and I was reminded of James’ hands in mine on that cold December night when life let go of a man who had fought so long to hold his grip on it.

Her hands were warm and fierce and strong as she gripped mine. She did not need me to warm them. She just needed me to hold on, for a moment, while she told her story.

Sometimes, that is all we can do. Hold one another in communion, sharing our stories, guiding our hearts to listen deeply to what the other says. And when the time is right, to let go so we can each continue on our journey, strengthened by our brief encounter, knowing we are not alone.

What if homeless didn’t equal criminal?

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The story is not new. An employer discovers the guy he hired a few months ago lives at a homeless shelter. He’s been doing great work but now the employer is scared and the employee must go.

When I worked at a homeless shelter we would ask clients if we could film them to include in different advertisements and videos we created to tell the stories of the shelter. Several times a year I would get a request from someone asking me to please pull the clip from our latest video or advertisement where their face appeared. Their explanation inevitably went something like this,

“I’ve got a job now. I’ve moved on and I don’t want anyone to know I was there.”

or

“I’m looking for work and I don’t want a potential employer to google my name and find me connected to that place.”

or

I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me, but people don’t trust homeless people and I’ll never get a job if they find out where I live.”

At the Foundation where I now work, we present annual awards to those who have demonstrated excellence in the homeless serving sector. As part of their recognition we include a booklet that lists the names of the nominators and award recipients as well as a brief story about the recipient from the nominators.

Last year, we changed our policy from including full names of nominators to just first name and last initial after one woman phoned me in a panic. “I googled my name and found the article I wrote about (name of person she nominated) and why I believed she deserved the award. I’ve been shortlisted for a job and I can’t risk the company finding out about my past.”

We pulled the booklet off the website, (it was from an awards ceremony five years ago) but could not promise the woman that Google would not have stored it in a cache somewhere. It was the best we could do.

And our best was not good enough.

Not because the employer ‘found out’. I’m thinking they didn’t because the woman did not contact me again.

Our best was not good enough because that woman, and so many others, live in fear that people will find out they were homeless. That they live or lived at a homeless shelter. That they used services designed for people experiencing homelessness. That they are somehow, in the views of many in our society, not good enough, broken, lacking and even, because they are homeless, criminals.

Most of us don’t spend our days worrying too much about the judgements of others. We’re not really impacted by the person behind or in front of us at the checkout. We know we won’t see that stranger in the elevator again so don’t really pay much attention to them.

We live in our bubble of ‘normal’ and move through our days without giving much thought to what others are thinking of us.

For someone experiencing homelessness, judgements come fast and furious.

They are heard from strangers walking by who hurl words at panhandlers that pierce like daggers to the heart.

From kids driving by in a car who think it is funny to hurl eggs at the woman pushing the shopping cart, or the man picking up empty pop cans from the street.

They are visibly homeless and thus, somehow do not deserve our respect or that we behave as decent, caring human beings.

For that man who lost his job because of his address, there is not much we can do. Discrimination of this sort is not illegal, and, even though we created a Homeless Charter of Rights, they are an idea, a beautiful wish for all mankind. They are not enshrined in our legislation.

And so, he will move on. He will chalk it up to another strike against himself, another let down, another put down that is just the way it is.

It doesn’t have to be. It can be different.

If we change. If we decide not to see people experiencing homelessness through eyes of condemnation and fear. If we decide not to equate poverty with lack of ambition, smarts or ability. Vulnerability as weakness. Homelessness as criminal.

If we change the way we see those whose lives have lead them into homelessness not as victims of their own doing, but rather as fallout from a social system that does not have the resources, affordable housing and supports people need to make their way in life, perhaps we will change our minds about who ‘the homeless’ really are. Perhaps we’ll see, ‘they’ are not us versus them. They are you and me, all of us.  Together.

 

 

Become and Let Joy Arise

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On this day of your life,
Louise, I believe God wants you to know…

…that safety is not the thing you should look for in the
future. Joy is what you should look for.

Security and joy may not come in the same package.
They can…but they also cannot.
There is no guarantee.

If your primary concern is a guarantee of security,
you may never experience the truest joys of life.
This is not a suggestion that you become reckless,
but it is an invitation to at least become daring.
Neale Donald Walsch (Daily Message from CWG)

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

When I read the message above from a daily note I receive in my Inbox, I felt this visceral, oh no! kind of response that said, “See Louise. No one can give you a sense of feeling safe or secure. Only you can do it and the only way you can do it is to seek joy, not safety.”

Dang.

Here I thought it was someone else’s job to make me feel safe and secure.

Wouldn’t you know it, the Universe knows and is constantly delivering what I need to learn. Sometimes, I’m just not ready, or perhaps not feeling safe or secure enough within me, to heed the lesson.

I have often confused feeling ‘safe’ with ‘trusting’, especially in relationships. Having been prone to trusting the untrustworthy, it was virtually impossible for me to achieve a sense of feeling safe so I constantly put the responsibility for my unease on the world outside.

“I need to feel safe so I need to trust you,” is very different than, “I feel safe within me so I choose to trust that I am capable of making loving decisions that support and honour me and my life, whatever you do.”

In the first, I am placing all the responsibility for my feeling safe and for having trust honoured (or not) on ‘the other’.

In the latter, I am acknowledging my accountability to creating my own sense of well-being within me, and acknowledging that I have the power to make decisions that create the more of what I want in my life — whatever is happening in the world around me — in loving, kind expressions of my truth.

And in living my life true to my inner knowing, I find joy arising with every breath.

The joy of freedom. the joy of knowing I am safe no matter how fierce the winds are blowing around me when I stand in my “I” and stay true to my beliefs, my values, my being who I am in the world.

At the talk I gave on Wednesday night at Canadian Business Chicks Christmas Social, I began with telling the group that I believe we are all born magnificent.

Within each of us, I told the group, no matter where we stand on the street, no matter our economic, spiritual, physical or emotional state, is the seed of magnificence that is our true essence.

When we’re experiencing homelessness or other life hardships, it is easy to forget our magnificence. It is easy to believe we are the labels we carry. Homeless. Addict. Bum. Emotionally disturbed. Mentally-ill. Broken-hearted. Rejected. Lost. Alone.

I shared with the group the story of a man in a class I was teaching at the homeless shelter where I used to work who was once a boy soldier in Africa.

I have done awful things, he said. How can I see myself as anything other than bad?

Do you want to be a ‘bad’ person in the world today? I asked.

No, he replied vehemently.

I invited him, and the group, to close their eyes and for just a moment imagine they truly were magnificent. That in that moment, they radiated pure, beautiful light. Live it. Breathe into it. Become it, I told them.

When they opened their eyes I asked the man who was once a boy soldier if he could feel it.

Yes, he replied. And he smiled and his eyes lit up and for just a moment, his magnificence shone.

Then it is true. I told him. You could not imagine it if it did not exist within you. Rather than fearing the truth that what you did when you had no choice but to survive or be killed is who you are, breathe into the truth that your magnificence is your birthright. Live that truth everyday and keep doing one thing, everyday, that awakens your magnificence.

I saw that man several years later when writing an article about one of the housing first programs in our city. He was working as a custodian/building manager. He saw me and took me aside and reminded me of that moment and thanked me. “I work at being magnificent everyday,” he told me.

When we live our magnificence, when we breathe into it without seeking anything other than to know it, we become it.

Just for today, let go of the fear you will never be good enough, or tall enough or rich enough or safe,  and simply, Become.

Become and Let Joy Arise.

When giving spare change isn’t enough.

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“Do you give to panhandlers?” one of my co-workers asked as we sat chatting about working in the sector and homelessness and what it means to end it. She is new to the homeless serving sector having come from the management team of a large retailer. She tells me how working at the Foundation has changed her perspective, helped her respond more compassionately, but still, she doesn’t feel comfortable constantly giving money to people on the street.

I never know if I’m doing the right thing, my co-worker said.

And I understand.

I used to give to people on the street who asked for spare change, and stopped. I never felt like I was doing enough. The giving always left me feeling empty. So now, I smile and acknowledge someone’s presence and tell them I don’t have any change, or that I can’t give them any money. But I always acknowledge them. Always let them know, I see you. You are real to me. Not a problem on the street I need to ignore. You are visible.

Several years ago, while teaching a class in self-esteem at the homeless shelter where I used to work, one of the students shared the story of finding himself at the far end of the city with no money to pay for a train ticket back downtown. He’d gone out to the south end in the hopes of getting a job he’d heard about. He hadn’t planned on not getting the job and only got one-way transit fare from the job office at the shelter.

When he got to his destination, the job was already filled and he had no way back downtown. He was stuck.

It would have been easier for me to hold someone up at knife-point and demand their money instead of panhandling for it, he told the class. But I don’t want to go back to jail so I begged.

I had never thought of panhandling as a stay out of jail card but for this 32-year-old man, life had always been about taking what he wanted by force. He’d learned the ropes in foster care and then juvenile detention and then, ‘the big house’ once he’d turned 18. The two years he had just spent not in jail represented the longest single stretch of time he hadn’t been incarcerated since he was 12 and started his relationship with the criminal justice system.

 

To this man, panhandling was the lesser of two evils. Going back to jail or panhandling to get back to the shelter for the night.

Panhandling stripped him of dignity, he told the class. People either didn’t look at him and pretended he was invisible, or those who did look at him saw him as ‘less than’. Some even called him names, mocked him where he stood, holding his ‘worthlessness’ in empty outstretched hands for all the world to see.

So often we look at panhandling through our eyes of judgement, or getting to choose, ‘is it right to give money or not?’. Seldom do we see it from the perspective of the asker. What does the act of panhandling do to the human being standing with outstretched hands hoping for a handout?

Desperation lead that man to panhandle. Not laziness. Not a need to feed his addiction or a desire to live off the system.

He’d never known true freedom. Never known what it was like to come home from school to sit around the kitchen table doing homework, laughing with his siblings and having a loving parent patiently guide him through the intricacies of life and living cooperatively within the world. He’d never been taught it wasn’t right to steal. He’d only been taught it was the only way to get what he wanted/needed. He’d never been shown how to be ‘a man’. He’d only been shown how life is a battlefield, it’s do or die, take or perish.

And there he was at 32 learning how to live outside the justice system, learning how to get by in a world that was foreign to him. People expected him to ‘know’. But he didn’t. He’d never been taught the ropes of life and never been shown how to navigate it in peace.

Last I heard from him, he had moved on from the shelter. He was living life beyond ‘the big house’. He had his own place. A good job. Friends to share the good times, and to lean on in the bad.

“If you’d told me this would be me,” he wrote in an email he’d sent me to let me know how he was doing, “I’d have told you that you were the one on crack.”

To read more on the subject of panhandling, the Homeless Hub recently shared this article:  How should I handle being asked for spare change?

Stampede has come and gone. yahoo.

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For another 365 days, the Calgary Stampede has ridden off into the sunset. It will return. Make no mistake. It is an institution, a part of our Calgary culture that rides in every year on the first Friday of July to spend 10 days reminding everyone, residents and visitors alike, of our wild west roots planted deep into the prairie soil and our cowboy heritage ridin’ free on the range.

And as we don our blue jeans and cowboy hats, with Stampede comes the contradictions and the disparities woven into our social fabric. A man leans against a lamppost too drunk to walk another step. Another vomits on the sidewalk oblivious to the mess he’s making for someone else to clean up. A hundred dollars lets you jump the line-up at Cowboys’ giant beer tent on the Stampede Park if you don’t want to wait the 3 hours to pay the $30 entrance fee the hordes are waiting to pay to gain entrance. Amidst the midway rides and flashing lights, a fight breaks out on Stampede Park and three men are taken to hospital with stab wounds, one of them in serious condition. A car rolls over on a city roadway, alcohol plays a role. A threesome have sex on the street near a favourite downtown Stampede watering hole, and the city is polarized in its response.

And I walk down the street towards my office one morning, stepping over empty beer cans left by late night partiers, listening to the sounds of a live band entertaining the folks who’ve come out to enjoy free pancakes and bacon at the annual Stampede Breakfast kitty-corner to my office building. They are ubiquitous, these Stampede Breakfasts. They appear on every street corner and parking lot throughout the city over the course of the 10 days of Stampede. They speak of community, of people gathering together to share a meal and conversation and good spirits in the morning.

I am enjoying the music as I cross the street towards my office building. My thoughts are on the community-spirit of Stampede when I spy a man lying on the sidewalk. He is oblivious to the noise and frivolity. He is lying silently on his side, eyes closed as I approach.

I kneel down and ask him if I can help.

“Do you want me to call the DOAP team?” I ask. DOAP stands for Downtown Outreach Addictions Program. It is operated by Alpha House and provides mobile assistance to help vulnerable persons in our community get to a safe place.

The man lying on the sidewalk nods his head yes.

While I wait for the team to arrive I try to engage the man in conversation. I want to keep him awake. “What is your name?” I ask.

“Michael” he mumbles. “I want to go to Alpha House,” he adds.

“The DOAP team is on their way,” I tell him.

He looks up at me. His eyes are dark, red-lined. He licks his lips.

“Let me die,” he says.

My heart stops for a moment. I feel his pain. His sorrow. His despair.

“I can’t,” I tell him.

“Let me die,” he repeats.

And I am saddened.

His roots are buried deep into the prairie soils. His roots are native to the wide open plains that surround our city. They run deeper than the cowboy trails that brought white settlers westward long ago paving over centuries of First Nations roaming proud and strong and free on these lands.

No more.

He lies on the hard, cold concrete that covers the lands where once his forbears rode free and pleads with a stranger to let him die.

And on the other corner, country and western music blares, bacon sizzles on the grill and sweet maple syrup runs freely onto pancakes as Stampede revellers enjoy breakfast in the sun.

“This land is my land, this land is your land.”

And no where in these lands is there a place for Michael to find a road back to his roots. Buried beneath generations of cultural genocide precipitated by white man’s journey across these lands we call home, he has lost himself to a past he cannot remember and does not dare to see.

Yahoo! Stampede has come to town reminding us of our heritage. For 10 days, cowboys and cowgirls roam the streets partaking of the wild west parties and celebrations of our past. Forgotten are the buffalo ranging free and warriors riding proud and strong who fell beneath the weight of our desire to own the lands they once roamed free.

There was a man lying on the street. He reminded me that not all our history is built on the proud conquest of the wild west. It is also built on the conquering of the people who once claimed this land as their land.