This past Sunday, when I arrived at Modified to prepare for Sunday Morning Frog Sitting, there was a homeless person wrapped tightly in blankets asleep on the stoop in front of the building. I was on my own to get the place ready that morning as Dogo Sensei was up in Prescott to celebrate Joko Beck's Birthday so I quietly went in to clean, and when I came out 20 minutes later to offer her some water and the use of a clean bathroom, she was gone.
The rest of this post is for her.
Originally posted on Oct 23rd, 2007:
I got off the streets of Detroit last Sunday afternoon, flew back to Phoenix Monday morning, and have been spending the last few days trying to wrap my brain around what I did. In a word, the Detroit Street Retreat was “intense,” in a good way.
I started writing about the experience last Tuesday morning. Originally, I was going to wait until I had a piece of writing completely together before I posted, but after working on it for five hours Saturday morning I realized that my piece about this experience is going to take time to unfold and I waned to post something shorter than seven pages on my blog.
The place last weekend’s Detroit Street Retreat holds in my soul is immense. The stories I could tell feel like fragments, lots of little pieces that could never really convey an understanding of the whole. In my head is a cardboard box of snapshots, which represent stories from the streets. These snapshots have become symbols of the depth of my experience.
I want to take out my shoebox and show you my pictures even though I feel like my stories are a bit like trying to capture the splendor of the Grand Canyon with a disposable camera. Rather than give a linear timeline of what happened, I will pull pictures out of the box as they come to me.
Admittedly, when my father dropped me off Thursday afternoon in front of the Still Point Zen Center, a red brick duplex on Trumbull Street, I was a little freaked out, like when you are in the front car of a really high, fast roller coaster at the top of the first hill looking down and there is that split second pause before the car drops you. I was the first to show up. So I sat on the front steps looking out at the city. There I was by myself in Detroit full of apprehension knowing damn well the car was about to drop.
I walked on to those streets open, not knowing what I would find. With a small army of thirteen other souls, together we lived on the streets of Detroit for four days bearing witness to the lives of people who generally are invisible in everyday life.
In coming back I have been asked several times why I think people are homeless. I don’t know. The notion of simply getting a job just doesn’t begin to touch the needs for those that I met. One of the things I can say about the homeless in Detroit is this. Most were men and most of the older men are Vietnam vets whose wounds from that war still bleed. I had no idea. Many of the younger street soldiers I met were vets from a very different war, the war on drugs. I always thought of that phrase as a metaphor. Not in Detroit.
But my stories are not war stories. It was quite evident all around me that Detroit is a hard, harsh city filled with much suffering. But the people of Detroit, both those on the streets and those who served us, are filled with love and compassion.
Some Street Life Snapshots:
- Getting fed fried chicken and french-fries for dinner on Woodward Avenue by Muslims outside their Mosque.
- Being constantly asked by all sorts of people, “What are you doing?”
- Being given the opportunity to tell people what we were doing.
- Sitting and talking with folks in the soup kitchens over meals.
- A salad at lunch made from vegetables from the church’s garden behind the parking lot.
- A big pot of various Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pastas mixed together and a side of beans for dinner.
- Flowers in bloom in empty lots.
- Sitting zazen outside in the long wet grass after dark.
- Checking out graffiti art with Mike and Shawn.
- Paco, standing over us as we sat in Cass Park, asking for us to pray for him.
- Listening to Don and other people from the streets tell their stories.
- Bumming cigarettes for Don from White women at the Eastside Market.
- Collecting cans for change.
- Being fed and taken in by the Pilgrim Church for the night.
- Being given a second blanket in order to keep warm at night.
- Cheap 24 hour Coney Island Restaurant coffee.
- Receiving a bag lunch from a hesitant young volunteer at a soup kitchen and remembering when I did the same thing “helping the homeless” as a teen.
- The tone of the bell that Sensei Grover Genro Gauntt used to start the sitting periods.
- Sitting in Heart Plaza by the Detroit River.
- A man handing us a sketch he had done of us as we sat.
- Rudie, (My man from Amsterdam) and the hole he walked in to the bottom of his shoe.
- Being pushed out of the way by a stranger on the street just before a pigeon would have shat on my head.
- Eating and sharing a fresh Mango that I had begged for and received from a vender.
- A homeless man named Eddie offering to share his mouthwash with me when I joked that after four days of not brushing my teeth I felt like a monkey lived in my mouth. (I did accept.)
- Carrying around the city pink, white and burgundy gladiolus that I had been given.
- Offering the flowers to a homeless woman after breakfast in a soup kitchen on Sunday morning. She took one stalk of burgundy and told me she was going to put them on her father’s grave that afternoon. When I offered her the rest she said, “No baby, I want you to keep the rest and give them out and make other people happy today.”
- Hugging my mom when I got home, giving her what was left of the flowers, and seeing that for lunch she had made me all my favorite foods.
This experience has left me open to the fact that the world may be a place of great suffering, but in the face of that suffering there are many who respond with love and compassion. In a snapshot, this is how I would describe myself after this whole experience, “a heart full of love and compassion.”
