Reincarnation

Down the road not taken there exists a weekly HBO ensemble drama called Anarchy! It’s set in some Midwestern city—Minneapolis perhaps, or maybe St. Louis. It’s about an odd household of people living together in an old house in a respectable middle-class neighborhood: a divorced woman in her 50s, a couple of punk kids, a mother and her young son, a musician/inventor, a bike fanatic. They spend their days doing things that any family does—talking, laughing, arguing, eating dinner, hanging the laundry out to dry—but they are not a family in the conventional nuclear sense. They are a collective house of avowed anarchists.

Every episode begins at the weekly meeting where the house members gather in the living room to discuss what’s going on in their lives and to make decisions about what happens next in the house. Over the course of the season viewers watch the anarchists scavenge local grocery store dumpsters for food; follow one of the members as she is arrested and tried for anti-war activities; observe a punk band unravel and finally disband; enjoy the appearance of various odd visitors—played by guest stars like Kelly Osbourne and Jake Busey–who hitchhike or hop freight trains into town. The show is a mix of comedy (the ongoing struggle between the rats and the animal rights activist) and drama (episodes deal with real-life issues such as childhood abuse and racism). The show has never been a blockbuster, but it has gained a devoted following that gives it almost cult status.

It could have been.

Two years ago I published an article about our collective house in The New York Times. In the days after the article came out we had all kinds of calls and emails from old friends, from literary agents, from random strangers and—most thrillingly—from a couple of TV producers who pressed us hard to let them option the story for a Six Feet Under-style HBO drama they called Anarchy! They promised us that it would no longer be our house by the time it made it to the screen—they would change the details of where we lived, would merge characters, would invent situations, but they would assign a couple of writers to live with us for awhile so they could get the overall flavor right. It never got that far: we only had to discuss it once at house meeting to discover that several of the housemates, most especially Stef, were so opposed to the idea that they could not imagine budging. That’s the way consensus works—unless everyone can agree to a course of action the decision is blocked. In this case, no one was deeply enough in favor of the TV show to argue the other side. After a brief discussion I was deputized to email the producers back and tell them “no”.

It’s too bad in a way. In the last couple of weeks I’ve found myself thinking that if this were Anarchy! our ratings would be going through the roof right now.

Here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on:

To start with, Jodi’s pregnant—she and Mark are expecting a baby in November. After living as housemates for three years, and then collaborating in the band Invisible, they developed deeper feelings and began a quiet relationship. Lucky baby! They set out to have a child together, but they didn’t expect it to happen quite as fast as it did….

…especially with the finances of the house in flux. Four years ago when my former husband and I divorced and I bought out his half of the house two women put some money into the pot. At that time we were talking about selling the house and moving in a fairly short period of time, but plans changed and time passed and the money sat trapped in the equity. Understandably, the investors would like their money back, but it’s been difficult to figure out how to untangle the finances without taking on so much more debt—without myself taking on more debt, since I’m still legally the owner of the house–that rents rise beyond viable collective house rates. All of which….

…provided a moment of clarity for me. I’ve been feeling restless for a couple of months now without having any idea where the restlessness began or what its end point would be. Out of the fog of uncertainty that permeated the house I came to recognize that I am ready to step out of the small community of our house and into a larger community of Food Not Bombs, the HIVE, and my own solitary company. Mark and Jodi are having a baby, Will is leaving in August to go back to college to study music, and I’m going to find a place of my own. Before the summer is over 406 North Mendenhall Street will be on the market. This six-year experiment is coming to an end.

It was an emotional meeting the Monday morning that we sat in the living room and acknowledged that one by one we had crossed off all the other options and had reduced the list to one. That one. There were some tears, some long silences, a lot of looking at the floor.

And at that moment—here’s where I would have liked to have had the team of writers from Anarchy! taking notes on their legal pads, though I’m not sure they could have improved on the reality—Clement came in. He had dropped by to use the computer, but he stayed to tell us what was on his mind. He spends a good part of each day walking around writing poetry in his head and thinking; what he had been thinking about that day was reincarnation.

“It’s Jesus,” he said, taking long strides into the room. Clement makes big gestures when he’s excited—that morning he occupied an even wide column of air than usual. “Why did he come back if he didn’t want us to know about reincarnation? I mean come on, if death is the end of everything then of course you’re afraid. Your enemies can control you, death can control you, fear can control you. But if there’s reincarnation fear can’t control you because you know—you know—that there’s another life, and if there’s another life there’s no death. No death!”

No one said much. “Sorry,” Clement said, winding down at last “were y’all having a meeting?”

“Sort of,” Mark said.

“Sorry,” Clement said again. “Oops, I’ll come back tomorrow. Mind if I take a couple of bananas before I go?”

“Help yourself,” I said.

The back door closed. More silence, but it was a different silence.

“You know…” someone finally said.

“What if…” someone else said.

And that’s when the idea began to take shape. This time not just a collective house, but a kind of collective urban farmstead, a demonstration project of sustainability, a public/private place where people could learn and teach all the practices of sustainability from rainwater catchment and permaculture to consensus decision-making and conflict resolution. Set it up as a true non-profit from the beginning, maybe work towards creating an urban land trust, do things with kids, learn from the community. We could find land in a neighborhood—Glenwood, not too far from the HIVE, would be ideal. Fruit trees, gardens, chickens, communal kitchen, artificial wetlands. Something like the Rhizome Collective in Austin, or The Food Project in Boston.

So that’s where we are right now: all over the map. Scared, hopeful, exhausted, exhilarated, full of plans and a sense of urgency, but under it all feeling as though a lock that we didn’t know was there, on a door we never noticed before, is opening up and swinging wide.

It could happen.

How to turn a bagel into a tomato

It started, fittingly enough, with a walk for hunger—one of those community walk-a-thons that raises money for local food banks and overseas charities. It was a nice autumn day, clear and bright, the red and green leaves of the dogwood tree glowing like stained glass and the sloping bank out front foaming with autumn clematis. Skye and I sat on the steps and waved to the hundreds of people in their matching t-shirts as they walked past the house, laughing and talking and waving back to us.

Someone must have arranged for bagels to feed the walkers as they assembled for the opening speeches in the ballpark. In any case when it was all done there were a lot of bagels—a lot of bagels—left over, and somehow the bagels ended up in our kitchen as a donation to Food Not Bombs.

Bagels. I don’t know if modern childhoods are still haunted by “The Dog of Pompeii”, but my 1950s childhood certainly was. It’s the story of a blind orphan boy living with his dog Bimbo on the streets of Pompeii. On the day Vesuvius erupts the two are separated; in the terror and confusion of the moment the boy is swept into a boat, but the dog runs back to the market to get his young master a raisin bun, is trapped in the falling ash, and loyal to the end and struggling to return, dies. Centuries later archeologists make a plaster cast of the dog, preserved forever with a plaster bun in its mouth. For a nine- or ten-year-old reader it’s a first powerful introduction to heartbreak.

The boy and the dog and the plaster bun come back to me every time I see a big of bagels. Bagels inevitably and rapidly go from less-than-fresh to stale to hard as plaster; when they’ve gotten to the plaster stage there’s nothing to be done with them but throw them away. That’s exactly what we thought we were going to have to do with the walk-a-thon bagels, until Mark came up with a different idea.

“Look, we’ve been talking about taking the half the driveway and turning it into a garden anyway,” he said. The two-car driveway was concrete on one side but just gravel and dirt on the other; the gravel side sat next to a garden that supported nothing much more than some elderly rose bushes and a few dispirited tomato plants. “Why couldn’t we put down a layer of bagels and build up the soil from there?”

Carrot, who was living in the house at the time, made some phone calls. Yes, her gardening friends said, bagels should make fine mulch. I was surprised to hear that—in my limited composting research I had read that baked goods shouldn’t go into the compost pile. “That’s just because they can attract rats and mice,” Carrot said. “But if you make bread soggy and mix it with other things it’s not a problem.” Bread, it turns out, is actually good for the soil—it’s high in nitrogen (so are some other unexpectedly compostable things like tea bags, coffee grounds, egg shells, human hair, and vacuum cleaner dust). Nitrogen is one of the three essential “macronutrients” that make up commercial fertilizers (the other two are potassium and phosphorus). Plants need nitrogen to make amino acids, protein and DNA; they can’t grow without it. Cool.

The first step was to clear the gravel out of the driveway and pick-axe out the half-dead rose bushes. The next step was to put down cardboard—cardboard not only discourages weeds, but as it breaks down it actually attracts earthworms who like its biodegradable glues and sugar. Lapped over each other, the variously sized pieces of corrugated cardboard  looked like a giant abstract painting.

The bagel-mulching day was rainy. Every trash can and plastic bucket in the yard brimmed with bagels and water that dripped down from the gutters; the bagels looked like giant Cheerios sogging in a bowl. When they had begun to soften and fall apart Mark, Carrot and Naman sloshed them out onto the cardboard and spread them around. Next came a layer of green stuff—weeds and leaves pulled up from around the property—followed by a layer of composted soil, forked up from the old compost pile behind the garage. We had all but abandoned the compost pile a couple of years before because of a sudden invasion of rats—but that’s another story. The pile’s remnants supplied us with good rich dirt.

After that came a second layer of cardboard. A friend had told us about a landscaping company that had moved, leaving behind giant piles of wood mulch. Mark filled his truck up several times with the well-composted mulch and spread it over the garden, which now rose a good foot above the original layer of bagels and cardboard. The final layer was leaves, salvaged from the bags our neighbors had left out by the curb for pick up.

All winter we continued to add leaves; every time the compost bucket in the kitchen filled up we took the scraps out, scatter them in the garden and cover them with more leaves.

And it worked. The tomatoes we planted the next summer could not have been more different from the droopy, anemic plants of my previous gardening experience. Suddenly the garden was filled with big muscular plants that looked like forerunners of a new backyard Paleozoic age. On late summer afternoons we would stand around in the garden eating beans and tomatoes straight off the vine.

We never went back to traditional composting. I don’t think we ever will. The fall after the bagel mulching experiment Mark put in two more garden beds in the back yard, piled and repiled with leaves. “Sometimes I’ll turn over a piece of soil writhing with so many worms it takes my breath away,” Mark says.

We’ve extended the technique to include the far back yard; the buckets of scraps I bring home from Food Not Bombs go under the leaves and disappear within days into the dark rich soil. Last fall I began on the front yard: cardboard and newspapers, scraps, leaves, more scraps, more leaves. I’m not even sure what’s going to get planted there. I just like mulching.

Mark says it’s the same for him. He and I sat at the kitchen table the other morning reminiscing about the bagel day and talking mulch in general. “It’s fairly magic,” he said “The way we roll here I can put ten or fifteen gallons of food scraps in the garden every week. I spread it, put a foot of leaves over it, and two weeks later that foot thick is six inches thick, and except for some orange peels and a sweet potato or two it’s gone.”

Now that the nice spring weather is bringing people out in their yards to rake and trim, Mark pulls into the driveway a couple of times a week with the bed of his little red pickup truck filled with more bags of leaves. “I can’t stop,” he said. “I see these bags of leaves and I have to pick them up. You know, it feels sometimes as though our whole world is stuck in this import/export economy: people’s trees and plants are fixing a huge amount of sunlight, but as soon as the leaves fall they’re treated at trash, then people export the leaves and import fertilizers and topsoil. It’s the same with lawns: you’re farming a crop, but you throw the harvest away—or it goes to my house.”

Who knows if we’ll ever have to depend more heavily on our yard for food; who knows where the world is headed. But whether we do or not, there’s a primitive satisfaction in knowing that little by little, bagel by bagel, we are making deposits in an account that will pay dividends for a very long time.

.

Winter Soldier

A couple of years ago I was interviewed on the radio about our house, and about the changes I had made in my life. A week or so after the program aired I had an email from someone who wondered if he could come for a visit—he was stationed at Fort Bragg but was about to get out of the army and was wondering what shape his life would take next. He was curious about collective living.

His name was Ian. He was quiet and polite, interested in the details of how the house worked, contented to sit in the living room reading zines or talking to whoever came through. Mostly he wanted to talk. He wanted to talk about Iraq, about the army, about the guys he’d known, about the way he’d watched them change, and watched himself change too. As he sat in the living room in the clear December sunlight looking out at the branches of the bare dogwood tree, his hands clasped together between his knees, it felt as though there were something else he wanted to talk about, something that can only be approached slantwise: what does it mean to be human when your humanity can be bent into a shape that you no longer recognize?

“I don’t know why I joined,” he said. “It seemed like the right thing at the time. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t believe in the war, but I had some idea that it would be better to have some good people on the inside.” It didn’t turn out that way for Ian. He described being in basic training and hearing stories from the people coming back from Iraq. “I couldn’t believe they were saying the things they were saying. One guy talked about riding around in a jeep breaking bottles over the heads of Iraqis just for the fun of it, and I wondered what kind of a person could do that and laugh about it. But then you get over there….then you get over there and you begin to change. You’re angry all the time. It’s different from what you expected. You change, and the things you never thought you would do is who you start to become.”

I asked Ian if he had heard of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. I had met some of its members in 2005 when I was doing media stuff for an anti-war event near Fort Bragg. The IVAW was still very new, its members not much older than Isabell and Margaret and Justin. It struck me then that when the Vietnam War was going on I didn’t think about how very young the men were who were being drafted and sent to war. I was that age myself. This time I couldn’t stop thinking about how tender and unformed we are in our late teens and early twenties, how the imprint of every experience bites deep. I could see its bite in the faces of the members of Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War who had come to take part in the event and, I think, maybe find some personal peace as well. I thought about the many veterans who show up at Food Not Bombs, the men who joined up or were drafted right after high school and have never left the war behind.

Ian had already heard about the IVAW, had thought about getting in touch. “The thing is,” he said. “I was in Iraq, but I was never in combat. I never fired my gun in combat. Those guys…I don’t know. I don’t feel like I would really belong there. It’s hard to explain.”

It was hard to explain. It was hard to hear. It was hard to understand. Ian, weeks away from discharge, getting ready to go back to Boston, trying to figure out what he was going to do next, didn’t belong anywhere. He was no longer part of the world he left when he went to Iraq, he was no longer part of the world he inhabited while he was in Iraq. He didn’t belong at our house. He didn’t belong in his own skin. He was a collection of molecules blown apart and trying to find a new shape.

It’s easy to forget about the war. The life at our house—the chickens, the house meetings, the dinners together in the living room, the music flowing out of Will’s room, Skye coming in from the school bus, the bicycles hanging in the shed—is a life very far removed from war. But this week I’m traveling; Margaret’s boyfriend is in the hospital in Austin, and on Monday I got on a plane to spend the week with her. As I waited to board my plane in Raleigh I watched soldiers in desert fatigues walk by in groups of three and four, chattering and laughing and hitching their big bags up higher on their shoulders. When I boarded my connecting plane in Atlanta I was seated next to a young woman flying, like me, to Austin. She was curled up with her iPod when I sat down, but we began to talk when the snacks came. I told her this would be my first time in Austin and explained why I was going there. She was on her way back to Austin after visiting her mother in New Jersey.

“I miss my mom already,” she said, resettling herself in the cramped seat. She was wearing lace-edged leggings, a tiny denim skirt, and little silvery flats. ”I’m kind of a mama’s girl.”

“Do you go to school?” I asked.

“No,” she said. ”Well, I sort of do I guess. I’m in the army.”

I never would have guessed. I asked her how she had come to sign up, and she told me that she had been trouble when she was in high school, making bad decisions and running with a bad crowd. Her mother finally told her she had to straighten up or move out. “So I was, like seventeen, and I didn’t want to be a bum, so it seemed like my best choice was to join the service.” She had only been in for five months, but she’d started school—she wants to be a criminal psychologist—and was learning how to jump out of airplanes. Her first deployment was going to be in Italy to join an airborne brigade. “I’m glad it’s not Iraq,” she said. “That’s all anybody talks about, is whether they’re going to be sent to Iraq.”

“What do people who’ve been there say about it?” I asked.

“It’s not so much what they say, it’s just that they’re different. It’s like Iraq messed with their mind somehow. They’ve seen things and they’ve done things you shouldn’t have to see and do. Who wouldn’t be different?” She chewed on the corner of her thumb and fiddled with the window shade. “It’s like, I was driving with an old friend who had just come back and some woman cut us off. He turned to me and said ‘See, if we were in Iraq right now I’d shoot her,’ and I’m thinking ‘What happened to you? This is not OK.’ A lot of people still want to go, though. I wanted to go when I first signed up, it’s like you haven’t really experienced anything unless you’ve been there, but now….I know people over there who are, like ‘Shoot me in the shoulder, shoot me in the foot, anything to get me out of here.’ I’m signed up for five years,” she added. “I suppose I’ll get deployed there sooner or later.”

“Maybe it’ll be over before that happens,” I said.

She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“What do people feel about us being over there at all?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re glad we’re there,” she said quickly. “I mean we’ve got to stay. If we pulled out now it would be like there was no point in us being there in the first place.”

The flight attendant came by and took our cups and crumpled peanut packets. We put up our seat trays. My seatmate drew up her knees and pulled her iPod back out of her pocket; I opened my book.

I had an email from Ian last week. He did connect with Iraq Veterans Against the War and has become active with the Boston chapter He was sending out an announcement about Winter Soldier—veterans testifying this week about what they’ve seen and done in Iraq and Afghanistan. The name comes from the 1776 quote from Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” The inspiration comes from the first Winter Soldier Investigation, held in 1971; Vietnam veterans brought testimony and evidence that war crimes like the My Lai massacre were not isolated incidents. I wrote back to Ian and told him that I would be putting a link up here; I asked him if it would be all right to write about him. He wrote back almost immediately.

Thanks for putting the link up there!! Feel free to write about the visit and if you have anymore questions send them my way. Thanks for helping me have a safe place in your home, it meant a lot to me.

Salaam,
Ian

To watch the live Winter Soldier broadcast, Thursday, March 13 through Sunday, March 16, go to www.ivaw.org

This is not easy watching

The Blues

Remember that scene in Annie Hall where the young Alvy Singer is sitting in a doctor’s office with his mother? The doctor asks him why he’s depressed, why he won’t do his homework and he says “The universe is expanding.”

That’s the way I’ve been feeling lately. Maybe it’s just February—which is itself expanding this year–or maybe it’s the several hours I spent on the living room sofa last Saturday evening watching The Corporation, or maybe it’s the headlines that land on our front steps every morning (yesterday morning it was health care costs headed into the trillions, gas going up to $3.40 a gallon, and what’s being called a “Doomsday” seed vault in Norway), or maybe it’s just that everything seems to be falling apart a lot faster than anyone expected or can respond to.

Usually I feel pretty hopeful about the world. Maybe not about the way the world is going right now, but about the resilience of the human spirit, about our innate capacity to make pleasure and happiness out of whatever materials we find at hand. But this week…I don’t know, I keep thinking about Chang and Eng, the conjoined twins exhibited by P.T. Barnum back in the 1830s. After they retired they moved to North Carolina, married a pair of sisters, bought farms and raised families. But Chang was a heavy drinker; in January of 1874 he contracted pneumonia and on the night of January 17 he died. His brother Eng, healthy up until then, died two and a half hours later. On days like this I feel like Eng, sharing vital organs and a circulatory system with a profligate twin whose habits are going to bring us both down in the end.

So let’s just go with it. Be forewarned: this is the jeremiad edition of my blog, a round up of some of the things that are making me feel bleak and hopeless and scared this week. Enjoy.

Here in the Southeastern U.S. we’re in the middle of a drought; by late last summer the lawns were parched, the fountains in the park downtown were silent, and the farmers at the farmer’s market were closing their tables early because they didn’t have enough to sell. The middle part of the drought map—the part where I live—is marked in dark red indicating “exceptional and widespread crop/pasture losses; shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells creating water emergencies.”

“We didn’t expect climate change, we didn’t pay attention,” Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said in October as that city looked at two to four months of water left in its reservoirs. On the other side of the country Lake Mead is drying up—mighty Lake Mead, whose waters are essential to Phoenix, Las Vegas and Southern California. “We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us,” said Tim Barnett, one of the scientists studying the lake’s future. “Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest.” On the other side of the world the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting because of climate change; the UN predicts that by 2030—2030!–they’ll be mostly gone. The glaciers act as a giant reservoir for the Ganges, the Yangtze, the Mekong and many of the other great rivers of India and Southeast Asia. When the glaciers go so does the water that sustains the two billion people who live along those rivers.

It’s everywhere. The U.N. estimates that by 2025 fresh drinking water will be a scarcity for two-thirds of the world’s population. Is there anything in our recent history to suggest that the remaining one third of the world—a lot of which is us–will gladly share? My guess is that not only will we not share, but that we’ll see the scarcity as another opportunity to leverage our own power. In 2000 the people of Bolivia rose up when the government sold water rights in the city of Cochabamba to a subsidiary of Bechtel and water prices increased by 35 percent. After massive protests during which several people were killed, the contract was canceled and the water operation became public again, but the problem isn’t solved: people in the poor sections of Cochabamba still pay ten times as much for their water as households in wealthy neighborhoods.

People are killing each other in Ethiopia over access to water and pastureland; in Kenya Kikuyu and Maasai are fighting over a river diversion project, and throughout northern Africa the desert is creeping southward. The bloodletting in the Darfur region of Sudan was set off by drought and water scarcity caused by climate change. Closer to home Tennessee and Georgia are squaring off over water, and feelings are running high in the upper Midwest as other parts of the country begin drought-driven legal maneuverings to get hold of the Great Lakes water.

It’s like some horrible metaphor: 72 percent of the planet is covered in water, over half of our own bodies is made up of water. Hunger is bad, but thirst is a thousand times worse. The French philosopher of gastronomy Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825: “The sensation of thirst is so intense, that in all tongues it is synonymous with excessive desire, and irrepressible longing: thus we thirst for gold, wealth, power, science, &c., expressions which never would have become common had men not have been athirst and aware of their vengeance. Appetite is pleasant when it does not reach the point of hunger. Thirst is not so, and as soon as we feel it we are uncomfortable and anxious. When there is no possibility of appeasing it, the state of mind is terrible.”

This isn’t oil we’re talking about. This isn’t the raw materials to make cell phones or Krugerrands or shampoo bottles. This is the essential ingredient of all life on this planet. When we use access to water to coerce or punish or harm other people, when we use access to water to enrich ourselves or to increase our own power without any regard to the effect of our actions, when we foul and disregard and dishonor water, we commit a crime against our own humanness. That’s where we’re headed. And we did it to ourselves.

Validation Day

A few years ago Jane came to stay for a couple of months–she built herself a loft on the side porch, piled the bed with warm quilts and moved in. It was early February, the unloveliest month around here, when the novelty of winter has long since worn off and spring has not yet begun. Outside is alternately muddy and dusty, and inside becomes the same as people track in whatever weather has pooled beyond the back porch. The sky is low and gray. Or high and cold and streaked with remote, windy clouds. Or warm enough to promise endless shirtsleeves for a day before lashing everyone back into sweaters. When the sun does shine the light is hard and charmless, showing up the dirty streaks on the windows and the worn spots on the stairs. Neither the house nor the household is at its best in February.

So I’m not sure that we were entirely gracious when the eight homemade construction paper Validation Day cards showed up on the mantel. Jane had decorated each one with a different cut-out design and written our names on the covers. The way it works, she explained, is that over the course of a couple of days we all write something about each other in the cards, but we don’t look at our own until February 14th, a.k.a. Validation Day. Fine then. We did it, taking a secret pleasure in eavesdropping on what our housemates had to say about each other. I know that I learned some things—nice things—about the crisscrossing relationships in the house.

Then came the day. We assembled a little awkwardly in the living room; someone took down the sheaf of cards and passed them out. The silence deepened in the room as we sat and read the heartfelt, affectionate, appreciative things that we seldom remember to say to each other in person. You could almost feel the skepticism and self-consciousness dissipate as we began looking up from the folded cards and thanking each other; I felt a tenderness for my housemates a little different from anything that I had felt before. I don’t know what other people did with theirs, but I saved my Validation Day card. And I saved the next one. And the one after that. The autumn after she stayed with us Jane went off to college, but every year a big manila envelope still arrived in the mail basket with a fresh set of Validation Day cards.

Everything has been a little out of sorts around the house the last couple of weeks. Stef and Crystal are moving out—Crystal, who is now teaching music at two different schools, wants the quiet and privacy of her own apartment, and Stef, who has been in the house since its inception as a collective more than five years ago, is moving in with two friends who share her interests in vegan cooking and straight-edge hardcore punk. It’s going to feel strange to have them gone. Skye will be taking over Crystal’s small room; she and Jodi will have their own rooms at last. In addition we’ll be getting new housemates, which is always exciting but also a little unsettling. And everyone is working hard on projects of their own, in and out a lot, passing in the kitchen or on the stairs, but not connecting for very long. It’s just February and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Jane came to visit for a week in late January before she went overseas for seven months, first to study in South Africa and then to travel and work in Europe. I’ve known Jane now for over five years; we met when I was very new at collective living, and Jane, recently graduated from high school, had just returned from stilt-walking and breathing fire as part of a CrimethInc Circus Tour. It was good, as always, to see Jane again last month, to observe how she continues to grow in depth as well as reach. A lot of people wanted to spend time with Jane; we all got a little piece of her, and then she was off.

Given that she was preparing to go all the way to Africa and be gone for more than half a year I was very surprised when a manila envelope, addressed in Jane’s handwriting, once again arrived in our mail basket. But maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of all the qualities that delighted and moved me the most as I traveled deeper into the anarchist world—the quality that in some ways required the most adjustment on my part–was the willingness to be unironically, unashamedly and openly loving. Loving to other people, loving to the world, loving to the mystery of being alive in a way that is alternately ridiculed and commercialized in the larger culture. I read once in a history of punk music: “What it comes down to is this—life matters, so don’t fuck it up.” That’s it: life matters. Your life matters, the lives of the people around you matters, the lives of the people you pass on the street, the lives of the people sleeping or playing solitaire or shaving their legs or kissing their children in the houses you pass on the highway matter. Life itself matters; and once your mental eyes adjust to that premise it’s hard not to see validation for it everywhere.

At least that’s the way I’ve come to see it, thanks to Jane and to all the other passionate, urgent, hopeful, resolute people I live among. So happy Validation Day everyone and everywhere, and many many happy returns.

Straying Home

I make my living writing snappy blurbs and photo captions for glossy magazines, so how hard can it be to come up with a book title?

How about The Visible Woman? That’s the title of a zine I wrote years ago and I still like it. I proposed the title to an agent I was working with at the time, one of several who got in touch with me after I published an article about our house a couple of years ago. She thought what I had written had the potential to be expanded a successful memoir published by a mainstream publisher. “You know,” she said “the biggest book-buying demographic is middle-aged women.” But no, she said, not The Visible Woman.

I pulled together the various things I’d written over the years, things I’d written mostly to try to make sense to myself of the choices and changes I’d made. The agent looked at them and suggested Standards of Living, but that didn’t feel quite right. How about Qualities of Life? I thought. Actually, no. Um, let’s see… Border Crossings. A Change of Address. Jumping the Fence. No. No. No.

The New York Times had titled my article Inviting Anarchy Into My Home. How about that? No, nobody liked that one. Then I remembered something I had read once in a history of punk rock: “Life matters, so don’t fuck it up.” How about that: Life Matters. I walked around for a couple of days sure that I’d found it. No one else could see it.

This went on for well over a year.

One late afternoon last November I asked Mark if he would help me decide among The Visible Woman, Standards of Living and Life Matters. Or maybe The Visible Woman: A Memoir of Life Matters. Or Standards: On Living. I had just come back from a week at a writer’s retreat where I had done yet another revision of the book proposal I’d been working on for a year and a half. I was ready to send the latest version off to New York, but I still needed a title.

“Just those ones?” Mark said.

“It’s the best I can come up with,” I said. I felt a little defensive. “It’s not that easy you know.”

Mark stopped whatever it was he was doing and stood up. “Look,” he said kindly. “You’re going about it all wrong. You have to have a lot of bad ideas before you can have a good one.” He went into his room and came out with a big roll of adding machine paper. He taped one end of the roll to the coffee table and put a pen down beside it. “Let’s say we won’t leave here until we’ve come up with a hundred titles. Bad ones. No, let’s say a hundred and one.” At the top of the paper he wrote 100 TITLES FOR LIZ’S BOOK.

GO!

1. Mark picked up the pen and wrote FREE FURNITURE!
2. I wrote A Dangerous Question
3. It Started With A Question
4. Renovation
5. Home Renovation
6. Home Repair

Crystal and Jodi came in. “What are you guys doing?”

“Coming up with a title for Liz’s book.”

They sat down on the sofa.

7. Less is More, Jodi said.

8. More for Less, Crystal said.

9. The Same Light, Mark wrote.

10. “I’ve always kind of liked Traveler’s Rest,” I said. Mark wrote: Traveler’s Rest.

It went on like that…Grounds for Divorce…New Eyes…In Case of Police Raid…Coming to My Senses….

27. “How about just Home?” I said, and wrote it down.

“But that doesn’t tell anyone what it’s about,” Jodi said.

Mark made a noise that sounded like “Bzzzt.” “No editing,” he said. “Just bad ideas.”

The bad ideas flew.

58. Riot Mom

59. Freedame

60. Notes on the Sink

61. Graffiti and Kitchen Notes

62. Resisting Arrest

63. Resisting A Rest

“How far are we?” Mark asked.

“Only sixty-three,” I said. “Steve across the street suggested Off The Rails And On The Run,” I added.

“Write it down!” Mark said.

Momentum returned. 66: Diet For A New Home. 67: Chicken. 68: Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road? 69: The Other Side

“I’ve got to go,” Crystal said.

88. Picking Sides

89. “Or maybe Choosing Sides,” I said.

90. Picking A Fight

“Picking My Nose,” Jodi said, and Mark grabbed the pen.

“Don’t write that down!” I said.

We hit 100 (Hunger) and kept right on going.

146. Happily Ever After

147. Ever After

148. After Ever After

149. After Disaster

…and finally we were done. Mark unstuck the paper, rolled it back up and handed it to me. I took the paper upstairs and sat down on the bed to look at it, and there between Staying Home and Biscuits and Gravy (where did that one come from?)was Straying Home. Straying Home. I liked it. I couldn’t even be sure who had said it, but it expressed better than anything I’d thought of so far the paradox I felt in having traveled so far in my own life without leaving the house.

So Straying Home it is.

But it turns out that Mark was right in more ways than one. I was going about things the wrong way–not just the title of the book, but the whole process of trying to get a book published. The wrong way, at least, for me. I sent off the proposal and didn’t hear anything. Not the first week, not the second week, not the third. Over the year and half or so that the agent and I had been working together the intervals between my submissions and her reactions had grown longer and longer, but this was unprecedented. I gave it a little more time; by early December I admitted to myself that chances were pretty good that I was never going to hear for her. It seemed as though the time had come to admit the truth. I quit. So as the year ended I had a title, a book proposal, some sample chapters, no agent, a good deal of confusion, and a surprising amount of relief.

Then a friend introduced me to the intriguing concept of print-on-demand–a new form of self-publishing that circumvents the whole agent/author/publisher nexus. Somehow that feels right for who I am and what I have to say. After all, my new life owes a lot to the DIY–do-it-yourself–ethic. Why not do this one myself?

So that’s what I’m going to do, but first I’m going to take it even one step further and serialize the book on line, on a separate blog. I recognize that in publishing the book myself I’m sacrificing the help of an editor, so please, if you have an interest in reading what I write, feel free to offer your editorial comments and suggestions. I’ll pay attention, I promise.

Here it is! Straying Home: A Memoir of Changing in Place

We Are Everywhere

Last Saturday morning I went to an Al-Anon meeting. It was one of those moist gray mornings, chilly but not cold, and it was nice to go into the Methodist church not far from my house and sit in the quiet little anteroom the congregation makes available to us for our meetings. The Saturday meeting is a step study group, which means that we discuss whichever one of the twelve steps coincides with number of the month. On the last Saturday of every month we discuss one of the traditions by which Al-Anon is guided; since this was the last Saturday in January, we were discussing the first tradition, which says Our common welfare should come first; personal progress for the greatest number depends upon unity.

The conversation traveled around the circle as it always does, each person taking a turn to speak. A silent consensus developed as people added to and amplified upon each other’s remarks. Unity is not blind obedience, we agreed; real unity lies in finding common ground, in outgrowing both the need to always get one’s own way, and the willingness to be dominated by someone else’s need to get his or her own way.

The circle was nearly complete and the hour was nearly at an end when someone said “I actually never experienced unity before I came to Al-Anon.” All around the circle people nodded in recognition. “In the world I live in most of the time ‘personal progress’ depends on crushing someone else before you get crushed—I mean everywhere, at home, at work, everywhere. Then I come here and it’s different.” The speaker stopped and looked down at the floor. “I wish the real world could be like Al-Anon.”

It’s been four years now since I went to my first Al-Anon meeting, four years since my life went totally haywire. At that first meeting I sat on a wooden chair pushed up against the wall of a Sunday school room and felt out of place and resentful. I was creeped out by the way people repeated each other’s names around the circle (“I’m Liz.” “Hi Liz!”). I looked down the long list of twelve steps and found something to quibble with in each one. I felt stiff and uncomfortable with the hugs after the meeting. I ducked out to the parking lot as soon as I could.

But somehow I kept going back. This was in the frantic, exhilarating, terrifying first couple of years of my new life when, looking back on it, I was very much further out on the edge of my own endurance than I realized. I felt sometimes as though I were racing across a series of suspension bridges, pausing only long enough to kneel beside each one and set it on fire. I am not by nature a particularly adventuresome person, but the exoskeleton of comfortable middle-class American life that had held me up for so long had cracked to pieces under a variety of pressures, and in its absence I was making everything up as I went along, obeying some deep instinct because instinct seemed to be the only solid thing I had left. In those days I laughed harder than I had ever laughed before, I danced more often and in more unexpected places than I had ever danced before, I widened the margins of my personal map to include people and places I had never known before. And some mornings the tears began before I had even opened my eyes.

I don’t think I could do it again. The changes in my external life—the collective house, the dumpster diving, the kitchen dance parties–were only the visible landscape over a tectonic shift that was rearranging the deep geology of my heart and mind. All during this time I was reading constantly. I talked and listened and argued, I sat and thought and wrote in my journal, I read some more, I listened and watched more, and slowly, awkwardly, sometimes painfully, the pieces of my shattered life began to coalesce around a new set of ideas. What it came down to was this: I came to see that the world I had lived in all my life, the respectable, order-must-be-maintained, it-may-not-be-perfect-but-it’s-better-than-the-alternative hierarchical world of rigidly defined haves and have-nots—in other words, the dominant culture world—was predicated on the assumption that people are essentially greedy and antagonistic. Every storyline led back to Darwin.

But I was beginning to see the world in a different way. What, I began to ask myself, if people are essentially whole and healthy? What if people long for cooperation more than they long for competition? What if we live best in a web of relationships as complex and mutually supportive as any other ecosystem? What if the world I have lived in all my life is not the world, but just a world, an essentially flimsy and unstable world that is kept in place by violence and fear? I was introduced to the ideas of Peter Kropotkin, a nineteenth century naturalist who countered Darwin’s theories of survival of the fittest with “survival of the most cooperative,” developed through his own observations of the natural world. Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince and an anarchist. It was Kropotkin who wrote the entry on anarchism in the famous 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica; it was Kropotkin who introduced the term “mutual aid” into the language with his book of the same name. Anarchism is probably the most reviled, misunderstood and marginalized of all the left-leaning political philosophies, and I certainly didn’t set out to live in its borderlands, but like most of the anarchists I know I didn’t so much convert to anarchism as recognize a set of beliefs that had always been there. As I moved closer to the deep well of anarchist ideas and into a culture of anarchist actions the world started to make sense again.

And unrelated to all the internal and external changes I was making at that time—or maybe not—I was finally able to acknowledge that someone I loved very deeply was ebbing out of my life into a sea of alcoholism. That’s how I ended up at Al-Anon, looking around at all the respectably dressed, earnest, middle-aged people so much like me and so unlike me, and feeling both alien and at home. Here I was, a newly-minted anarchist living with a group of people half my age, feeling a swing of emotions I should have left behind in adolescence, eating out of dumpsters, living a noisy, messy, seat-of-the pants existence, and I didn’t know what they would think of me.

What I didn’t know at those first meetings was that, first of all, no one cared one way or the other who I was or how I lived, but even more important—and more startling—in joining Al-Anon I had, in fact, joined the largest and most successful anarchist movement in the world. At first I was simply struck by the curious similarities between the way Al-Anon worked and the way the anarchist enterprises I was involved in operated. No leaders, no rules, no experts, no accumulation of wealth. Now I recognize that the similarity between Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A is the basis for all other Twelve Step programs, including Al-Anon) and the Circle A is neither metaphorical nor hyperbolic: “When we come into A.A. we find a greater personal freedom than any other society knows.”—this is Bill Wilson, co-founder of A.A., writing in a 1957 history of the movement—“We cannot be compelled to do anything. In that sense our society is a benign anarchy. The word ‘anarchy’ has a bad meaning to most of us. . . . But I think that the gentle Russian prince who so strongly advocated the idea felt that if men were granted absolute liberty, and were compelled to obey no one in person, they would voluntarily associate themselves in the common interest. A.A. is an association of the benign sort the prince envisioned.” So.

“I wish the real world could be like Al-Anon.”

It is. I see it every Monday night at my house when we sit down in the living room for our weekly house meeting. I see it at Food Not Bombs every time a group of people—some of them homeless, some of them not–take a couple of boxes of miscellaneous fruits and vegetables and turn them into a meal for thirty people. I see it lots of places. It’s not just the private precinct of anarchists, vowed or unavowed, it’s the way people behave when conditions are benign. It’s the real real world.

So why do those of us who have seen another, healthier way of doing things put up with the conditions of the unreal world? What would happen if we recognized our power, personal and collective, to reshape the community around us? What if we took the principles embodied in the Twelve Steps and in the writings of anarchist thinkers and used them not simply to heal ourselves and our families, but to heal our neighborhoods, our towns, our nations, our planet. We can! We don’t have to do it all at once, and no one of us has to do it alone, but I believe it’s the work that’s most worth doing. One day at a time—but starting now.

The Twelve Traditions of Al-Anon

1. Our common welfare should come first; personal progress for the greatest number depends upon unity.

2. For our group purpose there is but one authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants—they do not govern.

3. The relatives of alcoholics, when gathered together for mutual aid, may call themselves an Al-Anon Family group, provided that as a group, they have no other affiliation. The only requirement for membership is that there be a problem of alcoholism in a relative or friend.

4. Each group should be autonomous, except in matters affecting another group or Al-Anon or AA as a whole.

5. Each Al-Anon Family Group has but one purpose: to help families of alcoholics. We do this by practicing the Twelve Steps of AA ourselves, by encouraging and understanding our alcoholic relatives, and by welcoming and giving comfort to families of alcoholics.

6. Our Family Groups ought never endorse, finance or lend our name to any outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary spiritual aim. Although a separate entity, we should always co-operate with Alcoholics Anonymous.

7. Every group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

8. Al-Anon Twelfth Step work should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers.

9. Our groups, as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.

10. The Al-Anon Family Groups have no opinion on outside issues; hence our name ought never be drawn into public controversy.

11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, films, and TV. We need guard with special care the anonymity of all AA members.

12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to place principles above personalities.

Home

Normally I ride my bike or walk down to the Green Bean on Wednesday to sit in the wide-armed easy chair by the fish tank and write out my thoughts. Today I had some errands to do, and since I’m still feeling the last barbs of a heavy chest cold, I drove. I had the radio dial turned to the local NPR station and all the way downtown weighty authoritative voices came out of my car dashboard: Are we in a recession? Is there a way to stimulate the economy? What do the indicators mean? Who’s suffering the most?

As I drove along I passed the construction site where the old Wachovia building is being turned into spectacular-views-of-the-city condos. I passed nice new restaurants with handsome signs and shadowy high-ceilinged interiors; dress shops with headless mannequins looking beautiful and remote; dreamy New Age-y hair salons. At the same time I passed through another Greensboro, a Greensboro mapped out in invisible ink. It’s the city of the poor and the homeless. Just like the more visible city, it’s made up of individuals who wake up every morning, live out their day in a web of experiences and relationships, eat, sleep, talk, laugh, read, and at the end of the day fall asleep and roam through their own unique night landscape of dreams. They know the economy well. Why do I never hear their voices on the radio?

Last Thursday Tim and I went to annual Housing Summit sponsored by the Greensboro Housing Coalition. I’ve known Tim for a couple of years now; he started out coming to Food Not Bombs to eat, and began coming earlier and earlier to set up the tables and generally lend his common sense to the operation. He’s taken primary responsibility for the new kitchen project at the HIVE. The Summit was well attended in spite of icy, rainy weather—several hundred good, dedicated kind-hearted people made it there. I don’t know this for sure, but I would guess that Tim was the only one among them who was homeless. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of social workers, non-profit agency executives, government officials, academic experts, policy analysts, number crunchers, client service providers. And one homeless guy.

One of the principles I learned from Isabell when she was herself learning about anarchism is that people know best what’s best for themselves, and its corollary, the people most affected by a decision should have the biggest say in the decision. It’s pretty obviously when it applies to us and people like us; more difficult to see when we’re talking about the “other”, whoever our other might be.

Homeless people are America’s ultimate other. If owning a home represents the American Dream, homelessness is the American nightmare, and like all nightmares we try to shove it as far down in the collective psyche as we can. Unfortunately, with it goes real flesh-and-blood people who get shoved in all the ways our culture knows how to shove people—jailed, warehoused, hassled, humiliated, patronized, stigmatized. We make it difficult for people to take care of their most basic needs—we withhold food, shelter, withhold even a place to go to the bathroom–unless they have money, then we arrest them for stealing a loaf of bread, for sleeping outdoors, for urinating in public. We don’t give them a place to wash and clean their clothes, then we call them “dirty.” We shake our heads and say that if people are homeless it must be because they’re mentally ill, then we slowly drive them crazy.

For a long time I’ve wanted to write about the things I’ve learned from the people I’ve gotten to know at Food Not Bombs, but something hasn’t felt quite right. Finally I remembered another principle of anarchism that I learned from Isabell: we shouldn’t speak for other people, nor should we let other people speak for us unless we ask them to.

So in that spirit, last month I asked Tim if he would sit down with me and talk while the recorder ran about the experience of homelessness. Tim has been homeless for five or six years; he has helped me to understand that homelessness is as dynamic as any other condition of life—as dynamic as marriage, as parenthood, as work, as school, as aging, as illness, as love. He has helped me to understand that where you are in homelessness at any given moment is simply where you are at that moment, and that the condition of homelessness is as much internal as external. You can slip into homelessness while you are still living in a house; you can slip out of homelessness long before you move inside. I think that’s the aspect of homelessness—or of homedness for that matter—that awes me: the amazing resilience of spirit that allows people to make a full life out of the most rudimentary materials.

Tim has become a kind of one-man homeless welcoming committee. I watch him at Food Not Bombs, and I understand he does the same at lunch down at Potter’s House, going up to people who look lost and afraid, saying a kind word, telling them where they can find the food or shelter or other services they need, if those services are to be had. He helps people past those first terrifying days when all the safety nets that keep the rest of us in our homes have torn through. I wish there were more of him.

Here’s Tim:

It’s always the same story. If they didn’t have to be there they wouldn’t be. They got confused, and then they got more confused, and it’s hard on them. They feel ashamed. They’re sad, they’re depressed, they’re confused. I’ve invited several people down to my tent—you know, give them a place for the night so they can figure out what to do for the next day. Food’s a top priority, then somewhere to…finding a spot.

When you sit back and hear all the stories, they’re actually all the same, they’ve just changed the names and the places. For a lot of them homelessness is probably from addiction, but I think actually something happened earlier and they never got that resolved, or didn’t even know it, and if they were prone to be addicted one thing led to another. Everyone wants to get out of homelessness, but they don’t need to get out and go right back to the same situation they were in before. You’re supposed to learn from your mistakes, right? So if for some reason you find that job and you’re working every day and you get out, then all of a sudden you’re not homeless anymore, but before you know it you’re right back there at the same edge as before. You didn’t go anywhere.

Within the little community I live in, certain ones help each other and that’s just the way it works. You can’t always help everybody, but I’ve met a lot of folks, I’ve seen them come and go. Once you become homeless, you wonder “What do I do now?” A lot of them, they go, “Well, I’ll go to the day labor, get some work.” When that falls through and you don’t get sent out this day, this day, this day, and you’re having to move—once you start moving you realize you’ve got to declare yourself homeless. Reality sinks in. You end up moving from spot to spot until you find a good one, and then that one can only last a while. If you don’t go out to work it plays mental tricks on you—you get depressed. You’ve got to get over that. If you don’t, it eats you up and you slowly deteriorate, and if you have an addiction you keep going to it. You need to have something meaningful to do every day.

What’s better: to have nothing and be happy, or have everything and be miserable? Homeless people will accept the simplest things of life and be happy about it—we’re just talking about some kind of decent shelter with the minimum of requirements. We’re stuck in a culture that says, unfortunately, that you need to be indoors out of the cave, you need to have running water, you need to have a light bill, you need to have a water bill, you need to pay taxes, and then we’ll accept you. Most folks don’t realize that they got confused about all of this, about what was going on. Stress—stress is just a question you haven’t got an answer to, so they get stressful, all stressed out because they’re confused, they don’t know the answer, what to do for this or that, when instead somehow—we don’t know how—but somehow things work out, they really do, they really work out along the way.

I remember my first night out, I had no idea what to do. Right in downtown Greensboro I said “Well, this is it. It just starts right here.” I didn’t know the Weaver House existed, and here I was sleeping outside in the rain. I had no idea. So I can understand when I see somebody new, that they have no idea of where to go, of what to do, who to ask. You can tell, they won’t admit it, but they’re scared.
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Homelessness isn’t about having a roof over your head. It’s more about a person figuring it out for themselves. Homeless people need a place to be so they can get their thoughts together, because I’m pretty sure 10 out of 10 of them grew up in a house. It’s very few that were a homeless child. Some of them, they don’t want to accept the reality of it, they just feel “This ain’t right– something’s not right.” They’ve gotten off their timeline. They were meant to be somewhere else. And yet they’re here, and a lot of them, they just want to get back on the same timeline that was supposed to be their purpose. When you become homeless, though, the bubble pops.

One thing a person needs is time to themselves—that’s a fact. It’s almost chemical. I believe a person needs some place to be, something to do, and–Michele says–somebody who cares. This is just a natural thing, but you can’t do it on a mass scale all at one time. You’ve got to just keep digging at it, keep watching people and going “they’re ready.” I don’t mean a place like Urban Ministry; I mean a place where they can have time to catch up with their thoughts. They went for day after day without their thoughts. They got confused, and then they got more confused. To be able to survive this long you’ve got to…you’ve got to go through it all. You’ve got to figure it out and be happy with it, and once you are you can tell a difference in the folks. I can tell just by looking which ones are comfortable within their own skin.

If you do it on a mass scale it will attract those who aren’t ready to be there, or shouldn’t be there, people who have lost their energy. You’re supposed to be able to produce your own energy, your own basic instinct to survive, but you don’t know, you’re confused. And tired, tired all the time. You might try to lie down and die, but it doesn’t happen. You end up having to get up anyway.

So what’s it going to take? All right, once somebody has a place to be, the next is to find something for them to do that they really want to do, that they enjoy doing, that’s worth doing. They feel as though someone’s in control other than them. That’s the deal, they’ve lost control. They’re scared. So you’ve got to…what? Re-empower them. Let them know it’s OK. If they keep working at the day labor they’re going to go on staying in this small little circle that they’re living in, and they’re not going to get anywhere. They say “But if I don’t do that I’ll be thrown out of my place!” They’re right there homeless anyhow, they just don’t want to admit it. Our culture says: “Go get a job,” but actually in a lot of cases that’s the last thing they need right now. That would actually cause more damage—it actually does cause them more damage, and they stay in this horrible circle, and they just keep doing it over and over and it’ll slowly keep eating them away until they can actually come to terms and get a grip.

If we could just set up some kind of units and say “Look, we’re not going to hassle you, you can be here and have a start.” All the land’s owned by somebody so instead of saying it’s trespassing—just give them a place where they can be, no matter where it’s at. Don’t put them all in one place. Let them be wherever they want to be, then open the doors. They’ve got to be somewhere, then give them something to do.. There’s always something someone can offer. Society—our society—has forgotten this. They came over here in their fancy ship and they forgot. One side needs the other. Until the human race figures out that it’s the human race…that’s the hardest part.

The answer is it’s cheaper to go ahead and do something now. Go ahead and set something up, and over the half the people will even help set it up. They will help for themselves. Quit hassling them.

Thanks to Michele Forrest for the photos of homeless camps and Food Not Bombs. If you want to know what’s going on with homelessness in Greensboro and the world, make a habit of reading her wonderful blog ChosenFast.com

Permission

A couple of years ago the Food Not Bombs group in Greensboro found itself with an abundance of both food and cooks, so we decided to add another day. No one else in Greensboro was serving dinner on Monday so we chose Monday; a lot of homeless people spend the day down at the Central Library—Greensboro should have a day shelter but it doesn’t, which means that the library serves as a de facto day shelter–so we chose the library. There’s a low brick wall outside the library windows that makes a good buffet table and a couple of park benches where people can sit. It’s nice when the weather’s nice, not so nice when it’s cold or rainy or, as happens in the winter, dark. Still, no one complains.

Until, that is one day when a security guard came out and told us we had to leave. We had been serving there for well over a year but had never asked permission, partly on the Food Not Bombs principle that food is a right not a privilege, and partly on the principle that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission. Except that we didn’t want to ask forgiveness either. In many cities Food Not Bombs servings double as a form of non-violent civil disobedience, a tacit protest against the way poor and homeless people are shuffled out of sight. Food Not Bombs-related arrests are common around the country; it’s crazy, but the movement has even made the FBI terrorist watch list. All for serving food without permission.

It was a chilly night, winter, lit only by the streetlights and the glow of the library windows. “You can’t serve food here without written permission,” the security guard said. He was standing with his legs spread a little apart; he rocked a little back and forth on his toes as he talked.

“Permission!” several people said. “Permission! Permission for what? We’re eating, we’re hungry, this is a public sidewalk!”

“No it’s not,” the guard said. “This sidewalk belongs to the city. You have to have permission to be doing what you’re doing. Who’s in charge here?”

“Nobody! Nobody’s in charge!” That’s true. Food Not Bombs is a decentralized, consensus-based, leaderless organization. I’ve been volunteering with the Greensboro group longer than anyone else so a lot of people think I’m in charge, but I’m not. I was deeply gratified that the people clustered together on the sidewalk recognized that.

“Who drove the food here then?” the guard asked. Everyone was silent; no one looked at me. There was no escaping the facts, though.

“That would be me,” I finally said. “I drove the food here, but I’m not in charge.”

“Well you need to have permission to serve food here,” he said.

“Permission!” someone said again before I could speak. “Why do we need permission?”

It went back and forth like that for a while. At one point the guard went inside and got one of the librarians. The two of them stood in the chill telling us we had to ask permission; we stood in front of them saying we didn’t.

“If you come back and serve food here next week without written permission you’ll be arrested,” the guard said.

“For what?” people shouted. “For eating? For eating?”

“For serving food without permission.”

Nobody would budge but eventually, inevitably, the confrontation ran out of steam. The security guard wrote out a name and phone number on a page of his spiral-bound notepad and handed the paper to me. “This is who you ask,” he said, and he and the librarian left.

“Permission!” The crowd had dwindled a bit but those who remained still felt strongly. I had the little lined piece of paper in my hand. If this had happened a couple of years ago I know what I would have done—I would have apologized to the security guard, taken the piece of paper, and called to ask for permission. Except that a couple of years ago I don’t think I would have found myself in this situation in the first place. That was before I understood the concept of consensus, and the extraordinary power of direct action, before I had read the famous essay of the same name by Voltairine de Cleyre, one of the great anarchist thinkers of the early twentieth century. “Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his convictions, was a direct actionist,” she wrote in 1912. ”…Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments are essentially direct action.”

“So what do we do?” I asked. Homeless people are particularly vulnerable to arrest and get treated very badly when they are arrested. I didn’t want to do something that would put them in a dangerous position. “Should we come back next week?”

Yes, everyone said immediately. We should come back next week and we shouldn’t ask permission. “I’m tired of asking permission for everything,” one man said. “I can’t even sit in the park without a cop coming up and asking me what I’m doing. We don’t need permission.”

I love libraries; I love librarians; Greensboro has a terrific library. I was so proud of the direct action that the people at Food Not Bombs were taking, in awe of their courage at standing their ground, but as the week went on I began to feel worse and worse about the library. I finally emailed a librarian friend and explained what had happened—explained that this was not about the library, but that we would be back on Monday. We wouldn’t be bringing signs or drums or chants, we wouldn’t be making declarations or demands. We were just coming with soup and bread and salad. But we weren’t going to ask permission.

The next day my phone rang. It was Sandy Neerman, director of the entire library system. “I heard about what happened on Monday,” she said. This whole thing was taking on a life of its own; if this is such a leaderless organization, I thought, how come I’m the one in the hot seat? I stood in my room with the telephone to my ear and looked out the window at the big pine trees at the end of the yard. “I heard about what happened on Monday,” Sandy went on “and I want to apologize. Of course you don’t have to ask permission and of course we’re delighted that you’re doing what you’re doing. Please go on doing it.”

So that’s how it came about that last Monday 40 or so people sat down to eat together in the Nussbaum Room of the Central Library. This is the second winter now that the library has invited Food Not Bombs inside—inside!—to serve. Last winter we simply served food for the most part, but this year Jen Worrells, our wonderful library liaison and a direct actionist if there ever was one, suggested a full winter of programming. We’ve shown movies, done blood pressure tests, held discussions. Cakalak Thunder played after dinner on New Year’s Eve, filling the library with radical drumming (that was Jen’s idea!) This past Monday volunteers gave shaves and haircuts. One of the as hoc barbers was a man who was at Food Not Bombs for the first time—he had come for a free meal, but when he saw what was going on he said “I can cut hair” and picked up a pair of clippers. (Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it….) We’ll be inside for another couple of months. We have some meetings with government officials planned, we’ll be showing more movies, having more parties, maybe having a massage night, a dental care night, a poetry night, who knows?

Anything can happen.

UPCOMING WINTER SERIES EVENTS:

Mondays, 6:00 pm, Greensboro Central Library, Nussbaum Room

If you’re interested in being part of the process, join the Winter Series wiki

January 14 - Government Official
January 28 - Movie Night: War of the Worlds (2005)
February 4 - Culture / Celebration
Febraury 11 - Health and Beauty
February 18 - Government Official
February 25 - Movie Night
March 3 - Culture / Celebration
March 10 - Health and Beauty
March 17 - Government Official
March 24 - Movie Night
March 31 - Culture / Celebration