Ben and I are sitting in the driveway. The night's dark and breezy, sticky with humidity. We're watching wildfires across the bay make the sky glow. Every few minutes flames flare bright orange above the ridge line of the foothills.
Someone somewhere is evacuating, while, again, California burns.
I must have been only half asleep this morning, when sometime in the dark I jolted awake to a trembling. In my half consciousness, I felt my stomach lurch in fear as I waited and ran through scenarios of where we'd go. I've been following the quakes in Indonesia the last couple of days. Nothing more happened. Later I looked it up and found there had been a small earthquake in Long Beach, big enough to feel -- or sleep through.
Our worlds are so untouched until something breaks them.
I marvel at this over and over again.
It doesn't matter how much we know about pain, read about it, even witness it in friends, nothing prepares us for our own two-footed world cracking.
Every day when one's world is whole, another's is cracking -- or even crushed -- constantly and all at once, ocean to sea spray, everywhere.
Yesterday my sister and I met halfway in Los Angeles to go to museums (which, incidentally, are mostly all closed on Mondays). I've been to lots of parts of LA but never really downtown. Where we were, every fifth person (literally) was homeless, asking for a dollar, or ranting, lounging against a wall, or pushing a cart too heavy to navigate down the narrow sidewalk.
Years ago I spent a lot of time with the homeless community here. Almost all my time. It was a year of unanswerable questions that wrenched my heart constantly: how to help? could I help? was reintegration the goal? how to combat addictions, and why? how to speak through mental illness? was real healing possible? what was hope? what were real needs? who was safe? who was the good guy? The list went on for pages.
Since I've moved back here, I haven't reconnected consistently with that community -- it's dispersed, much has changed, my kids are bigger and busier, I started a business -- for so many reasons. I think about that every day.
The strangest thing walking through LA yesterday was feeling that I was seeing homeless people for the first time in my life. I saw each person in stark relief: a woman crouched by a doorway with greasy hair and filthy feet wearing bright flip flops, she had tan muscled arms and smooth red painted nails; the boy-man with my brother's eyes in dirty jeans with a tired face, who lifted his eyebrows when I passed, as if to say, "sucks, huh?" and it did.
Maybe it was a revelation, a rare moment of sight, or maybe just cold water on my face -- whatever it was, I kept thinking, "we let other humans live like this right in front of our faces. How can we let other humans live *outside* with no showers or bathrooms or toothbrushes. How can we let other humans, who look like our moms, push dirty blankets down the street and pull recycling from the subway trashcan so they can have a few bucks? How do we walk by -- rush by -- without even looking at them?
The wind is calmer for the moment, and if I didn't know the fire was there, I wouldn't see it at all. A moment ago, the flames reared over the crest and must have towered stories high.
Inhale. Exhale. Sight. Blindness. Wholeness. Fragmentation. How to stay near when we are far.
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