Tag: poverty

the only thing that can save us

~ Live & Learn ~ 21 Comments

[…] What he understood is the difference between charity and community — a difference founded in kinship, in recognizing that we all fall down, that sometimes it takes another hand to pull us up again. “All you have to do,” he once told the novelist Ann Patchett, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” ….

What Father Strobel understood is that compassion is the only thing that can save us.

—  Margaret Renkl, from “Proof That One Life Can Change the World” (The New York Times · August 14, 2023)

Don’t miss rest of Margaret Renkl’s Opinion essay here.

Photo credit.

Walking. With Moment that Sticks.

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4:33 a.m., or so. You are so damn precise with your clock.

I pulled into the Cove Island Park parking lot, my headlights illuminated her…sleeping. Hold that thought.

It’s been 770 consecutive (almost) days on my daybreak walk. Like in a row.

I was going to share a different story.  A running story. I page through the dates of my prior posts to find my last running post: June 6, 2020! MY GOD. It’s been 2 years! And, this back and these legs carrying 12 lbs more. Yep, I decided to lace up the shoes and run. 2 days in a row.  My body is so tired, that it couldn’t lift my fingers to the keyboard to tap the words out. So, we’re going to hold this thought for another day.

Back to this morning’s walk. A spectacular morning. 60° F. 5 mph breeze.  And it had the three elements of a perfect morning. 1) Low tide. 2) 30-60% cloud cover. 3) No Humans. So we have ALL of this going for us.

And I spotted my Swans, George and Grace, feeding.

And I spotted a black-crowned night heron, a mime, frozen in place; this morning’s twilight, the finest, lightest bulb, illuminating its thin, light white plume.  “Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.” — T.S. Eliot, from La Figlia Che Piange.

And then there’s my spirit bird. Plural, Birds. A flock of cormorants. Must mean that I’m going to have a great day.

And on the back side of my walk, I stalk a white-tailed deer, and snap a few shots of her. It’s a her I think. In this world of pronouns, I’m sure I stepped into it again.

So, you can pick any number of these moments, and hold them, for a moment, the day, into next week. Yet…one moment stands alone, higher above the rest.

It was 1 hour after I had first spotted her, and she was still sleeping, in the same exact position, undisturbed.

I’m going to remember this. Continue reading “Walking. With Moment that Sticks.” →

Invisible Child

~ Live & Learn ~ 13 Comments

She called her living arrangement “the house,” even after her family was moved into one cramped room. She choreographed her own privacy, taking turns with her siblings to undress while the others looked away. They maneuvered around the shelter’s rules as well. Residents were banned from bringing in bleach, yet the janitors refused to clean the bathrooms. So the children swiped the janitors’ bleach and scrubbed the floors themselves. On the outside, Dasani seemed steady. She kept a poker face when the staff scolded her thirty-three-year-old mother as if Chanel were a cheeky adolescent. Yet these episodes left their mark. “Sometimes it feels like, ‘Why you guys messin’ with my mom?'” To mess with Chanel was to mess with Dasani. There was no separating mother from daughter. They felt the same anger, the same humiliation. Feelings passed between them like oxygen.

Still, Channel tried to shield Dasani from the worst things… Smaller degradations were part of daily life.

—  Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (Random House, October 5, 2021)

One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by New York Times Book Review: “Dasani Showed Us What It’s Like to Grow Up Homeless. She’s Still Struggling.”

Walking. With Georgia.

~ Live & Learn ~ 28 Comments

It was Sunday morning. 4:50 a.m. 68° F. Morning Walk @ Cove Island Park. 432 consecutive days, like in a row.

My “observations” from my Sunday walk led to yesterday’s Monday Morning Wake-Up Call post — a quote from Janwillem van de Wetering, about being proud of his awareness, proud of his awareness of his pride, being clever to know that he is stupid, etc. etc.

The quote landed. My cup of awareness (I thought) runneth over, and I have a vice grip on all that I don’t know.  But this observation seemed to bottom out.

This spring, with the increase in seasonal park traffic, garbage cans were planted throughout the Park — electric pink — surely colored to encourage patrons to dump their sh*t in the can. I did notice the green cans, but they seemed fewer in number. And for 100 straight days, I walked by these cans, tossed trash in these same cans, and zero light bulbs turned on.

Until Sunday morning.

They were wearing headlamps, lights bobbing up and down as they approached.

Her head was down, averting contact.

His head turned to me in response to my “Good Morning”.

“Good Morning, Sir” in a Spanish accent. There we go again. Another human being calling me ‘Sir.’  Respect? Or do they see a Retiree? Either way, de-stabilizing.

They kept walking. I took a few steps in the opposite direction, stopped, and turned to look back. Continue reading “Walking. With Georgia.” →

Thanksgiving?

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starvation

Saleh Hassan al-Faqeh holds the hand of his four-month-old daughter, Hajar, who died of malnutrition at the al-Sabeen hospital in Sanaa, Yemen, Nov. 15, 2018.  “She was like skin on bones, her body was emaciated,” he said.  Hajar was one of thousands of Yemeni children suffering from malnutrition in a country that has been pushed to the brink of famine by more than three years of war.  (Source: Father mourns baby who died of starvation in Yemen, ABC News, November 15, 2018)

“Who can imagine hunger who has never experienced it, even for one day?

~ May Sarton, The House by the Sea: A Journal