The Bham Commons

With a few small exceptions, my careers have always been centered within a framework of poverty.  I began as an ecologist in a land losing it lushness to concrete and steel.  When I thought that my needs lay outside of the peopled world and I only wanted the outdoors and animals who communicated in languages that I could not understand.  I felt safe in this world even as I witnessed the poverty of space and resources affecting the populations that lived there.  I was energized by the injustice that I saw in human encroachment, this pushed me and made me feel useful.  This poverty was not one of human finances but one of land and space…and life.  But I could choose whether to live in a tent in the woods or a house in town, I could choose safety at any time, no matter how much passion I felt, I was not connected to the environment that I thought I stood for.  A clearcut in a forest to make way for new building made me sad for a moment but it did not make me feel that my veins had also been cut.  The extermination of an old growth forest and its many wildlife populations made me rage but I did not  feel that parts of me had also been broken.   

I was angry, I was impassioned…but I was not connected. 

From there, I was a teacher in a world where the education system is designed to scar and traumatize. Again, I felt ready to battle in a righteous war.  I had been through the school system and knew its vulnerabilities and evils.  I knew how to make changes that would help students to their truths and to move into the successful world of capitalism as seamlessly as possible.   I saw that those with no other choice who fought the hardest to thrive and therefore gave me the most sense of accomplishment-I thought foolishly that this was about me.  In my newness and zest, I tried this and that and most definitely caused some damage.  I preached but did not listen, I cried when I did not understand and I worked tirelessly to put children into the boxes that our society demands that they squeeze into because I thought that I loved them and was doing right.  Many of my favorite assignments and my favorite students lived in the midst of poverty and I reflected as a young teacher, that these were the places where I felt most fulfilled.  Why should that be? That the physical and financial pain of those that I served should give me a measure of fullness?  Today I am ashamed of my limited reflection.  

I was angry, I was impassioned but I was not connected.  

This career I kept for some time though and I learned through painstaking reflection to let myself listen and be taught.  To know that this was more important than anything else, that this was the gift of my profession.  I learned that I didn’t know anything, and that the system was rigged in a way that I never understood and that the students in my classroom did not need to fit in a box and that the boxes were killing them and killing us all and that we were one and not different at all when it came down to it.

It was from this new understanding that I came to social work in the homeless community.  I was pulled into this world because students that I had left behind were struggling in housing insecurity and I wanted to understand and change this system that boxed us into rich and poor, housed and unhoused.  I wanted to soothe my sad feelings that surfaced when I saw them leave school and knew that they were going to sleep under the overpass or in a shelter.  I wanted to put my skin and my blood and  bones into the game without really feeling it, to do some good, to make some change…again…it was about me.

Poverty does not exist so that we who are not in poverty can have projects.  I often feel that, while this is not a sentiment clearly spoken, this is where our sense of “charity” comes from-especially here in the South.  Some of us have escaped poverty and have survivor’s guilt, some of us never knew it, some of us are completely oblivious.  My desire for myself is that I never rest on my laurels and never allow myself to be separated from those that I serve.  My desire is to build a community of abundance that banishes poverty and is not separate from me.

I promised abundance as well and here it is.  This is not a reflection of how in the midst of poverty, I experience a richness of love and spirit and all that bullshit.  Poverty is not noble, it is rarely a choice and I don’t want to hear anyone elevating it to the point where it is necessary to keep folks there.  No, the abundance of my mind comes from my observation of the abundance that exists all around us in real time.   The abundance of a land where we have the resources to produce food for all of our people and yet folks are dying of starvation and lands are starved of nutrition, where we are one of the world’s economic superpowers and yet our wealth is concentrated in a small majority at the very top, where we are literally bursting with the production of stuff and yet folks go without the essentials every day, where we commit genocides and atrocities to people who look or speak different because we think that they have invaded or box when in reality none of us should be in a god. damned. box.  This abundance exists in the midst of stunning cruelty.

Abundance by rights should belong to all of us.  It should be The Commons.  It COULD, we could MAKE it so, but we would have to see that while we are all in it together…some of us are in yachts and some of us are drowning and some of us are in between and we can fix that if we choose to see each other as the same.  We would need to ALL put skin and bone and blood in the game not to feel a good feeling but because my skin and your skin are  one, my blood and your blood are one, my bone and your bone are one..and I can do no different.  ALL of us to be equal and in community.  

I think of this every day, because I know that it is so easy to do the other thing. To separate into boxes.  Until the end of my days, I will fight to see the boxes that I am in, I will believe you when you tell me about your boxes… I will tear them apart.