Our Dancing Mountains Board meets regularly by skype and as often as we can face to face to practice together. We have submitted all our official documents and await incorporation. This new edge of ‘becoming’ left us exploring questions about the shape of our practice. Who benefits? What do we want to commit to in the form of engaged practice? How could we join together as a sangha to work toward change that benefits our community?
I offer here an amalgamation of reflective writings that we shared after our conversation on the subject of homelessness in our so called ‘developed world. ’
‘I admit I haven’t liked this time of year for many years now. The mercenary thrust of sales from Halloween until exhaustion in January, the wasteful burning of electricity in flashing lights with Santa or the nativity whether you want it or not leaves me feeling alien. The use of children’s images to manipulate spending on charities we don’t trust anymore adds to the burden of helplessness about what else to do. Expressing views that are different to the masses carries the risk of being called, ‘Humbug.’ Existential questioning engenders a sense of frustration with the culture we live in and an energy that then dissipates into self-blame or hopelessness. The winter of 2009 was especially cold in UK and Ireland. Walking on New Year’s Eve along Galway Bay in my big duvet coat I enjoyed the water and the ice with 2 good friends. On our way to eat and enjoy music bringing in the New Year we passed over a bridge where a young man sat freezing and homeless. In a moment as if out of time I saw people pass by as if he was invisible, something I have also been conditioned to do. Eye contact is powerful and in a moment I was hooked. I sat down on the street beside him and we talked for a while. He was 19 years old and had left Poland with his girlfriend who was pregnant. He was sure that moving to Ireland they would get work that would lead to a better quality of life. My friends joined in my dilemma whether to join them since we had a table booked and it was getting late or find some way to help despite all the old beliefs about why people are on the streets in this culture of abundance. It was as if I couldn’t leave a limb behind and they are good hearts. We managed to book a B&B for the couple that night and give money for food. They were beautiful in their surprise, love and gratitude.
But this didn’t satisfy as a happy ending. From the pavement I watched how people passing looked through me also as an invisible one. It felt cold, detached, set adrift, de-humanised and, now known, I have never let go of the experience, brief and penetrating. I remain haunted by faces I pass on the street expressing their pain, shame, addiction and abused bodies as a means to be visible to the past suffering they can’t express. Homelessness is the great growing shame of our so called developed world. Bodhisattva vows crash in my heart to open and engage in some sort of engaged and visible action, not on my own, but as a sangha, as a body toward interconnected bodhisattva action.
I am motivated by, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Crisis report which states:-
‘One of the most worrying trends of recent years, that of rising homelessness. The study found that the number sleeping rough rose again last year by 6% in England and by 13% in London. Over the same period, the number in temporary accommodation increased by 10%, with a 14% rise in B&B placements. In total, homelessness has increased by 34% in the last three years (having fallen in the previous six), with 185,000 now affected in England.’
http://www.crisis.org.uk/data/files/admin_uploads/research/HomelessnessMonitorEngland2013_ExecSummary.pdf
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