By Kerry Echo on Jul 2, 2009 in Featured, Street Voices | 7 Comments
Life, as we know it, that is, in the way most people have structured their reality, begins with a place to live, usually a house, which becomes central. Everything else depends on that: owning a lawn mower, having pets, insurance policies, the dining room set, even having children. And it is difficult to imagine any other circumstance and even harder to create one.
My friend, Bob, when speaking of his buddies, as though apposite to whatever he says, always mentions where they stay. “Tom, he has the white car,” Bob starts off, or “John, he has the red van,” and so on, just as another person might refer to a house on a certain street. Were we truly able to live outside the cultural stricture of expensive one- and two-story boxes lined up row after row, we would not be living out of our vehicles or, lacking a vehicle, anywhere a person can be left alone.
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By Jesse on Jun 20, 2009 in Featured, Street Voices | 26 Comments
I became homeless the day my father fucked me up my ass.
I believe this. How can I not believe that?
If a boy can be raped by his father and still believe he has a home then what does “home” really mean?
So that happened when I was around 8 or so. It took a few decades for that homelessness to be reflected in my material condition. But that happened pretty quickly once I tried to live on my own. I left home for good when I was 25 and by 28 I was living on the streets.
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By Jesse on Jun 20, 2009 in Street Voices | 1 Comment
I have, for a long time, focused on spiritual concerns. I remember meditating quite often when I was in High School and I also remember doing yoga at an even younger age.
I have no idea what was the original inspiration for my interest in yoga? Perhaps my inherent divinity? Or a cool ad in some magazine perhaps.
I just spent the morning with a friend of mine who directs the kitchen work at a homeless soup kitchen and it was a profoundly depressing morning. He has a nice home, a wife, a new baby girl and he is also astonishingly lost.
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By Jesse on Jun 17, 2009 in Featured, Street Voices | 24 Comments
So I have been meditating twice a day, at the very least, for a month now and it has been life changing.
I was inspired to do this after I met a fellow at a cafe and had a great discussion with him. We were sitting next to each other and just started talking, the way people do in cool cafes, and before I knew it we were having this great talk about spiritual concerns and political issues. I was impressed because the fellow knew quite a bit and the discussion was pretty deep. This is not usually the case with me. I have basically thought about very little but these two topics (spirit and politics) for several decades and so it is always great when I meet other people who share my dedication.
Anyway, after about half an hour he said that I ought to consider myself a yogi but that I could only really do this if I started meditating on a regular basis.
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By admin on Jun 10, 2009 in Featured, Homeless Stereotypes, My Story | 60 Comments
They say truth is stranger than fiction. We have already seen some remarkable events unfold on Twitter including international breaking news stories such as the Hudson river plane crash and a revolution in Moldova. Romance is nothing new either, there have already been a number of marriage proposals taking place in full public view on the social network. There are even twitter dating sites springing up such as MyTweetheart.com and Twitterbirds.com. You name it, it has happened on Twitter. This story is a little different, however.
So inaccurate is the public perception of homelessness that the world cries foul when a homeless person is seen with a mobile phone or an ipod or heaven forbid; a laptop. Homeless people don’t use the internet, they don’t write blogs, they’re not webmasters and they don’t use Twitter. They are alcoholics, they are substance abusers, they are illiterate. They don’t work. They sure as hell don’t have the right to fall in love. Do they?
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By Kelly R on May 14, 2009 in Featured, Street Voices | 5 Comments
Define homelessness. Can you? Is it only a situation of not having a home, or can it also be a situation where your housing arrangements are solvent and could change at any moment? You might have a roof over your head, but the way it feels to know that you have no security is almost indescribable. There are hundreds of thousands of American families facing this right now. Foreclosure was not a part of their lexicon and now it is a part of their reality. Once it happens to you, you really are never the same.
Have you ever been in the process of moving out of a home you have lived in for a long time and you have to go back in one last time to check that you didn’t leave anything? The empty rooms echo the empty feeling in your gut. Memories bounce from the walls and ceiling and floor. Laughter and old voices seem to hang in the air. You might be moving to a new place, a better place, but that doesn’t matter in that moment. The emptiness of vacating a place you loved is inescapable. If you have no shiny new place to move to, emptiness becomes stark fear.
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By Rev Cynthia on May 11, 2009 in Featured, Street Voices | 11 Comments
Coming up with concrete solutions to ending homelessness would seem to be a worthwhile endeavor of our time here on “Homeless Tales/Street Voices.” To that end, I have come across a few signs of hope, which I would like to share with all of you.
While reading through Time magazine’s recent list of 100 of “The World’s Most Influential People,” I learned about the work of Sister Mary Scullion, who, along with Joan Dawson McConnon, co-founded Philadelphia’s “Project H.O.M.E.” According to their Values Statement, they “… believe that all persons are entitled to decent, affordable housing, and access to quality education, employment, and health care.” As I will be visiting my son in the Philadelphia area from May 9-19th, I’ve written to Sister Mary asking if we can meet. I am hoping to see first-hand the programs that she has helped to build.
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By Jesse on Apr 28, 2009 in Featured, Street Voices | 10 Comments
I am concerned with liberation. I am concerned with the liberation of humanity. That is, my dream is a world where no human being experiences injustice. Where we live in communities of mutual respect and love.
I offer this dream to anybody. It is certainly offered to my brothers and sisters who are called “poor”. To me, you are all a step away from leading humanity against oppression and towards compassion.
And I want to point out that I am not saying that “poor” people need to solely lead other “poor” people. That is certainly an critical piece but not the whole picture.
I want raise the bar and brazenly suggest that “poor” people are the natural leaders of all people. And that includes the middle class, the rich, the underemployed working class and so on.
And I say this because the tendency is to go ghetto. The pull is to just think that we are here to take charge of our communities.
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