Searching Homeward

I was driving the other day and noticed a young man sitting on a busy corner of a business amid the activity hub of people going home for the workday. The man looked to be about the age of my son who just graduated from college. He sat with a backpack and little else, his eyes were shaded with sunglasses. Upon closer examination, I could tell he was adrift, cast out into the life of the streets.

We see them every day, all ages of people from all places, some in altered states, ragged clothes walking the streets, cycling, or living out of vehicles. All these people seemingly headed into the abyss of desperation.

The statistics tell us that a variety of conditions lead to homelessness. This includes mental illness, chemical dependencies, lack of familial support, and the incredible elephant in the room — poverty.

There was also an older man who once roamed by neighborhood. He wore full-on cowboy gear including a big hat and boots. He rode a bicycle instead of a horse and in the middle of August, he also wore an overcoat. His skin, bleached by the sun, turned into a form of yellow-beige leather. The cowboy cyclist wheeled down the streets of my town for a few years, at times riding his bike off the sidewalk and blocking the right lane of the street while casually disregarding the horns of infuriated drivers.

The cowboy cyclist disappeared a short while after biting a cop who came to patrol the abandoned house he camped out in. Soon after that, he disappeared altogether. I haven’t seen him since.

It’s a hard thing to be cast out into the world with no shelter, no cohesive place, and a lack of food and necessities. All seems more poignant during this time of war when thousands of people have lost not only their homes but also their entire cities in a thunder of shrapnel and bombs. One’s total existence now wiped clean.

My Uncle Nolan used to have an analysis of the various takes on life and logic. He would often comment about people who landed on the adverse side of life with perhaps a too simplistic analogy. Uncle Nolan liked to say that the person zigged instead of zagged on the Zig-Zag continuum of life. Maybe for some, it’s true, the product of ignoring lessons, but for others, it might have been much simpler such as the bad luck of having lost a job.

“The ache for home lives in all of us, that safe place we can go….” — Maya Angelou. But for some, that place does not exist. Compassion and generosity go a long way in assisting and understanding this widespread problem.

Hand Christopher the sky

the cerulean folds of it

to blanket the sorrow in his heart

Hand him the four winds

to lighten the weight of his steps

and air so clean and pure

that tears can’t hide there

Hand him the shelter of

massive redwood trees

to lean into the wisdom

found there in forest canopies

Hand him the love

once lost on a journey

that he didn’t quite understand

to travel

Such is this….

in the magic of hands