If you’ve been following my meadysmusings blog you would know that last month I experimented with eating only raw foods (by about 70%) for a period of three weeks. It was a very interesting experience for me and although I’ve fasted for about a day on many occasions in the past this was my first experience like this- a more prolonged period of restricted eating. I’d have to say I learnt much more from this prolonged period than I had so far in my various one day fasts over my lifetime. That experience made me realise just how little we really need to eat to live and how much all the other stuff were just excesses…incredible luxuries really! When I was coming to the end of my time raw it was when the big financial crisis the world is now in had only just begun to explode in the US. Lehman Brothers liquidating like a snowman on a hot summer day…while other financial giants were flapping their arms as if wings in the air hoping to perhaps fly away or at least not topple over before Uncle Sam could prop them up. The world lost ‘a bull’…aaww… cause really and I don’t mean it sarcastically even as an outsider looking in I always admired that symbol Merrill Lynch had…I mean what could better symbolise financial strength and stability than the Merrill Lynch bull! And now he’s gone…aaww …he would have been 100 in 2014. I’m sure he will rise again like the Phoenix in the merger with Bank of America or perhaps reincarnate to live another life in a new identity. I’m not American and so the financial crisis then was not a national or personal issue for me but I did anticipate it would trickle down to the national consciousness here in Trinidad and Tobago sooner or later and I think it is just about happening now. However, I am a member of the Intent community which I like to call Mallika Chopra’s experiment (Deepak Chopra’s daughter) and on there you could feel the feelings of the Americans…So the financial crisis was on my mind and to be honest it made me wonder how people could be so impacted by these things although I continued to mourn the bull…cause I mean really how much did we need to live? I mean you didn’t even need to eat much as I had recently verified coming out of my raw experiment. Why so much worry and fear? I think Mallika Chopra’s dad Deepak Chopra was giving out some of the most complete and sound advice for the times there though…so lucky to have him as a voice out there! All the same fear was still rearing its ugly head and causing many an American to take their life! Sad and disturbing really… But the financial crisis was on my mind and I was just out of being raw…
Then one day at work I ended up literally walking down a path I had not walked in a very long time…I parked my car at one end of the Main Street in the town where I work. I had not intended it or planned it…it was just one of those, one of those things leads to the other walk based on what I decided to eat causing me to walk all the way to the other end of that street to the local Subway. An American icon that has made it to our island and is doing much better than ‘the bull’ some might like to know. Now in Trinidad this means leaving normally air conditioned offices (18-20 deg C/ 65-68 deg F) and walking on a street that is about 33 deg C (just over 90 deg F for my American readers) but it was not so shocking for me that day as I was on a field day but what was perhaps outrageous if not shocking was my orange work shirt with company logo and my name sewed on and everything! Now it’s an energy industry kinda town so it should not have been so different or unseen I’d think but perhaps some how the speed or manner with which I walked or my appearance in some way made me stand out more to the people on the street but I had people staring at me and calling out the company’s name and stuff. For a second I thought… oh no!… I’ve just made myself a target for so many things! But then I figured so what?…surely I’m not the first and only person to be walking on the streets in something like this cause as I just noted above it is an energy industry kinda town! Also many girls work in industry here too so?! I think it was more too that I was walking about in the town and I didn’t just stop my car jump out get something to eat and jump back in perhaps that was it…?! So anyway I get to the Subway and buy my ‘6” Vege Delite’ sandwich (parmesan oregano bread, no extra cheese, all the veggies except pickle and add pineapple and no sauces except for the Trini pepper sauce!). I normally don’t eat there but usually come back to my office but I had some meetings lined up at our main building just before I got back to the other building where my office is and so I decided not to go back to my office today as it made no sense. So I looked around for a table that was as secluded as you can get in a place like that and there was just one free corner table although not totally free as it had a co-worker (not in orange however but office attire) sitting there waiting on another one who was buying in the line. Of course when I moved towards the table she welcomed me to sit and while she waited I sat there chatting with her and eating my sandwich. Somewhere into our chat I realised when she realised and started looking towards the sandwich line that there was something going on…when I grasped what it was… I realised it was the lady behind the desk telling a lady to leave and get out of the place!…but I wasn’t 100% sure what it was that was going on until I saw a lady that I’d figured was a vagrant of some sorts was reluctantly agreeing to leave but the shop is small so on her way out she almost grabs the sandwich from my hand if looks could turn into action. It was happening so fast I …I couldn’t think quickly enough but I did feel how much she was to me, angry and hungry but violently so…it is like she was considering to beat me up and grab that sandwich from my hand and run! But in a moment of hindsight she didn’t and left the Subway. My back was turned to the exit but my co-worker at the table said: “She doh want to go nah…they telling her to leave but like she doh want to go…she going but she still only looking inside here.” I didn’t turn around to look at the commotion but I said to my co-worker when I had a second to get over the startle of it all…“Well maybe she is really hungry?!” I got the feeling that the silence it brought my co-worker to was perhaps her feeling just as I…guilt? Or genuine concern but knowing that she had her own life to live and so reconcile with perhaps she couldn’t save the world. Now I don’t know if this is how the girl felt …It is just my feeling the feeling moment! :) But I also started to wonder…the lady I will have to tell you did scare me…but really if I had enough time to think I would have given her my sandwich you know…and I’m not trying to make myself out to be a saint here…but really I had just been raw…I didn’t even have to be well off enough to buy her another sandwich or get another one for me to eat…we need so little to live I could have literally shared half my food with her and be fine anyway! However I’m so far lucky enough that I would have been able to get her a sandwich…?!
I wish it didn’t all happen so fast …that I could have done something…but what? On top of it I was already in official company attire orange and all…Subway is a very by the book kind of place like all chain stores…the employees are told exactly how to wash their hands how to wrap the sandwich…would they answer an orange freak who wanted to know if they knew what was that lady’s story? Also I didn’t know if the lady was indeed harmful…from my brief look at her she didn’t seem very thin…so she could have very well been just a trouble maker type…or one of those people who are on some sort of illegal drug and addicted or an outright hoodlum! So I played with the idea of asking the Subway people but didn’t. Instead I walked around outside the area trying to see if I saw her. I didn’t feel incredibly sorry for her though cause she didn’t look thin (like she was about to die) and really I was not going to get into trouble with my orange self in some alley way. So conscience or not I wasn’t going further than that. But I did feel her anger and her hunger. Really I wish she could have been fed when she was hungry cause no matter what… a person shouldn’t have to beg for food like that and be ‘buffed up(yelled at)’ cause they wanted to eat?! Surely there is enough food on this earth for all of us?…I’m no saint walking the earth though…is what I reconciled in my orange self but the incident made me more aware...
More aware of things in this little town where I’ve worked for ten years but never thought to look…right in my backyard. I could tell people bout the state of homelessness in San Francisco…by the way it is appalling indeed for such a rich city too and that man who hides behind a bush in the Fisherman’s Wharf area-he got me in 2001 and he got me in 2007 but I’m sorry I did not tip him for jumping out of a bush and scaring me twice in one decade! But perhaps some people like the adrenaline rush and so pay. Must be some reason he has been there so long?! But that is a strong sign of the homelessness there that a man has to resort to that ‘to make ah little end (Trini) or make ends meet (American)’. Not to speak of the vagrants that slept outside my door every day for two weeks in 2007 and the man who came off the cable car that was having this re-occurring talk in his head aloud for all to hear bout …“But you know I’m not like that…I’ve told you...” I can tell you of the rat man that lives outside the park in Toronto and has become an icon there and I can tell you that I find it amazing that while I saw rampant homelessness in San Francisco and Toronto with for sure San Francisco taking the prize for homelessness I never saw a homeless person in all of London. Are if there aren’t any homeless people in London and it’s not just that I happened not to see any…what’s their secret there? But I could have told you all that and I never realised that right there in my own backyard (of work at least) was Homelessness…cause after I didn’t find that lady who came into the Subway…I did see others…not many…it is a small place…but it made me realise how much you see when you really look and become aware…What saddened me more too was these people were also aged…and they were very thin and they looked as if they had given up just hanging on to this little corner on the earth someone wasn’t chasing them away from perhaps who knows waiting to die…but what could I do? One of the ladies I saw I did happen to see before and had given her a few dollars and I did feel bad then too…that I couldn’t do more or wondered if she had any family?
So I walked on…I thought about blogging it on that day itself when I got home perhaps…but what good would that do? And wouldn’t it just sound like I was making a big deal of nothing? Stating the obvious and crying out to the world on my blog like if only I had feelings …only I knew there were homeless people world over and in my backyard? What good would come of me spilling my guts out on a blog? And also at the time it had bothered me so much that I felt I would be too emotional to write it and also I might be divulging too much bout my personal life on a blog that I originally set up to be a place of yes spirituality and enlightenment but in a positive way and a fun and light hearted way. However when Dave from the Intent community told me bout Blog Action Day and how it was going to be about Poverty I said there…I’m going to write bout homelessness and tell that story! Didn’t know how I was going to do it or how it would come across to my readers but I guess I just told it didn’t I?
All I can hope is that by telling my little although perhaps a bit longwinded story (no editors when you blog!:) ) Is that it will make my readers also perhaps feel the feeling? I’m not sure yet if I am ready to put Arts in Action yet like I did on Sunday but hmmm…I’m feeling the feeling on that too…so stay tuned…but for sure charity begins at home or right in our backyards…but of course we have to be ready within ourselves to truly give before we can do so…cause if I’m going to put Arts into Action here I will have to dig deep and I have to be ready…of course if anyone is reading this and already has existing systems or resources that can already put Arts into Action well please contact me! Who knows perhaps Habitat can look into building a homeless shelter as a project? Or Elspeth can do a film to raise awareness further? Shovels or video cameras anyone?
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