SHELTER

By Cal Garrison

Bare Essentials

Abraham Maslow was the one who told us that food, clothing, and shelter are the three basic human needs. We all know this but most of us don't have to think about it because we have plenty to eat, more than enough clothing, and a safe place to live. But what if we didn't? What happens to a person when any of those needs aren't being met?

Having no food — well, unless you're in a famine-stricken or worn-torn area, food is pretty easy to come by. And as far as clothing is concerned, it's everywhere. You'd be amazed at how easy it is to dress your self for free. But for some reason shelter is a whole different story.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it costs more to put a roof over your head. For someone who's down on their luck, coming up with the rent is next to impossible. Anyone who hasn't had the experience might say, 'All you have to do is go down to the Welfare office' — but Welfare will not even look at you if you don't have kids — and if you're married or own anything, forget about it. You don't qualify. And if by some stroke of luck you do qualify, being on the dole isn't what people think it is. What you get from the Department of Social Services is just about enough to keep a box of Cheerios on the table.

Homelessness in the US

The homeless situation got noticeably out of control when President Reagan shut down all the mental health facilities back in the 80's. That decision and other right-wing political maneuvers put a whole new spin on our concept of 'outdoor life'. Up until then there were homeless people in the cities, but you never saw them in the suburbs, or out in the country. Twenty years later the swarms of unsheltered people in the US have become such a phenomenon they're everywhere now. Even in the Norman Rockwell villages of rural Vermont you see them walking the roads, or spending their days sitting on the stoops of the general stores.

The rest of us have become so inured to the sight of the homeless, we don't think about how they keep warm or where they sleep at night. What isn't our problem is easy to ignore. It's strange to me that we don't even wonder what happens to them when the sun goes down. Perhaps we're too cozy and comfortable, or maybe we're just too desensitized to care.

I only know two homeless people. One of them spends his summers sleeping in the woods and the winters sleeping in an old, broken down Civic. He was married at one time and owned a nice house and a parcel of land. When his marriage ended everything went to Hell. The doctors added to his list of problems when they told him he had Hepatitis-C. This made it impossible for him to work. If he had other options they couldn't have been that attractive because he chose homelessness over all of them. During the day he lives at the Quickie-Mart and unless someone hires him to mow their lawn or shovel their snow, that's where he sits, smoking cigarettes and reading the paper over and over again. No one at the store seems to mind. They're country people and they know enough about his situation not to kick him out.

My other homeless friend is an old logger. In his glory days he worked the woods of the Northeast Kingdom, back when everything was done by hand. This man could out do any logger in the state and is still a legend among his peers. The story goes that he went crazy from the backbreaking work and just up and quit one day. He couldn't force his body to do what he had spent his youth training it to do — but the problems was, he didn't know how to do anything else — so since that time he's walked the roads, stood by the bridge, or relaxed on the bench outside Dutchie's Store. His disability check covers his cigarettes, but it doesn't cover the rent, so he sleeps in Doris Graf's barn when it's too cold to sleep outside. Doris is dead now, but before she died she let it be known that he could sleep in her barn for the rest of his life if he needed to.

Through knowing these two men I learned a lot about how they feel about their situation. Neither of them seems to be the least bit troubled by what they don't have. They tell me they feel absolutely free. All the things that keep the rest of us so busy are of no concern to them. They have no bills, they never have to be anywhere, their time is their own, and they are both living as close to nature as a person can get. As far as shelter goes, they are content with the woods, the Honda, and the barn. In a lot of ways they're better off than normal people.

I never question it when they tell me how free they are, even though I wonder about it. If this notion helps them to rationalize their situation or loans them some sense of dignity, it's not my place to bust their bubble. At the same time, I can't help thinking that when a person chooses to liberate them selves in this way, on some level they have to be painfully aware that in doing so they have eliminated every other option. If they wake up one morning and decide not to be homeless, they can't do anything to act on the decision because they have fallen too far down in the pecking order to have any power over their circumstances. For the homeless man, the whole carefree 'King of the Road' fantasy is the only thing they can call upon to whitewash the truth — and that is, that they can no longer afford the luxury of caring about them selves or what happens to them — and they erase any possibility of caring for, or about, anything or anyone else.

Homelessness for the solitary male is less of an issue than it is for a woman or a mother with kids. Unsheltered females fall prey to all kinds of horror in the form of sexual exploitation, addiction, and abuse. They have to stop caring about them selves in order to survive. Who they are gets sacrificed to the extremity of their crisis and every choice is determined by what's expedient at the time — and what's expedient inevitably demands that they compromise them selves in ways that no one wants to think about.

(Above: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Click on the picture to enlarge.)

For a woman with kids it's easier to get assistance without having to sell body and soul for it — but Welfare is a Catch 22 that isn't designed to provide any real solution to the problem. To qualify for benefits women on Welfare are now required to work 20 hours a week at a minimum wage job. What they earn is barely enough to pay for day care. The forced labor in no way improves their lot and they're well aware of this — but they have kids to think about so they go along with the joke. It's a trade-off that buys them permission to receive Food Stamps, sets them up with a little shelter, and allows them to subsist. Keeping one's head above water is the main preoccupation when you're on Welfare — and this leaves no time or energy to think about anything but how to make something out of nothing.

Defining Shelter

When we hear the word 'shelter' we think of having a safe place to live. Without physical shelter we are in danger of exposure to the elements, our lives are at risk, and every day becomes a matter of survival. The mind keeps all of its attention on what it will take to stay alive and hasn't got the freedom to develop it self for any other purpose. With rare exception the same holds true for those who have graduated from homelessness to Welfare. The housing project may keep them out of the cold, but that's about it — unless you call rubbing two-cents together having a life.

Homeless people can't afford to dream or even consider what their true purpose might be. They can't think about what they want or who they are in the scheme of things because their survival depends on not wanting anything or being anyone. Acclimating them selves to that, their inner potential and their true gifts atrophy long before they have a chance to discover what those things are.

On paper it looks like Welfare is set up to foster more than just the basic human needs, but it doesn't. If the people who run the government are proud of how good the system works, or feel altruistic about 'how much they are doing for the poor', they should all be required to live on Welfare for a year before they say one more thing about it. Like I said earlier, public assistance may put a roof over your head — but the mind and the Spirit rarely get to shine in the projects. The cracker-box housing and the drugs and the violence are depressing at best. Giving someone a cubicle to live in does nothing to shelter a persons' inner life — all it does is keep them under control.

Think of all the genius and creativity that gets wiped out because there isn't any shelter for it. Think of all the light that can't shine because the only thing it's allowed to do is exist. Physical shelter is one thing, but what about emotional and spiritual shelter? What about sheltering human potential? A 'safe place to live' has much broader implications than just keeping our bodies out of the cold. All of our needs have to be protected and sheltered in a safe environment in order for humanity to evolve and grow.

Body and Soul

There's plenty of evidence to prove that there's a darker agenda behind all of this — but instead of going there, let's keep it simple. Somewhere along the line we lost sight of the fact that human beings are more than just their bodies. We have been entrained to forget that we are all beings of light and that each one of us is blessed with a purpose. Our hearts, and thoughts, and talents, and aspirations form the greater part of who we are. It seems strange to me that our understanding of the word shelter is limited to the idea that the physical body is the only portion of our being that requires it. This denial of Spirit and the myopic refusal to shelter the subtler aspects of human nature has engendered a form of collective amnesia that has caused us to forget who we are — and this has put all of us, and Mother Earth her self, in grave danger.

The Bottom Line

Half the children in the world live in poverty, without access to safe water and without adequate shelter. More than one third of the Earths' total population is homeless and starving. Those statistics do not include the Welfare or the 'working poor', but given what we've discussed so far, it seems reasonable to include them here too. All of these people have been denied any opportunity to connect with their gifts, their inner hopes and dreams, or their spiritual purpose.

For the ones who form the basis for the statistics, there is not even a glimmer of hope. What their suffering involves is so far beyond our comprehension we can't even begin to think about it without wondering where God went. But if we don't think about it we become accessories to an even greater crime — because at this point the poverty epidemic has infected Mother Earth in ways that endanger all of us.

The Earth is a living organism. All of life is part of her body and every human heart is one of her nerve endings. Each one of those hearts was intended to be a channel for light. The link between Great Spirit and the Great Mother has everything to do with us — because it's within the human heart that the two come together. When over three billion people are no longer able to enlighten the Earth with their presence, it cuts the entire planet off. This absence of light not only makes it impossible for her to breathe, it sucks the life out of her vital fluids, and the derangement of her nerve endings drives her insane. No wonder the planet appears to be terminally ill.

The poverty issue is the biggest problem in the world right now. The terror of the situation may be more apparent to those who live in it, but if our comforts and our preoccupation with daily life mask the impact that it has on the rest of us, we need to open our eyes and recognize that it is as much our problem as it is theirs. Those of us who feel moved by the desire to heal the planet need to know that we cannot expect to do anything about that until we heal poverty.

The problem is so huge it becomes difficult to know where to start. And it has been rendered more horrendous by governmental policies that do nothing but make the situation worse. At the nuts and bolts level, addressing the poverty epidemic begins with finding ways to provide adequate shelter for those who don't have it. If we are able to start by giving people a safe place to live we can move on from there and think about how to educate them, teach them about sustainability, and loan them the bootstraps they need to bring body and soul back to life. Shelter by it self is not enough — but a safe place to live, a safe place to restore a sense of peace within a family, a safe place to rest and find a bit of quiet and perhaps begin to feel and reconnect with Spirit — this is where healing the poverty crisis has to start.

There are many alternative building technologies out there now, some of which have the capacity to put up 100 sustainable dwellings a day, at little or no cost. The people behind these technologies are motivated not by money but by a desire to restore peace and harmony to the planet. Their work has already begun in different parts of the world and it has changed the face of poverty in those areas.

The powers that be have shown no interest in any of these methods. That could change and there are signs that it might. Past experience with government involvement has proved to be of little value, however, because the fox is watching the hen house here — and the vested interests that run the world not only profit from human suffering, they are at this point so Hell bent on 'thinning out the herd' it would be stupid to think that they would use these technologies to benefit the people they are trying to exterminate. Trusting the fox to take care of things is never a wise idea.

Since there is more power for positive change in the grass roots than there is, was, or ever will be at the top of the heap, these alternative building projects need to be brought to the attention of the public, because 'We the People' are the ones who care. And if we care enough, the good folks behind these efforts could be supported and funded by those who wish to make a difference in the world and are in a position to help. When and if that happens on a global level, we stand a chance of turning on all the light that has been snuffed out by this awful disease — and with any luck, if it's not too late, we will be able to heal the hearts of the people and restore health to the planet as well.

What Can We Do To Help?

Knowing that the poverty crisis is directly related to the environmental crisis might prompt some of us to think about what the future will hold if we continue to pretend that this nightmare is separate from us. The fortunate ones, who have the luxury of choosing where they live and how they live, and those in the construction business, might consider sustainable shelter options instead of employing building methods and resorting to power sources that suck the life out of the planet. You see, one piece of the poverty puzzle has to do with what we have deprived the Earth of in the way of resources. Moving off the grid isn't just good for us, it's good for the Great Mother as well — and anything we do to help her will help everyone.

It is unrealistic to think that too many of us could walk out of our lives and run off to build shelters for the homeless. And everyone who cares may not have the resources to fund the shelter projects that are out there. Those of us who can do either of those things, may feel called to — and God bless you if you're one of them — but those of us who can't have just as much and perhaps more to offer in the way of help.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter — when you get to the place where you understand that you create your own reality, you have to take the good with the bad and be able to own all of it. The poverty epidemic is one of our creations. We can't shake our heads and say, 'I feel terrible about it, but there's nothing I can do to change it', or hide behind any notion that lets us off the hook. We're all God here — and it would be better for everyone who sees it that way to start living that truth 100%, instead of covering their eyes whenever they get to the scarier parts of the 'movie'.

For the past four weeks, as I've worked to prepare for this issue, I have thought about nothing but poverty and homelessness. Three days before the deadline a friend sent me Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the young Sudanese girl and the vulture. (on the left) Out of everything I researched and read, that image totally destroyed me. The only way I could deal with the feelings it stirred was to go into my heart to find out what part of me created that horror. In doing so I have seen that there is a homeless, emaciated child inside each one of us. There is also a vulture. Because I am lucky enough to know that from the heart we can create and recreate anything, I went as far as I could go with that darkness and did my best to experience and transmute it. Behind all the horror I found shelter and light. And I brought the souls of all the people who live without those things into that place of safety and radiance.

I use the photograph to remind me to do this every day — and my hope is that if what comes out of all the words that I've written inspires you to do the same, maybe from within we will discover that we do have the power to change the world.