You’ll See What You Do

In mid-September I flew to NYC and spent one night at Leo House. The next day, I had about four hours free between when I had to leave Leo House and when the retreat began, so I walked over to the Hudson River and made my way slowly, slowly south and then inland again.

Here is the paper I wrote about my retreat for school. I could have written fifty times this amount.

What I Thought Was Going to Happen
Several months before the retreat began—as one of the co-leaders observed, the retreat starts the moment you sign up—I listed my worries:
•    Having to pee outdoors. (I was not worried about having to poop outdoors, because I was planning to suffer a ruptured colon rather than do this.)
•    Having a rat walk on me during the night.
•    Having my suitcase not be wherever I had ended up leaving it when I returned to retrieve it.

I was also kind of worried about going four days without brushing my teeth or flossing, I expected to be in intractable physical pain after skipping my daily exercises, and I assumed that all items of clothing would be so filthy as to have to be thrown out, along with the blanket acquired for the retreat.

I had secretly planned to cheat and to bring plenty of handkerchiefs tucked here and there, and also the lip balm I use ten times a day, but in the end, I did not bring either. (Having received a diagnosis of arthritis in both knees a week earlier, I did bring a lacrosse ball, and that was invaluable for loosening up corporeal tight spots.)

The first night we slept on the sidewalk, I was at one end of a row of retreatants. It occurred to me that I was a bit vulnerable in this position: what if someone were to come along and kick me in the face? I wished I were one of the interior people, but it seemed that it would not be very gentlemanly to ask R. to take the outside position so that I would be less likely to be kicked in the face.

What Did Happen
None of the things I worried about happened. I was never kicked in the face. Thanks to the lawsuit against Starbucks, and thanks to the ubiquity of Starbucks and Whole Foods, I never had to pee outside. A rat did not walk on me during the night; I never saw a rat. (When I asked co-leader J. what I would do if this happened, he thought for a moment and said, “You’ll see what you do.”) One of the retreatants let us put our valuables, along with my suitcase, in her apartment overlooking Washington Square Park, where we met on the first day (six women and six men), and it was still there after the retreat!

I even got to brush my teeth, usually without toothpaste and never with flossing. Our first evening, we had dinner at the Bowery Mission, and when I asked the fellow at the front desk if he had a toothbrush, he gave me one. I would have gone right into the restroom to use it, but someone said that the restroom had been smeared with feces.

I had scheduled, for immediately after the retreat, a visit to my dentist, a massage, a visit to my chiropractor, and a facial. None of these was needed. I was not in pain, my pores were not cemented shut, my teeth were not coated with rock-hard scum, nothing was so filthy that it had to be thrown out (though I did give away the fleece blanket, because if I ever do this again, it will be in a sleeping bag).

Retreat Humor
Before one afternoon council, co-leader J. asked how long we should sit.

Bugwalk: 45 minutes.

R: 50!

J: Until the sun goes down.

Bugwalk: Until the sun comes up.

R: Full sesshin!

What I Learned / Associated Insights
When it comes to sleeping outside, the more cardboard, the better, and it’s best to overlap the pieces than simply to place them alongside each other, but be careful about where the overlaps are; that little ridge can produce a surprising amount of discomfort. Our first night outside, it seemed as if I changed position every three minutes, as any configuration immediately produced pain in one area or another.

A fleece blanket does nothing to keep out wind. On top of experiencing pain in one part of my body or another all night long, I was freezing cold and envied those who had thought to bring a sleeping bag, though I could also see that others were also feeling miserable; one yogi kept giving up on lying down at all and just sat up, with a barricade of cardboard arranged around her. The faint blue light signaling morning seemed years away, yet came surprisingly soon, and was very gratefully received. (“Thank God!”)

I did not ever notice the lack of lip balm, and the need for something to blow my nose on was easily met by taking some extra toilet paper each time I visited a bathroom; thus the pocket of my backpack ended up stuffed with wads of toilet paper, more than I needed.

The Bowery Mission forces you either to sit through a religious service before you eat, or to go to the back of the line. Either way, the whole thing takes the better part of two hours, so that by the time you’ve had breakfast, it’s time to start finding lunch, and by the time you’ve had lunch, it’s time to start finding dinner, and then it’s time to look for cardboard and a safe place to sleep. Given that it takes nearly the entire day just to eat and drink and eliminate what one has eaten and drunk, the gulf between getting the most basic needs met and, say, showing up clean and neatly attired for a job interview or training program interview seems dauntingly, heartbreakingly vast. (Also, where would you leave your stuff while you were doing this?)

People are incredibly kind. As we slept on the front steps of a church at 51st and Park Avenue one night—I actually got a pretty good night’s sleep there, under the glaring lights and amid the unbelievable racket, including protesters with megaphones assuring all within earshot that they love Sisi and love the Egyptian Army; the hotel for the United Nations General Assembly dignitaries was just a block away—three or four African American men appeared with large bags stuffed with all kinds of goodies. I’m crying as I recall them saying, as they left these dazzling gifts, “Be safe. Please be safe.” The reusable bags contained clean socks, deodorant, toothbrushes, toothpaste, a piece of paper listing places offering free meals, lots of food, tissues, fragrance-free wipes, hand sanitizer.

I stayed on for several nights after the retreat, at Leo House, where I observed, on the one hand, the incredible luxury of having a clean bathroom and bed and upholstered chair indoors and all to myself. And I also noticed that in each moment, there was simply what was seen, what was smelled, what was physically felt, what was thought, etc. It was safer, cleaner and more comfortable. It was great, but it wasn’t sudden and permanent bliss; it was just what it was. It was also a little lonely, after several days of doing nearly everything in a group of 12. Suddenly I only had to count to one to account for the whole group.

B.
I think B. deserves a section of his own. A person with 35 years of experience being homeless in Manhattan and elsewhere, he joined us during our opening circle and stayed for the whole retreat, crying out a loud “ooh-OOH!” to get our attention when needed. (A couple of others in the group took up the same practice.) He was an invaluable source of information about many things, including where and when to find cardboard and what to do with it the next day. His feet were visibly misshapen, and he told us that walking was painful for him. It was touching to me that he was desirous enough of our company that he was willing to walk miles and miles on those twisted-up feet, not without periodic complaints that we were walking too fast, and also, that we were not very good at choosing efficient routes. He also threatened / promised to leave us a time or two, but allowed himself to be dissuaded. (Co-leader J., kindly: “What do you need from us?”)

I perceived that B. was often in need of a listener. At almost every moment of making our way around Manhattan, B. was far in the rear with one other person, a kindly and patient listener; co-leader P. did this for hours. B.’s conversation did not end when silence began each evening, after the dedication of merit, either. Our first night outside, on top of being physically uncomfortable and also freezing, I was kept awake by B.’s 90-minute conversation with a friend of his who had happened along. I was furious the next morning, and had a word with him about it, which he received very gracefully. (However, a night or two later, he kept me up again, this time chatting with a person he later told us was Trump’s cousin’s chauffeur / bodyguard.)

Co-leader J., not having the luxury of an hour for a nightly dharma talk, did a fine job of guiding us via short bits of instruction here and there. On the morning of our second full day of retreat, he said the sense of not knowing might be wearing off a little bit and that we might need to make a conscious effort to cultivate this, for instance by not getting into long conversations with our fellow yogis about our non-retreat lives. He also said, “There’s no right and wrong decisions. It’s just coming and going. We learn from everything.” He described an exchange between a student and Bernie Glassman, who originated the Zen Peacemaker Order street retreats, about panhandling, where the student said something like, “I don’t want to panhandle! I’m not homeless. I feel weird taking money from people who think I’m homeless when I’m not.” To this, Bernie said something like, “Where is your home right now? Is it here? Are you one hundred percent positive you’ll see it again?”

The end of the retreat was extraordinarily emotional for me. At our final council, I cried as I shared that I was born wanting to know what was going to happen next: Where are we going? When are we going to come back? Who is going to be there? When I was a child, I believed that knowing meant I was loved and seen, but now I see that maybe it is just the opposite: maybe having to have a tight grasp on—what’s the word?—everything cuts off energy, love, relationships.

As several of us headed off to retrieve our stuff, I watched B. walk off into the park and began to cry again. I sobbed, in fact, and tears arose several more times in the course of the next hour or so and even in the coming days. B. was a huge presence in our group, vivid and real, at moments very helpful and at other moments definitely irritating. By the end of the retreat, he also had a pretty strong urine smell per a mishap outside the scope of this account. As he limped into the park, I realized that, in a way, I was watching him turn from somebody into nobody: to those now seeing him, he was just another old, evidently homeless black guy who smelled like pee. It was incredibly painful. (And it was also rather romantic and condescending on my part, as I realized later. In fact, the genuine toxicity of racism aside, B. and I are equally somebody and nobody—loved by some, disliked by others, not noticed one way or the other by most.)

Applications to Chaplaincy
Things are no less or more certain now that the retreat is over. It’s just that on retreat, I was more aware that I didn’t know what was going to happen, which made even rather ordinary things seem miraculous and surprising: I’m sitting right near a children’s playground! I didn’t know that was going to happen! It is a substantial gift to realize that I still don’t know what’s going to happen, now that I am back home, and never did, including with each patient I visit.

Epilogue
Exactly two weeks after our final night on the sidewalk, a homeless man just a 25-minute walk away was bludgeoned to death as he slept, along with three others in other locations in Chinatown; a fifth victim went to the hospital with critical injuries. Having slept so near that spot made this horrible act of cruelty even most disturbing. Possibly the victims were at the Bowery Mission for a meal when we were there for the same reason. Possibly we might even have recognized their faces.