dailybread.earth

In the Netherlands, there is a town called Gheel, or Geel, where there is a tradition of housing people suffering mental illness with the residents of the town. This has been done for hundreds of years. In the town, there was a mental hospital that would regularly “overflow”. When it did, those unfortunates did not end up on the streets, but were taken into loving homes. This goes on to this day. Those persons are then known as “boarders” to everyone in the town.

The fact that people with mental illness are living with relatively non-judgmental (formerly) strangers and not with family members has been cited as a partial explanation of the success of this model, because it creates an environment that avoids emotional over-involvement, critical comments, and hostility (measured collectively in psychiatry as "expressed emotion"). Another aspect cited as helpful is that people with mental illness are allowed to live their lives relatively freely, without being labeled as "broken" or "in recovery". (wikipedia.org)

How to live in hope again.

The main and defining problem at the root of homelessness is, I feel, unresolved trauma. Very often this is the result of early childhood experiences. People who grow up in bad or highly challenging environments and situations are mostly disproportionately predisposed to the challenges of mental troubles and financial weakness as a result. They are unable to adjust to the demands of present day societal pressures in general. They lack the confidence and the social acumen necessary to navigate interpersonal relationships, at work and at home. Finding themselves at the bottom of the “dominance hierarchy” they languish under burdens of negative mental health symptoms. Many or perhaps even most may be often wrongly diagnosed as suffering from chronic depression or other maladies, when they simply have no perspective for success in life.

The main reason that homelessness is so difficult to tackle is that the situation of the homeless itself produces fresh doses of daily/nightly trauma, which are then heaped upon the existing traumatic injuries. Not only is a person unable to heal the previous traumas, but the injuries are continuing and increasing the weight of the burden on the human system. When a person is not able to regularly eat, sleep and care for the body, that is a very heavy issue, which requires superhuman efforts to manage for a person who becomes increasingly isolated. Life becomes an unending cycle of perpetual injury.

There are two things that will destroy a man: confusion and isolation. These two work together and are dependent each upon the other. If one is not there, the other cannot remain. So, the problem stands on two legs. If you destroy the isolation, confusion has to dissipate. If you get rid of the confusion, the isolation will cease.

When we cease to isolate, we can reach out to each other. We can talk, openly, and we can learn new things. Very quickly we begin to figure things out. They always say that two heads are better than one. And I think that multiple heads are even better. Three are better than two; four are better than three, and so on. Hence, when we are actively connected to each other, when we are allowed or encouraged to be open to each other and learn from each other, we are less and less confused. AND…When confusion has been conquered, when we are no longer running around like chickens with no heads, we know immediately and instinctively, and in virtually every situation, EXACTLY WHAT TO DO. And so, knowing, we act. We become natural geniuses in every situation at every moment. In so becoming, we develop confidence in ourselves.

There is so much talk about animals going extinct, trees becoming rare and disappearing, difficulties for so many species to survive in today’s world. I feel always the pain of the earth. And I feel of course also my personal pain; and one day recently I just thought, is man an endangered species? Homo Sapiens is supposed to mean “wise man”. Some popular mainstream narratives to the contrary, I do believe that there is a truly natural wisdom of each lived experience of a man or a woman. But, it has to be valued, appreciated, counted as worthy. Each person has to do that for themself. If we all can learn to appreciate our own natural wisdom, instead of buying into doomsday scenarios, I believe there is great hope.

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a unique project

The problem of homelessness is wrapped up within several other problems. But let me start again. Let’s just call all these things challenges. Or challenges, we could say are in actuality opportunities. So, we have this one opportunity and it is called homelessness.

This homelessness can be associated with mental disease and often with substance abuse and other anti-social tendencies, but it does not have to be. It can be simply that economic circumstances become so unfavorable that marginalized members of society end up suddenly on the streets.

Now, when mentioning mental problems, in this sense, let us call mental disease “mental disorder“. I mean this in the sense of things being out of order, or not appearing in their natural sequence only, and not in the sense of being broken. Now, let us release this issue from the stigma of negativity or hopelessness and simply attempt to put the mind in order.

Starting over again… mental illness is not ill-ness, not the condition of being ill in the sense of any stigma. There is nothing “wrong” with someone who is mentally dis-ordered any more than a person who is ill or ill at ease (dis-eased) in the body-only is “wrong” or bad. In our society as a whole there is great fear around these conditions (and again, these are opportunities)… simply because we have swallowed the narratives that have been pushed through on the surface. This is what I know to be true after many decades of searching for answers to my own dilemmas.

We all know that the world is in a very volatile state at this moment, that for decades, for centuries even, things have been building up towards a “moment of truth” where there shall come a shift of consciousness, a shift of being in the world that shall lead to peace on earth (good will towards men). Others may say that man will become extinct. But I believe in the crisis as an opportunity only. The way I see it is that the dis-ease in society is directly reflected in the individual and that the more we try to push it away, the more “in our face” it becomes.

I’m sitting here and trying to write this material. There is a jumble in the mind. I struggle with the feelings of worthlessness, anxiety and self-doubt that I have absorbed from society. But then I come back to my real Self. Those are the things that were implanted in the mind during my journey. The breath connects me back to the Self. What I want to declare without any apology to the world is that we are treasures. All of us are treasures, but those of us who have gone down this path, who have taken on the suffering of the whole earth in our bodies, we are most certainly great treasures.

If we put our heads together with the intention of opening our hearts to each other, we can do anything.

So, let me discuss again the opportunity of homelessness. It’s hard to describe something when our language has been and is being manipulated now on a minute by minute basis to reflect narratives that are not designed to help us reach the truth.

There is a thing called NIMBY, not in my back yard. But now what we need IS a back yard, any kind of yard. We need a place to work out this play. It is a play. It is an opportunity, a great possibility. And we need to make room for that now. The thing about defining these opportunities as problems, per se, is that one simply is insisting that they “go away” without one’s having come to any reckoning with the situation.

Let us make the analogy of an illness, but again, without any stigma. Homelessness is the symptom. And in that sense, it can be genuinely characterized as an opportunity. If we pay attention to WHAT IT IS THAT ANY GIVEN DYNAMIC, BE IT HOMELESSNESS, MENTAL ILLNESS, VIOLENCE ETC. IS TRYING TO TELL US, we will be able to respond appropriately and “heal” the “dis-ease”.

There is no “solution” to homelessness. It is not something to attack. We do not need to make war on it. It is and will continue to be a hopeless situation as long as we look at it as a problem. When we begin to look at homelessness as not a problem, but as a GRAND OPPORTUNITY to transform the earth and ourselves and our life here, it becomes simply a symptom, an alarm bell or a wake-up call so to speak. If the doorbell rings, we can answer the door and maybe receive a package. If our phone rings, we can connect with someone who will help us along our path. We have every hope of transforming our lives, in an individual and collective sense, if we can look at every so-called discouraging situation as a great possibility.

If we begin to shift our perspective about our lives on this earth in this way, if we shift a negative idea into a positive space, we will be able to survive as a species and the earth and all creatures will benefit.

Right now there is a war on the homeless. And that is to be expected. We describe this in a negative way and therefore the best “solution” is like all “solutions” like the “final solution” and that is to quash it, eliminate it, get rid of it. NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard). But the earth and collective humanity has produced this situation in order to help us overcome the root “problems”. I don’t even want to say that they are problems, but that is how they are being characterized. And we are being made to feel that there are no answers. But I want to say that it is simply another step along the way in the “evolution” of life on earth towards something grand, something enlightened and divine. These are all not problems but simply poorly organized areas of our lives. Priorities need to shift. In other words, we have an unparalleled opportunity to transform life on earth at this time.

The way to go about approaching the situation of the mentally ill, marginalized and homeless, is to realize that it is a great gift that there are people who are here in order to help the earth at this particular time. These people, though apparently marginalized, though apparently financially weak, though apparently mentally challenged, are in fact the strongest amongst us. They have the capacity to live, to keep on living, even when they have lost almost all hope, even when others have written them off. It is not any wonder that so many turn to drugs, alcohol and other behaviors to help them cope with the pain of this social rejection and isolation.

One way to look at it is to realize that there are a great many people in the society, who have turned away, who have not been able to carry this pain, or to deal with it, and that some souls have come to help the collective humanity by taking on this pain and carrying it within themselves, and to work it through in the process of their experiences in their day to day lives.

I realize that the following may seem bizarre to some. Still I do not hesitate to say it. Homeless people, people who abuse drugs and alcohol have been marginalized, criminalized, demonized and vilified as if the problem is strictly their own fault in isolation from other societal, political, financial factors. It’s like saying, if the bees are dying, it’s their own fault for flying around here in our territory, for wanting to pollinate our crops. But in fact the earth has been polluted and the system, particularly the agricultural system, has been corrupted, and that has caused the problem of bee populations dying off. In the very same way, the system has caused homelessness, mental illness, disease, etc.

However, until and unless we can embrace the above feeling that the “problems” that we face are indeed our greatest opportunities, our salvation even, we will remain stuck. So let’s just stop trying to place blame. If we try to place the blame, we are always caught in the perpetrator/victim mentality. It’s like blaming the victims of war for their dilemma, blaming sexual abuse victims, rape victims for their abuse. That actually just shows the absurdity of the blame game.

If we are honest with each other, we all know that assigning blame is not the way to “solve” any problem. The most we can hope for from such a pronouncement of guilt is that it helps us feel superior to the apparent victims and removes from us any locus or motivation to try and find the root. Through assigning guilt, we have removed ourselves from the issue and have rendered ourselves impotent. Assigning blame is always a backwards movement. No, it is incumbent upon each of us to search within ourselves and find out where we can change our focus, where we can shift our consciousness, in order to become fit for transformation. For, transformation is the reason for all this uproar.

I am not a believer in the theory of Darwinian evolution, survival of the fittest and so on and so forth. But in a way I can say, that yes, only the fittest will survive. But that is not to say that the fittest are the most aggressive, the most forceful and coercive element of our culture. Our mental being swings between being caught up in aggressive attitudes and relaxing into a more heart-centered, contemplative and gentle focus. All this language is so difficult, because negativity has been in the forefront for so long. Now I would like to promulgate a transformation through revealing to you a word painting of my vision.

The first thing to understand about the situation is that it is not broken and does not need to be fixed. Nothing is broken here. Things simply need to be reorganized. Mainly, priorities need to be shifted. People need to be in the forefront of priorities. Helping and supporting each other. If we help people, we are helping ourselves and the whole earth.

And, this reorganization needs a space. A space has to be created in order to build the foundation of a healed world. First, the space has to be created within each of us. Then, the space has to be somewhere here on the ground.

I have found a space. And this space is most certainly Not in Your Back Yard. It is away from the city, and away from the nearest town also. It is out in the country. There are no services there. There is currently no water, no septic and no electric hookup. It is raw land, a large tract of many acres. It is beautiful, raw property. In a word, it is remote. Since it is hilly and rocky, it is not suited for agricultural development on any large scale. No one seems to want to build there. But for homesteading, for camping, as a nature preserve and retreat it appears to be absolutely suitable.

the plan

the backstory