In the heart of our city and despite all the odds, the sun still rises for the lucky. Towers with vertically petaled stories and steel stalks reach like giant Yucca in the partial bloom of randomly lit windows. Just below them lie the lanceolate leaves of streets and sidewalks where traffic moves like tiny ants across their surfaces and around the monument through the grinding wheel of this city of circles. Much like waking up in the valley beneath a ridge of very high and desperate mountains, it takes additional time for the daylight to fully reach beyond the prominence of tall buildings and as a result, cool shadows will fill the alleys and parking garages where night will linger through the day and never completely leave. With measured consistency the days progress as soundless light bounces from glass boxes in shiny orange, purple and gold-hued windows encased by the dull gunmetal gray refractions of illumination humming imperceptibly with the radiant heat of our single transient star. Downtown, the warmth always reaches the tall rises first before it hits the streets far below. These buildings throw lots of shadows and sometimes when I miss the quiet peacefulness of the forest and trees, I’ll close my eyes for a few seconds and imagine I’m back under the familiar old cottonwoods at Fort Harrison or far out west beneath the shadowy grove of Giant Sequoias.
Mankind and its measured aesthetics for the natural has not fully abandoned plant-kind here and sound reasoning has allowed the earth to respirate selectively in the city through landscaped flower beds and around the pinched lungs of ornamental trees and up through the rectangular nostrils of manicured turfs that parallel select sidewalks. Miraculously, vegetation thrives in these areas out of the alien mulch of plastic trash, urine, cigarette butts, fast food wrappers, hypodermic needles, crack pipes, vomit, torch lighters, blunt wrappers, 12-gauge shotgun shells, feces, liquor bottles, beer cans, 9mm luger casings and recently spilled human blood.
Each morning, I walk into the south entrance of the City-County Building and assess the nightly damage to the plaza, the Marion County Jail, and Old City hall just north on Alabama Street and beyond the Old City Market; the grounds and landscape which were somewhat recently placed under my keep. I work with two other fellers that I was chosen to lead who have been here a few months more than me and although I have training and experience with plants, trees and landscaping to share, they both possess very valuable knowledge of these streets and the territory and the people who reside here in which I’m often looking to them for the guidance. The job is not glamorous but working for the city is well known to be a good job to have in most cases. In wrathful moments, under the open sky scraped angry by steel and stone structure, this can be a perilous place to work, but we look out for each other down here where the stakes of individual human lives and their fates run very high between the courts, the jail, the addictions, the unrest, the rage and violence, and the illnesses and the destitution many have found themselves planted into by circumstances that all the fingers in the world lack a sufficiency to correctly point complete blame at. When it comes to the cultivation and proliferation of misery, there isn’t a human being alive among us who doesn’t come gifted with a green thumb for growing more of it, and succession has transformed downtown into a forest of desperation in some areas. The same could said for the more noble qualities often buried deep and overshadowed within us all, but it’s here that we arrive at the first cross-roads of a timeless conundrum in the gardening of a life, full of the weeds and debris and adaptive mechanisms once meant to protect and defend, but often doing so much more harm and indelible damage. Anger, an adaptation to fiercely protect something loved becomes senseless in the inebriated state where an insult scratches the pride of a young man who’s never known how to love himself beyond the empty shell of an ego or value the miracle of his own life, so bullets fly and we walk up to more blood on the swings and the story of an Indygo employee taking a stray round overnight.
Vastly different realms of human experience surround all of us and in the city the density of this is very palpable if you allow yourself to become sensitive enough to detect it. It’s quite easy to be so grateful for everything when surrounded by those with almost nothing, but that feels to me like a life half-lived and with half a heart and that there is every possibility to go further down that route if one chooses to board the bus of understanding and wider capacities for empathy, where comparisons, judgements and ideas of seeing life through a fixed set of eyes must exit at various points along the way. Wavelengths of existence metaphorically vibrate at varied frequencies here and the low tones of suffering become background noise to tune out and desensitization results. No one is immune to human suffering and it is here that those energies manifest with such granitized consistency in the past few years that the displaced and forgotten become static fixtures lying as seemingly helpless human forms in slumbering clumps atop the concrete, along the sidewalks, in the doorways and beneath the bridges each morning. Some who live here, beneath the shadows of man’s progress have dwelled along the edge of proverbial cliffs their entire lives, stricken with a variety of mental illnesses made increasingly malignant by the very understandable though often tragic escape through the cold tunnel of a pipe, the dark hole of a pill, the tear of a needle or the plunge into anesthetic numbness with alcohol: the socially acceptable and often celebrated free fall with a paper bag parachute and a mere piece of cardboard to break the nightly fall back to the cold asphalt. Many were born with an inherent disadvantage and propensity to these illnesses and few if any examples or role models, foundations of stability and resilience. So little is understood about the complicated biochemistry of neurotransmitters and the integration of trauma. Other people camping here have suffered unimaginable tragedies and losses out of which grew more pain and suffering, dividing below the surface of their being in the similar nature of many tubers, like irises, tulips, hyacinths and one of the most poetically fitting perennials rising from the stratum of this starkly genuine landscape; the daylily.
Those who work here among the homeless have found it necessary through recognition of these people as humans, to take an interest in some of their stories and in their humanity and in certain brief moments it’s possible to glimpse the blooms of incredibly genuine and very real people beneath those layers of hardships. We don’t pretend to have any answer on how to solve this problem. It’s so much more complex than can be imagined and the sources of these sufferings have deep tap roots that connect exponentially to issues that have plagued humanity time untold. The best we can do, is pick up the trash made worse by charity, power wash the blood after a shooting or stabbing and tend to the flowers, grass and trees so they have at least something of beauty to remind them of the possibility of hope and transformation. It’s what I tell myself at least so that I don’t become entrenched and numbed by the pitfall of generalization and stigma. Perhaps it’s a somewhat selfish attempt to comprehend the nature of what goes on around us but maybe some of us believe that all we can do to help is take an interest in their lives and listen. We see the same individuals and begin to worry and ask around when the ones who we’ve gotten to know aren’t around. The police and security often do the same down here and spend a lot of time talking with the same street folks. They have to make arrests too, when things get violent and people break the law, but I only see them trying to help.
We all do what little we can to look out for some of the homeless and they look out for us too. It’s a violent and desperate world, but beautiful things still occur despite it all and the daylilies still bloom here, despite every odd that such a thing should still exist. They bloom around the jail, around the city county building and they bloom at old town hall where by noon, a man rises from he cardboard and talks to the ghost of his departed wife every day in the alley, in whispers of love and gentle pleas for forgiveness but by 2pm he’ll be face down behind a pallet with an empty bottle to his side and a puddle of emesis inches from his face. Like all human lives, we only have so many blooms and each flower that opens from the scape exists for a mere day, before withering in the night and returning to the earth. Is it possible to become more deeply aware of momentary beauty because of its brevity and in the face of that honor all life without becoming disintegrated by void of loss or the pain of unimaginable hardship? Is it possible to love wisely and deeply as we recognize our existence is but a passing?
I’m writing these stories because I come home from work some days very moved, confused, bewildered and overwhelmed by what I see and hear and writing helps me to create a space to be with those feelings, completely conscious of them in an honest and real way and tend to them like a garden as they break through the surface. These stories and experiences herein often don’t tie up neatly. They might lack the parable-like style that I’ve always tried to write with so that I can make sense of the world as I see it, and in that way it’s a challenge and perhaps my eyes are ready to open wider. Things always fall apart in life and reality shows they don’t ever come back together again in the same way. That’s a very human realization that I’d like to share through the lives of people I’ve gotten to know. Their real names are withheld, which is easy because they are often not known by their given names, and whenever possible I’ve asked permission to share these glimpses into their humanity. These stories may be disturbing to some or even triggering to those going through recovery from addictions or the very human struggles of mental illness. Like me, some might even find a part of their own story knotted up in the lives of the downtrodden. Just like those of us who sleep in beds and beneath roofs, their lives bloom in a mysterious dance with the ephemeral that we all understand and come to know through the windows of brief glimpses before they’re gone; the daily flowerings of hope, resilience, humor, resourcefulness, atonement and an inevitable surrender to the night.
fartlosophies 