Homeless Retreat

“I slept in my shoes, because the first rule of living on the street — protect against their being stolen and in case we needed to run... The persistent roll of my scuffed Doc Martens atop the concrete, as I flipped and turned incessantly through the night, a disturbance of surprising magnitude in my subliminal mind. On that first day, we arrived without showering, shaving, or washing our hair for five days. My privilege walks with me, I would discover, whether my hair is greasy or my hygiene turned a little sour. But context, I would discover also, changes everything. Four hours into the retreat, I was receiving a plate full of food from a young woman who gazed at me in certain knowledge of and curious wonder at the fact of my homelessness...

A man rolled in incremental bits across the stone expanse in front of me. “I need to find a blanket…” I heard him say, as the entirety of his face threatened to curl into a whimper. His half-filled jeans’ legs flapped below the rim of his institution-issue, no-muss wheelchair. I felt hints of the desperation he voiced, barbs of panic pricking my flesh, as I stood in the open lot of UN Plaza beneath a slab of stone whose engraved words bespoke of an era of treaties, of hope, of some promise of a diverse world willing to listen.

Amputated above the knees, the stumps of both of his legs slid freely side to side as he willed weary arms, atop the rubber of his chair’s wheels, to push. The shifting terrain of the stone seemed visible in the ebb and flow of his arms that worked, but purely by adrenaline. I could hear his whimper as he threaded his weak way past me, then gazed with fear and pain at the stone corridor ahead of him, leading toward the Asian Art Museum, then toward City Hall beyond. Looking as if he might burst into tears at any second, I released him from my sight, as he turned up the long corridor. I listened to the water cascading down the tumbled stone of someone’s idea of a fountain, though used needles floated in its foam, and the moisture only seemed to make it colder.

Twenty minutes later, we departed for a nearby corner where we would wait for Food Not Bombs to appear with our dinner of donated sandwiches (though they never did come), and where we would sit in plainer view as we waited for the others, the night coming on. We trickled toward the corner in a spotty line, and I saw him again — his upper body swathed in a man-sized, clear plastic bag, the loose edges of its opening tucked in tight beneath his tiny butt and stumps, a shield against the blustering wind, his ashen face visible through the cellophane. He looked delirious in the delivered warmth, cognizant, by some clarity of madness, that the oxygen within this prize of an artificial blister was, already, growing thin.



At the corner of Market and 2nd Street, a man slumped against the fake pebbly-wall of the stairs down to BART. In front of him, his two friends, one with his finger pressed hard atop a spray-can knob so that, as he pushed, a steady liquid stream of spray filled the man’s air, flew straight up his nostrils, populated his mouth. His face flicked and jerked in a merging of terror, ecstacy, a welcomed madness. And all the time he was laughing in great guffaws, his legs straightening and retracting in erratic flicks atop the pavement. As I curled past him, I saw him grab for the nozzle himself, shove its stream of noxious fumes straight into the twitching realm of his being, his thumb pressed hard atop the nozzle, something in him wailing for it to take him higher. Feet away, in the trash bin’s drip of garbage — the clear plastic dome-lids of emptied mocha soy-milk talls, burger wrappers, threadbare shoes, Twix wrappers, ads from the paper, a rotted pair of underwear—two green and white aerosol cans (like the two he had beside him), already emptied and snugged-up against the trash bin — for tomorrow’s discard...

We made our council circle in the grass near the Contemporary Jewish Museum, off Mission Street, as twilight began to fall. Ten minutes in as we chanted, clacked, and sang, a man appeared behind Joshin’s head dancing and gesticulating on the museum’s marble patio within yards of Joshin’s head, seemingly, rushing toward him as he yelled. It was as if he were the embodiment of a hungry ghost himself, freed from our make-shift zendo’s rafters by our song, enacting a shadow ritual that threatened destruction. And yet, in the minutes that followed, just as ferociously as he had appeared, so he mysteriously disappeared...

Mornings, we would make that same journey down — most often meeting the same people from the night before, awake at the same interstitial hours, before the heart of the city started its enervating hum. An easy communion of intimacy formed in those minutes and hours, an awareness of one another in their individuality, a unity of intimacy that made the occasional query, “How was the night for you?” feel like an address from family...

Inevitably, we would congregate with so many others at the entrance to the Safeway at Market and Church Street. Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days-a-week, its morning stockers, janitorial staff, and door-security guards witness a river of homeless humanity respectfully streaming-in through its open doors — to wash their faces, to brush their teeth, to use the mirrors & the toilets in their customer bathrooms — in those hours while the city still sleeps. Who are these (invisible) bodhisattvas of the morning? — that not only witness the naked procession of our need through their doors at dawn but who, I’ve seen, are so willing to assist the most broken of us, in so many small ways, from the depths of their this is me hearts.”

~ Mary Cecile Gee has volunteered for more than 10 years at Upaya Being with Dying and the Chaplaincy Program. Her creative engagement encompasses (almost) three decades of practice as a writer & visual artist, and her work as a tutor to students with learning differences. She is in-training with the Sojourn Chaplaincy program at San Francisco General Hospital, close to where she lives and practices in (nearby) Oakland.

“The aspect of street retreat that impacted me most was being temporarily immersed in communities and cultures very different than the ones I’m used to. I now work in a mostly low-income black high school, and having not grown up in the community I work in, I often feel similarly about my experiences in school as I did about my experiences on street retreat. Mostly I feel moved and grateful to have contact with my students and their perspectives. I feel super lucky to have had the circumstances to be able to listen to and understand the perspectives of my students, and I felt the same about the people and circumstances I came into contact with on street retreat.

My spiritual practice is and always has been largely about relating to other people. When I think about how I reacted toward homeless people before, during, and after street retreat, I feel very fortunate to see that I am less uncomfortable and presumptive, and more willing and quick to openly engage and ask how I can be of assistance. At times I feel moved to tears when I think about my good luck to have gone on street retreat and accessed some experiential understanding of some extremely different ways of life than the ones I am used to. And then I remember a few of the people I met on the retreat, and think about the people in my daily life now, and feel very humbled by the lives lived all around me then and now: lives full of resiliency, goodwill, humility, peace, and all the stuff of existence.”

~ Jonathan Green, a former resident of Upaya, shared how a Street Retreat in Albuquerque, New Mexico shifted his perspective. People experiencing homelessness live alongside us, but are often not seen or understood. On Street Retreat, we plunge into an environment that is unfamiliar to most of us, encounter our biases and fixed ideas and endeavor to let them go.