Ripples

Yesterday, I listened to my intuition and it led me to someone that needed help. 

Much of San Diego’s homeless population hovers near my floral studio. Sad situations span the sidewalks nearby, but I tend to stay away, weary of my safety. But yesterday, from my car, I caught a glimpse of someone sprawled on the sidewalk and it didn’t sit right. So I turned around, parked my car and carefully stepped into the Streets. 

This woman, middle-aged, sundress and sunhat clad, seemed out of place. Her belongings were in decent shape and her big hat felt like vacation. She laid non-responsive in the misty rain while another local employee and I called the paramedics.

She eventually started blinking. 

Her first comment, mumbled and broken and uttered through tears, was an expression of gratitude: “thank you for caring.” Overwhelmed, she and I locked eyes as she said, “I really miss my daughter.” Tears rolled down her tired face as she looked up at me from the brutal, unyielding concrete. Her sundress rippled gently in the cold wind, just barely concealing her from the predators that lurked. Patches of burgundy nail polish covered bits of her fingernails; her nail beds packed with the grime of survival.

She wailed, like she was experiencing the separation from her baby girl for the first time all over again. “Jackie,” she howled into the dark sky, “Where are you? I need my daughter.”

Time stood still as my knees nearly buckled and my heartbeat rose into my eardrums. Sirens blared over a dim scene in tableau.

I stood by as the paramedics tended to her, wrapping up and strapping in her limbs like a bandage that would never, ever stop her bleeding. I stood by as the dark crater of human suffering opened within me and therein, her pain echoed. I stood by and watched the paramedics swaddle her in a tarp lined with handles, lifting her onto a gurney, as flashes of a pink baby mobile spun slowly above her.

Pain passed from generation, to generation.

Wrapped in soot and shame, this woman survived her war another day. But the opponent that almost took her battle to the bitter end is one that transcends medicine. Her opponent is no match for the paramedics. Her opponent is a pain deeply engrained in our shared consciousness, and it lives within each of us: the visceral experience of love lost, separateness, hopelessness, worthlessness. In every act of self-abandonment, we amplify the impacts of darkness. If we peer into the eyes of the broken soul, we can see ourselves. 

There’s something softening about that.

In the same vein, like all of us, she is also woven together by the power of love, light and healing. But sometimes our circumstances or caregivers at key points in our lives afford us fewer chances to master accessing our light. I imagined this woman’s mother cultivating self love, compassion and forgiveness — to the best of her ability — 50-something years ago, and I wondered if this woman would be in front of me on the concrete today.

Maybe so. And also, maybe not.

Every act of compassion, whether it’s felt internally or acted upon externally, turns up the volume of earth’s loving heartbeat a notch. Every attempt to heal ourselves has a ripple effect. I closed my eyes and placed my hands over my heart as a chilling wind blew up the gloomy graffiti-laden Street, pushing crinkling debris across red and blue flashes on the asphalt.

Heavy Silence.

Then as she cried out again, my tears rolled and my thoughts thundered:

May we each save ourselves, and in turn may we save our sons and daughters, may we save our friends and may we save our neighbors by beginning with the radical act of self-understanding, and by embodying the transcendent forgiveness that follows.

In healing lies the light. In the light, lies love. In love, lies our oneness — the radiant healer of our existence.