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    Practicing Presence: Insights from the Streets
    Practicing Presence: Insights from the Streets
    Practicing Presence: Insights from the Streets
    Ebook161 pages1 hour

    Practicing Presence: Insights from the Streets

    By Phyllis Cole-Dai

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    About this ebook

    This is a companion volume to The Emptiness of Our Hands: 47 Days on the Streets but may be read independently.

    Deepen your understanding of the practice of being present while learning more about Phyllis’s time living by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. She wrote this blog series of forty-seven reflections in 2009 on the tenth anniversary of her 1999 streets experience. Each reflection is based on an excerpt from The Emptiness of Our Hands. Also included are photographs that until now have never appeared in print.

    Get a free sampler of Phyllis's work! Join her occasional mailing list at her website.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBell Sound Books
    Release dateFeb 23, 2018
    ISBN9781386994077
    Practicing Presence: Insights from the Streets
    Author

    Phyllis Cole-Dai

    Phyllis Cole-Dai began writing on an old manual typewriter in childhood and never stopped. Her work explores things that tend to divide us, such as class, ethnicity, religion and gender, so that we might wrestle our way into deeper understandings of one another.  Phyllis has authored or edited nine books in multiple genres, including historical fiction, memoir, and poetry. Her latest book is Beneath the Same Stars, a novel of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 (One Sky Press, 2018). With Ruby R. Wilson she co-edited the award-winning Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poetry (Grayson Books, 2017). Her memoir The Emptiness of Our Hands, co-authored with James Murray, chronicles 47 days that the two of them practiced “being present” while living by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio (3rd ed., Bell Sound Books, 2018). Phyllis now lives with her scientist-husband, teenage son, and two cats in a cozy 130-year-old house in Brookings, South Dakota. 

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      Book preview

      Practicing Presence - Phyllis Cole-Dai

      Practicing Presence:

      Before We Begin

      head and shoulders shot of Phyllis Cole-Dai

      Would you like a free sampler of my work?

      Join my mailing list and I’ll happily send you some of my music, poetry, spiritual nonfiction and historical fiction.

      Practicing Presence:

      Insights from the Streets

      Phyllis Cole-Dai

      Bell Sound Books

      To Irishman

      YK

      Contents

      Before We Begin

      Preface

      Introduction

      Fragment: Doors

      Fragment: Survivors

      Fragment: Ritual

      Fragment: Seconds

      Fragment: Indulgence

      Fragment: Romp

      Fragments: Squatting and Prospects

      Fragment: West Bank

      Fragment: Community

      Fragment: Carpetbagger

      Fragment: Please Seat Yourself

      Fragment: Preaching

      Fragment: Good Move

      Fragment: Specimen

      Fragment: The Professor

      Fragment: Beloved

      Fragment: Blue

      Fragment: Muster

      Fragment: Freedom

      Fragment: Shoe Swap

      Fragment: Bosom

      Fragment: Pain and Wonder

      Fragment: Trash

      Fragment: Sobering Up

      Fragment: Home Movie

      Fragment: Robin Hood

      Fragment: House Plans

      Fragment: Pick-Up Line

      Fragment: Kinship

      Fragment: Dust

      Fragment: Feast Day

      Fragment: Gravity

      Fragment: Answers

      Fragment: Zippers

      Fragment: Neanderthal

      Fragment: Missing

      Fragment: Dictatorship

      Fragment: Hostilities

      Fragment: Neutrality

      Fragment: Doomed

      Fragment: Fences

      Fragment: Custom

      Fragment: Goodbye

      Fragment: Staying (4)

      Fragment: Spikes

      Fragment: Fire

      Fragments: Sage and Silence

      In Black and White

      About the Author

      A Special Message from Phyllis

      Also by Phyllis Cole-Dai

      Preface

      From February 17 to April 4, 1999, James Murray and I lived by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, the fifteenth largest city in the United States. We went to the streets with a single intention: to be as present as possible to everyone we met, offering them sustained and nonjudgmental attention. Such attention is the heart of compassion.

      Those forty-seven days changed our lives forever.

      James and I would later chronicle our streets experiences in The Emptiness of Our Hands: 47 Days on the Streets, a meditative narrative accompanied by pinhole photographs. That book will thrust you out the door of your comfortable life, straight into the unknown. It will force you to confront what might happen to you, and who you might become, if suddenly you had no home.

      In 2009, to mark the tenth anniversary of our time on the streets, I wrote a series of blog posts reflecting on excerpts (or fragments) from The Emptiness of Our Hands. The series ran for forty-seven days, in keeping with actual events. I used it to elaborate further on the practice of being present, which had led me to the streets in the first place. I also hoped it would call attention to the 3.5 million Americans still experiencing homelessness every year and promote respect not only for their rights but their humanity.

      This book is a lightly edited compilation of those tenth-anniversary meditations. It also includes photographs that until now have never appeared in print. Though dating from 2009, its contents remain as relevant as ever. More than half a million Americans are without homes on any given night. Under the policies of the current presidential administration, that number is almost guaranteed to grow, as the income gap between the wealthiest and poorest Americans continues to widen. And the prevailing cultural climate, so polarized and full of spite, will only perpetuate the epidemic of violence against homeless individuals across the nation.

      James and I intend to resist the ugly cultural forces now in ascendance however we can. That’s why we’ve chosen to issue a new edition of The Emptiness of Our Hands and to distribute my tenth-anniversary series as a companion text.

      Practicing Presence contains forty-seven brief chapters, one for each day that James and I were on the streets. While you can benefit from reading them on their own, I recommend digesting them in the company of The Emptiness of Our Hands since they’re based on fragments of that text. You might wish to read only one chapter per day, so you can absorb and reflect.

      If you happen to be Christian, you might consider using this book and The Emptiness of Our Hands as companion resources during Lent and Holy Week, which served as a backdrop for our time on the streets. But you don’t need to be a Christian to take this stumbling journey into the practice of presence. Just allow these forty-seven days to be for you what they were for us: a deep embrace of core values that human beings around the world have held in common for millennia. These values might best be articulated as questions:

      How do we treat others as we would have them treat us?

      How do we love our neighbors, including those who seem alien and other?

      How do we extend hospitality to strangers, allowing them an honored place among us?

      These age-old questions have no simple answers. We must seek to answer them daily with our lives.

      Practicing presence helps me do that. To practice presence is to consistently offer my full and compassionate attention to whomever I’m with and whatever’s happening, without judgment. This practice has been central to my life for decades. Originally inspired by the example of Jesus, it has been guided by Buddhist teachings and shaped by wisdom from all directions. That doesn’t mean I’m very good at it. It just means I work hard at it, with joy, every day.

      The Catholic priest and author Henri Nouwen once penned an apt description of practicing presence:

      When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. (Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life, emphasis added)

      As Nouwen recognizes, when we’re present to others we’re willing to meet them where they are instead of trying to move them to where we are. We’re not forcing them to believe, to obey, to conform, to change. We’re not caught up in the need to fix, to rescue, to save. We’re just being there, strong in the power of our caring.

            This book is an invitation for you to join me in practicing presence. Moment by moment, let’s empty our hands of whatever holds us back from attending to one another—resentments, fears, assumptions, prejudices, distractions, desires. To paraphrase the poet W. S. Merwin, if we step out into life with empty hands, what we truly need and don’t have, we’ll find everywhere.

      Introduction

      (2009)

      I begin with gratitude. Gratitude for your presence as reader and the conversation we're opening today. Gratitude for a journey lived ten years ago that changed me forever. Gratitude for my friend James Murray, Irishman, who stumbled through it with me. Gratitude for my husband Jihong, who loved me all the way home again and helped me heal. Above all, gratitude for this precious life that you and I have been given, and the opportunities we’re daily provided to touch with gentleness the precious lives of others.

      From February 17 to April 4, 1999, James and I lived by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, the fifteenth largest city in the United States. We went to the streets with a single intention: to be as present as possible to everyone we met, offering them sustained and nonjudgmental attention. We eventually chronicled our streets experiences in The Emptiness of Our Hands: 47 Days on the Streets, a meditative narrative accompanied by pinhole photographs.

      This year, to mark the tenth anniversary of our season on the streets, I’m writing a series of forty-seven reflections based on excerpts (or fragments) from The Emptiness of Our Hands. I’ll use this series to elaborate further on the practice of being present, which led James and me to the streets in the first place. I also hope to call attention to the 3.5 million Americans still experiencing homelessness every year and promote respect not only for their rights but their humanity.

      Allow me to lay a basis for our discussion. To begin, let me share a few statistics, of which you might already be aware. Please store them up in your mind and heart.*

      Each year more than 3.5 million people experience homelessness in the United States. (That's about the same population as Los Angeles.)

      Their average age is seven years.

      A third of them are children.

      A quarter of them are veterans of the armed forces.

      40% are families with children, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population.

      Half of all homeless women and children are fleeing domestic abuse.

      [*Note from 2018: These statistics are from 2006. They’re the most recent data to which I had access when writing in 2009. I encourage you to consult the National Coalition for the Homeless or the National Alliance to End Homelessness for the most up-to-date numbers at the time of your reading.]

      Do any of these numbers startle you? How closely do they conform to your stereotypes of homeless people?

      Ten years ago, when James and I hit the streets, the national statistics on homelessness were distressing. Today, they're downright pitiful. Given the country's current economic crisis, they're not apt to improve anytime soon. In other words, we who care about homeless and impoverished people still have plenty of work to do.

      Now, what does it mean to practice presence? In broad strokes, here’s how I think of it: Practicing presence means keeping my mind and my heart where my body is, with an open and accepting spirit.

      To offer an example, as I'm sitting here writing to you, my thoughts and emotions are actually focused on my writing. I’m not at the same time mulling over what to fix my family for

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