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Beautiful inside and out

Invisible

I gave a little start when those words flashed onto the screen during a presentation by the poet Elizabeth Bradfield. Liz was in the process of describing six-word stories, modeled on Hemingway’s heartbreaking For sale: Baby shoes. Never used. The photograph showed a wall from the 6 Words Minneapolis project, in which city residents were asked to briefly describe themselves. This entry spoke directly to an experience I’d been having of late but hadn’t quite been able to name.

Consider: I smile at a young couple who are walking with their baby out of the grocery store as I enter. Their eyes flit briefly over my face and body without expression.

Waiting in a loose group of people for service at a food truck—there doesn’t seem to be a line—the fellow taking orders looks straight at me and then asks the guy in back of me what he’d like.

I’ve been doing one of those intense, year-long spiritual programs, where meditating on a daily lesson will, I hope, bring me bit-by-bit closer to the divine. It’s been hard, really hard, but also amazing. I have 47 days to go.

Today’s lesson is “My heart is beating in the peace of God.” Sounds wonderful, right? Only problem is, my heart isn’t the least bit peaceful. Actually, it’s smokin’ angry. My husband and I had an exchange this morning. Let’s say it involved money. Let’s say one of us has been spending more than the other, and that it isn’t me.

“I need you to be a part of this community.”

More easily said than done, especially when the place in question is a poor neighborhood in Detroit.

I was spending the afternoon with the Reverend Faith Fowler, executive director of Cass Community Social Services (CCSS), a nonprofit organization that for many years has worked to transform a cluster of largely abandoned city blocks into a functioning community, an oasis of truly normal life in an urban center where a typical “normal” day may include sporadic gunfire.

What does it take to help people in our most blighted cities?

Imagine a winter night in northern Delaware, no wind, just quiet, with the snow-covered land sparkling in the glow from the stars. The temperature is in the teens—cold for the mid-Atlantic, but not unusual. Six young people are climbing a hill, a steep, open slope, struggling upward and sliding halfway down, laughing, helping each other up but also grabbing at coats to pull back those in front. Me, my three best girlfriends, and a couple of boys. We were 17.

I breathed in the cold, exhilarated, filled with a sense of wanting to be exactly where I was, brought alive by the snow, and the company, and the feel of belonging. I vowed I would always live somewhere with real winter. Cold was part of me. I was part of it.

Which is why, six years later, I was so utterly stunned to find myself huddled miserably beneath blankets in my bedroom in Oregon, unable to get warm.