The Beatles had it right

A couple of nights ago, I sat at one of the long folding tables in the main room at here at the Bridgehouse Homeless Shelter in Lompoc, California and talked with Abuelita Cassandra over a cup of coffee. Her bunk is on the women’s side, directly across from mine. She’s older, thick waisted with a bulbous nose, but has fiery eyes and sits with sharp upright posture. She’s hard of hearing, some days more profoundly than others. Cassandra’s snow-white, upturned bouffant makes her look like a painting of one of the founding fathers. 

This abuela was born and raised in Santa Barbara. Her papa was a gardener. The family’s house, she told me, was in a good neighborhood. It was large, two stories tall, with smooth polished floors and green trim around the doors and windows. There were dogs and cats and chickens. Cassandra had her own pet, a loudmouth goat who followed her around like a puppy. The goat died when she was eight years old. Her mother never told her how, or why. It was Cassandra’s first experience with life’s impermanence.

Abuelita Cassandra lost her mother six months ago. Shortly thereafter, her husband had a fatal heart attack. Then, a few weeks later, her son succumbed to an aggressive cancer. Cassandra got the news while in the hospital with a brain aneurysm that seems determined to move around and remains, today, a pressing concern (no pun intended.)

 “I’m here,” she told me, gesturing with fingers fat as stuffed grape leafs, “because I need to be around people. People who give a damn.”

This was a revelation. It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually volunteer to stay at a homeless shelter. It’s always seemed to me to be the end of the line, the last fragile bit of a safety net before a plunge into oblivion.

“The people you meet here,” said a young man, sitting down beside us and running a hand through his imperfect mohawk, “they get it. They understand the value of home. The value of family, you know? Out there, we take that shit for granted until it’s gone. Until you’re on your own. Tell you one thing, jefe, nobody here takes home for granted.”

The people I meet in the shelter melt into family almost immediately, with the willingness and appetite of the starving. Because we are all hungry for love, all hungry for belonging, every person alive. But many of us grow complacent in our appreciation for what we’ve got. Complacency, at a homeless shelter, is not an option. Everything here in in vivid focus, both our surplus and our lack. And while there’s a lack of material things and assurance of consistency every single day, there’s a surplus of love. 

All you need is love.

Love is all you need.

That’s the only assurance we have in life; if we are open to love, if we put ourselves in love’s path and refuse to budge, we will receive it in abundant measure. 

I have never met human beings as willing to offer love and kindness and a sense of home as the homeless. 

At dinner last night, I sat at one of the tables with a young mother and father and their three kids. We were all bundled against the cold. Mom was crumbing crackers into the kids’ soup. Dessert that evening was an enormous, donated pan full of chocolate muffins in paper cups. There were three bowls of frosting—chocolate, strawberry and cream cheese—and plastic utensils for spreading. One of the little girls had dolloped her muffin with pink goo and was proceeding to use her little plastic knife to decorate her own face with the sugary fluff. I talked to her gently about table manners, and how big girls didn’t raise table knives to their face, and knives certainly didn’t go into their mouths; that was the job of spoons and forks.

“Thank you,” the dad said, watching. Then he added, with a laugh, “Bienvenido a nuestra casa. Welcome to our house.”

And in the end, the love you take

Is equal to the love you make.