I do a lot of sitting these days. Honest to God, just staring at a wall. Or out the window. Not meditating, really. Just sitting. A little spaced out if I’m being honest.
I took the trash out a year ago and someone else’s unit had been cleared out and thrown away. As if someone had died. In one of the bins—a large, framed image of a wild-eyed Buddhist deity wearing a necklace of human skulls, chalice of blood in hand, dancing naked upon the backs of two crushed and dead human bodies.
‘Wow,’ I thought.
I put it on my wall.
I don’t do my spiritual practices right now because I don’t feel like it. It seems worse to go through the motions, to be insincerely motivated, than to not do it at all. But back in March, back in the lockdown, I leaned into my practices hard. Meditation. Zoom yoga. Mantras and visualization upon waking and before sleep.
About a month in, I had half a dozen new neighbors just outside my bedroom window, sleeping in tents, playing guitars, living their life. They were mostly young crust punks, if that gives you an image to work with.
But then the camp grew, by a lot. It spread out across the street. Now there was near constant music, loud music, and loud noise most of the time. There was revelry but also fights, misogyny (a lot of it), weapons, drugs, scenes of heartbreak, barking dogs, sirens (every day), laughing, storytelling, cursing, outbursts, community building, 4AM drunken tirades that gave glimmers of an utter innocence underneath the crust. A whole vibrant, complicated world.
The noise made it hard to fall asleep. My patients asked if there was a TV on in the background. One ventured it was a crime drama. “Law and Order?,” she asked.
I had compassion for the campers. But sometimes I wished to be in a quieter home, and I imagined my life would be better if the people outside were living elsewhere.
No, indeed, I did not like the camp at all. Not just for the intrusive noise and flagrant misogyny, but for how it made me feel about myself in the world. Next to it, my apartment felt like an embarrassing and gaudy privilege, my spiritual practices the masturbatory ruminations of someone completely out of touch, lofted above actual human suffering.
Here’s something I didn’t know before “integrative” therapy school: that integration, in the healing sense of the word, can feel actually quite terrible. Really just terribly awful. That whatever was psychically un-integrated, or never integrated, was that way for good reason. Sometimes that reason was that it really fucking hurt. My therapy education biased wholeness. Integration? Sounds great. But what I had not personally realized is that this involves pieces of the psyche being pieced back together, even (and especially) the pieces we do not care for. Even worse, integration is not just increased proximity. No. It means being bound together: stitched, melded, needles poking holes, dissolution, melting, permanent mutual physical change, even of our preferred parts. Loss. To accommodate what we’d sometimes prefer was left behind.
Some of those on the block who lived in houses banded together in an attempt to force elected officials to “take care” of the people living in the camp. Others fought for the right of the campers to stay. Members of the encampment split too, with the original members trying to push out the new residents among them who were selling and injecting drugs.
Then one afternoon the fights spilt out altogether onto the street.
A drug deal went awry. A hit-and-run totaled a neighbor’s car. Policemen tackled and detained the original camp leader. The warring housed neighbors argued on the sidelines while the campers hassled the police. City social workers came and with police enforcement directed those who remained to a sanctioned camp site down the way. The remnants of dirty and broken tents, empty bottles, and all manner of detritus, scooped up by a sanitation crew into a dump truck. All of it, gone. Just like that.
As I approached my street corner the next day there was a new and eerie quiet. Save for a blustery wind through the leaves. And the sharp flip flap of yellow “do-not-cross” tape, tautly strung, demarcating where certain people were no longer allowed.
It felt so very empty.
Like there was a hole where life used to be.
Like something had tried, and failed, to integrate.
