One Day at a Time in the Guerrilla Garden

April 13, 2008. A sunny warm day in the Guerrilla Garden. Ordinarily, I'd be grubbing it though the garden, pulling out the winter gunk, hunting for green sprouts. I'd been plotting and planning, seeding and sorting. But I cannot bear to look at it. For today is the last day of my 'redemption period' and the bank forecloses on my house. In spite of all my efforts, they won. I am losing my garden, my house, and my home where I've nurtured my children for the past nine years. I have a grandchild due next month. Where will we be? I only ask for prayers now. Sometimes God has a peculiar way of giving us gifts in the form of catastrophes. I have had a lifetime of these kinds of gifts that came in disguise. Maybe this is one of them.

But for now, I grieve my garden. I yearn to get out there and see what it is doing, and yet I can't bear to look. I long to clean it up, for it looks like a real live ghetto out there after the winter, but I don't have the energy. Part of me says, for what? For the bank? Who took my house because I was one payment behind?

The shame that accompanies this kind of event is hard to fend off, since it assumes some blame on my part. It calls up the picture of an irresponsible, lazy, negligent person who is indifferent to grown up responsibilities. I am none of these things. I just had a series of bad things happen in a row.

I never thought that I would ever have a hard time finding a job. In America, I never anticipated that I would ever have a hard time feeding my family. But I have. Poverty is not a state of mind, but when you've been in it for a long time, when you have to wash yourself with dish soap because you don't have the money for a bar of soap that day, it can begin to seep into your heart. It can tear away at the confidence that you need to go looking for jobs.

I don't know what is going to happen now. We have to take it one day at a time. Today, I ask myself, What can I do today that will make my life and others lives around me a little better? And then go do it. It doesn't have to be a big thing. I don't have to move a mountain. It doesn't even have to be significant, in the greater world, just do something.

And in the doing, I will find freedom from the demons that work for poverty, who try to drag me away from the really important things in life. Like grandbabies and good friends...

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