The Food Bank

And there she was...

For three Wednesdays now I have been going to the local food bank. I sit in the long cue, waiting for up to an hour to enter the food line. I am already being recognized as family by the steady help that has made this their seva. They own their roles with heartfelt pride while some dress up in vintage aprons to keep an air of lightness and joy, or remind of us of “better times”- whatever that means.

I know one of the volunteers. She smiles at me and I notice the urge to explain my life to her, that I don’t really belong there. Do I need to be here? I don’t know. I just need help- but not like these people. I am not like these people! Just a little help please. For what I don’t exactly know- and here I am.

The voice that guides me here is the same that guided me into rehab in 2020. Both institutions were created to support the re-feeding of people out of particular states of starvation.

Instead I smile at my friend and hold back tears as she hands me a bunch of organic spinach from one of our local farms and a can of wild caught salmon donated by another local family owned business. “Only in Port Townsend” is the word on the street amongst those people who survive solely on the food banks scattered about the country.

There is medicine and there are treasures here amidst the stale bread, processed cheese, factory meat (not all) and random tube of Colgate toothpaste that you can get if you spin the dial- but not before you give your line token to the old asian woman, and it lands on blue- that little families are gratefully loading up their carts with. But no worries. There is enough gratitude in the air and loving hands serving us all to alchemize the toxins, create a buffer for the poisons.

Each time I have sat next to a someone who, I don’t know how to say this, needs my presence. Ha! Who needs who here?

Their life stories pour out, a latent smile that has been in the works since they were 5 years old starts to contort their drawn down eyes into a soft new moon. There is a straightening of their spine at the glimmer of a thought that their life in the trenches eating government food might actually mean something because the way I look at them says so- I don’t know.

Like the young man (I can say that now) who has some extraordinary degree in evolutionary genetics that the status quo ears aren’t ready to hear about (yet) and gets cast off as uneducated from the chunky grease stains matted into his hands. The old twinkly eyed woman from England alive almost long enough to remember when the food bank first crossed the Atlantic who threw her arms around me when I offered her a ride to the co-op for her special yogurt that she can’t get at the food bank, and the woman my age-ish…

Strong, barefoot, clear eyed, long shiny locks of blonde flowing to her waist and a veil of otherworldly feral energy buzzing all around her. I was cautious to begin conversation, feeling into her mental state as that is something to track here. She was likely thinking the same about me.

She tells me this tale of how she and this bag pipe playing man have been living in a van the last 9 years, that just broke down and she is fixing by herself, traveling the coasts and she took him on because his name was exactly like her father’s and she could see a karmic contract and felt it her duty to tend to him and his eccentricities, but now she can see that the contract is wearing out, her duties done, her lessons learned, because he is wearing her out and she doesn’t want to just dump him and trusts fully in the flow and timing and that all will be revealed and she wonders why she was stranded in this community of all communities she has been visiting, seeking home, and she is an artist, a blacksmith, (obviously a mechanic) and painter and she just turned 44 and senses that her body needs more tending than before and she will find a local clinic for a health check up but overall she eats well, listens, takes care, is at ease and doesn’t need to push what will reveal itself in time and doesn’t have any friends but knows she needs women in her life and loves the ocean…

Then she gets in cue with a grounded grace I rarely see, not a care or glimmer of shame or scarcity, laughing with every single volunteer on a first name basis. She seems free and I want to sneak a sample of her hair and suckle the DNA from the shaft and paste it on my head so that maybe, just maybe, a little of her ease can trickle into me.

I invite her to a women’s gathering. She only has a phone number “I don’t do any of that online stuff” she says. And yet, she is fully fed.

I reflect on her for days. She is living according to God’s grace with a rare deep root in the flow of her life. She flew the cuckoo’s nest and somehow didn’t end up an addict, in the sense of obvious substances (that I am aware of and don’t sense so), because going against the status quo, being born outside the status quo, speaking against the status quo typically lands you- well, at the food bank.

Yes, she is a little odd and walks with her own wisdoms of pain, and I don’t know the whole story, but wait a minute- you know what’s odd?..

…Running around serving a system that is killing the very life force that feeds us and calling it normal. We work like hell to avoid the food bank, yet are dead set on fitting into a system that starves its children while there is enough food and resources still on this planet to feed seven generations in both directions.

Our food systems produce 4000 calories per day per person. Granted the majority of those calories are from “foods” that contribute to the ever growing systemic starvation problem, but it is some sort of sustenance just the same. Just something to gnaw on.

*According to the US Department of Agriculture, up to 4,000 calories of food per person per day is available, while 2081 is consumed. Americans are wasting enough food for 150 million people a year – more than four times the country’s need, as 35 million struggle to access enough nutrition.

Back to her- She is walking in faith, against the grain and seems pretty ok doing it. For a society with ratty nervous systems, being pretty ok, even happy with what is, is worth more than gold. I have served people with gobs of “fortune” desperate to be free, who wold pay anything for one sip of satiation.

She is a mirror for what I have come to intrinsically know within myself over the last many years- that there is a path I am here to walk, that I am always on, and in walking it with conscious awareness of Grace’s role in my life, I am fed with what I need, when I need it, no more and no less. Within this a direct line to God is re-opened, the awareness of Grace and an embodiment of gratitude that shifts the very nefarious DNA that breeds stories of separation.

However, even though I look back through my life and can see this divine hand holding mine at every turn, my nervous system still resists resting into these arms that have been there holding and feeding me in the ways that MY life path has needed for its evolution and healing. Trust in Life. Trust in Life. Let go into Life on Life’s terms because when I fight, a war erupts and I mistakingly, fatalistically stay a victim, an addict of worn out systems based in division.

All along, every step of the way has been Love helping me open up to being fed properly, meaning from the correct Source. Satiation can only come from one place, while there are many ways to be fed.

What would happen if we all listened deeper and responded to the winds with a little more ease because we got quiet enough to hear the language of timeless trust in the one constant that haunts us all. As my dear friend Molly says “just follow the next right thing Shira!” Practice faith over fear and God consciousness reclaims its position as the hub in the Wheel of Life, where God has always been, but our awareness is what shifts the story and how that wheel turns for humanity.

We are always on our path. Our judgment of our path is what creates tremendous suffering. What if you’re here to shine shoes and collect stories from all the shiny shoes, and leave journals full of quirky wisdom that your nephew finds after you pass and he publishes them and it feeds his family and you are now famous, yet “dead”, but still shining somewhere from how your simple life helped in the feeding of those you love.

I don’t have answers, just experiences and stories. However, what I do know is that in the times we need help, let go into receiving that help and confront of our judgments of ourselves, is when Grace becomes the star in the great show of our life.

These are simply things to consider in a time when we need be considering a lot because tides are turning and new ways of being, through the old ways dying, are upon us. Our ideas of success, resource, abundance, beauty, wisdom, “educated”, worth and survival are all undergoing a massive transformation and will continue to do so. What happens if we have to all live in ways that “are for those people” so all can be fed?

Well, there are no “those people”, there are only mirrors of you shining- shining until we can see that every aspect of humanity has a role in the awakening, in the healing.

Ok- “Shira are you high? too much micro dose lately?” None at all actually, stripped of all vices. I am left with my mind as the last frontier of distractions and it’s full of craters, so there are some bumps and bruises and I need donated organic spinach at the food bank to heal them.

Blessed be,

Shira

P.S- if parts of you need a little re-feeding, I am open for one on one, online sessions to help you navigate your way back to satiation.

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