The courage it takes to live in poverty must be huge.

I have had plenty of flirts with voluntary poverty like hippie days, like living with the poorest of the poor in El Salvador, like being out of work for too long. But, in so many ways I can never be poor. I have my health, my education, and my family and my friends.

I think that visiting impoverished neighborhoods, or working with the poor, or for the poor should be part of our education. Their struggles are otherwise incomprehensible. The balance between life and death is often really thin. The pain and agony it takes to survive is huge. They lose too often.

I think it is a measure of our humanity how we treat the people who have nothing. How can we do this if we haven't met them? What would desperation drive us to do? Would we share or would we hoard? We moan and groan about our economy, yet we benefit always from the impoverishment of others. Cheap tee shirts from WalMart: how about those workers in Bangladesh? The scope of the problem is so huge, the temptation is to dig into our own stuff and turn a blind eye.

The divide is getting wider. It brings to mind that song from the twenties, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Would you take your child on a class trip to a Reservation or to any desperate area of your city or across the 'tracks' in your town? The weird thing is that there is a very good chance you would be greeted with warmth and interest.

I recently spent several full days waiting in line with a friend in the Welfare Offices in the Mission in San Francisco. There were some very fucked up people there. There were people who were dressed in dirty rags, people without shoes, people who were obviously impaired from booze or drugs or injuries. There were hundreds of people in various stages of desperation. There were very strict protocols and rules, some nearly insurmountable for the least fortunate (or most impaired) or those speaking a language no one recognized. The workers there were wonderful. They treated everyone with respect. They smiled a lot. They solved problem after problem.

I went with trepidation, I left with a different feeling. We are all human. We all want things to be better. We all do. I had a Buddhist friend who was feeling guilty about spending so much time on his own enlightenment that he wasn't acting for the benefit of others. He left his fancy life in Marin and lived with the homeless for a few weeks begging for his food. His big discovery was that he instantly became ' the homeless guy'. The brightest moments of his day were when some passerby introduced himself and asked him his name. By saying his name he felt more human. Simple stuff can make a world of difference.

When it comes down to it, all we can really own is our humanity. If we think and act from our hearts, we can never lose anything important.