Bearing Witness: A Zen Master's Lessons in Making Peace by Bernie Glassman

Author:Bernie Glassman [Glassman, Bernie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781101625255
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

—20—

Where We Eat

We eat in food pantries. We eat in churches, missions, and mosques. We panhandle for coffee, tea, and even fresh fruit at delis and restaurants. We get bologna-and-cheese sandwiches for breakfast from the Franciscan brothers on West Thirty-first Street.

I love coffee. I have always been a coffee drinker; I drink it all day, including during the evening. I joke that I need a strong cup of coffee at night in order to fall asleep. But if you drink coffee you need to pee. After my first street retreat I learned to avoid coffee on the streets. Which is just as well, because getting coffee is not easy. Many places that give out sandwiches won’t give out coffee. You can’t wrap hot cups of coffee in plastic, put them in a box hours ahead of time, and then give them out. You need to make the coffee in quantity, and you need to keep it hot.

I remember panhandling for coffee on our first street retreat. It happened the night we slept in cardboard boxes on the streets of Chinatown. It was cold and it was raining. In fact, it rained every day of that retreat. We found boxes and plastic and laid them all out. The rest of the group was ready to call it a day, but I needed my fix, my evening cup of coffee. So I started panhandling for money. I’d already been told that it wasn’t easy to panhandle in Chinatown. After a long, long time someone finally gave me a quarter. I had kept the Styrofoam cup I’d used at the Bowery Mission, where we’d eaten dinner, so armed with the quarter and the Styrofoam cup I started panhandling for coffee. None of the places in Chinatown would give me any.

Finally I entered a basement coffee shop, several steps down from street level. I approached the counter and said to the man, “I have a cup and I have a quarter. Can I get some coffee?”

The man looked behind him at somebody else, obviously the boss. The boss looked back at me. I was grungy and wet from the rain outside. “Yeah, give it to him,” the boss said.

The man poured coffee into my Styrofoam cup while I put my quarter on the counter. I felt very happy. This was the first time I’d panhandled on the streets, and finally, after a couple of hours, I had my cup of coffee. I went outside and slipped on the wet steps going up to the street. The cup fell from my hands and the hot coffee spilled all over me.

Just because we’re on the streets doesn’t mean that we lose our personalities or our distinct ways of doing things. Our styles, our idiosyncrasies, our particular ways of getting food and surviving shine through even though we all wear ragged street clothes with no money in our pockets. One of the people who has come with me on the streets panhandles by playing his shakuhachi flute for coins.

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