Only the Homeless Can Write

If only the homeless could write how would our world appear .How different would our sense of life become.

I came across a Blog this week, written by a lady who is living in a camper van following years spent in an abusive relationship. She now survives  largely without electricity or heat. Sometimes she gets access to the internet at a shopping mall and writes a post. Reading one, I got caught up in the rawness of her predicament, and her desire to cling to normalcy.  Many of us,myself included, are surrounded by, or in regular contact with, loved ones and  the sound of laughter and padding feet. Reflecting on a life safely led, or navigated with a certain skill,  the words we read upon our screens are words.   In some way we are  immunised from the circumstances which gave them birth.  Do they become a companion to coffee, or a short break after lunch. However,not everything you read is civilised, or  from the gentler part of town, but the script is not normally desperate enough to disturb

Blogs come in many styles . Are read in many circumstances, but for some, living in the outer reaches of desperation, those words are  the last resource they have. It is not a call for help. More a primal cry drifting on the ether to random homes.    For me to sit here with my coffee while this happens seems the poorest response I could make but the only one available to me. It is a characteristic of complex “civilised” societies, that people can fall through the cracks in the social fabric and exist largely un-noticed and neglected in a way which was impossible to imagine in many of the “primitive” tribal societies we were so proud to clear from our path in the name of God and the Freeway.

By  chance, the people I refer to are a continent or more away from me. Their words might be a message from outer space for all the good I can do. My words, or those of others moved by her distress might not be enough, but words can sometimes sooth a wound they cannot heal. That is my hope at least.