Visioning Homefulness, alongside the scholars at POOR, has made me take spiritual leaps.

     Visioning Homefulness alongside the scholars at POOR has made me take spiritual leaps.  It’s pushed me to think and feel more deeply about so many things—and recently safety nets have been on my mind. Class privilege looks like a million different things, but one of the aspects that has stood out most in my life is how much easier it is to move through the world knowing that I have a safety net ready to catch me. It’s at the other end of the telephone line, home:  the same phone number it’s always been, always in service, with family picking up when I call, asking what I need.

     There are different kinds of safety nets, and for me “home” offers more than one kind. It’s the incalculable kind of unconditional love, knowing that I’m not ever really going to be totally on my own because there are people who have always loved me. My home has always been free from abuse: when we hurt each other it’s always been the accidental injuries of not knowing how to love each other right. I don’t pretend that this is true of all homes, and I don’t take it for granted about mine. And then there’s the material part, the part about class, which is very real: home as a roof, home as a place where I can go and be fed, home as a car I can borrow. Home as people I can call if I need money, home as there’s-only-so-bad-it-can-get. Stability, safety, shelter.

     I read a story recently about a mother buying her child a pair of real diamond earrings, not because she cared about diamonds but because she wanted her kid to have something he could carry with him and pawn for enough money to buy a one-way ticket home, wherever he was, because then he’d always be okay. I feel like that kid sometimes.

     I have those material safety nets because my parents—my mom especially—do labor that is valued more than the labor that almost anyone else in the world does. They work really hard. Everyone works really hard. They offer me a safety net of home—of unconditional love, of material support—with a really profound generosity that I learn from every day. Everyone should be able to help build those kinds of safety nets for the people they love. I watch the hours my mom puts into her job, a job she likes sometimes, a job that asks too much of her—as most people’s jobs do—because she’s trying to make the safety nets foolproof. Or, maybe put another way, so that we don’t ever have to ask for help.

      But what Homefulness and POOR have asked me to understand is that real safety nets, the safety nets that are going to help us all survive, are different from the bank-account last-resorts that I have access to because of class privilege, because of the lopsided economic pyramid that’s harming all of us, killing us. Those kinds of safety nets can’t really save us, not from the spiritual bleakness and isolation that capitalism wedges between us. The real safety net is interdependence. Homefulness is a radical vision of a different kind of safety net: one piece of land in Oakland where a crew of poverty scholars, artists, revolutionaries, mamas, and kids will be able to catch each other, fingers locked together building something strong that’s a little less vulnerable to rent hikes, foreclosure, eviction, displacement. The land that POOR will take back is the raw material for a safety net of interdependence.

     My class privilege, and white privilege too, means my struggle to understand interdependence is going to be a particularly long and deep one. Class privilege does an incredible job of hiding all the labor that other people do so that rich people feel like we’re independent, like we’re doing it on our own. I have a hard time asking for help. I come from a family where people often walk out of the room before they start to cry. Often we don’t know how to ask for things that can’t be calculated, or paid for, or that leave us spiritually or emotionally indebted to each other. What I’m trying to learn every day is that those debts we owe each other are the fabric of real safety nets, those messy cords that enmesh us together too tight to pull away. Those are the kinds of safety nets I’ve learned about through Homefulness.

     I’m living at home right now, my toes curled tight around the fibers of the safety nets I grew up in, that have never left me. I’m deep in the struggle of building healthy relationships with my family, feeling the strain in my muscles as we try to figure each other out, try to ask loving and respectful things of each other. It’s really hard, sometimes harder than I thought it would be. But we are doing all of this on the stable footing of a home, a home we’ve always had and often shared. Our tender spots, our vulnerabilities, our anger, our distance, our laughter is playing out on a steady landscape of home. To me the Homefulness project is about chiseling out a hard-won piece of land from the predatory world of real estate and gentrification so that a family of POOR compas can have a home like that. Home is hard for me sometimes, it’s full of history and patterns and moments where I see the worst parts of myself rising to the surface too quickly. Homes are complicated, sometimes violent, sometimes brilliant. But at their best they can mean some stable footing where we have the time and space to figure each other out, for us to build together. I can only start to imagine how powerful a home will be for POOR, how the revolution of interdependence will keep expanding outward from a plot of un-stolen land. For me, as someone grown at the complicated collision-site of deep, deep love and isolating, ugly capitalism, it’s an indescribable honor to get to work with POOR to keep exploding and re-grounding our ideas about what home can be.