This post is going to ramble because the source of it left me with more questions than answers. Thank you ahead of time for your patience. A 'small' random thing happened on Tuesday that is burned into my cells. It is a moment of raw human experience.I nearly chose to remain silent. That would have been the comfortable choice.

There is no delicate way to talk about this so here goes: Walking back from the ferry building on Tuesday, a homeless woman, dirty and rumpled, had her pants pulled down and was relieving herself over a sewer grate on one of the busiest intersections in the city.

The emotions came fast and they hit hard. Repulsion, compassion, grief, rage, bone sadness, helplessness, frustration and fear. I witnessed her naked reality in that moment and also saw the vulnerable way she stood up with her pants around her knees wiping herself..images of a little girl learning how to use the bathroom or sitting with her legs hanging off the edge of the toilet talking to a long ago loved one all flashed before my eyes. And the witnesses. The palpable shock and recoil. Picking up their pace seeing and then erasing...walking on. I did that too. I didn't stop. I didn't speak. I turned my head back slightly to catch her face. But like everyone else I witnessed and walked on. It breaks my heart.

The question arises about the nature of my emotional response. She didn't ask or need me to feel sorry for her. She was living in her raw truth which bumped up against mine. My sadness which could quickly veer into pity has an implied judgement and pushes her humanity away from mine. The quick sadness protects me from really seeing her. And while I recognize it is a human and empathetic response I am not sure it allows me to fully sort this out. But I don't have an answer yet as to what this means when I am struggling to b a responsible, compassionate, and loving member of the human tribe.

A large part of me didn't want to write this because it feels like I am feeding off the misery of another human. Using it to BLOG about something that is loaded with questions about class, race, education and opportunity issues. And I have no answers for any of this so I could choose to just shut up. That was the cowardly choice for me and 2012 is about taking the gloves off and daring to be honest even if I say dumb stuff or piss someone off.

Homelessness exposes a raw nerve. I am not sure yet why but I think some of it is: What the hell am I doing to make a dent in any of this? I can't feed, house or clothe every person on the street and feeling guilty about it- well what does that do? Then the very uncomfortable question arises...what do I do? I can watch, react, feel sad and then nothing changes.

When I looked at this woman's face, I saw empty eyes. Her 'person-ness' gone far far away from the surface whether from mental illness, drug use, alcohol or the hard truth of living on the streets. I will never know. Her eyes and the raw scary exposed choice she made to conduct such a private affair in this public manner is something I can't make sense of. But alas she didn't ask me to or need me to if you think about it. This is her reality and my experience of it - well it is my problem. And this brings me to the meat of the matter....

She is me. I am her.

Isn't that our fear? And that is also our beautiful truth. How many dollars, choices, heartbeats are we away from such fragility? As David Whyte says: "...how you, in particular,live a hairsbreadth from losing everyone you hold dear."

All I know right now is this: The answer to what to do will come from my ability to see and hold her as another piece of me. To really stay with that truth. I will not be able to feed everyone or make everything better. But I want to dig underneath the guilt and the typical response to this kind of thing and figure out what is skillful action. Let's see what arises when I take off the polite gloves of the acceptable human response to suffering.

In the meantime, I will let what happened sit in the center of my heart. I am not pushing it away but seeking to understand what is trying to tell me.