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stella41b -> RE: The Power of Compassion in BDSM (7/16/2008 3:38:12 PM)
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Take a building close to Central London, four storeys high, just south of the River Thames. The entrance is a heavy wooden door, you press on the buzzer of an intercom, you speak through the entryphone and staff let you in. You come to a reception, a small window and a counter. Across the top you see the bottom of a metal shutter, the type you see covering shop windows then the shops are closed. There's another heavy door with a heavy lock and a release button which buzzes. You enter.
This is a hostel for the homeless, high dependency, a 'wet' hostel, home to sixty people who have issues. All of them take something or use something. They all have a room, first floor, second floor, third floor. Downstairs there's just offices, a couple of communal rooms, a canteen, a couple of rooms with a desk and chairs. Communal bathrooms, CCTV everywhere, and half of one floor a special area, designated for the female residents. The residents receive just short of £60 a week paid fortnightly, benefits. The hostel takes, if you allow them, £40 of this fortnightly payment in 'service charges', breakfast and evening meal five days a week, heating, hot water, etc. The rest buys two good sized rocks and perhaps a bottle of good alcohol, or else it goes just on alcohol, dope, tobacco, cigarettes, Rizla papers and lighters or matches, enough to keep you and your friends over a couple of days. The rest of the time the party continues once you get more money from elsewhere.. begging, shoplifting, stealing, it doesn't matter.
This isn't the bottom of society, for the bottom of society is out there on the streets, around Kings Cross and Euston railway stations, under the arches of Mepham Street near Waterloo station and the South Bank, the subways and the walkways on the South Bank, spaces between the dustbins of the Savoy Hotel in The Strand, shop doorways in The Strand. Bodies wrapped up in ragged sleeping bags and bits of cardboard who appear every night and vanish shortly before dawn and the street-cleaning teams. This is the very bottom of society, not the hostel. The hostel is the next step up.
This is one of my projects, where I work. Once or twice a week I sit with anything between half a dozen to a dozen residents and we do theatre. John once was a chef who trained under Gordon Ramsay, working in top London hotels, his own restaurant went under, taking a house, wife and two kids in its wake. Sandy just wants her own place so her UMs can come and visit her. Jimmy will never be able to wipe out the twenty two years he spent in Durham prison for the elderly couple he battered to death during a burglary. I'm using made up names of course, but the stories are real. I'm not sure when or even if there's going to be a performance. At the moment my target is to get through two consecutive rehearsals without having to go up to the second or third floor to knock on someone's door and get them out of bed.
We break off after an hour or so. Someone will get up and take the kettle to reception so it can be filled for coffee or tea. Someone always brings biscuits, milk chocolate digestives are the favourite ones. Under the watchful eye of the staff I'll leave some of them to make coffee and go with the others outside to have a smoke. I don't smoke, my role is to hand out the Rizla papers so the others can crack open the cigarette butts from what they've picked up on the street to make a cigarette. I also have a lighter. I wait until they've finished their smokes and we go back and do some more rehearsing.
This is their life, and this is my life. I'm a missionary. I'm connected with fringe theatre, I write plays, direct them, I've devoted my artistic work to help others, I couldn't find regular employment, I'm unable to sit around on welfare doing nothing, so I've spent a year developing a theatre, charity and projects. Jimmy, Sandy, John and the others are the beneficiaries, the actors in the production, people who are working to find some sort of way back into society. I can wander through the hostel freely, nobody 'kicks off' around me, I can walk away from a kettle of boiling water knowing that it isn't going to be thrown on anyone, but poured into mugs and served with milk chocolate digestives.
These aren't homeless people to me, but people like you and me struggling to get through the traumatic experience of homelessness. This is just another stage in the process. They no longer have to sleep on the streets, they have their own rooms, they're not in any fit state to get a job, or to be employed, some don't really have much more than what they carried with them when they came to the hostel for the first time, taken there from a night shelter. But it's all down to perspective. They don't have to earn my respect, I give it to them freely. They all know that I was in the same situation as they are now, though I never abused drugs or alcohol, they know I've moved on, and they also understand why I've come back. I talk to them and relate to them as though they're not homeless. That hostel is their home, and I behave accordingly.
There's no expectations. No dates for performance, not even a performance as an aim. It doesn't matter. When I first met them I got them to stand in a circle, I occupied the centre, and I asked them to step forward if they considered themselves to be any less socially acceptable than me and to explain why in their own words. Nobody stepped forward. "Right, now that we have established that we all respect ourselves to some degree...."
I'm breaking my own rules here in writing about this. Compassion is something which is done, not written about or spoken about. It's a way of looking at someone from a position of being in their situation or circumstances, and seeing the very best in them going out of your way to make something available to them, or to give them something they need, without any expectations of anything in return. This isn't the same as being nice to someone, nor is it going out of your way to help someone, for compassion requires both insight and understanding.
Sometimes I log in here and I come across things and read things which give the impression that some people here have more issues than the people I'm working with in the hostels and on the streets. I know this not just from my own life experience, but also from my own issues. Issues are well, issues, stuff you usually need to be dealing with, sort of like the baggage you carry about with you through life. Every so often you reach a stage in life where you look at some of your baggage and you think 'I really don't need this any more'.
I could write about the power of compassion in BDSM but I won't. It's too big a topic, too general. Besides I know from the OP that BDSM in the OP is a euphemism for the Collarme Message Boards. I've been coming here regularly since early 2007, March I think if my memory serves me well. I moved into my apartment here the middle of November 2006 from the hostel, I came here from IC (a UK BDSM site) and it was a few weeks after the trial in Crown Court of a convicted paedophile who had sexually assaulted me in the hostel. I was a mess.
Today it's a little different, things are coming together but you know, there's quite a lot of people out there who've reached out during that time, quite often unexpectedly, people I've met, many I haven't met but would love to meet if ever an opportunity presented itself, if only for coffee. This is one of the best Message Boards you could find on the Internet, and it's this way not only because of the work of the moderators and the site owners but also down to the people who, like me, log in and come together to share their experiences, lives, thoughts and opinions with everyone else.
I like coming here. I don't have to be popular, it's brain candy for me. I have no need to preach to the masses, to teach, nothing other than to share. You see the mugshot and the screen name on the left is just one of hundreds, if not thousands coming through this site every day, I'm just a small part of the rich Collarme tapestry, a thread in the Collarme carpet. I'll come in and post to certain threads, every so often I'll start a thread - same reasons, to come and share, be a part of, without too many expectations. Hundreds of pairs of eyes will come to threads like this, to postings like this, some will read, some will sigh and move onto the next posting, some will relate, some won't, and a few might be able to take something from these words. By which time I've moved on, doing something different, what I've written is already posted, up there for all to see. Only when I've specified at the start of my posting are my words to be taken to be addressed to someone.
It comes back to that key word in the beginning - choice. People post whatever they think and feel and choices, for better or worse, are made. This is just the way things are, the way the world is, and really when it comes down to it all you can do is take it or leave it.
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