“Wherever you live is your temple if you treat it like one.”
--Buddha

A few years ago I enrolled in a Hatha yoga group, and I met thirty other people twice-a-week in a big room for instruction. After three months I had learned the asanas (postures) and pranayama (breathing techniques); and by that time, I had settled into a pattern of practice of yoga every morning at home. A week go I added one more thing to a “ritual” that begins my day. Daughter Nancy gave me Buddha’s Little Instruction Book, by Jack Kornfield, and I’ve been reading one of the “teachings” before I settle into the yoga session. Today’s “quote” from the teachings: “Wherever you live is your temple if you treat it like one.” I began today thinking about Buddha’s teaching and wondering how homeless people treat a shopping cart like a temple under a bridge or anchored to a parking meter or pulled alongside a bench in the park.

A September report from a survey of homeless persons in San Diego County estimated in March last year that the number was 8,500 persons. That number had risen to more than 9,000 by September of this year. Not all of them are adults. San Diego has a special school for homeless children. Not all the adults are young or middle aged persons who have temporarily lost their way. Last year Lola Dotson had lived on the streets of downtown San Diego for around three years... she didn’t remember exactly when she became homeless. She’s 73, a great grandmother. She gets just over $500 a month in social security benefits, but she doesn’t want to go to a shelter; so she lives on the street. Andrew Scira hasn’t been on the street for as long as Lola Dotson. He is only 19, and he hopes to join the military. Their stories, along with their names, were included in a story posted in September on Sign On San Diego. I have no way of finding out what happened to either of them.

The homeless are very visible in San Diego and in most other American cities. Today I saw a homeless woman in Mission Valley not far from my home, my temple. She was different. She appeared clean and reasonably dressed. If she hadn’t been pushing an overloaded shopping cart, she would have looked like someone on her way home from a job in a shop or a bank or a school... and if she hadn’t searched the waste barrels outside a fast-food restaurant and a Starbucks coffee shop I would have thought she had a kitchen somewhere with food in a refrigerator.