In the weird way that your pocket selects random pictures from your phone, even when you haven’t looked at that particular photo in months, mine chose pictures from last October’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial to show me each time I took my phone out on my morning walk to take a photo of Portland’s rolling homeless disaster. A disaster for which this libertarian city has chosen a mostly hands-off approach. To an outsider (me) this is incomprehensibly cruel.

My own rage at the cruelty, the finger pointing, the word jockeying, the loss of what I hoped would continue to be my home, lives in my body. My anger fires in my joints, especially my wrists, which feel like they are in a tightening vice grip. It lives in my gut and the back of my neck. Someone told me recently that I’m carrying around a “s***_load of anger”, so maybe it lives there, too.

On Tuesday I saw a healer, an Alexander Method practitioner, who works with cancer patients and athletes and accident survivors to listen to their bodies and report back to their minds what’s going on.

This was my body’s story about why I have pain along the top of my diaphragm Simplified: there’s anger in my gut and tenderness in my thorax. Those two energy fronts meet just below my ribs causing a storm of pain. . (If you haven’t done body work or aren’t feeling poetic, this will sound “woo-woo.” That’s okay. It is. And it’s as real as it gets. Both.)

On a personal level I know what to do now to reduce the physical pain. What do we do on a community level to calm the crisis of conflicting fronts of compassion and rage?

Lincoln’s decision was to take a stand against the cruelty of slavery. Young people now gather in the evening at his Memorial and dance with spontaneous joy. Veterans stand proudly, patiently waiting for their photo op. Family members support each other up the steps just to gaze upon his marble likeness.

What will we do? What are we willing to do to set our suffering homeless brothers and sisters free so that future generations will be proud and dance with joy?