Don't ever go in there at night

The blight in my humble Southtown neighborhood has not been transformed as planned. Instead the discarded brewery has defied four consecutive developers trying to breath new life into the crumbling icon.

The other day I was pondering the graffitied wreckage as I meandered by with my dog toward river trails, considering the bad luck every buyer has had. As I looked at the silent gaping openings, I recalled young women I had seen on occasion, stranded by the broken chain links, crying, trying to call someone on the phone.

A tattooed young man in dirty black jeans with bulging backpack rambled up from the river. "Don't ever go in there at night," he warned, and sashayed past, squeezing between ripped fence edges.

I watched his black pants disappear into darkness and all was still and deathly quiet once more.

I imagined nights of uncontrolled drug abuse - rubber tubing, spoons, needles littering cement floors - junkies in throes of agony and ecstasy, rooms of tangled bodies, those wanting acceptance bringing the booze. A pecking order brutally and gleefully enforced with dominant deviants creating the rules.

A far cry from my life in a cottage with window boxes and a porch swing just blocks away.

In Buddhism they say a good way to learn about reality and impermanence is to visit charnel grounds. In these Tibetan cemeteries, dead bodies are chopped and tossed on the frozen earth to be eaten by vultures.

American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron explains,

Traditionally the image used for regarding whatever arises as the very energy of wisdom is the charnel ground.

Perhaps the closest thing to a charnel ground in our world is ...a hospital emergency room. That could be the image for our working basis, which is grounded in some honesty about how the human realm functions.

Lone Star by night might provide a similar lesson on the raw realness of human existence. Something we need to acknowledge.

*illustration of Lone Star redevelopment found in various articles online

*Pema Chodron quote from "When Things Fall Apart" p. 160

* drug use illustration and photo of charnel ground from Flickr free images