Magnetization and The City

Every visit to the City of San Francisco is an adventure, without fail. Heroin addicts brush past techie executives on the piss-stained sidewalks, while artists rub elbows with Fentanyl dealers in front of vibrant murals, so you just know interactions are going to be wild, and on a recent visit to The City, as we call it in the Bay Area, I found myself truly in the thick of it.

My first interaction was innocuous enough. After reluctantly parking my car in the sketchy Mission district, a woman in a dingy mini van flagged me over to her. She spoke to me as if she’d known me for years. Right off the bat she informed me that the club she was parked next to had dancing, and she had a great time on her birthday. I told her that I’ve been to the club many times as my cousin worked there. I started to walk away but she flagged me down again, “What kind of car do you think I should get, this van’s too big for the city, isn’t it?”

I’ve known this woman for 38 seconds.

“I like Subaru’s,” I replied. “Maybe a Forester?”

She contemplated this statement, as if seriously considering my sagely advice like I wasn’t a complete stranger.

“I’ll have to research that one,” she said.

She was about to ask me another question when my cousin showed up and it was time to go. I waved and smiled at her, and she smiled back, showing more than a few missing teeth. Welcome to San Francisco I guess?

The next interaction was not so innocent. The Mission District has become a gigantic open air drug market, and I had to walk all the way through it. Thousands of homeless people crowded the sidewalk. Some were selling drugs, others were buying drugs, all were taking drugs, and every single person down to the last man, woman, transgender, and child had a thousand yard glassy stare in their eyes. Looking around, I was the only sober one. The sun was setting and apparently that’s the time to shoot up, drop, snort, or whatever the hell they were all doing. Someone pulled out a garbage bag of used sneakers that was descended upon like ravenous piranhas. One guy was buying a pound of weed out of someone’s car, exclaiming at the top of his lungs for the community to hear,

“I knew you sold weed, but I didn’t know you sell crack and pills too!”

This carried on for about 10 blocks. I had to walk in the street several times to get around the addicts, dealers, and unconscious bodies lying in unknown liquids. Fumes of urine, cigarettes, and crack wafted in the air. Most people looked right through me. I got the feeling that they could sense I was there, but also that they couldn’t. I can’t explain it.

One man did see me though. We made eye contact. He was a tall African American man leaning against the corner of a building, holding a crack pipe.

“Hey man,” he shouted at me. “How you doing? How’s your night going?”

He seemed friendly enough for a crack head, but my fight or flight kicked in. I could only wonder what he wanted from me. I acknowledged him, but I kept it moving. The fact that he was next to a darkened alleyway didn’t score him any points. I can only assume he wanted to lure me in to claim my 7 dollars cold hard cash and travel sized tarot deck for himself.

Later I found myself in the much more peaceful neighborhood of the Inner Richmond, the defecating Fentanyl addicts replaced by Millennials walking their rat-sized dogs. I was happily strolling down the sidewalk when I made eye contact with what looked to be a man on the fringes of homelessness. His hair was unkempt and he wore a huge backpack that seemed to hold his worldly possessions, but as soon as we locked eyes I felt an inner knowing. I knew he felt it too. We shared a realization that we were destined to cross paths. I stopped him, and after a few pleasantries a question popped in my mind out of nowhere.

“Do you have a message for me?” I asked.

He took a moment to contemplate, but only a moment.

“What do you do when you find yourself on new land?” he asked me.

I gave him the first answer that came to me.

“Explore.”

“No,” he replied. “You get on your knees and you show gratitude.”

His wisdom hit me like a heroin-filled, city-supplied, free needle. I had lost my home recently, and I had found myself on new land. But I had made a choice to only see the darkness in my new land. I hadn’t chosen to see the light. I hadn’t given it gratitude. I hadn’t thanked it for supporting me through a tough time.

The man gave me a wink and strolled off, coalescing back into the streets of San Francisco, leaving me dumbfounded. How did that man know to say the thing I needed to hear the most?

One of my cousin’s friends witnessed the interaction and said to me,

“You’re just out here magnetizing people to you, huh?”

And I put it all together.

The toothless woman. She represented neutrality. The crackhead was the dark polarity. The wise homeless sage was the positive polarity. I magnetized all of them, attracted them to me in order to show myself the different aspects of myself. I saw myself in all of them. The neutral part of me wanting to treat strangers as friends. The dark side of me wanting to get over on strangers. The light side of me wanting to bless strangers with the perfect nugget of wisdom for their healing and expansion. They are all me, in all aspects of the spectrum, and I needed to come to this land in order to see my own reflection in them, or else I would not have manifested any of it into my reality.

There was only one thing left to do, and it was obvious. I brushed aside the cigarette butts, got down on my knees, and showed gratitude for this new, strange land.