Yard Angels?
October 05, 2015(original post date)
Ive been getting more refreshing sleep lately thanks to another Ashland resident letting us sleep in their yard! Thank you so much to Beth, Mitchell and Alex for taking the initiative to solve homelessness themselves by giving a homeless person a “home” to sleep for the night! A “home” is anywhere you feel safe to lay your head down to sleep. These 3 “yard angels” are not even religious! This is not surprising to me because in my more than 10 years of traveling as a homeless man i have been “adopted” for the night by far more non-religious people than i have been helped by people claiming to be spiritual. I have tried to make it easier and more fun to help citizens in houses actually act spiritual by creating something called “Sleep Slip Dollars”. These new Sleep Slip Dollars can be printed out for free and then issued to a homeless person for even just 1 night, giving them permission to simply “be” in your yard or behind your business between your designated time-frame. If even just some citizens did this and twitted about it then we could start a new trend of individuals working independently to collectively solve the world-wide homelessness problem! If i could get these printed on a carbon-copy pad like the ones that police use to write tickets, then the citizens who issue the Sleep Slip Dollars would have a carbon-copy to carry in their wallet so that they could show their friends how humane and spiritual they are the next time they pull out their wallet to pay for their group’s dining bill. These carbon-copies seem to be absolutely necessary to make these work and provide the incentive for citizens to issue them because then they can show it to their friendssince people seem to be most interested in just making it look like they care. So carbon-copy Sleep Slip Dollars would be able to help not only the homeless become better people with sleep, but they would also make it easier for citizens to become better, spiritual people too! By the way, the home owners here also think of the sheep and I as “yard angels” because we maintain the plant growth and subsequent potential fire hazard.
My yard angels also insisted that i accept this gift(pictured) of blanket, ground blanket and pillow from them.. pillows are a HUGE upgrade to a homeless person’s quality of sleep, but we can never carry such volumn in our backpacks! This is the only way that i know of that homeless people ever get to sleep with a pillow..is when someone who has the space to store such an item helps us for the night. I have tried to invent a new portable DIY pillow. I used an empty wine bag for a few months by just blowing it up at night and then deflating it each morning so that it would fit in my backpack, but they aren’t stable and you end up unconsciously using your micro-neck-muscles all night to stay balanced! If we could find a way for homeless people to easily tote around their own pillow it would change the life of many homeless people.