Some of the most difficult yet profound experiences of my 65 years transpired during the course of five journeys I made to Africa. Four of them took me to Burkina Faso, where I spent many weeks among the Dagara people in the remote tribal village of Dano, near the border with Ghana. Because of its remoteness, the essential elements of the indigenous world had survived in this area despite some 500 years of European colonization. I went there with a teacher, Malidoma Somé, to immerse myself in the rudiments of that world.

During my first sojourn, I was told by one of the diviners named Gandenou of two Spirits that had, since my birth, watched over me in a way similar to my idea of guardian angels. But now, he said, the time had come for my own Spirit to “merge” with these two so that they could become even more useful to me in the fulfillment of the purpose for which I had come into this world. As is typical of initiatory rites, this would be a grueling one, I learned, and my first task was to spend the following year preparing for it.

From the books I'd read and stories I’d heard about initiatory rituals, I recalled that they ended with a welcoming home by the people of one’s village and an acknowledgment from them of the ordeal one had endured. Malidoma cautioned me, however, that in modernity there would be no community there to give me that finishing touch of “coming home” from my initiatory journey. Or if a community were there, it would neither remember nor acknowledge that I had been on an initiatory path—something far more insulting than just remaining in the mundane world of my earlier days. I could be left feeling such “homelessness,” he said, that perhaps I would be better off lingering forever outside of my purpose in the dreary world of the uninitiated.

Furthermore, he cautioned me that in choosing such a path, I would enter a transitional and unpredictable initiatory space. And if I remained there long enough, I would realize that I am not the one in control, and that a person cannot predict even his own survival on a perilous journey at the hand of Spirit.

Upon our return to the capitol city of Ouagadougou, Malidoma had me visit another diviner, a Muslim whom I shall call “the Sandman” because of his technique for communicating with Spirit. As Gandenou had done in Dano, this man assured me that the Spirits would maintain their vigil and provide me the means to complete my journey. But the Sandman also gave me a task to accomplish before my departure for home the next evening. He instructed me to purchase twelve small cakes and seven choloa nuts and give them to a beggar along with 60 cfa (pronounced ‘seefa’—the local currency, worth 9 cents). I was to approach the beggar in prayer and simply hand over the bag containing my offerings.

So shortly afterwards, I was making my way along a deserted dirt street, in silent prayer, toward the Grand Marché, where I had seen several beggars the day before. Ahead, seemingly out of nowhere, appeared an old Muslim woman sitting off to the side. Her face was jet-black, thin and wrinkled, and she was dressed completely in black, including her headdress. As I continued toward her, she tilted her head to one side and cupped her hands. Continuing my prayer, I walked over and handed her the bag containing my offerings. Then bowing and stepping back, I turned toward my hotel. But a few yards away, I took one last glance at the woman, and what I saw astounded me. Her eyes had changed in a way I cannot explain. I can only say that they did not look human, that they were very large, jet-black and shining. And at that moment, a palpable sensation resonated throughout my body, a feeling of being blessed that wouldn’t subside for weeks as I kept seeing those eyes.

I was glad to have returned to the comforts of home a couple of days later; but the memory of my last experience of Africa would penetrate my concentration at the office and render me unable to work. Then one day, the first lesson of the Sandman’s task came to me as suddenly as the woman’s blessing had: that I could do the same thing here, in New Orleans!

I immediately leapt up out of my chair, raced out to my truck, and headed up the street to the Piccadilly Cafeteria, where I bought a meal, put it in a bag, and struck out across the Mississippi to downtown and the French Quarter, looking for one who was homeless. I found him at the corner of Camp Street and Canal, a homeless man approaching a pair of tourists for some money. From my truck, I could see that they wouldn’t even look at him as they shook their heads and scurried on their way. Before the light turned, the man pulled a “Big Gulp” from a garbage can to drink its leftovers. Not worried that I was parking in a cabstand, I got out of my truck and approached him with the food, a beverage, and a ten-dollar bill, and asked, “Sir, could you use some food?”

“Sure could,” he said, taking the bag.

“And here, take this too, please.”

He slowly took the money from my hand, squinted his eyes at me for several moments, and asked, “What is your name?”

“Bob. What’s yours?”

“Eddie." He stared at me in silence for a moment more. Then he spoke in a voice that seemed to emerge from somewhere deeper inside: “I didn’t know there was anyone like you left in the world!”

I was as shocked as I had been on that street in Ouagadougou. I wasn’t expecting anything either time, and though the blessings were different in sound and form, they felt the same. Eddie, in this soulful voice, told me that he was dying of cancer, that he had about two weeks left on the streets. At the end, he expressed his gratitude that this would be one of his last memories.

Eddie and I parted, and I drove away in tears knowing now the second lesson of the Sandman’s task—that Eddie was as much a gift to me as I was to him. Eddie was living the homelessness that Malidoma had warned me I would face in another way. But the Sandman had given me a means of surviving my homelessness in the absence of a “village,” especially during those times when “the system is kicking my ass” and it seems there is no one to acknowledge my struggle as a furthering of my initiation. These blessings were accessible from the homeless stranger.

When I told these stories to Malidoma, he explained that the homeless in our culture mirror our own homelessness but are more explicit in living the truth about their homelessness than we are. In doing so, he said, they are telling the truth much more loudly than we, and therefore are, to a greater extent, living/embodying their own life’s purpose.

“Not speaking to the homeless,” he said, “is a kind of silent ostracism by the so-called normal, healthy ones, and is actually symptomatic of an inbred attitude that says, ‘I don’t want to look at the truth about me.’ Those who embrace this truth, however, are the ones who’ll say, ‘How ya doin?’

“Therefore, we must revitalize our efforts toward creating true community,” he continued, “in order to help each other ‘come home.’ Otherwise, we’ll just walk the street like everyone else and point at the homeless as if we ourselves are not homeless, and the discourse of the country will be about the mortgage crisis instead of the crisis of soul in which purpose is forgotten. We will enlist in the absurdity of several hundred million ‘homeless people’ talking about a collapse in the housing market.”

Well, after surviving the initiatory ritual in Dano that following year, I stayed over a few days in Ouagadougou to visit the Sandman again. This time, he said I had to take food and money to three beggars before going home and gave me a very long list of food items to buy. Perhaps I will tell that story in another writing and include a few of the hundred or so stories I have collected of feeding beggars in New Orleans, Istanbul, and Africa over the last five years. Whenever I talk about the specifics, however, I emphasize the importance of entering the experience with no expectations, remembering the words of the Buddha: “There is only right action. Right result does not exist.”