Waking Up: Poison as Medicine

When I was 11 years-old, my 6^th grade teacher, Miss Lewis, decided to teach our class about democracy. 
 

It was June, the end of the school year, a time when any teacher could have easily decided to coast on autopilot till the last day of school- especially during Social Studies.
 

But that year, Miss Lewis chose not to.
 

No, she decided to educate our class about democracy by bringing our attention to the most current event of that time: The Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 in which hundreds of student demonstrators and civilians were killed by the Chinese military.
 

For those of you who don’t know (or don’t remember), in the spring of 1989 there was a period of student-led protests in Beijing, China to call for greater democracy including freedom of speech and freedom of the press. 
 

At its peak, it is estimated up to a million young men and women gathered together in Tiananmen Square while thousands of others protested in 400 other cities nation-wide using non-violent techniques-- including hunger-strikes--to communicate their outrage.
 

I can’t tell you how much this one Social Studies lesson changed me.
 

And I mean that almost literally. 
 

As in, I don’t completely know or understand how this one single event got so deeply under my skin so as to rearrange the furniture of my mind- to borrow a phrase from Joanna Macy.  I just know that it did.
 

For some folks of my generation, the event they most remember is the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion that was largely viewed live on the television.
 

But not me.
 

Learning about The Tiananmen Square Massacre awoke something inside of me that felt like it was always there, and I began to make connections.
 

Fast forward five more years.

I am now 16 years-old, it is 1994, and I am on a school trip to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. The museum officially opened just one year before under President Clinton, and I have my first experience in the Shoe Room.

For those of you who have never been to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, there is an exhibit that displays 4000 shoes  in the museum that actually belonged to the murdered women, men and children of the Nazi concentration camps of World War II, and the experience of seeing piles of these extremely personal belongings is visceral (oh, yes! there is a smell!)  and overwhelming- as it should be.

Looking back, I remember silently walking through the room with all my senses alert and flooded with unfiltered human reality, while a lump sat hard in the back of  my throat. I remember thinking without remission: "I don't understand how this could happen...How could human beings do this to other human beings?...How could children be murdered?...This was just decades ago when my own father was already in this world?"
 

Fast forward 3 more years.

I am now 19 years-old, it is 1997, and I am sitting in an African American History class as an undergraduate.
 

My professor is an elderly Jewish man barely taller than I (I am only 5 feet) who has taught at the college for decades.  He matter-of-factly tells our class that by learning African American history, we are actually learning a more accurate, whole history of the United States; he said the historical view from the "bottom" is a fuller picture than the view from the "top."
 

It is.
 

I learn for the first time about the devastating 1896 United States Supreme Court decision called Plessy vs. Fergusen; a criminal legal decision that legitimized "separate but equal," or what became known as Jim Crow, for the next 70 years. 
 

I learn how 9 white male Supreme Court judges constitutionally disenfranchised African Americans politically, economically and socially.  I learn how this one court case was so powerful, it successfully un-did 3 decades of progressive post-Civil War, post-slavery reconstruction. 
 

I also begin to make connections between my own personal experiences and this court decision.

Like Charlotte weaving her spider web,  this eye-opening class was a catalyst for a whirlwind of insights and understandings of reality that had previously been blind to me regarding the historical context for the housing projects just miles from where I lived; for my mother's friends' families who were part of the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the southern states to the northern cities who were trying to escape lynching, the poverty and the terrorism of the KKK; for how the de facto segregated school systems of the north, that I was educated in, were created.

In other words, I began to see with much greater clarity how we were still marred by this single court decision over 100 years later.  You could argue: I was waking up.

And it continues to this day.

For me, President Trump’s recent executive order to stop all refugee programs from war-torn Syria and “temporarily” restrict all travel from 7 predominantly Muslim countries was another such "wake-up call" that was exacerbated (or maybe punctuated) by reporting by The New York Times on 1/30/17 that a January, 2017 Quinnipiac Poll found 48 percent of Americans support the new policy.

What?!I  thought. How could this be?!
 

It seems so strange to me that these events, like the alarming 1960's television images of the civilian war carnage in the Vietnam War and the police dogs and water hoses being used against protesting African Americans were for my parents' generation--arguably some of the darkest low-points in the last 100 years of our human history--were my "coming of age moments" in my journey of awakening.

I'm incredulous that it is the ugly of the ugly that wakes me up...

On the other hand, Buddhist thinkers and writers might say, Of course! That's how it works.

In Pema Chodron's1997 book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times she wrote:

We can use difficult situations--poison--as fuel for waking up...Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself. We can use everything that happens to us as the means for waking up. We can use everything that occurs--whether it's our conflicting emotions and thoughts or our seemingly outer situation--to show us where we are asleep and how we can wake up completely, utterly, without reservations...Use poison as medicine to use difficult situations to awaken our genuine caring for other people who, just like us, often find themselves in pain.
 

Poison as medicine?

Suffering  and awareness of suffering as part of the path to enlightenment or what is more commonly called: wisdom?

I suppose this way of understanding the path of awakening is present from the very beginning of the legend of the Buddha when the young prince Siddhārtha Gautama, the man who would become known as the first Buddha, left his protected palace gates for the first time and witnessed the reality of human suffering in the form of an old person, a sick person and a dead body, and this experience became his first hard-core wake-up call.
Yet, I have to wonder, how many more "wake-up calls" will we need--like the indefinite ban on Syrian refugees--before our society as a whole can evolve into an enlightened future where we live the values of a spiritual democracy? 

In the meantime, it appears anyway, there will be plenty of opportunity (aka poison) for you and me to use for our own awakenings in the next four years.

May our practice benefit all others.

Poetry 109: Will I Rise

Will I Rise

When rage merges 

with heartbreak,

separation feels imminent. 

When me and mine,

greed and fear,

guide my leaders

and my neighbors,

sorrow feels inevitable. 

When day after day

there are more endings 

than beginnings,

destruction than

creation,

despair feels obvious. 

When tear drops

sting the backs of my eyes

with each new reckoning 

of hate and exclusion,

helplessness feels overwhelming. 

When waking up alone

feels terrifying and fruitless,

resignation feels almost possible. 

When curling up in a ball-

afraid to open my senses

to a brave new world

I do not understand-

feels more than tempting,

I ask myself:

Will I rise?

Will I pound my feet 

forward toward 

a freedomland 

I know exists.

Will I sit proud and tall

each daybreak

to allow for one, small,

moment of peace

on my very own  

living room carpet?

Will I sing

and dance

and shout

and march,

and be as nasty as I am

because that is 

more than enough?

I ask myself:

will I rise?

-Me

Little Zen Teachers Part III

Children and Koans

(youngzine.org)

My 3 year-old daughter asked me the other day:

Mom, what do memories look like and where do they come from?

At the time she was standing in front of the open refrigerator in our kitchen looking for a snack, and I was sitting in the dining room.  It seemed that her questions were so mundane, that they did not even require a look away from the refrigerator when she asked them.

In the moment I tried my best to answer her question- trying to find words that were informational and satisfying.

Yet I must admit, I felt pleasantly stumped by her question.  I almost wanted to linger in the question rather than fumble my way to an answer, and it felt reminiscent of a Koan.

In traditional Zen Practice a Koan is a story, dialogue, question or statement that is offered by a Zen Master to their student as a method of teaching.  The purpose of the Koan is to challenge and test the student.

Classical examples of traditional Zen Koans include:

o   What is the sound of one hand clapping, and

o   What did you look like before you were born.

Just for fun, I have asked my 7 year-old son the 2 Koans that I just listed.

What was interesting to me was that he readily answered each Koan as if it was the most ordinary of questions. 

No pausing. No questioning. No confused expression on his face. 

It was as if I had just asked him the most commonplace of questions like: Is it raining outside?

Observing my son’s considerable comfort with the philosophical and my daughter’s casual inquiry about the unknown (to her) struck me poignant. 

It seems we adults get very quickly befuddled when we are facing a puzzle that we cannot solve (possibly why a Koan is sometimes referred to as a “Great Doubt”), when maybe it is our reaction to the Koan that creates the struggle, rather than the conundrum itself.

In other words, if we adults, like children, could have less emphasis on our own perception, our own sense of effort, our own OMG reactions when facing a riddle or perplex problem, what would be different?

What could be different?

Compassion Toward Others: Including Trees?

In my yard I have a small Japanese Maple Tree that may be on its last leg.

The roots do not look super hearty at this point, and each year fewer and fewer leaves sprout from the braches.

My daughter has taken a liking to this little tree though, and each time we are playing in the yard, she will walk right up to the reddish brown shrub and talk to it.

“Are you thirsty?” she will ask. “Are you tired?”

Yesterday, my daughter asked me if I had a Kleenex in my pocket.  I did, and I handed it to her.  She took the tissue and walked over to the tree, and put the paper up against the branches.

When I asked my daughter what she was doing, she said very matter-of-factly: “She’s sick. She has a runny nose.”  “She” in this case was the tree.

She, my daughter, then proceeded to get water for the tree and poured it over the roots that half-heartedly stuck out of the ground, while proclaiming that the sick tree was quite thirsty and tired.

As I stood by watching this display of compassion toward another living organism, I was moved to wonder what this level of compassion for all living organisms might look like on a world-wide platform?

In that moment, I remembered once hearing an interview on NPR with a professor and author of environmental biology at the State University of New York named Robin Wall Kimmerer. In the interview, I recalled her statement:

I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory, and we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.

How interesting that children already intuitively know what we adults continue to question- thereby requiring more hard-won scientific research and studies to “prove” what is already here.

Compassion Toward Self

Last summer my family and I went for a long hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. 

It was  glorious day, one that I will remember always, but at the very end there was an unfortunate accident: my then 2 year-old daughter fell flat-out, face first, onto the pavement.

My husband, son and I all saw it happen, and we collectively drew in our breath when we saw the “splat.” 

I think we were all waiting for the initial scream, followed by the tears, and then the all-out total meltdown.

Strangely though, it never came…

We all rushed over to my daughter’s side to help her back up onto her feet.

Of course she looked upset and distressed, but also oddly contained, which led us to decide to just keep walking as if nothing had happened.

To this, however, my daughter, forcefully objected. 

“Wait!” she asserted. 

We all stopped.

She then proceeded to sit down on the ground, exactly where she had fallen, and kiss all the different areas of her body that had been scuffed and bruised in the fall.

Of course it is very common for most kids, including my daughter, to ask for a kiss on the “boo boo” after a fall or an accident, but in this case, my daughter was taking care of herself.

As if it was the most natural thing in the world, she began kissing her left and right knee, right elbow and left elbow; methodically moving through each area of her injured body.

When all of the necessary kisses had been given, without fanfare, she stood back up, and resumed the hike.  It was as if the need had been identified, met, and now she was ready to proceed.

Watching my daughter, I secretly wished I could be as nurturing and compassionate toward myself as she had been toward herself.

Maybe I will try.

Another Glimpse of Interbeing

Have you ever had one of those moments when your linear sense of time as past, present and future collapses into one? 

I have.

Similar to the new television show on NBC called “This Is Us” in which the past is seamlessly moving in and out of the present (or maybe it is the future that is seamlessly moving in and out of the present?), I have these moments in which time feels more fluid than fixed, more dynamic than static, more cyclical than linear.

The beauty and mystery of which can be an intersecting mosaic of causes and conditions that is constantly shuffling--and then reshuffling again—of what we know to be “true.”

Lately, I’m wondering if this experience is another glimpse of Interbeing, a term coined by Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh regarding the exquisitely interdependent nature of all phenomena.

Like this past Sunday for example.

It was the day before Martin Luther King Day (which in the United States is celebrated on the 3^rd Monday of January every year), and I was at church with my 7 year-old son.

In the service, the ministers reminded our Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregation about a moment in history in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at a Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Hollywood, Florida.

The year was 1966, two years before Dr. King’s assassination, and the already famous Reverend and Civil Rights Leader was invited to speak at the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists. 

The title of his speech was: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution.

He framed the talk around a little known fact about the story of Rip Van Winkle.

For those of you who don’t know, Rip Van Winkle is a character in a story of same name, and in the story the character sleeps for twenty years.

However, the fact that Dr. King drew out to his undoubtedly primarily white UU audience, was that ol’ Rip slept through the entire American Revolution.  Yup, he missed the whole thing! 

Dr. King then drew the parallel possibility that the UU church might “sleep” through the entire Civil Rights revolution; of course to which he offered the alternative solution that the UU church “wake up” and participate in the revolution instead.

He said:

One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

He then added:

Victor Hugo once said that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. The idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity, and so all over the world we see something of freedom explosion, and this reveals to us that we are in the midst of revolutionary times. An older order is passing away and a new order is coming into being.

Now I ask you, my dear sister or brother who is reading these words 51 years later, is Dr. King’s message any less relevant today than it was over half a century ago? Is it any less urgent than Mahatma Ghandi’s Indian Independence movement some 87 years ago upon which Dr. King modeled his non-violent liberation methodology?

When we find ourselves in a moment in history in which dozens of Congress men and women are boycotting the U.S. Presidential Inauguration on Friday and over 200,000 protesters are expected to rally on Saturday in the Women’s March on Washington with the mission statement:

We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us,

one cannot but marvel at the truth of Dr. King’s moral vision for our world which he also stated in that 1966 speech:

we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

Sitting there in the pew last Sunday, with my arm wrapped around my next generation son, listening to this story of intersection between my UU faith and Dr. King on the eve of a historical transition of political power, I felt a deep sense of kinship with Dr. King’s message of “waking up” that felt nearly palpable.  And for me, time collapsed into one.

I think the reality of interbeing, is what allows for awareness of such moments.

In the same speech delivered to the UUA General Assembly, Dr. King commented on this very topic:

All I'm saying is this: that all life is inter-related, and somehow we are all tied together. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality…This realization is absolutely necessary if we are to remain awake in this revolution.

Hearing this message again in 2017, I can’t help but wonder: could this profound truth actually be transcendent of time itself creating further evidence for the need to not just accept but rather embrace interbeing? 

I believe so.

If we can allow past, present and future to collapse into one by internalizing this seed of inter-being that was planted (again) some 51 years ago on a spring day in 1966, while we swear in the 45^th President of the United States, what would that mean for our intricately interdependent state of union?

Think about it.

I will.