Tag Archives: compassion

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John Nelson Eden…

[I probably should have begun with this one! My first child, so the beginning of this whole saga… but, like my war journal, it’s an exploded timeline here, developing perspective as it unfolds. This is the sixth post in the series on The Children.]

October 7, 1976

John Nelson Eden was born this morning! I can’t begin to capture the torrent of emotions and thoughts. The love, the joy, the awe and wonder of it all is perhaps best, and surely forever, emblazoned in my memory in that moment when I first looked into his red, screaming, screwed-up little face as the doctor held him up and said, “Hey boy, say hello to your mommy and daddy!”

That contorted little face was so beautiful, and that cry has to be the sweetest sound I ever heard!

It was an experience of ultimate magnitude, transcending anything else in my experience. Now I need some sleep real bad! Just a few more thoughts and I must go to bed…

Connie, his mom, was just beautiful through it all! Even as nothing prepared us for the experience as a whole, so not even the suggestions of veterans about how it brought them closer prepared me for just how meaningful it really is for the bond between us.

The effect on my perspective clear. There is a great difference between planning and thinking of “a child” in the abstract and planning and thinking of John Nelson, this actual precious bundle of potential!

November 17, 1976 (A Wednesday night)

To John Nelson:

As I sit here in the loofa with you, son, I can hardly contain my feelings! You’ve been having colic almost all afternoon, and mommy is all worn out, so I’ve rocked you to sleep, and now, you’re sleeping, fitfully, here beside me while I study.

Every now and then, you have a gas pain or something, and I just reach over and pat you on the tummy and murmur a few comforting words, and you settle back down, sometimes with with a little sigh that is sweet in that gentle, innocent way that I suppose only babies have. Sometimes, when you have these bad nights and mommy is so tired, you sleep on my chest while I read, and so I feel very much in tune with all your little pains, your cries and whimpers, and your little sighs as you try to sleep. You’ve always been a noisy little guy! High level of spontaneous vocalizations, in technical terms. But all of this is just a preface.

Tomorrow, you’ll be six weeks old by the calendar. In the last six weeks, you have made a profound and lasting impact on me as a person, and I just want to record a little of my feelings now for you to maybe read one day when you understand and appreciate my feelings. Joy and wonder and love have been the main things I’ve been feeling. This love for you is so strong there’s just no way to really express it! I feel so close, so in tune with you and your needs and responses, and so committed to you in the way that only this love can inspire, and so proud of you! Yet all of this fails to really describe the feeling!

This tremendous love that I have for you, John Nelson, is more than just an emotion. In it I find the key to the understanding of existence, for it is in response to this internal feeling — part of the relationship between you and me — that I will be to you all the things that will become my contribution to your humanity, to your personhood and thus to all humanity.

The degree of my awareness of this feeling and my response to it is the measure of my own humanity. The degree to which I allow the external and internal problems and pressures of life — and there are pressures: work, school, church, home life — to interfere with my response to you is the measure of my failure of you.

But if I, and your mother, and your grandparents, your relatives, and all of the people with whom you live in relationship are half-way able to be real persons to you, you will know all this. And you will know what I mean when I say, “Son, your daddy loves you!”

January 9, 1977

It’s almost hard to believe that it’s 1977. Somehow, I always thought things would be different by 1977, if we managed to make it that far! But here it is and here I am — I’ll be 31, thirty-one, this year, a settled family man by all appearances, yet not knowing what the coming year will bring.

I begin student teaching next week, should be certified after summer session, with 20 hours of graduate credit… had thought I’d teach her in Independence, get that master’s degree, but now I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try to get a job in a tribal school in Arizona, go to school there. We just kinda need to leave Missouri… lots of reasons.

John Nelson’s birthdays:

[In the journal I began in 1979, is this list of where JN lived for each of his first 13 birthdays. It is a pretty clear picture of how our lives were a bit nomadic for those years.]

1976 – born in Independence, Missouri.

1977 – Crownpoint, New Mexico (Eastern Navajo)

1978 – Jesup, Georgia

1979 – Jesup, Georgia

1980 – Koinonia Farms, Georgia (near Plains)

1981 – Eugene, Oregon (West Broadway St.)

1982 – Eugene, Oregon (West Broadway St.)

1983 – Eugene, Oregon (West Broadway St.) / Dad in Florence

1984 – Eugene, Oregon (West Broadway St.) / Dad in Florence

1985 – El Cajon, California

1986 – Ramona, California (spend 2nd half of 5th grade in Florence)

1987 – Ramona, California

1988 – Ramona, California

1989 – Jesup, Georgia (with Dad)

August 7, 1979

(In Winter Spring, Florida visiting Uncle Stewart.)

John-John got his second set of stitches today. Fell or something while we were in a health food store, split his forehead open, blood all over his face again, took ten years off my life and three stitches to close it up. It was all about two inches from the three stitches he got last summer.

After it was all over, I had to go into the restroom and cry. I still could cry just thinking about it. He doesn’t much like hospitals or doctors now for sure! But it didn’t even slow him down. Half an hour after the stitches, he was laughing, running, jumping — and kept it up all afternoon!

[The stitches last summer came after he ran into a metal band in a health food store in Machias, Maine on a summer trip there. Someone in the store took us to the local hospital, and I’ll never forget holding him along the way and realizing I could see his bone through the split in his skin. A very sweet doctor there wrapped him in a cloth and sewed it up and he was calm and not crying before the sewing was done.]

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Latent cruelty

This has all been building up for a while, I know, but the last few weeks have seemed to be particularly offensive and painful to watch in America.

Reading John Pavlovitz’ latest blog post today seems to have crystalized in my mind a few things that have been bubbling around there for a while, too. He calls it The Trump Effect, and he lays out the development of it pretty clearly. It’s been remarked on before by others and I’ve certainly been thinking it since it began to surface during the T-thing’s administration, as racism and white supremacy began to be expressed in new and more open ways, violence increased and the quality of the national conversation began to decline daily. The slide away from truth and accuracy and decency in his daily rants had its effect.

There are lots of examples, and Pavlovitz relates some of the most egregious, but to me its in the essential failure of basic human compassion in the face of this raging pandemic that it is most clear.

How people can equate the simple discomfort and slight inconvenience of wearing a mask with putting other people–and other people’s children–at risk of serious, life-threatening disease has just been beyond me to understand. But seeing it as just another expression of the crass, stupid insensitivity to others that is at the heart of the Trump Effect helps me to understand it. It somehow makes these people feel empowered, self-righteous, justified in their own petty hatreds to be pretending that refusal to wear a mask or get vaccinated is somehow an exercise of their rights as an American.

So it’s not enough just to not do it, they have to proclaim their heroic stupidity and even harass others who are wearing masks and getting vaccinated. It’s so remiscinent of something…. what is it? Oh yeah. Nazi rallies. Book burnings. Klan rallies. Lynchings.

All these are of a piece. People venting their anger and fear and seeking justification in some kind of twisted version of “rightness.” Pavlovitz lays it clearly at the feet of Trump’s monstrous venom.

Though certainly not created then or by the man, for the first time in America’s history the latent ugliness in people was revealed and validated and celebrated by a sitting president—it was officially normalized. And what we’re experiencing now; this staggering, insensitive posturing in the face of so many people’s suffering, is the late-ripening fruit of something that has been set into the bedrock of half our nation. It is the malicious entitlement that MAGA was designed to nurture from the beginning.

JohnPavlovitz.com

If you’ve followed the rise of fascism in America over the past few decades, which has been documented by many including the guy on Orcinus, you know this strain of “americanism” has been festering under the surface, held in check by the sense of decency and fair play that is–at least I believe it is–a stronger, more truly American trait, but developing under cover of various rationalizations and facades. Trump’s legitimization of that strain is what has allowed the racism to swell along with all this other petty hatred. The whole development, of course, has been facilitated and exacerbated by the ease of vicious communication made possible by the internet and social media.

So now we are facing fascist America. Big Time. Trump’s America.

{Post script: My brother was one of the 599 people who died of of COVID in Florida yesterday, so this is all very personal to me. He was a victim of the anti-vax conspiracy theory wackos, didn’t get the shot, didn’t go to the hospital when he got sick. They kept him alive for weeks, but it ravaged him so that he eventually succumbed to a cardiac arrest.]

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Pro-lifers really aren’t

A great column that goes far to explain why these Christians have pushed to such extreme positions on abotion, and showing just how un-Christian it really is. And how anti-life they really are.

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2021/09/03/the-easy-selective-morality-of-the-pro-life-movement/
John Pavlovitz
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2021/09/03/the-easy-selective-morality-of-the-pro-life-movement/
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A miracle at Standing Rock

Yes, a miracle is what we need, what the world needs. Charles Eisenstein suggests that the miracle could begin at Standing Rock. The miracle of action out of compassion, seeing the Other as oneself, opening one’s heart to the realities of all beings – a miracle of love.

The halting of the Dakota Access Pipeline would be miraculous simply because of the array of powerful ruling interests that are committed to building it. Not only has Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the pipeline, but a who’s-who of global banks has committed over $10 billion in lines of credit to ETP and other involved entities. Those banks, many of whom are facing financial stress of their own, are counting on the profits from the loans at a time when credit-worthy capital investments are hard to come by. Finally, the United States government has (in its estimation) a geopolitical interest in increasing domestic oil production to reduce the economic power of Russia and the Middle East. To hope to halt the pipeline in the face of such powers is in a certain sense unrealistic.

But, Charles says, things could go differently this time, if we all stay off the warpath, as the elders have advised the Water Protectors to do. “… at Standing Rock, something different is possible. It is not because the Dakota Sioux have finally acquired more guns or money than the pro-pipeline forces. It is because we are ready collectively for a change of heart.”

That’s pretty strong. This is an opening not seen in a long time, and one that could stand as a non-violent model for all the confrontations we’re likely to see over the next four years or so. If the pipeline is re-routed, it establishes a precedent – we can affect even these huge corporate projects if we stay focused, unified and nonviolent.

It will be a victory whether to pipeline is stopped or not: “This has already born fruit: if not for the resolute nonviolence of the resistance, the government would surely have forcefully evicted the Water Protectors by now, justifying violence with violence.”

Each of these invitations onto the warpath also presents an opportunity to defy the enabling narratives of violence and to take a step toward victory without fighting. It is an opportunity to employ what Gandhi called “soul force.” Meeting violence with nonviolence invites the other into nonviolence as well.

Beyond that, this action has the potential to awaken the world:

… when we choose love in the face of enormous temptation to hate, we are issuing a powerful prayer for a world of love. When we refuse to dehumanize in the face of atrocity, we issue a prayer for universal dignity. When thousands of people sacrifice their safety and comfort to protect the water, a powerful prayer issues from their gathering. Some day, in some form, it will be answered.

Charles’ essay is very much worth reading:

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart

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Joanna Macy – heart wisdom

Joanna Macy, a wonderful Buddhist teacher with many years of deep practice and profound teachings, shares this wisdom on the dark times we live in. I’m paraphrasing…

These times, The Great Turning, call for Shambala Warriors wielding the twin weapons of Compassion and Insight – Compassion to provide the heat and motivation to get out there and do what needs to be done and the cooling wisdom of Insight into the ‘radical inter-dependence of all phenomena.’ And we must understand that it is not a war between the good guys and the bad guys, but that ‘the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart.’

Deep wisdom that only true practice can help us bring into the world.

Joanna shares this in her movie, The Great Turning, and this clip is available to view on Vimeo – Joanna Macy on the Shambala Warrior.

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Metta for All Beings

In these dark times, times that demand such awareness and commitment to strong action, we need to build each others’ heart strength for the suffering we will encounter, for the hard work we will do, for the long struggle we must endure.

One way of building this strength is to send out heart-felt messages to others, spoken and unspoken messages that come from the meditative state and have power to spread encouragement and support. In some Buddhist traditions, this process is known as metta, which is usually translated ‘loving kindness’, but goes far beyond that when part of a deep practice of compassion and compassionate action.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel composed this poem, whose words speak to us so strongly in light of recent words and actions, in the spirit of that powerful form of metta:

 

For All Beings

May all beings be cared for and loved,

Be listened to, understood and acknowledged despite different views,

Be accepted for who they are in this moment,

Be afforded patience,

Be allowed to live without fear of having their lives taken away or their bodies violated.

May all beings

Be well in its broadest sense,

Be fed,

Be clothed,

Be treated as if their life is precious,

Be held in the eyes of each other as family.

May all beings

Be appreciated,

Feel welcomed anywhere on the planet,

Be freed from acts of hatred and desperation including war, poverty, slavery, and street crimes,

Live on the planet, housed and protected from harm,

Be given what is needed to live fully, without scarcity,

Enjoy life, living without fear of one another,

Be able to speak freely in a voice and mind of undeniable love.

May all beings

Receive and share the gifts of life,

Be given time to rest, be still, and experience silence.

May all beings

Be awake.

The poem was published in Turning Wheel by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in 2009. May it be spoken, heard, understood and enacted throughout the world.

Metta!

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Breathing thru the pain

My dharma friend Maia Duerr has a beautiful perspective on the recent horrors of hatred and violence rife in our world: it’s all the pain of birthing a new life.

In her July Full Moon newsletter, Maia shared her thoughts and a wonderful new video from India.Arie, “Breathe”, which led me to a good cry that I knew I had been needing! Maia says she believes “we are in the throes of some tremendous birthing process.”

With every bone in my body I believe we are on our way to living into a more awakened way of being with each other and being on the Earth. But we are not there yet. Like any birthing process, the going can get very rough and it would be delusional for me to not recognize that things will likely get ‘worse’ before they get better. Those who are entrapped by fear and ignorance are acting out in ever-more terrifying ways. But always remember this is not the truth of who we are as human beings. 

As some in the #blacklivesmatter movement have pointed out, things are not necessarily worse now, they’re just getting uncovered. What we’re seeing is the karmic fruit of centuries of injustice and a mindless, grasping social and economic order. Maia says, “This brutally honest recognition of “what is,” painful as it may be, is a necessary step toward transformation.”

We can only continue to live our lives if we maintain some kind of confidence that this transformation, this world-wide awakening, is possible and is happening despite our difficulty seeing it.

Maia’s words, and India.Arie’s video, are helping me get through this week.

#blacklivesmatter

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A different perspective on crisis

Charles Eisenstein, my go-to guy for understanding what’s happening in this crazy world, for making sense of it – at least the sense of seeing clearly what the causes and implications of it all are – has written another gem. Whatever he writes about, it seems that he’s able to clarify everything and bring a beautiful, open perspective to the world as he explicates the question at hand.

This one is on ‘Brexit’ – and by extension Trumpism.

He says that the conventional interpretations of the motives of the anti-elitist sentiment as expressed in both these current phenomena are flawed and patronizing to the extreme, blaming it all on the ignorant xenophobia and racist attitudes of the ‘yahoos’. He notes that there are deep and legitimate reasons behind both the anti-EU vote and Trump supporters’ anger.

We don’t agree on what to do, but more and more of us have lost faith in the system and its stewards. When right-wing populists blame our problems on dark-skinned people or immigrants, the response they arouse draws its power from real and justifiable dissatisfaction. Racism is its symptom, not its cause.

It’s the underlying assumptions and attitudes that are creating all of these problems, the ideas that drive people to fear, anger and hatred against someone – who depending on one’s social analysis.

 The right-wing populists incite hatred and anger at the blacks, the immigrants, the Muslims, the gays, the transgender, the “libtards,” etc. The mainstream liberals stir up outrage against the bigots, the nationalists, the contemptible narrow-minded over-entitled “crazy” (a common adjective) climate-change-denying Bible-thumpers. Further left, the critics of neoliberal imperialism follow the same formula by invoking images of heartless corporate executives, greedy bankers, cowardly political elites, and drone-like bureaucrats and technocrats who should surely know better.

Understanding the causes of all this – and then communicating with each other about how to solve it – is the only way our world will come to find a way through all this that leads to a livable world for all.

Charles says the underlying issue is the mindset of modernity, the belief that we as humans are separate and set apart from the rest of life, and from each other.

 …it is part of a mindset that is integral to modernity and has roots going back to the first mass societies. It is fundamentally the mindset of war, in which progress consists in defeating the enemy: weeds or locusts, barbarians or communists; germs or cholesterol; gun nuts or traitors. And that mindset rests on a foundation more basic still: the Story of Separation that holds us as discrete, separate individuals in a world of other, in opposition to random forces and arbitrary events of nature, and in competition with the rest of life. Well-being comes, in this story, through domination and control: glyphosate, antibiotics, GMOs, SSRIs, surveillance systems, border fences, kill lists, prisons, curfews…

–Which pretty much describes most of the nasty stuff going on around us!

It is from this story too that neoliberal capitalism sources its power. It depends on the idealization of competition, encoded in “free markets,” as a law of nature and primary driver of progress; on the sanctity of private property (which is a primal form of domination) and, most of all, on exercising control over others through the creation and enforcement of debt.

At some point, Brexit, Trump, or worse will shake us out of our trance, break our fascination with this world story, and force us to confront the beliefs that underpin it all. Maybe then humanity will embrace the interbeing that is our true home, and we can all live in this world together.

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The value, and point, of practice

One thing I have tried to focus on here is why we practice, whether Buddhist or otherwise, meditation and other mindfulness practices. It’s often a difficult question to answer, and seems to me to be central to the process of offering help for others.

This article is a personal story that gives some very good, solid answers to that question. Primarily we practice to save our lives. And once we experience that, there’s some kind of natural inclination to want to share its benefits with others. If we keep at it a while, we learn lots about ourselves and the way one needs to live in order to stay connected with the meaning that keeps us alive.

This is to me the heart of the article, and the heart of practice:

As soon as I was willing to feel my pain, I regained access to my joy. I regained access to my love, and my boring, mundane life sprang forth in full color. The last day of that sesshin, I asked myself the question “When I am dying, what do I want my last thought to be?” and the answer came right away — gratitude. If I can die being grateful for my life, it will have been a life well lived.

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Quivering with compassion, quaking with confusion-

From Buddhist Peace Fellowship: (this describes my state of heart – Perfectly!)
People need space to make sense of this political moment — Trump’s hate mongering, the daily stories of cops killing folks of color, and the inspiring brilliance of liberatory movements like #BlackLivesMatter. White Buddhists are reading about this in the news or seeing the stories pile up in their Facebook feed, with aching hearts quivering with compassion but troubled minds quaking with confusion. How could all this be happening — hadn’t they been told that racism was a thing of the past? — Dawn Haney, BPF co-director, in Growing the Ranks…
As my friend said yesterday, I find myself crying everyday, thinking, what is this place? Looking around at what people are saying, I wonder, who are these people? How can they have so much hate, anger, fear? Dawn’s answer to the venom directed at the Black Lives Matter concept, it seems so simple and obvious, I wonder why it’s so hard for some to get it. Dawn says:
We demand that Black Lives Matter, because in the relative reality, they don’t. If we want all lives to matter, its time we started making sure that black lives matter.
And I wonder what is the role we White Buddhists can play? This answer  from Mushim Patricia Ikeda is instructive:

If you’re at the beginning of your ally journey, there’s something you need to know, right off the bat, if you haven’t already given it a lot of thought. Beyond feeling good about being anti-racist, you’re going to need to face your fear of losing your protected status as a white person.

We can begin to see and feel that fear, and live with it enough to understand what’s driving some of those angry folks, without letting the anger rise in us. That means a lot of sitting with the feelings, because it’s not easy. I’m pretty sure almost all anger has fear underneath it, so there’s that natural progression that wants to happen. Just watching it, watching it, seeing it for what it is… that’s the only way I know of to be clear.

A lot of practice, some of it sitting. Some of it while walking around, talking, lying down, working, thinking. A lot of letting it sit in the heart without denying, excusing, suppressing, ignoring. That’s what it will take.