Death is happening all of time.
I forget that. I am reminded. This month I attended the third funeral since I've arrived here and today I went to pick up my friend and Zen priest from the airport from his step father's funeral. In downtown San Jose, I stood before a mural of 1, 300+ pictures of trees. Their story: they are the trees of an orchard in Silicon Valley. As the city grew up among them, one devoted man nurtured these trees for the past thirty years. Eventually the business that owned the orchard sold out to another business that couldn't afford to keep the orchard or water the trees. The man still went though. He watched the cherry trees with shallow roots begin to die first, watched trees fall in storms, and slowly even the deep-rooted oaks begin to dry. He watered two by hand. I don't know why two, maybe that was what he had strength to do-- he'd grown old with the trees. The photographer met the trees once earlier in his life and was drawn back to them. He took each trees portrait during the winter. It was a stirring display... both celebratory, like proud family portraits proclaiming a history in a hallway, and also the photography of a cemetery. It made me cry. We live in a beautiful world. We live in an ugly world. And it is so good and difficult to be born human.
When I talked to Rick about how to the hold the stories of the people who crack their lives open for me he said simply, "Grieve."
I asked Ellie today what had become clearer to him lately (thank you, Larisa for that question). He said, "That the world is evil..." The system, the injustice of it... the grossness of our ignorance to how our lifestyles effect others. "...but fighting may not be the best response." I asked him what was better and he said maybe openness, to be vulnerable. Hmm.
The Sea of Vulnerability: Fred Luskin
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Sunday, April 15, 2012
in the realm of hungry ghosts
My small act of insurrection this month is getting food stamps, which I qualify for, but is also a means of there being less government money for the insanity of the US military complex. And! Roy and I did our grocery shopping at Trader Joe's... (Brookster, in your honor I am devouring a box of Barbara's shredded oats which I'd forgotten about since HA.) Delicious nutritious Food Not bombs!
Community life is really hard. Some days I want to escape from being around everyone. When my superiority/ego/ideals rise to the surface... which is more often then I'd like... I am reminded of how a true community is not easy work. In order to create beauty in Chinatown we have to cultivate an atmosphere of contagious love (something like what must've been happening among 1st century Christians) but that love comes at a very high price-- all of us working on ourselves, building friendships where we learn to truly trust and sacrifice for each other. It requires incredible patience, and willingness to see people without holding on to my idea of them (or their motivations)-- allowing people to change not binding them to a version of their self. It requires noticing the constricting of my heart, the narrowing, enduring together, sharing (the material and immaterial things of life.) Love reaches past the tit-for-tat of reciprocity and asks for a life of dying to the self so love can be reborn over and over. How much am I actually committed to that? How invested in honesty, in learning to walk uncomfortably until the way becomes clearer am I? How willing am I to admit to failures, to take responsibility for my action, to not delegate the difficulties of communicating uneasy things off on others?
Today I went with Rick & Roy to the Buddhist Temple for Buddha's birthday. The dharma talk was thought-provoking. He talked about how difficult it is to be born in human form, but how the celebration of the birth reminds us how miraculous our own life is, that we are here to become human. There are six or seven realms in their cosmology (though its metaphorical)... something like hell, then the realm of the hungry ghosts, and animals, and titans/warriors, then humans, and heavenly... (the titans or warriors are people who by being obsessed with power are lacking full humanity or something like that) and the heavenly can also be negative in the sense of being so spirit-minded we sit in a content bliss while others suffer... but the uniqueness of being human, of a realm where is suffering and birthing-- is a beautiful thing-- the only realm where we can learn to be conscious and awakened. To often we live in the other realms, live hellishly, live as wandering, hungry ghosts, searching, live as warriors consumed with lust for power.
Rick wrote a poem that I've been dwelling on that contains these lines... "You smile at me and say: Love is the sweetest of all paths! I turn on you a stern glance and ask: how much pain are you prepared to endure? ... we would rather crucify Love than walk this world under Love's burden of pain." Many days I do not desire Love at all. To follow Jesus is more difficult than any endeavor. Recently I have been asking myself how I can survive the stories I carry... how to be faithful to the vulnerability of others-- to remain open, to keep baring my heart to the moment... when that looks like talking to a 20-yr old pregnant heroin addict about parenting, or helping an ill and drunk woman clean shit off her shoes and scrubbing the bathroom floor while she tells me how she was molested for years of her childhood, or a woman showing me the scar that runs down her neck where a jealous boyfriend cut her? Love is a tricky thing-- accompanying myself and others through the different realms.
There is a 'dharma gate' called "the intuitive tolerance of the complete incomprehensibility of all things." Yes. Yes.
Community life is really hard. Some days I want to escape from being around everyone. When my superiority/ego/ideals rise to the surface... which is more often then I'd like... I am reminded of how a true community is not easy work. In order to create beauty in Chinatown we have to cultivate an atmosphere of contagious love (something like what must've been happening among 1st century Christians) but that love comes at a very high price-- all of us working on ourselves, building friendships where we learn to truly trust and sacrifice for each other. It requires incredible patience, and willingness to see people without holding on to my idea of them (or their motivations)-- allowing people to change not binding them to a version of their self. It requires noticing the constricting of my heart, the narrowing, enduring together, sharing (the material and immaterial things of life.) Love reaches past the tit-for-tat of reciprocity and asks for a life of dying to the self so love can be reborn over and over. How much am I actually committed to that? How invested in honesty, in learning to walk uncomfortably until the way becomes clearer am I? How willing am I to admit to failures, to take responsibility for my action, to not delegate the difficulties of communicating uneasy things off on others?
Today I went with Rick & Roy to the Buddhist Temple for Buddha's birthday. The dharma talk was thought-provoking. He talked about how difficult it is to be born in human form, but how the celebration of the birth reminds us how miraculous our own life is, that we are here to become human. There are six or seven realms in their cosmology (though its metaphorical)... something like hell, then the realm of the hungry ghosts, and animals, and titans/warriors, then humans, and heavenly... (the titans or warriors are people who by being obsessed with power are lacking full humanity or something like that) and the heavenly can also be negative in the sense of being so spirit-minded we sit in a content bliss while others suffer... but the uniqueness of being human, of a realm where is suffering and birthing-- is a beautiful thing-- the only realm where we can learn to be conscious and awakened. To often we live in the other realms, live hellishly, live as wandering, hungry ghosts, searching, live as warriors consumed with lust for power.
Rick wrote a poem that I've been dwelling on that contains these lines... "You smile at me and say: Love is the sweetest of all paths! I turn on you a stern glance and ask: how much pain are you prepared to endure? ... we would rather crucify Love than walk this world under Love's burden of pain." Many days I do not desire Love at all. To follow Jesus is more difficult than any endeavor. Recently I have been asking myself how I can survive the stories I carry... how to be faithful to the vulnerability of others-- to remain open, to keep baring my heart to the moment... when that looks like talking to a 20-yr old pregnant heroin addict about parenting, or helping an ill and drunk woman clean shit off her shoes and scrubbing the bathroom floor while she tells me how she was molested for years of her childhood, or a woman showing me the scar that runs down her neck where a jealous boyfriend cut her? Love is a tricky thing-- accompanying myself and others through the different realms.
There is a 'dharma gate' called "the intuitive tolerance of the complete incomprehensibility of all things." Yes. Yes.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Money is not wealth.
This morning I have been thinking about foreclosure and alternative economies (though the scent of fresh jasmine from the Chinatown community garden, the bamboo wind-chimes and songbirds are distracting deep thought). Last night I was at a campfire discussing what a foreign policy with Iran would look like if it took into consideration our history of imperialism. It reminded me of Lisa Schirch's work to see development and diplomacy as acts of our national defense. It is difficult to watch the way the system works against healing and progress in people's lives.
On Thursday our writing group wrote about 'the color of hunger.' One guest wrote (in Spanish), "Only you know the color of your hunger." There are so many struggles in my community-- struggles to re-enter against the stigma of felony, of past-drug use, struggles to maintain homes, to find work, to find a place to sleep at night. Recently there have been more guests (and even volunteers) who are facing foreclosure and the loss of their homes.
"The anti-foreclosure and right-to-housing movements are among the most consistent in our nation’s history of activism—a constant necessity in a country where private property is a right but a family’s basic shelter, security, and safety is a privilege." Occupy Moves to Front Lawns
I can not fully understand what a terrifying place to be in that is for them. And what is happening here is just a tiny sliver of the struggle across the United States- the struggle which I hope is the birth-pangs of awakening to the unsustainable way of American life. Having just finished my third cup of coffee this morning I can't articulate the urgency, passion, despair, and hope I feel about this... but I am recalling the power of the human microphone at Occupy Wall Street last October and the sense of embodying others words and speaking for and with them to be heard. We must take our power for each other, from each other, together with each other. We must not forget that money is not wealth. And we must challenge the systems that prevent us from being human with each other.
[David Korten]
On Thursday our writing group wrote about 'the color of hunger.' One guest wrote (in Spanish), "Only you know the color of your hunger." There are so many struggles in my community-- struggles to re-enter against the stigma of felony, of past-drug use, struggles to maintain homes, to find work, to find a place to sleep at night. Recently there have been more guests (and even volunteers) who are facing foreclosure and the loss of their homes.
"The anti-foreclosure and right-to-housing movements are among the most consistent in our nation’s history of activism—a constant necessity in a country where private property is a right but a family’s basic shelter, security, and safety is a privilege." Occupy Moves to Front Lawns
[David Korten]
The devastation created by Wall Street’s failure affirms three truths that are the foundation on which millions of people are at work building a New Economy:
- Our individual and collective well-being depends on acting with concern for the well-being of others. We all do better when we look out for one another.
- Money is not wealth. It is just numbers. Sacrificing the health and happiness of billions of people to grow numbers on computer hard drives to improve one’s score on the Forbes Magazine list of the world’s richest people is immoral. Managing a society’s economy to facilitate this immoral competition at the expense of people and nature is an act of collective insanity.
- The proper purpose of the economy and the enterprises that comprise it is to provide good jobs and quality goods and services beneficial to the health and happiness of people, community and nature. A modest financial profit is essential to a firm’s viability, but is not its proper purpose.
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