Years ago, a little girl
my little girl
painted an Amaryllis,
leafed out
not yet blooming.
This afternoon, the late October sun lights
the broad fan of leaves of the latest generation
of Amaryllis half grown;
and I must send a note
to Laura, gone round the world to New Zealand
where it is Spring, not Fall:
Dear Laura,
I think I see
what you meant.
Friends,
This letter came from a young woman who has just recently returned from serving in the U.S. Air Force in Iraq. Her main task, and one she took on so thoroughly that she voluntarily extended her tour of duty to bring it to a place she felt would be viable, was to set up a Girl Scout program. As you’ll see from her letter, she almost didn’t make it back home. A week before returning to the U.S., she was hit by the blast from a bomb. Fortunately, she is very much alive.
Love is Watching Someone Die
by Erinn Woodside, Saturday, August 6, 2011, at 5:32 p.m.
“Love is watching someone die.
So who’s going to watch you die?”
— “What Sarah Said” by Death Cab for Cutie
As I read through some of the media buzz about our 31 fallen in Afghanistan this morning I felt compelled to put down some thoughts that have been swirling around in my head for the past several weeks. I thought I would share them with you…
How do we fight? I’m not asking what political, social, economic, religious, or otherwise philosophical reasons cause us to fight or wage war. That is another discussion. But how are we able to actually raise our right hand and follow through with the mission at hand? Most military members, when questioned, reply by saying “Simple. It’s for my brother or sister on the right or the left of me.” It is this depth of intimacy that has has haunted my mind lately.
Within days of getting back from Iraq I heard a short piece on NPR about a new book, “12 Breaths a Minute” a collection of essays about dying. The editor spoke of the recurring problem in the healthcare community of doctors and practitioners and family members “distancing themselves” from dying patients. The Editor suggested the common thread of all the essays was that death requires great intimacy from doctors, nurses and from loved ones that can be difficult and painful. Far from being an experience of separation, death is deeply personal and rarely is one more aware of life.
Having been very close to death just a few weeks ago, I can vouch for the Editor’s claim. As the ringing in my ears blasted and my head throbbed and the feeling of too much energy shook through my body…I realized I was alive! Not just breathing, but alive. Dark, shaky, and very real.
Deployed military members and civilians live with the impending threat of death on a daily basis. Gunfire, rockets, mortars…these are the background noise of life. You can’t worry about it or let it stress you, it is simply a fact and we chose to be there. Living with death in such a way builds a special kind of intimacy. You do what you can, so that your sisters and brothers can return home safely. And when we loose one? Well, you stand in formation proudly, stare at their dog tags dangling on an upturned rifle and helmut, and listen to Taps being played in their honor. You are deeply present with them, a fallen friend…you offer love. And then you continue the mission…
Life on deployment often makes no sense, you are part of a chaotic world and often feel like pawns in some global, political hell. However, it is also remarkably simple. Do your job well, keep yourself and your troops safe, go home with honor. I think the presence of death and living in such a “real” way is incredibly powerful.
And then you go home. We return to a world that doesn’t understand death…and consequently, may not truly understand life. Our reality has been challenged and we made it through. The loved ones we work so hard to protect have, meanwhile, been caught up in the mirage of busyness and distraction. To us, they don’t understand life and we may not fit in anymore. In order to “acclimate” to “normal life” we buy new cars and fancy TVs and take expensive vacations. We also drift into busyness and distraction, keeping those memories of life tucked away for the next deployment.
I could very easily do the same thing. But then I hear about 31 fallen brothers in Afghanistan, a suicide in theater, more rockets landing on my old camp and I’m thrown back into the mindfulness of death. I remember my loved ones still serving over there. I remember my workout buddy who died and his platoon-mate who shortly after took his own life. I remember the rocket that nearly took my life and rattled my head.
So I continue to ponder life and death. In Zen Buddhism, non-duality of life and death is taught. They are one and the same. In Christianity, Christ died for us so that we might live, and live abundantly. For the first time in my life, I am beginning to really understand what this means.
Life without awareness is a type of death. Unless you are deeply present to all that IS…you cannot touch Life. Facing death forces you into awareness… and consequently into life. To be fully present in life or death requires deep intimacy and that can only be found in Love and Grace.
Death can be an act of creation; it can bring us back to life.
I hope through the course of my life I experience a multitude of deaths and re-births. Through Grace and Love it seems to me that this cycle of life and death opens us to true peace and presence.
So how do we fight to stay aware and be really present to life? I guess it’s the same way we fight for each other in war…with love and intimacy? Developing a deep sense of connectedness (intimacy) to all creation, such that they feel like brothers on a battlefield, must be the way to gain awareness. Inevitably, when some part of our world dies we should also respond in much the same way as a soldier…salute respectfully, listen with your whole heart to Taps, and carry on with your mission…and see that part of your world born again.
When we finally realize that fighting is not necessary to be fully aware and present in life… well, that’s what I would call real Peace!
Maybe none of what I just said makes much sense? I would dearly love to see what you think! Coming home has been an interesting ride…
In honor of:
SPC Nick Newby and SGT Nathan Beyers, KIA 7 Jull 2011 on VBC, Iraq.
SGT Beyers leaves behind a wife and baby girl… I hope and pray his life is reborn in them!
“And I want to know my fate
If I keep up this way.
And it’s hard to want to stay awake
When everyone you meet, they all seem to be asleep”
— “Bixby Canyon Bridge” by Death Cab for Cutie
http://www.wickpix.com/portfolio/animation/
This one’s for fun.
Esperanza Spalding’s performance at the Nobel Peace Prize proceedings (Dec. 16, 2009). Lovely and meandering, not a new message but…is it new messages we need? “The road to peace is endless, the journey with open eyes is how we’ll mend this…. I’m sure enough, and I won’t give up” she says. Yep, like that.
Then what is the answer? — Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history … for contemplation or in fact …
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
— Robinson Jeffers, The Answer, 1936
I came upon these words again this evening, and find them a comfort. I hope you will, too.
HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS
I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin
of a quick splashed picture–bug, leaf,
caricature of Teacher–
On paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it
Their world and several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it–
Cheered as it whizzed by–
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom
winejars
Happy to have saved us all
by Philip Whalen
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/bodys-grace/transcript.shtml
Yesterday, on NPR’s “Speaking of Faith”, Christa Tippett interviewed Matthew Sanford, a philosopher and yoga teacher who has been paraplegic since the age of 13. He’s published a book, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. I’m including here some selections from the transcript, because I found the way Sanford speaks of silence and absence, after injury but also just in the course of aging, very intriguing!
“…a level of silence or absence of normal sensation, silence, got infused into my mind-body relationship, but I think that’s happening to all of us. I think that’s aging. Like our mind-body relationship is changing over time.
“The silence is the aspect of our consciousness that makes us feel slightly heavy. It is the source of our feeling of loss, but also of a sense of awe.”
and later, “This silence demands grace, not rupture.”
Mr. Sanford: But part of what I try to do is make it seem more ordinary. When I do compare it to our experiences, I, you know, like when you’re washing your dishes for another day after another meal and you have that kind of quiet feeling, I think we all know what I’m talking about. You can kind of feel it, when you feel beauty.
Ms. Tippett: It’s the silence within us.
Mr. Sanford: Mm-hmm. For example, you know, when you learn to soften your organs of perception, let’s say if I’d ask you right now to soften the inside of your mouth, and in particular, relax your tongue, something will happen to your perception inward in your body and you will hear something different. The world will suddenly get a little quieter; you’ll feel a different kind of presence in you. That’s what I mean by silence. And I do think it’s an ordinary experience. I think that we have it all the time. We just don’t recognize it. I think that’s where stress lands. I think that there’s an invisible aspect of our consciousness that’s here, that we need to manage better, we need to be more present with for a lot of reasons because I think this same silence we’re talking about both connects us to other people and separates. It goes either way.
Ms. Tippett: In a way, I understand it also goes towards life or towards death.
Mr. Sanford: Or it is both. You know what I mean? It’s not like the silence can only go towards life. In fact, I kind of think that level of absence that we carry within us that I’m calling silence is itself some level of dying or death that we carry within us. And so it’s not that the silence can go away from it. I think in trying to listen, for example, to the silence of my paralysis, that it itself has texture, that it itself has life in it. And it’s a kind of life that mixes. In a yoga pose, for example, you try to make what I would say the silence congruent with physical exertion, not just physically exert with a lot of will. Think about what you can feel in your body. You only feel a little portion of it. If I were to ask you to stretch the intercostal muscles right now, you wouldn’t exactly know how to do that.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah.
Mr. Sanford: Like you have silence, too, in your mind-body relationship. If I’d ask you to lift your inner — the arches of your feet directly, you wouldn’t be able to do that. If you were to try to go there, you would encounter a wall, a brick wall. Now, the question is, is it just a brick wall? Or if you start, and start to listen and to be quiet, you can start hearing that brick wall. It isn’t just a wall. It’s a different quality of awareness that’s residing within you, that in that silence, sounds can gain texture again. And I say one place the moon might reveal itself, life reveal itself again, only darker. I compare it to walking from a well-lighted room into a dark one. At first you can’t see anything. But if you sit and you pause and you listen, usually there’s enough light to get across the room, you know? It’s not going to be like turning the light back on, but in fact, the world gets this other kind of texture that makes it beautiful. Also makes it scary in the dark. You know, it goes either way.
[music]
Ms. Tippett: Here’s how Matthew Sanford describes this silence in his memoir:
Mr. Sanford: (reading) Imagine walking from a well-lit room into a dark one. Imagine the darkness as a visual expression of silence. My rehabilitation made a mistake with the silence by focusing on the absence of light. It too quickly accepted the loss and taught me to willfully strike out against the darkness. It told me to move faster rather than slower, push harder rather than softer. It guided me to compensate for what I could not see.
Another course of action, however, is patience. Stop moving, wait for the eyes to adjust, allow for stillness and then see what’s possible. Although full-fledged vision does not return, usually there is enough light to find one’s way across the room. After a while, the moon may come out, sounds might gain texture, the world might reveal itself once again, only darker.
May 19, 2010, 8:33 p.m.
If You Build It … / By LIZ ROBBINS/New York Times
For 15 years, Kevin Costner has been overseeing the construction of oil separation machines to prepare for the possibility of another disaster of the magnitude of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.
Does this evoke his tagline from “Field of Dreams?” It seems that Mr. Costner, the 55-year-old actor, environmental activist and fisherman, was ready for the current spill in the gulf.
Disturbed by the effects of the Valdez spill in Alaska, Mr. Costner bought the nascent technology from the government in 1995 and put $24 million of his own money into developing it for the private sector.
“Kevin saw the Exxon Valdez spill, and as a fisherman and an environmentalist, it just stuck in his craw, the fact that we didn’t have separation technology,” said John Houghtaling, Mr. Costner’s lawyer and business partner as chief executive with Ocean Therapy Solutions, which developed the technology.
Mr. Costner’s brother, Dan, is a scientist who worked on the project and was also in New Orleans this week.
On Wednesday, BP’s chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, said that the company had approved six of Ocean Therapy’s 32 machines for testing. All boast centrifuge processing technology — giant vacuum-like machines that suck oil from water, separate the oil, store it in a tanker and send the water, 99.9 percent purified, back into the gulf.
“I’m very happy the light of day has come to this,” Mr. Costner said at a news conference in New Orleans. He said he was “very sad” about the spill, “but this is why it’s developed.”
“It’s prepared to go out and solve problems, not talk about them,” the actor said of the technology.
Mr. Houghtaling of Ocean Therapy Solutions said that the company had trained independent contractors and were bringing in scientists from U.C.L.A. to deploy the machines, which were waiting on a barge in Venice, La., on Wednesday afternoon.
The technology was available for use 10 years ago, Mr. Houghtaling said. “These machines have been very robust, but nobody’s been interested in them until now,” he added.
BP officials and Ocean Therapy are working to determine where best in the gulf to test the machines, and if all goes well, the technology will be running within the week, he said. “We just need the green light from BP.”
He said that the largest four machines have the capability of separating 210,000 gallons of oil from water a day, 200 gallons a minute.
A number of people have asked me what they can do about the heartbreaking destruction of life and habitat going on in the Gulf.
Here’s one thing:
http://www.oceanconservancy.org/site/PageServer?pagename=home&cvridirect=true
And then, there’s the day-to-day discipline of buying less new stuff. Pretty much every new thing you buy burns petroleum one way or another.
I like to think of myself as living pretty simply…I think most of us like to think of ourselves that way. But the fact is, I buy stuff I don’t need. It’s not gloomy, macabre, or Puritan to ask myself to stop and wonder if this whatever will really make me happy. What really makes me happy right now? What do I rejoice in? Probably not so much the new shoes, more taking a walk in the old ones. Think I”ll go do that!
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/
Here’s a link to a gorgeous thing—an interactive trail designed by Stephen Oppenheimer, which summarizes scads of research showing where humans originated (Eastern Africa) and how, over thousands of years, we spread all over the globe. What a resource!
Instead canvas plimsolls will replace uncomfortable and “environmentally hazardous” leather shoes.
The move by the country’s school boards follows a campaign by Maneka Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s widowed daughter-in-law, who is now an member of parliament for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. She is one of India’s leading animal rights campaigners and a fierce opponent of slaughtering cows, which are revered among Hindus.
India’s Central Board of School Education and the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination has accepted her proposal.
Black leather shoes were introduced as mandatory items in Indian school uniforms during British colonial rule and have continued unchallenged ever since. Their widespread use has made schoolchildren the country’s largest consumers of leather products, according to the People for Animals (PFA) campaign.
Sixteen schools in Madras have already banned leather footwear in response to their campaign and protesters have since been lobbying schools in Chandigarh, Punjab.
Now central government officials have backed the campaign following a series of letters from Mrs Gandhi.
“This decision was forced on Indians by the British. It is a decision that is not just unhealthy for children but environmentally very dangerous,” she wrote. Leather shoes do not absorb sweat, force children to change their shoes during the day, and cause schoolchildren to have larger carbon footprint, she said. They are also more expensive for parents.
Gerry Arathoon, Secretary of CISCE, has backed the campaign and said the board believes leather shoes ’stink’, gather dust, need regular cleaning with ‘toxic’ polish, and that the tanneries they come from are a source of disease for their workers.
Canvas shoes, by contrast, are easy to clean, comfortable, absorb sweat, kind to cows and without colonial associations.
from the Telegraph, 5 May 2010
This is a slow, pensive rendition I’d never heard before. It’s worth listening through the whole song, because she makes a beautiful clear statement near the end.
On a night when the news about oil fouling the Gulf keeps coming and coming, when a person has to grieve and grieve again, it helps to hear the song of such a great big soul and be thankful for that.
Love this poem.
THE WORLD OF THE SENSES
What a day: I had some trouble
following the plotline; however,
the special effects were incredible.
Now this, the
dreaming breathing body
lying right beside
my own, just think–
at any given instant
it might undergo a change so
enormous that nothing is left of it
but mere object, a thing
to be taken away from me, never
to be seen again, never.
– Franz Wright
from The New Yorker magazine, April 28, 2008
Yesterday evening I spoke about the ways I can see sangha developing strength, bringing forth its full creativity for the life of us all. The following two links have been inspiring to me this way, in recent days.
Lauren Reichert, in “Tikkun”, writes about healing in community.
http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010reichelt
Chaz Buzan dancing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tbjOC0CjY
I hope you’ll enjoy these, gorgeous in different ways.