How do we read the signs that the world and our own hearts and minds are giving us? The universe doesn’t just text us one, clearly typed message, explaining all we’re facing. Would we even welcome such a message? Maybe we do get such messages sometimes and aren’t sure if we’re only imagining?
I’ve been reading Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji, by Shinshu Roberts, and just started to alternate it with Seaglass: A Jungian Analyst’s Exploration of Suffering and Individuation, by Gilda Frantz. Dogen is a 13th Century Zen teacher and founder of one of the main schools of Japanese Buddhism. I usually read only 2-4 pages at a time, because each paragraph is like a puzzle requiring considerable reflection. But the beauty that can be discovered in doing so is immense. Frantz’s book was recommended by 2 Facebook friends. It’s been a remarkable find, of essays, personal stories, and interviews about facing the difficult in life and revealing the myths and motivations that drive us.
And yesterday, after reading a little in both books, a deep realization, frightening in its scope, grabbed my mind and challenged my emotions. Both books synchronistically seemed to be sending one message, a message of something being asked, no, demanded of me. Something more than I’ve already given, to the world, to myself. It was less a regret for something left undone than a glimpse into an opportunity⎼ if I could take it. Frightening in the risks involved, both in the doing or undoing.
There’s a sense of inevitability posed by life in these times, hidden between news reports and the sounds of rain. Between bare tree branches, deep gray clouds, and the feel of tension in my hands and shoulders. Between the ordinary, the known, and the extraordinary and unknown. And a question⎼ We know we must act. But how?
More is being asked of all of us than probably ever before in our lives. No matter how much I might want this not to be so, that is the reality. We must let go of so much of what’s normal to our lives so we can do what the times require of us. What our inner selves demand of us.
How do we change our lives internally so we can respond skillfully to the fear DT incites and manipulates in us? To the assault on our values and humanity? How do we respond to his blatant assaults on our security as a people and a nation? To our health care? To our incomes? To threats of deporting immigrants of color, from Latin America? Threats to LGBTQ+? To anyone who opposes him? To the rule of law? How do we respond to the expanding climate and ecological crises?
How do I feel less the me isolated from the rest of us, and more of the rest of us in me? Doing so might not only reveal how to help others, and maybe help others realize what they, too, can do, but inspire or expose unseen depths in myself. I want to meditate even more than I do. To learn more than I know. To do more.
To help me do this, I plan to read poets and writers from Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and the US, about how to face the horrors caused by one group of humans against others. Or read writers from the distant past, in ancient China when the social order had collapsed, or even in Ukraine or Eastern Europe, in the villages where my own family might have once lived⎼ so we can feel any horrors of life can be faced, and the strength in ourselves to act can be found.
The famed Chinese poet Tu Fu wrote of life in the devastated landscape of a civil war in 8th century China. Somehow, he was able to keep on engaging with his world despite the frightening reality of his time.
Repose vanished in all four directions,
No one finds peace in old age anymore,
And I’m alone, my sons and grandsons
War-dead now, so why live out this life?…
Contemporary Ukrainian poet and combat medic Yaryna Chornohuz wrote, as reported in the New York Times:
Every time you want to be wrong
About the brightness of those eyes
The eyes of those who decided one day
To die in battle
Are always brighter than others’
Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha wrote, amidst the violence in Gaza:
Our backs bang on the walls
whenever the house shakes.
We stare at each other’s faces,
scared yet happy
that so far, our lives have been spared.
And I’d like to remember and honor Nikki Giovanni, who died today. She was a wonderful black poet from the US and authored several collections. One poem was called Rosa Parks, about the woman who played such a courageous and vital role in the struggle of Black Americans, and people everywhere, for equal rights and freedom from oppression, misunderstanding, and racial violence.
…This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, [Emmett Till] …would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. …
And to learn how my own family in the more distant past might have faced great adversity, I’m reading Jewish humorist and novelist Sholem Aleichem’s novel Wandering Stars. It gives a romanticized view of life in the early twentieth century, beginning in small Russian or Ukrainian shetls, villages and urban ghettos. And what happens when a traveling Yiddish theatre company enters the lives of the people in one village, particularly the family of a Jewish cantor, a talented vocalist who leads the congregation in prayer, and teaches music on the side
Almost all the people in the village are so poor they live in tiny homes with little to eat, knowing the threat of a pogrom is never far away. A pogrom is originally a Russian word used to describe riots of extreme hate and violence, often politically manipulated and directed at Jewish people.
Even the cantor, a very prominent man in the community has little food for himself and his family. He’s too poor to pay a few cents to attend the theatre. But thanks to his wife’s intervention, who reminds the wife of the shtetl’s richest man how much their son enjoys the music lessons with the cantor, does the cantor’s daughter get to attend the theatre.
Aleichem describes the night as the daughter returns from the performance: On such nights sleeping is truly a sin. Your eyes are drawn to gaze at the sky, the moon, the stars. Your soul strives, not knowing toward what. Your heart longs, not knowing for what…
We also strive, not yet knowing how, not yet knowing if we’ll succeed. All we know is the need to act.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
