Ahz mah (So what)

On vacation, in my own home. Calling it a retreat, because that sounds more spiritually meaningful (although shopping online for a vacuum cleaner and cleaning up the deck and rearranging bedroom furniture and filing papers might not seem particularly spiritual). This morning, savoring a cup of loose leaf fair trade organic green tea from China and a small piece of banana bread with chocolate chips that I baked myself, I hear my reverie interrupted by a sneering inner voice: Suburban white lady. The world is on fire and you are sipping fancy tea. People in nearby Brockton – no, even here in Stoughton – don’t have enough food for their children, and you are sipping fancy tea and staring out the window at the leaves and squirrels. Millions of people in this country and beyond are in high anxiety this week over the fate of our democracy and their very lives, and you are savoring a cup of fair trade tea and a small piece of banana bread. This is a familiar voice. It pretty much hangs out j

Every Thursday in my condo neighborhood, except for during the winter months, the landscaping workers descend upon the earth for many hours with their soul-crushingly loud machines. Mowers and blowers. It has been my weekly ritual, for years now, to sit in meditation each Thursday observing deep aversion, righteous indignation, sadness, bodily distress, cursing. Every week I think: This is Wrong. The gasoline-powered blowers in particular are an ecological nightmare. This has been known for years. I fret for the ecosystem, I fret for the workers' well-being. Someone should Do Something. I should Write a Letter. They should – we should – and then I never do, and they never do, and the landscaping workers continue to descend upon the earth every Thursday. This month, a new level of outrage arises, as I realize that they are altering our experience of the fleeting glory of autumn. Crunchy leaves underfoot on the quiet streets where we all walk, blankets of reds and yellows on the vibr

It’s happening again. I’ve been trying for several days to write about something really Big. A fundamental, largely unseen crack in our culture; something that impacts every one of us, down through the generations. But I’ve been writing about it, in pristine and earnest abstractions. I know I’m right, but who do I imagine I will convince with carefully crafted logic? And then I realize that it’s happening again – that the mind is wrestling with the fog of Big Issues when it could be dropping down into actual experiences – like the swish of yellow leaves underfoot, or the cool dampness of the air at twilight, or the uneasiness in the body after an oddly tense conversation with a friend. Or noticing how the days are flowing by rapidly and that I no longer find it troubling.

What do I know? By that I seem to mean: What do I know to be true? to be reality? Not what did I “learn” in all my years of schooling. (Definitely not that.) Not what do I believe, or want to believe, or choose to believe. (I would say that facts like the earth’s orbit around the sun belong in this category. I accept them as true, but do I really know?) Not what came to me through the filter of family, or the white supremacist-patriarchal-christian-capitalist culture. What do I know, really? Perhaps I only know for sure what this particular body/mind has experienced directly. Okay, so start there: I know that emotional distress arises out of the experience of wanting . I know that a sense of pleasure arises in response to sunshine (but not too much sunshine), and rustling trees and salty ocean air. I know that another person’s drama is not mine to fix or solve or even grok. I know that communicating clearly (both expressing and hearing) is extremely difficult and endlessly humbling. I

I don’t think I’m the only person who does this: When something shocking happens in a movie I’m watching, I cover my eyes with my hands. And, simultaneously, there is the compulsive move to peek out from between my fingers, squinting in an effort to see but not-quite see. This week I am noticing how the national news has this quality of seductive shock, and how the mind is responding with its own gestures of both protection and compulsive squinting.

 Here is what I shared with my community on Yom Kippur: Judaism began with idol smashing. Some of you may be familiar with the ancient midrash about the childhood of our patriarch Avraham. The story is told that Avraham’s father made and sold idols. One day his father went out and left Avraham in charge of the shop. Avraham took a hammer and smashed many of the idols, then put the hammer in the hand of the largest one. When his father returned and was horrified, Avraham pointed to the idol holding the hammer and said “He did it.” His father responded, “You know that’s not possible, these idols can’t do anything. They’re just wood and stone.” And Avraham replied with some version of “Dear Father, if only your ears could hear what your mouth is saying.” Judaism began with idol smashing. The Torah is idol obsessed -- filled with instructions for the early Israelites to smash idols wherever they found them. Including in their own homes. The lure of idol worship was apparently a continuous