Against Longevity

We are mistakenly under the impression that thing obtain value by lasting forever.

The earth, for instance, and the environment; we (especially us on the ‘environmental’ side of things) have a hard time feeling that this planet ball has any worth if one day, as it shall, it will explode, implode along with the universe and everything in it.

Heaven, some believe, succeeds where earth fails, and is the place we all yearn for, precisely because it is never-ending. Eternal life – the grail cup each of us dips into our secret hearts, drinking in the hope of it, quietly, secretly.

Relationships: We speak of them as “making it.” “Will we make it?” To which I say – “Make what?” Of course our love songs are peppered with the words of eternity – always, everlasting, paradise, forever and ever amen. A good relationship is defined by its length. My grandparents, for instance, married fifty or sixty-something years. Wow, impressive, right?

And then we speak of our individual lives, too – about “I’ve made it to 80 years” or a child dying as being “cut off too soon.”

I’ve got some bones in this whole ideology of longevity as-marker-of-value to pick, lick clean, and toss.

Time-Less

For instance: Encouraging people to stick with relationships for the sake of trying to achieve a certain amount of time put in – as if it were a job, a jail, a retirement fund? Criminal.

Is it not true?: A relationship can change you, challenge you, embolden you, crystalize and shape your beliefs, inspire your passions, awaken your intellectual curiosity – and last only a month, a year, a semester.

Of course, time affects and impacts the nature of a relationship, whether it’s a parent-child, teacher-student, colleague-colleague, or romantic relationship. And I believe in the value of intimacy and trust deepening over time.

But I also believe there is value in a thing in itself, not how it performs as compared to a model of fairytale endings. We certainly don’t feel college is a waste if it only takes four years to complete; why don’t we similarly perceive a four-year-romantic involvement?

And time is not always an indicator of character or a predictor of impact; to use it as the only measure of the solidity of a personality or the importance of an impression ignores the complexities and possibilities that occur in our lifetimes. I’ll never forget Jade Richardson, a girl I knew fleetingly for two years in high school, and our good friend Marcus, who died right before turning 18 and graduating. They mean more to me and affected my life much more than others I’ve known for longer.

To feel that you have failed because a relationship ended is to negate the worth of the time that was spent. So instead of leaving a marriage richer, you leave it feeling poor. Instead of appreciation for the joy of a life lived, you weep for the fact that it didn’t continue ad infinitum.

I’ve noticed about myself that I experience a twinge of social shame when recounting episodes from my first marriage, which ended in divorce. It took me a while to realize I was hesitating to say “my first husband” or “my ex-spouse,” because it was like waving a flag in front of my face: “Failure! Divorced! Unstable! Disaster Area!”

But these judgments have little to do with the sum total of that relationship, which had many positive elements and good memories within it. Why does the fact it ended cast a shadow over the length of time it endured?

Considering My Dad

My father serves as a good case in point, on many counts. He was married three times, but it’s the one that lasted 8 years, not 15, that meant the most, that surged and bubbled with love.

He canceled a lifetime commitment to his ministry, but not because he was unsteady in nature or failed to live up to a promise; he left because he was being true to an even higher duty, to truth and to his faith, which continuing in that particular ministry had started to compromise.

My father died when he was 52, certainly before anyone expected. He was too young. And yet, when I think of his life, it encompasses a full range of experience and expression. My father lived.

And after he died, we received hundreds of emails and letters from people, many who had not known him very long at all, but all of whom had been touched by his jocularity, charisma, and warmth. He had a singular ability to make people feel listened to, appreciated, and loved.

I didn’t get enough time with my dad. What I wouldn’t give to soak up hours, days, years of him.

But having lost him when I did hasn’t lessened my love for him. Death did not diminish him in my heart. Leaving marriages and a ministry did not lessen his religious conviction. He was not perfect or unwavering in all things, and he didn’t “make it” to any invisible finish line.

But oh, to watch him run! He did it with all his heart.

Disaster Plan

We were at Northeast Park, crossing the wooden bridge over the little creek, when we spotted a deer. It let us gawk for a while, then moved on. We continued up the trail. My daughter running up ahead disappeared behind a bush – we heard some running, bushes cracking – then a scream.

The deer had run into my daughter – and luckily, only left a hoofprint bruise on her shoulder, hardly harming her.

The whole incident, as they do, only took a few seconds, and there was no way to prevent it, other than to have my kid roped to my body at all times.

Freak accidents – I particularly detest them. We work so hard to avoid disaster – car seats, arch supports, vitamins, looking both ways when we cross the road. A woman blithely pushes her child in a stroller down a sidewalk, and a car spins out of control and crashes into them. A snake bites a woman in her garden and she doesn’t reach her phone to call for help in time. A boy gulps too much water at the pool and dies several hours later at home on his bed of drowning. Even living in an impenetrable bubble or cement cocoon I have a feeling would be susceptible to an earthquake, a volcano, a knawed cord cutting off the oxygen tank…

There’s part of me that still thinks I can outwit fate. If I can interpret the signs, see what’s coming around the corner, I can jump out of harm’s way in time… dodge the bullet…

There’s part of me that gives a little “Whew!” when I hear about someone else’s disaster – “Wasn’t me!”- and subconsciously I file away on my list of Dangerous Activities whatever it was – like “Don’t walk child in stroller on sidewalk between 5 and 5:15 on Wednesdays” and “Don’t let child swallow water while living in Florida” – even though I logically know that these mishaps are not lessons, but accidents. True accidents don’t teach us safety lessons. They have no point or purpose. All we can learn from them is that we are all, at all times, susceptible and endangered. Life ends in death, and we have little control over determining the hows and whens of the termination.

After my father died, this reality felt to me like a hungry dog, invisibly breathing down my neck, about to snap its jaws on me and my loved ones at any moment. I lived in constant fear. I had no warnings my dad would die. I had dinner with him, and he went to bed and died. It was the first time I had seen him in a year and a half. It was the last time I saw him ever.

It’s only years later that I can understand that giving up the need to prevent disaster is the only way to live fearlessly. All the gurus find this freedom and peace – giving up the desire to control life and avoid pain. But it’s not something you read about in a self-help book and gulp down in one swallow. Finding a way to let go of the illusion that you can grab onto the carpet so it’s not pulled out from under you is one of the hardest things a person can do. That carpet is a security blanket. That carpet is the ground on which many of us walk. Even when you know that illusion is false, it can feel good to believe in it.

I know for myself that when it comes to grief and loss, I experience some anger. It feels like a joke, a setup – here’s this gorgeous world, here’s these lovely people, here’s a beloved, here’s a child – now, guess what? It’s all temporary. It all disappears. One by one it goes away. Then you go away.

The rabbit disappears and doesn’t show up again. Great trick. Some people have stories about how the rabbit gets resurrected, and then they argue about whether it really happened or not (and then they invent Easter).

And then there’s the argument that if everything were eternal, nothing would have any meaning. To which I initially replied, Bullcrap. (I think the first time I read this was in Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, a fun novel that deals with eternity and a wierd Irish guy.)

But I’ve started to discover that relationships and lives and other things don’t derive their meaning from their longevity – from lasting. Nothing lasts; to define worth by time amounts seems an odd valuation system.

And when I think of a child’s life, it is not worth less if it ends sooner rather than later. Or a father’s. Or that of a marriage. Or a business venture. Or the time of owning a house. The import of a love, a moment, an experience, may be affected by the time it spans – but that is not the sole factor.

When I spend all of my mental and emotional energy focusing on ’saving’ myself, my children, my relationships from ending, I abandon the actual living of life, the spending of the time together. And then – what am I saving?

The only way I have been able to comfort myself about the inevitability of loss is to let go of it, and drink in what exists now.

I still sometimes think I won’t be able to stand it, to take it, to make it through. I still miss my father, terribly, and feel robbed of his presence in my life. I still want never to have to say goodbye to anyone. I don’t like it.

I’ll never forget this one night when I was 17 years old. My first love called me long distance and broke up with me. I was inconsolably weeping. The rest of the house was asleep, but my father, night owl that he was, was up. He gave me a hug and said, “It’s not the end of the world.”

I was furious. Who cared about the end of the world? I didn’t – it was the end of my heart.

Poor Dad. Weeping adolescent. What do you say? And when he died, I wanted so badly to tell him – Yes dad, not the end of the whole world, but you dying is definitely the end of mine.

Seventeen years later, I want to tell him – Dad, I know what you mean. Things come and go, including you and I. It just takes so long, Dad, to get used to it – life being so cruel and beautiful at the same time.

No, no way to stop it. We can choose to try to – or choose to accept it. Choose to dive into life and accept that we will die, over and over again.

I scribble up my disaster plans, my strategies for escape, and then rip them up again, over and over.

I’m not getting out of it alive.

The Secret Imagination: Part II

In the recent edition of Yoga Journal, Sally Kempton writes:

Imagination – our ability to create images not available to the sensory system – is arguably our greatest faculty for evolving human consciousness. In order to transform ourselves and our world, we need to be able to leap out of the familiar and into the unknown. … the imagination can help us begin to replace our internal patterns, especially the ones that keep us limited and stuck. If we can reimagine our sense of who we are, we can change our experience of life. If you can imagine yourself, say, free of suffering, you’ve taken the first step toward that freedom.

Later in the article she connects our internal imagination with external acts, pointing out that:

If you’re spending time during your day imagining yourself as filled with compassion, it doesn’t take you long to notice that you speak to people differently and even treat yourself with much more subtlety and kindness.

So yesterday, for “shits and giggles” as a favorite person used to say – (I won’t go into the images that comes into my head when I hear that phrase – don’t want to sully your imagine and bring about the wrong kind of transformation!) – I “tried” “The Secret.” Caveat – I have avoided the book and movie or any other description of this completely – I only followed the vague idea I heard from my therapist – who was also skeptical, but did wonder what would happen if I tried it.

Item #567 you can do when you don’t have a job: Experiment with New Agey psycho- hijinks (next week, Tarot cards and a colonic cleansing).

I performed a kind of meditative visualization exercise and wrote down five things I wanted to happen that day. They were:

1. To be told “I love you” by a certain someone

2. For someone to offer a job or job interview

3. For sandalwood perfume oil to reappear in my life

4. To have a stranger flirt with me (reassure my ego!)

5. For someone from my past to warmly contact me and inquire as to how I am doing

The Results

Now, here’s the funny thing. Basically, all of these items “came true” or came to fruition – but before you get excited about the possibility of a magic recipe, let’s recall the insights from Kempton, summarized above – the act of the imagination in the mind can have force and expression in the body, transferring from the world of ideas to the world of actuality a wish, a possibility, a desire.

Example: The basketball player envisions the perfect slam dunk before the game, and her chances of actually performing that slam dunk “in real life” go up immensely.

So here’s basically how it went down.

1. I arranged coffee with the certain someone and though I had no expectations, the love was indeed reciprocated.

2. From the networking I’ve been doing through Facebook, a person I hardly know connected me to others I don’t know, and it looks like at least one of them will need me for work.

3. I went online and ordered the sandalwood.

4. I went out to a social gathering; someone flirted with me.

5. I spent a large part of the day beefing up my Linked In profile by writing recommendations for past colleagues, and indeed, someone from my past did warmly email me, as a result.

So, we’re not talking about mystical alchemy here. We’re talking about how writing down the things I wanted from the day in a positive manner – as in, I wasn’t thinking “here’s my goals to accomplish,” which would have pressured me with onerous tasks, but rather “here’s what I want, deep down inside, but who knows” – provoked me to take steps that made the things I desired occur. I wasn’t really focused on the outcomes I had listed. I just acted out of desire – to connect, to be near a loved one, to smell better.

This isn’t magic or rocket science. It’s kind of the principle of the book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow – ridiculous, but really when you engage in what you love and desire, when you – yes, here I go again! Joseph Campbell alert! – follow that stinkin’ bliss, but not for the accomplishment or the reward but for the love of the thing in itself – then you truly enter into the kind of fruitful relationship with yourself and your work/art/relationships that allows you to be fully present and ultimately fully satisfied.

One of those paradoxical laws that is so simple and hard, it must be true.

So, no: I’m not a “The Secret” convert. But this experiment did underscore for me

• the importance of giving so that you can receive – without expectations;
• doing what you love out of love;
• and sometimes, when you want something – well, you can go online and order it.

Notes on Desire

I have to address desire – it gets such a bad rap with religion – it causes suffering, etc. But you have to add a dash of Rumi to your Buddha, I believe, to round out your understanding of desire in the context of spiritual awareness:

Let yourself be silently drawn

by the stronger pull of what you really love.

Rumi

For Rumi, love and desire pull us to the Love with a capital L – the rapture of union with the All. When we are following our heart’s arrow of true desire, our path, when we are doing the things we love to do and loving the people we love and embracing the identity that feels right – when we are honoring our deepest self – then we are, simultaneously, honoring and celebrating the whole, the larger truths.

True love, I have found, requires sacrifice of the selfish, ego-driven love.

True faith requires the sacrifice of the illusion of control.

This is not easy stuff to maintain, master. But it is getting to the heart of where the imagination and reality meet. Through our desire we create a vision of true love and faith that changes us and leads us into the experience and presence of truth.

Desire withers the heart.

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is as open as the sky. [Tao te Ching, 12]

I guess I think that perhaps desire leads to delight or suffering depending upon its root and its object.

If we want only for the happiness of our small egos, no matter the suffering of others, no matter the well-being of the world, then that is when we are full of the desire that ruins us, for we are falsely seeing our Self as separate from the world, and we are placing its importance above that of others. If we desire to control, to go against things as they are, we are setting ourselves up to battle the whole of which we are apart, and we will suffer.

But if our desire includes the happiness and well-being of the world, includes caring for the suffering of others as well as our own, if our sense of compassion and love places our individual selves within the proper context of the whole, then our desire is divinely inspired.

A good example is romantic love. The ego-driven desire wants the beloved to fill the self, to love the self, to complete and satisfy the needs and wants of the self. The self likes the way the beloved’s attention feels.

But true love views the beloved for who he or she is, and desires that person’s happiness, whatever the cost to the self.

See the world as your self.

Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self;

then you can care for all things. [Tao te Ching, 13]

If we love our neighbors as ourselves, then we can find the right balance. If we lose a lover, but he or she is happy, we can accept the reality of the loss and our sadness – but we can also delight in his or her happiness. This happiness can remove the sting of loss and is the way to true peace.

Death Will Ease Your Suffering (no, really, it will!)

I’ve been experiencing a great deal of grief, sadness, and loss lately, and sometimes, the loneliness feels intense.

It was pointed out to me that I seem to want others to fix it for me, comfort me, soothe my misery.

And yes, I have to say that as I walking today, exposing myself to sun, hoping to walk out the sadness, I realized that I do so want someone – my estranged mother, my dead father, my friends, anyone – to wrap themselves around me and tell me I am loved, and it will be okay.

Of course, the desire is understandable. But it is desire, and you know what that does to you, of course. And I’m trying to learn to comfort myself.

It’s not so easy.

I wandered into a cemetery – I was ambling, walking down dead end streets, not exactly lost but I couldn’t tell you where I was, exactly – one of those patches of grass and stone that feel like some kind of abandoned city with no historical texts to tell you what happened. Names and dates, but no storyline. Just a lot of silence.

My heart felt swollen, tender, like an injured foot.

I thought about dying (go figure).

And then it dawned on me, there among the ruins, that when I die, I won’t have these awful feelings anymore.

Oddly, like nothing else, the thought calmed me.

Not because I want to die – truly not looking forward to it, kind of angry about it, but that’s a whole other story – but because this suffering is indeed going to end, and life, even with this intensely acute suffering, is much preferable to feeling nothing at all.

This isn’t some earth-shattering revelation – but I truly felt it, not just as an abstract consideration, but as a solid reality.

the goddess Kali

Hope, you know, hasn’t been really possible. I can’t hope that I’ll ever have a family again, with love and comfort; even if I get it, it will go away again. Everything dies, changes. So hope has not been a comfort.

As Pema Chodron says:

If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be
exterminated, then we can have  the courage to relax with the
groundlessness of our situation.  This is the first step on the path.

My problem has been that I’ve been getting lost in the groundlessness, sinking in the quicksands of my despair.

But death has been a rope out – and lead me to remember Kali. Years ago when I first started reading about Tantra and goddesses, I had a hard time understanding the rituals surrounding worship of the goddess Kali, who is alternately the most fierce and the most loving of deities. Some Tantric practices involve digging up corpses; Kali is often portrayed having sex with the body of her dead husband, Shiva.

There’s this odd mix of comfort and utter destruction mixed into this figure, and I didn’t quite get it. She’s a mother goddess – but she represents the absolute dissolution of all things?

But I get it now. When we face death, we see life with a precision and clarity that provides the sustenance of reality, truth, — and comfort.

To confront or accept death… is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept one’s mortality is to be able to let go, to be able to sing, dance, and shout. Kali is Mother to her devotees not because she protects them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely, releases them from the incredible, binding web of “adult” pretense, practicality, and rationality [from exoticindia]

As I walked home, I smelled the rosemary from someone’s garden, saw the brilliant clouds, tasted sun, hurt but alive, and glad to be so.

A Website for Happiness: Who knew?

I know there’s all kinds of websites, but this is just ridiculous:

This world needs more happiness. Obviously – even in a cushy society like ours, we have websites like the one above.

The Bad Rap on Happy
Growing up a Christian, finding happiness wasn’t really high on my priority list. Happiness was disdained as something self-serving, self-indulgent, and not quite as grounded or as elite as “joy,” which I remember being defined in my young head as ‘a good feeling even though you are suffering, because you’re suffering for the right reasons.’ Being happy was considered a transitory state – not like deep, abiding joy. Later, when I was studying Buddhism, there seemed to be a similar nose-wrinkle about all things ‘happy.’ Definitely, even as a poetry student, Truth and Beauty and Love landed higher scores than silly old happiness.

And Happy is the dwarf who seems a little too, right?

Even in the broader American culture, there exists bias against happiness. Wives aren’t supposed to be happy, but loyal; men aren’t supposed to be happy, just satisfied; kids aren’t supposed to be happy, but good. And lots of happiness is just stupid, right?

On the other hand, in our youth-worshipping world, we idolize childhood as the time of happiness, and we long to return to it, we’re jealous of it, bitter and resentful that kids get to be happy… to want to be happy gets in the way of enlightenment, stability, security, success, all the things that feed the culture’s image of itself – but not the individual.

Reconsidering
I’ve given happiness a second chance.  But it’s definitely new for me to consider seeking happiness as a worthwhile enterprise. I kind of like it. I’m finding that happiness is not as superficial or selfish as advertised.

Marcus Aurelius agrees: “Happiness is a good god within.” (And hey, if a Roman dude says so…)

If happiness is a goodness – a good thing to have and to desire – the pursuit of! – I feel a kind of gentle leniency enter into my perspectives of others whom I might otherwise judge on the harsh side.

That is, if you evaluate people’s choices based on an external set of rules vs. the level of their internal happiness, you’re often going to dislike their choices.

Lizards
Like, for instance, getting a lizard tail attached permanently to your bottom. I read about this several years ago in Harper’s – there’s at least one, probably more, surgeon whose specialty is giving people butterfly wings and other animal-esque add-ons. It’s tattoos and plastic surgery taken just that one step further…

… I was kind of horrified and disgusted when I first read about this – and disturbed that individuals wouldn’t be satisfied with their own bodies, and worried about the implications for biological ethics.

But really – if lizard-tail guy is happy? If the god within him is delighted with that tail, if his soul is cheerfully singing, then I am happy for him. Truly.

Now, that is, in a way, an easy scenario. Presumably, the lizard tail can be delivered without the expense of any one else’s happiness. That’s where things get tricky. Sometimes you find your ultimate happiness – and someone else has to pay for it. Or so it seems.

The Messy Side of Happy
I’m going to be radical and say that happiness, just like love, is not always distributed fairly. Sometimes it’s messy and expensive.

Often someone profits from another’s misery – often unintentionally, though sometimes knowingly. For instance:

• A gorgeous diamond ring! but workers in South Africa suffered to mine it
• You win the spot on the cheerleading squad! But that other girl who had wanted it so badly lost out to you, and will cry herself to sleep
• You choose  your happiness, which means to go live in another country – causing your parents deep unhappiness that you are so far away

Etc. The relationship between suffering and happiness and the choices we make – ah, that’s a book I’m sure many a philosopher has already written more thoroughly than I could even attempt… it definitely gets messy.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want…
But ultimately I believe that we are each responsible for finding our own happiness. It’s not something else someone can deliver to you or anyone else’s duty to preserve for you.

Elizabeth Lesser writes in her book The Seeker’s Guide that  (I’m paraphrasing): you can get what you want – but you can’t get what you want all the time, or get everything you want.

This rule definitely applies to happiness. In some ways, my early instruction was correct: Happiness can be fleeting. It is never some permanent end-state blacking out all sorrow or grief. You can find some happiness – but you can’t escape all sadness. Both are part of the human experience.

I think I can safely conclude that you’ll be happier if you learn to treat happiness with some respect. So remember:

• When you find it, let yourself have it, fully – honor and relish it
• When others find it, let them enjoy it, without jealousy, bitterness, or judgment
• It’s not always going to be pretty or easy
• It’s never going to last forever (nothing will)

I guess I am probably still biased toward truth and all that. But I think it’s important to give ourselves and others permission to be happy.

I doubt a website can do it for anybody, but you know, if it makes you happy…

A Short, Bright Life

My grandmother, in her upper 80s, having strokes, has now been struck with anxiety. Her mother died of strokes. She is now on the precipice of her own demise.

When I imagine what it’s like to be my grandmother, in her body, in one of her 99 pairs of shoes, I feel her panic as young as my own, the hot volcanic fear of that door being shut, your mind buried and blacked out.

I learned about fireflies this summer – that they live underground until they appear in June, rising with the heat, and then live for maybe two weeks, tops, a short, bright life during which they signal to possible mates, urgently blinking on and off, Let’s procreate!

It’s a two-week long orgy of reproductive sex. And then the light goes out.

This makes me think several things:

1. No matter when we die, whether after two weeks or 88 years, our lifespan may feel like it was too short. It is never enough. So while I might conclude that Gee, at least I live longer than two weeks! it’s really not that much of a helpful contrast.

2. I’m so glad that a human life is more than a speedy rev of mating lust.

3. Is a human life more than a speedy rev of mating lust?

4. Why do I have an internal reaction of disdain that the pretty luminous flickerings of fireflies is nothing more than a dance for reproduction? Why do I find that kind of vulgar? Why do I want the patterened pulses to be discussions of flower art? Why do I resist the idea that biologically, Life wants to reproduce as its main mission, and to acknowledge that force within myself as well?

I guess I would like for us to have ‘higher’ goals at the core of existence – spiritual evolution, not just physical reproduction. I’m reading Mother Nature right now, and so many male primate behaviors are explained by the desire to promote and protect the passing on of one’s own genes. That kind of disgusts me. I want human beings to transcend genetic transference. I want us to practice agape and compassion for others of our species, whether or not we share genetic material. I want there to be an inherent generosity of spirit in the human DNA…

But then I run into a conflict with myself -the part of me that balks at any notions of the abstract/spiritual layer of a person as rising “above” the physical realm. Instead, I believe the physical and spiritual (mental, emotional) parts of a human are interlaced, and you can’t untangle one from the other. And one is not better than another…

Thinking this way butts against centuries of gnostic and Christian dualism, however, that are deeply imbedded in our language and thinking.

5. Is it ‘firefly’ or ‘lightning bug’?

6. Whatever our goals in life, whether we manage to mate or not, reproduce or not, live for a week or a year, our lives blink with radiance and beauty. There is, for us human beings, no real set amount of time that we are ’supposed’ to live. There is only the time that we do live. And for me, there is no external comfort to offer my grandmother regarding her death. There is no invisible god waiting to catch her when she jumps off the cliff of her life. There is only the joy that comes from what is, the time that we have at this very moment, which is special precisely because it is not eternal.

7. Sometimes the meaning of our lives, the beauty in them, is found, not in our own limited perspective, but in our part within the whole. I don’t care so much whether firefly X manages to sire a next generation. But the light of his bulb delights me, makes an evening magical – another instance of nature’s effervescence that kindles a flame in my heart.

How lovely my grandmother is to me, for she is similarly bright.

Of course, I am a product of her successful reproductive efforts – so I am grateful – but more so, happy to have been around her, witness to her smile, the way she eats off other people’s plates in a way that’s charming and not annoying…

I have some reservations.

My friend and I were talking about Native American reservations last night. Reservation is an odd word:

reservation

Noun

1. a doubt: his only reservation was, did he have the stamina?

2. an exception or limitation that prevents one’s wholehearted acceptance: work I admire without reservation

3. a seat, room, etc. that has been reserved

4. (esp. in the US) an area of land set aside for American Indian peoples: the Cherokee reservation

What a strange idea – reserve a piece of land, corral, fence in, set aside, here’s your pasture…

My thought today was how the Park is also a reservation, only it’s not fenced in, because what’s being kept there can’t exactly move: What’s being reserved here is Nature.

Kind of like the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation – the park is not a place people visit for an hour’s recreation – Nature is something you go to, something separate, an entertainment arena, it’s not the environment you live in, the reality that circumscribes your life.

What strikes me is that when you set aside nature, you are not only restricting, delineating the appropriate area or zone for nature to exist, but in the same act restricting the experience of the people, too.

When we put human beings on a reservation, when we encircle animals within a fence, when we jail a prisoner, when we bound any population with restrictive demarcations, keeping something in, keeping something out, we effectively do to the thing on the outside what we’re doing to the inside.

We enclose the reservation; we are cutting ourselves off from that land, those people, too. It’s the inverse property of enclosure.

By saying of the world within the park, “Here is (public) nature,” I am conversely saying of my property and experience across the street, “Here is not nature, here is something else, here is something private, here is something managed for a different purpose.”

My friend was talking about the role of social workers on reservations, how oppressive the ideas can be that get enacted about what’s considered to be appropriate behavior for the wider culture, what’s defined as mentally and emotionally healthy, etc.

It is also interesting that the park represents the ideas of beauty and aesthetics of a small number of humans who decide what’s enjoyable in the park, what elements should be fostered or eradicated, what plants should grow, what trees get to remain, what makes it a nice setting. Seems like an odd arrogance, really.

We come from a basic assumption that our judgments have an almost godly justification to them, because they are based on science and study and learning. We can point to a book and say to a Cherokee child, You are out of line, or to a thorny bush, you don’t fit our strategic vision.

It’s been our problem from the beginning.

And because I feel when we slice and dice to make things nice we effectively hack away at ourselves, as well, I feel an empathy with the park. I feel like my humanity has also been corralled. I have been cut off of from Nature, I have been kept from the wisdom of the Native Americans, I have been circumscribed by conventions of propriety applied to society with the stamp of unquestionable authority.

We were talking about how people long for connections to old tribes, awkwardly so. It is a cliche to mention one’s Cherokee grandmother; it’s cheesy to put up a dreamcatcher in your window; it feels ignorant and condescending to want to read and hear and learn about the ways of people that had their world ravaged by our predecessors. It feels arrogant to want a neatly chopped and bug-free lawn for personal pursuits of peace, while not making any major sacrifices for the salvation of an environment we are continuing to desecrate and destroy.

But deeper than that is the fact that when the earth goes down, so do we (if not us before it); and the spiritual paucity we have inherited as consequence of the reservations we created for others has crippled us already…

This is a shared world. May we learn to share it, so that all of us can heal.

Grace and Karma: Mix, Match, Mush

I’m a young Unitarian-Universalist.

So I don’t really know a lot about the theology.

I like the idea of not just comparing religions side by side, but of seeing what happens when you intersect them. (Bahai?)

I was thinking about a person I know who really needs some miracles – or grace, I should say – gifts that he doesn’t earn. I believe in the laws of karma, in that I think if you want a friend, for instance, you have to become a friend; if you want gifts, you have to give. But sometimes people just aren’t capable of making those first inputs into the system; they haven’t been trained, they aren’t aware, they’re so low and down they can hardly move.

But grace is a Christian concept. Can it occur within or with the context of karma? What would that look like?

i lack faith and patience
like waiting for a fish
the one time there’s a bite
and i pull it out, wet and frightened and
it’s grace, and i throw it back to
keep the karma going -