Not the moon we saw, which we did not attempt to capture via photograph, but one just as real. :)
What is this “I” that tries to move across the page?
Still, recently I’ve been contemplating how Buddhism relates to activism (or, any activity in the world, really). I’ve been asking every Buddhist teacher I know from various traditions. Some suggest equanimity no matter what is happening, a kind of being at peace with suffering. During one meditation sit, a Zen teacher described the gap between impulse and action, “you might have an itch, but you can train your brain not to scratch it, and then you witness the itch’s impermanence; you are not a slave to your impulses.” I love the gap between impulse and emotion, between re-action and action, between reactiveness and actual response. It’s such a worthy goal to live with intention, and even more if that intention is guided toward two wings of a bird (compassion and wisdom—one unable to move without the other). Yet, there’s something unsatisfying about being at peace with suffering if it leads to passivity rather than activity. A Vipassana teacher recently said, “accept what you cannot change,” and yet do we not change by being in the world? How do you define “change?” How did MLK?
But when I sit, and feel quiet as an activity—not as passivity—I also understand renunciation. If society is built on illusion, trying to “better” any part of it is to get further entangled in illusion. I have never known how best to enter political conversations because I so rarely accept the presuppositions they’re founded on. (Should everyone deserve equal rights by law? Are there more than two genders, considering we constructed them in the first place? Are these questions a joke? Sorry—I hate rhetorical questions, it’s bad practice, because it’s questions that move us toward truth and they should not be wasted.) When I am in quiet as an activity, I find it difficult to return to the world. When one steps back a little, it’s natural to step back a lot.
Yet some teachers say compassion is fierce (this is the more intellectually satisfying response), that Buddhism is about action, not equanimity. In fact, certain types of meditation (Tibetan Tong-lin and Theravada Metta) involve actively, with the breath, taking in difficulty and breathing out love (for one’s self, for those one is close to, and, eventually, for all sentient beings). Meditation can be active prayer.
Why am I going to the Women’s March on Saturday? Because this.
Because I don’t want someone leading the country who values illusory cultural construction more than personal reflection and connection. Because when so much is constructed, we don’t have enough alternatives to imagine. Beauty, to me, does not involve seeing other human beings as disposable objects. And beauty is the thing that’s most worth being alive for.
I don’t know these days whether to combat hatred with voice (signs, chanting) or contemplative quiet prayer. Not the passive kind that learns to become at peace with suffering, but the kind that goes very deep, much deeper than we can afford to do in our daily lives, and unearths what’s meaningful. What I think is that some people can combat it beautifully—exquisitely—with voice, and some with contemplative, active, quiet. Bravery takes many forms.
In a conversation with my brothers, I told them how academia has a way of making me question what I think I know. That people assume I go to school and know things, but I really unknow things. (Not a good cocktail conversationalist, I joked— which, incidentally, I stole from a fellow MFA who said to me once on a roof that she wasn’t a good cocktail conversationalist because of her passion for criminal justice reformation, to which I smiled.)
Yet, I wonder if not knowing can be a starting point. That we must find ground to exist on even though we do not know, rather than stand on ground thinking we do. In a conversation with someone I love dearly who loves me back just as dearly, he said, “you are so interested in women’s rights, but, Hillary took money from countries who behead women.” I paused. “But Dad, we are all complicit in such a world. We are driving in a car with oil that funds we don’t know what country. The clothes I’m wearing were made in China, maybe from a sweatshop. Our old Apple phones get tossed in a landfill somewhere that we don’t see,” etc. “What we need is a leader who offers alternatives to complete self-interest in a world built from some success necessitating others’ oppression.” It was the “we” that connected us, driving beside the cornfields, allowed us both to pause. No moral superiority, but suddenly the chance to collaborate, to problem-solve with what we do agree on, not the solutions we differ on. If we are not satisfied with the narratives we’re offered, why don’t we make new ones? Why don’t we go off left-right scripts and be ourselves?
So many people want to do “good” and don’t know how. So many liberals are made fun of for their / our yoga and coffee shops, but where is the channel for expressing and articulating alternative ways of being alive with one another?
One friend said Trump could be the best thing that happens to people, strengthening moral clarity and community values. Another, that his faith in humanity is lost. I said, I’m reevaluating faith, with no conclusions yet. This is where I have always been, and where I will always be. I am not “figuring it out” so much as understanding my own ambivalence as a _stance_ and trying to find it as a source of strength.
I align myself fiercely with those who fight for LGBTQ rights, who combat toxic masculinity (difficult for both men, women, and all the genders in between and outside of those two constructed ones), who understand that “feminism” is not about hatred, but about valuing all members of the human community.
I had to listen to Trump’s asinine comments all during the campaign. I thought he wouldn’t win. Maybe it makes me an ignorant left-leaning liberal. Okay. But I’m going to the March because the win that emboldened his statements full of hatred against Muslims, women, transgendered people, and honestly his lack of knowledge and understanding about the world (I lost someone dear to me from a terrorist killing and yet every time I hear him talk about terrorism it’s obvious to me he doesn’t understand anything about it except the surface and what will get people to react), felt like a slap in the face to all my personal values (diversity, accessibility to education, feminism, nature) and I want to be around like-minded people; I want to sing with them, even if my heart holds deep quiet. Even if I said to a friend today, “I hate Trump so much, but I love some who voted for him more.” (And saying that doesn’t come without pain, thinking of his comments toward women, and immigrants, and Mexicans, etc. etc. etc. etc.— we all know.)
I leave you with part of a conversation between me and a dear friend, driving from PA to MA in the dark. We happened upon a beautiful full moon, low in the sky, huge, glowing, and it gave us pause.
“How do you think Trump would respond to a moon like this?” I asked. “I mean, for me, it undoes everything I think I know about the world.”
“Maybe we got the idea of miracles wrong, that what’s everyday can be miraculously beautiful. That’s how I’d like to think of marriage. Can you imagine being on the moon, looking at earth? How would you every come back?” (exactly, I think, silently), “and yet those boot prints, those scars will always be there,” she continues. Some gray clouds start covering the moon; it’s beautiful in different ways.
“I mean if he saw this moon. And yet, maybe there’s a moment where you choose to turn toward beauty or turn away from it. I think he just turns away from any moment that undoes knowing because he must be all-knowing at all times.”
While some may not be persuaded to undo their worldly assumptions by a huge, glowing, middle of the highway between hills moon (the comfort in knowing it’s there every day in different subtle forms), what I mean by sharing part of our conversation is: beauty isn’t going anywhere.