1. Truth: Real change takes time and effort. Pictures showed up in my Facebook memories from our garden eight years ago, as we were just starting, putting in the front burm and three raised beds, starting to plant. I went out this morning and took pictures of those same spots, to document the progress. Seeing the pictures side by side made me realize, again, that things take the time they take, and that is sometimes a very long time. It can go so slow it seems like you aren’t making any progress, but if you keep moving forward, even if it’s just baby steps, even if you take breaks to rest, even if you get lost for a bit, if you don’t give up you will eventually get somewhere. It might be different than what you planned or expected, but it might be even better.
2. Truth: Life is suffering. It’s uncomfortable and difficult, change is constant and impermanence is the outcome. Things won’t go how you planned and you won’t get what you want. You will get sick, injured, and eventually die, as will everyone you’ve ever known or loved. The foundation of Buddhism is four noble truths, the first of which is exactly this: life is suffering. Yoga offers a similar understanding: “One of yoga’s central teachings is that everything changes. This material world of prakṛti is impermanent and always changing (pariṇāmavāda) and we suffer when we remain attached to the way things were,” (Dr. Jarvis Chen). Most of us can consider our own experience as the proof: this is hard.
3. Truth: Cultivating the ability to stay with it is a worthy effort. To stay with it, keep at it, not give up, even when it gets hard. I was thinking about this in the context of racism this morning. As I work to be anti-racist, there was a time when I thought there would be an end to the internal personal process, that I would eventually root out all the racism in me, that I would reach the bottom of it, the end. Now I realize that as a white person during this moment in history in this culture, I will probably always be racist on some level. It’s like the bindweed in my garden — I continue to pull it out, day after day, season after season, but I most likely will never be entirely rid of it. It’s just too prolific and hardy. And yet, I will keep trying. My hope is the same with anti-racism, that if I continue to put in the effort, I will see more clearly, my actions will continue to be more skillful and effective, and I will cause less suffering, do less damage.
One wish: May we cultivate our ability to stay, to make the effort for as long as it takes even if it takes forever and even when it’s hard, doing as Andrew Boyd said, growing “strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”
1. Quote from Rabbi Yehuda HaChasid, “I will build an altar from the broken fragments of my heart,” (by way of Jena Schwartz‘s Dispatches from Daily Life.)
2. Wisdom from Francis Weller, “The task of a mature human being is to hold gratitude in one hand and grief in the other and to be stretched large by them,” by way of Erin Geesaman Rabke‘s newsletter. Erin also included a poem from Mark Nepo and these lines really touched me,
I guess, if you should ask, peace
is no more than the underside
of tired wings resting on the lake
while the heart in its feathers
pounds softer and softer.
9. A message for graduates: Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts from Austin Kleon. Also from Austin, A tiny triumph and Work and learn in evil days, in which he says, “Feeling grateful for what art can do. How you can disappear into a tiny room and make your own world. How you sit down with a blank page and fill it with your hands and at the end there’s something in the world that wasn’t there before. That simple, basic thing.”
10. Wild Writing Family, a Wild Writing membership with Laurie Wagner. In all sincerity and seriousness, this practice with this teacher has had as much of an impact on my life as meditation, yoga, and my dogs, is as essential to me as air or water.
Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism. We will live with the knowledge that a hashtag is not a vaccine for white supremacy. We live with the knowledge that, still, no one is coming to save us. The rest of the world yearns to get back to normal. For black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free.
15. A Weekend of Pain and Protest from The Daily podcast on The New York Times. “Demonstrations have erupted in at least 140 cities across the United States in the days since George Floyd, a black man, died in police custody in Minneapolis. We were on the ground in some of them, chronicling 72 hours of pain and protest.”
16. In Some Cities, Police Officers Joined Protesters Marching Against Brutality. I appreciate the Flint officers who took off their helmets and put down their batons rather than spraying mace, shooting rubber bullets, etc., instead marching with the people, but I also think it was wrong of Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson to say, “let’s turn this protest into a parade” because it is dismissive of the ongoing pain, grief, rage, and harm. Nothing about this is fun. It’s not a party or celebration. There is something absolutely worth protesting, raging against. I also feel weird about the officers taking a knee. I think they intend to show (or rather perform) solidarity with Colin Kaepernick’s protest, but to take a knee when this current surge of protests was triggered by one of their own taking a knee on George Floyd’s neck, it’s tone deaf at best.
17. How to more safely protest in a pandemic. “Tips for reducing the risk of spreading the coronavirus in a mass gathering, from public health experts.” It’s been scary to watch some of the video, people shaking hands and hugging, so close together, many of them not wearing masks.
One of yoga’s central teachings is that everything changes. This material world of prakṛti is impermanent and always changing (pariṇāmavāda) and we suffer when we remain attached to the way things were. So, it is important for us as yoga practitioners to question our attachment to how we used to live our lives, our aversion to some of the things we may continue to have to do to mitigate the risk of coronavirus transmission, and our fear of the unknown.
May this work be done in a spirit of generosity
not driven by ego, greed, or delusion.
May kindness sustain us and prevail in conflict, and compassion guide us and lead us to understanding.
May we rejoice in the successes of others,
and remain unmoved by praise or blame.
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 