wakeful [weyk-fuhl] adjective

Get woke, America. On November 6 , 2018, it seemed–for a bright, shining moment–that a majority of America was working together and ushering in a new age of cooperation and compassion and real desire to see justice return to American soil. What a long, long time ago that was: before the renewed battle over the wall sleight-of-hand detracted from children dying on the border and the opening of national monuments to fossil fuel decimation. Before the longest government shutdown in American history. 

Wakefulness, to me, is rising to find that the world is not what you thought it was but different. This new understanding–often triggered by crisis– is like a shock to the system that implies you must change your life. In Buddhism, wakefulness is the awareness that you may not exist in a binary world. You have to make non-binary adaptations. The implications of this are dramatic. This elicits a re-evaluation of our economic system, of our cultural understandings, our narrow-minded tribal perspectives, our ego-dominated separation from self in the world. To be woke is to learn what is, not what we thought.  We are changing all the time.  With each decision, a path is forked that determines what our next choices will be and we are on the path to becoming unique personalities. If this were not so, we would not be able to sit in a sanga meditation and watch our story unfold before us and recognize it as just a story. We would not be able to choose compassion as a path to pursue. As Sartre says, “We are doomed to be free.”  Our conception of ourselves is not who we are. Who we are is the sum of the choices we have made, whether we face up to them or not. It is often the case that we do not tell ourselves the truth about who we are. 

Adyashanti, a Buddhist monk, expressed the opinion that poetry attempts to articulate the irreducible quality of things. The thing is just the thing, not in anything said about it. There are no things, everything is a process. Whenever you call it one thing, you’ve eliminated other things. Words can both reveal and conceal. Don’t walk in someone’s mind with dirty feet. The thing you take away from a poem did not come from the words themselves.

In this issue, we invite you to write about a time you confronted your sense of self, were moved to examine a cause you are passionate about.  As Rumi says, “Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”