Mindfulness OS Issue

mind·ful·ness ˈmīn(d)f(ə)lnəs/noun

1. the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.

“The sign outside the yoga class you passed on the way to Starbucks before you were late for work. The current buzz word on the cover of the Time Magazine dismissed on the newsstand you glimpsed in the supermarket line. Mindfulness is more than the latest trend. Mindfulness=Awareness. Not just the moments that you put away the smart phone and listen to the birds, or the Sunday you take the Headspace app for a spin, but letting those important personal moments connect you with your everyday: the ecological empowerment of minimalism over consumerism, knowing the agricultural methodology for your food, caring how your Senator got reelected, why your town square is designed that way, where your taxes go.”

That’s how Sisyphus pitched this issue. It turns out that the interesting thing about embodying a Mindfulness Operating System is that it is more of a challenge than it seems. Mindfulness requires complete engagement. Awareness is an extreme sport. The authors on the following pages didn’t just take the first steps out of their comfort zone, but giant leaps: shifting their focus, upending their methodology, walking their life paths in different shoes. For a chance to live their lives in a better way, they took personal risks, striking out against conventions, cultures, classes, and sometimes even family traditions. Of course, the philosophies of Buddha appear and reappear in articles because one can practice mindfulness without Buddhism, but you can’t practice Buddhism without mindfulness. And there is a distinct difference.  As the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein has written, mindfulness is about cultivating, “the quality and power of mind that is aware of what is happening, without judgement and without interference.” Buddhism is just the starting point. The artists and poets and writers on the following pages are personally engaged in interference, in shifting the paradigm to a more conscious world and bringing as many as they can along for the ride. A full half of the authors or their subjects travelled to other cultures to learn and teach, to share and trade their newfound awareness back home like explorers of a bygone age might bring exotic spices for a gumbo.  Some confronted institutions to bear witness and be a voice to the voiceless. They marched on Washington D.C. People challenged political ideology and the very economy underlying it all. Several moved backwards to move forward, silencing cell phone chatter and social media “progress” to hear the water in the streams, the literal birds in the hand and in the bush, maybe even the food growing—those things that will disappear if we don’t pay attention. The one thing that the current administration has accomplished is to unify a nation against the homegrown terrorism in the Oval Office and remind us all that we are only the stewards of this world for future generations. What kind of ancestor do you want to be?  

Sometimes I’m of two minds. This poem expresses that. Each calendar day, I’m given the opportunity to choose despair or beauty.

 
The music slows, signaling the end of song

heart-beat       dance-step         someone laughs

you think ‘it’s not so bad’
but you feel as though maybe you missed the message
You might never wear those shoes again

it’s true            you won’t
can you conjure up ‘however’?

Today the sun’s more slant
You feel winter blues slide in
think about what a fool you’ve been
what a fool you now are

talking to yourself in the autumn mode
forgetting your very lucky luck

you aren’t in Syria under bombs
your relatives aren’t in Syria

or Mozambique or in the back of a truck

you aren’t crazy or gun-crazy

full of rage

you have all your limbs you can write your name
you know your name
you know your children’s names

the song is ending

you know how to work the CD player
you can let the next one play or
play the first again

sing along

I spent the past November attending what is (in certain circles) a well-known Buddhist course at a Tibetan monastery in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. Though I’ve come to refer to the experience as “Buddhist Boot Camp,” I deeply enjoyed my time there and feel as though I’m the better for having gone. However, as is often the case with any experiment where the subject is one’s own mind, the results have not been quite what I’d expected. Neither, as it turns out, were the reasons for the experiment in the first place.

Prior to hopping the flight to Kathmandu, I’d dabbled in mindfulness and meditation and Buddhist philosophy and yoga here and there for a few years but never did a deep dive; life is distracting and all that. When I learned of this month-long course at Kopan Monastery, it seemed like my next logical step — also, the timing was perfect: turn and face this whole concept of mindfulness and in the meantime, avoid being in the States for November 2016. I didn’t fully understand why, but I knew that I did not want to be in the U.S. for this particular presidential election. In fact, I wanted to be as far away as possible, both in body and mind. Studying meditation on a mountaintop in Nepal? Perfect. Two birds, one stone. (Pardon the idiom, Buddhist friends.)

I had wanted to be away from the U.S. because I was confident that the States would elect Ms. Clinton and feared that all the DT* supporters would go nuts dealing with their loss, occupying government buildings with their guns, burning whatever they saw fit to burn, and scaring the shit out of everyone. I believe now that some part of me knew I didn’t want to be in the U.S. because I could not handle the possibility of a DT presidency, that the enraged losers of the election, of the White House, of the ideals that Obama had campaigned on, would include me. I would be the screaming nut wanting to set fire to the ignorance that allowed this to happen.

My self-needed checking.

The idea that happiness comes from within always made sense to me; the idea that one could be impervious to outside influences did not. How could a person not dissolve into a puddle of rage when confronted with vitriolic hate? Turns out that’s what I was doing on that mountaintop — facing some of the scarier aspects of myself. Good thing I didn’t know that going in, or I might not have gone at all.

In my short and long 30 years on, earth I felt I had become aware of all too much. There is too much suffering, injustice, ignorance, anger – in short, pain – in this world. What I wanted was to become aware of how to deal with and how to help others deal with it all, and I did. You begin with yourself. Like on an airplane, you need to secure your own air flow before helping others. It seems almost selfish at first, but it’s true — you have to balance yourself before you can hope to steady anyone else. If the world is too full of hate, ignorance, etc., you have to find and eliminate those states within yourself first. Otherwise you will encounter them wherever you go: you’ll be bringing them along.

When I heard, atop that quiet hill in Nepal, the results of the election, I went through all the stages of grief, at a speed I am ultimately grateful for. I’d only been detoxing my mind from the news cycle for a short time, but already it had begun to air out. The things that surface in the mind during such times can be just what’s needed, and what surfaced in mine that day, through no conscious effort of my own, was the tail end of an M.L.K. assertion**: 

Only love can do that. 

            Only love can do that. 

                        Only love can do that. 

This idea, that had made its way to me I don’t know how long ago, is what emerged that day, ringing quietly at first and louder as the day persisted, as the news sank in. While I was experiencing the shock, the denial, the confusion so many of us felt, that refrain played patiently on.

The trouble with hate and ignorance is that like inspires like. DT campaigned on hate and it made me rage. But what I learned from those unruffled monks was that no one makes you angry. That anger comes from you. This was (and sometimes still is) a hard pill for me to swallow. If someone is annoying the shit out of you – your problem is you! How simple. How tiresome. DT didn’t put rage inside of me — he brought it out. It was already there.

How troublesome.

I thought that studying Buddhist meditation and practicing mindfulness would make life in the Western world seem easier to comprehend and navigate. And yet the absurdism in Washington that continues to unfold before our eyes every day has made it harder in some ways for me to exist in this world, despite all that I did learn that month and have since continued to practice. 

One of the many Buddhist teachings that has been helpful for me to remember is that problems are your friends. To embrace problems head-on is how you grow, awaken. To see a human causing pain and understand that he is causing such pain because he is so pained himself and to approach him with equanimity is what is necessary. To develop love and compassion in the mind is to reduce anger and suffering as a matter of course. (See? Only love can do that.) 

Since November I’ve had many, many moments wherein I find myself completely overwhelmed, paralyzed by the number and enormity of problems swirling around us, all of us on this earth. Despair has knocked on my door a few times, but so far I haven’t answered. My brother likes to say, “If you ever get lost, just remember you’re on the third planet from the sun and work your way back from there.” He means it to be funny, but it helps me to be mindful — mindful of our place in the universe, of my place in the universe.

Now at least I can focus on my breath and remember that peace and balance are not things to struggle for. Struggle belies the absence of these. Peace, balance — these are for tapping into, allowing. Does this mean we should allow the wrongs we witness to proceed? Nope. But if peace is what we want, it’s what we need to embody. It will expand outward from us. Take a breath, acknowledge what is, allow the peace within you to come forth, to take over. Be the change you wish to see in yourself. Once you’ve mastered that, you can go about changing the world. Simple.

Right?

*His name is said, read and written far too much and in this I will not participate. However, he remains unavoidable.

**The front end being: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate;”

Editor’s Note: The unexpected consequence of the 2016 presidential election is the way that it coalesced America in resistance to moral outrage and awareness of principles on which the nation was built:

Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
            –From “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus, 1883.

Taking the message of “Indivisble” to heart (links available in the American Identity Issue), Alicia Ostriker shows us how to be mindful and make a difference in the world around us.  About Ostriker, the author Joyce Carol Oates writes, “[She] has become one of those brilliantly provocative and imaginatively gifted contemporaries whose iconoclastic expression, whether in prose or poetry, is essential to our understanding of our American selves.”

This morning I spent with some New Sanctuary Movement people accompanying a woman named Iris, pronounced Eeris, with her twelve-year-old son Estefan, to her court hearing.  All I knew about her was that she was undocumented, that this was her second hearing, that she did not have a lawyer, that she lives in the Bronx, and that her case was in some unexplained way “complicated.”  She spoke only Spanish and had probably been apprehended at the border.

She was slated for deportation, as were all the undocumented people there.  

Our task was to give her moral support, simply by being there, accompanying her.  In our training session, we were warned not to be in any way confrontational, even if she or we met with hostile behavior.  And we were warned that much of our time would be spent waiting.

That was the case.  The building, devoted to processing immigrants, felt like a hospital.  There were a dozen of us. We introduced ourselves to each other, and our leaders, and Iris, who shook our hands or hugged us.  We went through security and up to the 12th floor, where we all hung out in a hall outside judge’s chambers, and then in a waiting room.  There we waited two hours.

It was altogether different from what I expected.  Guards were courteous.  I watched one guard squat down in the hall to persuade a small boy who’d thrown himself on the floor to be a big boy and get up.  Both laughing. The door in the waiting room was open to Judge Brennan’s chambers, and we listened to her berate—not the immigrant whose hearing it was—but a lawyer, for not providing more mitigating facts, such as the danger his client’s little girl might be in if he could not afford to send her to school or get medical care.  This was rather astonishing.  A little later, she berated a different immigrant for not co-operating with his lawyer.  It was clear she saw her job as doing whatever she could that was legal to delay deportations.  

When she came out she let us know that she was familiar with the New Sanctuary Movement organization.

The judge hearing cases of people without lawyers was also a woman.  Each case had an interpreter. The judge ascertained through the interpreter that she had the person’s name, address, child’s name and age correctly.  She smiled rather often, especially at children. At some point, she doffed her black judge’s robe and was wearing a sleeveless grey dress underneath.  Everyone received a change of address form in case they were to change their address, and a form listing places they could look for pro bono lawyers, and the instruction to come back November 14. 

That was it.  There are, of course, not enough lawyers.  And they will take only cases they think they can win, which is very few.  The order of the day, at least in New York, seems to be delay, delay, delay–and the job of the New Sanctuary Movement is to keep figuring out ways of playing the system.

I can learn more if I go to the organization’s meetings.  And of course, it would be better if I knew Spanish.

You can look up the New Sanctuary Movement.  It is a coalition rooted in synagogues and churches but is happy to use anyone’s help.  It exists in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and presumably other cities as well.  Go to https://newsanctuarynyc.wordpress.com/about/

What is the birthplace of the light that stabs me with joy      

and what is the difference between avocados sold on the street

by a young man conceived in Delhi and avocados sold 

in the West Side Market by cornrow girls, I am anyhow afloat

in tides of Puertorican, Cuban, Mexican, Westindian Spanish, wavelets of Urdu

swelling like oceans, sweating like jackhammers, rasping like crows, calling out

in the West Side Market, the Rite Aid, and every other shop on the street

Porque no comprendes, you don’t own this city any more

the city belongs and has always belonged to its shoals of exiles

foaming and crashing ashore in salty droplets, como no, gringita—

with their dances and their grandmothers, with their drinking and their violence

and their burning yearning to be free, and smelling money, what, what is the joy 

is it those lamps of light those babies in their strollers

those avocados with their dark-green pebbled rinds, shining from inside

two for four dollars in the West Side Market, and three for four dollars from the cart

joy like white light between the dollar bills, is it these volleys of light fired 

by ancestors who remember tenements, sweatshops, the war,

who supposed their children’s children would be rich and free?

Reprinted from Waiting for the Light (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)

Photos courtesy John Twomey

In 1988, I began teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Late in the day I’d pass through a grove of white pines to my building’s parking lot. Often I’d see a man watching the small pond across the road, where graceful birds danced and dove in the air. One day we fell into an easy silence, watching together. “Tree swallows,” he said. It turned out he had made and installed their wooden houses on poles. He kept count of breeding pairs, eggs, and fledglings. 

John Twomey had been teaching there for several years. His still, intent way seemed unusual, more like a hunter than a professor. Our first conversations were about the pond, and the life it sponsored.

John welcomed me to the university, and we began a quiet twenty-year conversation about the nature around us. We were glad to be in different departments, he in Spanish, I in English. We could leave work matters on the other side of the pine grove.

John expressed his sorrow at having seen the Connecticut farmland of his early days cut into suburbs. He was set on doing something, at any scale he could, about habitat destruction. He had a long-term plan for after retirement. Did he ever.

John and his partner, Leigh Norcott, moved up to the farm in 2009. They manage the land for wildlife, grow their food, chop their wood, and feed the birds from their hands.

When I met him, I thought his ecological awareness was unusual. As time passed I became aware of his longing for this life of good work and solitude among wild beings. He was pouring his love and care into public land (our campus), soaking in what he could amid cars and students.

For his children and grandchildren, he has invaded his own privacy and written a book about his life on the farm. It is filled with details about how to grow vegetables, fruit, chickens, and trout, how to preserve one’s food, and how not to crowd one’s wild neighbors. His book manifests his generous spirit.

The book is a practical guide which reveals a land ethic. While John refers to himself as a farmer, and his home as “the farm,” he never sells anything. He could, of course. He produces a surplus. But he keeps his project closer in scale, and spirit, to gardening.

If the guiding principle behind a farmer’s hard work isn’t to make a living, nor even to feed himself, what is?

The short answer: protection of all the living beings within his reach. His reach includes the 125 acres of the farm, and another 30 acres nearby.

Of course, before conservation can begin, decisions must be made about what to protect, and how. Then somebody must actually be there to nurture the land.

“I encourage the summer flowers,” John said to me, “—but also dandelion and violet for the early spring, then golden rod and asters for the fall and late fall. Another favorite of mine is called ‘sow thistle’—a little flower, not unlike the dandelion, but it blossoms in late summer through fall. For many years, I’ve gathered the seed heads and spread them to the twelve green patches, where now that flower is quite well established and is self-seeding.  Wild bees love to feed on the blossoms and wild turkeys adore the buds prior to opening — they snap them off and gobble them down.”

In a talk John said, “nurturing was, and always has been, central to my life. Nurturing gave, and gives me, a sense of purpose, and a sense of direction.”

I always felt John’s mix of sensitivity and steel determination. I wonder whether others might sense his way of being-in-the-world if they  listen to this radio interview he gave to the program “Maine Calling,” on May 8, 2017: http://mainepublic.org/post/retiring-farm

It’s a lively discussion, with host Jennifer Rooks, and callers who ask good questions. Even the station’s announcements seem to contribute to the community-within-nature discussion and energy. 

John is a subtle man, and his passion sneaks up on you—maybe. Who can say what one friend sees in another? 

In his book On Friendship, Alexander Nehamas describes a mystery. Suppose two people, A and B, know a third person, C, pretty well. A and B agree in all their judgements about C. They find him admirable and accomplished. Yet one of them, B, isn’t particularly interested in C. A, on the other hand, finds C fascinating, and values any time they spend together. Nehamas discusses various explanations for this, but when all is said there remains a mystery about the feeling between friends.

John is a good listener. People know that. Whether they perceive his awareness, or his joy, in the creatures around him, I don’t know. My question is whether he was born this way, or created himself from fortunate, or unfortunate, circumstances.

I asked John to tell me about his childhood, what encouraged or discouraged him, on his path.

Luke Wallin: When you were young, did you have mentors who were farmers or conservationists in the ways that you are now? 

John Twomey: Yes… I observed the farming operations of two neighbors.  Both seemed quite contented with their rural activities, both knew their land and animals well, and both truly cared about their land.  

My mother lovingly encouraged my interest in gardening, raising chickens and pigeons, feeding wild birds, and hunting and fishing.

LW: Your passion for the natural world seems a lot like mine, which, emotionally, is still tied up with hunting. I don’t hunt now but thrill to seeing a nice buck, or a gobbler, or a woodcock overhead. Did you ever have that drive to hunt? You seem to have it for fishing.  

 JT: I most certainly did. Uncle Ed bought me a BB gun and turned me loose on the “mountain” at age seven -– hard to imagine in today’s world. All on my own I learned to stalk birds and other critters –- when to move and when to remain still –- and how to sit for long periods of time –- motionless! 

I truly loved every minute of these experiences. 

I spent hours and hours alone –- hunting, observing, silently taking in the ways of the creatures and the woods. To this day I find that that early wiring of my brain allows me to read wildlife and know how to move or not move around them, and it makes it possible for me to be completely at home in the woods.

In my sophomore year, a year when I was anything but a good student, I wrote an essay about waking up in my upstairs bedroom, coming downstairs, having coffee, and going rabbit hunting with my beagle. At that point in my life I tended to view myself as a country bumpkin and was somewhat inclined to hide my rural upbringing. Much to my surprise, Ms. Little wrote back that I was so fortunate to know what I knew about beagles, rabbits, hunting, and the outdoors. I remember that positive feedback so well –- it was the first time I experienced someone thinking that there was some value in what I was doing –- aside from putting meat on the table.  

I did not have a great relationship with my father, a man with an unpredictable temper and rather strong propensity toward physical violence and verbal abuse. While he would spend weekend afternoons watching sports on TV, I would retreat to the forest and the wild creatures I had come to know so well. 

LW: You extend the gift of solitude to the creatures, as well.

JT: I’m interested in how things are going in these secluded locations but rely mainly on tracks in the snow, such as those of fishers and bobcats, to inform me on the comings and goings of those who frequent these particularly quiet spots. I do find the information I glean from tracks to be quite enough — I’m happy to speculate on what good things are going on once they get into the areas where we do not venture.

LW: Your emotions seem to be about the creatures—rather than the “farming” focus of your book. 

JT:  You are absolutely right. I did have an early inclination to garden, and began gardening on my own around the age of eight.

But it is the wildlife and wildlife habitat that are the heart and soul of what I do on the farm. Fortunately, once again, Leigh feels exactly the same way. Being around relatively undisturbed wild creatures meets some sort of a need deep within me. 

I never tire of watching critters like deer, turkeys, squirrels, and small birds. To see a fox, coyote, or bobcat hunt is a special treat. While watching them I absorb their movements and reactions –- I feel as if I’m gaining an understanding of their inner needs. Spending time now working on wildlife habitat is, I believe, sort of a way of repaying nature for all it did for me at a critical point in my life.

Retiring To: Not From, may be ordered at http://johnhtwomey.com.

 #

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of The Louisville Review, under the title “Your Pictures Are Beautiful, But Where Are All the People?”

In my early twenties, time seemed to move at lightning speed. From age twenty-one to twenty-four, I worked, traveled, dated, paid rent, failed to pay rent, shopped. All this time, I felt like soon it would all be over—I’d be old and all I’d remember about my life was this rushing feeling and the blurry image of a photo taken from a moving vehicle. This might have been an appropriate time to take up meditation, but I focused on the external. I decided to get out of Brooklyn, to move someplace where time moved slower, where history was remembered and traditions were honored without irony (someplace far from New York City).

Let me preface this by saying I could not speak Spanish, at all, when I made this move. If I had been able to, I might have thought twice about this region, named for its harshness: Extremadura. All I knew when I signed my name to a year’s ESL teaching contract were Google Images of crisp vineyards and hills of shrubby green trees. This, and a large dusty book I’d checked out from the library back when I lived in coastal North Carolina, whose stories stayed with me:  James Michener’s Iberia, travel tales from Spain.

The stillness of Michener’s photographs, black and white, a dust-blown Castilian village, evoked John Wayne on a horse, an anecdote of  Michener’s visit to the home of Vasco Nuñez –better known to the rest of us as Balboa—claimer, “founder” of the Pacific Ocean. That jeweled, beheaded conquistador, and this was his hometown: Jerez de Los Caballeros. Yes, I said to myself, let’s go there. I’d love to teach there.

 *

The donkeys are hungry. This makes them mean, mostly, but there’s one I visit and the joy, the relief in his face after my hand touches his flank makes me ashamed. I turn my head.

Michener wrote about the silence of this place, the stares of local eyes from the small clean windows, as he walked up and down in search of Balboa. Now I see it, hear it.  I live in a small piso above a widow— needlepoint, embroidery everywhere, and tall dark salon rooms with plastic blinds fastened tight against the sun. And on top of the blinds, drapes: hand-made, thick, skimming the floor, but dirt-less, dust-less. Louisa’s house smells like Lysol and cigarettes.

When I return from work at three I find her in the stairwell, scrubbing my footprints off her landing. She orders me inside to try on her discarded blouses before she gives them to Las Hermanas at the convent, and suddenly I’m topless in her formal bedroom twitching left, then right, to avoid her hemming needles. She pulls the blouse tight and cinches it at the side.

“Guapissima,” she says, grinning.

As I walk  to work at seven in the morning to teach my eight o’clock class, the streets are dark. The Spanish sun rises late, sets late. I see men in mauve or brown wool sweaters, brown pants, yellow teeth; they lean out on canes from doorways, call out, “Niña! Venga! A donde vas guapa?”  I’m not too much younger than their youngest sons maybe. Do I have un novio? They’re ready for grandchildren; this economy isn’t doing them any favors.

They can’t sleep I guess.

After school, I return to the heart of things, through the crooked passage from the medieval stone archway marking the entrance to this walled city. The school was only built in the ‘70s, so it sits outside the village walls, down a sharp hill and up again. I’m sweating by first period each day, breathing heavily as I explain to my students about American universities, about all the cars.

 *

For the past thirty minutes we’ve been doing a grammar lesson from the English textbook—British grammar—and I’ve been struggling. In the middle of the room, a hand goes up.  

“Marie-José?”

“What your favorite Michael Jackson song?”

I won’t answer this, I think, but after a breath they get to me—their brown eyes, brown hair, and golden brown skin—they melt into me. These children haven’t been alive long but their lineage is solid, traceable, altogether un-American. Moments of communal understanding are few, and I see this could be one.

“P.Y.T.,” I say, but my pronunciation leaves them unsure. They squint. “I want to love you,” I sing.

Later we do an activity where each of the kids has to describe in English the clothes of someone else in the class. Things move slowly, church-like, until someone says, “Black sues, black sirt, jeans an botas—no, boots,” and then the girls start to giggle and the boys chant, “Tea-cher, tea-cher.”

 *

On my return walk I move, unsteady, between dazzling sun and cool rock limestone castle, work not to trip on cobblestones, twist an ankle. I need my ankles in good form to explore this afternoon.

The sharpest incline between the school and home leads me to a plateau, where I may catch my breath before a statue of Hernando de Soto, one of the sons of this village. I’ve learned that De Soto asked for his remains to be buried beside his mother’s in the church up the street by my piso, San Miguel, but angry natives disappeared his body before the request could be carried out. This statue honors him instead—seven-feet-tall at least, concrete—with rough features. It’s no David, but to an extranjero like me it makes an impression. The base of the carving lists De Soto’s birthdate as 1500, which alone tests my notions of history, almost laughs at my concept of national identity. A hundred years before Plymouth, this guy went out walking and stumbled on the rushing foam of the Mississippi.

But that’s not the story the locals talk about most. Before Vasco Nuñez left to conquer Central America, he lived here and had a girlfriend named Yarcy. Well, Vasco promised Yarcy he’d return, and they’d live together—and you know what happened to that plan. So Yarcy never recovered, and she would talk about the long-lost Vasco Nuñez all the time to everyone, drove them all crazy, until finally someone opened a restaurant in town to commemorate these goings-on. It’s called Boca Yarcy: mouth of Yarcy. I had dinner there last night, and over bocadillos heard at least three versions of the story.

*

After bathing and eating I re-tie my boots and leave the piso, quiet as I can, to avoid a run-in with mi casera, Louisa. Behind me the door latches shut and I look down where I’m headed, to the campo. This is the best part of day, leaving the village walls for the second time, retracing Michener’s hike up here from the bus station, feeling the eyes of the old women in black, the leathery men, silver-toothed, arthritic. The diet built around jamón iberico and tortilla de patatas leads beyond hardening of the arteries and joints to an overall appearance of inflammation. I can see that here, especially, growing old is hard to do.

The glaring white houses Michener noted are as bright today as they were more than a half-century ago when he came, and the housewives I see mopping the stone outside their doors are likely the granddaughters of the women he observed at the same task. I’m not sure their daughters will continue on this path—21^st century changes are coming fast; steel factories close in neighboring towns and unemployment rises past 30%; these villages bleed young people.

But for now the white walled city lies sleeping, silent as time, and walking through it at a good clip, boots scuffing against the cobblestones as I begin my descent, clip-top, clip-top, I see the bright blue sky and feel as if I’ve escaped from under pressure of fossilized rock.

Soon I’ll reach the road out of town, and when I cross it I can turn and look up at Jerez or down past the farms, the animals tied up every few yards (a simple rope around the neck looped through a cement wedge lodged in the earth), farther, to the reservoir, where in a few minutes I’ll sit and read and breathe the only humidity Extremadura can offer: man-made, stagnant.

On the way there I pass rolling fields divided by no more than a few shabby cork trees or a wire fence. Each plot has its own animals, not grazing so much as enduring the dry conditions, stiff brown grass for seven months of heat followed by four of cold.

The first two farms on each side of the road have horses and cows. One large horse bucks up as I pass, fighting his rope. The ears of the fatter cows have been tagged in slips of pink cardboard marking them for slaughter. Soon I’ll reach sheep, pigs and finally the smallest square of land with a scruffy brown donkey no bigger than a pony, and his enemy, a barking dog.

The first time I walked down here the donkey neighed at me, nodded, bared a mouth full of great teeth, and leaned his mane and neck up against the fence for me to pet. Since then he runs to the fence when he sees me, stepping up on the low stone wall separating his owner’s land from the road. He presses himself into the fence. I run my hands along his body, scratch behind his ears and talk to him (not too loudly, since the farmer’s just on the other side of the yard). I try to feed him with grass I pull from the ground, but it’s dry and probably bitter—still, he seems to appreciate the effort, nodding his head, trotting along the fence beside me as I continue toward the reservoir. Sometimes the dog makes noise, tries to get between the donkey and me. Once the dog jumped up on the stone wall and barked at me to leave. His barking grew hysterical, maddening, and when he wouldn’t give it up the donkey turned to me as if to say, “Hold on a minute, I can handle this,” and then bit the dog’s back, lifted him into the air, swung around and tossed him out of the way. As the dog slunk off, the donkey resumed his petting position at the fence.

In my piso at night I consider the donkey and his indifferent owner—I wonder what value the animal might have with his small build—what cart could he pull? I’d like to ride him away from here. I think I should taper off my visits, so he doesn’t get too used to me and miss me when I go.

*

At the end of the school year I packed up and moved to Madrid—another capital city, more subways and street food and high rents. But this time city life felt slower; my year in Jerez had changed my brain somehow, made it possible to walk down Gran Via in Madrid—or through Times Square at home—without succumbing to the endless rush, to the quicksand of distractions that had eaten away my early twenties. It was another five years before I found mindfulness meditation, but the immense stillness of the village had worked its way into me, clean and suspended like the reservoir I used to pass on my daily walks. Jerez de Los Caballeros. That arid land birthed Hernando de Soto, Balboa, Hernán Cortés, and Francisco Pizarro, all of whom wandered away and crossed seas to declare ownership over continents and waters unknown to their Queen’s men. If you’ve never been to the west of Spain, this may seem odd—why so many from this region? Michener knew; his photographs and snippets of prose from the days he spent here can tell you exactly how it happened. The sun there kills, the hills are jagged, spilling limestone ash, and it never rains. You have to build structures to retrieve buried water—

but when you stand at the castle wall and look down, move your gaze right, slowly, the earth rises to meet you, and the flatlands beckon to the sea.

Introduction

The ideas and daily events in this journal took place during fifty days in summer, 2004. Each day I carried a small tape recorder with me and recorded thoughts when they seemed relevant to what had become my overall quest: to think about thinking, to watch the stream of consciousness.

This stands in contrast to a more narrow, focused introspection, of the kind, say, practiced in versions of Buddhist meditation. In my free-form variety, mind-watching is linked to a state of mind-wandering; in other words, recording the mind while thinking what you want to think.

The issue of “want” is a bit problematic, however, because as all beginning meditators quickly note, but also often are shocked to discover, much of thinking is done for us by deeper unconscious mechanisms that continuously roll out a cornucopia of thoughts into consciousness. 

What I wanted was the time to follow my thoughts and then pick up on themes and reinforce them in memory. I’d record them for revisiting. It was akin to freely wandering in a state of discovery across an intricate landscape. Each daily entry —only a few sentences here— was recorded in the field. It’s followed by my reflections on it later. 

My physical landscape was a wondrous one in which to wander. I had for many years spent summers in the mountains of Southwestern New Mexico. But I usually had writing projects in science and philosophy to start or complete, and I had craved mental breathing space for more personal explorations.

Home was a ten- by forty-foot trailer with a covered porch of the same size. And there I lived for fifty days, without companionship, without television or radio. It was easy to limit human contact—neighborly or electronic—to the bare minimum. The result: I took ownership of a rare block of time for personal experiment.

I discovered practices that deeply merged the patterns of nature and mind like intertwined lovers.

What follows are my entries for the first three days.

Day 1   The Stream

I sit on a rock, surrounded by the riffles of a stream. Each foot rests upon a small rock of its own. My eyes are transfixed upon the clear upstream water flowing toward me. As I listen to the gurgles, the eddies hypnotize. A phrase floats into my mind: “the stream of consciousness.”

I didn’t make up the term. It has been in use for more than a hundred years, since William James proclaimed the stream of consciousness to be the primal fact that the science of mind must admit and study.

The metaphor feels true. Our inner being does seem to flow. Thoughts and feelings glide along smoothly, at other times with roars.

How is consciousness like the intricate patterns of flow that swirled around me? If we are streams, we are surely paradoxical ones. On one hand, the moment-to-moment mind is like a parcel of water in the real stream, shifting yet always bounded to its own unique present. But also, on the other hand, via memory, the mind is aware of its own experienced past and, via anticipation, the impending future. Thus unlike the moving parcel of water, the mind lives broadly, both upstream and downstream. We are more like the entire stream.

In saying, “Mind is a stream,” of course we observe in ourselves James’ primal psychological fact.  But then we can realize that the very noting of the stream of consciousness, whether experienced as an inwardly heard sentence or purely as imagery—itself takes place as a unique present moment. In other words, the act of noting is a parcel within the very flow to which it refers. Thus from a point within the flow, you can say, “I am the flow.” How can a particular slice of mental time within the ongoing flow know that there is ongoing flow? 

A part seems to sense the larger whole. We might answer, “by using memory and anticipation.” But these processes are mysterious when we use them to define the self, the “I.” It is one thing to recall this morning’s breakfast. It is altogether another level of abstraction to be able to say, “I am the flow,” all the while limited to the viewpoint from a mere parcel in the flow. We’re clearly an oddball kind of stream. We appear to be a flow that can observe itself.

 Day 2  The Mesh

In solitude, my mind is not a flow with clear direction. Beneath a towering ponderosa pine, I gaze down at a bed of dried pine needles. The inner voice proclaims, “That’s me!”

Unlike water, needles exhibit no steady flow. They could be individual lines of thought, perhaps mini-streams. But upon reaching the end of one, in a short amount of time you start along another needle. It is all quite entangled, akin to loopy nets of neurons in the brain. From one short path of consciousness angles of other possibilities splay off in segments that can lead to new regions and eventually back. At that point the mini-you crawls along the same needle again, to re-run the same thought again, to feel the same anxiety or thrill again.

Here, as in the case of the stream, the shape of consciousness can be sensed as a pattern, created by memory. Some needles are the previous day’s experiences, scattered on the ground, set in place. Some are dug in deep from years past. Some are anticipated scenes yet to come. All are parts of the networks of self. Some, detached from any explicitly retrieved memories, are thoughts in the moment, which can include the following: “The mind is a mesh of pine needles.”

We usually know only a limited range of a few needles at any point in our self-monitoring. Most of the mesh is unconscious. We lurch in and out of moods, of scenes, songs, memories, and projected hopes, of replays of the past and fantastic imaginings. We can get stuck, caught on a sharp needle tip, unable to move either ahead or back.

The outstanding enigma in all this prickly meandering is, surprise surprise, the act of observation. The observation of the mind’s patterns is itself a mental pattern, perhaps on a higher level. We are in the mesh and above it. We cannot be exclusively “above,” because, paradoxically, when we observe our self in time, that takes place in the present moment, just like anything else that comes to attention—white cloud, singing bird, or hearty breakfast. Still, this self-observation hovers in a lofty, abstract “above,” by virtue of memory and anticipation. These two cognitive processes somehow weave our moments together to provide a vision of the whole mesh at the same instant in which we are confined to a needle within the mesh. Therefore, we can be global within the local. That seems paradoxical. There’s a saying that if the mind were simple enough to be easily figured out, it wouldn’t be a mind.

Day 3   Shoes and Paths

I am spending the warm middle of this day hiking upstream along the West Fork of the Gila River. Wearing sandals, I ford rocky river crossings back and forth for several miles. The valley sides become sheer cliffs that embrace me.  

Were my feet bare I would  be stuck at home, staring at pine needles. Were there no trail I would be hacking my way through brambles of willows at each crossing. Shoes and paths: these are appropriate metaphors for how our society provides us with the means to smooth the courses we travel in life.

We need “shoes,” which are mental skills. To become a surgeon, welder, teacher, or parent requires concerted and directed effort to fortify one’s capacities for each next stage. And as real footwear shields us from painful rocks, socially-gained footwear often feels good. We gain rewards, such as money and community. It’s important to choose shoes that fit.

We might want to be wary of the seduction of these aids of “shoes and paths.”  The ways they offer to escape inner entanglement of meshes are so easy and soothing that it is difficult to say “no” to them. We become addicted—financially, of course, but we’re speaking psychologically—to having footwear and paths. From the trivial time spent hooked to a quickly forgotten video to what are sometimes decades of devotion to an institution’s goals of selling, the trouble with many social shoes and paths is that the sacred self, the inner core of the individual, gets buried.  

Tyler Volk is Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at New York University. His latest book is Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be (2017). The book boldly proposes a rhythm to a “grand sequence,” with levels of fundamental things and relations that have built from elementary quanta to globalized human civilization.

Dr. Brown coined the term Buddhist Economics in 2011 and recently released a book detailing its practice in 2017. The following interview about the book is courtesy Italian publisher Vallardi, an imprint of Gruppo Editoriale (part of Penguin Random House).

Interview by Mauri Spagnol

What are the basic principles of Buddhist economics?

Buddhist economics assumes that people are interdependent with each other, and people are interdependent with nature. These assumptions immediately lead to outcomes where shared prosperity and sustainability improve social welfare because one person’s well-being is affected by everyone else’s well-being and by the well-being of nature (the planet). Think of Indra’s Net, which is an infinite net with a jewel at each intersection, so each jewel reflects what is happening in all the other jewels. This is the infinite interdependence of Buddhist economics!

Free market economics focuses on efficiency, or the size of the pie produced (national income). Most economists also care about inequality, or the division of the pie (distribution of income). Buddhist economics also cares about how people live, or what is in the pie (all output and activities that create a meaningful comfortable life and care for nature).

What are the main differences between Buddhist economics and free market economics or Socialist economics?

Economic systems present a variety of capitalism, as taught by political scientists. The role of the government is to structure markets to achieve specific social outcomes. Each society chooses their inequality and their carbon emissions (pollution), as well as how many people are suffering from poverty or inadequate health care. The government can be minimalist, as in Free Market Economy where the government enforces rule of law, property rights, and national security. Or the government can be activist, as in Social Democracies that structure markets in order to reduce poverty; provide social services such as child care, health care, and education; limit discrimination; and administer a social safety net. A Buddhist economy is a market economy where the government plays an important role in structuring markets so that everyone can live a comfortable, meaningful life in a sustainable world.

What are the policies supported by Buddhist Economics compared to Free Market Economics? Are these policies already being applied by some countries?

Free market economics ignores inequality and pollution, because these problems are assumed away, which means they are denied.

Buddhist economics looks to policies that have been used in many countries that effectively reduce inequality, and my book mentions some of them, such as higher minimum wages, laws that strengthen unions and workers’ bargaining power, more progressive income taxes (taxes that increase as income increases) with a top rate of 65%, more progressive inheritance taxes, adequate health care and education, child benefits, and mandated vacation days, overtime pay, and family care leave.

Buddhist economics also relies on available technology to transition from dependence on fossil fuel energy to a clean energy economy that is modern and affordable. Scientists have provided two road maps that show how countries can meet the Paris 2015 global warming target of < 2 degrees centigrade by implementing 75%-100% renewable energy by 2050: Stanford’s 100% clean energy Solutions Project http://thesolutionsproject.org/ and the UN’s Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project  http://deepdecarbonization.org/.

How does Buddhist economics evaluate and measure economic growth?

A critical part of Buddhist economics is measuring economic growth in a holistic way that looks at the quality of life provided to all people and the health of the environment, because what we measure indicates what we value and lays out the path for the economy.

One chapter of the book explains various approaches used by economists to measure economic performance as quality of life. Economists agree that average national output (Gross Domestic Product, GDP) is not a good measure of a country’s economic well-being because only what is sold in the marketplace is included in GDP, and all other human activities are ignored. Yet GDP is used to measure economic performance around the world. Economists have created several ways to measure pollution and environmental damage, income inequality, happiness, human capabilities, and nonpaid activities (both useful and harmful). These metrics have been used to create various holistic measures of economic performance, such as the UN’s Human Development Index, the OECD Better Life Index, the Genuine Progress Indicator, the Happy Planet Index, and Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index. Buddhist Economics relies on these measures, and any one of them is better than using the GDP.

What are the steps to implement a Buddhist economy in a Western country? To what extent does it require a change of perspective, and what motivates this change?

The last chapter pulls together the Buddhist economics framework and lays out eight steps to make the leap to a Buddhist economy: four steps for the country, two steps for business, and two steps for people. The major change in perspective for a rich country, like the OECD nations, is to focus on the quality of life of everyone and go beyond consumerism to create happiness and a better world. Our perspective shifts from a focus on chasing after more income to creating a meaningful life and preserving nature. In a Buddhist economy, “Practice compassion to be happy,” replaces “More is better,” and “Everyone’s well-being is connected,” replaces “Maximize your own position.” Our motivation is that we are dissatisfied and want to have a more meaningful life; we want to get off the materialistic treadmill and enjoy the relationships and experiences that make us happy; we want to pass along a healthy planet to future generations.

You can see the book trailer here: https://youtu.be/88RX5A2iezs 

BUDDHIST ECONOMICS is part of Gruppo Editoriale’s bestselling Sakura line about Zen & Japanese philosophy and way of life.

Put your hands at your sides.

Stand straight, shoulders back, tummies relaxed.

Keep your mouth slightly open to allow you to breathe.

Lower your eyes.

Breathe normally and focus on the feeling of the breath coming in and going out.

We will brush our brains for one minute or up to 60 counts once I ring the bell.

And our brain brushing begins now…

A few years ago, I taught in Bhutan for a few years, and this was how my school day began and ended, with a minute or so of daily meditating, brain brushing, mindfulness. Indeed, as a way to bring Bhutan’s principles of Gross National Happiness into everyday life, all students in all schools, public or private, meditate twice a day; once in the morning just before classes start, and again in the afternoon, just after classes finish.

At the primary school where I worked, we called it “brain brushing” — a term coined by the American U.C.L.A.-based professor of psychiatry, Dr. Dan Siegel — since comparing meditating to brushing one’s teeth made it easier for the younger students to understand the point of standing silently “doing nothing,” as a few kids liked to put it. Along with explaining the similarities between “mental hygiene” and “dental hygiene,” Early Learning Centre’s founder, Deki Choden, liked to emphasize that meditating allows us “to focus on all that we learn at school and be mindful in whatever we say and do.” For me, then, meditating and mindfulness are inextricably linked, with the former helping the latter to be that much more possible.

Our daily sessions lasted between one and two minutes, depending on how long the leader of the session, usually a sixth-grader, wanted them to be; during the warmer months, they were generally longer. When the bell rang signaling the start of our brain brushing, I found myself savoring the silence, stillness, and, despite being in a courtyard with close to a hundred students, solitude. In the quiet, by focusing on my “breathing in and breathing out,” as I looked down and stared at a cobblestone, everything else faded away; my breathing was all that I was.

At first, however, I fought this intense focusing. I didn’t enjoy losing full awareness of my surroundings, my thoughts, and my body, since I felt that my body, my thoughts, and my surroundings were what largely defined me. This zoning in had me zoning out and — being something of a control freak — I didn’t like feeling this loss of control.

Still, I stuck with it. Partly, I was curious to see where this meditating would take me. But even as I began to be one with my breathing, I could feel myself going somewhere else, to a kind of blankness, where thoughts and worries didn’t ricochet about because there was no room for thoughts and worries, just my breathing. I wasn’t me anymore, but I didn’t mind it. For quite quickly — by which I mean after just a few days of twice-a-day, minutes-long sessions — I relished being there, coming to see it as “my place.”

It’s not that my responsibilities melted away. I still had lessons to prepare, classes to teach, meetings to attend, calls, emails, and texts to make. It’s that their pressing urgency didn’t matter, didn’t apply, didn’t exist right then. Within this calmness, this respite, I could sense my heart not beating so fast, my lungs not breathing so hard, my body not bracing itself so rigidly against the day. It wasn’t “doing nothing,” as much as being nothing. When the session-ending bell rang, just as I had been aware of my breathing, when I returned to the courtyard, I found myself quite aware of an array of things, such as the breeze across my face, the sound of the birds in the trees, the warmth of the sun.

Students and teachers at Early Learning Centre could have extra meditation time during the day if they wanted. And so my fifth graders, classes 5A and 5B, would occasionally request them, and regularly did so in the run-up to tests. I occasionally asked my students what they liked about meditating, and after they had joked that it took up class time — of course, it did do that — they relayed how it helped them feel relaxed. And how about mindfulness? That wasn’t so clear-cut for them, or, really, for me. 

We talked about how being aware of something could prove to be the first step towards being mindful of it. For instance, since I mentioned that I felt more aware of the birds in the trees whenever we finished meditating in the morning, one student, Sonam, suggested that I could and should take it further, and be mindful of birds, and trees, and nature in general. Thinking about meditation and mindfulness in that way prompted us to consider how being aware of our breathing could then get us to be mindful of our lungs and, by extension, our health in general.

And from there, being mindful of everyone else’s health? It felt logical, but also a bit of a leap, and something of a stretch. A kind of variation on, “Think globally, act locally?” If everyone were to take care of themselves, then everyone would be taken care of?  Or, perhaps, an inverse of the so-called Golden Rule? Treat yourself, as you would like everyone else to treat themselves?

One way Early Learning Centre tried to answer that question, tried to make that leap from self-awareness to being mindful of others, was through “The Kind & Wise Way,” an empathy awareness class that I also taught. During the semester-long, twice-a-week class, third graders sorted out and carried out weekly acts of kindness, so that such acts would become a welcomed regular part of their lives, rather than regarded as unusual or un-cool. As for who and what would benefit from their acts of kindness, my two sections of kids came up with the categories of friends, family, animals, nature, poor people, and teachers, and they enjoyed reporting back that helping — by way of, say, writing a kind note, running an errand, picking up garbage, donating clothes — made them feel good about themselves and those that they helped.

Even so, they could be incredibly rambunctious. Granted, they were third graders, and third graders anywhere can be boisterous. Still, when I made clear they needed to behave in class (as well as in their other classes; as I said, they were rowdy), their response caught me up short.

“But, Sir Ivor, we are Buddhists, and we are like this because of our past lives,” their ringleader told me. “We can’t help it. It’s karma.”

With their smiles letting on that they were kidding (or at least semi-kidding), I told them that while I didn’t know a lot about Buddhism, I had a feeling their religion allowed for self-improvement, or at least self-restraint. When they rejected my points with laughter, I went on to say that they could then regard being quiet and respectful in class as an act of kindness towards me, their teacher, one of their chosen categories. I had them there, at least for the next few classes. In addition, I also confirmed that Buddhism does in fact allow for bettering one’s self. As one colleague told me, “Buddha teaches that the wise master themselves.”

The elementary school in the suburbs of New York City where I currently work as a substitute teacher has a mindfulness instructor visit every month to briefly discuss mindfulness and partake in meditation with the students. Not surprisingly, compared to the students at Early Learning Centre, mindfulness and meditation remain somewhat abstract and unknown, if not a novelty. Still, they enjoy the sessions, so much so that some fifth graders recently asked that we meditate just after they’d come back from lunch.

Getting them to settle into silence at their desks proved to be, also no surprise, a challenge. But just like with my fifth graders — my “fives” — at Early Learning Centre, we got there eventually, and I enjoyed feeling a little like I was back in Bhutan. Still, a classroom is not a courtyard, and intermittent meditation is not the same as meditation every day, twice over. But with the books put away, the lights dimmed, and the students hushed, I could begin to sense the calmness. Then, about two-thirds through, breaking the stillness, the class joker loudly whispered, “Mr. Hanson, I am seeing my future!” to which I quickly shot back, “Is it the Vice Principal’s office?”

Not only was I back in Bhutan, I was once more in my “Kind & Wise” class. That said, I did feel we were making some progress, in that plenty of his classmates made clear they did not want their meditating to end. As one student put it, “I am really liking breathing!”

Ivor Hanson is the author of Life on the Ledge: Reflections of a New York City Window Cleaner.

This poem began in the sudden return of a very old memory.

You don’t see them much anymore.
Mostly schools have gone dry
erase and smart board and flipped
classes, but maybe one slate hangs
in a gone classroom, where a gone prof,
young and powerful, smoking in a window
leapt down and began writing, talking,
wearing chalk down to a nib then
flicking it at a trashcan, smoke still
hanging in the air filling with chalk,
talking Shakespeare and Shaw
talking Brooks and August Wilson
and filling every corner of the board
rising to crescendos sinking low
and slapping the board to wake
a sleeper, but hardly breaking stride,
then writing in the white cloud
of words on words with an eraser–
words only decipherable to the rapt.

I’d like to be a person my ancestors are proud of, and I’d like to be a person that my descendants thank. I think most of us would. —Winona LaDuke, 2017 Geography of Hope Conference Presenter

This past March I attended the semi-annual Geography of Hope Conference in Point Reyes, California. This year’s topic was Ancestors and the Land: Our Past, Present and Future. Many of the presenters were Indigenous People. Native American author and activist Lyla June Johnson gave the moving speech excerpted here. I was touched, because the speech referred both to our past “American Identity” Issue and the “Mindfulness OS” that we need to navigate the challenges of climate change. An Athabaskan man from the Bering Sea was travelling the world sharing a message from his village. It was such a moving, unexpected moment, my wife Gail composed a prose-poem about it. “This is a time of unprecedented threats to clean water and air, national parks and forests, and to productive farmland,” conference founder, Steve Costa, says. “Clearly in the coming months and years, we will be called upon again and again to act to protect our fragile ecology. We will be called upon to decide what kind of ancestors we will become.”

Pt. Reyes Station, California
March 17-19, 2017

The black-haired, olive-eyed man across the table is an Athabascan chief, I’m told, here to speak at the Conference, and a fellow guest at the home of my friends.

Over breakfast our friend, an excellent host, asks, and Ilarion tells us — recites really – looking into the middle distance, the 30 years he has spent trying to save the Bering Sea.

Fur seal numbers, a tenth of what they were when he was a boy, and he’s only 57; sea bird numbers even more catastrophic.  These are the staples of the Unangan people. 

More than 20,000 species go extinct each year.

Waters along the island shores are moving up onto the land. 

He has recently been to a gathering of 250 chiefs and elders from around the world: Egypt, Nigeria, Malaysia.  An agreement was reached, most believing as he does, as his elders told him before he went:

Stop trying, they said, to save the Bering Sea and our brothers who live in it. 
It is too late for this. 
The white men are asleep and will not wake up. 
The time is upon us when we must turn to the question:
How will any of us survive? 

I spend a lot of time honoring and calling upon my Native American ancestors. I am keenly aware that my father’s people hold a venerable medicine as well. He has ancestry from the Great Sacred Motherland of Europe.

I have been called a half breed. I have been called a mutt. Impure. I have been told my mixed blood is my bane. That I’m cursed to have an Indian for a mother and a cowboy for a father.

But one day, as I sat in the ceremonial house of my mother’s people, a wondrous revelation landed delicately inside of my soul. It sang within me a song I can still hear today. This song was woven from the voices of my European grandmothers and grandfathers. Their songs were made of love.

They sang to me of their life before the witch trials and before the Crusades. They spoke to me of a time before serfdoms and before Roman tithes. They spoke to me of a time before the plague, before the Medici, before the guillotine; a time before their people were extinguished or enslaved by dark forces. They spoke to me of a time before the English language existed. A time most of us have forgotten.

These grandmothers and grandfathers set the ancient medicine of Welsh blue stone upon my aching heart. Their chants danced like the flickering light of Tuscan cave-fires. Their joyous laughter echoed on and on like Baltic waves against Scandinavian shores. They blew worlds through my mind like windswept snow over Alpine mountain crests. They showed to me the vast and beautiful world of indigenous Europe. This precious world can scarcely be found in any literature, but lives quietly within us like a dream we can’t quite remember.

As all this was happening, I peered into the flames of our Diné hoghan fireplace. These ancient European voices whispered to my heart to help me understand. “See, our songs are not so different from your Diné songs,” they seemed to say with a smile.

In this moment, the moment I first acknowledged and connected with my beautiful European ancestors, I could do nothing but cry. It was one of those messy, snotty, shuddering cries, where my face flowed over with tears of joy and sorrow. It was the cry of a woman who met her grandmother for the first time. I always wondered where she was. What she looked like. What her voice sounded like. Who she was. And now, for the first time, I could feel her delicate hands run through my hair as she told me she loved me. I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed.

Intermixed in there were also tears of regret. My whole life I was taught to hide my European side. All I knew was that my father came from Dallas and that was all I needed to know. These pale-skinned mothers and fathers were to be forgotten, I was taught. They carried violence in their blood and avarice in their smile, I was taught. They were rubbish, I was taught. There was no need to ask questions about them or think about them, I was taught. Whenever I wrote down my race on official forms, I would only write “Native American,” as I was taught.

But then, as thousands of European ancestors swirled around me and reassured my fearful heart, I wished I had honored them sooner. I wished I hadn’t disowned them. I wished I knew how beautiful they were. I wished I could have seen through the thin wall of time that dominates our understanding of Europe. I wish I could have realized the days when indigenous Europeans were deeply connected to the earth and to kinship. In my mind I told them I was so, so sorry for forsaking them. But, of course, they did not care. They only held me tighter and assured me they would be with me to the end.

The sweetness of this precious experience changed me forever. I have come to believe that if we do not wholly love our ancestors, then we do not truly know who they are. For instance, I get very offended when people call Native Americans “good-for-nothing drunks.” Because by saying this, people don’t take into account the centuries of attempted genocide, rape, and drugging of Native American people. They don’t see the beauty of who we were before the onslaught. And now, I am offended when people call European descendants “privileged good-for-nothing pilgrims.” Because by saying this, people do not take into account the thousands of years that European peoples were raped, tortured, and enslaved. They do not understand the beauty of who we were before the onslaught. They do not understand that even though we have free will and the ability to choose how we live our life, it is very hard to overcome inter-generational trauma. What happens in our formative years and what our parents teach us at that time can be very hard to reverse.

They estimate that 8-9 million European women were burned alive, drowned alive, dismembered alive, beaten, raped, and otherwise tortured as so-called “witches.” It is obvious to me now that these women were not witches, but were the Medicine People of Old Europe. They were the women who understood the herbal medicines, the ones who prayed with stones, the ones who passed on sacred chants, the ones who whispered to me that night in the hoghan. This all-out warfare on Indigenous European women not only harmed them, but had a profound effect on the men who loved them. Their husbands, sons, and brothers, who surely went mad watching the women of their families burned alive.  If the men respond to this hatred with hatred, the hatred is passed on. And who can blame them? While peace and love is the correct response to hatred, it is not the easy response by any means.

The Indigenous Cultures of Europe also sustained forced assimilation by the Roman Empire and other hegemonic forces. In fact, it was only a few decades ago that any Welsh child caught speaking Welsh in school would have a block of wood tied to their neck. The words “WN” were there-inscribed, standing for “welsh not.” This kind of public humiliation will sound very familiar to any Native Americans reading this who attended U.S. Government boarding schools.

Moreover, our Indigenous European ancestors faced horrific epidemics of biblical proportions. In the 1300s, two-thirds of Indigenous Europeans were wiped from the face of the earth. The Black Death, or Bubonic Plague, ravaged entire villages with massive lymph sores that filled with pus until they burst open.

The parallels between the genocide of Indigenous Europeans and Native Americans are astounding. It boggles my mind that more people don’t see how we are the same people, who have undergone the same spiritual assault. The only difference between the Red Story and the White Story is we are in different stages of the process of spiritual warfare. Native Americans are only recently becoming something they are not. They are only recently starting to succumb to the temptations of drugs, alcohol, gambling, self-destruction, and the destruction of others. Just as some Native American people have been contorted and twisted by so many centuries of abuse, so too were those survivors of the European genocide. Both are completely forgivable in my eyes. Now I see I have a double-duty. I must not only honor and revitalize my Diné culture, but also that of my European ancestors. This ancient Indigenous European culture is just as beautiful as Native American culture and was just as tragically murdered and hidden from history books.

And so, some years later, armed with this new understanding, I traveled to Europe. I scaled a beautiful mountain in Switzerland to see if I might hear hints of ceremonial songs in the wind. I stepped upon the earth guided by those grandmother and grandfather whispers. I plucked a strand of hair from my scalp and placed the offering upon the earth, still wet from morning dew. I ambled through the forests enchanted by the new sights and smells. And I did see glimmers of visions of the villages of yesteryear. And they were full of Earth People living out harmonious community. And, they had beautiful music.

As the sun went down, I fell back on the grass and looked up to the sky. At the time, I was going through a very painful separation from a person I loved. To my surprise, it felt as if the earth was pulling all the sorrow I was carrying down into her core where she could transform it into beauty. The sky was speaking to me about how I didn’t need to worry, that I would be happy again one day. The earth and the sky healed me that day from the great weight I had carried for months. It was a special reunion with the mountains of my foremothers.

My mountain experiment yielded astounding results: The Great Sacred Motherland of Europe is still alive and breathing and waiting for her children to come home! She is waiting for us to ask her for songs so that we may sing to her once again. She is waiting for us to scratch past the surface of time, into the B.C.E. period, when our languages were thriving and our dancing feet kissed the face of the earth. She is waiting. She is waiting for us to remember who we are. If you are of this descent, or any forgotten descent for that matter, I am asking you to join me in this prayer to remember who we are. I have a feeling this prayer will heal the whole world.

In 2009, archaeologists came across a female effigy believed to be the Goddess of the Earth buried in German soil. The radiocarbon dating tests came back. They indicate that this clay deity was molded by European hands 40,000 years ago. 40,000 years ago. This is the time she beckons us to. This is the world she hopes we will remember: where man and woman alike held the soil in their hands and saw the value and sanctity of women and of the Mother Earth. This is the world that still flows through our veins, however deafened we have become to it. With prayer, we can learn to hear it once again.

I compare this earth-based, Indigenous European culture to the witch-burning psychosis of the first and second millennia. I cannot help but ask myself when and how did this egalitarian, earth-loving, woman-honoring culture, become the colonial, genocidal conquerors that washed upon American shores? Could it be that our beloved Indigenous European ancestors were raped and tortured for so many thousands of years that they forgot who they were? Could it be they lived in a pressure cooker of oppression for so long that conquer-or-be-conquered is all they knew? Yes, I believe so.

Our task is to shake the amnesia. To not be ashamed of our European-ness, but to reclaim our beautiful grandmothers, to reclaim our venerable grandfathers, to reclaim our lost languages, our lost ceremonies, our lost homelands, and become one with the Great Sacred Motherland of Europe once again. The European diaspora is spread all throughout the world, searching the planet for something that lives inside us. I promise you will hear it when you climb the mountains of Switzerland! Of Scotland! Of Tuscany! Of Hungary! Of Portugal! Of the Great Sacred Motherland of Europe! Just because bad things happened upon her bosom does not mean she is bad.

Our task is to honor our ancestors, even those who caved beneath the weight of systematic destruction and became conquerors themselves. Our task is to remember that we are those beautiful Earth People. The ones whose love and prayers were so strong that they could carry 25-ton blue stone monoliths for miles and miles and build the sacred place of prayer known as Stonehenge. That is who we are. When we remember this, the healing of our lineages comes full circle. When we remember this, we will no longer need to borrow spiritual practices from other cultures (although that can be very helpful when there is nothing else to hold onto). When we remember this, we will remember that the fates of all beings are intertwined with our own. When I remembered this, I found whole-ness in my self—no longer a half-breed, but a daughter of Two Great Lineages, Two Great Rivers that ran together to make one precious child.

This is the story of how I became whole. Some days, it feels like both fire and water live within me. They dance and swirl around one another. In the morning when I wake up, each bows to the other, honoring themselves as equals, as beautiful. When I go to sleep at night they wish each other good dreams. They teach me how it could have been when Columbus first stepped upon Taino shores: a meeting of two long lost brothers, embracing each other and celebrating their unique cultures. They teach me how things can be for our children in the future.

Because that’s what matters most, doesn’t it?

Not how the story goes… but how it ends.

We each hold a pen. Now, let us co-author a story of how humanity fell in love with itself and its Mother Earth once again. Shall we?

#

When my grandmother took me
 on the giant parachute drop
at Coney Island Amusement Park—
I remember the long, long time
it took for the little bench
we were strapped into
to be cranked up several stories in the air.
The drop was nothing by comparison,
a big whoosh! and it was over.  
I wonder:  Did she want me to live it
or did she want to do it for herself?

Charles Entrekin

“The Peoples Climate March on April 29, 2017 was a huge success, with over 200,000 people participating in Washington, D.C., and tens of thousands more taking part at over 370 sister marches across the country. The march extended for over 20 blocks down Pennsylvania, with tens of thousands more surging along the mall to push back on the Trump administration’s policies and stand up for ‘climate, jobs and justice.

The day’s activities in D.C. began at sunrise with a water ceremony led by Indigenous peoples at the Capitol Reflecting Pool. Participants included Cheyenne River Sioux tribal members who traveled 1,536 miles by bus from Eagle Bend, S.D., to attend the ceremonies.

At an opening press conference, representatives from front line communities spoke about the impact that climate change and pollution were already having on their lives and called out the Trump administration for worsening the crisis. They called for a new renewable energy economy that created good paying, union jobs, and prioritized low-income and people of color communities.

The march began at 12:30 PM EDT and was led by young people of color from Washington, D.C., and Indigenous leaders from across the country. Tens of thousands of marchers headed up Pennsylvania Avenue in creatively named contingents, like ‘Protectors of Justice,’ ‘Reshapers of Power,’ and ‘Many Struggles, One Home.’

Art played a central role in the organizing of the mobilization and was on full display during the march. Dozens of giant parachute banners filled the streets, while puppets danced overhead. Some contingents carried sunflowers, a symbol of the climate justice community, while others simply raised their fists in resistance.

By 2:00 PM EDT, organizers had succeeded in their goal of completely surrounding the White House. Marchers sat down in the streets in a silent sit-in to recognize the damage caused by the Trump administration over the last 100 days and those who are losing their lives to the climate crises. They then created a movement heartbeat, tapping out a rhythm on their chests while drummers kept the time. The heartbeat was meant to show that while march participants came from many different backgrounds and communities, their hearts beat as one. It was a heartbeat of resistance, one that began with the Women’s March and will continue through the Peoples Climate March to May Day and beyond.

After the heartbeat, marchers rose up with a collective roar and continued down to the Washington Monument for a closing rally. Speakers at the rally celebrated the success of the day, while many marchers gathered in ‘Circles of Resistance,’ some set up around their parachute banners, to talk about how to continue to build their movement.

Sister marches took place on Saturday across the world including in Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand, Uganda, Kenya, Germany, Greece, United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, and more. In the United States, tens of thousands more took to the streets at hundreds of events in nearly all 50 states, from the town of Dutch Harbor in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands to the streets of Miami, Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major American cities. Early counts estimated that more than 50,000 events took place nationwide.” From the People’s Climate March website: peoplesclimate.org 

https://www.facebook.com/peoplesclimate/videos/1851119185139056/

My wife Gail and I attended the Washington D.C. march to protest President D.T. and his policies against climate change as part of the  Elders for Climate Action Organization with friends/activists/committee members Eleanor Despina and Bing Gong. (I agree with author Kelly Rummel that he shouldn’t get any more press).

On the day before the march, we took time out to wander (and be inspired by) the National Mall and Memorial Parks.  Gail and I met with her friend of forty-odd years, John Sheridan. John had volunteered to act as tour guide through the national monuments (more like outdoor rooms) and we walked under the flowering cherry trees in the late April afternoon with the sun shining overheard.

It was a quiet and peaceful, but we were occasionally interrupted by a giant, thundering helicopter screaming just above our heads and interrupting our conversations. John said he thought perhaps the military was conducting some kind of exercise. It struck me as strangely inappropriate, odd, unsettling, and vaguely threatening as we strode along. The political atmosphere around us was tense with the presence of the current ascendancy of D.T. and the urgency of the upcoming climate march. The ominous appearance inspired us to discuss and debate conspiracy theories—who really killed J.F.K.; what really happened on 9/11; why did the U.S. overthrow fledgling democracies in Chile, Iran, the Congo, and Guatemala?

We talked about the politics of the day and our past shared histories and John pointed out significant passages in the inscriptions on the walls of the memorials of various famous historical figures as we strolled along. Gail read to me (since I am no longer able to read them for myself) the most compelling passages in her eloquent poet’s voice.

And the voices seemed like echoes in the trees surrounding us, filling us with a sense of awe and history. Martin Luther King, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln—men who shaped the true America.

“…Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’” A.L. second inaugural address.

“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” A.L. (1809-1865)

“… this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” A.L.

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” M.L.K. 

“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.” M.L.K.

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” T.J. (1743-1826)

“I have the consolation of adding nothing to my private fortune during my public service and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.” T.J.

As we exited the park, past the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, it came to me that President D.T. is not one of us. He does not seem to embrace the history of the country or the fundamentals of democracy. He is anathema, a return to the age of authoritarianism, of strongman rulers, and, I must say, it sent a chill down my spine.

And the question came to me, “Why are we here?” And the answer is because D.T. will provide no help to our nation. We are, as the signs read, the guardians of the future. If this is a government,“of the people, by the people, and for the people,” it is up to we the people to protect the government. To enforce the climate accords. The time has come to step forward and be counted and be accountable. The Conscious Elders Network took the following legislative proposal to every Senator in Washington, D.C., that week.

And as I thought long and hard about what this means to me, what kind of ancestor I want to be, I decided to start the following open letter to my grandchildren. There are many years between myself and my grandchildren, as there are many years between some of the voices of inspiration quoted here. But truth is timeless and mindfulness is ageless.

I add the concept of seven generation stewardship, a concept from the Constitution of Iroquois Nations that influences modern environmental sustainability: “In all of your deliberations… in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self-interest shall be cast into oblivion.”

Oren Lyons, chief of the Onondaga Nation, writes: “We are looking ahead … to make every decision that we make relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come… Where are you taking them? What will they have?”

First, know that you are loved. Your parents love you. Your grandparents love you. Your aunts and uncles love you.

Next, consider these thoughts, in the good days ahead as well as in the dark days:

Listen to your body. Your body will tell you what you need to know, if you listen to it.

Live in the present.

Avoid toxins, especially the attractive ones.

Surround yourself with good friends that you admire and respect.

Understand fear; replace it with love. Fear is retreating, love is opening up.

Avoid judgment.

Avoid attachment to beliefs or opinions.

Be the witness to your own thoughts.

Trust yourself.

Let go of your mistakes. Mistakes are a learning process. Benefit from them.

Your decisions are the story of your life. Honor them.

Never make a commitment you can’t honor. Honor is a gift you give to yourself. No one controls it but you.

Enjoy the morning light.

Last year my friend Charles Entrekin, publisher of Sisyphus, recommended an audiobook: At the Existentialist Cafe՛: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others, by Sarah Bakewell (Chatto, 2016); ably read by Antonia Beamish.

Charles and I were grad students in a Philosophy program at the University of Alabama in 1966. Our friendship grew around seminar tables, cafe tables, and late nights with our families. We loved discussing philosophy, often with our young professor Bob Rikkers. As we read Kant, Wittgenstein, Russell, Brentano, Husserl, Sartre and the rest, we’d try to hammer out underlying assumptions and the worth of their claims.  

After listening to Bakewell’s book, I wrote Charles the following letter.

Dear Charles,

This was a really interesting experience—listening to the book and re-thinking these figures, all the while reliving our days in Tuscaloosa.

Bakewell likes writing about people she admires, and her upbeat approach initially gave me hope that she would reveal a more positive interpretation of the individual doctrines and their movement than I had. Her optimism and joy did bring out at least a new feeling about their works.

She was taken by the moment when Sartre and de Beauvoir, not long out of college and intellectually restless, were told by their friend Raymond Aron about phenomenology. He said that one could make philosophy out of any descriptive writing—that’s the power of phenomenology. Bakewell recognized that the existentialists blurred the line between philosophy and literature, but she didn’t seem to think this was a great problem. For me, though, there’s a question of how one gets from literary writing to claims about ontology.

I remember our discussions of Husserl’s epoche՛–his bracketing of assumptions in order to get back “to the things themselves.” As I recall, we decided that he was confused. He wanted to get, not to things, but to essences that were complex, private, and directly apprehended. Without Husserlian training, who could perceive them? Getting from such an ideal object to the intersubjective public world would be a problem.

He didn’t come up with a new foundation for scientific knowledge, one of his goals. In trying to provide a ground which would make scientific knowledge certain, he foundered on an impossible reef. Dewey and Popper had it right, Plato and Descartes had it wrong.

While I felt we had caught him in a contradiction, Bakewell suggests a more positive take on his project.

As to his call for bracketing away assumptions and paying attention to “the things themselves,” she suggests similarity with a writer saying, “show don’t tell.” I was struck by the contrast between Husserl’s obscure presentation of his methodology and Bakewell’s invocation of relatively clear guidelines.

“Show don’t tell” means, when spoken by writing teachers, not just “use the five senses,” but, more deeply, “describe in sensory terms so that the reader can experience being there and can contribute to the meaning of the scene.” “Show don’t tell” doesn’t mean “eschew narration.”

While the writer’s shorthand, “show don’t tell,” insists on close observation and fresh description, it assumes there will also be story. But Husserl insisted on bracketing conventional narratives about objects, and capturing their essences in description. This process is called an eidetic reduction and is supposed to yield an essence which is not asserted to have contingent, empirical existence.

While I like Bakewell’s redeeming the molasses of phenomenological methodology by comparison with the injunction to writers that they should observe intently and freshly describe, this seems—to me—a very personal reading.

Bakewell has studied philosophy in depth, but I don’t think she cares about traditional problems of epistemology or metaphysics. She digs fresh descriptions. As do I.

Andrew Hussey, in The Guardian, writes:

“Bakewell is a skillful and nuanced teacher. Her explanation of the mysteries of phenomenology, clear and succinct, is as brilliant as any I’ve heard in a French university classroom. For the uninitiated, phenomenology is a philosophy of German origin that focuses on the world as it appears (‘phenomena,’ in Greek, means ‘things as they appear’) rather than questioning the interpretations of reality. In the hands of the French existentialists, this means, as Bakewell puts it, a philosophy that goes ‘straight to life’.”

I don’t agree that Bakewell explains the mysteries of phenomenology, but I think she does something better. She anoints writers with the power to explore any subject, revealing it as never before.

In attempting to describe the world in such depth that “being itself” will be revealed, the male philosophers in the “existentialist cafe՛” story tended to get carried away. Bakewell’s enthusiasm for (her take on) the method is best exemplified by her discussion of Simone de Beauvoir.

My favorite chapter in Bakewell’s book tells the story of de Beauvoir writing The Second Sex. She told Sartre she wanted to write about what it was like growing up as a girl. Here Bakewell finds a great example of a writer bracketing assumptions, and looking with fresh eyes at her subject.

Bakewell says:

“Beauvoir soon developed the project into something revolutionary in every sense: her book overturned accepted ideas about the nature of human existence, and encouraged its readers to overturn their own existences. It was also a confident experiment in what we might call ‘applied existentialism’. Beauvoir used philosophy to tackle two huge subjects: the history of humanity — which she reinterpreted as a history of patriarchy — and the history of an individual woman’s whole life as it plays itself out from birth to old age. The two stories are interdependent, but occupy two separate parts of the book.”

Bakewell continues:

“She wrote quickly. Chapters and early versions appeared in Les Temps modernes through 1948; the full tome came out in 1949. It was greeted with shock. This freethinking lady existentialist was already considered a disturbing figure, with her open relationship, her childlessness, and her godlessness. Now here was a book filled with descriptions of women’s sexual experience, including a chapter on lesbianism. Even her friends recoiled. One of the most conservative responses came from Albert Camus, who, as she wrote in her memoirs, ‘in a few morose sentences, accused me of making the French male look ridiculous’. But if men found it uncomfortable, women who read it often found themselves thinking about their lives in a new way. After it was translated into English in 1953 — three years before Being and Nothingness and nine years before Heidegger’s Being and Time — The Second Sex had an even greater impact in Britain and America than in France. It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement.”

De Beauvoir wrote a novel called The Mandarins, which was very successful, and which reflected her circle of friends, their political anxieties, and her divided loyalties between two lovers— Sartre and Nelson Algren. I found a copy—600 pages, original mildew—and read as much as I could, skipping along, checking out the sex scenes. Between them stretched miles of political discussions.

It was written rapidly, with great narrative drive, and I liked her language despite my sense that it was awkwardly translated. She really was from a different time and different culture.

Bakewell recognizes that phenomenological description was often a matter of finding new metaphors. The philosopher who went crazy with this was Martin Heidegger.

I thought the most revealing passage in Bakewell’s book was a quote from Gertrude Stein which used outrageously funny metaphors for aspects of people.

Bakewell says that, via Janet Malcolm’s study Two Lives, she came across excerpts from Stein’s novel The Making of Americans. The narrator, speaking of her characters, says “the ‘being’ in them can be a ‘slimy, gelatinous, gluey, white opaque-y kind of thing and it can be white and vibrant and clear and heated…’.”

When I read this the first time, I thought Bakewell had said that Heidegger had read the passage and that it influenced him. I thought, oh my god yes! Rereading it later, I saw that she’d said, “he might have appreciated the sight of a writer stretching language to its utmost to avoid the dulling effect of ordinary perceptions. He might also have recognized that her distinction between characters and the ‘being’ in them foreshadows his own notion of the ontological difference.”

Bakewell continues, “Thus, it can help to think of Heidegger as an experimental novelist, or a poet.”

Heidegger, I always felt, was a charlatan. British philosopher John Gray reviewed Bakewell’s book, and said that Husserl told the young Heidegger to read Kierkegaard, and Heidegger’s categories are nothing more than K’s categories transposed into Husserlian language. I had never heard this, but it seemed plausible in light of one or two examples. He makes a number of good points at Literary Review.

I hated listening to all the chapters on Heidegger and his depressing bad character and the Nazi events. But I stuck it out because Bakewell had done interesting research, and she came up with surprising stories throughout. In the end I didn’t change my views of these thinkers.

Sartre was the most interesting figure to me. I remember discussing Being and Nothingness with Bob Rikkers in 1967 and his saying Sartre describes how human beings often feel about themselves, but not how they feel about themselves all the time.

I thought that perfectly summed up the problem of ontological claims in Sartre’s great book. But I still thought it was a great book.

Sartre was praised for his novels and plays, as well as for Being and Nothingness. All of these works tell stories of people of unequal power playing roles with each other. The challenge is to be authentic, which is to say, to avoid bad faith. A person is called a “for-itself,” and any object of that person’s awareness is called an “in-itself.” Subjectivity, as a “for-itself,” is fluid, diaphanous, anxious, reaching out, and experiencing itself as incomplete. On the other hand, an “in-itself” is any object of perception—other, complete, finished. As Rikkers said, Sartre is correct that we often feel ourselves alienated from all things, including our own bodies. But these feelings aren’t always the same, or always negative.

I had barely been aware of Emmanuel Levinas, but I looked him up and read some of his work online. I admire him very much. As a Jew in concentration camps he used phenomenology (in something like Bakewell’s sense) to describe human relationships as fundamental to a single person’s identity. Somewhat like Buber.

One philosopher I felt made a huge contribution to current thinking was Merleau-Ponty. His ideas of embodiment are very much with us. I wished I had not heard about his philandering.

I always thought Sartre’s ideas about freedom were incoherent, and I still do.

This was a case of a book title – At the Existentialist Café: – Apricot Cocktails etc. – giving the book a different spin than it would’ve had with a more accurate title. Except for the first few chapters, it wasn’t light and fun. Nazi chapters were dreary, and Husserl ones tedious.

Yet I never thought of stopping my listening. I was transfixed, reliving study of these people, and reliving our days together.

I’m grateful to Sarah Bakewell for rescuing, for me, a sense of possibility in phenomenological description.

I found the chapters about Paris after the war sad, with all the squabbles between the friends who were drunk much of the time. All that agonizing over whether to support communism, overlooking Russian atrocities for the “good of the proletariat,” seemed silly. And yet I realize that was a different time, they were European, and they were French. (Actually, I remember hearing similar arguments between leftists in New York in the ‘70s. I thought those were silly too.)

In taking the step from emotionally moving stories to claims of phenomenological ontology–the experiential structure of the world–philosophers go too far. Yet with a little modesty, perhaps, they could convey a profound point. That is, the world is deeply mysterious, and certain stories and poems give us a feeling of contact with patterns of reality. Sartre’s account of a waiter playing the role of a waiter, for example, illustrates what role-playing is like for anyone serving customers and bosses.

There is ontological weight to good writing. It can be felt through metaphors and other aspects of literature, as it can be felt through painting. But we mustn’t get greedy and claim tight literal links between our deliberately obscure sentences about Being and real things, then claim certainty, then set ourselves up as the only philosophers in town with the truth.

Sarah Bakewell is right to ignore such pretensions and to celebrate her metaphorical readings of phenomenology and existentialism. Observing her subjects closely, describing them well, and narrating these complex lives and times so thoughtfully, she has created–like de Beauvoir in The Second Sex–a beautiful product of her method.

Philosophy is a unique subject in that one cannot study it without doing it. Bakewell doesn’t just take ontological heavyweights and redefine their efforts in a lighter vein. In going with Heidegger into the forest, with Simone Weil and Levinas into the concentration camps, and with the Paris crowd into their cafe nights, she gives enough care to their philosophical claims. In celebrating their literary works, she reveals her philosophical commitments. Rather than mocking their efforts, as is often done by analytic philosophers, she generously implies that writers should be remembered for the best work they leave behind.

Thank you so much for the recommendation.

–Luke

Some worthwhile reviews of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails:

Janet Maslin at the New York Times  

John Gray at the Literary Review

Andrew Hussey at the Guardian

After 25 years of meditation practice and related study of Buddhism (including three years in an advanced practice group), I had an epiphany recently that there are just a few salient principles that are the most important to study. This summary is simply my point-of-view interpretations based on practice and study, an ongoing work in progress, an opinion without attachment, as opposed to an opinion based on belief.

Benefits of meditation

Buddhism today in its Western forms is the foundation of a variety of paths for improving well-being. Fundamentally, it is about relieving suffering in our lives and developing a deeper appreciation for living in the world. The current predominate form in the United States is mindful meditation.

As coined by Jon Kabat Zinn, “Mindfulness is paying attention, on purpose, to the present moment, non-judgmentally.” This implies meditation in some form.

There is now a large body of research that attests to the power of this simple practice to affect well-being. Sustained regular practice, studies show, cultivates attention, emotion regulation, and compassion, as well as reducing effects of chronic pain, anxiety, and depression. Neuroscience studies have also shown that it affects the structure of the brain and thus provides a way to “re-condition” ourselves to overcome negative habits that are part of lifelong conditioning.

Mindfulness practices are sometimes called a secular form of Buddhism. Other forms of Buddhism appear as religions. However, the teachings of Buddhism (the dharma) are not religious in the Western sense of the word. Dharma refers to both “the truth of how things are” and Buddha’s teachings in general. It is a non-theistic spirituality and the primary admonition in its practice is to validate the teachings from direct experience rather than embracing dogmatic endorsement of specific beliefs.

Finally, consistent practice engenders profound experiences of contentment, peace, equanimity, and joy, and in advanced practice provides transcendent knowledge of inter-dependence, unity, and unconditional love.

ALL WORDS ARE CONCEPTS: TRANSMISSION, TRANSLATION, TRANSCRIPTION, INTERPRETATION (T.T.T.I.)

The reader should be aware that dharma teachings (much like virtually all spiritual works) are all conceptual forms created from human minds that appeal to the mind but are intended to be “pointers” to wisdom that can be realized with meditation practice.

At the core of meditation practice, strictly speaking, is a “doctrine of salvation,” the primary aspect of which is relief from suffering in all its forms, varying from pain to dissatisfaction. The dharma, passed down over a period of 2500 years and derived from knowledge passed down well before that, still maintains its relevance.

The lineage of these teachings can introduce biases and varied interpretations (or at least change through time) by the following factors:

• Transmission from teacher to teacher – Guatama Buddha (~563 BCE/480 BCE – ~483 BCE/400 BCE) never wrote anything down. His disciples began documenting his teachings several hundred years after his death. Keep this in mind when somebody says, “The Buddha said…”
• Translation – Starting with Sanskrit and Pali, his teachings have been translated into many other languages, possibly losing nuance along the way.
• Transcription –Due to the impermanence of written documents on inferior materials like papyrus, scribes were entrusted with copying repeatedly for hundreds of years. Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern has a stunning description of this process in the Middle Ages.
• Interpretation – Each teacher and student invariably has their own interpretation of the words and concepts based on their conditioning and depth of practice. There is no literal truth, as is the case for all sacred documents.

FUNDAMENTAL PATHS OF BUDDHISM

In my view, two fundamental paths have emerged in Western interpretations of the dharma. There are certain basic Buddhist concepts that one needs to understand to embark on either of the two paths:

Mindfulness Path – In the spiritual language of Vipassana Buddhism, this path can be considered a metaphysical psychology that aims at opening awareness through a process of self-discovery of the fundamental nature of life and death. In Western modernity, it has become a science-based meditation focusing on personal development aimed at psychological well-being or happiness.

Awakening Path – An advanced spirituality-based “deep” Buddhism, I believe, this path is represented by “non-dual” understanding of the underlying connectedness of all living organisms, aimed at a transcendental form of enlightenment sometimes referred to as “waking up.” This “goal-less goal” is a form of awakening that yields “living in the world but not entangled with it.”

BASIC DHARMA CONCEPTS

Basic concepts are sufficient for beginning a meditation practice and engaging the “Mindfulness Path” but seem to be an essential understanding for the “Awakening Path.”

Understanding Pain and Suffering

As Buddhism author Jack Kornfield says, many people pass through years of life driven by greed, fear, aggression, or endless grasping after security, affection, power, sex, wealth, pleasure, and fame. This endless cycle of seeking is what Buddhism calls samsara or suffering. In Buddhist philosophy, there are two kinds of pain and suffering:

1. UNAVOIDABLE – Certain kinds of pain are inevitable or unavoidable in life: birth, sickness, aging, and death.
2. OPTIONAL – Other kinds of pain and suffering are “optional,” in that we inflict them upon ourselves through judging, taking things personally, thinking that we are unworthy, and adopting behaviors that undermine happiness and can cause harm to ourselves and others.

“Three afflictions” describe how we think or act to cause suffering to others and ourselves.

• Desire/greed/sensuality/clinging/attachment – This affliction is a reflection of our “wanting,” an attachment to things and good feelings, things we like.
• Aversion/hatred/rejection – We push away from things we do not like to focus only on the things we do like or desire.
• Ignorance/delusion/denial/avoidance – Not seeing clearly, we ignore or deny that we suffer or believe certain beliefs and opinions are true.

Understanding Basic Buddhist Morality

There are ten precepts for nuns and monks, which appear to be in the realm of renunciations (Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism), five which apply to all. I interpret these to be either conscious or unconscious behaviors.

Abstain from:

• Killing living creatures.
• Taking what is not given.
• Engaging in sexual misconduct or abuse of power.
• Unwise speech or lying.
• Intoxicants that cause heedlessness.

UNDERSTANDING meditation practice 

The two principle aspects of meditation are awareness and acceptance of all our experience through bodily sensations: all five senses, plus feelings and emotions caused by thoughts. Consciousness is axiomatic and is the source of awareness; we cannot experience anything without being aware and conscious of it.

The three qualities of experience are pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral.

The first two tend to create desire or avoidance; wanting things to be more, better, or different from the way they are.

Neutral suggests non-reactivity or unperturbability and accepting the flow of how things are (their “IS-ness”) or the realization that nothing is happening in the moment other than what we are sensing through our body and our mind.

IS-ness connotes the reality that things are the way they are, there is no such thing as “this shouldn’t have happened.” This is the goal of meditation practice: the acceptance of what is.

The body and sensations are the portal to all experience. The space or gap between these experiences is the portal to the absolute.

Thoughts have different forms, but they all include elements of fantasy, imagination, images, discursive discussion, and figuring things out. But they do not really exist, there is nothing solid or real about them, so when we believe them to be true, we can suffer when reality does not unfold in a way we thought or expected.

This is tantamount to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) where we intentionally debunk our “distorted” thoughts as the source of depression and anxiety.

Thought also is the source of who we think we are, insistently updating the ongoing “it’s-all-about-me” narrative in our minds. When we enter on the Buddhist path, we become more mindful of our thoughts and actions.

BASIC MEDITATION TECHNIQUES

• Sit, stand, lie down, or walk in a quiet and comfortable spot.
• Breathe in the belly – start by following the breath in and out. Come back to this when caught in obsessive thought. This is the practice of awareness.
• Scan the body for all sensations without trying to change them. This is the practice of acceptance.
• Monitor the mind and step back to view thoughts as thought and intend not to engage in the content of the thoughts. Awareness and acceptance.
• Practice can be broadened and deepened by embracing all experience together as one awareness, by changing the focus to the silence and stillness as foreground and ongoing experience as background.
• Try (in an effortless-effort sort of way) to embrace the sense of your first practice to maintain “beginner’s mind.”
• As one sage says, “Start with ten minutes every day unless you do not have time, then do it for one hour!”

sus·tain·a·bil·i·ty səˌstānəˈbilədē/noun:
the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.

After this morning’s meditation, you timed your shower at three minutes (shaved a minute off!) and didn’t leave the water running while you lathered your hair. Of course, you didn’t leave your phone charger plugged in—that would be an energy drain—but where is it? You sit down to eat fruit and granola from Saturday’s farmers’ market and find it on the kitchen chair. Whew! You leave the Tesla in the driveway because it is bike-to-work day. After you pick up your lunch at the place that doesn’t have the best sandwiches, but they have recyclable plastic forks and don’t use Styrofoam so all your friends eat there anyway, you head to the break room safe in the knowledge that you didn’t contribute to the beef industry practices. The TV is tuned to the news and, after a story about another crisis created by Putin’s Papaya Pawn is an exposé about the North Pacific Gyre—The Garbage Patch that is somehow forgotten, no longer news. Who still creates this growing environmental disaster? Everyone you know is conscientious and caring. It must be some other country. But the United States is 15th in the sustainability rankings, languishing behind Australia and New Zealand, Canada and most of Europe. Sustainability is a complex subject—at the crossroads of economy, culture, and society, not only a matter of environmental concern. Of the UN’s proposed seventeen sustainable development goals, only a third are environmental because of the recognition that embracing shared goals requires a semblance of fiscal, educational, and gender equality in a society. In this issue of Sisyphus, we want to spread good words about minimalism, conservation, sustainable building, urban villages and farms, the “shop local” movement AND sustainable businesses’ key performance indicators, poverty, education, and immigration reform.

Share a piece that exemplifies a cause you are passionate about. Remind readers of the simple things that freedom ensures. Pay attention to the details of a thriving society. A solid civilization and vibrant community look to art for their inspiration.