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We don’t get a say in the roots we inherit, even as they stretch beneath the surface of our daily lives and contain within them countless stories—of danger and survival and elation and heartbreak—that inform our living in ways we understand and ways we do not. No matter if we spend a lifetime tracing what we can learn about our family’s branches of these roots, or if we do all we can to ignore or even abandon these roots, they will remain there all the same, connecting us to the past, and in a sense, to each other.
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My uncle had lost his powers of speech by the time he died. In his hospital bed, surrounded by his loved ones, he used a bead board to spell out what he wanted to say during his final days. At one point, my cousin told me, everyone leaned in close because it seemed like he wanted to say something important. C-H-A-N-G-E—the whole family sounded out the word—change!—and wondered what important words might follow. T-H-E O-I-L F-I-L-T-E-R eventually came through. He was reminding my aunt to do a job he had always done on their furnace. For some reason, letting go of this detail was critical for him as he departed the planet. These were some of his final words.
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Have you ever had an all-out, meltdown, full-on temper tantrum? I don’t remember having major hissy fits when I was little, although if you asked my mom you would probably learn that’s more about my faulty memory than my good temper. I certainly have been witness to some raging temper tantrums as a parent. My daughter’s frequent tantrums in her younger years pretty much always grew out of wanting something that she couldn’t have—either because we weren’t willing to satisfy her desire, or simply because couldn’t find the thing that she wanted. Either way, you could watch her brain dashing around and around in a tiny little circle: “I want it! I don’t have it! I want it! I don’t have it! I want it! I don’t have it!”
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It was the weekend before I was scheduled for a biopsy. Marta spent the morning gathering stones on the beach. Later that evening, she pressed a smooth round stone into my hand and said “I know that when you’re facing a challenge it helps to have something to hold onto. I chose this stone especially for you so you will have something to hold onto this week.” On the plane going home somehow I lost the stone, but during my biopsy I held on to Marta’s love.
May 2014
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” —Havelock Ellis
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I love to draw, and for well over a decade I attended a drawing group in San Francisco. There, drawing a new model each time, I would produce ten drawings per night on 18×24 inch sheets of tinted paper. Some were quick gesture sketches; some were completely finished with shading and color. I was faithful, and went every Tuesday night. After ten years, despite pieces I had given away or sold, I had collected what felt like a ton of the drawings in the large tablets. They were so big I needed to store them in the hallway of the loft where I was living at the time, an old factory building. I was able to keep them out of the way by putting them into an alcove no one was using. In 1993, we had a terrible rainy winter in Oakland, where I lived. No thunder, no lightning, which are exceedingly rare in California, but downpours for days on end. Cold rain that came down so hard it hurt to walk in it without an umbrella. Downpours for literally days at a time, causing little rivers along the curbs; the cuffs of my trousers never dried for weeks. Read more →
The trouble with Donald Sterling is that he’s an…well, for the sake of public consumption, let’s just say that he’s a jerk. A racist jerk who said appalling things. I hope his girlfriend dumps him. But the question is what his jerkiness means to those of us who have the good fortune not to be dating him. After all, he, like all the rest of us in the United States, is entitled to freedom of speech. If he wants to be a jerk on his own time, he has the right.
Of course, freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. Freedom of speech means that the police can’t come and arrest him for being a jerk. But it turns out that the NBA is entitled to suspend and fine him, the players on the team he owns are entitled to protest his words, his friends are free to avoid being seen with him in public and those of us in the blogosphere are entitled to call him a racist jerk. Racist jerk.
The real trouble with Donald Sterling only comes when those of us who are publicly appalled by his words think that sanctioning his offensive language has anything significant to do with combatting racism. Yes, Donald Sterling is a racist jerk. So is Cliven Bundy. But in the time that we’ve been filling the interwebs with commentary on what racist jerks they are, the real racism has been flowing on with the minimum of discussion. The real racism is happening as the Supreme Court disassembles the Voting Rights Act on the pretext that we’re over the need for all that. While the poverty rate in the US for African Americans and Hispanics is nearly three times that of Whites. While the criminal justice system unfairly targets people of color. While students of color are disproportionally likely to be suspended from school, and to attend schools where they lack access to higher math and science classes and experienced teachers. And on and on.
Sure. It’s important to call out the racist jerks, for people to hear that that kind of racial hostility is not OK. But the problem comes when we assume that dealing with racial hostility, with offensive remarks, means that we have dealt with racism. Racial hostility and racism are not the same thing. If someone has been rude to you because of your race or ethnicity, whatever that might be, you have experienced racial hostility—prejudice. But racism is a whole complex interwoven system of privilege and oppression that has very little to do with hostility and very much to do with power and privilege. So addressing the hostility is all very well and good, but let’s not pretend that we’re seriously dealing with racism. Systems of oppression need to be combatted by systems of justice. Like, say, the Supreme Court of the United States. That’s something worth talking about.
The high April winds blowing damage across the US this week also blew something into town that my lungs are treating as poison. This morning I face the day with more empathy and exhaustion than I have known in a while.
To everyone who struggles with their own health through the quiet hours, may you feel the love and support of your community.
To everyone who serves babies, elders, or the ill through the night, may you know that your efforts matter.
To everyone who sleeps through the night, may you remember to have compassion for those who do not.
Be well, beloveds. Rest easy when you can and know, when you cannot, that you are not alone.
It’s springtime. Spring stirs in me a feeling of anticipation along with a feeling of unsettledness. What does the future hold? Left turn, right turn, which way? I love the days of good weather and I start to get too much sun for the first time in months and months. I feel that springtime sense of hopefulness, and I get overwhelmed by all that lies ahead. Pacing, pacing, I remind myself. Savor the gorgeous days, when they are here, slow down and enjoy watching the birds voraciously discovering the trees and buds. Enjoy the longer periods of light at the beginning and end of each day. Don’t wear yourself out by trying to do it all.
My family and I are most likely moving this summer, from D.C. to Connecticut. We probably won’t have much of a garden this year, but I still feel like tossing some seeds out onto the dirt, at the very least. At this time of year it doesn’t feel right not to put one’s hands in the dirt for at least a bit. Maybe I’ll optimistically plant cucumbers and let them spread out all over the garden and take over, knowing that we’ll move before there’s any produce to be had. (Barbara Kingsolver has a wonderful essay about this in her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle book — about planting asparagus, which takes at least a year to produce any actual asparagus — in some patch of dirt outside every home she’s lived in, even temporary apartments she knew she wasn’t going to be staying in long enough to see it produce. I think about that all the time — is the planting for the purposes of its end result, or simply for the purposes of planting? Do we garden for the product, or for the act of gardening?
What does the springtime stir in you? Are you outside today? What calls you out into the beckoning world?
Here is the beautiful truth—saints and sinners are the same from the start.
Hsu Yun, Chinese Chan Buddhist (freely adapted by me)
As a young writer, I read everything I could find on the subject of writing. One of the books that impressed me at the time was written by novelist John Gardner called Moral Fiction. If my memory serves me, it is in that book that Gardner argues that every writer has a wound which drives his or her writing. By “wound” Gardner meant a psychological trauma so devastating that the writer revisits and seeks to re-write this trauma constantly in her or his work. (This theory predates the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD.)
It’s not surprising that Gardner should have developed such a theory, since he had suffered a severe trauma in his own life. John Gardner grew up on a farm and, as is often the case, he drove tractors when he was quite young. One day Gardner was driving a tractor with his brother riding on the back. His brother fell off and was killed by the implement the tractor was pulling.
For the rest of his life, Gardner replayed and replayed in his mind the image of his brother falling. He blamed himself for his brother’s death. He never stopped asking himself, “What could I have done?”
Gardner himself eventually died in a motorcycle accident.
As I made my own attempts at writing, I discovered that the old cliche “truth is stranger than fiction” is partially true because writers can’t help attempting to make sense of the random happenings of the world. The human mind can’t help trying. Creative writing is, if nothing else, an assertion of the self in the face of what often appears to be a completely random reality. It’s the human need to create meaning that makes fiction less strange than truth.
But it is not true that only writers have wounds. Sure, some people become writers because of the need to process trauma. But the fact is, as the Buddha observed long ago, life itself is loss. We suffer because nothing is permanent except change.
Think for a moment about something you are hanging onto. Something that you just can’t let go. Something that makes you cringe when you think of it. Something that you replay, like an old movie in your head.
Now. Allow me to ask a very simple question: what do you gain by hanging on to what you are hanging on to?
Pain makes us individualists. As Shakespeare put it,
I will be flesh and blood,
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
I think that Shakespeare is driving at the insight psychologist Carl Jung had when he coined the phrase “wounded healer.” It isn’t that therapists or ministers or anybody else have the answers to life’s wounds. It is, rather, that dwelling on those wounds drives many of us to be therapists or ministers or philosophers.
And the insight we find, when and if we find it, is that pain makes us individualists, but the cure for pain is reaching out. However we write the style of our gods, we must accept our flesh and blood and dependency on others before healing begins. This is perhaps not an entirely reassuring insight. We would rather see our healers as experts. But that attitude, too, is a fall into individualism. The answer is in reaching out.
The Chinese Chan Buddhist Hsu Yun said it simply:
Here is the beautiful truth—
saints and sinners are the same
from the start.
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