Snowy Considerations

Tuesday morning. The storm has mostly blown through. In the early darkness a few neighborhood snowblowers begin their happily ferocious roar. The snowplows that have been scraping the streets all night are quiet for the moment and the accumulation of the past 18 hours has ceased. The wind continues, but the worst/best is past. I sip my morning tea and appreciate the warmth of my laptop on my lap as I tap away on the black keys—writing and preparing for meditation, breakfast and then a morning of snow removal.

I did go out briefly last night around eight to have a small adventure and to perhaps do some initial clearing. By that time about eight inches had fallen. I easily cleared the backstairs—the snow was light and fluffy. I then wandered across the wind-swept parking like an arctic explorer treading over vast white expanses. At the street, I paused to assess the situation and to make my official-snow-removal-guy assessment. There’s a certain self-importance that comes with these practical jobs. Perhaps it is our innate desire to be useful or perhaps it’s that so much of what we do is hard to measure and snow removal is a job with a clear and satisfying end-point. With the strong winds and the continuing-through-the-night forecast, I decided to ‘keep my powder dry’ and wait till the morning.

Snow removal in New England is an art and a science. Shovel too early and you waste valuable energy and time. Wait too long and the drifts get soggy or frozen or simply too high to penetrate. The solution for the city snowplows is simply to go through the night. Worcester (unofficial snow-capital of Massachusetts) owns a fleet of snow removal vehicles driven by city workers and also relies on a militia of independent drivers, guys (there must be some women who are in the business, but I have yet to see one) with pick-up trucks and snowplows, to clear the miles of city streets.

It’s been a quiet winter for these snowplow drivers. It’s a seasonal business with no guarantee of steady or even adequate income. You’ve got to be willing to go out at all hours and keep going. To be able to stay in the business, you’ve need enough regular customers that you maximize your income but few enough that you can get to them all in a timely manner. A delicate balance.

But I’m just an amateur and have the luxury of waiting till later. I looked out the back door when I got up at 5:30. I was pleased to see that the small shoveling I did on the back stairs was completely filled in with the wind and the overnight snow. This validated my decision to wait and also meant the temperatures had not risen to the wet-heavy-snow range so the shoveling and the blowing later on this morning should not be too difficult.

I am happy to have these considerations. I am blessed to have the (new!) snow-blower and the physical constitution to still be able to perform this necessary winter ritual. So after I finish my tea and after meditation and after breakfast, I will gear up and tromp out to fulfill my important responsibilities. Such is the shape of the good life this morning.

100% Snowfall

The storm has begun. Up from DC, Baltimore and NYC; the snow has begun to fall. The latest predictions call for 9 to 15 inches before it passes out to sea tomorrow morning. A white day. A snowy day. Memories arise of assembling a pile of books and some hot chocolate along with a blanket and a young daughter to sit by the sliding doors to the porch and watch the snow fall. We were safely snuggled and inspired by the water-color pictures of Miss Rumphius planting her blue, purple and pink lupine as we watched the porch slowly disappear under fluffy mounds. Over a quarter century later, I am still warmed and delighted by that one white morning.

Now having another young friend who’s almost two, I’m amazed again at the life-giving properties of very young people. As a child, I was sure that I was just waiting to become an adult for real life to begin. I thought being a child meant being only a partial being—someone who was limited by physical, emotional and mental immaturity. But now that I’m nearing the end of my 7^th decade on this planet, I’m much more aware of the equality of it all.

Of course there is little and big, young and old, strong and weak, more able and less able. But looming much larger is the beingness of it all and some mysterious exact intertwinkling necessity of each and all. As living beings, we are always limited, dependent and contingent. Even a person at the ‘height of their powers’ cannot jump over tall buildings nor survive without food and shelter, nor exist except within the interactive support of sun, earth, water, plants, stars, stray dogs and mosquitoes. Limitation is not a limitation, it is life itself.

In some ungraspable way, we are, each one of us, a part of it all—perfectly arising beyond our intentions and plans, perfectly manifesting ourselves in each moment, and perfectly passing away at some appointed and unknown time. In each moment, from our first breath to our last (and I have had the privilege to be present with others both in the arriving and the departing) we are 100% full of life. 100% living into the circumstances of our life. Even resisting and complaining and wishing it were otherwise is 100% too. Beyond measure.

Yesterday I walked with a friend beside a partially frozen river yesterday where geese swam easily in the water that would quickly kill either one of us. We, for our part, did our best to resolve the great issues of life-and-death, meaning-and-purpose, red-and-blue. We didn’t get very far, but we did arrive at the realization that measuring is irrelevant to the most important things in life. While there are innumerable and fierce measures that are pressed upon us from the earliest ages, many of which become an unthinking part of our constant self-evaluations—none of them can measure life, nor tell us what we should do.

Buddha spoke of the eight worldly winds: prosperity, decline, disgrace, honor, praise, censure, suffering, and pleasure. We are all subject to these dynamic, erratic and unavoidable conditions. His teaching was that it is our attachment or aversion to the coming and going of these conditions that causes our suffering. Prosperity comes and we feel good. Decline comes and we feel bad. When we allow ourselves to participate in whatever condition arises, we can appreciate the fullness of our unlimited conditional lives.

So I appreciate the perfect ‘help’ of my two-year-old friend when we wash the dishes together and am honored to help him change his soaking shirt after we tire of our chores. He is 100% full of life though he does sometimes seem to leave me at about 30% as I do my best to keep up with him. Nothing lacking on either side. Exhaustion is 100%. Squealing and jumping up and down is 100%.

As the snow falls today, the little ones of past and present are here with me. We are all playing and working and struggling and delighting as best we can. May we all today appreciate the whole miraculous catastrophe of our 100% life—in whatever form it may appear.

On the Frozen Lake

When the mass of doubt is shattered amidst all the particulars, one thing covers the blue sky. (Taego Bowu 14th century Korean Zen Master)

On the frozen lake,
snow sparkles and
crunches under our feet.

Four old friends still
out walking on ice
under the vast azure dome.

Both/And

I’m up to Step Six in my Equipping Anti-Racism Allies Bootcamp Training. (A program of thirty self-paced steps toward engaging with racial skeptics who think discrimination is as much a problem for white people as for black people in order to invite them to consider new perspectives.) So far, I’m quite impressed with the curriculum and am learning a lot. What I’m learning, however, is not so much about any ‘other’ people, but about me.

I’ve seen how reactive I can be when someone gets angry and accuses me of hurtful actions. I’ve noticed of how my preference for confluence and calm leads me to unconsciously and continuously avoid conversations and situations that might lead to disturbance. I’ve become more conscious of how my social circle (pandemicly limited though it is) is filled with people who mostly have similar educational backgrounds, skin color, incomes and world views. And I’ve been thinking a lot and even practicing communicating across the boundaries of ‘otherness.’

These boundaries of otherness are encoded both in institutional structures and in the human consciousness that we all share. Institutional patterns of education, work, socializing and access to resources all reinforce the ideas of difference that led to their creation. At every point and in every place, human societies have valued some people more than others. In every group that gathers, there are power relationships—there are leaders and followers, bosses and workers. There are those who are listened to and those who are not heard. Even so-called egalitarian groups create subtle hierarchies of power and meaning.

These structures of power and hierarchy are unavoidable and even useful. The problem is when we begin to think they are an expression of some kind of ‘natural order’ rather than a temporary and fluid expression of human interaction.

But the deepest level of division is the division between self and the world. Our human consciousness arises out of the capacity to make this distinction. This separation creates enormous opportunities for imagination and creativity. It is one of the primary gifts of human beings but the cost is enormous and the confusion created is endless. Unlike the plants and trees, the dogs and fishes, we mostly live in the delusion of our separation, one from another and each from the universe. This delusion creates great pain and causes us to act in ways that are hurtful to ourselves, each other and our environment.

When we look closely, however, we can see that this idea of separation is not true. There is no such thing as an ‘individual’ human being. We only arise and survive in relationship with each other. We are intimately intertwined with the world we life in. The sun, the earth, the air, the water are all part of us and there is no human life possible without everything that is around us. We are merely waves on the great ocean. We momentarily appear, make our wet complaints of separation, and then fall back into the vast water we were never separate from.

I feel rather inadequate and unclear as I try to tease out these ideas and connections. I suppose the main thing I am trying to say is that the ‘problem’ of division is one we can (and should) work on at every level – internally, with our families and friends, with those across the political, racial and ideological spectrum. Our partners and friends are fundamentally as much a mystery to us as the person who voted for the other Presidential candidate or holds other views of how race operates in our society.

My ongoing practice is to tolerate and even appreciate difference and disagreement wherever I encounter it. I vow to continue doing the internal work to bear my own fears and reactivity even as I take concrete actions in the world. This includes listening and appreciating others at the same time as standing up for what I believe, even with people who strongly hold opposing positions.

Both/And rather than Either/Or.

Appreciating Energy Efficiency on a Cold Morning

When we replaced the boiler for the hot water heating system here in the Temple ten years ago, we were amazed. The old boiler took up half the furnace room while the new boiler was a small white box that hung on the wall. The old boiler kept 60 gallons of water hot and ready to push through the radiators as needed. The new boiler, when signaled, simply raises the temperature of water running through it by ten degrees. The new boiler also vents directly to the side of the building because the exhaust from the heating process is not hot enough to make it all the way up the chimney. We were told the new boiler has a 90% efficiency rating—that 90% of the energy in the gas used to power it goes to heating the water rather than to heating the furnace room or the exhaust that goes out the top.

I’m thinking of all this because the kitchen thermometer reports the temperature outside is below zero. This particular measuring device is, however, rather dramatic. Attached to a thermostat on a western wall, on summer afternoons it often registers temperatures well above 100 degrees when the local weather stations claim it’s closer to the high 80’s. But I like the kitchen thermometer because it makes life more interesting. I come from a long line of minimizers. My natural tendency is to describe things as being as close to the usual as possible. I’m not sure whether this is from my desire to keep everything under control or simply to not let my words cause more difficulty than the situation itself already holds.

But this morning, even the weather stations are reporting temperatures in the single digits and wind-chills well below zero. And yet, here in the room where I write on the second floor of the Temple, it’s toasty warm. Our little white box on the wall that takes small steps, heats this large building—this large mostly vacant building. We haven’t had a residential retreat here since last January nor gathered for meditation since March 13th. The third floor is closed off and unheated, slowly gathering dust, as is a portion of the second floor. The lower floor, the ‘men’s dorm’, is chilly too, and the vinyl flooring is even starting to buckle in some places without the regular intermittent padding of stocking feet.

I’m reminded of the huge white house we lived in when I was four. My father, having finished seminary, had just accepted his first placement as a Presbyterian minister. The church owned the house where the minister and his family lived which was right across the driveway from an impressive (to a four-year-old) church building. We were only there for two or three years but my first memories are set in the rooms of that church manse.

One room on the ground floor, to the right of the front door, was never heated in the winter, and I remember one Sunday morning my brother and I put on our winter coats and hats to watch the test pattern on the small black and white TV while waiting for ‘Highway Patrol’ to come on. I didn’t understand why the room was so cold, but I was glad for the warmth of my jacket and the symmetry of the test pattern. (Interestingly, when I returned to drive by my old stomping grounds in my early 20’s, the house and the church were much smaller and more modest than I had remembered.)

This past week, Joe Biden has released a raft of executive orders about the environment. Following through on remarks from his inauguration address, he is taking climate change as the existential threat it is to our country and to the whole world. Biden’s directives are designed to roll back the directives of our previous President who did much to undo the environmental protections for the easier exploitation of the earth for profit. In announcing these executive orders, Biden both acknowledged the hard stuff and called us to the opportunity of the challenge. I’m beginning to see that this is his style—this is how he sees the world.

It’s a future of enormous hope and opportunity.  It’s about coming to the moment to deal with this maximum threat that we — that’s now facing us — climate change — with a greater sense of urgency.  In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis and we can’t wait any longer.  We see it with our own eyes, we feel it, we know it in our bones, and it’s time to act. 

While I know that Biden’s Presidency has aroused many fears in some of my conservative friends, I hope that his words and his actions will relieve some of the anxiety. As far as I know there will be no ‘re-education camps’ for Trump supporters as reported in some of the far-right media. Nor will we soon resemble the social democracies of Scandinavia. (Though those countries do report some of the highest level of happiness in the world.) But Biden is acting to lead the country to face the crises of climate change, economic inequality and racial injustice. We can and should have debates about how best to do this, but the direction is clear and urgent.

This morning, I am grateful for the warm room that protects me, for the leadership of a new President who is willing to tell the truth and for the challenge of these times which requires me to keep learning, risking and growing.