Loneliness, Politics and Christmas

Several years ago I was speaking with a friend on the phone. I was feeling quite blue and told my friend I was feeling kind of lonely. I fully expected her sympathy and encouragement as I went through these painful emotions. But she surprised me by saying: ‘Oh, I really like feeling lonely. Isn’t it interesting?’ She wasn’t being mean, but I was shocked—and kind of curious.

These feelings of separation and sadness that are so familiar and unwanted (especially around the holiday season)—might they be something other than the stories I tell about them? I suppose this possibility, that the most troublesome things in our lives are not what we think they are, is at the center of what I’ve been thinking about these past few days.

Speaking of unwanted things, yesterday Trump announced that, after months of negotiating, he now thinks the Congressional compromise passed for economic relief and for continuing the government is terrible. He is threatening to veto the whole bill and shut down the government unless the individual relief payments should be $2,000 instead of $600. This position, that surprised his aides and his Republican congressional colleagues alike, has kept him in all our minds and put the Republican Party in quite a fix. (see NYTimes Trump’s Attack on Coronavirus Relief Divides G.O.P. and Threatens Recovery)

While it seems irresponsible of Trump to threaten to scuttle this relief package to offer some support to those suffering with unemployment, missed rent payments and economic hardship, this could be the turning point in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. Both Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock have backed the President’s proposal for raising payments to individuals. Rev. Warnock: “As I’ve said from the start, the Senate should have acted on this months ago, and support for Georgians should have been far greater. Donald Trump is right, Congress should swiftly increase direct payments to $2,000.” The Republican candidates now have to decide whether to support the President or their party.

Hopefully, this will be enough to tip the scales in both races so that the Democrats can indeed regain control of the Senate. I am trying not to get too hopeful, but it seems increasingly apparent that if the Republicans control the Senate they will block most measures for government support to help us through this economic recession—preferring the austerity measures that increase suffering for those at the bottom of the economic ladder and keep things pleasant for those at the top.

All this comes along with the second wave of self-interested and politically motivated pardons. Robert Hubbell says: “Trump turned up the corruption factor to “11” by issuing twenty-six new pardons, which included Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Charles Kushner. Trump is intent on destroying the Republican Party on his way out the door so that he can appoint himself king of the tattered remnants of a party that will consist (in large part) of QAnon adherents, coronavirus deniers, and conspiracy theorists.” Trump is inflicting as much damage as possible to the country and even to the Republican Party that has so faithfully supported him unprincipled and unethical behavior.

Maybe he’s just lonely? Maybe he’s truly evil? Maybe he’s caught up in a frantic bubble of narcissistic rage? We should expect him to continue to pardon his political allies as a quid pro quo for their silence and support. We should expect him to fall deeper into patterns of erratic and malicious behavior. For four years, I have hoped that he would become so outrageous that more and more people would begin to see through his bluster and destructive acting-out. I’m not hopeful there will be a mass defection, but I do hope that even four or five percent of his core supporters will begin to re-think their position and begin to see a broader perspective.

All this goes on and still tomorrow is Christmas. The guardrails of democracy have held so far and the present I’m most looking forward to is Joe Bidden’s inauguration as our next President on January 20^th.

But what if these difficult times we find ourselves in are more than the painful stories we tell about them? Unprecedented indeed, but isn’t all of life unprecedented? Could our current struggles the birthing of the possibility of a more equitable and just country? Have we all been disturbed enough to re-examine the ways we have all been complicit in the economic and racial violence around us?

As we move into the Christian remembrance of a star brightly shining in the midst of dark and of a defenseless baby born to marginalized parents, let us take heart in the ancient story of an oppressive system that was transformed by the fierce power of love and vulnerability.

A Different Kind of Holiday

We live our lives in cycles. The diurnal rituals of night and day deeply carved in our circadian circuits. The palpable rhythm of the seven-day weeks we grown up with (I used to really believe that a Monday was different from a Thursday but the pandemic has slowly eroded most of these usual distinctions). The familiar passage of the seasons and the associated holidays. It’s easy to think that we know what’s coming.

It’s partially true. Or maybe we could say there’s enough truth in our foreknowledge to get us in trouble. One of my current prediction is that we will go through several months of cold weather while the days keep growing slowly longer. Then, in three months, some reliable warmth will return and small green shoots will begin to poke up through the frozen ground. I also imagine, and here’s where it gets dangerous, that I will begin planting seeds in small pots indoors in preparation for the summer’s garden. With this image in my mind, I can already sense how delightful it will be to see the tender green bits of life erupt through the moist soil on the shelf where I keep them. I’ll have lots and lots this year and may even need to buy another grow-light.

I have a pretty strong confidence in my general prediction of the weather pattern and my forecast of unlikely green appearances in late March. Chances are good that I will start seeds indoors at the same time, but maybe not. A thousand things could happen between now and then that would turn those personal predictions into pure fantasies. It’s true these imaginings of my future doings bring me pleasure, but just the other week as I was working through a difficult situation, my future thoughts were equally disturbing and brought me anxiety and discomfort.

So much of what we experience in any moment is about the futures we are continually creating in our minds. We all live an infinite number of futures—right in this moment of the present. Some of them bring us great suffering and some might bring us great pleasure and…none of them will never arrive. Even if you’re ‘right’ it will be different than you imagine it. Or our future fantasies may be pleasant enough but bring us great disappointment when what actually arrives is different from the ideal we imagined. If I had been hoping to get new grow light for my spring seedlings and all I get are some warm argyle sox, even though it’s a lovely pair, I might be very unhappy.

Our minds are such troublesome places. Just writing this, trying to make some sense of it all, I’m becoming irritated. It’s all too complicated. Can’t we just enjoy what’s here? Why all this explaining and posturing? Why all this hope and disappointment?

Can’t we just enjoy what’s here? Obviously not. I mean, we can, but it’s much trickier than we imagine. Without intention and patience and some appreciation for the unexpected we will just be carried away by our thoughts of how it was and how it should be.

Why all this explaining and posturing? The explaining never fully explains things, but I have found it so helpful in pointing directions of travel. We human beings are so much more similar than we usually imagine. Words, tips and stories from others can reassure us of what we know and help us feel less alone. (I do, however, take slight offense and embarrassment in above the self-accusation of ‘posturing’, though I suppose that to do or say anything involves some element of self-consciousness.)

Why all this hope and disappointment? What is the survival value of creatures whose inner lives are an emotional roller-coaster? Why so easily aroused to joy and discouragement by mere thoughts and images that run through our heads? It’s quite a mystery to me, but it does seem to be part of being human.

What I really want to get to this morning, and I think I finally have, is that the regions of joy and suffering that we humans traverse are part of our connection to each other. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s never just you. It’s never just personal.

I know a lot of people who will be spending the holidays separated from people they love dearly. This physical and sometimes emotional distance is a part of every holiday season, but it is especially pronounced this year with the Covid restrictions still in place. The annual ritual of travel and sharing food and arguing with relatives and rekindling ancient animosities and primal connections—it’s all being disrupted this year.

My encouragement for us all over the rest of this holiday season is to say ‘yes’ to as much of our inner life as we can. If the Christmas spirit is about warmth and welcoming, we get to practice it this year within ourselves, wherever we are. Whatever arises, can we meet it with compassion and curiosity–welcoming it in out of the cold of judgment and disapproval?

Though the circumstances and location of your holiday may be different than in past years, the fullness of life courses through your veins flows undiminished. The very place you find yourself in is the pulsing center of a vast web of life. Take as many moments as you can to stop and remember the beating heart of life that so faithfully sustains you and from which you can never be separated.

The Perfect Gift

I wrapped presents last night and was reminded of why I don’t like Christmas—how I automatically evaluate my expressions of love as performances and almost always come up short. While wrapping presents for people I really love, I’m wondering: ‘Will this gift be enough or will they be disappointed?’ ‘Is this wrapping job creative and fun, or just plain sloppy?’ In some part of my mind, the balance is delicate and the consequences overly consequential. While wrapping, I notice this internal conversation and work to ignore the critical one who chatters away so relentlessly on my shoulder.

But maybe I should give him a gift? He’s a hard worker, this little fellow—constantly vigilant lest a mistake be made. It’s a dangerous, nerve-racking job. Always on the alert. Always imagining the dire repercussions that would cascade down from some possible unskillful action. Most of his attention is devoted to worrying about how others are feeling and will be feeling—how they will react to something I do or don’t do. He’s not really concerned about me and how I’m doing. Or rather, he is concerned about me, but from the perspective that my happiness will only be possible when everyone else is happy with me—especially those people closest to me.

On the plus side, he does want me to be happy and safe. Now that I think about it, he is more into safety than happiness. From his perspective, this is life and death stuff. Negative reactions to my actions feel life-threatening to my critical little buddy. He lives in constant fear of doing the wrong thing and being cut off. ‘What if we do something wrong and everyone leaves us?’ ‘What if they decide we’re not worth their time anymore?’ Poor fellow.

He tries so hard. He’s quite admirable and inspiring in that way. Relentlessly working though his fear, he thinks and plans far into the disthymic future. If everything is so delicately balanced and the stakes are so high, there is no time to rest or slack off.

He lives in the world of a scared little boy. This little boy can’t quite figure the world out and is sure it’s all up to him to make everything come out right. He constantly works hard and things do come out right so he has learned he must keep working hard in order to keep things coming out right. Trapped in a never-ending feedback loop.

So, for Christmas this year, I’m getting him an all-expenses paid vacation to Costa Rica. Since he’s not real, Covid-19 is no problem. He can just slip into an empty seat on the next flight down. But as I think more deeply, I realize that that’s not what he wants. He’d just lie there on the white sand beaches under the warm sun and be worried about me.

No, what I need to give him is a stay-cation. That’s clearly the perfect gift! I’ll get him a mini barcalounger for use on my shoulder. I’ll also give him a four-pack of Greater Good ‘Pulp Daddy’ Imperial IPA and some 1,000 day aged gouda cheese. He can sit back in the lounger, sip beer, nibble cheese and survey the world from his advantaged perch on my shoulder. And the final gift, the one that will really let him know how much I love him and change his life forever, will be a copy of the Tao Te Ching so he read about the glories of ‘doing not-doing’ while he’s lounging around at home.

I can just see the surprised and delighted look on his face as he opens the wonderful presents I have gotten for him. He’ll look at me with wondrous disbelief that, having a choice, I would still be willing to have him stay. With slightly watery eyes we’ll remember our deep love for each other. And as we hug, we’ll both appreciate the intimacy and immediacy of our sometimes challenging relationship. We’ll remember again that though we can never get it right, that’s part of the fun of it all.

Celestial Stories

As I write this, it is exactly 5:02 on December 21^st, 2020. Winter solstice. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day of the year is finally here. It’s caused by the angle of the earth’s axis and the consequent angle of the sun’s rays as we stand here on the surface of this spinning chunk of rock and water. Today the sun’s elevation above the horizon will be the lowest of the year.

Though the coldest months are still to come, the days will now begin to grow longer. Slowly at first, then comes the lengthening of the lengthening—accelerating till we reach a maximum of around two minutes of extra daylight every day. I’m already wondering how I should spend my coming treasure trove of minutes. One might think that two minutes isn’t a long time, but don’t be fooled.

These days, my sense of time seems rather erratic. On the one hand it feels like I’ve been in some kind of lockdown for years. On the other, I can’t believe Christmas comes on Friday. Where did the month go? Where did the year go?

Last night, a friend gave a lovely Zen talk that featured the image of erratic boulders. These large standing rocks are the ones dropped onto the New England landscape 22,000 years ago by the glacier that then covered this whole region. They had been picked up further north as the glacier carved the valleys and shaved the mountains on its southward journey. Then, as the ice melted, these stones of sometimes great proportion were left like travelers stranded in a foreign country with no means of return.

But how could travelers be stranded for such a long time? Maybe they lost their wallet and your passport. Maybe they couldn’t speak the language. Or maybe the foreign country was an island and all the boats were sunk and the airport was destroyed. The local inhabitants had had enough of all of this coming and going—were tired of exchange rates and the globalization of their traditional jobs—decided they didn’t want to be part of the world-wide-web or any other webs of commerce, intrigue and deceit.

Maybe everyone was going native, just as you happened to arrive. And since you had always hoped to lose everything anyway, you decided to join in. You finally gave up on the person you were and decided to join in the insurrection of disconnection. Slowly you learned the beautiful language of where you were. You found friends and learned to fish and grew a few vegetables in a small plot by your kitchen door. (I’m now thinking that your island was off the coast of Greece and the weather was nearly always perfect.) Or maybe you just became a storyteller and entertained the next generation with tall tales of the mythical world across the waters. You walked a lot, were happy to work hard and enjoyed the rest of your days on the island.

Now that would be erratic.

But last night, my friend, who had never, to my knowledge, been stranded on such as island as described above, told all of us who were webbing together on Zoom Zen that the word erratic comes from the Latin root erraticus which means wandering and also mistake or error. Certainly we are all wanderers living lives that, as one Zen teacher put it, are one mistake after another. We find ourselves deposited in this moment of time at this particular place. We don’t really know where we came from and the sheet of ice, or whatever it was that brought us here, has long since disappeared. So we make up stories. My father was of royal parentage but I was born in humble circumstances. There was a big star that was really two planets, but that’s just incidental. It’s a long story and with an R-rated ending. (graphic violence)

Believing the story or not, this will still be the shortest day of the year. We are all stranded here on the shores of present—carried here by vast depths of time beyond comprehension. We do our best to learn the beautiful language of this true place, but the syntax is hard and the subtle sounds nearly indiscernible.

And all the while this blue-green pearl of a planet twirls on its imagined axis as it hurtles through space—held in the magnificent thrall of a burning orb. I’m reminded of the ancient Native American song: ‘Why do I go about pitying myself, when all the time I am being carried on great winds across the sky?’

Balancing Both

I have recovered from my alarm of yesterday morning when after writing a reasonably reassuring blog about the psychological processes that lead toward extremism I read some very disturbing news about the Russian cyber attacks, the refusal of some parts of the military to continue to work with the Biden team in transition and ongoing reports and investigations about the Trump camps fund-raising practices, and I got so upset I posted the whole article/newsletter that had upset me.

Was that an incidence of exactly what I was warning about? I was certainly emotionally reactive, but was I moving from denial into a more realistic assessment of the dangers of this moment of transition and alternative realities? Or was I getting carried away by bits of information that I put together in ways that confirm my worst fears about ‘those people’?

As a good Zen practitioner, I have to assume that it’s both. In our linguistic world, things are either this or that—either light or dark—either good or bad. But when we look more closely into our experience of life, we can notice that these clear boundaries and demarcations are nowhere to be found. I might say that I’m upset, but I’m also eating my breakfast and planning for the day’s events. In the dark there is light, and in the light there is dark. Events in the past that seemed good at the time led to some very difficult times. Conversely failures and disappointment may have turned out to had some unexpected gifts. It’s never just one thing.

But yesterday, I was surprised by the duration of my disturbance. My emotional state is usually fairly stable, but yesterday morning I was deeply agitated for several hours. I was worried about the Presidential transition and the ongoing damage of Trump’s baseless but powerful challenge to the legitimacy of the election. Trump is attempting a self-coup. He is doing whatever can to undermine the lawful transition of power and to stay in office. He is not defending the country (has said nothing about the Russian cyber-attack or about the rising Corona virus deaths) he is defending himself and his grip on power. He is openly spreading unfounded rumors and fanning the flames of conspiracy theories. He urges all toward extremism then presents himself as the only one who can bring stability.

Though Republicans in Congress are increasingly coming out and publicly accepting Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, they are still unwilling to directly take on the President’s preposterous lies and his passionate supporters. This is not a good thing. We are still in danger. Biden’s election was a huge victory but Trump’s influence and attempts to subvert our democracy are ongoing and need to be taken seriously.

This morning, as I open this can of worms again (and remembering that cans of worms, though perhaps slimy and icky are also wondrous and life-giving) I am not nearly as disturbed. Yes, there is ongoing danger and we should all do what we can. But many people are awake to this and we are, generally, moving in the right direction. Here are some suggestions I have for moving forward, honoring both our social responsibility and individual sanity:

1) Stay informed, but not too informed. Don’t imagine ‘it’s over and we won’ but also don’t stay glued to the constant agitation of information. Also remember to listen to a variety of voices, not just the ones that shout the loudest.

2) Find some small actions you can take for the good of all. I recently called my state representatives to urge them to fight Governor Baker’s amendments that weaken the recent Police Reform bill. I sent some postcards to George to urge people to vote. Not much, but it’s something.

3) Remember what you love. Don’t let the behavior of others be the focus of your inner life. Be intentional with your attention. Don’t wait until thing ‘settle down’ to appreciate the simple things that are already here.