Leonard Visits Me

I recently heard a friend sing a lovely version of Leonard Cohen’s Anthem. Not many people know, but Leonard and I grew up together. We met when I was in high school. He wrote the songs and did the singing and recording. I bought the records and sheet music and sang along. I loved his unapologetic sadness—his joyous expression of the mysterious impossibility of life. His songs were never about resolution, but were a celebration of whatever particular imperfect moment you happened to be in. Leonard’s vocal range was small and his guitar abilities limited, but he found a way to bring his heart and soul to every note.

I first got to know Leonard through Judy Collins’ version of his earliest big hit, Suzanne. I was just learning how to shave, how to play the guitar and how to kiss girls. I never really knew what the song meant or when was the exact right moment to kiss or not kiss. But I never tired of singing about the ‘tea and oranges’ that came ‘all the way from China’ or of imagining that perfect kiss. Suzanne’s hypnotic melody and the mysterious romantic yearning were a perfect expression of my own confusion and endless longing.

Thirty years later, my Zen teacher would tell stories about sitting retreats at Mount Baldy Zen Center with Leonard and his gravely voice. The senior monks, like Leonard and my teacher, were sometimes invited to drink sake and smoke cigars after hours with ‘Roshi’ – the old Japanese teacher who was a fierce, brilliant and, as it turned out, a serial sexual predator that maintained a cult-like hold on his Zen acolytes. Leonard had left his high-profile pop-star life to live the austere Zen life, but he was eventually disillusioned and returned to life in LA.

While away at the Zen center, Leonard’s personal fortune had been squandered by his financial manager and that led to a new burst of necessary creativity and a world tour by the then old man. I bought the London album and had the good fortune to see him when he came through Boston. His voice was lower and more limited than ever. He was old and creaky and delivered an amazing and exactly choreographed show. At one point, he knelt down in a romantic gesture and it was clear how much that physical effort cost him. He managed to get back to standing, but it was not a sure thing.

But I woke this morning with the chorus of Anthem going through my head:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

 These lyrics have become an anthem of the Mindfulness movement and have been dutifully recited in mindfulness classrooms around the world. Assuming iconic status is a mixed blessing. Having heard them so often, I usually just tune them out, but yesterday, heard them fresh again.

Humming to myself in the dark room, I was first struck by the injunction to ‘forget your perfect offering’. How necessary it is to abandon our notions of perfection and how things should be. How easy this is to say and how difficult to live. Moment after moment is filled with expectations about myself and those around me. Part of my brain is constantly comparing what is happening with what I think should be happening. Only in the moments when I give up how it should be, can I fully appreciate how it already is.

Then I moved on to the humor and the poignant acknowledgment of the first line ‘Ring the bells that still can ring’. A sweet reminder that, as we move on in our lives, not all the bells can still ring. We can’t walk as fast or work as long as we used to. The capacities of youth stay with the youth as we cycle through the stages and ages of life. Not a problem. Use what you have. Sometimes you can run, sometimes you’re lying in bed. Sometimes you have words, sometimes just a glance or a squeeze.

So, the encouragement for us all this morning is to forget how it should be and let whatever is here be enough. You are already the full presentation. Just a few notes or no notes are more than enough. In each kiss the universe finds itself again. The light has already entered and nothing can be fixed.

Coming Out of the Darkness

I recalculated this morning in the dark as I lay awake in my bed. November 26, 1952 to November 26, 2020—that’s sixty-eight years. I’ve always made it a point of honor to not quite remember my age—refusing, in my own mind, to be defined by a number. It’s getting easier to forget. Even as I write sixty-eight, seventy-eight comes to my mind and it takes me just a fraction of a second to locate my self on the alleged time-line. Both are big numbers reserved for ‘old people’ and feel somewhat alien to me.

When I was in fourth grade I knew that a man was always ten years older than the woman he married. Being nine, I calculated that my future wife had not yet been born. Little did I know that my wife of the years to come (which I am living at this moment) was already a precocious student of the second grade—delighting her teachers and teaching her friends.

School was arduous for me. I was so eager to please and the rules kept changing. I’m reminded of my daughter once saying to me that I was lucky to be a grown-up. When I inquired as to why that might be, she said that when you’re a kid they expect you to learn something new all the time, but when you’re a grown-up it’s all the same. I think I made some feeble counterargument about life-long-learning, but I got her point. In school, they keep moving the goal posts. You master one skill—or get enough of a sense of it to fake your way through a test—then you have to go on to the next.

The good news and the bad news about learning is that it never ends. Life is an ongoing experiment of trial and error. Just after we finally arrive at some brilliant insight and an elevated equilibrium, life gives us the next impossible issue. Each new problem requires we use everything we have already learned as well as uncovering some new tool, understanding or perspective we can’t even imagine. I think it was in the movie Junebug where one of the characters says ‘God loves you just the way you are but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.’ The ultimate tough love of the universe. We’re always on the edge. What we know up to this point is all necessary but not sufficient to get us to the next place we need to go. As one author put it succinctly in his book title: ‘What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.’

One of the things we rarely discuss in our praise of continual learning is that all learning involves loss—loss of certainty, loss of mastery, loss of identity. Learning something new about ourselves or about the world means that some understanding we had is disrupted—made more nuanced, experienced at a deeper level, or even directly contradicted. In many areas of our life, this is not a big deal. When I learn that margarine is a decent substitute for butter for the topping of an apple crumble, it doesn’t cost me a lot of anguish. I just tuck that new understanding away in hopes of making future deserts that the whole family can eat and appreciate.

But when the new understanding has to do with the ongoing nature of my capacity for unskillful action, and when I see anew the impact of those actions on people I care about, I am chagrinned, sad and angry. After all these years, I still don’t like to make mistakes – especially when my mistakes cause pain to other people. (Actually, I don’t mind making mistakes, because when I’m making them, I don’t think they are mistakes or I wouldn’t do them. It is the realization that I have made mistakes that I find particularly painful.) My first reaction when confronted with this ongoing realization of imperfection is to withdraw—a kind of ‘If you don’t like me, I’ll take my marbles and go home.’ On some deep internal level, I have equated making mistakes with being unworthy of human contact. I preemptively withdraw into a very dark place. Any contact, even well-intentioned feels almost unbearable.

This dark place is terribly familiar. It’s like I’m abducted into the underworld and am helpless to get out. Sometimes it’s for just a few seconds. Sometimes it’s a few hours or days. I have also known weeks and seeming months of dark disconnection. Recently, after a difficult conversation, I found myself in such a place. The new part was that in the middle of my confusion and anger, I was also curious about this place of dislocation and darkness. I thought of Dante’s preface to the Divine Comedy where he says ‘In the middle of my life, I woke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.’ And I thought ‘THIS is the place he was talking about.’ It’s not just me.

I imagined I was sinking down into the darkness of the great ocean. Slowly and slowly falling deeper and deeper. Until a whale came and swallowed me up. And there, in the fetid darkness was my old friend Jonah, sitting in an easy chair reading a book of poetry and sipping a cup of tea. He warmly welcomed me and said that after his adventure in Ninevah, he decided to retire and come back here. ‘It’s quiet and still here. No one bothers you and, after a while, you get used to the dank smell and the low light.’ I settled in with him for a while, reassured by his story of being spit up at the appropriate time on the appropriate beach.

The next day, I called my mother who told me that she and my Dad went to the hospital in the morning, the day before Thanksgiving sixty-eight years ago, but then went home. Then, in the afternoon, they went back again and I was born. While her mother watched my 14 month-old brother, the doctor stood aside and positioned a mirror so she could watch as I emerged onto the beach of this world. My first and most appreciative audience.

I thanked her profusely for her labor and her gaze—then we went on to talk about other things.

Deep Democracy

We human beings are naturally inclined to either/or thinking. Should we reconcile or should we resist? Should we be worried or should we be hopeful? Are we OK or are we in trouble? The mind often prefers a simple answer, even if it’s wrong, to the challenge of the contingent and complicated truth.  Some part of us just want the matter settled.  But the answer to all these binary questions is YES!…or as one ancient Zen teacher famously said: NO!*

When we frame a problem from two opposing views, much is lost. There is always truth on both sides.  Both sides are not equal and there are truths and positions that need to be defended vigorously, but reality is subtle and infinitely complex.  We each see this ‘reality’ from different points of view. We might even say that we all live in different universes.

Part of our life as human beings is learning to acknowledge and even appreciate this fact. Arny Mindell**, author, thinker and founder of Process Work, has spent his life considering and exploring how we can work together with others who do not share our beliefs and world views—even those we radically disagree with. He calls this endeavor World Work and one of the foundational teachings is the concept of Deep Democracy.

Deep Democracy asserts that each person in a situation speaks not just for themselves, but for the situation itself. Each person deserves to be heard, not just because they have a right to be heard, but because they see and experience some unique aspect of what is occurring.

Mindell teaches that there is wisdom inherent in every situation – even situations of conflict and chaos. Our job as participants is not to control or fight to impose our will on a situation, but to support what is emerging. What if the current difficulty is the gateway to new understandings and new solutions?  As we uncover and support the deep currents of  what is already happening, we create the potential for new and sometimes paradoxical resolutions of ancient problems.

Curiosity and courage are the two essential skills here. We have to be willing to step beyond right-and-wrong thinking and to set aside, even briefly, some of our cherished certainty. This requires an intentional practice of flexibility and growing capacity to deal with the many inner opinions and feelings that inevitably arise. This is not easy to do, but we can grow our skill and capacity to appreciate and work with what is emerging.

So, this day before Thanksgiving, can we practice curiosity with whatever and whoever we encounter?  What if everyone (excluding no one) is speaking some important truth? What if these difficult times are part of an important transition into a better way for human beings to live together? What if our job is to not to sort and filter everything to confirm our position, but to be open to the new and unexpected that is trying to be born?

I wonder.

*for a wonderful collection of essays on this ‘No!’ see THE BOOK OF MU edited by my colleagues James Ford and Melissa Blacker

**Arny Mindell has written many books, but my favorite is still LEADER AS MARTIAL ARTIST

Another Moon

Nana cuts the pear
into small pieces
for us on the stools
in the middle of
the kitchen floor.
The pear is sweet
and he happily lets
the overflowing juice
dribble down his chin
while, out of propriety,
I dab at the excess
with a damp a cloth.

We want more
pear but it is close
to dinnertime and a
suggested walk distracts
us to the mudroom.
We don’t want the new
blue fancy mittens, insisting
instead on the thin white knit
pair with dinosaurs still
damp from the morning’s
adventures. We also don’t
want our new pretty down
jacket, and hold out for
the familiar hand-me-down
brown plaid and hooded one.
Shoes are next. While
he sits on Nana’s lap, I help.
Then he finds my big ones
and helps me too.

(Isn’t this the way it is?
No matter how it appears,
we are all cradled
in the vital web of mutuality.)

Out the door, he immediately
wants to be picked up in
the unfamiliar late afternoon
darkness. Happy to oblige,
I hold him close. Pointing
to the hazy moon above,
I whisper in his ear of
the ancient Zen poets
who sang love songs
to this same hazy moon of
enlightenment. He stays
very still for a moment,
then, instantly heavy, he
wriggles down, eager to stand
on his own two feet and
begin the exploration.

Around the block we
marvel and exclaim at
the wondrous rush
of traffic and the size
and sound of big trucks.
He wants to smell
the chrysanthemums that
used to be in planters
by the restaurant and I
have to explain they have
been ‘nupped’ (cleaned up)
for the winter. He seems
satisfied, but I’m not sure.

Half-way round the block
we stop as I explain the
esoteric meanings of the
traffic light’s green and red.
He listens patiently, then,
happening to glance up,
exclaims excitedly ‘Nother moon!’
And indeed, here at
another corner is another
moon, hanging still in
dark the sky. I abandon
the details concerning
perspectives, distance
and object permanence, and
this time, agree with his vision.
‘Yes – nother moon.’

We jump off the curb
a few times, see a
wondrous tree with
lights of all colors
shining, then get excited
about the possibility
of seeing Nana again
running together up
the driveway to the warmth
and safety the blue house
where he lives.

Favoring Connection Over Conflict

Good writers convey arguments with vivid images. While this often makes for memorable writing, it also obscures important issues and simplifies complex situations into binary choices. This morning, I’m thinking of Rebecca Solnit’s striking piece On Not Meeting the Nazis Halfway.  While I agree with the gist of her argument—that not every issue has two positions that are equally valid and that endless listening is not always an effective or even ethical strategy—I take issue with her literary choices that actually fan the flames she claims to be fighting. It makes good reading and it does inspire me to stand for what I believe, but the inspiration comes at a cost.

When we equate all people who disagree with us with the extreme exemplars of their position, we add to the very problem we say we want to solve.

One of the hardest things for us humans to see is that we each have a part in what is going on. From my common sense position (and almost all of us believe that our position is common sense), I clearly see that most of my problems come from outside of me. ‘If only other people would stop being so greedy and deluded, I would be fine.’ Our own attachment to drama and conflict—our attachment to a particular and necessarily limited perspective—is mostly invisible to us.

Our efforts to solve a problem contain a wide range motivations—many of which are hidden from us. Often, the very actions I take to solve the problem are part of the problem. Einstein once said that problems cannot be solved at the level they were created. In politics and in society, it’s important to have inspiring speakers, writers and leaders that remind us of our values and encourage us to keep working for what we love. But there is a danger of getting get locked in the thrill (and thrall) of opposition.

Conflict itself is wildly stimulating. Conflict is passionate and enlivening. It may be unpleasant and scary, but it arouses us all. In speaking with friends about Trump and the Republican denial of Biden’s victory, I notice that we sometimes go into a trance state of anger, outrage and powerlessness. It’s like a switch gets flipped and we fall into a pit of darkness and despair. We wallow there for a while, then something else catches our attention and we go on.

Altered states are actually a normal part of human life. While we pride ourselves on being reasonable, most of us are occasionally or often carried away with some emotion or powerful idea. It’s not a problem, but it can be helpful to know when we have entered an altered state so we can be skillful in working with and living through their power. In altered states we have less access to our reasonable selves (pre-frontal cortex) as our brains have been flooded with dire messages of danger from our more primitive selves (amygdala).

Altered states are often a part of conflict. It can be important to know that they come and go. These aroused or depressed states have their own half-life. The brain is overwhelmed with danger signals for only a short time. If we can wait, even for a little, these trance states pass. (Hence the origin of the time-honored self-management technique of counting to ten before speaking in an aroused condition.) Altered states also give us access to powers and perspectives that can be necessary and helpful. But our whole person reasoning that engages heart, body and mind is not available to us in these states of disturbed consciousness.

In contrast to writing that polarizes, I want to draw attention to the writing of David Campt. His recent op-ed in the Atlanta Journal encourages us to shift from debate to dialogue. Of course, this is not possible with people whose position is hardened and who are not willing to engage in this way. But in Campt’s Ally Conversation Toolkit (ACT), he is clear that his goal is more limited. We will not be able engage everyone in a meaningful dialogue, no matter how skillful we are, but we certainly can engage some people—and this can make a huge difference.

‘The ACT Initiative aims to significantly reduce the percentage of white Americans who think that racism against white people is just as important a social problem as racism against people of color— 55 % in 2017. The goal of the initiative is to catalyze a cultural shift so that this figure is reduced to 45% by 2025.’

In a polarized society, it’s important to remember that there are always those whose attachment is more to an ongoing process of discerning truth rather than to maintaining a pure position. If we ourselves can stay in that group and work with others from different positions who share this value, then a shift of even 10% can radically alter our whole society.

In his piece in the Atlanta Journal, Campt mentions three helpful intentions as we try to move into dialogue with those near the middle who hold different positions:

1) Shift your intention from trying to demonstrate your position to searching for places of authentic connection
2) Tell stories. Be curious about the personal experiences that undergird your position and your partner’s position. Facts and figures are rarely helpful
3) Listen with heart.

We are all part of the fragile tribe of upright, mostly hairless, wanders who call themselves human beings. Forging empathic connections with people who see the world differently is the most powerful tool we have to find our way together through these disturbing times.