Of all the little trinkets we picked up in southeast Asia, this is by far my favorite.

It is a wood carving of a Thai monk that is begging for his food in the morning from the people, as all monks there do every morning.  Every time I look over at this little statue, I am reminded of our profound interdependence.  The monks that beg for food in the morning are not just depending upon the people to sustain their physical bodies, they are reminding themselves, and those who feed them, as well as those who witness, that there is no future, no eternity -- neither physically nor spiritually -- without each other.  Despite what appearances may be, my very being is dependent upon you, and yours upon me.  And every moment that we forget this, we bring more misery into our fragile human predicament.

I have not said a word about the CT school shootings up to this point -- there has been so much noise on that subject - much of it valid, heart-felt, authentic, and necessary - that I felt for me, this was a time to shut up, to merely reflect and listen.  But as I look at my little statue here, I will say only that when human beings remember by means of mass consciousness, that we are not islands, that nothing is truly our own, that on the most basic soul level WE NEED EACH OTHER, these things do not happen.

One morning in Vietnam a few days after the shooting, the bellhop helping us from our hotel room turned to us, and in broken English and with deep pity he said, "I am so sorry about what happened in your country. I saw it on the news and I had tears, like your president, Obama..."  This man, who probably makes about $5 a day, who lives in a country who's government oppresses its people in ways that you and I cannot truly conceive of, who most likely has had no formal education past the age of nine, who is helping us with our over-sized luggage out of a hotel room that costs more money for one night than he probably makes in a year, so we can go back to our freedoms and liberties in our super-power country...  HE takes pity on US...
Because he knows that all three of us in that room are really just beggars, relying on each other to get us through this next moment...

He is Like the Rain

He is like the rain.

And You,
You are the fire crackling under the mantle,
You are the hearth,
The warmth of the sun on my face,
A blanket wrapped tight
around my body,
You are a place I call home.

But he is like the rain.
Outside it washes over us
I hear it slapping the roof
and clanking on the shutters,
clamoring for a moment's notice.

You are I are safe in here.
I step inside of you and shut the door
and it's warm like fresh baked bread
Like six o'clock sand on a Seychelles shore
Like my own womb

But he is like the rain.
Always present,
sometimes just waiting to form
I can hear him outside...
I won't get caught in it!
I now come prepared
with You as my shepherd
You, as my shelter
You, my ward and my word,
You,
my Heart.

And as for him?
Well,

he is like the rain

On Bullying

On my walk the other day, I was thinking about the bullying that I experienced growing up, and the teachers that passively participated (or even actively, occasionally), even encouraged, the behavior.  Perhaps they felt kids will be kids, life is cruel, or maybe this was some kind "tough love" - who knows?  But now, by the grace of God, there has finally been awakening in our education system that bullying is a very real problem that can lead to the most tragic of circumstances.  So I thought to myself, if I were a teacher now, and I observed bullying in my classroom, what would I do?  Sure I could reprimand the bully, even hold them in detention, but I know full well that all that would do is ensure that the bullying continued on where I could not observe it - perhaps it would even be worse for the bullied because now they've gotten the bully in trouble.  So what can be done?  Well, I had a few thoughts and wanted to share them, in hopes that perhaps they can be of some help to someone somewhere...

First of all, there are situations that teachers can create without meaning to, that lay the foundation for bullying, or even if it's not explicit, hurt a child's self-esteem.  For instance, when I was a kid, in gym class the teacher would pick team captains (usually the two best male athletes in the class) and then leave to them to choose their teammates.  I was always picked last (unless by the some miracle there happened to be a morbidly obese kid in my class - then I was picked second to last).  Obviously, being picked last every day can do nothing good for a child's self-esteem.  Clearly those gym teachers were not considering the fact that child/adolescent athletics are supposed to help build up a child's image of themselves, not cripple it.  Thankfully, I have heard that this kind of thing is no longer a common practice in schools.  I assume it has been replaced with the teacher picking teams at random.  But I imagine that had my gym teachers picked the teams (or let us pick out of hat or something), that whoever's team I ended up on would still have responded with obnoxious sighs, or comments along the lines of "Ew!", "Damn it!", etc.

So what is to be done in a case like this?  I began to picture myself relegated to a team, and one of my oh-so-cool peers expressing his distaste for it....  If I were the teacher, I would have given us BOTH detention.  But not just any detention - a special detention.  I would have said to the bully - let's call him "Seth" - "Seth, thank you for comments.  Going forward, for the rest of the year, whatever team you are on, Jaime will be on as well.  In addition, you will both spend a half hour with me everyday after school for the next week, wherein Seth, you will help teach Jaime how to play [insert sport here] better, so she can be a more valuable teammate to you."  In doing this, Seth is going to have to get to know Jaime, and actually be forced to help her.  After this, unless Seth is a total sociopath, he will no longer be able to look Jaime in the eye and bully her - in getting to know her, he will no longer be able to objectify her, and once someone is a person, rather than object of amusement, bullying loses all its fun.

But what about Jaime? She didn't do anything wrong, right? Why does she have to have detention with someone she probably can't stand?  Well, as a girl who was tortured by the students in her class growing up, on a constant basis (to the point of contemplating suicide), I can tell you that as an adult, I came to realize that even the bullied are not purely victims.  A bully/bullied relationship is a two way street, and there are always two sides to the story.  It is almost never simply because the other kids are "just jealous" - that's just what Mom's tell their children to make them feel better.

So what did I do to bring on this bullying? To bring on the contempt from my peers.  Well, for one, I was desperate for them to like me, and this was as obvious as it was pathetic.  At the same time, I also believed in a way that I was better than them.  They were stupid jocks, and I was really smart.  My attitude also displayed this - a sense of social inferiority, but a belief of inherent superiority.  They were horrible to me, but I wasn't kind or respectful to them either.  I remember in the 8th grade there was this one kid who was friends with all the guys who bullied me, but he rarely made a comment himself.  One day, I got up from my desk to go up to the front of the class and his desk was blocking my way a little bit so I just pushed by it, moving his desk while I did so, and not even looking at him.  "You can say 'excuse me'!" he chided.  There he was, a soldier of the enemy, accusing ME of being rude.  ...but he was right.  Of course, I didn't get it then.  It never occurred to me that perhaps if I had made an effort to be kind to these people, to feel compassion for them instead of defensively assuming myself to be far superior, perhaps things could have gone differently.  My point in all this is that despite appearances, the bullied is usually unconsciously a co-conspirator in their situation, not purely the victim.  And as such, they too can benefit from getting to know their peer, who they surely also objectify as "the enemy", "the stupid jock", etc.

This method can also obviously be used in situations outside of gym class as well.  For instance, let's say a student is being bullied in Chemistry class.  If the bullied child happens to be a good student and the bully not, the consequences could be that they have to tutor the bully until a certain test score is achieved.  If they are both average, make them study together after school until a grade a certain grade is reached by both.  Or make them work on a project together.  Whatever it is, the idea is to simply to move them from seeing each other as objects to knowing each other as human beings.  And if there are multiple bullies, just do this with the leader - and there is always a leader.

So that's my two cents - may it be in some way of service.

Me (9th or 10th grade)

Daily Prayer of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama

With the determination to accomplish
The highest welfare of all sentient beings,
Who surpass even a wish-granting jewel,
I will learn to hold them supremely dear.

Whenever I associate with others I will learn
To think of myself as the lowest amongst all
And respectfully hold others to be supreme
From the very depths of my heart.

In all actions I will learn to search into my mind
As and soon as a disturbing emotion arises,
Endangering myself and others,
I will firmly face and avert it.

I will learn to cherish ill-natured beings
And those oppressed by strong
misdeeds and sufferings,
As if I had found a precious
Treasure difficult to find.

When others out of envy treat me badly
With abuse, slander, and the like,
I will learn to take all loss
And offer the victory to them.

In short I will learn to offer
everyone without exception
All help and happiness directly and indirectly,
And respectfully take upon myself
All harm and suffering of my mothers.

I will learn to keep all those practices
Undefiled by the stains of
the eight worldly concerns,
And by understanding all
phenomena as like illusions,
Be released from the bondage of attachment.

On racism...

I want to talk about a topic that is maybe even more dangerous than politics and religion; I want to talk about race and racism in the right here, right now.

In the year 2012, in the Northeast, it is almost taboo to say that we have a racism problem.  New York City especially has an incredibly diverse population.  The city is overwhelming liberal and in many ways one of the most "progressive" places in the world.  

I grew up in a small town about 20 minutes outside of NYC, where the population was 99% white, but I was convinced that racism was no longer a large scale issue in this country.  Sure, there were racists - you can find crazies anywhere.  And of course in the South you would find more bigotry then in the rest of the county, but overall, I believed - I was taught - that racism was problem of the past.  We celebrated "Black History month" in school, racist slurs were no longer culturally acceptable, black people and white people freely shared all the same facilities, and black people were treated no differently than white people when engaging in the regular functions in our society, for instance, a black person could go to a white teller in a bank, or a white salesperson in a store, and be treated exactly the same as those individuals would treat white people (in most cases, anyway).  So what was the problem?  When I was a freshman in college I had a Sociology professor that said to our class, "America is a racist country."  I was extremely offended by this and argued with her that while certainly there were "racists" in this country, "racist" is not an appropriate adjective to define our country overall - this is the land of the free, home of the brave, I have a dream....  I chalked it up to the fact that I was in California at the time, and Californians were always over the top about these things...

Fast forward 12 years.  I'm back home in NY.  My job takes me to multiple NYC public schools daily (all in Queens) and I have been struck by what I've seen.  It took me a few months to really come to terms with it, but it is impossible now to deny: while not legally, NYC public schools are, in effect, segregated.  There are two kinds of schools: white schools and black schools.  I had always assumed that one of the great benefits about raising children in an urban environment like NYC was the racial and cultural diversity they experience growing up.  But I have realized that despite Queens being the most diverse area in all of the U.S., for the kids growing up here, there is little to no integration with other races.  Granted, people here come from all over world, so the white kids probably get more exposure to other cultures (Greek, Russian, Italian, Indian, Asian, Middle Eastern etc.) then they would otherwise, but when it comes to black and white, things haven't actually changed much since the 1960's: the segregation still exists - we're just not supposed talk about it.

P.S. 15Q

Trey Whitfield School, Brooklyn, NY

P.S. 124 Flushing,Queens

Forest Hills (Queens) School Chldren

P.S. Q30 - First Grade - 1969 (5 years after segregation in public schools was legally banned)

There are all kinds of neighborhoods in Queens and I get to see all of them.  Yesterday, I was in Forest Hills Gardens, one of the wealthiest places in NY State (the streets are actually private, even though it's not a gated community).  The day before that I was in Jamaica aka "the hood".  Where I live in Astoria, it's mostly yuppies and old Greek/Italian families and I feel safe walking by myself on the street at 2am.  Down the road a few minutes are the projects, and that area has all the stereo-typical issues you would expect.  The populations of these not-so-nice areas are predominantly African American.  I keep hearing the lyrics from Tupac's "Changes" in my head: "It ain't a secret, don't conceal the fact, the penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks."

The "Merriam-Webster" dictionary defines racism as: (1) a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race (2) racial prejudice or discrimination

I don't think this classical definition is inclusive enough for this millennium.  It seems to me there exists now a post-modern or "neo-racism", and it has more to do with assumptions and stereotypes, then judgment on the overall worth of human being.  This is the truly insidious racism.  It's the racism that infects even the "liberal", "open-minded", and "progressive" people.  

This neo-racism is the force behind the idea that because of the color of your skin, you are supposed to act a certain or think a certain way.  Think of Carlton Banks from the Fresh Prince of Bellair - Will Smith's character was always teasing him for being a white man trapped in a black man's body - an oreo cookie.

Or what about Eminem? Even though his music was endorsed, promoted, and produced by Dr. Dre, he will still never have the kind of foothold in the African American community that a black hip hop artist might.  

There is also a term that I grew up with for when a white person acts like a black person (whatever that means...) - we used to called them "wiggas":

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what two words were merged to create this lovely term.

This is the racism that underlies the assumption that because of cultural differences connected to race in this country (which developed as a result of the jim crow laws, etc.), there are insurmountable divides that prevent bi-racial relationships of any kind (love, friendship, colleagues, adoptive children, etc.) from being the norm.  And in this scenario, there are no innocents; we are all complicit (with the exception of a very small minority that is working to promote change in this area).

When I reflect on my personal experience with race, I see the evolution in my own thinking as I assimilated into this culture from childhood to adulthood.  From the time I was 3 years old, I had a live-in Jamaican nanny named Beryl, who took care of me while my parents (and after their divorce, my Mom) was at work.  She was not educated so she was unable to help me with my homework.  She didn't drive.  And I was the only one that could understand her accent.  With a short break during the 2 years that my Mom and I moved to LA, she was my primary caretaker from the age of 3 to 14, after which she moved out, but would still come one day a week to clean the house.  Beryl loved me very much.  I was her "lick-ul (little) Jame-james".  For my birthday every year she would make sure she got me a card, and gave me $25.  (She made $300 a week, most of which she sent back to her family in Jamaica, and the rest of which she used to pay rent in Brooklyn, where she lived on the weekends).  As for me, I definitely cared for her, but ask me how many family pictures she's in? Zero.  Ask me how many times we invited her out to dinner, or even to sit down with us to eat a meal she made?  Zero.  Ask me if I ever saw her apartment or even had any idea where in Brooklyn she lived or what she did on the weekends?  I didn't.  She was a fixture in our household for over 15 years - and as I look back, I am horrified, because that is exactly how we treated her - as a fixture.  As...the help.  My stomach is turning as I write this...

When I was in the first and second grade at a private school in LA, I became friends with these two black girls, both named Tiffany.  I came to believe that black people were much nicer than white people, because most of the white kids in my school were snotty brats who would leave me out of things, while T&T just accepted me as I was made me feel welcome.  As I started to get a little bit older, I found that I was more attracted to black boys then white boys.  My first boyfriend in the 6th grade was black (he was not from my town, of course).  In the 7th grade I also had a huge crush on this older boy, Jareek (one of the only 3 kids black kids at my school).

I continued to be attracted to black guys as I got older, but the playing field started to even between them and the white guys, and slowly I started to find myself less and less attracted to black men.  Right after college I worked at a mortgage company (pre-crisis) and I ended up making out with a colleague of mine one day after work who was a big (built like a football player) black man, with dark skin, and very full lips.  His name was "Rock".  

That was it for me.  I remember sitting in his car after we kissed and thinking to myself, "well, there's really nowhere to go from here."  It wasn't like we could actually date...  The options were push it until we slept together, or walk away now.  I knew there was no future there - we lived in two (or 'too') different worlds.

I pretty much ceased to be attracted to black men after that.  It's not a physical thing - I still love the contrast between a darker skinned black man's skin and his teeth/white's of his eyes. I still think high cheek bones with a broad nose makes for a strikingly beautiful face.  It is not skin color, or any inherent traits that kept me at a distance after Rock - it is the cultural divide.  I have been brainwashed.  I have drank the kool-aid and bought into the idea that a) a skin color can dictate which part of American culture you "belong to", and b) the cultural differences between 'us' and 'them' are too vast to ever bridge that gap, to ever find enough common ground to build a relationship.  And by the way, it is not enough for a white person to say, "but I have a couple black friends..." or visa versa - exceptions do not nullify the rules of the norm.

These things are not easy for me to say - I am embarrassed and ashamed.  But they're real, and whether they want to step up and admit it or not, most of people I know, black or white, feel the same way.

It is no longer acceptable to me that white Americans and black Americans should live "separate but equal" lives.  It is not acceptable to me that classrooms, offices, churches, movie theaters, non-profit events, etc. that I walk into should be overwhelmingly one race or another.  There are three places in NYC where you can find a genuine mix of people - the subway, the bus, and the dmv.  This is how those other places I mentioned should look. 

Now of course, people have differences - in personality, in culture, in interests, etc. and naturally people will make friends with those they feel they have the most in common with, but this is not an excuse to throw up invisible walls.  

So what is my point here?  I guess my point is just that we have a real problem here, and we need to stop being afraid to recognize it.  As they say in AA, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.  And I'm also saying that this problem is not acceptable, and it will not go away by itself.  We need to take steps (after we figure out what those steps are), to create genuine integration and re-write those tapes that play in the heads of the American people, repeating over and over, "We're not like them."

"The highest happiness of man is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable."   ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Occupy

I was thinking about Ghandi's words yesterday:

and it got me to thinking, why? What does he mean exactly? How is my personal behavior and attitude going to  make any significant effect on the world at large?  I started thinking about the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement and how there is something about it that doesn't sit right with me - and doesn't have to do with the fact that they have no real demands or suggestions for how things can change, though I think such things would certainly help their cause.  On the one hand, it is invigorating for me to see people finally standing up and saying, "Hey! Something is wrong here!"  I think that is certainly a step in the right direction.  But the way the whole thing has been executed so far comes across to me like, "We're angry!  It's not fair! Why shouldn't we have everything we want! Off with their heads!" and then they point their fingers at anyone and everyone that has more than them.  They are lashing out against corporate greed, but what I see, honestly, is greed.  You don't have to be rich to be greedy.  It is like a child who throws a temper tantrum because another child got a bigger piece of cake.  There is a covetousness about it...

So I think back about the most successful movements against oppression, and I think of Ghandi and Martin.

What was it that made their movements so powerful?  In my opinion, it was that they came from a place of love, not hate, of disappointment not anger.  Ghandi did not say, "Screw the British! They're all a-holes! They took everything from us!"  Instead he looked at them as human beings, and he appealed to their compassion.  He sat in front them and forced them to take a good hard look at the suffering they were causing, and ultimately, he succeeded in eliciting change, because his actions spoke to the humanity within them.

Ghandi - Hunger Strike - 1932

In the same sense, Martin did not say, "Screw the white man!"  He said, "I have a dream that one day black and white children will walk down the street hand in hand." 

US National Guard troops block off Beale Street as Civil Rights marchers pass by on March 29, 1968. (Memphis, Tennessee, USA) 

What both these wonderful men were saying to their oppressors was, "I love you, because I love all human beings.  I want us to walk together in harmony.  I am disappointed in your actions but I know that they come from a place of ignorance.  Let me show you just what you are doing, because I know that once you look us in the eye and you see our suffering, your humanity will take over, and you will no longer be able to inflict pain upon us."

You see, at the end of the day, it's not the laws, or the policies, or economic system that is the problem.  Those are only symptoms of the problem.  The problem is we view ourselves as separate from other human beings.  We are concerned only with our own lives and the lives of those that are closely intertwined with ours.  "Love your neighbor as yourself."  "You want to be enlightened? Feed people. Serve people."  The only way there is going to be more equality is if we stop looking at others as outside of ourselves; we start to see our own interdependence.  It's not about, "Oh, I feel like being nice today.  I'll give the homeless guy some change."  It's about, "That homeless man is me.  I am him.  We are connected by our humanity.  He is my brother.  I can do nothing else but to help him."

So back to the 'Occupy' movement, I feel what is missing is the Love.  I feel this movement will move forward by leaps and bounds when they figure out that the 1% is not the faction of evil-doers in this country - they're just people.  Just like you and me.  They struggle like us.  They are ignorant like us.  They need to be shown the harsh truth, but in a loving way.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.


If you want equality, if you want people to treat you with care, concern, and compassion, to look at you as a brother or sister, not an 'Other', then you must treat them with that same love that you are asking of them.

Fierce Grace

Was watching the documentary "Fierce Grace" with Ram Dass yesterday:

He was talking about his Guru, Maharji

Ram Dass & Maharji

One day, when he was alone with Maharaji, Ram Dass asked, "What do I need to do to become enlightened?"
Maharji said, "Serve people. Feed people."


Serve people. Feed People.

I keep coming back to this poem in my head over and over...  I know it's a famous one, but I only recently discovered it, and it has impressed itself on me..

i carry your heart with me
                by E.E. Cummings



i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
                                  i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

This is how God speaks to us... But we don't understand...

The other night I was sitting in my room and I looked up at the big picture frame hanging above my bed. It is of one of the photos taken as part of the Ashes & Snow exhibit.

This is it:

I have had this picture hanging above my bed now for about 5 years but for some reason when I saw it that night, I felt the need to go back and review the whole exhibit online.  In doing so I found a note about the animals in the exhibit - some of the animals in the photos were trained; others were wild. Then I googled "elephants", wondering if I might be able to determine which group they fell into.

What I found were several articles talking not only about how smart elephants were, but that they are the only animals besides us humans that bury their dead. They also experience grief, joy, and (this was the "Wow" moment for me-) they are capable of compassion even for other species, and even in some cases where the compassionate act requires risking their life.

Up until this point, I had thought that what separated humans from other animals, what made us more than just really smart primates, is that we had the capacity to transcend our instinct for survival.  We are capable of putting our own lives on the line for the sake of others or for things we believe in.  But it turns out that elephants are capable of this too - not only of trading a primary survival instinct for a secondary or tertiary one (that is, not only would they put their individual survival on the line for the sake of their kins' survival, or even for their own species' survival) - they are actually capable of the kind of compassion that is purely for it's own sake.  At least, I cannot come up with any other reason why an elephant would risk its life over and over again to pull a baby rhino out of a hole it was stuck in, while it's mother continued to charge the elephant every time it went to help (a field researcher working on the "Save the Elephants" team reported this incident.)

Soo, a day or two later, I was flipping through the channel guide and I saw that there was a documentary on the "Secret Lives of Elephants", which I then taped.

A day or two after that, I went to Lincoln Center to visit my old college and as I came out of the subway, what do I see?  Two life size statues of elephants planted in the middle of the 59th St. traffic circle. "That's weird," I thought to myself, "I was just thinking about elephants...".  I decided to take a picture:

As I walked along Central Park South to another subway line, just people watching, etc.  I glance over and in a window that I'm walking by at that very moment is this display:

Seeing as how this was starting to get pretty odd, I decided to take a picture of that too.

OK, so now I'm really starting to wonder - is there some kind of pattern here? What's with all the elephants?  I get to the N train and I walk down to the platform, where I begin to pace up and down, as I wait for the train, continuing to wonder about the elephants.  As I am turning the question over in mind, I look up and see this advertisement:

A message?  I dunno.  I take another picture and  keep walking. 

Next poster:

This is an ad for a TV show that I "happened to" set to record the day before.  The series premiere would be that night.  The Fox website says the show is about a boy who, "possesses an extraordinary gift—the ability to perceive the seemingly hidden patterns that connect every life on the planet."

I keep walking.  Next poster:

That was it.  There were a few more posters along the wall, but nothing that I perceived to be part of this...trail?  I don't know what other words to use.

The experience left me in a state of bewilderment...and wonder. A quote from the very beginning of Elie Wiesel's, "Night" also kept running through my head:  Moshe the Beadle says to Elie,

"Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him...That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!"