​     I have no Palestinian friends. I have Palestinian colleagues and acquaintances whom I like and respect but I have no Palestinian friends. I have many Jewish friends and some Israeli friends, most of them left-leaning, some left-leaning and Zionist, some even hawkishly Zionist, and all of them sensitive to anti-Semitism and aware of the preciousness of a home country for the Jewish people, given Jewish history. Many have heard me express my questions and concerns, some since the 1980s, about the dispossession and second-class status of Palestinians but I have not been a vocal public advocate for Palestinian lives, rights, and sovereign status until the beginning of the war on Gaza in October 2023, in part because I was conscious of the deep collective hurt suffered by Jewish people from mainly European anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, all of which drove Zionism and subsequently the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
     The war on Gaza started in response to the horrific violence, killings, and kidnappings by Hamas and associated militias on October 7, 2023. Why then, you might ask, did I not offer unambiguous support for Israeli “defensive” action? Because the violence against, and dispossession of, Palestinians has had a long history — too long — that is so much more than a defensive war against Hamas that started in October 2023. Witness, for example, increasing settler encroachments and violence in the West Bank, plausibly called settler terrorism, from well before Oct 7, 2023 and escalating with impunity in parallel with the war on Gaza. Regarding the war on Gaza, anyone who cares about that part of the world knows the massive death and destruction suffered by civilian Gazans at the hands of the Israeli army, a more than thirty-three-fold collective punishment whipped up and orchestrated by an incompetent, corrupt, manipulative, and cruel leader. I am no apologist for Hamas, but anyone who knows the history of the last 15 years in Israel knows that the elected governments of Israel have done more than their share to contribute to the current destruction of Gaza and the mutual fear and distrust of Israelis and Palestinians, much of it fueled by the policies of and military support from successive US governments.
     If we, as citizens of the United States, must hold ourselves accountable for our elected governments — even if we did not vote for this or that President or this or that legislator — and Gazans are held accountable for Hamas, surely Israelis must hold themselves accountable for their elected governments!
    But what does all of this have to do with two flags? Well, as part of doing more public advocacy for Palestinian lives and rights, I joined the Land Day demonstration in New York city on March 30, 2025. There was a very large number of pro-Palestine people in attendance, and a few pro-Israel people. I stood with the demonstration for about an hour. During that time, while I heard no one from either side explicitly calling for the killing of people on the other side, I did hear aggressive words from a few people, both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, that proclaimed the other side as an enemy to be excluded from the speaker’s ethical or moral circle of reference. These angry and bitter words, coming as they do from fear, frustration, and grief, take a toll on the speakers and the listeners. When I heard these words from pro-Israel protestors, I compartmentalized, and mostly ignored the words and the speakers. But when I heard very strident and adversarial words from pro-Palestine speakers, I felt ambivalent, confident in my decision to be part of this public advocacy, but some of those words did not represent me.
    I strongly believe that at this point — when President Trump speaks of shipping Gazans off to some coerced or bribed place, and building luxury resorts on their land; when pro-Palestine voices are silenced in multiple unfair, cruel, and murky ways — those of us who care for Palestinian lives and rights must show up publicly. But I am not against Israelis or Jewish people, not at all. I do believe that the Palestinian flag must be able to fly as freely and proudly as the Israeli flag and I do believe that the Israeli flag must be able to fly in safety and friendship with the proud and free Palestinian flag. You do not have to tell me all the ways this imagined future would be hard, hard, hard to get to. But they have to figure this out — Israelis and Palestinians — and from the Palestinians and Israelis I know, I believe that they have the capacity despite their deep fear, distrust, anger, and grief. Certainly both sides know fear, distrust, anger, and grief, know how each of these feels! At this time, however, Palestinians have lost a lot more — have suffered at least a factor of 30 more casualties of children, women, people, homes — and Israelis have grabbed a lot more. An honest and fair give and take will be hard, hard, hard.
     At the demonstration, pro-Palestine demonstrators carried Palestinian flags, pro-Israel demonstrators carried Israeli flags. I had a watermelon slice pin on my bag. Could I have put a blue Star of David next to it? No. At this time, the extreme asymmetry of power, influence, constraint, and suffering, dictates that I must unambiguously show my support for Palestinian lives and rights. 
     Perhaps one day I can wear a slice of watermelon pin or a Palestinian flag pin proudly next to a blue Star of David pin or an Israeli flag pin at a celebration of a fair and viable peace, in which the next generation of Israelis will know Arabic in addition to Hebrew and read the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, and Palestinian children — already often bilingual in Arabic and Hebrew — will analyze and understand the history of their region not only through the work of Palestinian writers but through the novels of Amos Oz and David Grossman. This is a dream that is realizable.

​
​     In Kairos (2021), Jenny Erpenbeck (translator: Michael Hofmann) writes through, and of, her character, Katharina:
     "Wolfgang Mattheuer, Sculpture, “Step of the Century.” Heil Hitler with the right, clenched-fist salute with the left, equal parts goose step and genuflection, or is the distorted figure collapsing? The center has given way, the head slumps. The giant scrawny figure takes a great leap forward and at the same time he falls back. Just as she’s feeling now." 
     I knew nothing about Step of the Century — Jahrhundertschritt by Wolfgang Mattheuer, first exhibited in Leipzig, East Germany in 1985 — until I read Katharina’s note on her visit to the Tenth Art Exhibition in Dresden. Erpenbeck’s novel, set in East Berlin in the late 80s through the fall of the Wall, courses through longing, abasement, exploitation, and beauty in the dialectic of the two main characters — Katharina, enthralled by Hans. The brilliance of the novel lies in how well Erpenbeck uses their wearying relationship as the warp on which to weave personal and social history meeting prophecy.
     This phrasing of history meeting prophecy is drawn from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) which couldn’t be more different from Kairos. They don’t even share a similar sorrow for the beauty and degradation of life. Beauty in Kairos appears despite the degradation, somewhat like the moments of grace in Wim Wenders’ (West German) film Wings of Desire (1987), in both cases tracing the persistence of living in broken, divided Berlin with its broken relationships, ruined buildings, betrayals, dead bodies, shrapnel of history, shame, desire, daily life, and aspiration to love. Erpenbeck quotes Friedrich Hölderlin* through Hans through Katharina, “once I lived, like gods, what needs there more.” Erpenbeck’s Hans, or Hans’s Erpenbeck, points out the commas to propose, “not a comparison with any idealized divine life, but the question whether being alive is what makes a god.”
     Living itself is where Berlin meets the profoundly alive environments of Kimmerer’s beloved world of complex ecologies and natural reciprocities. Mind you Kimmerer, looking to repair earth and humans, is openly aware of the dispossession and brokenness that pock the foundations of contemporary ecologies and their human societies. Her scientific and spiritual narrative seeks to restore symbiosis and reciprocity between human and non-human nature, calling for one retouching of the earth at a time, one renewed relationship at a time, one cycle of reciprocity at a time. At this time of increased strife and threat, with potential for extensive conflict and environmental damage throughout the planet, reading Sweetgrass is nourishing for me. While Kairos pushed me to question and see — judgement-no judgement-yes-no!-yes — Sweetgrass invites me to hope and to touch.
     Each book has a deep ethos of paying attention to, and valuing, non-consumerist living: in Kairos with attention to the richness of the human mind, the desires of the human body, and the complexity, even beauty, of human longing and comprehension especially as expressed in art and in Katharina’s and Hans’s relationship; in Sweetgrass with conscious recognition of and gratitude to sources, and open joy at touching what is alive. From Kimmerer I learned to touch the wood of my chair, thank the tree from which it is made, recognize that the tree gave up its life for the objects I and other humans use, and to ask myself what do I give in return. Like Kimmerer, I am a bit stymied by plastics.** Quite apart from the toxicities of the manufacture, use, and disposal of plastics, their natural provenance — which has implications for paths of reciprocity — is unclear, though Kimmerer does make an effort to see and acknowledge “the diatoms and marine invertebrates who two hundred million years ago lived well and fell to the bottom of an ancient sea, where under great pressure of a shifting earth they became oil that was pumped from the ground to a refinery where it was broken down and then polymerized to make the case of my laptop or the cap of an aspirin bottle — but being mindful in the vast network of hyper industrialized goods really gives me a headache.” A Black Ash basket provides a simpler example. She quotes John Pigeon, a Potawatomi basket-maker instructing aspiring basket-makers: “slow down — it’s thirty years of a tree’s life you’ve got in your hands there. Don’t you owe it a few minutes to think about what you’ll do with it?” Pigeon’s question gets me thinking about the two million years behind the plastic of my refillable fountain pen.
     When, earlier in this essay, I used the phrasing of “history converging with prophecy” I mentioned that I took the phrasing from Sweetgrass, and used it with reference to the agonistic 20th Century in German/European/World history as expressed in Kairos and by Step of the Century. Kimmerer uses the phrasing quite differently. Drawing on the words of Anishinaabe elder Eddie Benton-Banai, she tells us the first work of First Man Nanabozho was “to walk through the world that Skywoman had danced into life… in a such a way ‘that each step is a greeting to Mother Earth.’” She adds: 
     "In the way of linear time, you might hear Nanabozho’s stories as mythic lore of history, a recounting of the long-ago past and how things came to be. But in circular time, these stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come. If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophecy converge — the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead…. Nanabozho did his best with the original instructions and tried to become native to his new home. His legacy is that we are still trying."
      Wolfgang Mattheuer writes about the same man, differently. Referring to Step of the Century, he says:
     "This nightmare figure, as the embodiment of absurdity, is ‘that conflict between the longing mind and the disappointing world,’ it is ‘… homesickness for unity, this fragmented universe, and the contradiction that connects both’ (Albert Camus) and which all too often erupts into aggression and destructiveness, as a centrifugal force that tears the individual apart. No attempt at self-discovery is successful anymore." (Mattheuer in Wolfgang Mattheuer (1997) Ursula Mattheuer-Neustädt (ed.). Bilder als Botschaft – Die Botschaft der Bilder, as quoted and cited in the Wikipedia page — as available on February 26, 2025 — on Step of the Century)
     Contrast Mattheuer’s image, resonant in Erpenbeck’s Hans, of the agonized individual pitted against the “disappointing world” and “fragmented universe” with the fundamentally social First Man who is enjoined to live in respectful relationship with Skywoman’s creation.
    In Erpenbeck’s and Kimmerer’s works there are different ontologies — theories of being — at play: one animated by an agonistic dialectic of domination-submission-learning, as lived out in unrelenting detail in the relationship of Hans and Katharina; and the other weaving pragmatic material reciprocity with conscious attention to and gratitude for respectful and sustainable relationship, for example (even) between hunter and hunted or forager and foraged. One could suppose Donald Trump and Elon Musk are conscripts in an agonistic socio-political dialectic. Through their domination there will be change and learning, at great cost. Meanwhile, the voices of gratitude, respect, and sustainability tend to get lost in our complex anthropocene world that slips in and out of the delusions of machine learning. But we are not simply handlers of intelligent machines and to live as humans we — some of us, some parts of us — must and will return to sensing and expressing gratitude, respect, and sustainability in relationships with each other and with the non-human natural world. While recognizing the drive and pull of the agonistic, indeed not denying or shying away from it, how do we keep alive and amplify the sound of  positive mutuality? 
     We are in a time of dire change. The change will happen. We are not going back: not to the golden past of MAGA dreams; not to the old institutional stability of late 20th Century democracies, international trade, and international law; not to what we hoped might become a straightforward moral path to fairness and kindness. We will draw on the roots and lessons of the past, yes, but already we are building the future. As we push back against the excesses of the Musk-Trump-Vance government, how are we shaping what comes next?
    Kimmerer retells a story she heard from Sakokwenionkwas, also known as Tom Porter, a member of the Mohawk Bear Clan: 
     "The twin grandsons of Skywoman had long struggled over the making and unmaking of the world. Now their struggle came down to this one [gambling] game. [If one twin won] all the life that had been created would be destroyed. [If the other twin won] the beautiful earth would remain. They played and played and finally they came to the final roll. The twin who made sweetness in the world sent his thoughts out to all the living beings he had made and asked them to help, to stand on the side of life. Tom told us how in the final roll… all the members of Creation joined their voices together and gave a mighty shout for life. … The choice is always there.”
     Of course, few of us, if any, are just one twin or the other.
     And the twins are still in here and out there, playing for high stakes.
    In Trump’s and Musk’s 2025 United States, I read Katharina’s interpretation of Step of the Century as an uttering of history and prophecy — looking back from 1988 to (1920s) man staggering between left and right, looking forward from 1988 to (the present) man staggering between right and left. But, I remind myself, right and left are not just one point or a straight line. Right is a wide 180° angle and left is a wide 180° angle.
     Before closing, a comment on the number of men in this essay (that draws primarily on two books by two women). I grew up questioning the evident primacy of men as writers, speakers, and characters with agency. Though the stories and histories I grew up with were always more complicated than the apparent primacy of men, I learnt that the structures of primacy have deep linguistic roots, and draw sustenance from language. While the effects of structures of primacy are sometimes benign and even very positive for some people, we know that, unquestioned, they can become scaffolding for layers of inequity, hence this noting of the recurrence of men in this essay.
      Several times “men” show up in this essay -- especially with reference to Erpenbeck’s and Mattheuer’s work -- leaning in the direction of “toxic masculinity." Mulling “toxic masculinity,” especially today, is a rabbit hole. After trying several times to write some of the mess of my thoughts, I find myself tied up in knots that I can untie concisely only with something platitudinous like: even in Erpenbeck’s work and certainly in Kimmerer’s, men, indeed all of us, are gendered beings (and, I would add, not just binary and heterosexual!) and also human. We are all Nanabozho, we are all Skywoman, we are all taking a step, all potentially falling into a need for creativity: but differently. 
     Step of the Century is not the end of the story.
     Nanabozho kept trying. We keep trying.

*Friedrich Hölderlin was a German poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who, among other things, had his hopes for a new society dashed by the excesses of the French Revolution, as discussed by Erpenbeck’s Hans and his therapist. I mention this because in Erpenbeck’s book, as in Sweetgrass but differently, every narrative turn in Kairos spirals to that meeting of history and prophecy, curling into past, present and future for man, human, collectivity, life.
** While stymied by plastics, Kimmerer is defeated by Ding-dongs and Cheetos, which she calls “an ecological mystery.”

#midwinter 
Or Nature’s Plotlines (from Jenny Xie, through Latif Askia Ba)

    Some mornings ago when I started writing this essay, it was 9 degrees F (-12.7 degrees C) in New York city. President Donald Trump’s government was unsurprising. 
     Friends and commentators began predicting the end of the global order “as we know it,” of multilateralism with the dominance of the United States, surrounded by its circles of allies, the closer and more stable allies tending to be European and richer, and outer circles a motley crew of more recently independent states some of them with democracies rendered precarious by Cold War games. Multilateralism built a 20th century web of relationships, interdependencies, and “international law.” Over the course of the 20th century, especially after WWII, international law got more specific and codified than in the past, crafted multilaterally by and for apparently sacralized “nation-states,” whether these were states formed in earlier centuries by increasingly centralized and high-language governments that pulled together contiguous communities with related dialects and customs, or states formed more recently with the breakdown of monarchies and empires. Relatively free trade, under the economic power of the United States and its allies and economic partners, flourished in this world of nation-states and multilateralism.
​     Entwined with this multilateralism, international law, and free trade, was the dominance of democracy as a form of polity and governance, mostly based on the evolved European model, but also drawing on local forms and practices. Over centuries people in different parts of the world struggled to get “democracy,” a system in which the will of many replaces the power of a few. Increasingly the promise of democracy swelled to a system in which, aspirationally, ordinary people can participate in choosing and changing their leaders and the policies to which they are subject. In the 21st century, especially over the last two decades, with the rise and successes of populist leaders and governments in many parts of the world, diverse observers — including “experts;” ordinary people like my octogenarian mother; and people like the romantic and somewhat anachronistic Curtis Yarvin — have rung the alarm for a crisis of democracy. Mind you, people are ringing the alarm from and in different directions.
    Reflecting on the two phrases — “end of the global order as we know it,” and “crisis of democracy” — draws my attention to structural flaws in these interlinked systems despite their many good intentions and positive effects, both potential and realized. While democracy in general is likely to be more fair than the dice-throw of effective-to-ineffective benevolent despotism or efficient-to-ruthlessly-uncaring authoritarianism, from its beginning it has leaned to protect the interests of the better resourced in wealth, power, and education. And the global order as we know it — meaning the post-WWII global order that was initiated primarily by the winning Allies headed by the United States to stimulate recovery and prevent another world war —  has similar structural flaws to democracy. Indeed, in both cases the flaws are recurrent through history; the larger a state or polity, especially in terms of population, the more vulnerable it is to these structural flaws. 
     Over the decades, the post-WWII global order has served the wealthy, powerful, and academically educated more than the less resourced or other-skilled, whether in the “global south” or “south in the global north,” the last referring to the socio-economically vulnerable in the “global north” whether immigrant or not. There were murmurings of crises in the global order in the critique and defense of “globalization” but, by and large, for those who fear the end of the global order of the late 20th century, the order was a decent, rational, and corrigible frame for “progress.” I weigh down all these words with quotation marks to reflect how they are weighed down by ideological and partisan meanings that have accrued over decades; these and other potentially tumbleweed words have become widgets in the technical minds and language of “experts,” and signals in the common language of like-minded people.
    Through the crisis of democracy, not just in a single nation state but as a dominant form of governance in a globalized world, the chaos of (potential) breakdown of same-old democracy in individual states connects to increasing cracks in global order. Now the turning of the United States to nativist populism under an egotistical, erratic, and amoral man shoves a chisel into the biggest fault lines and pries them open. The breaking of order restricts and kills people, gives larger license to unfairness, and pollutes our planet potentially more than these things were already happening. Vulnerability rises up socioeconomic strata.
     So, what do we do, where do we go now?
     These days, in response to our new government’s strategy of unrelenting shocks and distraction, I’m here, I’m there, I’m going around and around. Resist here, support there. The crisis of democracy and the breakdown of the global order as we know it makes us all vulnerable. Some of us feel more vulnerable than others. Some of us feel bully pride — fuck yeah! Yes, I’m including all of us.
     At this point, will harking to the premises and rules of democracy and multilateralism work or is the rot too deep?
     And what does all of this have to do with ducks in midwinter and “nature’s plotlines?”
     I could start (again) in at least three different ways.


     Midwinter. 
     When it’s 18 degrees F (-7.78 degrees C) or less in the middle of the day, the ducks curl themselves in and wait in the middle of an inhospitable pond. What predator could retrieve them there?


OR


     Don’t be surprised if the end of the world isn’t great, or rather Do not expect too much from the end of the world: Radu Jude’s brilliant movie about Romania, about being less powerful and fucked.* About sticking it to them nevertheless, in the process profanely laughing, finding beauty, even protecting, even sharing, even loving. 
     Green on each side of that long road, cross after cross after cross; that’s the only green I remember in the movie, minute after lonely minute — why is it taking so long?! He needed a better editor! Not. The green surrounds old crosses, new crosses, new crosses, new crosses, new crosses. People who died on the road, who keep dying on the road. It did not need better editing. Cadence is perfectly calibrated: speed, thumping, obliviousness, and grass growing around those crosses, a poem so to speak, splashing the eyes with the sense of

            All this gaining
            and letting go
            honed along
            the sharpest edges
            of this life’s perimeter.

            (Jenny Xie “Postmemory”)

Xie’s words bring back a sentence from HBO’s True Detective Night Country (2024), situated in Ennis, Alaska: “And Ennis is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams.”
     I’m not done with Jude’s end of the world. After all it comes from Romania, which right now is caught in a curious experimental drama of democracy (and TikTok). Voted in, not voted in; Russia, not Russia; EU, not EU; propaganda, propaganda; law, whose law? I’m not going to tell you the details. Look it up. It’s an interesting twist to the crisis of democracy, the end of the world order as we know it.
     Radu Jude looks at the global order from above and from below and we’re never quite sure what’s up and what’s down. A developer making luxury flats can’t have his wealthy buyers look at graves while sipping their morning coffee, so let’s move the graves, shall we, we’ll pay for it all, the exhumation, the new plot, everything. And by the way, the boss apologizes for not being at the meeting, he’s doing his mindfulness thing (which, somehow, reminds me of lululemon) And, then, less mindfully, or perhaps every bit as mindfully we have Bobita’s filtered TikTok videos: irreverent, sometimes obnoxious, always deliberately and shockingly profane, sticking it to my mindful mind, sticking it from below. Hmmm… a distant, filtered MAGA (without the first A of course, mostly without the G as well — just MA, making again and again? — turned upside down, back up, down again, I don’t know what’s what. You’re never bored. Well, except maybe for the long stretches of road with green and crosses on each side.
     It’s striking how mindful the bosses are, invoking the Way along the way.
     There are two narratives in the film that converge in the end. Angela in the past — from a real movie in the real-life past — is a taxi-driver. Angela in the present is an assistant in a film production company. The two Angelas meet in this film’s present, both more-than-surviving from below.
     The young Angela — also Bobita, the maker-star of the TikTok videos — rushes around for the production of a worker safety video for an Austrian company, evidently a logging company. She picks up and drives around the Austrian marketing executive, Doris Goethe, who is overseeing the film project. Yes, she’s a blood descendant of the Goethe Doris tells us shruggily, though perhaps because it’s family she doesn’t really read him. Angela asks her if she cares about the cutting down of forests that her company does. Doris responds by invoking the Taoist Way: she just needs to do her job as marketing executive, she says, not know or care about how her company is cutting down forests. And, she adds, in any case the Romanians allow it to happen, it’s up to them.
     I’m upside down. I too am mindful and invoke the Way. 
     Overthinking. Real people are under real threat today. More threat is likely tomorrow. Defeatist, poetic nihilism gets us nowhere.
     Jude does the trapeze with the Way, swinging this way, turning that way, upside down, inside out, amazingly light, agile, and alive. And then he quotes haiku in the credits.

in this world
we walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers

(Kobayashi, translated by Robert Hass, and displayed with the credits in Jude’s film) 


OR


     I could start with nature’s plotlines, drawn from Jenny Xie’s poem “Postmemory” and quoted by Latif Askia Ba in his interview with Brooklyn Poets. His new book of poetry just came out: The Choreic Period. Look it up. I didn’t know the meaning of choreic. I’ve bought his book.

            Nature reuses
            plotlines
            not wanting
            to waste
            a thing.

            (Jenny Xie “Postmemory”)

    At this point, can I add anything? What else can I write? Do I have to write any more? Some of you would say no. I waste so much. Everything is done already, experienced already, written already, known already, dead, resurrected,

            And so we get sewn
            back into
            our origins

            (Jenny Xie “Postmemory”)

And yet, it’s fresh again, it’s new again! Read The Choreic Period, read “Postmemory.”

            The deeper
            textures.
            
            (Jenny Xie “Postmemory”)

     If you’ve read any of my work or know anything about me, you know I’m much older than Xie and Askia Ba. I’m still stumbling alive with each fresh turn, still pulsing to receive and give, seduced by the deceptive eiderdown of comfortable age, still agile, still sensing, still writing, still steady. I still care.
     Democracy is in crisis. Many — including my now-deceased and most ordinary mother — have declared that. Curtis Yarvin (you could look up the NYT article) declares it. His solution is the mythos of the strong man, which by the way my old mother might also have considered as a solution. It’s a romantic solution, a yearning for the strong father. It serves those who believe in and obey the rules of the father. For the rest, they’re impure, lower, chattel, or enemies. I don’t really need to say more about this. Most people who read me would not be interested in a Yarvin-style solution, and those who are would not have read this far. My question — still holding hope for democracy — is how do people broadly like me live together with people broadly like Yarvin in a democratic system? Heather Cox Richardson, a historian of the United States who has a very large substack following, might say we have, we can, but right now — I say, she might say, many of us say — we are in a dangerous place. Crisis and disorder.
     Democracy is flawed. The global order as we know it is flawed. If your forests are being chopped down, it’s because you are allowing it. And, by the way, if you are not allowing it, you are probably breaking the law. The law can be bought. The law can be changed. But not always. Meanwhile, I can be mindful. I can be mindful. Mindfulness has many shades and textures.
     There is no way out of this. There is no way out of this. This is the one plotline — life comes back to Chernobyl, so to speak — which you can see as the inherently corrupt beauty of life, or the gloriously messy complexity of the Way,

     or work to be done now.
     Let’s get to work.

If you don’t know where to start, Jamyle Cannon from Chicago has superb advice.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DFHEpz4R4CG/
In case the link doesn’t take you to the exact reel, it’s one of the videos posted on January 22, 2025. And in case you are raising your eyebrows at our use of Meta, hey he uses us, we use him.

Another excellent resource is this post on dodging the firehose by David Litt.

Meanwhile:
— Stay informed, read various sources to check your information and assumptions
— Avoid jumping reactively on and off their carousel of big and bigger threats
— Hug someone or smile at someone at least once a day
— Support one initiative, small or big, that does what you want to see more of in the world. I just supported Word Up with a donation and purchases
— And, ok, I would not follow Bobita, but allow yourself to laugh!

*Trigger warning: it’s very long, it’s very irreverent, it’s very odd (and it’s brilliant).

This morning as I was about to post this essay, I received sad news and glad news and both fill my heart in connection to the people they relate to. Heart, connection, relationship: these are core ingredients for the way forward. I may as well add two other core ingredients for me, in my case received from sources in yoga and buddhism: honesty, and non-harming to myself and others. These are easier than they sound and more difficult than they sound.

Opening note: I started addressing Marietta in my head soon after the election. I started writing this essay about three weeks ago. When I started I wasn’t reading the news and commentary. Very personally and emotionally affected by the election, I thought and wrote with reactivity and deep feeling that could not simply be bounded and rationalized by logical thought and “data.” Then I returned to reading news and commentary including from more conservative sources. Logical thought and data have filtered back in but I have tried to keep this personal: a real person (me) addressing a real person (Marietta). I’ve felt internal pressure to wrap it all up into a comprehensive view, a stable edifice of argument that preemptively knows and responds to potential critique, but I cannot. This long piece comes from a mess of feeling and thinking.

     I met Marietta in over-canvassed PA the weekend before the election. Over-canvassed by the Dems, that is. I saw no other canvassers and few Trump signs. We had the ground game. They played a brilliant game of disinformation.
     Marietta was on my list, a registered Democrat. Two Trump signs — two of the very few we saw in this area that likely voted mostly for him — stood side-by-side in a small front yard. It wasn’t clear whether that stretch of green was part of Marietta’s property or belonged to her neighbor. Undeterred, I rang the doorbell. Little dogs set up barking, an annoyance to their owners I knew, so I prepared myself to offer an apology. No one answered. I walked away from the door and a man came out of the open garage. He wasn’t on my list.
     I’m here canvassing for Kamala Harris, I said. I am voting for her, he said, my wife isn’t. A mild man. I was puzzled; he wasn’t on my list which included independents. Marietta came out. I always voted Democrat, but not this time. My father was union, she said. We always voted the same, he said, this time she’s different. The prices, she said, and immigration. She was emphatic. She was voting for Trump. And so it went on. I tried to listen, a fellow canvasser argued. Marietta was emphatic. I was in the Iraq war, she said, wars aren’t good. Trump will stop the wars. And Biden let the prices go up. Not everyone has to have an abortion, she said, but everyone has to buy food.
     Marietta, you came out to talk to us. You were never rude, hostile, or aggressive. You continued to speak with us. We left. We had to do our list. To my ear, you were not happy, or proud, or angry; maybe sad, maybe defensive; always emphatic. I felt that you were trying to persuade us that you were doing the right thing. You wanted us to understand. I do; and I so, so don’t, as I still reel from the results of this election.
     I don’t hate you Marietta. What else can I say?
     I don’t fear you. I don’t hate you. Hate is a strong word I use sparingly, and very, very rarely in relation to people. I wish the Democrats, the left, would not call people “haters.” If, as a thought experiment, I call someone “hater,” I feel myself narrowing. Perceiving you boxed in by “hate,” I box myself in. So then we shake our fists at each other from our boxes. Our boxes open in trusted spaces of family, parks, forest, seashore, dog-love, sunrise, a recognized constellation of stars. But as those moments pass, the itchiness and stuffed sinuses of narrow-box air return. Well, if all that happens is that we shake our fists at each other from those closed boxes, it sounds limiting, maybe somewhat unhealthy — chronically high cortisol levels, not good — but that’s not so bad, is it? I ask you, I ask myself.
     I’m writing to you, Marietta, but not just to you. Do you fear that I’m setting up a springboard for myself and a trap for you? Are you curling your fingers as you listen to me. Mine are already clenched. 
     The thing is: you curled your fingers around a pen or a pencil to let a genie — a potentially very destructive genie — out of the bottle. This is what I experience, this is what I see.
     Donald Trump and his enablers and sycophants are not an ordinary trusted family. They are certainly not a park, a forest, a sunrise or a seashore. Well, you might say, I’m not looking for a park for a President. I’m not looking for family. Prices and immigration, remember. Does trust have value for you, I might respond. I feel it does from the way you engaged with me. Trump and his gang blow hot, smelly winds of fear, greed, and ignorance. They offer illusion. While they conjure an illusion of beauty and wellbeing for you and you and you, offering each of you the fantasy you want, they themselves grasp at money-power-power-money. Amassed behind the delusions they offer are breakage, pain, and repression, even as they declare that only they can shepherd you away from the loss, lies, and theft that — they say, and perhaps you believe — incompetent and corrupt liberals represent.
     I don’t think you hate me. I don’t think you want to hurt others. But your vote helped invite out the gloating boy who wore a blue t-shirt with large letters imprinted on the front: MASS DEPORTATION NOW. You want immigration controlled. I heard you. You don’t want what you experience as masses of undocumented migrants spoiling your America. The boy with the blue t-shirt goes further, and expresses careless cruelty. With Trump, what you want and what the boy expresses come together. The boy’s careless cruelty draws strength from what you want and from Trump’s messages of fantasy and fear. The boy turns to cruelty to find pride again, a pride he feels entitled to, that he thinks would have been his in the past, that he believes he can have back when America is Great again. Trump draws strength from what you want and from the boy.
     America is great, Marietta. You and others are right when you ask me and others like me: why did you come here, if you don’t like it? In my case, I didn’t have to come; it wasn’t desperation that drove me, I wasn’t a refugee. I came because of the creative energy and individualist freedom of this country. Bound by the norms of my old country (where I also was held with love and offered much beauty), I came here to grow. And this country, your country, my country, fully my country now, offered me growth: space, affection, beauty, complexity, sometimes loneliness. I slowly learned — first in my mind, increasingly in my body and spirit — that amidst the wide open spaces and the wellbeing of many people lie pain, repression, poverty, illness. Under the promise of opportunity is cruelly different access to wellbeing, indeed to opportunity itself. A lot of this has to do with how race and color are embedded in our common experience and understanding of what is rightfully “American.” As Europeans settled on this continent, in the process taking more and more land from indigenous peoples, the “United States of America” emerged. Peoples of European descent (“white people”) grew to have more access to opportunity than colored people, especially indigenous peoples and descendants of Africans who were brought and held in servitude with vicious force and disrespect. Layered with race and color are income, type of education, and the kind of work we do. Academically well-educated people grew to have substantially more access to wellbeing. There is an unfairness there as well, hard to pin down, and hard to address. 
     But perhaps I am wandering away from the moment and space of our engagement. I am wandering into a larger space and time that holds us both; if I keep wandering I will lose you. 
     It’s the economy, you say, our prices!! It’s the wars!
     The prices affect me also Marietta. You and I are about the same age. My income is flat, and right now declining because of higher prices. Soon it will decline more rapidly because of my age. I am beginning to confront inadequate health care in the face of slow deteriorations in my body, my home, my food, my life. On prices, I don’t think Trump will do any better than Harris, though he inherits a strong economy from Biden. Strong, you might protest! Yes, the fundamentals are strong and hopefully will fill the sails of many younger people’s lives. My concern is that some people will benefit more than others: under Trump, the very rich will benefit more than the middle and working classes. We who are older with limited incomes are always vulnerable, quite significantly so in this country, more so under Republicans, and even more so under Trump.
     The wars: we didn’t start them. Biden didn’t start them. The war you served in, in which you directly saw the horror of war, was started by a Republican. All the wars the United States has officially fought in the last few decades were started by Republicans. I’m glad you are against war, Marietta. Wars are a terrible thing. I am still struggling with war and violence as a human condition. And I deeply fear that Trump may bring about more war, more suffering, including war in our country. It’s not a big step from the cruelty of the blue t-shirt to mass violence, mass destruction. You remember the illusion — the lies — on which the terrible war you served in was based. There will be lies and related violence under Trump, and I am afraid.
     Am I really writing to you? Am I just writing for myself, for people who think like me, feel like me? Rationally it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Emotionally? I am afraid. I am afraid, not just, not so much, for myself, but for the people who will suffer humiliation, placelessness, and real and big wounds of the body.
     My meditative practice acknowledges — or wants to acknowledge? — the placelessness of everything in life, the impermanence, the flow. Right now I am ok enough to have the luxury of making such an acknowledgement. If you fear losing your home and feel that your world is increasingly relegated to a disrespected past and future, you may feel further disrespected by such meditative placidity. Indeed, those struggling with very long histories of disrespected pasts, presents, and futures might also reject such placidity. Fuck meditative placidity you, and they, might say. I’m realizing as I write to you, that my meditative practice is a personal practice. It shapes how I listen and act, but has little relevance apart from that.
     Your eyes glaze over. 
     What is placelessness, your face asks.
     Placelessness is most drastically not having a physical place of safety. More broadly, it is not having place to be — physically, socially, culturally, economically. 
     Marietta, you’ve known placelessness in some form or the other; by our age, we all have. You fear it, perhaps, as a result of economic vulnerability or what you experience as mass immigration of people different from you. Perhaps you fear losing your home. Perhaps you see your world increasingly relegated to a disrespected past. You honored the worthy struggles of your past. Your own struggles, laid upon those of your past, were to lead to golden years in your present. You worked for this, and now you may feel your present has been tarnished by people who dishonor your past and don’t care for you. You didn’t work for this fool’s gold, you want your world back.
     You don’t want placelessness; you may feel you don’t deserve it. Residents of the U.S. who are “legal” don’t deserve placelessness either you might allow, but they have to work for the real gold; you’ve worked for it, work is all it takes if you are legal. They, who are “illegal,” who are here illegally, deserve placelessness. This is not their place, you protest, and it isn’t your concern where their place is. This is God’s Country and there’s a line and a process for finding a place here.
     I’m getting sadder, not wanting to fight, understanding, not understanding, scared, sad, angry. I am in some middle: I legally placed myself in our country, seeking and finding creative freedom. And as my place became part of the fabric of your world, I became increasingly bound to the weft and weave of that fabric, and I saw the dirt and blood, dirt and blood in the fabric, over and over. Some of that dirt and blood is the suffering and heroism of your ancestors’ struggles. Indeed, in my youth in India, I read about the tribulations and resilience of early European settlers, pioneers to the west, and successive waves of Europeans who came looking for better lives. Already at that time I was discomfited by the depictions of “savages” and the destruction of their lives. I sought comfort in the romantic accounts of “Indians” who became friends and loyal, most of them as servitors, but occasionally in a glowing moment an equal. I held on to those glowing moments to redeem the rest of that world. Until I became friends, truly friends not just smiling acquaintances, with African-Americans and met members of tribal communities in California.
     Listen to me, Marietta. I am telling you I don’t hate you. As you tried to tell me that you don’t “hate” me. Hate is an aggressive feeling that tries to deny the being and integrity of someone or something. What I feel in response to the election results is fear, grief, uncertainty, and loss. I could speculate how you feel. Perhaps you feel the same as I. It doesn’t take much for fear, grief, uncertainty, and loss to be expressed as hate. I heard you wanting to hope from a boxed-in place; it’s the same for me.
     As my friendships with African-Americans got deeper, I learned their anger and their constant awareness of woundedness, threat, and fragile-place-possible-placelessness; and I learned and grew from their wisdom and profound awareness of love and beauty in the midst of imperfection and insecurity. In their writing and art, in their relationships, they reveal the dirt and tears in the fabric of our country, but they’ve also turned that dirt, if you allow yourself to see it, into gold, real gold that glows for all of us. They, many of them, are afraid of what you have chosen Marietta, of you. In the glow of the gold they created out of pain, hope, and love, I see wider and deeper into the history of Europeans settling in North America, into the physical and ontological decimation of tribal communities that were native to this continent for millennia. Ontological decimation? Destruction and denial of who they are, of their being.
     European settlers on this continent are not the only, or first, people to engage in this kind of denial of being. Humans have a great capacity for this. But Europeans have done this with a consistency and power — sometimes with assumptions of right and goodness, sometimes with wide-open greed — over the last six hundred years or so. Their increasing dominance — economically, militarily, politically, culturally, and racially — has led to a racialized social layering of obliviousness, cruelty, and pain. All humans suffer struggles and pain, we all do, but the social stratification of obliviousness, cruelty, and pain means that some people have more constant and larger struggles and greater and more generational pain.
     Am I losing you? There is real feeling behind my distant words, but perhaps the feeling is lost for the words. And, you might say, some of these words, really, they feel like a way of silencing me. The onto-word? Yup, even I find that word and phrase clumsy. Destruction and denial of being. People who’ve felt it know it. I think it’s likely you’ve known it and felt it in some way.
     There’s no going back, Marietta. You know that also. I don’t mean that in the campaign slogan way of “we won’t go back.” And not going back isn’t contrary to memory embedded in spirit and body and living fully and dynamically with that body of embedded memories. 
     I hear you wanting (back) a world in which you (and your ancestors) earned your safety and economic security through your (and their) hard work. You (and they) earned something. Others have too. And I fear that with these election results many of us — possibly you as well — will lose, drastically, safety and economic security.
     My fear is that not only will Donald Trump not give you back your old world with its promise of safety and economic security, but he will bring back the bad old days. He and people emboldened by him will try to put layers of people back where they belong, if necessary with force and cruelty. In some ways you are ok with that, I think, but you wouldn’t want to do the dirty work yourself, or would you? I don’t know. What I do know is that in our conversation I not only heard fierce fear and entitlement, but also glimpsed fairness and acknowledgement of being. I heard the fairness of your engagement with me, as we stood there before you, one of us trying to listen, another one arguing, and you trying to convince us and yourself that you are right.
     Why is my fear for myself, others, and my country so overwhelming after this election? This fear does not simply come from deep disagreement on world views and policies. 
     Donald Trump is erratic and his sycophants are erratic also. His enablers —  very rich people and more rational Republican leaders — are less erratic but in their greed for ideological and structural domination, which is a fundamentally undemocratic greed, they have unleashed an erratic power that will likely escape them. They, meaning Trump, his sycophants, and his enablers, freely lie and have disproportionately contributed to our politics becoming a swirl of rhetorical fantasies and illusions. Of course the Democrats have contributed to this as well; if they don’t play the game, they’re out of it. Looks like they are out of it anyway. Trumpian conservatives and Republicans play this game better, indeed they played it superbly in this last election. They don’t really care who you are, about you. They need you and others to win power and they will use the power to go where the money is and where their egos find space and fuel to become and feel larger. 
     They will hasten potentially disastrous climate change without making provision for the safety and security of even ordinary (and “legal”) people like you and me, leave alone people who have few resources even in the best of times and certainly not enough to survive our increasing droughts, floods, hurricanes and so on. Have you noticed your home insurance premiums going up? That’s not Biden. Insurers are protecting themselves against climate change that Trump denies. 
     Regarding job and income security for our middle and working classes, Trump’s enablers and allies will seek and build policies and technology that will drive middle and low income people even further into insecurity. Educated liberal Democrats also do this; they have been at the forefront of our development of technology, sometimes naive about negative effects, sometimes willfully ignoring negative effects, often hopeful about positive effects. After all, there’s always someone else who will ignore effects and follow the money. Now Trumpian Republicans want to grab the technological advantage for conservatism; they have already mastered social media. 
     In addition to their policies that are likely to make our lives less secure, Trump and his associates pose the danger of cultish authoritarianism based on a system of egotism and sycophancy.
     Marietta, your wanting safety and security is understandable, but that’s what you want for yourself, not what they want for you. They want you as a voter (and potentially as a militant), manipulable because of your longing and your fear: your longing to be safe, secure, and whole, and your fear that your past, present, and future are falling to pieces.
    You spoke about the wars, so let me address those, since Trump might indeed “end” them. In many ways it feels like people want them just to end; killing and destruction no longer being before us in the news would be enough. Certainly, an end to the violence, the killing, the dismembering of people, and the destruction of homes would be good.
     Maybe for Ukraine this would be better than the current war — many Ukrainians, exhausted by the long war so far, might now agree. For me and people who know what I know and think what I think — no secret information, we know and think based on what we read and see, and everything I read and see is public — Russia under Putin is, at the minimum, amoral and repressive. If you’re with him you’re fine; if you are not, you will be repressed, mostly on the side and quietly, but loudly if needed. If you are not with him, you are an enemy. He needs and names enemies. Those who are with him are drawn to fear those enemies as well and rely on him to keep them safe. I fear that Trump’s United States might become the same, which will suit some people and hurt others grievously. How many of us will look away or watch from the side as people are silenced, quietly or loudly? Trump and his associates are already well on their way to commandeering and deforming our constitutional guardrails.
    And Palestine and Israel? With Trump, there is no hope of fairness and real peace. The denial of being that Palestinians have suffered — which they did not initiate, but, yes, to which they have contributed — will continue until their being possibly becomes merely memory. It seems that for some they are already memory — regretted or silenced — but indeed many Palestinians are still in Palestine, still alive, many of all ages and genders are being killed, maimed, and dispossessed under Israeli government policy right now, right now as I write this. Perhaps they will become another lesson for us humans about the wrong we can do in which many of us collude or stand by and watch. It is a process of wrong that Jewish people know well from their experience of centuries of cruel discrimination, especially by non-Jewish Europeans, that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust, which remains a shame and lesson for all humankind. All human societies have the capacity for such cruel exclusion — we all do — and Jewish people, too, are humans with human capacities.
     What your vote has helped open up is much larger than Trump. We face inflation of our human capacity for destructive disaffection. Disaffection, yes, is the opposite of affection. Affection is linked to connection, trust, and relaxation of the body; it is a potent source of wellbeing. Disaffection is based on fear, blame, distrust, the cutting of connection, and stress that directly contributes to physical inflammations in the body. Disaffection can seem to offer a promise of aliveness, similar to the aliveness of valor in fighting. Often the initial seduction of valor in fighting comes from feeling that we are fighting for what we value, against what threatens what we love, including ourselves. Often enough, intoxicated by valor we lose connection to what we value, what we love. You’ve seen war, Marietta. You’ve seen how valor in fighting can be manipulated by greed and ego and how much destruction and terror it can bring into the world.
     With increasing polarization in our country, indeed in the world — some of it manipulated by powerful people and corporations — we’ve all tapped into our capacity for disaffection. Meanwhile, some with rising fortunes have become greedier; and some, feeling forgotten or dismissed, have become aggrieved and angry. Some who are among the most vulnerable have become more vulnerable and when they tap on the doors of dignity with their meagre social and financial resources, many of us look at them and say “who are you?” A few of us in that place of dignity they seek will welcome them; most of us will shrug and turn away. Some of us will say you, stranger, you are the cause of my troubles, will try to chase them away and close the door, will try to avoid killing them but will let them die — you are not my problem, you are my problem — and if they become more of a “problem,” some of us may start killing them as well.
    Marietta, would you turn away if a group of proud boys started beating me up? (Would you ask me the same?)
    My language, Marietta, is both dramatic and muted because this is dramatic and I am scared.
     As disaffection has grown, in part stoked by forces that seek power and money, it has grown ripe for manipulation. Donald Trump attuned to our widespread disaffection and his enablers discovered the effectiveness of finding and voicing grievance. He and his enablers crafted a winning formula to push away democratic constraints on power and profit-making. 
     For decades, modern conservatism has been significantly driven by profit-making. Straightforward profit-making needs a functional society which gives it a social ethic, albeit twisted to the pursuit of money. Today’s risk is that the power-seeking which always underlies political leadership has found an egotistical host — Donald Trump — who has repeatedly broken institutional and conventional constraints and, in the process, has attracted and emboldened similar people with great capacity for egotistical seeking of power. Egotism has no social ethic; it serves and feeds its host, itself. Today we face danger because the most greedy forces of profit-making have allied brilliantly and cynically with egotism to stoke and deploy disaffection, all to win, wield, and perpetuate the power of a few.
     Trump is neither a good man nor a good leader. You, Marietta, know that he is not a good man; I heard you.  With regard to the quality of his leadership, look at who he has been proposing to appoint to his cabinet: for the most part, sycophants and greedy, egotistical people. In the military you certainly encountered people like that. In an ethical, disciplined military, such people are contained; in a healthy democracy, such people have limited play. I fear we are no longer in a healthy democracy.
     I hope you are right, Marietta. I hope the wars end, and everyone suffers death, indignity, and insecurity less, not just rich Americans, not just Putin’s supporters, not just Israelis. Yes, we are not the police force of the world. Equally I don’t want us to use very large amounts of our tax dollars to support a government that occupies the land of another people and destroys them. I genuinely would be relieved to find my fears unfounded. I would go back to advocating for my values, what you would call liberal values, and others would advocate for theirs; that’s what democracy is for: to figure out how to live reasonably functionally and non-violently with our different histories, values, and policy preferences.
     I hope you are right, Marietta, that this is simply another “conservative” government that focuses on profit-making, “family values,” and the preeminence of “American” as white and Christian, while also continuing to hold a social ethic and respecting the guardrails of a healthy democracy. I would still oppose such a government. Yes, I am “liberal,” and I would advocate for my values in healthy democratic process. That’s democracy: messy, imperfect, but founded on a social ethic and institutional checks and balances. That said, the most profound imperfection of modern democracy is its alignment with, indeed dependence on, the structures and dynamics of existing and reproduced socio-economic inequality. Trump and his associates have dug deep into this vulnerability, not to address the structural imperfection of socio-economic inequality but rather for their own power and money-making. I am afraid that we are heading away from healthy — albeit imperfect and vulnerable — democracy towards repressive democracy, even more concentrated kleptocratic oligarchy, and quite possibly also authoritarianism. These are big words that come down to repressive rule by greedy, egotistical people rather than democratic and somewhat accountable government.
     You did not bring up gender and Democrats’ protection of the rights and safety of trans people but I know this was a stick used against Kamala Harris and your Democratic Representative Susan Wild who lost in this election. Trump and Republicans’ cynical fight against trans people, who are among the least safe and secure in our communities, was such a sad and ignoble fight. Trans people are a tiny proportion of the population, which Trump acknowledges now. They don’t harm people at any higher rates than heterosexual males and females, but they are actively harmed at much, much, much higher rates. We are still learning how to create space for this kind of difference, that generates so little harm in itself. Yes, I know it’s unfamiliar and therefore feels threatening; after all, in the old days we were just girls and boys, women and men, or so most of us thought. Yes, we are still learning how to make space in our minds and communities, space in which all our children and adults can be safe and have opportunities to thrive. In contrast to making efforts to ask and learn about ourselves and others in generous ways, I see people stoked by the fear-mongering and disinformation of Trumpian Republicanism and  as a result expressing cruelty, and yes in this case hatred, directed against the idea and reality of trans people. This is wrong.
   I don’t hate you, Marietta, and I don’t think you hate me. I am confident that if we lived close to each other little ones from our families would be out selling girl-scout cookies and trick-or-treating and side-by-side we would enjoy it. 
     Our world is changing.
     There is still racism in our world, particularly sharply expressed against and felt by African-Americans, but we are leaving that world behind. I think you know that and don’t necessarily reject the change. You just want to know that you still have being, dignity, security, and respected history. Everyone wants these. Everyone wants these, but some want destructively more, some want to go back to the bad old days of racist exclusion, and too many of the latter are behind Trump and his win. 
     Marietta, uneven privilege based on income and class calls for urgent attention and political action. We can do that together. Could we — so different from each other — be creative together?
         We will never have this conversation. Could we even have this conversation? I think so. If we were chatting, I wouldn’t talk like this! And I would listen more, of course. I would hold myself back and listen. This is my writing. I sometimes talk like this but I adapt very quickly when I see that my listeners are drifting off.
     When we met, I failed you. I wasn’t able to convey how I can both hear you and conclude that Donald Trump poses an enormous danger to our country and the world. I’ve failed you and many, many others, not me alone, but I am responsible for my part. You are responsible for yours.
     The world is changing. 
    Climate crises are coming at us fast. They will affect all of us in this country and many, many others — real people — on our planet. This is not the time to be led by a potentially disastrous government of immoral, unethical, profit-making, uncaring, egotistical, and incompetent people.
     Marietta, I am committed to fairness, including democratic fairness to you. Would you commit to the same?

Closing note: If it seems like this essay is simply about what could go wrong with Trumpian Republicanism, read again. There is a mirror being held up in which Democrats — liberal and progressive — will also see themselves. I don’t have an answer. There is no straightforward, final answer. The world doesn’t simply become simple. Our values may be simple and to paraphrase MLK Jr, the arc of history does bend towards justice, but it is a long and wide arc that sometimes reveals itself to be a spiral, slipping back, pushing forward again, and if you treat it like a straight line on a flat world you risk falling over the edge and having to start all over again. 

So what do I do now? What do we do now?

(How to find a way to democratic change in the face of democratic inertia and alignment with socio-economic inequality?)
​

Over the last couple of months, like many people, I have felt pulled and pushed between competing suffering, fear, and, yes, hatred, in, and in relation to, the Palestine-Israel region. I turned for solace to reading and writing. Some of the writers I turned to I’ve known for years. Some I have become aware of in recent weeks. As I’ve read them, I’ve longed for them to hear each other. So I created this conversation of sorts. It’s not really for people who are directly experiencing the suffering of this violent conflict — their pain may be too raw and they are likely consumed with immediate survival and grief — but it’s for the rest of us in the world who are bystanders. Many of us care for both sides. So this conversation of poets and writers is to help us hold, generously, attention to both sides, not condoning cruel actions, but not choosing a side either: not highlighting and mourning the suffering of only one side, nor cheering the combatants of one side or the other. Meenakshi Chakraverti (1)

Note: The quoted poems and writing below are NOT in chronological order. Notes at the end of this imaginary conversation provide dates, sources from which I drew the quotations, and occasionally some additional context. These writers open up possibility. Your reading and reflection will do the same.

A conversation among poets and writers
Sahir Ludhianvi (Punjabi/Pakistani/Indian) (2): 
Come let us weave dreams for tomorrow’s sake
Else the vicious night of our troubled age
Will poison life and heart such that all our lives
We’ll be incapable of dreams of love and peace.

Toni Morrison (African-American) (3): 
No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.

James Baldwin (African-American) (4): 
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
​
Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian) through Agha Shahid Ali (Kashmiri) (5): 
Who am I after the night of the estranged? I wake from my dream,
frightened of the obscure daylight on the marble of the house, of
the sun’s darkness in the roses, of the water of my fountain;
frightened of milk on the lip of the fig, of my language;
frightened of wind that—frightened—combs a willow; frightened
of the clarity of petrified time, of a present no longer 
a present; frightened, passing a world that is no longer
my world.

Irena Klepfisz (American, born in the Warsaw Ghetto) (6):
Zi flit
she flies
vi a foygl
like a bird
vi a mes
like a ghost
Zi flit
iber di berg
over the mountains
ibern yam
over the sea.
Tsurik
tsurik back
back
In der fremd
​Among strangers
iz ir heym
is her home.
Do
Here
ot do
right here
muz zi lebn
she must live.
Ire zikhroynes
her memories
will become monuments
ire zikhroynes
will cast shadows.

Amos Oz (Israeli) (7):     
    At first sight this girl seemed to be my age but from the slight curve of her blouse and the unchildlike look of curiosity and also of warning in her eyes as they met mine (for an instant, before my eyes looked away), she must have been two or three years older, perhaps eleven or twelve. Still, I managed to see that her eyebrows were rather thick and joined in the middle, in contrast with the delicacy of her other features. There was a little child at her feet, a curly-haired boy of about three who may have been her brother; he was kneeling on the ground and was absorbed in picking up fallen leaves and arranging them in a circle.
    Boldly and all in one breath I offered the girl a quarter of my entire vocabulary of foreign words, perhaps less like a lion confronting other lions and more like the parrots in the room upstairs. Unconsciously I even bowed a little bow, eager to make contact and thus to dispel any prejudices and to advance the reconciliation between our peoples:
    “Sabah al-heir, Miss. Ana ismi Amos. Wa-inti, ya bint? Votre nom s’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle? Please your name kindly?”
    She eyed me without smiling. Her joined eyebrows gave her a severe look beyond her years. She nodded a few times, as though making a decision, agreeing with herself, ending the deliberation, and confirming the findings. Her navy blue dress came down below her knees, but in the gap between the dress and her socks with the butterfly buckles I caught sight of the skin of her calves, brown and smooth, feminine, already grown up; my face reddened, and my eyes fled again, to her little brother, who looked back at me quietly, unsuspectingly, but also unsmilingly. Suddenly he looked very much like her with his dark, calm face.
    Everything I had heard from my parents, from neighbors, from Uncle Joseph, from my teachers, from my uncles and aunts, and from rumors came back to me at that moment. Everything they said over glasses of tea in our backyard on Saturdays and on summer evenings about mounting tensions between Arab and Jew, distrust and hostility, the rotten fruit of British intrigues and the incitement of Muslim fanatics who painted us in a frightening light to inflame the Arabs to hate us. Our task, Mr. Rosendorff once said, was to dispel suspicions and to explain to them that we were in fact a positive and even kindly people. In brief, it was a sense of mission that gave me the courage to address this strange girl and start a conversation with her: I meant to explain to her in a few convincing words how pure our intentions were, how abhorrent was the plot to stir up conflict between our two peoples, and how good it would be for the Arab public — in the form of this graceful-lipped girl — to spend a little time in the company of the polite, pleasant Hebrew people, in the person of me, the articulate envoy aged eight and a half. Almost.
    But I had not thought out in advance what I would do after I had used up most of my supply of foreign words in my opening sentence. How could I enlighten this oblivious girl and get her to understand once and for all the rightness of the Jewish return to Zion? By charades? By dance gestures? And how could I get her to recognize our right to the Land without using words? How, without any words, could I translate for her Tchernikhowsky’s “O, my land, my homeland”? Or Jabotinsky’s “There Arabs, Nazarenes and we / shall drink our fill in happy manner, / when both the banks of Jordan’s stream / are purged by our unsullied banner?” In a word, I was like that fool who had learned how to advance the king’s pawn two squares, and did so without any hesitation, but after that had no idea at all about the game of chess, not even the names of the pieces, or how they moved, or where, or why.
    Lost.
    But the girl answered me, and actually in Hebrew, without looking at me, her hands resting open on the bench on either side of her dress, her eyes fixed on her brother, who was laying a little stone in the center of each leaf in his circle.
    “My name is Aisha. That little one is my brother. Awwad.”
    She also said:
    “You’re the son of the guests from the post office?”
    And so I explained to her that I was definitely not the son of the guests from the post office, but of their friends. And that my father was a rather important scholar, an ustaz, and that my father’s uncle was an even more important scholar, who was even world famous, and that it was her honored father, Mr. Silwani, who had personally suggested that I should come out in the garden and talk to the children of the house.
    Aisha corrected me and said that Ustaz Najib was not her father but her mother’s uncle: she and her family did not live here in Sheikh Jarrah but in Talbieh, and she herself had been going to lessons from a piano teacher in Rehavia for the past three years, and she had learned a little Hebrew from the teacher and the other pupils. It was a beautiful language, Hebrew, and Rehavia was a beautiful area. Well kept. Quiet.
    Talbieh was well kept and quiet, too, I hastened to reply, repaying one compliment with another. Would she be willing for us to talk a little?
    Aren’t we talking already? (A little smile flickered for an instant around her lips. She straightened the hem of her dress with both her hands, and crossed and uncrossed and recrossed her legs. And for an instant her knees appeared, the knees of a grown-up woman already, then her dress straightened again. She looked slightly to my left now, where the garden wall peered at us among the trees.)
    I therefore adopted a representative position, and expressed the view that there was enough room in this country for both peoples, if only they had the sense to live together in peace and mutual respect. Somehow, out of embarrassment or arrogance, I was talking to her not in my own Hebrew but in that of Father and his visitors: formal, polished. Like a donkey dressed up in a ballgown and high-heeled shoes: convinced for some reason that this was the only proper way to speak to Arabs and girls. (I had hardly even had an occasion to talk to a girl or an Arab, but I imagined that in both cases a special delicacy was required: you had to talk on tiptoe, as it were.)
    It transpired that her knowledge of Hebrew was not extensive or perhaps her views were not the same as mine. Instead of responding to my challenge, she chose to sidestep it: her elder brother, she told me, was in London, studying to be a “solicitor and a barrister.”
    Puffed up with representativity, I asked her what she was thinking of studying when she was older.
    She looked straight into my eyes, and at that moment, instead of blushing, I turned pale. Instantly I averted my eyes, and looked down at her serious little brother Awwad, who had already laid out four precise circles of leaves at the foot of the mulberry tree.
    How about you?
    Well. you see, I said, still standing, facing her, rubbing my clammy palms against the sides of my shorts, well, you see, it’s like this — 
    You’ll be a lawyer too. From the way you speak.
    What makes you think that exactly?
    Instead of replying, she said: I’m going to write a book.
    You? What kind of book will you write?
    Poetry.
    Poetry?
    In French and English.
    You write poetry?
    She also wrote poetry in Arabic, but she never showed it to anyone. Hebrew was a beautiful language, too. Had anyone written any poetry in Hebrew?
    Shocked by her question, swollen with indignation and a sense of mission, I began there and then to give her an impassioned recital of snatches of poetry. Tchernikhowsky. Levin Kipnes. Rahel. Vladimir Jabotinsky. And one poem of my own. Whatever came to mind. Furiously, describing circles in the air with my hands, raising my voice, with feeling and gestures and facial expressions and occasionally even closing my eyes. Even her little brother Awwad raised his curly head and fixed me with brown, innocent lamblike eyes, full of curiosity and slight apprehension, and suddenly he recited in clear Hebrew: Jest a minute! Rest a minute! Aisha, meanwhile, said nothing. Suddenly she asked me if I could climb trees.

Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian) (8):
My sky is ashen. Scratch my back. And undo
slowly, you stranger, my braids. And tell me
what’s on your mind. Tell me what crossed 
Youssef’s mind. Tell me some simple
talk … the talk a woman always desires
to be told. I don’t want the phrase
complete. Gesture is enough to scatter me in the rise
of butterflies between springheads and the sun. Tell me
I am necessary for you like sleep, and not like nature
filling up with water around you and me. And spread
over me an endless blue wing …

Naomi Shihab Nye (Palestinian American) (9):
The man with laughing eyes stopped smiling 
to say, “Until you speak Arabic,
you will not understand pain.”

Something to do with the back of the head,
an Arab carries sorrow in the back of the head
that only language cracks, the thrum of stones

weeping, grating hinge on an old metal gate.
“Once you know,” he whispered, “you can enter the room
whenever you need to. Music you heard from a distance,

the slapped drum of a stranger’s wedding,
wells up inside your skin, inside rain, a thousand
pulsing tongues. You are changed.”

Outside, the snow had finally stopped.
In a land where snow rarely falls,
we had felt our days grow white and still.

I thought pain had no tongue. Or every tongue
at once, supreme translator, sieve. I admit my
shame. To live on the brink of Arabic, tugging

its rich threads without understanding
how to weave the rug … I have no gift.
The sound, but not the sense.

Hayyim Nahman Bialik (born in the Russian Empire, Jewish) (10):
…Get up and walk through the city of the massacre,
And with your hand touch and lock your eyes
On the cooled brain and clots of blood
Dried on tree trunks, rocks, and fences; it is they.
Go to the ruins, to the gaping breaches,
To walls and hearths, shattered as though by thunder:
Concealing the blackness of a naked brick,
A crowbar has embedded itself deeply, like a crushing crowbar,
And those holes are like black wounds,
For which there is no healing or doctor.
Take a step, and your footstep will sink: you have placed your foot in fluff,
Into fragments of utensils, into rags, into shreds of books:
Bit by bit they were amassed through arduous labor—and in a flash,
Everything is destroyed…
And you will come out into the road--
Acacias are blooming and pouring their aroma,
And their blooms are like fluff, and they smell as though of blood.
And their sweet fumes will enter your breast, as though deliberately,
Beckoning you to springtime, and to life, and to health;
And the dear little sun warms and, teasing your grief,
Splinters of broken glass burn with a diamond fire--
God sent everything at once, everyone feasted together:
The sun, and the spring, and the red massacre!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayim_Nahman_Bialik

David Grossman (Israeli) (11):
    See Under: Love is a novel about a story that was lost, torn to shreds. There are several such lost stories in the book, which have to be told again and again because that is the only way to assemble the traces of identity and fuse the fragments of a crumbled world. Many characters in the book are looking for a story they have lost, usually a childhood tale, and they need it very badly so that they can retell it, as adults, and be reborn through it. It is not innocence that drives their desire to tell children’s stories, for they have virtually no innocence left. Rather, this is their way to preserve their humanity, and perhaps a modicum of nobility — to believe in the possibility of childhood in this world, and to hold it up against the sheer cynicism. To tell the whole story again through the eyes of a child.

Hiba Abu Nada (Palestinian) (12):
I shelter you
and the children who
are sleeping
as chicks in the lap
of their nest
they don’t walk
in their dreams
because death
towards the house
walks
….
I shelter you
from wound and woe,
and with seven verses
I shield
the taste of orange
from phosphorus,
the color of clouds
from smoke.
https://lithub.com/a-palestinian-meditation-in-a-time-of-annihilation/

Ben Ehrenreich (American)/Asmaa al-Ghoul (Palestinian) (13): 
    When Hamas breached the walls surrounding Gaza on October 7, al-Ghoul said, “I was happy.” Not because Israeli civilians had been killed—that news, which filled her with sadness, shame, and fear, had not yet reached her—but because, she said, “we thought this will move something,” that finally, something might shift and the slow, steady strangulation under which Gaza had lived since 2007 might be broken.
    “We didn’t know the rest of the story,” she said. In those early hours, before word got out about the killings in the kibbutzim and the Israeli towns outside the Strip and at the music festival, this is what people were celebrating. We thought the targets were military, al-Ghoul said, and for a moment she allowed herself some giddy hope that some real victory might come of it, that Israel could be forced to end its siege so “we can come and go like normal people,” free to drive across their own country. “This is what I miss,” she said, “I miss the good air, just to visit, to have a home.”
    She couldn’t finish the thought. Sobs overwhelmed her. Her voice crumbled into a moan. She waved her hand at the images flashing across the television screen, more bodies covered in gray dust. “Look what happened,” she said, “they destroyed it. They destroyed Gaza.” The first neighborhood to be razed, she said, was al-Rimal, in Gaza City. Her family had lived there in a rented house for most of the last 19 years. “It was one of the most beautiful places in Gaza.” She brought up a photo on her phone, a vast, nonsensical geometry of twisted concrete and buildings collapsed in on themselves. It was captioned in French: “Ma maison était ici,” My house was here.
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/death-in-the-air?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20November%209%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list

Lily Galili (Israeli) (14):
    Some years ago, I worked on a series of articles on mixed cities in Israel where Jews and Arabs live together (Akko, Ramla, Lod, Yaffo etc). All throughout this ordeal I felt accompanied by two ghosts: one of my mother, a holocaust survivor dead by then, the other of an old Palestinian refugee. Both stared at me with anticipation; both whispered in my ear: “this land is my land.” I’ve known, by then, I cannot fully satisfy both. I can only recognize the drama and the tragedy of one of them, and try to minimize the damage and the pain of the other. I chose my mother, over and over again….
    My intricate relationship with Zionism started on the wrong foot. As a child growing up in communist Poland, I was madly in love with then long dead Stalin. When my mother announced we were leaving for Palestine (that’s how she referred to Israel), I was less than ecstatic….
    And then I fell in love again. This time with this crazy, pained and pain-inflicting country. Decades of participation in anti-war and pro-peace demonstrations, learning to live with the unfulfilled promise of a safe-haven certainly caused some erosion, but never destroyed my self-definition as a Zionist. Just the opposite, it made me an all-Zionist girl. I’m the liberal “peacenik” at rallies, but also the settler from an illegal outpost. One day I might feel closest to an Israeli Arab and on another day, I might identify with an American Jew.
    Ultimately, my Zionism is about shouldering collective burden. I feel responsible for everything that goes wrong in Israel and I rejoice in the little that goes right.
    I am the All-Zionist girl. I know it sounds terribly self serving. It’s not. If anything, it’s selfish.
    I know, from experience, I could never live again in a place where I am a minority. I’d rather struggle with the often non-democratic nature of Israel , the lack of social justice, the cruelty of occupation, the constant sense of guilt, and do (almost) the best I can to change it. From here, from within. Yet my Zionism stops at the Green Line. https://www.thedailybeast.com/all-zionist-girl

Fady Joudah (Palestinian American) (15):
    As I witness my collective Palestinian death unfold live on digital media and non-American TV, as I have become “a river of bodies into one,” a conduit for common decency, condolences, solidarity that affirms and elevates me, a survivor who has his dead, a survivor with a familiar name, relatable sound, relevant corpus, a vessel for the outpouring of empathy whose primary mode offers me the visibility that can’t be uncoupled from market forces—and it is true that my books, along with those of several Palestinian writers, have been selling well since, in my case, I have announced my dead to America, at least until the mainstream media became uninterested in parading my grief, since my grief did not come without troublesome talk about equal humanity, a political condition for freedom, an unthinkable condition for the US and Israel vis-a-vis Palestinians, a condition whose absence is necessary for the continued destruction of Palestinian life.
…
    But I have a more daring question. The Israeli people at large, the Jewish communities outside Israel that identify strongly or faintly, defensively or hawkishly with Israel, the mainstream Western world, and all expressions of Zionism, what do they want from Palestinians?
    In the best-case scenario, I do not think they really know. I am terrified to think that this relentless progression of dispossession and carnage against the Palestinians has reached irreversible, irrational levels. In my dark hours, which increase by the year, I wonder if Israel is unable to examine or defuse its impulse to test the limits of genocide against the Palestinians—because it has not been able to process the genocide that the Nazis committed against the Jewish people. A genocide that was made possible by centuries of European antisemitism, pogroms, silence, and looking away.
https://lithub.com/a-palestinian-meditation-in-a-time-of-annihilation/

David Grossman (Israeli) (16): But the cracks in the sense of security are deeper and more fundamental : in recent years, the years of the second intifada, Israelis have been living in a world in which people are, quite literally, being ripped apart. Entire families are killed in the blink of an eye, human limbs are severed in cafes, shopping malls, and buses. These are the materials of Israeli reality and the nightmares of every Israeli, and the two are inseparably mingled. Much of daily life in Israel now occurs in the pre-cultural, primitive, animalistic regions of terror. Fierce violence is employed against the Israelis, and they respond with equal ruthlessness against the Palestinians. To be an Israeli today means to live with the perception that we have lost our path and that we are living in a dismantled state, in every sense — the dismantling to the private, human body, whose fragility is exposed over and over again, and the dismantling of the public general body. Deep fault lines have emerged in recent years in the various branches of government, in the authority of the law and of the courts, in the credibility of the army and the police, and in the trust that the public affords its leaders and its faith in their integrity.

Ben Ehrenreich (American)/Asmaa al-Ghoul (Palestinian) (17): 
    Death on television isn’t death. It’s an image, a recyclable flash of pixelated light accompanied by commentary, chatter, noise, the obscenity of cliché. It can be bent into some semblance of meaning, inserted into one or another political narrative. But when you’re there, al-Ghoul said, what stands out is the silence. “It’s very quiet.” Bodies that minutes earlier were warm and alive are cold and still. And then there’s the smell, which no screen can convey. “I smell the death in the air even though I am not there,” al-Ghoul said. “When I go out, when I walk, there’s death in my eyes. I cannot live like before. My eyes are full of death.”

David Grossman (Israeli) (18):
    I feel the heavy price that I and the people around me pay for this prolonged state of war. Part of this price is a shrinking of our soul’s surface area — those parts of us that touch the violent, menacing world outside — and a diminished ability and willingness to empathize at all with other people in pain. We also pay the price by suspending our moral judgement, and we give up on understanding what we ourselves think. Given a situation so frightening, so deceptive, and so complicated — both morally and practically — we feel it may be better not to think or know. Better to hand over the job of thinking and doing and setting moral standards to those who are surely “in the know.”

Fady Joudah (Palestinian American) and Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian) (19): 
    Around 1988, during the first Intifada, Darwish was a member of the executive council in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Along with Edward Said, he was assigned the task of drafting a new charter toward peace. It was a prickly and odd time for Darwish, “for what is a poet doing there, there in the executive council?” he asked himself. In an essay titled “Before Writing My Resignation,” Darwish became uncomfortably aware how “the creative Palestinian is prohibited from the luxury of vacated and dedicated time for the sake of creativity, because this is bound to a direct cessation from patriotic activity. Yet prisoners grow flowers in their prison yards. And in front of the zinc huts mothers plant basil and mint. The creative person must create his flexible margin between the patriotic, the political, the daily, the cultural, and the literary. But what am I to do? What does a poet do in the executive council? Will I be able to write a book of love when color falls on the ground in autumn?”

David Grossman (Israeli) (20):
    In this reality, we authors and poets write. In Israel and in Palestine, in Chechnya and in Sudan, in New York and in the Congo. There are times in my workday, after a few hours of writing, when I look up and think: Now, at this very moment, sits another author, whom I do not know, in Damascus or Tehran, in Kigali or Dublin, who, like me, is engaged in the strange, baseless, wonderful work of creation, within a reality that contains so much violence and alienation, indifference and diminishment. I have a distant ally who does not know me, and together we are weaving this shapeless web, which nonetheless has immense power, the power to change a world and create a world, the power to give words to the mute and to bring about tikkun — “repair” — in the deepest, kabbalistic sense of the word.
… 
    It is hard to talk about yourself. I will only say what I can say at this time, from where I stand now.
    I write. The consciousness of the disaster that befell me upon the death of my son Uri in the Second Labanon War now permeates every minute of my life. The power of memory is indeed great and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing effect. Nevertheless, the act of writing creates for me a “space” of sorts, an emotional expanse that I have never known before, where death is more than the absolute, unambiguous opposite of life.
…
    I write, and the world does not close in on me. It does not grow smaller. It moves in the direction of what is open, future, possible.
…
    I write. And all at once I am no longer doomed to face this absolute, false, suffocating dichotomy — this inhuman choice between “victim” and “aggressor,” without any third, more human option. When I write, I can be a whole person, with natural passages between my various parts, and with some parts that feel close to the suffering and the just assertions of my enemies without giving up my identity at all.

Fady Joudah (Palestinian American) (21): 
    [Mahmoud Darwish’s] The Stranger’s Bed is a journey of, and through voice. There is a delicate speech that gives birth to itself here. There is an “I” that overflows from the “you,” and a duality that merges beyond the narrow constructs of language. There is dialogue between masculine and feminine, prose and poetry, self and its others.
    Not enough can be said about the metaphysics of identity in this book of love. An appeal to healing begins the collection: “We came / with the wind to Babylon / and we march to Babylon,” “Am I another you / and you another I?” “Then let’s be kind.” The subtle dialogue between tone and cadence in poems such as “Low Sky” and “We Walk on the Bridge” ushers the tender musical exchange throughout the book, where even the mythic can be treated with “one cup of hot chamomile / and two aspirins.” And the sonnets — a stranger’s template for another vernacular — develop the spine that gives the book its sway as man and woman, poetry and prose, commune with each other.  Duality (or the annihilation of it) becomes “the necessary clarity of our mutual puzzle.” In many respects The Stranger’s Bed is a conversation that, once begun, compels the reader through to its last utterance, uninterrupted, where the Familiar and the Stranger become “two in one.”

David Grossman (Israeli) (22):
    Who will we be when we rise from the ashes and re-enter our lives? When we viscerally feel the pain of author Haim Gouri’s words, written during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, “How numerous are those no longer with us.” Who will we be and what kind of human beings will we be after seeing what we’ve seen? Where will we start after the destruction and loss of so many things we believed in and trusted?
…
    Are we capable of shaking off the well-worn formulas and understanding that what has occurred here is too immense and too terrible to be viewed through stale paradigms? Even Israel’s conduct and its crimes in the occupied territories for 56 years cannot justify or soften what has been laid bare: the depth of hatred towards Israel, the painful understanding that we Israelis will always have to live here in heightened alertness and constant preparedness for war. In an unceasing effort to be both Athens and Sparta at once. And a fundamental doubt that we might ever be able to lead a normal, free life, unfettered by threats and anxieties. A stable, secure life. A life that is home.
https://www.jta.org/2023/10/20/ideas/israeli-novelist-david-grossman-who-will-we-be-when-we-rise-from-the-ashes

Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian) (23):
We store our sorrows in our jars, lest
the soldiers see them and celebrate the siege …
We store them for other seasons,
for a memory,
for something that might surprise us on the road.
But when life becomes normal
we’ll grieve like others over personal matters
that bigger headlines had kept hidden,
when we didn’t notice the hemorrhage of small wounds in us.
Tomorrow when the place heals
we’ll feel its side effects

Naomi Shihab Nye (Palestinian American) (24):
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

David Grossman (Israeli) (25):
    I conclude with one more wish, which I once expressed in my novel See Under: Love. This wish is uttered at the very end of the book, when a group of persecuted Jews in the Warsaw ghetto finds an abandoned baby boy and decides to raise him. These elderly Jews, broken and tortured, stand around the child and dream about what they would like his life to be, and into what sort of a world they would like him to grow up. Behind them, the real world is going up in smoke, with blood and fire everywhere, and they say a prayer together. This is their prayer: “All of us prayed for one thing: that he might end his life knowing nothing of war … We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war.”

Nikola Madzirov (Macedonian) (26): 
I saw dreams that no one remembers
and people wailing at the wrong graves.
I saw embraces in a falling airplane
and streets with open arteries.
I saw volcanos sleep longer than
the roots of the family tree
and a child who’s not afraid of the rain.
Only it was me no one saw
only it was me no one saw.

Agha Shahid Ali (Kashmiri) (27):
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
 I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
 I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.
 Your memory gets in the way of my memory:
    …
I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.
 I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to
                      myself.
There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.
 If only somehow you could have been mine,
 what would not have been possible in the world?

Joy Harjo (Mvskoke) (28):
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning 
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we 
Were born, and die soon within a 
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

Audre Lorde (African-American) (29):
    Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
…
    The angers between [peers] will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.
…
    The angers of [peers] can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal but a sign of growth.

                    ***

Meenakshi: These poets and writers open up possibility. But you — people of strategy and action — need to build the structures and make possibility into reality. Do it.

NOTES:
 (1) Who am I? Why do I care? Why these writers? FWIW, what do I think?
    I am Meenakshi Chakraverti, an US American of Indian-Bengali origin. I am a writer, living in NYC. I live on land that was inhabited by the peoples of Lenapehoking. Descendants of the Lenape and other indigenous communities continue to live on this land that has been settled, often with violence and theft, by waves of settlers, including me, from other parts of the world. I honor them and I own that history. I chose to become an American citizen and over the last two decades have been learning to live with American history as my history. Having grown up as a member of an upper-caste Hindu family, I am also learning to be more conscious of, and own, my caste history.
    I am aware that this war in Palestine-Israel is just one of many wars, and many other wars cause grievous harm without me feeling so stirred. So why this war, this region? In my case, two things: (1) Early in my life I grew up with the grief of the Holocaust (a horror and a grief for ALL people; we are all accountable), and then I became increasingly aware of the losses and plight of Palestinians. I know Israelis personally and have good Jewish friends who have family in Israel. And I’ve worked with Israelis and Palestinians in Second Track dialogue work and grew to have a personal fondness for all of them. So there is a real personal connection with that region. (2) I am a US citizen. The US continues to be inordinately powerful and influential in that region, as much or more than it is any other region. As a US citizen, I am accountable for the policies of the US.
    Most of the quoted writers are people whose writing I know and admire. A few are new to me but their writing has made me think and feel in ways that open up understanding and possibility. They all have written things that “the other side” might “disagree” with, and they all have written things that show they see something and feel something of what “the other side” sees and feels.
    A long time ago, after the Oslo Accords collapsed and the Second Intifada had started I did some work with a group of Palestinians and Israelis. Most of them were writers; all of them worked with words. In one of the breaks between their facilitated conversations, they sat together. They took a long break. At the end, they turned to us, and said: “if it were up to us, we’ve resolved the conflict.” I do believe that if the writers I’ve quoted here were to meet — for all the pain and anger that those still alive feel right now — they would have a different conversation from the engagements between the Israeli leadership, especially Netanyahu and his government, and the Palestinian leadership, especially Hamas. I believe they might well find a way to resolution and the rest of us in the world would rejoice. But many of the writers quoted here aren’t still alive, and those who are, don’t get to meet and certainly don’t get to decide the way forward. However, perhaps, we, who read them, can push our leaders to hear and amplify their voices.
    What happens next?
    I have no solutions, but I see the possibility of peace (yes, really, even today!) and I have no choice but to hope. I have no standing from which to propose or build solutions but I do think that I and others like me —bystanders who care — can create space for people who are more immediately affected to breathe, feel, and think with less rather than more fear and thus to be more active supporters and participants in a real peace process. Perhaps a peace process could start with recognizing the state of Palestine with 1967 borders. Let’s seek and support people brave enough to make this a peaceful and prosperous region for all.
 (2) This excerpt is from a poem by Sahir Ludhianvi, the pen name of Abdul Hayee, a poet and writer born in 1921 in Ludhiana, Punjab. I was introduced to this poem by Punjabi (both Pakistani and Indian) partners in Sahar, a Boston area-based dialogue effort in the early 2000s. This translation is based on the translation I was given, perhaps slightly modified by me. I have not found any source with this exact translation. Here is a transliteration of the original Urdu. The link also leads to a video of the poem being read.
aao ki koī ḳhvāb buneñ kal ke vāste 
varna ye raat aaj ke sañgīn daur kī 
Das legī jaan o dil ko kuchh aaise ki jaan o dil 
tā-umr phir na koī hasīñ ḳhvāb bun sakeñ 
https://www.rekhta.org/nazms/aao-ki-koii-khvaab-bunen-aao-ki-koii-khvaab-bunen-kal-ke-vaaste-sahir-ludhianvi-nazms
 (3) “The War on Error” (in the section titled The Foreigner’s Home) in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison.
 (4) “The Creative Process” by James Baldwin.
 (5) From “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” by Mahmoud Darwish, the English version by Agha Shahid Ali, with Ahmad Dallal. Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri poet writing in English. The original poem was written in Arabic.
 (6) From “Di rayze aheym/The Journey Home” by Irena Klepfisz, in Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021. Klepfisz’s mother was a Holocaust survivor and her father was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto.
 (7) From A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz (translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange). This excerpt is situated in the summer of 1947 in British-ruled Palestine.
 (8) From “Two Stranger Birds in Our Feathers” by Mahmoud Darwish (from the collection The Stranger’s Bed, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah).
 (9) From “Arabic” by Naomi Shihab Nye (from her collection Red Suitcase). 
 (10) From “In the City of Slaughter” by Hayim Nahman Bialik, written in 1904 about the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in Moldova which was part of the Russian Empire (translated from the Hebrew by Vladimir Jabotinsky). I found this version on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayim_Nahman_Bialik. 
 (11) From “Books That Have Read Me,” an essay by David Grossman, published in the English collection titled Writing in the Dark (translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen). 
 (12) This poem by Hiba Abu Nada is quoted by Fady Joudah, in his essay titled “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation,” published on November 1, 2023 by Literary Hub. Hiba Abu Nada died in the bombing of Gaza on Oct 20, 2023. (https://lithub.com/a-palestinian-meditation-in-a-time-of-annihilation/) 
 (13) From “Death in the Air” by American writer Ben Ehrenreich, in which he interviews Gazan writer Asmaa al-Ghoul (blog post 8 November 2023). https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/death-in-the-air?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20November%209%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list
 (14) From “All-Zionist Girl” by Lily Galili, in The Daily Beast, April 27, 2012. Lily Galili is a major Israeli journalist. https://www.thedailybeast.com/all-zionist-girl 
 (15) From “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation,” by Fady Joudah. See (12).
 (16) From “Contemplations on Peace,” by David Grossman, in the collection Writing in the Dark. See (11).
 (17) Same as (13). 
 (18) From “Writing in the Dark,” by David Grossman, in the collection Writing in the Dark. 
 (19) From the Translator’s Preface, by Fady Joudah, to the collection of poems of different periods, The Butterfly’s Burden, by Mahmoud Darwish. 
 (20) Same as (18). 
 (21) Same as (19). 
 (22) From “Who will we be when we rise from the ashes,” by David Grossman, published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on October 20, 2023. https://www.jta.org/2023/10/20/ideas/israeli-novelist-david-grossman-who-will-we-be-when-we-rise-from-the-ashes. 
 (23) From “ A State of Siege,” by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah in The Butterfly’s Burden. See (19).
 (24) From “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, from her selected poems in Words Under the Words.
 (25) From “Contemplations on Peace,” by David Grossman, in the collection Writing in the Dark.
 (26) From “I saw Dreams” by Nikola Madzirov, published in How Does the World Breathe Now? Film as Witness, Archive, and Political Tool, by Savvy Contemporary, Berlin. Translated from the Macedonian by Peggy and Graham Reid. 
 (27) From “Farewell,” by Agha Shahid Ali, in his collection of poems, The Country Without a Post Office.
 (28) From “Eagle Poem, by Joy Harjo, from her collection In Mad Love and War. 
 (29) From “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” by Audre Lorde, keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, June 1981, and in the collection Sister Outsider.

     The children of today become the grown-ups of tomorrow. The grown-ups of today are the children of yesterday. 
     Many years ago I was invited to a fundraiser for a program called Hands of Peace which created space for Palestinian/Arab and Israeli/Jewish teenagers to live together for a few weeks and engage in full and honest encounters. The children spoke at the fundraiser and from what I could tell they had many very important and very challenging conversations. How challenging? Think how challenging it is today to talk to someone who thinks even a little differently from you on the topic of Palestine and Israel, leave alone people who think “Israelis” are the bad guys (as if all Israelis are the same) or “Palestinians” are the bad guys (as if all Palestinians are the same), leave alone people who because of deep relational or cultural or historical connections to Palestine or Israel, and to the suffering woven into each of those histories, feel that each word — just listening to it — has the potential to destroy or at least draw blood. These children did it. Held by Hands of Peace, they had these conversations. They didn’t, indeed couldn’t, solve the conflict, but they created a tender foundation of relationships that the grown-ups they would become, perhaps, could draw on to build peace in their region. As I write this, I am sad and somewhat fearful thinking of those children, now in their late twenties. Who are they now? How are they? What’s left of the tender foundation of relationships? 
     A silent auction was one of the mechanisms of the fundraiser. A box with an embroidered cover was contributed by a young Palestinian, a girl if I remember correctly. A large metal hamsa hand was brought by a young Israeli, a boy, as I remember. They looked like elements of home, they looked like they belonged in a home, and I could afford them, so I bid for them and now they are side by side in my living room, in a central place. I brought these objects to my home many years after some work I’d done with Palestinians and Israelis, whom I’d grown to like and respect, all of them. That work happened at a time when I still hoped for change. Then, as one barrier to peace after another was layered and stacked, often with the blood and tears of someone, or someone else, and sometimes with the bland words of political and bureaucratic “strategies,” I looked away. The box and the hand stayed in my living room in a central place, perhaps silently holding hope. Perhaps those children will…? 
     And, now, I have been shocked out of my looking away, though I’m tempted to look away again. I could look away, utter some platitudes, and look away once more, but I will not. This time I will not look away and I’m writing this to ask you not to as well. This is not simply about safety, land and dignity, ceasefire, or justice, though all of those things are important for Israelis as well as Palestinians. It’s about the children. It’s about the grown-ups we want tomorrow. 
     While the violence and kidnappings committed on October 7, 2023 by Hamas militants were unambiguously cruel and wrong, I knew they would be followed by “lawn-mowing.” As I struggled with external and internal responses to the Hamas violence and Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza, killing and maiming tens of thousands, destroying homes and hospitals, along with a sideshow of beatings and vandalism in the West Bank, I went back to writers I’ve admired: Mahmoud Darwish, Amos Oz, David Grossman, Naomi Shihab Nye. I read news commentaries carefully, looking for more than escalating fear and hatred; looking rather for kindness and empathy that goes both ways even if not quite symmetrically, for glimpses of generosity in the midst of anger and pain. I created a conversation of sorts among poets and writers, using quoted excerpts of their work. As I read the conversation I’d composed, I wondered why everyone doesn’t see: there’s beauty here (I look one way) and there’s beauty there (I look the other way); there’s pain here, there’s pain there; there’s anger here, there’s anger there; there’s kindness here, there’s kindness there; there’s love here, there’s love there; there’s fear here, there’s fear there. I want to write — it fits the cadence of the words and the sentiment cloud I am conjuring up — there’s hope here, there’s hope there, but I can’t. There isn’t much hope, here or there. 
     If we care about that region, it’s up to us to create space for hope for all the peoples of Palestine and Israel. And I believe that the content and direction of the hope can only be a fair, robust, and viable peace process. It can be slow, it can even be angry, so long as anger is seen, as I learned from Audre Lorde, as a “distortion of griefs among peers.” Indeed anger in this context is a distortion of griefs, but can Israelis and Palestinians see each other as peers? Do we in the rest of the world hold them as peers, hold space for them as peers? If anger is not expressed and understood and explored as a distortion of griefs among peers, it drops into hatred, and “the object of hatred,” as Lorde puts it, “is death and destruction.” Peace does not mean stepping away from anger, “for anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.” (from “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” in Sister Outsider) 
     Scouring the news for reasons to hope I watched a brief video on The Washington Post website that shows displaced Palestinian teenaged boys doing parkour, watched by delighted little children. A teenager who is interviewed explains that it’s an outlet from the stresses of the war and the delight of the little children makes him happy. I watched it thinking of David Grossman’s wish. In his essay, “Contemplations on Peace,” he writes: “I conclude with one more wish, which I once expressed in my novel See Under: Love. This wish is uttered at the very end of the book, when a group of persecuted Jews in the Warsaw ghetto finds an abandoned baby boy and decides to raise him. These elderly Jews, broken and tortured, stand around the child and dream about what they would like his life to be, and into what sort of a world they would like him to grow up. Behind them, the real world is going up in smoke, with blood and fire everywhere, and they say a prayer together. This is their prayer: “All of us prayed for one thing: that he might end his life knowing nothing of war … We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war.” (in Writing in the Dark) 
​     This wish — my wish, your wish I hope — is not just for happy children, it’s for the grown-ups — whether Israeli or Palestinian— who can be so much more if they are not consumed by fear of destruction and destructive themselves. Little children are sweet and innocent and, of course, we don’t want them to be harmed. But, as importantly, these children grow up to be the grown-ups who govern our world and the world of new generations of sweet and innocent children. Wouldn’t you want grown-ups who know and can give generosity and joy, because they have received it, rather than grown-ups who live with grieving and fearful barriers,  hardened by and into hatred, barriers which open more easily to violence than to generosity? 

Composition: the artist as impostor
Composition: writing like a visual artist
Composition
Routine Joy

     When I start a new piece, I throw myself into writing, a sensual, wordy mix of hand movements — fingers tapping, or moving pen — and the heady intoxication of words, like a visual artist drawing and cutting lines through space, always falling short of the depth of each perspective, each frame, and the grades of light and shadow. I don’t know what is going to happen. I clutch an idea, something between a prop and destination. I propel myself beyond foolishness and prophecy. I, unfailingly human and impostor, am representing life, the world, something like that.
     The words themselves have histories. Composition, put together. Impostor, put upon. Grade, measure, step.
     If I stick with this, I’ll lose myself, probably you as well. Where is the idea? Seeded in two layers of ordinary life: routine joy, and the tree outside my window, which means the window, the tree, the street bounded by humped cars and brownstones, shadowed stairs and arches, and my eyes catching the light, filling the continuity of that farthest wall through the opacity of branches. My sketch captures only lines and the barest wispy movement of leaves.
     I started the sketch because I wanted to do some fresh writing again, after months of revision and reading. Not my fourth work yet, there’s more revision to do. Just a short piece, a blog post. On what? Nothing in particular pushed to be thought, to be written. My thoughts are bucketed, moving forward in orderly ways. Those gentle buckets shepherd my unruly feelings as well, expand to give them space, and hold them. After many years of change, my life has fallen back into a routine in which I am loved and loving, some people honor words I utter in writing or in direct relationship, and my coffee is good. There is a routine joy in my life. I laugh more easily. In the gaps between working and loving, listening and caring, I step out with an easy frivolity. It’s a happy feeling. But wait, how much can I write about that? It doesn’t hold the meaning of life — whatever that is — and I know its evanescence, I know some — many! — of the shadows below it, it being that routine joy. 
     Presupposing the limitations of that routine joy, I couldn’t start that new writing and so, itching and driven to do something, I sketched the tree in my window, which, as I have already said, is not just the tree.
     I was sketching again after an even longer break than writing, about a year and a half. As with the blankness that met my fresh writing intention, there was no particular shape or emotion that revealed the subject-object of the sketch. But I love looking out at my street from that window, and that tree is a mirror; also beautiful, with some dead branches, and changes with the seasons. So the tree, of course! 
     I anchored the sketch with the fire-escape and now one might say the sketch is of the fire-escape, anchoring as it does everything that’s also in that gaze. 
     This was a very frustrating sketch. I have no illusions about myself as a visual artist — I’m just a scribbler — but I couldn’t capture the range of perspectives that my eye does, that I can sense! Does the photograph capture more than the sketch? It has more shadows. Or does the sketch, with the shiftiness of my eyes and the frustration of my hand, capture more than the photograph? As representations they are both my impositions, my sorry expressions of what I sense and feel and think. But, sorry or not, they are also expressions of my life reaching out and touching life on my street. Spring is so beautiful. This same street has lived garbage, winter, storms, covid, solitude (both still and staggering), collectors of recyclables — the hardest working!! — and now, with me, routine joy, from me, but not just me, not just joy, but, yes, also joy.
​     As I cannot raise despair to flat, so I will not reduce joy to flat. I am alive with all of it.

Dharma and Buddha nature, or layering is a form of propagation
     A few weeks ago two different thought clouds clapped against my mind like disparate cymbals, but with no violent residue, no headache. The sounds — the force of each — struck moment after moment of my mind, each confused with the other, and resounded, ringing with joyfully learned, naturally moving polyrhythms. There you have it, the word “nature,” both the ground from which roots draw the substance of life and the material of the roots and tips, indeed the air of respiration.
     Layering is a form of propagation, Elaine Ng, an artist and my friend taught me. When I told her about how the last months have been, for me, a popping out of a multi-year experience of bewilderment as one life structure after the other changed, some by my choice, some fated by the course of my own and others’ lives, some changes woeful, some joyful, the whole bewildering, I concluded that now, after popping out, I feel like a grown and aged baby. 
     A rooted seedling, she responded. A perfect metaphor I exclaimed, a rooted seedling! I went on to further describe the wending of my aged babyhood. She listened and listened; I’m long-winded. And then she said, I’m revising my metaphor. I looked skeptical. What could be better? 
     And she conjured up and recited a truer metaphor after all. Layering, she said, layering, which is a form of propagation.
     If you’ve read or heard me speak about my first novel, you’ll know that layering is the ground I walk on, the air I live in, even — to hold no exuberant excess back — the thermoclines I ripple through when diving. (Hmmm, there are no thermoclines in my first novel.)
     Hunh, I responded curiously and unusually pithily.
     I said seedling, she said, but you’re a grown plant. A grown plant can get knocked over by something outside itself. It may fall over, be driven to touch the ground. In ideal circumstances, the fallen plant will shoot roots into the ground on which it lies. It’ll draw from the remaining strength of the original plant to grow again with new roots, its tip growing up into new life. After a while this new growth is independently strong. The original plant does not necessarily die, but if you cut it off, the new plant will still live and grow.
     I’d never known anything like this, so I looked at her with wonder.
     This is layering, she said, a form of propagation.
     Really? There are real plants that do this? Is this like the banyan tree?
     No, I’m not talking about aerial roots like the banyan has, nor about the bowed rooting that is part of the normal growth practice of forsythia and cane plants (mind you, through all of this I was gaping in my mind, if not on my face, an amazed and delighted gaping). I believe, she said, offering the caveat that she is no expert botanist, that “layering” implies that something external forces the plant to the ground. 
     Do you have an example, I asked, a plant I may know?
     Time, she said. No, she did not say time. Thyme, she said.
     Thyme! Of course.

     So what does all of this have to do with dharma or Buddha nature, beyond all of these sharing a space in my mind, a time in my life, that morning of October 21, 2022?
     Well, let’s start with dharma. I am not referring to what is commonly understood as dharma in Buddhist traditions, but rather a Hindu notion of dharma that I learned as a child and youth. As I absorbed various inflections of “dharma” through stories and philosophical writings, I came to understand it as who one is, living who one is. Your dharma is directly related to who you are, your dharma is to live who you are. This notion is complicated. It’s been pressed into justifying socio-economic stratification in ways which have spilled into brazen constraint and cruelty, as when Hindus have insisted on some version of: you must, you can only, live your caste or lack thereof — your high status, your low status, that’s who you are, that’s your dharma. However, in the stories and philosophical writings I encountered, there are enough examples in which “dharma” is not bound to structural position. I found enough boundary-crossing that I came away with a notion that can expansively hold a complex mess of being human. But then one could ask: do you mean that serial murderers can justify their practice of killing people by saying they are living their dharma? That would suggest a notion so immoral that it has no meaning beyond willful, contingent idiosyncrasy. Technically, yes, a serial murderer could say that. But my dharma, and many of yours too I suspect, includes stopping harm to others, especially what looks like wanton murder, and so we’ll try to find ways or support ways — investigative, judicial, preventive, etc. — to do that. From this perspective community norms and statecraft may be viewed as the collective expression of recurrent and overlapping elements of individual dharmas, including dharma elements related to loving, sharing, seeking well-being, seeking domination, seeking overweening survival-to-immortality, destroying an obstacle, propagation, growth.
     But this kind of efflorescing, even rampant, dharma sounds very different from Buddhist notions of dharma which modestly propose a way to live with no, or at least less, suffering by giving up the delusion that if you get what you desire you will not suffer. The Buddhist way is taught in a combination of practice and precepts that often enough sound and feel prescriptive.
     Buddhist understandings of dharma — that I draw from my sporadic chunks of practice with Zen sanghas, and my mostly autodidactic reading and home practice of Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions — have both attracted and puzzled me. A mystical, Taoist aspect deeply appeals to me because it seems to hold the length and width of what is knowable and unknowable, but then when I read “when love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised,” (Chien-chin Seng-ts’an, Third Zen Patriarch), I make that concise sound again — Hunh?
     Well, I’m not going to stop loving, so I guess I must focus on not hating, no dualism, so all love, all-all. And from there I’m back to trying to be good, to only love. Efforts to only love mean constantly denying or suppressing parts of myself, or feeling guilty, trying to be better. Not that trying to be better is bad, but denial and suppression invariably come back to bite me.
     The Buddhist teachers I read foresee that happening and tell me that’s no good either. Ok then, feel nothing, think nothing. That’s not happenin’! 
     Then, on that same day as layering opened up and when I was feeling a nagging conflict of “shoulds” — including the insidious should not-should — around a personal dilemma, I read some pages of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind for the nth time: “When there is no gaining idea in what you do, then you do something. … It is just you, yourself, nothing special.” 
     Bingo! It’s my Hindu notion of dharma! Buddha nature is living who you are. Nothing special. So maybe greedy, conflicted, unhappy is who I am, so nothing further to be done, you might say to me. Maybe, I would respond. I can’t tell you who you are. I could tell you what I experience but that may or may not be interesting or helpful to you. But if you want to feel differently, be more comfortable in yourself, I do find the Buddhist path to the root of your suffering a helpful practice and exploration. Importantly it’s a living that has no end apart from itself; it both has a goal and no goal. From this perspective, fulfillment is not a levitating cushion of certainty.
     I’ve found the path laid out by Chogyam Trungpa, particularly in his teachings in The Truth of Suffering, helpful. His detailed description of the path of the Hinayana way to liberation from suffering starts annoyingly prescriptive and ends with illumination of a potential passage to clarity about who one is. Parenthetically, Trungpa’s teachings seem to contrast oddly with accounts of his un-Buddhist sounding lifestyle that apparently included womanizing and alcoholism. These may seem logically inconsistent, even hypocritical, but they are not inconsistent in the body, mind, and emotions of a human. This way of looking at it is not about justification, it’s about seeing all the parts.* Nothing special. Trungpa’s teachings, along with the backdrop of his life, are dramatically different from Suzuki’s austere expressions of his Mahayana way, but they converge for me on an understanding of life, of Buddha nature. This Buddha nature is nothing special; we all have it, we can all uncover it, and it’s not all one thing.
     I realize that many committed Buddhists may find what I’ve written here inaccurate or misleading. To them and to you, my dear reader, I say: find your way.

     This is where I am on my meandering way — sometimes dancing along, sometimes staggering with too much, sometimes taking the long way deliberately, sometimes levitating on that cushion of delusional certainty, sometimes the cushion collapses and I fall to the ground, and then LAYERING!
     Among the recent life changes that bewildered me, my mother passed away from pancreatic cancer. She was my remaining parent and caring for her in her last months turned my experience of life from living and death to dying and alive. Caring for her I became corporeally aware of impermanence, of how life falls away from body and consciousness even as we live as we are now.
     So here I am: new growth, energetically grounded in impermanence, uncertainty, and incompleteness. Alive. I can only live who I am, die who I am. Nothing special. 

* Is it too much, too extravagant, pushing limits too far to suggest that you read Rita Dove’s brilliant, lovely poem “The Regency Fete” in this context? 
   AND I struggle with how this notion of dharma or Buddha nature can become a refuge, a delusion in itself, whether on the cushion or debauched like the Prince Regent or colluding, by commission or omission, in the collective injustices of one set of people upon another. Where is dharma there? Whose dharma? If I have the answer in one dimension, I don’t in another. Uncertainty, incompleteness, imperfection, nothing special.


More meandering through dharma, vegetation, changing light, inconclusive living


     A couple of weeks after the above piece was first drafted, I looked out of my window and gazed at a tree — mostly yellow, some green still, a few bare twigs — glowing in the morning sunlight, and mused: if I am the tree, I can’t be the sun. But I can enjoy that light, let it warm me, feed me, enrich my living. And I can glow and be beautiful just as I am, making the beauty of my spread and my colors, just as I am. And perhaps someone like me will look at me and see that spread, those colors, my glow. I may not know it, I may never know that Meenakshi watched my leaves grow yellow and fall in yellow showers and loved me and felt her life enriched by me. It’s just the way I am, I live, until I don’t.
     These sentiments, projected onto and drawn from the tree and the sunlight, became conscious as I decided to continue reading Andrey Tarkovsky’s lovely Sculpting in Time. 
     But first I dipped back into Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and found myself reading what seemed to me exactly the description of my vegetative life that morning (though perhaps not quite obvious in this telling): “When you know everything, you are like a dark sky. Sometimes a flashing will come through the dark sky. After it passes, you forget about it, and there is nothing left but the dark sky. The sky is never surprised when all of a sudden a thunderbolt breaks through. And when the lightning does flash, a wonderful sight may be seen. When we have emptiness we are always prepared for watching the flashing…. If you want to appreciate something fully, you should forget yourself. You should accept it like lightning flashing in the utter darkness of the sky.” [Meenakshi’s added note: forget the should as well.]
     Of course that vegetative sharing of life with the tree came in the morning, in a time of glory and reflection. But then, that same evening, as I was lower, duller, I looked at that same tree that now, like me, felt night fall heavily. Another dog had pooped, another man had peed. A paper cup and a plastic bag lay in the speckled mud of the tree bed. If I were the tree I’d be wondering: where will my seeds go? (This tree has lovely large, dark clumps of seed pods.) Why do I even bother morning after morning, night after night? So this is living, it’s not all glory and reflection.
     I’m also reading Moby Dick. Melville names submission and endurance as womanly virtues, in one of his rare references to the female of a species; most such references offer soft contrasts to the looming, flailing masculinity of the more obviously active characters, indeed of the exploration itself. So, does the tree submit and endure? Is that its action and heroism?
     Inconclusion

     I listen to music as a non-musician, naively. Every listening, even a repeat, or much-repeated, listening is naive. Naïveté in listening is the foundation for the ecstatic luxury of body and sound when I am listening to music. Movement may or may not enter the act; body in stillness is still body, still hearing and sensing the reverberation that is sound.
     I listen to a lot of music, infinitely different kinds. In the universes of music I have encountered — with ever greater density rushing past me, mushrooming, my body relentlessly naive — I have found only occasional spots that have stopped me short, but no, I will skirt around that path, it’s not interesting.
     Sound — the music I stay with, but sometimes even and consciously ordinary sound — may be just strung or dropped notes without words.  
     Or: that sound that catches and holds me, that I behold so to speak, may be words that give histories, expressive consciousness of a sort, to the notes that run through them. 
      In music, I listen to words as sound first, and as words after. Often I barely listen to the words as words at all. This is certainly true about words in languages I don’t know, but often this is true about words in languages I know as well. When I listen to the words, often I hear just a repetition or a phrase, sometimes I hear the wrong words, meaning the words I hear or place in that music are not the words that are formally part of that composition. When I listen to the words, however I hear them, I attach conscious meaning to that phrase of music, to that sound composition as a whole. Sometimes that meaning is fragmentary and surrounded by the corporeal and unconscious sensation of music on and in the body, and sometimes it dominates the composition. Whether scattered, ethereal, or dominant, the meaning permeates the composition, not in some completed or static way, but in a dynamic, evolving, and sometimes dying way.
    Returning from my digression into meaning, in the primary experience of listening naively, music as sound and body is meaningless.
     This post was catalyzed by listening to the music of Son Lux for the first time. I haven’t dared write about music before this because, well, I’m naive. But some days ago, I listened to Son Lux for the first time. Initially this was an unconscious listening to the background sound of the tumbling pictures and disorderly words of the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. The film is such an eye-popping feast of increasingly riotous movement and meaning that I didn’t notice the music until the credits. That’s a compliment to the synchronicity of the music with the psychedelic movements and meanings that lurch with the characters and their stories, between bills to pay, receipts to recover, hurtling stereotypes, a stunning range of emotional content, and much more. 
      I only noticed the music, noticed the music as composition in its own right at the end when the score continued through the credits. Aha, this is interesting, I thought. I looked for and listened again to the most obvious track, the song This Is A Life, then bought and downloaded it. After listening to that song a couple more times, I got more curious. Who or what was this Son Lux? So I listened to the full score and loved it. I bought and downloaded all of the two hours. My first few listenings of the whole two hours in one sitting were gloriously naive listenings.
     There are some words associated with this soundtrack: a few songs with English words; one song with Chinese words; the titles of the songs; and the name of the group that composed this soundtrack using original and sampled music — Son Lux.
     When I first saw the name Son Lux, I assimilated the word “Son” with its homonym, “son” meaning male progeny. Of course, it’s an electronic boy group. Then as I listened to the full score the first time, the second time, “Son” became sound, and lux became the first syllable of luxury, sensuous excess. And that led to this first written reflection on music — indeed sound — as I hear it.