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?)
​

     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.

Madre and desmadre
     I very recently became aware of a Spanish word desmadre, first spoken more generally in my presence and then directly to me by a group of magnificent women in the centre of San Diego. I was told desmadre means ruckus. The way I heard them use the word, it sounded like John Lewis’s “good trouble.” I thought it was two words. Of mothers? No, no, I was told, one word, meaning ruckus. The word intrigued me. Does it have something to do with madre? Well, of course it has something to do with madre, I found. It comes from a root of separation from the mother. Disintegration. Chaos. And now good trouble.
     In my three works of fiction, all the main characters are women: two wandering mothers, one grandmother, many daughters. My first and third work are about separation from the mother, in one case chosen by the mother, in the other not chosen by the mother. I wanted to close these books, close the stories, go from heimlich to unheimlich to heimlich -- the formula for a good novel I was glibly instructed by a literary agent with unliterary tastes — but the characters are broken are broken, whole only in the luminescence of the world in which they live, loved and loving.
    Earlier this year I presented the artwork edition of my first novel, Night Heron, in Berlin. My daughter introduced me, moderated the presentation and asked me how I came to write this novel about a visual artist who leaves her son for no very good reason, neither heroic ambition nor poor traumatic past. For the first time in all my stumbling, convoluted speaking about this novel, I spoke about the motivating ambition for this story. It was simple and too ambitiously silly to be spoken of before this, but there in Berlin, speaking to my daughter and a group of mostly artists and writers, I said I wanted to create a female Stephen Dedalus, as in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I had loved as a young woman. I wanted a woman to step out as vividly: the language, yes, but also that stepping out. I found no Dedalus. There was no easy Dedalus, no female derivative who felt remotely real or interesting. My own life at the time — a mother of young children — pushed me to the not-Dedalus figure of a mother of a young son, and then she leaves her son, which is experienced as desmadre by all readers, disturbingly and uncomfortably so for most, satisfyingly provocative in a melancholy way for some. 
    Art and writing has often propelled or reflected desmadre, traditionally in most parts of the world in the voices and through the agonies of men, often men with, or aligned with, more power (though they could and often did write about men of less power and even women). In the last couple of centuries that has changed. This change has become more rapid in the last sixty years or so as women and traditionally less powerful men — less powerful at least in the context of our long modern era of military gunpowder, industrialization, colonization, and rampant capitalism — have explored what it means to articulate main characters from their own experience of work and living in crowded interior and exterior worlds. 
​     Which brings me to an early stimulus for this blog post. 
    A few days ago, biographyof.red, an extraordinarily delightful Instagram account that evidently springs from Anne Carson’s work and posts mostly poetry, posted an excerpt from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. The excerpt, in turn, quotes Henri Bachelin on the conjuring of myth - involving “tragic cataclysms” of the past, and ends of times — around winter hearths. Evidently this conjuring comes from men, most definitely not old women who tell “fairytales.” Bachelard’s and Bachelin’s lovely words inscribe the space in which old masculinist myths can loom. Their words projected to me a willfully blind desire for understanding that penetrates “the end,” that grandly foresees its own tragic failure. I refused this space and asked myself, what larger space do I make, what poetics if life is the hurling of oneself — whether slowly, grandly, or awkwardly — against the hard transparency of end? What poetics, what space for people living splintered lives — loving, working, laughing, living — and expiring despite themselves, where narratives of yawning pasts and distant ends are often unheeded?
     Yes, yes, I know, Shakespeare, Dickens, the novel. And, yes, how does this relate to madre and desmadre, apart from the obvious gender stuff. Well, yes, the obvious gender stuff is key.
     Madre, a trope for connection, with all its connotation of home, gathering, shared food, shared corporeality, cooking, fire, transformation, sometimes even hearth. Complaints, shush, small tales, snoring, reaching into “forces and signs” by women and men. Desmadre, inside and outside. Inside and outside bodies, inside and outside that gathering at the hearth, inside and outside the home, heimlich always roughly pixilated, parts spinning into unheimlich, unheimlich pressed into new forms of homeliness by personal and collective intimacies.
     From trope to subject, madre to desmadre, women and the historically less powerful are saying we will occupy this hearth, we will make the space under crossing highways a hearth, we will make it a space for life, for gathering, for drought-resistant plants, for art that exclaims “we are here!”, and here encompasses the beauty and pain of our pasts, the struggles and dancing of our present, and our shared future of children, life, and death, all of that!
     I didn’t know how this blog post would spin out. It is still spinning within, tilting into aliveness, spilling into uncertainty. 
     Madre and desmadre are mythical figures of worlds that have long been binary-gendered. As binary gender dissolves into two figures in a much larger flow, or if gestation becomes incubation in genderless machinery and separation becomes connection to a human, will madre — traditionally female, one of a binary, bloody and corporeal — change? I don’t know. The best I can do for now is to observe that the binary was always only a device, a tool for organizing rhetoric and meaning. The non-binary has always been available, residing in both vast madre and desmadre. Reflecting on the mothers in my fiction and the space-making event alluded to above, madre also seems to connote separation and desmadre also connotes connection, gathering.

     For the last four months, I have been in Chennai, living with my brother and his family, helping take care of my mother who has terminal cancer. This has been a new life for me in many ways: far from my home in West Harlem; reestablishing and deepening bonds of affection with my brother and his family; inverting more fully, with affection and irritation on both sides, my child-parent relationship with my mother; and touching that line between living and dying that is always present in every one of our lives — ‘living is dying’ is a startling truism — though mostly we remain unaware of this illusory line, and when we are forced to face it we tend to fear it, or pacify it by placing it as a central mystery in spiritual or natural cycles.
     Death as a physical event is ordinary. Death as the end of consciousness is terrifying. There is no further dawn, or at least most of us don’t know that there is dawn after death. This is true even for those of us who have grown up with rebirth and reincarnation as commonplace scaffolding for being, meaningful and effective in their own cosmological register. Most, if not all, have no consciousness, no corporeal memory, of a dawn after death. Yes, dawn recurs over and over for those who live — I’ll see the sun rise again, ‘this too will pass’ — but is there dawn after death? I can have faith that there is dawn after death, but I don’t know it. I may never wake up again; certainly this body of mine will not wake up again. The hope immanent in that metaphor — dawn after death — may just be a fantasy of this consciousness, now, that will die. In itself, rationally, there is nothing disastrous about consciousness ending. Pain may be grievous. Losing someone who is part of one’s emotional universe feels like losing a part of oneself, but a self remains to mourn that loss. Injustice and betrayal may feel like mortal wounds, but short of death, a self remains to feel the hurt, the anger, the debilitation, the shame, thus to be alive.
     Until my current experience of watching my mother live with her fierce energy, her obdurate independence and fierce though momentary pleasures, her recurring flashes of charm and tenderness, her sudden humor amidst her sharp changes in lucidity, until this current experience, I pacified death by drawing wisdom and succor from evidence and accounts of natural and spiritual cycles. But recently two things infiltrated my foundational calmness in the face of death. First, the smell of parsley cooking in my sister-in-law’s kitchen drew a very specific longing in me to cook one of my stews in my NYC apartment, with fresh parsley and fresh lemon thyme. My nose and stomach harked into that future: when I get home, I’ll smell that parsley cooking in my stew, in my home. The second infiltration came from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,” one of his best-known poems. I can’t remember how it popped up on one of my screens a week or so ago.
     At first reading the poem seems to be calling for a last barricading against death. But after my recent reading, the poem slowly turned in me. Now I read the poem as a raging for life, not just for life too quickly past, nor for life too quickly passing, but for life now, living as dying, dying as living. Live fiercely like my mother does. 
     “Rage, rage against the dying light,” sounds like an honoring of the last, frustrated fulminations of a dying consciousness that struggles but must slowly fade, and it is that. But I also found the energy of the poem coursing in me, and I see it coursing in my mother. Yes, there is frustration and fear as one part of my mother’s life after another slips away, more and more with no possibility of another dawn. Yes, this is happening throughout our lives. In the Japanese ichi-go ichi-e, each moment happens only once, each moment has no future dawn. Dawn, dusk, death pass quickly in each moment. This is palpable and ordinary if we dwell on constant change, but mostly we live our lives with the experience and expectation of regularity and continuity, the sun will rise again, spring will come again. In terminal illness, the irrevocability of change glares. This is gone, that will never come back. Each quick dawn is smaller, more fleeting, each smile, each lingering step, perhaps the last, each acquiescence to sleep, still only sleep, not death. When my mother’s smallest, most fleeting dawns cease, I will cook with fresh parsley again in NYC. 
     Is rage in the face of death impotent then, an impotent struggle against the inevitable end of life, better to replace rage with meditative calm among those cosmic — natural and spiritual — cycles? The simple answer is that rage, the full living of each moment, however waning, is part of those cycles, no false choice there between one and the other. The less simple answer — fraught and agonistic — is that each lost dawn is ok if you know you’ll see or feel or hear another dawn, but when each lost dawn narrows conscious time to that point at which consciousness ceases — what dawn lies beyond that point? — the terror is real. Palliate the terror, but the terror may not simply be palliated away.
     One of my mother’s greatest gifts to me and the world is her joy of life, her unabashed vigor as she loves, laughs, dislikes, argues, fights, never shrinking, even now with her tired mind and frail limbs. I marvel at that vigor but to see her fully I cannot shy away from the contrast between my imagining parsley cooking in my West Harlem kitchenette again — a plausible future, wafting from my delusion of continuity — and her prospect of what dawn, what smells in what kitchens?
​     At that line between living and dying, in that gap between the possibility of parsley cooking again and all possibilities as ephemera in a possibly meaningless unknown, in that space between delusion and fathomless uncertainty, Dylan Thomas’s poem exhorts, “rage, rage.” Live now, live now! Live now, live now, my mother’s life proclaims. Dylan Thomas chose “rage, rage” — the words are mad and measured, the sound beats out, and beats against, time — but in his calling for, calling forth, that crazy human consciousness of life, he could as easily have written “laugh, laugh against the dying of the light,” or “love, love against the dying of the light.” Just live, live as long as you touch this life and this life touches you.

     Age may have something to do with it, but I’m not sure.
     I was safe from March 2020, even before that, and I’m safe enough now. I was healthy enough to start with, and had enough money. Two grocery stores near me were open, a friend sent me a mask when I needed one, my daughter sent me more, I bought a few, I had lots of Zicam, ibuprofen, and Vitamin C, and I live close to the river, which means I can walk by the water. I had my phone, and FaceTime and Zoom. For some months, the only real people I saw were on the streets, in Duane Reade, and in my two grocery stores. People died, many people died in New York City; I didn’t know any of them. In May I saw a morgue truck a twenty-five minute walk from my home. Then one of the grocery stores shut down, the one I favored; it had been struggling already.
     I already had a practice of drawing pleasure from small evidence of life or shape: a sparrow; the magic of a male cardinal, his insistent courtship; the loud cacophony of birds in the morning; the small bumps on branches outside my window that grew and burst into fragile green then darkened to heaviness; the early yellow of some hasty fellows, some as early as June; the fall; the winter again. But now I saw and felt more of these, and more than these. I gazed at the shadow of the locked gate on my fire-escape window. I watched the light of the late gibbous moon swell until it was full through the gingko in the backyard. The plants silhouetted against late light in neighbors’ windows became my friends in the night. A trumpeter played and played and played until two or later in the night; then he was gone and the lights stayed off in those windows. I watched mourning doves squat the abandoned blue jays’ nest outside my window, lay eggs, share brooding duty, then one dove disappeared, the other tried, gave up, and the eggs dried to shells that caught the wind and blew away; in grief and greed I prised the nest away and tossed it to use the fire escape for my solitary Covid wine. One May evening, that same May when I saw the morgue truck, when I went back in to replenish my glass of wine, I found G from downstairs with two policemen at my metal-sheeted door. Someone had heard a shot. No, it wasn’t in my apartment, not even in my building; I hadn’t heard the shot, I never heard any more about it.

     All the writing and talking about grief over the last months – in the close circle of my personal life and also in wider circles of the published world – led me a couple of days ago to write, in two columns, all the things that have weighed heavy on me in recent times and then all the people who, during these same times, have received love and given love to me in interactions that range from the ordinary and funny to the profound and otherworldly. Over the last week I’ve fluctuated between lows and highs especially noticeably, to the degree I mentioned it in a work meeting as my check-in, noting that I was at that time on an upswing, perhaps even cresting, but knew from experience it wasn’t going to last so I was just taking it as it comes, enjoying it while I could. 
     Then Simone Weil’s Waiting for God fell into my hands via a recommendation from Susan Sontag from 1963 and an order from my neighborhood bookstore, Sister’s Uptown Bookstore in the borderlands – actually all one world! – between West Harlem and Washington Heights. I already had Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, with Jasmine Syedullah, which came via a recommendation from thandiwe Watts-Jones a few months ago and from Sister’s Uptown also. It quickly became obvious that I had to read these books in tandem, which I am still doing. A few passages stood out early on. Deeply striking passages have become a regular flow now. If I wrote them all I’d basically be telling you to read the books. I’ll just mention a couple of passages from early on that –  along with conversations with dear friends, music, and just living in NYC through day and night with intense attention to every phenomenon in these COVID times – stimulated new clarity about what I am calling grief in a general way.
​
     If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry ‘my God why hast thou forsaken me?’ if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God.
…
     There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God, in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word.
     -- Simone Weil
And
     To embody the truth is to live beyond the limits of self-reinforcing habits, which take the narrative of the past, projected into the future, and obscure the present, leaving us to sleep-walk in the dreamscape of other people’s desires and determinations. It is to transcend the borders directed by pain, fear, and apathy, to discover new territory unbound by the privileges and preferences that trade freedom for familiarity and comfort but pretend they’re one and the same.
     -- Rev. angel Kyodo williams
​
     With all this gathering like water in a wave, though I no longer really know what’s up or down in the making of such a wave, I woke up at three in the morning a couple of nights ago and didn’t fall back asleep for hours. I don’t often have insomnia but I’ve learned that, when I do, it’s best to “play possum,” which is to stay awake, lying still and physically resting, while thoughts and feelings move in and out. The first hour was the usual lying quietly with my thoughts and feelings. Over the next couple of hours I wrote some thoughts, not in one go; I jumped up every ten minutes or so to write an additional thought. I wrote in the dark because I didn’t want my eyes to get dazzled by the page. I did not want my resting body and sort-of floating mind to get dazzled into full awakeness. Awakeness is usually invoked as a very positive metaphor but dazzled awakeness is also restrictive.
     Here is what I wrote in the dark, really in the dark, only streetlight on the page of my notebook.
     There’s been grief all my life. Most of my life I lived in the midst of it, not always conscious of it, but in the midst of it. Sometime in the last two decades, while living a suburban working-parent life in San Diego, I separated from grief. My divorce and now our COVID times reconnected me with it. At first it felt like grief spouted singularly from the breaking of my marriage and family, but COVID has pushed me into awareness of all the grief, or at least has put me back into the midst of grief.
     My separation from grief in San Diego was not because of any special badness in San Diego or myself, but came from a convergence of personal, historical, and cultural time within me. What I needed in my last years in San Diego was not more aware and active efforts to find happiness and experience contentment, as I felt pressured to do by the wider culture, but to feel again the grief that was always there.
     Yesterday (catalyzed by the writings of Simone Weil, Rev. angel, Lama Rod, and Jasmine S, along with interactions with a couple of dear, dear friends, and my witness of increasing homelessness in the streets of New York), I reintegrated grief as a regular – mutable but constant – part of my life. In a funny way, that reintegration makes joy more possible. My hurt, loss, and grief from the ending of my marriage are real and still present, but the reintegrated grief is something much longer and larger, with many, many sources, ineffable. The grief of my immediate family and childhood friends, the grief in the streets when I was growing up in India, my failures, the grief that surrounds me now, the grief of real people in real pain across the US and world, not just those tragedies out there while I live in my bubble of clutched and privilege-guilt wellbeing here, the grief of family and friends in this latter stage of my life.*
     (Now back to my writing in the present of this day.)
     I don’t own the griefs of other people, but I’m in the midst of them along with my own personal griefs. Grief is not separate from me at any time, not even when I feel really happy being irritated with one of my children (or my mother!) or laughing with a friend. I want you to know this. This is not being sorry for myself, or for others. This grief is not instrumental, it is not a problem to be solved, though some of the conditions that give rise to some of the specific sources of grief are problems to be solved. My awareness of the world – joy and suffering – and my commitment to social justice never went away, but I unwittingly separated from grief as part of my life. It became an emotion to get over or a problem to solve rather than an intrinsic part of being. No longer. I can’t ignore it but I  can’t control it either. I’m more attuned to, and gentle with, my own and others’ grief, rather than making joy a treasure around which I have to build barriers and defensive strategies, or which I have to pursue blindly. I’d like to stay this way. If you know me, you know that I can be rather joyful, and seek joy for myself and others. That will continue. So will grief.
     This piece is very personal, but it’s part of work and writing for what I value in life – beauty, equity, justice, complexity, love, life itself.
* Some of you may read this as referring to specific grand griefs of specific people. Sometimes grief is terribly grand; often enough, in my understanding, it is not. For many people, let’s even say all, there is pain, sometimes inherited over generations, that’s muted, not even called grief. We all have affliction, grief.