LivingSmall

Fourteen Precepts in Fifteen Days

Eighth: Do not utter words that can create discord and cause the community to break. Make every effort to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh

A few weeks ago, my brother went down to Gardiner, which is one of the northern entrances to Yellowstone National Park, with our friend Bill to check out a demonstration. The protesters were there to register their disagreement with the current policy of slaughtering buffalo who cross the park boundary into Montana every winter, usually in search of forage. Because Montana is certified as a “brucellosis-free” state, the cattle industry here is insistent that the Yellowstone herd, some of whom carry brucellosis, be prevented from mingling with Montana cattle. Bill was there to take photos, since that’s what he does for a living, and Patrick was just hanging out.

So as my brother is hanging out, leaning against the truck, watching the demonstrators, an older woman came up to him and screamed “F*ck you! F*ck you, assh*le! Stop the killing!” Patrick was somewhat taken aback, because as he told me later, she looked like someone’s granny, and the profanity and the hostility coming out of her mouth, both rocked him back on his heels and made him want to laugh at her. She didn’t help her cause at all, she just made them ridiculous. We’ve actually been talking about this old lady for a couple of weeks, both as we watch demos on tv, and as we watch our President and his cronies get more and more entrenched in their own bully-pulpit positions.

In his commentary on this precept, Thich Nhat Hanh says: “This precept is about reconciliation … In order to reconcile a conflict, we have to be in touch with both sides … to listen to both sides and understand.” When everyone’s shouting, no one is listening. And it’s tempting to shout. I grew up in a family of shouters, and there’s a kind of relief when you’re deep in the thick of it, having a big emotional scene, shouting and crying and so convinced that you are right and the other person is not only wrong, but unjustifiably wrong. But it doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s like the old lady screaming obscenities, the old lady who has become a symbol in our household for ridiculous anger. In that I guess she serves a certain defusing kind of purpose. At this point, if Patrick or I look at one another and say “F*ck you, assh*le” in a little-old-lady voice, it’s certain to cause one, if not both of us to start laughing. So that’s something.

Fourteen Precepts in Fifteen Days

Seventh: Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings. Learn to practice breathing in order to regain compuosure of body and mind, to practice mindfulness, and to develop concentration and understanding.
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh

My friend Wendy, sent me an email yesterday asking if the next precept was about not intoxicating oneself and others, and lo and behold, yes, I think you could read this one that way. Friday night was great fun, and there’s something to be said for the Dionysian impulse, particularly when one small, winterbound town seems to all come out at once to celebrate our communal joy that spring has once again come around, but on the other hand, at least when I get in that space, I stop actually paying attention to what anyone is saying and wind up in the land of blah blah blah blah blah. That space where you chat people up, and become entertaining and funny, and yet, the next morning you realize that none of those conversations stuck. That they all just flew off into the ozone because you weren’t being mindful. Because you weren’t actually paying attention.

Fourteen Precepts in Fifteen Days
LivingSmall lived a little large last night — between drinking with the “emerald dealer” from Columbia (by way of Fargo), and the guy who dragged me out of the party at midnight and pulled his mother’s old shotgun out of the back of his pickup truck in order to show me how nice and small and light it was (we’d been discussing bird dogs), well, LivingSmall has a bit of a head on her, and will resume pure, zen-like thoughts tomorrow, once she’s cleansed the toxins from her body.

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Five Do-Over
Fifth: Do not accumulate weath while millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of your life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need.
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh

Some days a girl just wakes up groggy and out of sorts, particularly after a night dreaming that she’s being chased through Baghdad by threatening Baath Party officials, dreams that she couldn’t shake even after the world’s best puppy climbed in bed for a snuggle at three am. After a night like that, sometimes it’s hard to get your brain to figure out what it wants to write about a precept, even if it’s one of the precepts you’d really looked forward to writing about. So I’m going to take a do-over on this one (although in an effort to be zen-like about it, and to own all my stuff, I’m leaving the other post, the post I won’t refer to as “the stupid post,” down below).

Okay, here’s the personal challenge for me on this one. Renouncing wealth isn’t the hard part — anyone who decided, as I did, to spend a life writing novels, literary novels, in my case, dark literary novels pretty much gives up early on on the idea of being wealthy. Sure, some people get huge advances and movie deals, but some people also get hit by busses. I’ve been broke until about the last year or two, and I’m okay with that.

Here’s what has been a challenge, particularly since I’ve moved to Montana. I have these friends in Bozeman who I met when we were all in our early twenties. We were out of touch for a number of years, but when I came up here last year looking at houses, I looked them up. Now, I grew up in one of the wealthier suburbs of America, among, shall we say, the haute bourgoisie. I went to school with kids whose surnames were also the names of major corporations, and among people for whom having to work at all was often an option. Then I left that world, and worked my way through graduate school, and somehow wound up out here in the regular world where it’s simply a given that one has to earn a living. And that earning a living isn’t something one should be pitied for. And then I got back in touch with these old friends, and realized that they live in that other world, that world in which I was raised. When I told my girlfriend that I was looking at houses in Livingston, her immediate reaction was “Oh! You don’t want to live there”

And despite myself, I knew exactly what she meant by there. She meant out there in the world outside that carefully-defined bubble of “people like us.” And as I explained that yes, I did want to live in Livingston, not Bozeman, precisely because Livingston is funky, and a little rundown, and populated by weirdo artists and painters, I could see that my friend was not believing me. I could see that she assumed I was simply making the best of my “poverty,” putting a brave face on it. This is the same friend who looked at me with tears in her eyes and told me how proud she was that “you’ve done this all by yourself.” Which was sweet. But was also maddening. Yeah, me and about 95% of the rest of the world have gone to school, gotten jobs, bought houses “all by ourselves.”

So the challenge for me is to somehow stay friends with these people, when I feel like I’m always holding my breath to avoid losing my temper and accusing them of hoarding wealth, of living off trust fund money they didn’t earn themselves (which brings out the little tiny Karl Marx in me, ranting about living off the labor of others), of pretending to be environmentalists while driving two SUVs, of buying an enormous suburban house and turning what was ranch land into an acre of lawn, lawn that their kids don’t even play on, and most of all, of thinking that their excessive lifestyle is “normal” and just the way “nice” people live, and pitying me for “having” to live in a little house up here in funky town. The challenge for me is to somehow find a way to maybe start speaking my truth with these friends, who are really good nice people, with great kids, find a way to start speaking my truth about how I feel this “normal” bourgeois lifestyle is a danger to our nation and our world, find a way to start speaking this truth without sounding accusatory or judgemental.

So far, I haven’t done very well at this. So far, I’ve pretty much just been avoiding them. Which I don’t think is what the spirit of this precept is asking us to do.

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Six

Sixth: Do not maintain anger or hatred. As soon as anger and hatred arise, practice the meditation on compassion in order to deeply understand the persons who have caused anger and hatred. Learn to look at other beings with the eyes of compassion.
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh

A little note about this precept project. I worry that I’m coming off like someone who knows something about all of this, which is really not the case at all. The purpose of this project was to keep me from the brink of despair. To give me a little piece of text to riff about and to try to put something out there into the cybersphere that was about peace, forgiveness, love. And to try to remind myself every morning, that peace must start in our own hearts. It’s Lent, when we’re asked to look inside ourselves and to acknowledge our personal failings. Believe me, my heart is not a peaceful place, and I am a long way from living in right speech (my love of gossip, a fatal flaw). I’m still failing to generate any lovingkindess energy for Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney … although this meditation on the precepts did help me refrain from getting in an email spat yesterday with a tetchy co-worker. So that’s something I suppose.

Annie Lamott writes about this subject beautifully in this morning’s Salon. I don’t know if she’s still in the subscriber-only section, but this was the quote that really struck me (since I continue to fail at this project):

I am going to pray for George Bush’s heart to change, so that he begins to want to be a part of the human family. He really doesn’t want to gather at the table with God’s other children, because he might have to sit with someone he hates. Iraqi soldiers, or someone like me. I really, really know this feeling. It is something he and I have in common.

Maybe that’s today’s inner project. Try to sit at the table, if even only in the imagination, with someone who is driving me crazy, someone with whom I really really disagree. Or maybe just try to watch the President on tv without hitting the mute button. Without hitting the mute button and without thinking about how much I despise and fear him.

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Five
Fifth: Do not accumulate weath while millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of your life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need.
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh

Again, where to start? It seems that as a culture, our instatiable desire for wealth, fame and sensual pleasure is what’s gotten us into this mess in the first place. And there seem to be two camps, those who think that perhaps we could dial it back a bit, perhaps we don’t need so much stuff, perhaps we could even share our wealth not only with the poorer nations of the world, but with those folks who are struggling so hard here at home. And another camp that is outraged by even the suggestion that their lifestyles may in any way be contributing to the problem. A camp who sees sharing resources not as something that helps us all out, but as something that takes away from them personally. Why is it, I wonder, that so many people feel that criticism of their SUVs is a critical civil rights issue, that to suggest that these behemoths are bad for society and the environment is suddently perceived as a direct assault on their “right” to drive whatever they want? (And why aren’t these same people outraged over the assault on our actual civil rights being led by John Ashcroft?)

Buddhism posits that we are all connected to one another, that none of us is separate, apart, individual in the classic Western sense of the lone individual. If we are all in this together, then yes, hoarding resources for you and your own family is a problem. I would imagine going to war in order to “protect” “our” economic interests would then too, be seen as a problem.

I started this weblog because I wanted a place to explore some of my ideas about why choosing to live small, choosing to live a few rungs lower on the consumer food chain might be a good idea. Hence the gardening, the cooking, even the discussions about literature. It was my hope that if I could get off the wheel of consumerism, if I could get out of debt and into a house I can afford, then I could begin to clear some space in which to write, to garden, to have a life. To enjoy life. To take an afternoon and go paddle the Yellowstone, or hike Suce Creek with the dogs, or volunteer in my community. I’m still working on getting financially clear, but at least thus far, choosing to live small has been much more satisfying than those years I spent in the Bay Area trying to keep up. I only wish our nation could figure this out a little bit.

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Four

Fourth: Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sound. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh

That there is a global struggle for peace being waged simultaneously with this war seems to me a new phenomena, as though the world has realized that despite all assurances from the American command, wars cannot be “clean” or “surgical”, that the expectation held by the hawks that the Iraquis were simply going to lay down their arms en masse and surrender is of course, a false expectation. That there is a large voice out there, insisting that wars cause suffering, human suffering, that the front page of the Livingston Enterprise yesterday afternoon, a small-town paper in a conservative Republican state, carried a terrible photo of a wounded Iraqui girl, with a caption that told us that she didn’t know yet that her mother and sister had been killed, this seems new.

This war is a terrible thing, but that we are seeing it “live”, so to speak, that as a culture we are not turning away from this suffering, that voices have been raised to protest that violence is not the means by which to relieve the suffering of the Iraqui people, that violence cannot be the means by which to stop violence, can be the seed for a tiny hope.

And if you want to join the effort to acknowledge and relieve the suffering of kids with autism, go read Wampum’s account of the newer, even worse legislation Bill Frist is proposing to protect Eli Lilly from the consequences of using the mercury-based vaccine preservative Thimerosal. Make the calls. Write the letters. As Jim reminds us at The Rittenhouse Review, bloggers had an enormous effect on the Trent Lott situation, so now, while the nation is distracted by the war, a war Senator Frist seems to be using as cover for this legislation, we need to beat the drum, need to make the calls, need to send the faxes. Need to engage with suffering.