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Month: March 2003

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Three

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Three

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Three

Third: Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. However, through compassionate dialogue, help others renounce fanaticism and narrowness.
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh

I suppose waging war against others in order to force them to adopt our views might fit under this heading, wouldn’t it? I don’t really know what to say here, it seems so obvious to me that forcing one’s beliefs on others is wrong, and goes against our core values as Americans as expressed in the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. And of course this is the big divide right now, between those who feel justified forcing their beliefs on others, and those who feel that forcing their beliefs on others is wrong.

The harder part of this precept is the “compassionate dialogue” part — and maybe this is the place to focus our energies. Its so tempting to get sucked into argument, to shout and stomp one’s feet and just tell the opposition that they’re wrong. Compassionate dialogue entails really engaging with the other side. I think of Jimmy Carter when I think of compassionate dialogue. It seems to me that there’s a lot of compassionate dialogue going on out in the blog-o-sphere right now. Sites like Body and Soul, Where’s Raed?, and of course Sean-Paul’s heroic efforts over at The Agonist to keep us up to date on what’s happening in the war while stripping away the interpretive overlay that clogs up the mainstream news coverage (he’s running out of bandwidth though, so Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Electrolite is suggesting that people use the mirror sites located here, here and here) all seem to be participating in compassionate dialogue that seeks to make an end run around fanaticism and narrowness. I guess all we can do is try to keep it up. Try not to lose heart. Try to stay engaged.

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Two

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Two

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Two

Second: Do not think that the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to recieve other’s viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and the world at all times.
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh

Since I’m not actually a Buddhist, although I’ve read pretty widely in the tradition, and have started sporadically sitting again as my Lenten practice, I asked my friend Wendy, who is a Zen practitioner to keep an eye out in case I go off in a doctrinal ditch, and she reminded me in an email this morning that “we never ‘take’ the precepts. They are always out there, available, like the Dharma. We choose to open ourselves to them and receive them if we’d like. We never take, get, grab, grasp, or use the precepts.” So, let’s all keep in mind that I’m just out here sharing my attempts to open myself to the dharma in a time of global violence and trouble.

Here’s what I was thinking about this second precept, which is, of course, an extension of the first one. I’m thinking the Oscars provide a little example of this precept — first of all, everyone looked really uncomfortable even being there. All dressed up in the middle of a war, a gag order on, in the middle of what is probably the most judgemental group of people in the universe, the LA movie community. But there they were, trying to figure out how to proceed. There were two moments where people tried to break through the weirdness and have their say, and although this is a precept about being nonjudgemental, it seems to me one moment was unsucessful, and one wasn’t. Skillful means here people. We’re talking skillful means.

Now as you know from my earlier post about Bowling for Columbine, I loved that movie. It was a thoughtful and nuanced examination of our culture of guns and violence, and it absolutely deserved to win the Oscar last night. But Michael Moore fell into the trap Thich Nhat Hanh warns about in this second precept. He marched up there “bound to present views” and although it was nice to see someone take a stand, his confrontational approach just kind of didn’t work in that context. People were freaked out. He was so attached to his basic premise (which I tend to agree with) that this is an illegitimate presidency, that he lost the audience and everyone started booing and freaking out and didn’t hear what he had to say next.

And then there was Adrian Brody. First of all, I think the “present views” were that he wasn’t going to win, because he appeared so shocked, and the other nominees appeared so shocked, and then genuinely delighted, and that genuine delight seemed to spread through the auditorium. Suddenly it seemed right to people that this young actor won. An actor who put his heart and soul into a role about oppression and war, in a movie directed by a man who regardless of his sexual history, has suffered unspeakable violence on a personal level and has managed, somehow to go on as an artist. He was charming, and modest, and flustered and about to get shooed off the stage by the orchestra when suddenly he collected himself. And made the orchestra stop (that alone was a shock). And gave a very sweet and tender plea for compassion, for peace, for prayers. He told how he’d learned from playing that part, had gained some insight into how war dehumanizes us all, and he simply asked us all to resist that.

It’s really tempting to dehumanize those who frighten us. I myself, am more than guilty of attachment to my views about the men running this current administration and their humanity. I was against this war, and still think that although Sadaam Hussein is an evil evil man, our violation of international law and aggression in starting this war were also deeply wrong. However, we’re in it now, and I’m trying to practice non-attachment to my views about the military and the legitimacy of using military force. What can we do now but pray for them all? Our soldiers, their soldiers, the civilians on the ground?

Gardening update

Gardening update

Gardening update It was a fruitful weekend here in the garden. I’m building a somewhat elaborate traditional kitchen garden with raised beds, and this weekend I got it all marked out with stakes and chalk line, and then today I dug six of the eight beds. The other two, which I suspect will be heavy with crabgrass roots, as well as with roots from the large virginia creeper I cut down, will have to wait until I can fit them in this week, because my back made it abundantly clear that it had had enough for the day (I hate not being 20 anymore). They look beautiful. I’ve been planning this on paper all winter, and I’m so thrilled that my design looks like it’s going to be terrific — the beds will be both decorative and practical. And I feel really great about keeping Mrs. Warnik’s vegetable patch going. (And should I somehow lose my enthusiasm for farming, they will make lovely perennial beds.)

I also started some seeds in the basement yesterday. I have a flat of herbs started, and the tomatoes and eggplants. Whenever the war really freaks me out, I go downstairs and look at those two flats of seeds warming on their heat mats, at the condensation on the inside of their little clear plastic domes, those seeds in there, warm and moist and sprouting. Summer will come somehow or another, and chances are, there will be tomatoes in my yard.

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days

Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days
Yesterday, while rereading Being Peace, I came across the fourteen precepts of Thich Nhat Hanh’s InterBeing order of Buddhists, and I thought that since it’s still Lent, and since we are at war, perhaps it might be a useful exercise to take a look at one of them each day. If nothing else, it’ll afford me the chance to keep working toward my goal of starting with peace in my own heart. Which I am finding difficult at the moment.

First: Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.

Where to start with this one? As someone raised by divorced parents who each held very firm beliefs about their own righteousness, beliefs that were in direct opposition to one another, and since each of them was convinced that it was desperately important that we kids believe their version, it has become second nature for me to be skeptical of ideologies (this was a huge problem in graduate school, it all would have been so much easier had I been more capable of simply marching along in the post-structuralist lockstep). A big part of my recent troubles with the Catholic Church has been the way the church has turned in the past few years away from the open spirit of inquiry fostered by Vatican II, toward an increasingly rigid orthodoxy. There are any number of Catholics out there who would be more than willing to throw me out, to point the finger and tell me that I’m not a Catholic at all because my theological beliefs don’t line up with theirs. And I struggled with this for a long time. I even left the Church for several years. But whatever. I’m back. I’m out there in the pews, taking my own odd little faith off to Mass with me and trusting the Big Guy to forgive me if I take a different path to the light.

What is it though, that makes absolute truths so attractive to people? We’ve just been led off to war by a bunch of people who are convinced that they possess an absolute truth, and that their absolute truth is so much better than the rest of the world’s that they can just go out there and do what they want. Weren’t those guys who hijacked the planes also fueled by their belief in an absolute truth? Didn’t we already spend several centuries fighting the Crusades? While I agree that Saddaam Hussein is an evil dictator who has perpetrated unspeakable crimes against his people, a people who will be better off without him, I also keep thinking of the Dalai Lama, who has led his people in resistance to oppression through peaceful means.

In my heartbreak and confusion over this war, I’ve also been reading Sharon Salzberg’s book, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience. Salzberg talks about something she calls “bright faith” – that stage of belief in which one places one’s faith outside oneself, usually in a charismatic teacher. She says that at that early stage in her practice, what I really wanted was for him to give me the definitive word on what was good and what wasn’t, what I could trust and what I couldn’t. I wanted to find in Buddhism a system I could belong to. I wanted to be able to say “I am a Buddhist, and therefore I am compelled to believe the following fifteen things. That’s who I am.” I was trying desperately to reduce the range of choices life was presenting every single day by making one controlling choice. A belief system might keep all uncertainty and fear away, keep the complexities and ambiguities of the world away. However, Salzberg spends much of the book discussing that deep faith, faith in the unknown and unknowable aspects of life comes only after one gets past this early stage. That spiritual maturity requires that we change the object of our faith from something external, a set of beliefs, a teacher, to something less definitive and internal. That like intimacy, faith requires us to willingly leap into the unknown.

I have no idea what’s going to happen as a result of this war that we are all, as a society, implicated in. Like so many things in this world, I have no control over this, and watching war coverage 24/7 won’t change that. But I guess I can try not to be so afraid, look for ways, once the dust settles, to try to effect some positive action. I guess I can try to resist my own ideological belief that everything that comes out of Donald Rumsfeld’s mouth is a lie.

Being Peace

Being Peace

Being Peace
In the peace movement there is a lot of anger, frustration, and misunderstanding. The peace movement can write very good protest letters, but they are not yet able to write a love letter. We need to learn to write a letter to the Congress or to the President of the United States that they will want to read, and not just throw away. The way you speak, the kind of understanding, the kind of language you use should not turn people off. The President is a person like any of us.
Can the peace movement talk in loving speech, showing the way for peace? I think that will depend on whether the people in the peace movement can be peace. Because without being peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help other people to smile. If we are not peaceful, then we cannot contribute to the peace movement.
Thich Nhat Hanh

This morning, after being sucked into the war coverage despite myself, I went into my library in search of … what? Context? A reminder, as Wallace Shawn said in this essay , that since we are each capable of violence and anger, it’s our responsibility to turn to the better angels in order to resist succumbing to inner violence. So I pulled Being Peace off my bookshelf, and headed out to the front porch for a little downtime. A cup of tea. The puppy on my lap (he’s nearly too big), and the words written by this gentle man who has seen so much violence and terror. The world started to feel like it was on its axis once more. A reminder that even small efforts count. A reminder that calling Ari Fleisher a dickwad is not right speech, and doesn’t help the cause. Sigh.

Of course I support the troops.

Of course I support the troops.

Of course I support the troops. Please folks. Of course I support the troops. My meditation on violence and killing aside, these are people who volunteered to do a dirty job, and who are out there in unimaginable conditions. May they all be safe. May they behave with honor. May they be a beacon of hope to those ordinaray Iraquis they encounter. I have enormous faith in ordinary Americans. It’s our regime I distrust. It’s the civilian command I distrust.

All that aside, today is a day for gardening. I have raised beds to dig out and build. I have peonies that need cages to protect them from the dogs. My last seed order arrived yesterday, and it’s time to start tomatoes and herbs and flowers so that in a month, when our “official” last frost date passes, I can start putting them out. Seeds of hope here in southwestern Montana.

Louis Owens

Louis Owens

… what Steinbeck is arguing in his writing is that we have to be responsible for what he terms the whole thing, known and unknowable, in a very deep way: that if you step into a tide pool, you have to realize that that step has changed the entire universe, and that will fit neatly into what Silko’s arguing in Ceremony, the whole sense of having to be careful, to walk in balance, to be responsible for knowing that every single act of humanity changes the world. Steinbeck was arguing that sixty years ago, before anybody in white America really was… Louis Owens

I’ve been meaning to write about Louis for some time now, but it was a ridiculous photo I saw on the San Francisco Chronicle website a couple of days back of troops preparing for battle by doing a “Seminole War Dance” that brought his spirit back into the room. It was the kind of thing that he would have laughed at, with that dark laugh of his, a laugh that for a long time managed to stay just ahead of the despair at its heart.

I’ve been thinking of Louis because he was the only writer I knew personally whose work took as its central question the real problem of evil, how evil walks in the world, how evil manifests itself in violence. Louis’s novels, particularly The Sharpest Sight, Bone Game and Dark River all take as their central question the ramifications of violence — on individuals, on cultures, on landscape and place. Louis is the guy I would have called, or emailed when I saw that silly photo, the guy I would have gone to because Louis had the singular ability to acknowledge your fear, your despair, your flagging faith with the kind of dark joke that could keep you going.

And I’ve been thinking of Louis, because for several days I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around the process that brings a person to the point where he or she feels entitled to kill another person. There was a death penalty advocate on NPR the other morning, I only heard a fragment of it, but he was saying that the Supreme Court’s recent stay of execution wouldn’t deter him from proceeding with executions even in the face of DNA evidence exonerating those on death row. Coming on the heels of our President’s weird television appearances in which it was clear that he was looking forward to going to war, that despite his words to the contrary, all his body language screamed how badly he wanted to go to war, that he really really wanted to go kill Iraquis, and that he felt fully entitled to do this, that he felt they deserved to be killed by him, I found myself missing Louis. So this morning, when I couldn’t sleep, I went to Google; I thought maybe I could find something of his out there about violence that would help me make sense of this process. There’s a section of the interview from which I pulled Louis’ quote about Steinbeck, where he and John Purdy discuss Vietnam. Louis didn’t go to Vietnam, but his beloved older brother Gene did, and came back deeply wounded by the experience. Gene disappeared one night, and it was thirty years before Louis found him again. (His essay Finding Gene describes the experience.) I thought this exchange about Dark River was interesting:

JP: … I like how you play with …the “week-end warrior” who is out there trying to experience the “thrill” of war . . .

LO: The militia . . .

JP: Yeah, but even more insidious than that in some ways, less blatant. The professional person who comes from the urban center to learn the ways of the “wilds” and to hunt humans. Then the convention of the Vietnam veteran, the Black OPS type of characters, and you take them all apart.

LO: Well, good. I�m glad you think that. And actually, the militia were inspired by a group of guys I ran into when I was backpacking on a reservation. They were wearing camouflage uniforms, out practicing war. Disneyland with weapons. I know there are people like that, practicing violence against others. ….

JP: That group is an interesting group because it has such a wide array of characters; they�re all participating in the same type of activity, but operating from different backgrounds and values, so there are these moments of crises for some of them: “Are we going to kill these women, or what?” It is no longer a game, and they have to decide.

LO: Ironically, in a group like that the most violent are often the individuals who never experienced war.

JP: They haven�t had to live the aftereffects.

LO: Well, yeah. You were in Vietnam. You know what I�m talking about. I wasn�t but my brother was there for three years and a lot of my friends were there and a number of them died there. It seems to me that it is almost always the people who haven�t experienced the immediacy of violence who are capable of getting involved in it as a game.

As a game. That’s certainly how it’s being portrayed on the television (yeah, yeah, I turned it on again last night despite my best intentions). As the latest, “realest,” reality TV. But those aren’t suckers who volunteered for some stupid tv show out there, they’re actual people who for any variety of reasons agreed to take up arms and defend our country (note: defense not offense) and despite the ways the media and the government are colluding to try to assure us that this is a “clean” war, that these strikes are “surgical” go read the guys who were there the last time, and what they have to say about the experience on the ground.

The doublespeak is so virulent right now. This morning’s newspaper is full of angry letters to the editor from people outraged by the peace demonstrations. There is this suffocating voice from the right, a voice so full of anger and hostility, calling for unanimity. Claiming that dissent is treason. Claiming that we all need to obey. Like my inability to figure out how someone makes it okay in their own head to go kill someone else, I don’t really understand why anyone would think a nation of people all lined up in lockstep agreement is a good thing. Unless maybe it’s denial at the heart of it all.

Louis says in the John Purdy interview:
I guess one thing I’m working on in most of my writing is the way America has tried, and continues to try, to bury the past, pretending that once it’s over we no longer need to think about it. We live in a world full of buried things, many of them very painful and often horrific, like passing out smallpox-infested blankets to Indians or worse, and until we acknowledge and come to terms with the past we’ll keep believing in a dangerous and deadly kind of innocence, and we’ll keep thinking we can just move on and leave it all behind. That’s a reason that one of Nightland’s protagonists, Will, ends up living on a ranch containing a world of buried things, including even a smashed Range Rover…. But he�s going to stay there. You can�t run from that buried history.
But you can try to shout down anyone who mentions it, I guess. You can start a war to “prove” our dangerous innocence.

Louis was my mentor and my friend. I can’t ask Louis any of the questions I want to ask him, the questions I’m posing in this entry, because on July 25 of last year, Louis put a gun to his chest and shot himself. Somehow the violence he’d spent his life exploring in fiction came off the page and claimed him. Louis’ friend Glen Martin said it best, expressed the shock and sorrow and anger many of us felt, still feel.

Violence begets only violence.

Turn off the TV!

Turn off the TV!

Turn off the TV!

Warning — Rant ahead.

Here’s the LivingSmall call to action — turn off your TVs. Don’t give them the ratings push they think they’re going to get. Don’t buy into the propaganda, the hysteria, the doublespeak of it all. There they were last night, all those “anchors” and reporters and just look at them! The excitement in their eyes. The thrill of it all. It’s started! It’s finally started and they get to go off and play with their new toys, get to watch things explode, get to stand on the deck of the aircraft carrier while the planes take off. I get this. I’m a person who jumps up and down like a five-year-old over firecrackers, for goodness sake. I’m a person who thought the air show over the San Francisco Bay during Fleet Week was about the most exciting, seductive, frightening thing I’d ever seen. And yes, since I got access out onto the pier, I’ll admit, the Navy pilots were incredibly sexy and attractive. But that doesn’t make it right to succumb to that kind of thrill seeking. So fuck you Mr. President and fuck the networks and CNN and all the rest of you. I’m not watching. I’m not being sucked in by your shameless propaganda.

This from my friend in Washington DC: “Here in the real world of homeland insecurity, there are fighter jets circling overhead day and night, not to mention Marine 2 shuttling Cheney look-alikes to and from their undisclosed locations at CAMP DAVID hint hint….Phony presidential motorcades scream through the city to confuse the enemy. Meanwhile a deranged tobacco farmer drives his John Deere into a decorative pond a hundred yards from the White House, and holds all 38 discrete protective agencies at a standoff for 48 hours.
But we’re not worried, we’ve got duct tape.”

What? Is there no end to their arrogance and delusion? Fake motorcades? Give me a break. At least behave with a little dignity if you’re going to start this stupid war. Who do you think you are, Sadaam Hussein with your look-alikes?

Via the cooler head of Jeanne at Body and Soul, I highly reccommend this terrific article by Wallace Shawn — this quote just might become the LivingSmall motto:
Sure, it’s been great, the life of comfort and predictability. But imagine how it would feel if we could be on a path of increasing compassion, diminishing brutality, diminishing greed–I think it might actually feel wonderful to be alive.

And if amid all this craziness today, if in order to get the sight of Ari Fleisher’s condescending asshole newsconference out of your head (okay, I turned the TV on, but I was looking for my new favorite show, BBC America’s Ground Force, where a pack of charming English people transform the garden of some worthy person in two days, not Ari-dickwad-Fleisher) you might want a little laugh, you could always go check out this very funny interpretation of the Dept. of Homeland Defense’s warning signs.

(So I wonder if I have enough keywords here to trip the John Ashcroft Big Brother sensors off. If so, fuck you too, assholes.)

My arborist agrees.

My arborist agrees.

My arborist agrees. My local arborist came by to give me a quote on taking out an overgrown juniper that is way too close to the foundation (and shades the porch too much), and we got talking about the war. He said he’s really frustrated because he feels like there’s nothing he can do now but pray. And pruning helps, he said. Doesn’t change anything but a body sure does feel better after a couple of hours of pruning.
He said I did a pretty good job on the apple trees, too.

What is there to say?

What is there to say?

What is there to say? Be prepared for the focus here to get smaller, small to the count of my fifty-by-one-forty foot lot. I am going into nearly full news blackout mode, because I just can’t even begin to formulate a way to deal with this madman president and his end-time cronies who actually seem to want a war. I really thought we’d avoid this — perhaps it’s my tendency toward optimism, but somehow I though that millions of people marching in the streets all across the globe might make some impact on this president. But I’m now convinced that he’s such an elitist bastard that he sees all the opposition as proof of his own righteousness. Now let’s hope he doesn’t declare martial law and call off the 2004 elections. Now let’s hope the Democrats perhaps awake from their slumber and do something.

In the meantime, LivingSmall will concern itself with building a garden, growing flowers and vegetables, and the reading and writing of books.

On the garden front, the fabulous local hardware store, Kenyon Noble delivered the wood for my raised beds this morning. Delivered it for free, mind you, unlike a certain big box hardware store that has opened in Bozeman. Delivered by a cheerful man who assured me that he dug through all the 2″x12′”x12′ boards to find me nice straight ones that weren’t split. So, this weekend I’ll be building my slightly elaborate raised bed kitchen garden, with some help from the brother. I’m trying very hard not to be seduced by the warm weather. It isn’t spring yet. We’ll still have more hard freezes. This weekend I also pruned the remaining two apple trees, which was enormously satisfying as I got to both lop off enormous limbs with my handy little hacksaw, and got to climb the tree to do it. Other garden chores included moving rocks to dismantle the rock garden I built on New Years Day (changed my mind about that one), built a low stone wall/pile from the stones, and put up lots of wire fencing to begin training the dogs about which parts of the yard are garden, and which are yard. That is going to be an ongoing task, I’m afraid. They currently seem to think the dormant perennial bed is the place they should poop.

And today’s excitement is the arrival of my propagation heat mats … I hung the hand-me-down shop lights in the basement this weekend, and I now have two very nice 3’x4′ surfaces on which to start propagating seeds. Also another surface of the same size (old metal utility shelving units that were in the garage in California) that I’ve made into a sort of gardening desk. I’ve got all the books down there, and the calendar, and the notebook in which I’m trying to keep track of what happens when. It feels kind of like Ranger Rick science … like when I was a little kid with my microscope and chemistry set doing “experiments”. Although my degrees are all in English, I was a real science wannabe, and did a considerable amount of environmental biology as an undergrad. So I want to start building some data on my little corner of the universe. That is, of course, if our president doesn’t start WW3 and bring us all to nuclear (nuc-u-lar) destruction.