Posted by Patrick McMahon in Sangha'hood Blog | 3 Comments
Preoccupied
PDF Sunday I find myself in the local plant nursery selecting pink and yellow primulas to take to a neighbor undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma. What better place to be on a winter verging into spring day, I think, and what better thing to be doing than bringing a little color home to a neighbor? — Downtown, perhaps, site of Occupy Oakland’s latest action. I was listening to news of it on Free Speech Radio on my drive to the nursery and was chagrined not to know anything at all about yesterday’s attempt to take over a vacant public auditorium. I put the picture together as I listened to one incensed caller after another, but it was a picture like one gets from any report: distant and as different from the experience at the epicenter as a seismograph. I hadn’t been there, and short of that can’t sort out whether the action was disorganized and provocative or the police out of hand and “brutal.” Certainly, listening to Free Speech Radio, I’m getting the message with considerable spin.
Flowers arranged in a capacious ceramic pot, I drive home listening to Ry Cooder singing of “walking all night until we set things right.” It sounds to me like the Battle Hymn of the Republic in a modern key, not militaristic but definitely militant: the 99% on the march to take things back from the 1%. One of the 99% , as I assuredly am, where had I been? What happened to this one-time conscientious objector, sign-carrying protester of the Vietnam War? 400, apparently, have been arrested, the largest civil (not so civil, as it sounds, from the break in at City Hall, the smashing of window cases, the burning of the flag) disobedience arrest since the ’82 blockade of the Livermore Labs, our local nuclear weapons research facility, where a thousand of us were arrested and taken to the Santa Rita detention center—same place as these 400 occupants. Deja vus all over again, except that then I had been one of the thousand and proud of it and now I’m feeling guilty, or at least left out, at having kept my body out of the line of action. Cooder’s song is a call to arms that pulls on my heart. The music, the camaraderie, the satisfaction of having a common enemy (the banks, the corporations, the prison-military-industrial complex, the nuclear weapons industry), the promise of putting things all right in a world so wrong. Compared to that grand project, inhabiting my little life dwindles in significance.
I recall the conversation I had yesterday evening with a long-time friend and fellow zen student. From our vantage point, we could see all the way downtown, scene of all that struggle and strife earlier in the day: tear gas, flash bombs, “less lethal” bullets, batons, encirclements and stampedes, but from here all we saw was a skyline rosy in the sunset. My friend, like me has gone from being, back in the day, a political activist, to a solid citizen, or as solid as the marginal likes of us will ever get: he a father, owner of a landscaping business and resident of a quiet, comfortable, backwater Berkeley neighborhood; me a gardener, homeowner and board member of the Rose Drive Neighborhood Association. I questioned him about his engagement with Occupy Oakland. “No way can I get with that,” he said. “The family is in a more precarious position than ever. We’re spending more than we’re earning and whatever I’d give to protest would be at our expense. It’s hard enough to balance being there for the kids and doing what we need to do to keep us afloat.” Like me, he is too preoccupied to occupy.
I allow that there may be rationalization in our decisions to stay in place and out of trouble, keeping our noses to the samsaric grindstone. As we’ve gotten older, our counter cultural edge has worn down to something approaching the blunt conservatism of the culture we were once counter to. As our physical eyesight has dwindled, so some political myopia may well have set in. When I asked Peter, thinking of this sangha’hood blog, what connection he saw between practice with the Buddha Sangha and practicing as a family man and neighbor, he replied, “I’m just giving my attention to what’s in front of me, same as ever, trusting the whole is in the parts.”
But can we trust ourselves and our all-too common attachment to familiarity, comfort, obligation? Perhaps we’ve been hypnotized by the parts, with age and the times the whole having become too complex for us. To the extent that might be so, we owe a debt to Occupy Oakland and the occupy actions all over the nation and world, for forcing us to look up and around, whether or not we agree with this or that strategy. And to the extent that we aren’t fooling ourselves, marching on with our pedestrian lives and changing society from within in slow and hardly visible ways, Occupy owes much to us, we who tend the home fires while it walks all night. We are all, indeed and at best, parts of a whole.
I drop off my pot of flowers on the porch of my ailing friend. I don’t ring the doorbell, suspecting that this might be one of her “pajama days,” as she calls them, a euphemism for feeling too bad to come to the door much less entertain company. Her porch seems to signal the general deterioration of an individual life and an ailing society: peeling paint, dead plants. Will these primulas, too, die of thirst? As I walk away, I look back to see those spots of pinks and yellows, brave, hopeful, fragile. Cooder’s song still plays in my head. We need our own song here, the Hymn of the Battle Republic as it comes down to Rose Drive.
I’m staying, if it takes my life,
Joining my neighbor
In sickness, pain and strife.
Thanks for this. I can relate, and know was not easy to open up to this. I want to Occupy something, tho am too involved with things I do around me, things in front of me that need doing… as Joanna Macy and your friend said. But your words are very insightful, and are helpful to me in my struggle. Thanks for sharing them.
Flag this comment
Thanks John, for your response, and I’m glad my words could have helped you in your struggle to “occupy something.”
Now, “things in front of me that need doing”–like one’s occupation? That’s certainly right in front of us, for all but the independently wealthy (the 1%). But home and neighborhood are even closer, and the paradox is, I find, that they front on a world as large as need be, which grows wider the longer one patiently stays put with it, a kind of informal meditation, inhabiting just where you’re at. I’m sure you can think of your own instances, but for me, this afternoon serves as well as anything. I had the luxury of a day at home, a day off from my profession as a gardener, a day free to do gardening at home. In my neighborhood there’s a common space where we have a community flower plot. I’ve maintained the irrigation system that waters it, and today, a dry windy day, the flowers in one particular section were not being served, leaving a dry, thirsty spot, and I could see that flowers were going to soon die if I didn’t do something. I got out my tools and supplies and set to making what I thought would be an easy fix. In the meantime, a neighbor, who takes care of this particular area of the garden, saw me from her doorstep and came out to help. We worked together as the solution to the problem became more complex, she turning the water on and off at the valve as I fiddled with a variety of sprinkler heads. Left to myself, I probably would have settled with an a mediocre solution, but between us we generated a synergy that inspired me to do the thing righteously. During the hour or so we were at work, three sets of neighbors walked or drove by, commenting on the “beautification” going on. They were, you have to think, only a very small percentage of the folks in the neighborhood or passing through, representative of many whose lives are lifted by the color of reds and purples and blues of pansies, and the gold of daffodils — such common colors, such ordinary plants, but so deeply resonant in our culture and psyche. “A host of golden daffodils,” as Wordsworth had it. Now, as the Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh might have analyzed it, those colors interdepend with a vast web of natural and human elements, seen and unseen. Earth, air, light, water–with which we were directly dealing–the manufacturers of the irrigation parts, the nursery, the many hands tending plants all the way south to Mexico–it goes on. Quite a large world. including my helpful neighbor and I, the passersby, the places they were coming from and going to, the folks they were going to meet, the mood with which they met them perhaps a little lighter for the flowers. And who knows what beneficial effects might radiate from those encounters? And then there were the flowers themselves, helplessly dependent on human attention (in this dry winter in Northern California), to slake their thirst, satisfy their roots, allowing them to do their job of photosynthesizing, producing color, attracting insects.
So, a small thing, what was right in front of us, but vast in what it involved us with, literally rooted us in. Larger than the human, political, economic, industrial web: the web of being.
Occupy that!
Flag this comment
Well, you are quite the gardener of words, too! Very moving ones.
I am going thru some trying times, lots of leavings, struggles for meaning. Your afternoon meditation and its notion of this world of home and neighborhood touching on such a wide world is a helpful grounding. Thanks again for sharing! I’m finding I really like this new version of Turning Wheel!
Flag this comment