{all those tiny deaths}

Throughout our lives, we all experience things that dismantle our worlds and make us feel as utterly minuscule as we truly are. Think back to your first broken heart, the first time you lost a family member, or when your beloved childhood pet died. You had never experienced blows like these, they were brand new to your ego. Whatever your first mini-death was, something in your heart died with this first great sorrow. To this day, you probably cannot pinpoint what that something was, but you know how much it hurt. What you probably also recall is how insignificant you felt. As your own suffering filled the rooms you moved through, life kept flowing. Television shows still played, dinners were still eaten, and new cars and shoes were still purchased. You may recall how people in your life continued to worry about trivial things and, out of politeness, you fought not to scream that whatever it was they were fretting over was small and meaningless compared to your new great pain.

You probably remember how nothing changed while your heart stood still. How everything seemed to happen in slow motion while you watched from within the distorted fishbowl of your overwhelming sadness. This feeling is so universal, it has been illustrated in film countless times, we can all visualize it. You may recollect the one day when the water was drained from your emotional fishbowl and your soul took the heartache, neatly folded it up and put it away. You remembered that you were not dead. And life resumed. 

I call this pain the hungry ghost feeling. In Chinese Buddhism, hungry ghosts are the results of extremely unhappy or violent circumstances.  These ghosts can also linger as a result of neglect by living ancestors.  I have always pictured them wandering around lost, hands out, mouths speaking words that no one hears, moving through the world with the feeling of complete and utter dissatisfaction. In fact, when one has the hungry ghost feeling, I think the primary indication is that  one is temporarily incapable of being satisfied. Usually, healing from these tiny deaths requires time. Sometimes other conditions must also be met.

The other kind of tiny death we experience happens at times when we do nearly die. Times when something happens and we narrowly escape death feel the inevitable weight and possibility of our own mortality. Most of us suspend thoughts of this fact so that we can live. But from time-to-time, we are reminded that our bodies, like the bodies of all of our ancestors, will return to dust.

I have had a number of these experiences. In 2004, I was traveling in Thailand with a group of friends. We were on a small island that had to be gotten to in a boat taxi. During the day, these taxis could come directly to the beach we were staying on. At night, however, if you wanted to take a taxi to another part of the island or leave the island altogether, you had to walk over large, dark rocky hills. I became ill with food poisoning. I was vomiting and unable to drink water for an entire day. After dark, I began to wonder if I was going to die in the poorly lit little beach cabin. I knew I was too weak to make it over the rocks and wondered how I would even get medical care if it was required. I went to sleep, and when I woke, news of the tsunami that killed more than 250,000 arrived. I had the feeling that death was everywhere and I would not escape it. The realization that my life would end became certain instead of abstract, for the first time. A few days later, we returned to Bangkok and in the early morning light I wandered through the city streets reading the names of hundreds and hundreds of posters for missing people. People from every corner of the world, lost in the water, dead in small waterlogged cabins, or buried under rubble.  

These wee deaths of the ego are absolutely ubiquitous reminders of our relative size and importance in the universe. Knowing they are common to everyone does not make them easier, but moving through them does. Once you have endured one, you know you can withstand the next. Call it self-efficacy, strength, or experience, it does make the journey feel a little lighter knowing that the small death will kill something in you, but something else will fill the space and you will also  learn something about how to live from it.

{ if / then}

As a younger woman, I was obsessed with Surrealism, and especially, the female surrealist artists. To me, they represented a freedom and boldness that just did not exist anymore. The way that surrealism was influenced by dreams (or the subconscious),  indigenous art, the drawings of children, and creative works by those considered insane or in mental institutions, was fascinating to me because these were such raw and untraditional inspirations. It made for art worth looking at. Art not always technically well-executed, but always part of a larger conversation about what made art critical for the continued evolution of culture. The ladies, in particular, seemed to dive deep, with intensely personal art full of dark, mysterious, symbolism. I also felt that many of them: Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Leonor Fini, in particular, made rich and masterfully beautiful art that told exploratory stories that sought full exposure all that lurked beneath the surface. The courage and beauty of their works still take my breath away.

In those years, I spent a great deal of time with other artists and we all wanted to explore and see how far we could push things. Playing with all kinds of media, but also, diving deep into ourselves for whatever was there that needed exploration and expression. The collision of these two experiences happened frequently  and friends and I would often spend hours playing Surrealist games.

The most popular of these games and one you have no doubt played yourself, is Exquisite Corpse. In this game one person draws part of a body, then folds a sheet of paper over, exposing only the ends of the lines they have drawn. The next player continues the drawing, not seeing the work of the previous, likewise, he or she hands the page to the next player with only the tips of the drawing’s lines exposed. This player finishes the drawing. After every player has finished, the page in fully unfolded, revealing the body in its entirety.

Another common Surrealist game is ‘if/then’. In this game, players all get a small square of paper. Each writes an ‘if’ statement, such as, if the sky were full of doves, or if tomorrow never arrived.  The sheet is then handed to another player, with the ‘if’ statement hidden. Players all add a ‘then’ statement to the page. When all the players have finished, everyone opens the papers and reads the statements together to make a full ‘if/then’ statement.

Usually, for the first round or two of either game, there would be absurd drawings with heads at both ends and statements that made little sense and caused lots of giggling. But, something amazing would happen by second or third round; everyone would synchronize. I don’t know if I will ever fully comprehend by what mechanism this occurred, but, it always did. Somehow the creatures sketched would wind up with mostly matching scales on each section, or dragon heads and feet. The ‘if/then’ statements would go from things like  if the jackalope ate a rainbow then the semi truck crashed yesterday, to if answers came easily then questions would be meaningless. Synchronicity would find its way to us and everything would align in a most magical way. No one would speak about it. We’d all just look at each other and grin so wide our faces nearly cracked.

Now, I think everything works this way. It is like Rumi said, “What you seek is seeking you.” Given enough attention, you can harness synchronicity so that it feels less like an inscrutable force of nature and more of a reliable law of matter. It can take a little time, but things seem to right themselves and order find its way out of chaos with a little bit of concentration.

{great, again}

I keep seeing the ignorant Make America White Again billboard and reading about how shocked and upset people are by it. But, what I don’t understand, is how people don’t get equally upset about Trump’s campaign. Make America Great Again, is a veiled way of saying exactly what this billboard says outright. It is a racist slogan. Any prior time in American history, any halcyon days of greatness, that this slogan may be referring to, would have been days of institutionalized racism, or even worse, of slavery. Trump has disdain for everyone who is not Trump. Period. It is silly that we are even discussing this person as a potential leader, but we are and that is indicative of a really dangerous trend in American culture. Blue collar white folks who want to feel better about themselves by creating some illusory race hierarchy and scapegoating other groups should ask themselves if they can really believe that Trump cares about them. No way, guys. You are just a means to fulfilling this bigoted narcissist’s need for adulation.

We need to get focused and re-direct this cultural narrative because it is alarming and does not position this country on the right side of history or of anything else. Bigotry is toxic and doesn’t serve ANYONE. We really need to talk about this and we really need to stand up against racism and bigotry in any and all forms when and where we can.

After my recent trip to Atlanta, I am reminded of how much has NOT changed and how much hate is right below the surface of things. Walking down the street at night, where many other people were also walking, a white man in a pick-up truck pulled up to me and yelled, “girl, you better get off the street, there are black folks everywhere.” As is typically the case, all the great responses came to me later and dumbfounded I simply replied: “are you serious?” He responded with some of the foulest most hate-filled words ever spoken to me. I felt as if someone had slapped me, but no one on the street even looked back. “Is this so common that no one even takes note?” I wondered.

Sitting in the back pew at the Ebenezer Baptist Church days later, I was overcome with emotion. I hid behind my sunglasses as tears rolled involuntarily down my face. We have not come very far, but we think we have. This false sense of cultural achievement is dangerous. It makes us think that we can stop talking about civil rights and feminism when really, we are mere toddlers in terms of our development of an equitable society. A cursory glance and any day's headlines will tell you we are not an equitable society and in America, some people matter and others do not, contrary to what most American's think.

Let’s not be lulled. Let’s talk about these things fearlessly and really try to change attitudes and beliefs and corresponding behaviors in our own families and neighborhoods. America is not making progress, so Americans are going to have to do it for ourselves.