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Alice Walker in the Archives |
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Alice Walker and Sharon Salzberg on Loving KindnessA discussion led by Melvin McLeod
It's too bad you can't hear the tape of this conversation we had with Alice Walker. There is a lot of heart and many powerful ideas in this printed version, but it can't convey the real depth and caring and calm certainty of Alice Walker. While Sharon and I often made reference to our particular Buddhist traditions to try to express our thoughts, here was someone who spoke directly from her own life experience, from intimate, direct knowledge of her own heart. Here is a person of true, self-realized spirituality. By way of background, Sharon Salzberg is a member of the Insight Meditation Society, a very fine Buddhist teacher, and author of Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Alice Walker is best known for, among her many writings, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, and as a committed social activist who has had the courage to take on difficult and often unspoken issues.
—Melvin McLeod
Sharon Salzberg: I'm really delighted to have this opportunity. I've loved your work and have been so moved by it. In speaking about metta practice, or loving kindness practice, one of the hardest things is not to sentimentalize. That's especially hard in our society, where the whole idea of love can be degraded and considered a weakness. But in your books, the power, the actual life force and potency of loving kindness, comes through so strongly.
Alice Walker: I think my feeling of loving kindness is rooted in a very irrepressible spirit that has always been earth-connected. When I was a child I felt so much a part of the countryside and everything that was in it, that I couldn't avoid the feeling that I had to have been loved very much, to find myself there.
So when I came to meditation—I actually started doing TM when I was living in New York after a divorce—it was a kind of going back. Just after being initiated in doing the training, when I finally sort of got it, I started to laugh, because I recognized where I was. I was back in a place where I had lived as a child, in my spirit, in a very open, spacious, loving place, where I felt totally at peace and in myself.
Then last year, when I was in another period of great struggle and trial, I read your book about metta practice, and it was wonderful. I was so comforted to have again such a place within my reach. It was that incredible thought that we can care about ourselves and not fall into the pit of thinking that just because life is not working now, there's something terribly wrong with us. That is what metta has done for me, this reassurance that of course we go through incredible periods of stress and pain, but if we hold on to our love of ourselves through it, we can come out the other side.
Sharon Salzberg: There's a teaching in Buddhism that suffering strengthens our faith. That's hard to understand, it's hard to even speak about, because so many people are embittered by suffering and are broken by it, rather than renewed by it. It's finding the transformative quality in the openness that makes all the difference.
Alice Walker: For me, it is also not having my love and faith in the earth itself broken. Ten years ago I experienced having Lyme Disease, which at the time I didn't even know existed, so I just thought I was dying of some mysterious thing that nobody had ever heard of. Then when I realized that this disease was caused by a tick bite, I thought that the earth had kind of turned on me. I had always been such a shameless pagan, out there fornicating in the grass and up the trees and everything, and I felt I had to withdraw from that kind of intimate contact with nature, because nature bites back, I thought. So I went for years with this kind of fear, and only after a very long time did my love for the earth and for nature prove so strong that I just decided that I loved it no matter what it did. And so (laughs), it's been wonderful.
Sharon Salzberg: In the tape you did, "My Life as Myself," you say something like, "Love makes me look at what I can't stand," which is a tremendous affirmation of the bigness of love.
Alice Walker: It's true. I think that feeling had to develop in me because so much of what I've had to look at in life is so hard. If I didn't have the love of the people and of the earth and of the life force itself, I couldn't bear it. I couldn't know that children are being subjected to all the things that they are being subjected to. I would just turn away, I think, as many people do. People go into drugs, they go into television, and they go into many things. But you can also go in through love.
Melvin McLeod: Can I ask what your understanding is of the actual practice of loving kindness. Many people might hope that they could access such love in their lives, love for themselves and for others, but how does one actually do it?
Alice Walker: Well, for me it has always been through activism. I've been a very contemplative person by nature, and was fortunate enough always to live very far out in the wilds of the country. I think this is where all meditation really comes from, that feeling of spaciousness in the countryside or with nature. But I was also very lucky to have been placed in a part of the country where one has to struggle politically and socially in order to grow, and actually to exist at all. So I was brought into contact with people and movements and with forces for change in society, and I could not help but grow. It was just inevitable that if I looked out and saw people in all their radiant fighting beauty, then I would just be struck with love for them.
I'm so happy that I lived in Mississippi for seven years, because each day I could see these warriors, who were really the least of everybody. They were poor, they could be thrown off their land, they could be jailed, they were often shot; you know, lynching was not uncommon. And there they were—they would stand up to anyone and hold their ground, insist that they were children of God, and that they had a right to exist. This was incredibly humbling, and I just found myself loving them without reservation. The thing about love that I've discovered in my life is that one love leads to another. It just gets bigger and bigger. You can let it start anywhere; it can be really tiny. You can start with a daffodil, but if you sincerely see it and if you sincerely love it, then it's like the key. The daffodil is like a key to the big, big, big storeroom. Then everything becomes something that is lovable.
Sharon Salzberg: You describe the naturalness of it all. I guess the problem is that we've forgotten, or we've got out of touch. It's not so much a practice to get more loving, but to remember more, and to feel more safe and confident in our ability to love.
Alice Walker: Yes, and also to see the good even in the midst of the dreadful. That has always been very powerful to me. I've known so many people in my life who were almost split in half, good and bad. You could see them doing something that was just horrendous and despicable on Tuesday. And then on Wednesday, you would see them drop all of that and stand up to incredible forces of oppression and despair, and call upon something very deep within themselves that was really precious.
Sharon Salzberg: It's like the creation of the other, even within oneself. We don't incorporate all aspects of our being into this loving space, and so it's that much easier to dishonor others and to feel so separate.
Alice Walker: I think you have to really work at it, to see the good, and sometimes you do it in such peculiar and maybe perverse ways. For me, I have had to recognize a real fear of Germans. When I travel through Germany I feel afraid, and all of that. But I made myself get a German car, and I really like it a lot. I drive around in it and it's perfectly smooth and wonderful and it makes me every day think about Germans in a different way. I don't think about them as people who are hunting me through the woods or frying people in concentration camps. I kind of think about them on the car level, the Mozart car-making level, that this is something very beautiful and very efficient also, in a positive way. I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we've been brought up to.
Melvin McLeod: Is there also a healthy type of anger or outrage that is compatible with, or perhaps even a companion to, loving kindness? Could this be the sense of the power of loving kindness that Sharon referred to originally?
Alice Walker: Creativity—for me, that is where the power is, that is where the healing is. Even if you don't consider yourself an artist, to make something that is beautiful and not destructive, or to make something that is useful and not destructive, that is the healing power of the artist. For me, as someone who spends so much time in solitude, it has been about making actual objects—making stories and making quilts, you know, things that you actually make. And making friends with somebody, that's very good. And we all together make political movements; we make change in society.
One of our big problems is that we live in a culture that bombards us with destructive images that are killing us. I think that the children are battered so badly by destructive, negative images from television, mainly, and the movies, that they often have no idea that they can create in a way that is not destructive. They actually think that creation itself is destructive. That's a terrible place for us to find ourselves, where our children believe that.
Sharon Salzberg: Maybe the power we're talking about is the clarity of truth telling and clear seeing. I would hate to call it the positive aspect of anger, but maybe it has some of the energy of anger.
Alice Walker: I love clear seeing. It is such a wonderful phrase. It just gets right to it, that you try to see things as clearly as they are. Then you try to express them to yourself, and then to the world, as clearly as you can. This, I think, is really the only hope. Because it's as if this world is constructed almost entirely of lies, and so we can't help but be lost. We are floundering about, trying to find the path, and they have deliberately said East where it's West, North where it's South, up where it's down, green where it's blue. And all the time they are wrong. These signposts have been deliberately put on the path to send us off somewhere else. So clear seeing, clear speaking—that is our responsibility.
Sharon Salzberg: It's also feeling the truth of our own experience, because being cut off from our own suffering, it's that much harder to open to the pain of others.
Alice Walker: That's why it's good to be a writer, or to be a poet, because you can at least offer your own truth. I've had the experience of writing about incest, wife beating, child molestation, female genital mutilation, all kinds of things, and having people say, this could not possibly exist, and even if it does, why would you want to tell us? And at some point you stop really caring whether it makes other people uncomfortable, because, as the Buddhists say, this is just basic human stuff (laughs). Essentially, your experience, whatever it is, is human stuff. And for people to pretend they don't know what it is, or that it's so shocking somebody said it, this is another signpost that says East instead of West. Because deep in your heart, you recognize what is human when you see it.
Sharon Salzberg: In your novel The Temple of My Familiar, Carlotta says to Fanny, well, maybe the problem is too large for anger. The way you phrased it in "My Life as Myself" is that maybe it's too big not to forgive. That sense of bigness is, I think, a spiritual understanding which is totally inclusive. It's not separate from what's happening, or trying to get beyond it, or transcend it in some way.
Melvin McLeod: For me, the problem is that it is so hard to recognize what is happening beyond our immediate sight. Literally, at this moment, there are terrible things being done to people around the world. Right now. Just over the horizon. Yet it is so difficult to see this world in its entirety and to see beyond our own lives to the terrible, terrible things that are happening right as we speak.
Alice Walker: Well, Melvin, you just did. So stop beating up on yourself. Have a little loving kindness, please! (laughs)
Well, I don't know. I think that with me, I do realize it's pretty messy all around. Lots of suffering, lots of pain. And I have just decided that there are places where I feel I am uniquely suited to be, and causes that just fit. Causes where I feel I understand some of what it's about, where I feel I can actually do this without being insulting or ignorant or not good for the people involved.
I work on what I am able to work on, more or less joyously. When I tackle something like female genital mutilation, I think about one child at a time, and I try not to think about a hundred million people. I can't really think about every one of them all in their collectivity. I have to just try to go after one child who has a possibility of not being harmed, if I speak now. And I go into that with a real light heart. It's very heavy, but because I'm off my couch, my heart is fairly light.
And that's it. I give to the extent that I can, and then I sit back and I eat tomatoes. And I enjoy them, and I look out at the landscape and I love it, and I walk and I go swimming and I love being alive, and I enjoy my life. And then when I get my strength back, I go out again. That's all I can do, and I do it with such happiness. It's not in any way a strain, and when it gets to be a strain, I just take a nap. But it's good for me.
Sharon Salzberg: That reminds me of something out of the classical Buddhist tradition, that at the time of the Buddha, the Buddha would smile, throw a flower, or say three words, and 50,000 people would get enlightened. And it doesn't happen that way these days. I asked one of my teachers once, why not? And he said, it's basically because we can't open up to the suffering all at once. We have to do it gradually. It's not the point to suffer; it's the opening that's the point. It is that lightheartedness, that bigness, that spacious mind and love that can hold the suffering and accommodate it and integrate it and understand it. It's not just to suffer and be broken by it.
Alice Walker: I've had this experience where I go somewhere, and even on the way, I'll be thinking, oh no, it'll be so rough, how can I stand it? Then I'll get there, and I'll be with the people, and sure enough, they'll be up against some incredible madness, and I'll just find myself getting happier and happier and happier. And we'll all look at each other, and we'll be grinning and grinning and grinning, and by the time it's over, whatever it is, we will have decided that this was absolutely the high point of life. And so there's that to be experienced.
The book I'm just finishing is on activism. The point of it is that unfortunately we live in a time when people think that if their activism is not some huge, grand thing, that if they're not some great hero like the ones who have been assassinated already, then what they have to offer is not good enough. Just writing a letter, for instance, or teaching somebody how to vote, or picking up litter in a neighborhood where picking up litter is unknown, and so influencing the people there. They feel that, well, this is so small, I'd like to do it but what is it, it's so tiny. And I'm saying that the tiniest thing can be very powerful and very beautiful, and it's something that one should do for oneself. That's the whole point of it. It's not to clean up someone else's neighborhood, or feed their children, and just do this for them. It is really for you; that is where your happiness is.
Sharon Salzberg: It's so healing to recognize our connection. I've received a lot from people who had very little, and that has been an awesome experience. Like going to a country such as Burma to practice meditation, where every single meal is offered to us by people who are sometimes just dressed in rags. They're so happy for the chance to have fed you, and they have nothing. To receive so much from them is beautiful.
Alice Walker: Also, Sharon, you know what?
Sharon Salzberg: What?
Alice Walker: They are quite aware that they have everything and you have nothing.
Sharon Salzberg: That's true too.
Alice Walker: You're the one who left home to come to Burma.
Sharon Salzberg: Yes, that's very true. And sometimes when we do something small, we have no idea where it's going to lead anyway.
Alice Walker: Never. And also there's just the joy of beginning, beginning.
Melvin McLeod: I'd like to go back, Ms. Walker, to your ability to maintain a light heart. I saw part of a film on TV, which may have been your film about female genital mutilation, and it was an actual scene of a young girl undergoing some sort of terrible excision of her genitalia. The child was screaming, and I was completely shaken. I couldn't watch it. So when you've seen that sort of thing, as you have, how do you not get your heart broken, on one hand, and on the other hand, not be completely enraged at the people doing it?
Alice Walker: I think you feel all of that, and you just don't stay there. Once again, here it is—the most horrible thing in the world is happening, but by some miracle you are there at the beginning of seeing that it stop. So how could you not be light hearted? I mean, ultimately. But it's very difficult, I know. When I was in Africa, I was walking along—this was after a whole long line of young girls had been mutilated—and I couldn't watch it. And out of nowhere there was a little girl, I guess maybe three or four years old, who just came up to me. She'd never seen me before, and she just took my hand, and we walked along holding hands for a little distance. All I could think was, I'm doing this for other children, but we're not starting in time to save this particular child. And I'm telling you, it almost drove me under the ground.
At the same time, I think, well, I am here to help. I'm here with all of the skill that I have acquired as a writer over 25 or 30 years, and all the love that I feel for the people here, and all the love that I feel for myself and my connections to the people of Africa. So I felt like it was okay. It's better to start, even when things are so dire, than to be sitting home not starting.
Melvin McLeod: This reminds me of Trungpa Rinpoche's metaphor of the "Great Eastern Sun," which refers to the fact that in every situation, no matter how difficult, there is always the possibility of going forward, toward waking up, toward helping others. This situation seems exactly the definition of warriorship, that you can see the possibility of going forward, even while your heart is broken.
Alice Walker: You know, what are hearts for? Hearts are there to be broken, and I say that because that seems to be just part of what happens with hearts. I mean, mine has been broken so many times that I have lost count. But it just seems to be broken open more and more and more, and it just gets bigger. In fact, I was saying to my therapist not long ago, "You know, my heart by now feels open like a suitcase. It feels like it has just sort of dropped open, you know, like how a big suitcase just falls open. It feels like that."
Instead of that feeling of having a thorn through your heart, that feeling Pema Chodron talks about in tonglen meditation, you have a sense of openness, as if the wind could blow through it. And that's the way I'm used to my heart feeling. The feeling of the heart being so open that the wind blows through it. I think that is the way it's supposed to feel when you're in balance. And when you get out of balance, you feel like there's no wind, there's no breeze, there's just this rock and it has a big thing sticking through it. I don't know how you get from one feeling to the other, except through meditation, often, but also activism, just seeing what needs to be done in the world, or in our families, and just start doing it.
Sharon Salzberg: I think open heart comes from a sense of community, and it can come from a meditation practice, or both ideally. Because when there's a central connection with others, that's also the source of joy. Realizing that what's happening to those little girls is not different from me, not other than me. Inevitably, it's awful and one's angry and terrified, but at the same time, that connection itself is the joy, that open suitcase heart.
Alice Walker: I don't know where that suitcase image came from (laughs), but now that I think of it, a suitcase is something that you also fill up again and move on off with (laughs). So it doesn't stay empty. It's also portable.
But I don't know, the world is in such a mess. What has been on my mind a lot lately is the land mines that have been planted all over. They are completely evil and horrible, and the damage that they do is so severe. This is something the world has to face up to and do something about. And the best place to do it is at the point of manufacture of the mines. It's too dangerous to go to these countries to try to remove the mines yourself, so some pressure has to be brought to bear on the manufacturers who sell these things.
Sharon Salzberg: I was at a conference with MahaGhosananda, who's one of the surviving Cambodian monks, who actually leads peace marches through mine fields. Somebody asked him how he encourages the people he's walking with and keeps them from being afraid, and his response was, "I tell everybody, just go step by step." And of course it's what we all need to do, go step by step.
Alice Walker: Instead of always being at the receiving end of the violence, maybe a shorter step, and a more effective step at this late date, is to just go after the people who are actually responsible for creating the violence and the disaster. It doesn't make sense for us to always be the ones catching the bullets or stepping on the mines, when there are some very wealthy industrialists sitting somewhere in an office and selling these very things that we have to put our bodies in front of and on top of, so that people will know that they are being made.
Sharon Salzberg: Perhaps that is also part of the role of community, both to enlighten one another as to what's going on, and also to support one another in taking that kind of action.
Melvin McLeod: There is also a pervasive issue which I think of as the team mentality, the division of the world into competing teams on the basis of nationality or ideology or race or gender or whatever. And for teams, winning is the issue, not the transcending interests of the whole. I know, Ms. Walker, that at times you've suffered accusations of not being "on the team" for taking on certain difficult issues. It's so easy for "my community" to become "my team."
Alice Walker: I know. Well, my little theory is that you find that you just keep doing the thing that gets you kicked out, and this has everything to do with living as your true self. And then you meet up with all the other people who've been kicked out. And then you have your team, and it's a team of everybody.
I definitely feel that way. I feel that because of the positions I have taken and the things that I have written, I often find myself totally out. But it never means that I'm alone, because then I discover that there are all these other people who also have subversive thoughts and have also done and written things that their particular clan didn't approve of. And so there we all are, and there begins to be built a whole other community, a whole other family of people who are not related by color, blood, sex or whatever, but by vision. That's how I feel, that I'm a part of a whole community of great people, and it's not about race, it's about vision and what we think the world will be and should be.
Melvin McLeod: Sadly, in situations of conflict, those people who see beyond the interests of their own side usually get crushed.
Alice Walker: But there's also the realization that you crush me today, and tomorrow you die of cancer. So it's not as if anybody is winning, and I think that's clearer today than it used to be. When I was growing up in the segregated apartheid South, the white supremacists actually thought that they would crush black people, and they even thought that they would live happily ever after. They would never be sick, and nothing could touch them. In a way, any kind of supremacist system means that the people who are at the top really feel that they're invincible, that they'll live forever. If not them, then their children will inherit the earth and roam over it. But in fact, we know that the earth is so poisoned, and so full of danger everywhere, that it is well for people to understand that whoever they crush on Monday, on Tuesday they themselves may find that Life is crushing them. So there is no winning. And I take solace from that, actually.
The Power of Loving Kindness, Alice Walker and Sharon Salzberg, Shambhala Sun, January 1997.
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/catchusers3/2010620/shambhalaback/Archives/Features/1997/Jan97/Alice Walker.htm Good Medicine For This World
Alice Walker and Pema Chödrön in Conversation
Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön and novelist Alice Walker on how tonglen meditation practice opens our heart, expands our vision, and plants the seeds of love in our lives. From an evening of discussion at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts Theater.
Alice Walker: About four years ago I was having a very difficult time. I had lost someone I loved deeply and nothing seemed to help. Then a friend sent me a tape set by Pema Chödrön called “Awakening Compassion.” I stayed in the country and I listened to you, Pema, every night for the next year. I studied lojong mind training and I practiced tonglen. It was tonglen, the practice of taking in people’s pain and sending out whatever you have that is positive, that helped me through this difficult passage. I want to thank you so much, and to ask you a question. In my experience suffering is perennial; there is always suffering. But does suffering really have a use? I used to think there was no use to it, but now I think that there is.
Pema Chödrön: Is there any use in suffering? I think the reason I am so taken by these teachings is that they are based on using suffering as good medicine, like the Buddhist metaphor of using poison as medicine. It’s as if there’s a moment of suffering that occurs over and over and over again in every human life. What usually happens in that moment is that it hardens us; it hardens the heart because we don’t want any more pain. But the lojong teachings say we can take that very moment and flip it. The very thing that causes us to harden and our suffering to intensify can soften us and make us more decent and kinder people.
That takes a lot of courage. This is a teaching for people who are willing to cultivate their courage. What’s wonderful about it is that you have plenty of material to work with. If you’re waiting for only the high points to work with, you might give up, but there’s an endless succession of suffering.
One of the main teachings of the Buddha was the truth of dukha, which is usually translated as “suffering.” But a better translation might be “dissatisfaction.” Dissatisfaction is inherent in being human; it’s not some mistake that you or I have made as individuals. Therefore, if we can learn to catch that moment, to relax with it, dissatisfaction doesn’t need to keep escalating. In fact it becomes the seed of compassion, the seed of loving kindness.
Alice Walker: I was surprised how the heart literally responds to this practice. You can feel it responding physically. As you breathe in what is difficult to bear, there is initial resistance, which is the fear, the constriction. That’s the time when you really have to be brave. But if you keep going and doing the practice, the heart actually relaxes. That is quite amazing to feel.
Pema Chödrön: When we start out on a spiritual path we often have ideals we think we’re supposed to live up to. We feel we’re supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then ironically, taking in pain—breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are—heightens your awareness of exactly where you’re stuck. Instead of feeling you need some magic makeover so you can suddenly become some great person, there’s much more emotional honesty about where you’re stuck.
Alice Walker: Exactly. You see that the work is right ahead of you all the time.
Pema Chödrön: There is a kind of unstuckness that starts to happen. You develop lovingkindness and compassion for this self that is stuck, which is called maitri. And since you have a sense of all the other sentient beings stuck just like you, it also awakens compassion.
Alice Walker: I remember the day I really got it that we’re not connected as human beings because of our perfection, but because of our flaws. That was such a relief.
Pema Chödrön: Rumi wrote a poem called "Night Travelers," It's about how all the darkness of human beings is a shared thing from the beginning of time, and how understanding that opens up your heart and opens up your world. You begin to think bigger. Rather than depressing you, it makes you feel part of the whole.
Alice Walker: I like what you say about understanding that the darkness represents our wealth, because that’s true, There’s so much fixation on the light, as if the darkness can be dispensed with, but of course it cannot. After all, there is night, there is earth; so this is a wonderful acknowledgment of richness.
I think the Jamaicans are right when they call each other “fellow sufferer,” because that’s how it feels. We aren’t angels, we aren’t saints, we’re all down here doing the best we can. We’re trying to be good people, but we do get really mad. You talk in your tapes about when you discovered that your former husband was seeing someone else, and you threw a rock at him. This was very helpful (laughter). It was really good to have a humorous, earthy, real person as a teacher. This was great.
Pema Chödrön: When that marriage broke up, I don’t know why it devastated me so much but it was really a kind of annihilation. It was the beginning of my spiritual path, definitely, because I was looking for answers. I was in the lowest point in my life and I read this article by Trungpa Rinpoche called “Working With Negativity.” I was scared by my anger and looking for answers to it. I kept having all these fantasies of destroying my ex-husband and they were hard to shake. There was an enormous feeling of groundlessness and fear that came from not being able to entertain myself out of the pain. The usual exits, the usual ways of distracting myself—nothing was working.
Alice Walker: Nothing worked.
Pema Chödrön: And Trungpa Rinpoche basically said that there’s nothing wrong with negativity per se. He said there’s a lot you can learn from it, that it’s a very strong creative energy. He said the real problem is what he called negative negativity, which is when you don’t just stay with negativity but spin off into all the endless cycle of things you can say to yourself about it.
Alice Walker: What gets us is the spinoff. If you could just sit with the basic feeling then you could free yourself, but it’s almost impossible if you’re caught up in one mental drama after another. That’s what happens.
Pema Chödrön: This is an essential understanding of vajrayana, or tantric, Buddhism. In vajrayana Buddhism they talk about how what we call negative energies—such as anger, lust, envy, jealousy, these powerful energies—are all actually wisdoms in disguise. But to experience that you have to not spin off; you have to be able to relax with the energy.
So tonglen, which is considered more of a mahayana practice, was my entry into being able to sit with that kind of energy. And it gave me a way to include all the other people, to recognize that so many people were in the same boat as I was.
Alice Walker: You do recognize that everybody is in that boat sooner or later, in one form or other. It’s good to feel that you’re not alone.
Pema Chödrön: I want to ask you about joy. It’s all very well to talk about poison as medicine and breathing in the suffering and sending out relief and so forth, but did you find any joy coming out of this?
Alice Walker: Oh Yes!. Even just not being so miserable.
Part of the joyousness was knowing we have help. It was great to know that this wisdom is so old. That means people have had this pain for a long time, they’ve been dealing with it, and they had the foresight to leave these practices for us to use. I’m always supported by spirits and ancestors and people in my tribe, whoever they’ve been and however long ago they lived. So it was like having another tribe of people, of ancestors, come to the rescue with this wisdom that came through you and your way of teaching.
Pema Chödrön: I think the times are ripe for this kind of teaching.
Alice Walker: Oh, I think it’s just the right medicine for today. You know, the other really joyous thing is that I feel more open, I feel more openness toward people in my world.
It’s what you have said about feeling more at home in your world. I think this is the result of going the distance in your own heart—really being disciplined about opening your heart as much as you can. The thing I find, Pema, is that it closes up again. You know?
Pema Chödrön: Oh no! (laughter) One year of listening to me and your heart still closes up?
Alice Walker: Yeah. It’s like what you have said about how the ego is like a closed room and our whole life’s work is to open the door. You may open the door and then discover that you’re not up to keeping it open for long. The work is to keep opening it. You have an epiphany, you understand something, you feel slightly enlightened about something, but then you lose it. That’s the reality. So it’s not a bad thing.
Pema Chödrön: No
Alice Walker: But it’s frustrating at times, because you think to yourself, I’ve worked on this, why is it still snagging in the same spot?
Pema Chödrön: That’s how life keeps us honest. The inspiration that comes from feeling the openness seems so important, but on the other hand, I’m sure it would eventually turn into some kind of spiritual pride or arrogance. So life has this miraculous ability to smack you in the face with a real humdinger just when you’re going over the edge in terms of thinking you’ve accomplished something. That humbles you; it’s some kind of natural balancing that keeps you human. At the same time the sense of joy does get stronger and stronger.
Alice Walker: Because otherwise you feel you’re just going to be smacked endlessly, and what’s the point? (laughter)
Pema Chödrön: It’s about relaxing with the moment, whether it’s painful or pleasurable. I teach about that a lot because that’s personally how I experience it. The openness brings the smile on my face, the sense of gladness just to be here. And when it gets painful, it’s not like there’s been some big mistake or something. It just comes and goes.
Alice Walker: That brings me to something else I’ve discovered in my practice, because I’ve been doing meditation for many years—not tonglen, but TM and metta practice. There are times when I meditate, really meditate, very on the dot, for a year or so, and then I’ll stop. So what happens? Does that ever happen to you?
Pema Chödrön: Yes. (laughter)
Alice Walker: Good!
Pema Chödrön: And I just don’t worry about it.
Alice Walker: Good! (laughter)
Pema Chödrön: One of the things I’ve discovered as the years go on is that there can’t be any “shoulds.” Even meditation practice can become something you feel you should do, and then it becomes another thing you worry about.
So I just let it ebb and flow, because I feel it’s always with you in some way, whether you’re formally practicing or not. My hunger for meditation ebbs but the hunger always comes back, and not necessarily because things are going badly. It’s like a natural opening and closing, or a natural relaxation and then getting involved in something else, going back and forth.
Alice Walker: I was surprised to discover how easy it was for me to begin meditating many years ago. What I liked was how familiar that state was. The place that I most love is when I disappear. You know, there’s a point where you just disappear. That is so wonderful, because I’m sure that’s how it will be after we die, that you’re just not here, but it’s fine.
Pema Chödrön: What do you mean exactly, you disappear?
Alice Walker: Well, you reach that point where it’s just like space, and you don’t feel yourself. You’re not thinking about what you’re going to cook, and you’re not thinking about what you’re going to wear, and you’re not really aware of your body. I like that because as a writer I spend a lot of time in spaces that I’ve created myself and it’s a relief to have another place that is basically empty.
Pema Chödrön: I don’t think I have the same experience. It's more like being here—fully and completely here. It's true that mediation practice is liberating and timeless and that, definitely, there is no caught-up-ness. But is is also profoundly simple and immediate. In contrast, everything else feels like fantasy, like it is completely made up by mind.
Alice Walker: Well, I feel like I live a lot of my life in a different realm anyway, especially when I’m out in nature. So meditation takes me to that place when I’m not in nature. It is a place of really feeling the oneness, that you’re not kept from it by the fact that you’re wearing a suit. You’re just in it; that’s one of the really good things about meditation for me.
Judy Lief: I assume, Alice, that as an activist your job is to take on situations of extreme suffering and try to alleviate them to some degree. How has this practice affected your approach to activism?
Alice Walker: Well, my activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I really feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television.
Judy Lief: This is where you bring together your private practice and your public action.
Alice Walker: Yes. Before I was sort of feeling my way. I went to places like Mississippi and stood with the people and realized the suffering they were experiencing. I shared the danger they put themselves in by demanding their rights, I felt this incredible opening, a feeling of finally being at home in my world, which was what I needed. I needed to feel I could be at home there, and the only way was to actually go and connect with the people.
Pema Chödrön: And the other extreme is when our primary motivation is avoidance of pain. Then the world becomes scarier and scarier.
Alice Walker: Exactly.
Pema Chödrön: That’s the really sad thing—the world becomes more and more frightening, and you don’t want to go out your door. Sure there’s a lot of danger out there, but the tonglen approach makes you more open to the fear it evokes in you, and your world gets bigger.
Judy Lief: When you are practicing tonglen, taking on pain of others, what causes that to flip into something positive, as opposed to being stuck in a negative space or seeing yourself as a martyr?
Alice Walker: I think it’s knowing that you’re not the only one suffering. That’s just what happens on earth. There may be other places in the galaxy where people don’t suffer, where beings are just fine, where they never get parking tickets even. But what seems to be happening here is just really heavy duty suffering.
I remember years ago, when I was asking myself what was the use of all this suffering. I was reading the Gnostic Gospels, in which Jesus says something that really struck me. He says basically, learn how to suffer and you will not suffer. That dovetails with this teaching, which is a kind of an acceptance that suffering is the human condition.
Pema Chödrön: It is true people fear tonglen practice. Particularly if people have a lot of depression, they fear it is going to be tough to relate with the suffering so directly.
I have found that it’s less overwhelming if you start with your own experience of suffering and then generalize to all the other people who are feeling what you do. That gives you a way to work with your pain: instead of feeling like you’re increasing your suffering, you’re making it meaningful. If you’re taught that you should do tonglen only for other people, that’s too big a leap for most people. But if you start with yourself as the reference point and extend out from that, you find that your compassion becomes much more spontaneous and real. You have less fear of the suffering you perceive in the world—yours and other peoples’. It’s a lot about overcoming the fear of suffering.
My experience of working with this practice is that it has brought me a moment by moment sense of wellbeing. That’s encouraging to people who are afraid to start the practice—to know that relating directly with your suffering is a doorway to wellbeing for yourself and others, rather than some kind of masochism.
Alice Walker: I would say that is also true for me in going to stand where I feel I need to stand. I feel I get to that same place.
I also appreciate the teaching on driving all blame into yourself. We need a teaching on how fruitless it is to always blame the other person. In my life I can see places where I have not wanted to take my part of the blame. That’s a losing proposition. There’s no gain in it because you never learn very much about yourself. You don’t own all your parts. There are places in each of us that are quite scary, but you have to make friends with them. You have to really get to know them, to say, hello, there you are again. It’s very helpful to do that.
Pema Chödrön: One of the things the Buddha pointed out in his early teaching was that everybody wants happiness or freedom from pain, but the methods human beings habitually use are not in sync with the wish. The methods always end up escalating the pain. For example, someone yells at you and then you yell back and then they yell back and it gets worse and worse. You think the reason not to yell back is because, you know, good people don’t yell back. But the truth is that by not yelling back you’re just getting smart about what’s really going to bring you some happiness.
Judy Lief: The lojong slogan says “Drive all blames into one,” that is, yourself. But there are definitely situations where from the conventional viewpoint there are bad guys and good guys, oppressors and oppressed. How do you combine taking the blame yourself with combating oppression or evil that you encounter?
Alice Walker: Maybe it doesn’t work there. (laughter) Pema why don’t you take that one. (laughter)
Pema Chödrön: Well, here would be my question: does it help to have a sense of enemy in trying to end oppression?
Alice Walker: No.
Pema Chödrön: So maybe that’s it.
Alice Walker: I think it’s probably about seeing. As Bob Marley said so beautifully, the biggest bully you ever did see was once a tiny baby. That’s true. I mean, I've tried that on Ronald Reagan. I even tried that on Richard Nixon, but it didn’t really work that well.
But really, when you’re standing face to face with someone who just told you to go to the back of the bus, or someone who has said that women aren’t allowed here, or whatever, what do you do? I don’t know what you do, Pema, but at that moment I always see that they’re really miserable people and they need help. Now, of course, I think I would love to send them a copy of “Awakening Compassion.” (laughter)
Pema Chödrön: It’s seeing that the cause of someone’s aggression is their suffering. And you could also realize that your aggression is not going to help anything.
So you’re standing there, you are being provoked, you are feeling aggression, and what do you do? That’s when tonglen becomes very helpful. You breathe in and connect with your own aggression with a lot of honesty. You have such a strong recognition in that moment of all the oppressed people who are provoked and feeling like you do. If you just keep doing that, something different might come out of your mouth.
Alice Walker: And war will not be what comes out.
Judy Lief: It seems to me that Dr. Martin Luther King had the quality of a tonglen practitioner. Yet he didn’t ask us not to take stands.
Alice Walker: He was from a long line of Baptist preachers, someone who could really get to that place of centeredness through prayer and through love. I think the person who has a great capacity to love, which often flowers when you can see and feel the suffering of other people, can also strategize. I think he was a great strategist. I think he often got very angry and upset, but at the same time he knew what he was up against. Sometimes he was the only really lucid person in a situation, so he knew how much of the load he was carrying and how much depended on him.
As activists, it is really important to have some kind of practice, so that when we go out into the world to confront horrible situations we can do it knowing we’re in the right place ourselves. Knowing we’re not bringing more fuel to the fire, more anger, more despair. It’s difficult but that should not be a deterrent. The more difficult something seems, the more it’s possibile to give up hope. You approach the situation with the feeling of having already given up hope, but that doesn’t stop you. You said we should put that slogan about abandoning hope on our refrigerators.
Pema Chödrön: Give up all hope of fruition.
Alice Walker: Right. Just do it because you’re doing it and it feels like the right thing to do, but without feeling it’s necessarily going to change anything.
Pema Chödrön: Something that I heard Trungpa Rinpoche say has been a big help to me. He said to live your life as an experiment, so that you’re always experimenting. You could experiment with yelling back and see what that happens. You could experiment with tonglen and see how that works. You could see what actually allows some kind of communication to happen. You learn pretty fast what closes down communication, and that’s the strong sense of enemy. If the other person feels your hatred, then everyone closes down.
Alice Walker: I feel that fear is what closes people down more than anything, just being afraid. The times when I have really been afraid to go forward, with a relationship or a problem, is because there is fear. I think practice of being with your feelings, letting them come up and not trying to push them away, is incredibly helpful.
Question from the audience: Thank you both for being here and bringing so much pleasure to so many people tonight. I’m asking a question for a friend who couldn’t come tonight. She was at Pema’s three day seminar and she left on Saturday feeling badly because she had got in touch with her anger and couldn’t stay. Now she feels she’s a bad Buddhist, a bad practitioner. I’ve been trying to tell her it’s okay but I think she needs to hear your words.
Pema Chödrön: Well, tell her we’re used to using everything that we hear against ourselves, so it’s really common to just the dharma teachings and use them against yourself. But the fact is we don’t have to do that anymore. We don’t have to do that. It’s just like Alice saying that the heart opens and then it closes, so she has to realize that’s how it is forever and ever, She’ll get in touch and then she’ll lose touch and get in touch and lose touch. So she has to keep on going with herself and not give up on herself.
Question from the audience: This is really hard on her because you two are her favorite people in the entire world.
Alice Walker: And she didn’t come?
Question from the audience: She’s so broken-hearted.
Pema Chödrön: She didn’t come because she was so ashamed of herself for not being able to stay with it...that’s not true, is it?
Question from the audience: Yes, it is.
Pema Chödrön: Really. Wow. You should tell her that she’s just an ordinary human being. (laughter) What’s a little unusual about her is that she was willing to get in touch with it for even a little bit.
Question from the audience: My name is Margaret, and I have practiced Tibetan Buddhism for a number of years. About eighteen months ago, right around the time that for the first time in my life I fell in love with a woman, the Dalai Lama made a number of comments pointing out where the Tibetan tradition did not regard homosexuality as a positive thing, in fact an obstacle to spiritual growth. It reached the point that I left the sangha I was connected with and found a different part of the spiritual path that’s working for me now. I have gay and bisexual friends who are interested in Buddhism but some of them have been stopped by what the Dalai Lama had to say and by the lack of coherent answers from other people. I think it would be a big service if you could address that.
Pema Chödrön: Well, listen. I have so much respect for the Dalai Lama and I think that’s where people get stuck. I didn’t actually hear those comments, and I heard there were also favorable comments. But aside from all that, as Buddhism comes to the West, Western Buddhist teachers simply don’t buy that. It’s as if Asian teachers said that women were inferior or something. I mean, it’s absurd. That’s all there is to it. (applause) It’s just ridiculous.
Question from the audience: Let me ask you to say that often and loud.
Pema Chödrön: Sure! I go on record. And I’m not alone, it’s not something unique with me. Western teachers, coming from this culture, we see things pretty differently on certain issues and this is one, for sure.
But the Dalai Lama is a wonderful man, and I have a feeling that if he were sitting here he’d have something else to say on the subject.
Alice Walker: You know, when he was here at the peace conference he was confronted by gay men and lesbian women and he readily admitted that he really didn’t know. He didn’t seem rigid on it.
But also, when there is wisdom about, we should have it! Wisdom belongs to the people. We must never be kept from wisdom by anybody telling us you can’t have it because you’re this that or the other.
Question from the audience: I have a question about the connection between tonglen and joy, because I kind of understood the question of the moderator, anyway, Judy’s question when you breathe in so much suffering how do you avoid becoming so burdened or martyred by it, and what I’m understanding about tonglen is that there’s something kind of transformative about it, when you breathe in suffering and then you breathe out relief and healing. I keep thinking about that prayer of St. Francis of Assisi about being an instrument of peace, and where there is hatred, let me sow love, and where there is despair, let me sow hope. I’m wondering if joy has a place in the ability to make that transformation.
Alice Walker: I think the practice of tonglen is really revolutionary, because you’re taking in what you usually push away with everything you’ve got, and then you’re breathe out what you would rather keep. This is just amazing. I mean, it really shakes you up. I’m sure there are many people who can’t believe that you’re being asked to breathe in the dark, breathe in the heavy, breathe in the hard and the hot. They want to breathe in the white light. But the time has come for all of us to breathe in what is the most difficult, to own it, to get to know it, to feel it out. And then to really think about what the world needs, and to try to send that out. I think that’s the transformation.
Question from the audience: So it’s the courage to face the suffering and the darkness?
Alice Walker: To bring it into yourself. Think of all the people who don’t think that there is any darkness in them. There are millions of people who think they don’t have any darkness. But it’s something that we all have, and part of the problem is that we’ve been pushing all this stuff away and denying it, so of course it’s the biggest shadow you can imagine. That’s what’s clobbering us, everything we pushed away.
Pema Chödrön: My feeling is that it’s like taking off something that’s been covering your eyes and hindering your ability to see. It’s overcoming your fear of what’s painful, although actually you’re training in opening to both joy and suffering, You see if it’s just aimed at joy, then suffering always seems like then you blew it, like this poor woman who didn’t come tonight because she felt she wasn’t living up to the instructions. That’s very common. People want it all on the joy side or the success side or the victory side. Then when it’s just naturally is part of life just naturally flips, or the mood changes, or the energy changes, you feel that you’ve made some mistake or you’re a failure. So it has to include all of that.
One of the basic tonglen instructions, sort of like the tonglen outlook, is that when anything is delightful in your life, you wish that other people could have it. That heightens your awareness of even those fleeting moments of appreciate you usually don’t notice. You start catching the moments of delight and pleasure, just the smallest kinds of happiness and contentment.
The other part of the instruction is that when you feel suffering, you also think of all the other people who are suffering. It covers everything: you share what’s good and you also realize we’re in the same boat with the suffering. So it’s all bigger. Some kind of joy comes from that, strangely.
Judy Lief: Pema, how do you avoid the trap that has come up in these questions—wanting to be the perfect practitioner and feeling worse and worse because you can’t accomplish it?
Pema Chödrön: You could do tonglen with that feeling of failure and include all the other imperfect failure people. So there’s nothing that can happen to you that you can’t use. It takes a while to get the hang of that, but when you start to hear yourself saying “bad dog” or whatever, you stop right there and acknowledge what you’re feeling and the billions of other people feeling the same way. Somehow that shakes up our ways of getting stuck.
When I’m teaching, I’m so aware that most people are hearing with a filter of turning it against themselves. I try very hard, as do most Western teachers, to address that, but it still keeps happening. You just have to keep addressing it. You know, it takes practice. That’s why it’s called practice.
Alice Walker: It’s also important to accept and even embrace the fact of our imperfection. Our imperfection is probably our one perfection. Also I think it’s really good, when you have periods of happiness, to say , I am happy. I think that focuses you in the moment of being happy, and you really know that you’re happy. Otherwise, especially in this culture where you’re always being told to buy something or go somewhere or do something, you lose that moment of being happy because you’re projecting happiness as being somewhere or something else. So when you feel happiness, you just say it, even to yourself, maybe especially to yourself, but aloud, I think it helps to say it aloud, Just say, I’m happy.
Pema Chodron: I hadn’t thought of making it so simple, but that’s right, just say it. Then you could also say, could other people have this, too. Words are powerful in terms of brainwashing ourselves. (laughter)
Pema Chodron is director of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Her most recent book is When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.
Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple. Her latest novel is By the Light of My Father's Smile.
To order this copy of the Shambhala Sun, click here.
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Days of the Diggers |
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Peter Coyote: Days of the DiggersAn interview with Peter Coyote by Melvin McLeod.
The Diggers were a group of sixties radicals and performers whose formula for building a new society was equal parts utopianism and indulgence. In Sleeping Where I Fall, Peter Coyote remembers his life as a Digger.
Shambhala Sun: After reading your book, I found myself haunted by this dedicated, talented, crazy group of people. You don't romanticize anyone, least of all yourself, and the hard drugs and the violence and the foolishness almost overshadow the ideals you wanted to bring out. So, what were the Diggers trying to achieve?
Peter Coyote: I think the core value was to create a culture in which it was possible to be something more than either an employee or a consumer. We wanted to create a culture in which it was possible to live a life predicated on the more human impulses and values, with room for one's personal eccentricity.
We were part of a huge wave in the sixties that called in the nation's markers and promises. We were the products of high school civics classes and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and we were smacked in the face by the civil rights movement. Remember, this was a culture that had just gone through the paroxysms of the McCarthy period.
So we were a generation of kids looking for something authentic and real, a generation that I think produced a great deal of substance that still exists today in our culture. When you think of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the gay movement, the alternative health movement, the alternative spirituality movement, the environmental movement, the organic food movement-all these have permeated the culture and changed the way people live.
These are manifestations of the intentions of the sixties. I don't care at all about the institutions of the sixties-I don't care if I never see another peace symbol or bad psychedelic poster or pair of bell bottom pants-but the important thing is that the intentions of the sixties have been manifested.
Shambhala Sun: The key term for the Diggers was "authenticity." Yet you were performers who treated their own lives as art, and you say that as you look back now, you see what you achieved then as essentially a work of art. What is the relationship between authenticity and life as performance?
Peter Coyote: To me, authenticity means being responsive to your true feelings, thoughts and impulses. That's what authenticity is. One of the things the Diggers had in common was that we were actors, and when we were performing we were trying to invent vehicles to talk about the subject of authenticity. For instance, if we wanted to give people the opportunity to explore the issues that come up around profit and ownership and the roles of manager and shop person, we would invent a theater in which we would be ourselves, but the setting was made highly theatrical. For instance, we had a free store, where not only the goods were free but the roles were free. When someone came in and said "Who's the boss?" and we said, "You are." We could deliver the lines as ourselves; it was the setting itself which was startling.
We felt we could undermine the culture. People will not cross the street to see Bill Clinton, but if you put Tom Cruise in the parking lot of a mall, you'll need police to keep people away. If the people have an image of something they want, they will organize their aspirations and activities to get it. What we realized early on was that a vision was much more compelling than a foot in the back.
We were trying to create compelling visions of the kind of society that people would want. So our challenge as performers was how to invent situations and contexts that would expose people to their own conditioning and the expectations held out for them by the culture, and offer them the opportunity to respond in a fresh and authentic way.
Shambhala Sun: This reminds me of the vajrayana concept translated as "crazy wisdom," in which a highly accomplished teacher may manifest a true sanity that transcends or even violates convention in order to wake people up.
Peter Coyote: Like the Zen master who kills the cat: "If someone can show me their true self this cat will live." The only thing was, we were not highly evolved wisdom people.
Shambhala Sun: Yes, the key element in such a risky endeavor is a great deal of internal discipline, which was outstandingly missing in your cases.
Peter Coyote: That's right. Part of the arc of my book is the precise stages and mechanisms through which a lack of internal discipline and a submission to indulgence erodes high personal callings and intentions.
Shambhala Sun: Unless you're coming from a point of view of genuine selflessness and discipline, how do you draw the line between a political choice to free oneself from social conventions and plain personal indulgence? In practice, are they really separable?
Peter Coyote: Well, we didn't know. If you believe the culture is your enemy, and that you're going to imagine your way out of it, and you're going to make your imaginings real by acting them out, one of the dilemmas you have to face is the possibility that your imagination has been co-opted by the culture. One of the reasons we took drugs, aside from just curiosity and peer pressure, was to consciously try to bust out of the envelope, to make sure we scrambled the mix so thoroughly that the ideas that emerged would be authentic by-products of our own imagination.
Shambhala Sun: But we're talking about a lot of heroin and amphetamines, not drugs known for their consciousness-expanding qualities.
Peter Coyote: Except that when you look at the great artists of our time who were our mentors and heroes-Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday and all the great be-bop musicians and the Viet Nam vets coming back-basically we joined that chorus of people singing through the flames after setting themselves on fire. I'm now talking from hindsight, having been a Zen student for twenty-five years, but at the time we thought that this was selfless behavior. We felt that we were giving up concern with health, with identity, with fame, with wealth, so we could achieve this kind of compassionate reworking of the culture to liberate other people.
Shambhala Sun: Much of your book is devoted to life in various rural communes, in which people attempted to eliminate any manifestation of the personal or the private, often to the point of obsession.
Peter Coyote: Well, I think it was an adolescent misunderstanding-going to the opposite end of the spectrum without discrimination. In point of fact, there's no such thing as freedom, but you learn that late. You learn that freedom, if it's anything, has to do with accepting absolute and unalterable interdependence. Certainly part of authenticity would have been admitting that we all had possessions that we liked, and that we had certain senses of order that we liked in our private living spaces.
I think you have to look at it as a kind of experiment which found the edges of the envelope. I think that if we had tried to create a village instead of a commune, for instance, it might still be going. But it was too radical a leap to try to put thirty souls into a one-family house and rethink everything. It was too exhausting.
Shambhala Sun: Which is to say that the revolutionary approach, which is to go back and redo everything in life, failed where a more moderate approach might have worked.
Peter Coyote: I think the middle ground is the most effective, although that's not necessarily the way that young men and women think. For instance, I think the extremes of the sixties may have led the country into the hands of Reagan. I don't think the American public embraced his conservatism. Rather, I think they embraced his avuncular old fashionedness, because the sixties raised so many questions that people couldn't answer, that they looked for a kind of holding action, a place to rest. They didn't know they would be opening the door to a kind of home grown fascism.
I take a certain amount of responsibility for that. One of the things you learn is that being in a counter-culture condemns you to marginality: if people don't like your style, they're not going to go for your ideas. Had we not been so insistent on our own style, with our own vocabulary and our own everything, we might have frightened people a little less and kept the debate going a little longer.
Shambhala Sun: On the other hand, the sixties had a significant positive impact on the culture, which it might not have had without the extreme element which you represented.
Peter Coyote: Well, Malcolm X used to say that Martin Luther King ought to thank the Lord that I'm around, because every time I go out there and frighten everybody, all those white people go running to him and write him checks. So there is a way in which radical forces push the edge of the envelope, and I do think we have moved the cultural ground in a progressive direction.
Shambhala Sun: One of the most fascinating-and frightening-parts of the story is your deep involvement with the Hell's Angels, who in that period were close to radical elements in San Francisco. The Angels were nothing if not authentic.
Peter Coyote: Well, it's a complicated bag. First of all, I don't know anything about the Angels now; they may be just another organized criminal class. But at the time, we had to come to terms with these guys who lived on our streets. And my experience was that by approaching them as men capable of intellection and decent people-until I knew better-they would respond, and they did. I had unprecedented access to the Angels for a number of years and met some of the most intelligent and lucid men I've ever met in my life, and also some of the scariest and most psychopathic men I've ever met.
Shambhala Sun: Tell me about your transition from drug-addicted radical to serious Zen student.
Peter Coyote: That was in a period where I suddenly was forced to think about a lot of things that I'd never thought about before. Suddenly I was alone; I did not have this nurturing community supporting me, and I realized that a lot of my predilections and impulses had been unhealthy. I realized that I'd damaged my health, and I began to get curious about what constituted good health. I put myself in a course of psychotherapy, I began Zen practice, and I met this woman who seemed like a very healthy person. I wanted to live a life that included good health and respect and reverence for my body and other people's bodies, which had been an enduring criticism of mine of the Diggers. There were a lot of things I couldn't go along with-a lot of our events were so chaotic and unbeautiful that I felt estranged from them. That wasn't the way that I perceived the universe.
Shambhala Sun: And ironically, beginning with a desire for simple good health, you ended up involved in something that may be fundamentally far more radical than anything the Diggers ever did.
Peter Coyote: Without a doubt. Buddhism is far more radical, by far the most radical thing that I have ever been involved in. Healthiness was just the path I took getting there. A lot of people didn't have to do that; a lot of people at the monastery where I lived were just innately intuitive and healthy people, who got there by a much gentler and less dramatic path. And god bless 'em. I did a lot of damage along the way, karmically and physically, to myself and other people.
Shambhala Sun: Why do you think that young people today have turned back past the sixties to the Beats in their search for cultural heroes? Is it because it's hard to see one's own parents as rebels, or is it deeper than that?
Peter Coyote: I think there's something deeper than that. First of all, you have to remember that from the sixties to the present there's been twenty- five years of aggressive disinformation and re-estimation of the sixties. The Reagan/Bush people did not want another generation of committed activists stirring things up. They've spent millions of dollars paying pundits to dismiss the sixties as a failure, to dismiss committed social activism as somehow unhip. They have created icons like David Letterman, whose attitude of cynicism about everything is the supreme goal of adolescence.
So one way in which they can co-opt the counter culture is to go back to the Beats, who were primarily interested in self-exploration. Certainly the most radical elements, like Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, were political, but the effect of the movement was not specifically political.
Shambhala Sun: So cynically, you could say that the mainstream can promote cultural rebels like the Beats, but not political rebels like the Diggers.
Peter Coyote: David Foster Wallace has an essay in which he tracks down the strategy of television ads. What they do is create a sense of irony that kind of washes over everything. Like, yes, of course you're being pitched as a stupid consumer, and we know that you're smart enough to know that, and we know that you're not going to take it seriously because you're so hip you don't take anything seriously. Wallace's essay is a brilliant examination of the kind of convoluted argument that TV has to make to keep a sense of cultural rebellion alive at the same time that it makes you part of a herd of consumers and television watchers.
Shambhala Sun: The mainstream culture is far more pervasive and sophisticated than it was when you were young-capable of instantly co-opting whatever it wants to. How much chance does a young person today have to genuinely rebel?
Peter Coyote: Well, I think young people are telling us that they don't have a lot of hope they can change things. When I see a kid walking around with pins through his nipples and twelve rings through his eyebrows, what it makes me think is that he's in a great deal of pain; that's what he's showing me. They've come up against a culture so monolithic that all they can do anymore is reflect how it feels. It makes me feel really bad, because I think there are ways in which they can contribute, if they can get outside of their own pain and they can link up with other people who are in pain. There are things they can do which may not look flashy but which are conscientious. You can start buying less, using less, wasting less-any place your life touches the culture you can make a difference.
Shambhala Sun: As you look back at the Diggers, what beyond the basic impulse do you think still has validity today?
Peter Coyote: Well, I think the notion of doing what you do without thinking about fame and fortune is pretty valid. I think the notion of doing things for free is pretty valid. It doesn't work in all contexts, but it certainly works in some. I really trust that compassionate intentions will find the appropriate ways to make themselves manifest and that each generation will think up their own ways to do it. Just as we related to the Beats, kids will be relating to what we did and correcting it and altering it to be more appropriate to their time.
I think it's a new game because we have exhausted the idea of having a pure place to stand outside the culture. I think this is now the time of mahayana culture-this is the big vessel, the big boat, and we're all in it. Things are going to be played out not as outsiders, but as insiders, and I trust that young people will work out their own ways of doing it. You know, things are coming around. It looks like capitalism has won but it's not over 'til the fat lady sings. They're creating a global proletariat, they're creating global oppression, and people are not going to dry up and blow away. I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to change.
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It's Been a Long Time Coming |
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It's Been a Long Time ComingKay Dougherty
Saturday morning, June 14, the third annual Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington, DC got off to a feisty start. The media was out in full force, with reporters jammed into the press tent and photographers pushing and shoving for a good shot. Asked by one reporter what a bunch of musicians were really going to be able to do for Tibet, both Thom Yorke and Sean Lennon went on the counterattack.
Sean Lennon stated flatly that he "resented" the question and insisted that he and the other artists were consciously using their celebrity as a vehicle to increase awareness about Tibet. Thom Yorke, of the band Radiohead, said, "There are a lot of really stupid reasons to become a rock star; this is one of the good ones." He incorporated East Timor and other repressive political situations around the world into his discussion of Tibet, and ended by telling the press that they had "the responsibility to tell the truth." Recently released Chinese political prisoner Wei Jingsheng and Tibetan Rhodes Scholar Tashi Rabgey spoke about the denial of human rights in China and Tibet respectively.
On the mainstage later that day, hip hop cornerstone KRS-One, self-proclaimed "blastmaster," spoke emphatically to the crowd of how he had attended a public talk by the Dalai Lama just a few weeks earlier and thus felt compelled to convey the importance of keeping a warm heart and being compassionate towards all human beings and not being "anti-Chinese." Shockingly, the first day of the concert came abruptly to a halt when a bolt of lightning struck the seats in RFK Stadium, injuring twelve people. The music stopped, people were asked to move away from the large television monitor screens, and the Weather Service was called to see if it would be safe to continue. It was determined that the lightning and rain would continue into the evening and it would not be safe to proceed with the performances. The capacity crowd of 60 thousand left the arena cold, wet and confused, some upset and demanding a refund.
Thunderstorms and lightning gave way to a warm and sunny day for Sunday's concert. Canceled performances by bands such as REM were rescheduled for Sunday. Becky Schwartz, concert volunteer and Wesleyan University student, was enthralled by REM's performance: "Thom Yorke's performance of Patti Smith's singing part in the REM song "E-Bow the Letter" was a moment of transcendent musical brilliance." Less articulate attendees settled for adjectives like "cool" and "awesome."
Show-stopping performances of the day included Wyclef Jean and Radiohead. Hip hop's four-star generals, A Tribe Called Quest, captivated the crowd for the third year in a row. As expected, the Beastie Boys followed by Pearl Jam had everyone in RFK Stadium on their feet. The Red Hot Chili Peppers took to the stage using Pearl Jam's equipment for a surprise set that had fans rushing back in from the exits.
The concert ended on a positive and energetic note, and the rally that followed was better than any of us could have hoped for. Monday, June 15, was a day of firsts for many of the people who found themselves on the west steps of the Capitol building in Washington, DC.
On this bright summer day, hundreds of young men and women-inspired by the weekend's Tibetan Freedom Concert-were attending their very first political rally.
For many Tibetan refugees in the audience, it was the first time they would have an opportunity to meet with congressional representatives and talk officially about their oppression by the Chinese.
For some of the Republican and Democratic congressional representatives, it would be the first time they had come together to speak out in support of Tibet's continued quest for self-determination.
But for activist and rock music mogul David Crosby, the mix of music, protest and politics was nothing new. On this morning, he looked something of the wise old grandfather as he rested on a large speaker to the right side of the platform looking out over the crowd, many of whom weren't even born when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were at their peak of success.
"Excuse me, sir," a young woman security guard said, tapping him on the shoulder. "Could you clear this area. I have an artist coming through here that needs to get on stage." He turned to her with a mischievous smile and stated flatly, "I'm an artist, too!" The young woman was embarrassed, but still didn't know to whom she was speaking. She turned and asked some older men around her if they knew him; they chuckled and explained his identity. Indeed the cause of Tibet seems to belong to a whole new generation of protesters.
Although Crosby was there to gather information for his new book, Stand and be Counted, which chronicles the history of music and political activism over the last forty years, someone asked him if he would be kind enough to perform. He walked over to Sean Lennon, son of John Lennon, and asked if he would join him for a song.
"It would be an honor," Lennon replied, and within an hour they took the stage.
Smiling at the crowd, Crosby said, "I wasn't supposed to be here on stage today. I came for the same reason you did-to be counted, to stand up for what you believe in. I am very proud to be here today exactly as you are. Somebody asked me if I would sing one song-I thought I might have one." The twenty thousand plus crowd was filled with inspiration as they played "Long Time Coming," and after the song was over Sean Lennon, a three-year veteran of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, took the podium and spoke passionately about the importance of preserving the culture of Tibet.
I spoke with David Crosby a few days after the rally, and he commented on the "bittersweet feeling" of playing with Sean, his fascination with Adam Yauch's commitment to the cause of Tibet, and his own feelings about Tibet. "I am not constructed so that I can just stand idly by and do nothing," he said.
When I asked him how it felt watching this new generation of activists, he replied, "I was really very, very proud of everybody who was there, and as I was watching the young people there I knew that nobody needed an instruction book-it just came naturally to everybody."
Indeed the National Day of Action rally for Tibet came off without a hitch. It was a day of impassioned music by artists such as REM and Thom Yorke, and powerful speeches from congressional representatives, human rights activists and members of the Tibetan government in exile, including the head of the Tibetan Parliament, Samdong Rinpoche.
The event culminated in a deeply personal and heartfelt speech by Richard Gere. He began by saying that the view of the enormous crowd gave him a chill, because he knew that Tibetans inside Tibet would hear about this event and gather so much strength and hope knowing that people all over the world cared deeply about their human rights.
Gere eloquently moved the issue of Tibet beyond the realm of economics, geography, diplomacy and politics and into the realm of non-violence and compassion for all of the universe. He invited everyone present to join him with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the Potala Palace in Lhasa on the first day of the new millennium for the beginning of a whole new world.
The day was closed by the Venerable Soygal Rinpoche and Tibetan monks and nuns with prayers to generate bodhicitta, but emotions were still high after the event. People lingered about the field and the steps around the capitol. Hundreds continued chanting "Free Tibet"; a large group of people carrying Tibetan flags and banners formed and began to move towards the White House, where reportedly several arrests for civil disobedience occurred.
The rally was the essence of what the Milarepa Fund, in conjunction with other Tibetan support groups, has been working for over the past three years-building awareness and translating that awareness into action for the people of Tibet. All the rockstardom, glamour and good times at the Tibet Freedom Concerts ultimately made this National Day of Action for Tibet possible.
While the rally of 20,000 might seem small by comparison to the 128,000 tickets sold for the concert itself, it was in fact a major victory for the Tibet movement, which has seen unprecedented expansion in the last five years.
The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) and Students for a Free Tibet (SFT), co-sponsors of the concert and rally, have both experienced a dizzying growth in membership and support. SFT will be going into its fourth year with close to 400 college and high school chapters in North America, and another 25 chapters in eleven countries around the world. Working together, ICT and SFT offered education about Tibet to concert-goers and gathered 7,000 postcards addressed to Chinese president Jiang Zemin expressing concern over the welfare of political prisoners such as the Panchen Lama and Chadrel Rinpoche. SFT also had information and postcards expressing concern about clothing manufacture Levi Strauss' decision to resume operations in China, despite China's abysmal treatment of its labor force.
As Clinton's comments to Jiang Zemin proved the following week, the people do indeed have the power. Freedom for Tibet seems more possible than ever before, but as David Crosby reflected, "In regards to freedom for Tibet, I feel that debating whether it is a hopeless battle or not is really not the point. The point is that a truly evil empire is acting in a way that is blatantly wrong. They are crushing Tibet in no less a fashion than Hitler crushed Europe. Regardless of whether we are artists, activists or just the guy next door, we are all citizens and we all have a responsibility to take a stand against injustice."
Taking a stand for Tibet . . . it's been a long time coming. Looks like the wait is finally over.
Kay Dougherty is national coordinator of Students for a Free Tibet.
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Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Way Up High |
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Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Way Up High Hank Rosenfeld
No, Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore. We're in Arizona, where sixties' peace and love live on at the annual Rainbow Family gathering. Hank Rosenfeld says everyone should go at least once in their life.
If I am to spread the information properly-"take all the junk in the news and make it sing like poetry," as I.F. Stone taught-then I must inform you I'm starting with disinformation. Disinformation as opinion piece, from the United States Senator from these parts of Arid Zone A, Republican Jon Kyl, in the White Mountain Independent up in Show Low, AZ:
Arizonans near the site of this year's event already are finding out how disturbing this supposedly peaceful and spiritual group really is. . . . Residents of the town of Springerville have been told if they try to interfere with the group's illegal activities, this "peaceful" group would "trash the town". . . . Rainbow members have urinated on food in stores so the shopkeepers will throw it in the trash where members could then retrieve it. . . . I would think all Arizonans would be concerned for the safety and well-being of their fellow citizens and for our state's beautiful natural resources.
My pal Cape appears to be playing it straight this time, we're covering this for CBS after all, but once inside the RX-7, he's still a goner and sooner than ever, stoked by the strong coffee he made on the trunk, followed by a joint, a cigarette, a Coke and more coffee. We're late and we have to wait for Black Rock headquarters to Fed-Ex the relay equipment from New York: CBS-issue cellphone and mini-disc recorder.
We really came here of course, to The Rainbow Family of Living Light's annual world meditation for peace, in order to see all them thousands of hippies dancing naked and tripping around their teepees. To conduct a radio investigation for CBS. Who are these people? Are they just some kind of weird Neil Young leftover hippie dream, or the last and best hope still leftover from the 60's?
Cape sends this first report back to network headquarters: "They came to the Apache Forest in northeast Arizona to pray for world peace, but the Forest Service said `Get a Permit.'"
Pretty good lidlifter. Then our CBS cellular dies-or maybe the wilderness is bereft of cells-whatever, we have to go use a payphone 30 miles back in Springerville, where they don't get folks from CBS too often.
"Aw these kids are awright, they just don't like the government is all," says Joe Ellis, 73, in a laundromat on N. Hopi Drive and Main. "Hell, I don't like the government either."
Heh, heh. Way to go Joe, set the scene for us here in the heartland. Eagar, two miles away, is the home of eastern Arizona's most famous militiaman/supremacist, who just happens to be on the front page of today's Arizona Republic for refusing to obey a court order and come down from his hilltop lodge/bunker.
Eagar's also where we find the National Incident Control Readiness Strike Force Team, the authorities that the U.S. Forest Service headquarters sent here to handle the Rainbow Family. From this command post in an Eagar elementary school, National Incident Team Information Officer Rose ("I used to be in radio") Davis sits us on teensy kindergarten seats for an interview. Davis says she's from Idaho, and there are Forest Service officers here from as far away as Georgia.
The U.S. Forestry and Senator Kyl are upset because the Rainbows adhere strongly to the part of the Constitution where it talks about the right to peaceful assembly. So why don't FS Officers just go in and bust those 'bows for the no-permit no-no?
"Sheer numbers," Davis shrugs at last. There are 20,000 Rainbows arriving but if any of them are seen using the lake on reservation land, they'll be kicked off by the Apaches because, she says, "the Apache do not like the Rainbows. They think they're American Indian wannabes."
On the mountain top, the wannabes greet us warmly. All we've got are sleeping bags and dead technology, but they invite us out in the meadow for a huge drumming circle to communicate with the rain gods. It has been another dusty hot day, 100 plus degrees, even here at 9,000 feet. But "it always rains at a Rainbow Festival," Running Cloud, our guide says. Rain soon arrives, followed by a double rainbow. Then an additional prayer wish is added, for both rain and bow to be sent to "Our brothers and sisters in Flagler County, Florida."
Two days later, it will rain in Florida for the first time since the fires started. No propaganda. Just fact. We're CBS, we can't make this stuff up. Sure, the double rainbow will turn into "nine rainbows" according to Wolf Hat, sipping tea by a fire the next night. Probably on acid there were nine rainbows visible, but why argue about rainbows? A red-tailed hawk flies overhead. There's a guy Red Hawk, too; all the Rainbows have names like this, like gang monikers, only the opposite of gang monikers in that these seem peaceful.
Running Cloud's been camped here 34 days already. He's a scout who helps find the landing site for the Gathering. He says Senator Kyl's opinion piece was the typical retro-propaganda re Rainbows, something they're used to from the local scare-mongering fishwraps. "Migosh," he laughs, "any damage we do to this forest, which we repair before we leave, doesn't hold a candle to corporate industry's weapons of mass destruction. This is just more diversion, puffery, makeshift reality. Like Shakespeare says, the masters of culture always hatefully resent the promises and the trustworthiness they're forced to demonstrate. They loathe it. The reason the Forest Service is upset is twenty thousand people are having too much fun in their park."
After harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man would have discovered fire.
-Teilhard de Chardin
As night falls, we throw our sleeping bags on some pine needles and go meet Jackie from Iron River, Michigan ("up in Superior") working at the Gathering's Info Center tent. Jackie also helps run the Lost and Found there: a hemp hat, knife from Kathmandu, a puppy, and "Oh, we found your husband..." That sorta stuff.
Jackie gets us stoned. "Welcome home!" Amazingly this is also CBS's motto: "Welcome Home." (Nice yin-yang there, the somethingness and the nothingness mutually necessary.)
CBS deemed it okay we spend our days straight and nights stoned to get perspective on the scene here. I have never seen so much grass smoked. And this just in the Info Center, because I haven't been here long enough to see anything else. Psychedelics use appears much more discreet. We can't find any mescaline at all for instance, nothing for sale, certainly. Only barter is done here.
"Using money jeopardizes our right to use public land," says the Guide. My green energy, five bucks, dropped into the "magic hat" is welcome barter. "Remember," says the Guide, "The energy you give will come back. Wherever possible."
"It's a pleasure doing pleasure with you," one trader says after I exchange my WalMart canteen for a rock. Cape, trading with a six-year-old from Pt. Loma, gives up Pez for a crystal. We heard Rainbows love sweets. In fact, this place runs on sweets and no sleep. Everybody's slept two hours in the last three days and has been up for about 38 hours straight, depending on their drive or hitch to get here.
Directions from the Info Center lead us to a living breathing Whole Earth Catalog, with workshops on everything from earthship building (solar homes in Taos, I learn), to Lubavitcher Kosher cooking (chicken, trust me).
Something else from the guide: "What you have, share. What you are, teach."
Pretty intriguing. To see if it works, I show Jackie some sign language I learned from my nephew in San Diego, and she teaches me how to draw a new Lost & Found sign (somebody lost the old one). Cape says Abbie Hoffman said, "There are no teachers, we are all each other's teachings." This seems to grok what the Rainbows grok. We get into a discussion with her friends about Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Huxley, Buckley and Cassady, touching on Groucho, The Free Speech Movement, SDS, the Diggers and Dharma Bums. Jackie suggests that from now on, the Info Tent will be where one brings information.
She calls me "brother" and takes me to sit by the "Gypsy Cafe" fire. There is a total fire ban statewide, but the Rainbows got an okay from the Forest Service to architecturally-construct a couple of safe fire pits. Beautiful faces reflecting rising firelight are chanting in front of us. Some of the sisters bare their breasts and beat drums with beatific looks beamed back out into a widening circle of dancers. I've died and gone to tribal heaven. Welcome home.
High on popcorn, fire and dope, this is the best party I have ever been to. One of the keys I think, was realizing that being a "reporter" sent a bad vibe. Plus all our CBS TV references and movie references are lost on the Rainbows. They are not only a US Forest Service headache, they're Hollywood's worst nightmare. They just do not meditate at the multi-plex; they're busy making their own movies in the moment. Hippies, lawyers, stroke victims, people with broken necks, architects, grandmothers, all here doing it. So Cape and I have decided to tell them we are "elders," and in this way the media wrapper peels away and kids and women and men will overcome their inhibitions more easily and speak with us. Not that they have any...
"Omitakuye oyasin!" I keep hearing this by the fire and along the trails here, as a greeting or exclamatory. Or: "Om atakwe ase," as BeeohBee spells it for me. It means: "All my relations. Two-legged and four-legged. Whole!" Shared responsibility (Oglala).
We dance around religiously for a bit, meet parents and their children, Willow and Miracle, Ocean and Stony. I meet Roger, who hitches to the gathering every summer. The rest of the year he is an electronic underwater welder. "There's like twelve in the world," he says. He teaches me some Rainbow code: "Six Up" means there are Forest Service or cops in the camp. Guns in the church, six bullets to a gun, hence "Six up."
"This is our church," Roger explains.
After nodding off by the fire, I stumble my way back to our CBS campsite, and a perfect night for lucid dreaming. It's cloudy and no stars now, a slight breeze at 9,000 feet. Cape and I are probably the only ones here without tent or teepee. My new $29.95 bag from SPORTMART keeps me cozy. (It was really $39.95, but the woman rang it up wrong; hence, shopping smart at SPORTMART!) Laying back I feel wet drops fall upon my eyelids. Not a lot of rain, intermittent droplets like little angels from above, telling me to "Go! Go! Go to Sleep!" each time one plunks my peepers.
An elder named Elijah, a fantastic-looking black man walking naked with a stick, says all of this is about love and God. Peace and passion too, but mostly love and God. That's what people bring in and search for here. People are lost all over the place here; everyone is always asking directions to the dozens of neighborhoods and kitchens. With all the hitching, praying and partying, everyone has had like two hours sleep in three days. Children give the best directions.
For Running Cloud, it's not all warmth and light. "Rainbow life can be hectic, chaotic, blissful, rewarding," he says. "Also disappointing, the political side of it especially. Sometimes they get on your last nerve, and I only got one."
Another thing making him nervous are the US Forest Service choppers whirring overhead. On my morning walk, I see a Ronald McDonald beheaded and stuck on a pike just off the path. I see Elvis on a skull and crossbones flag. There is a "DEAF TRIBE" campsite here. A woman lifts up her granny dress and pees right next to me. Here's a firefighter from Maine, a software salesman from Provo. Perhaps our best interview for CBS today is a guy from The Netherlands who wants to, "Thank you everyone, for this is the American dream!"
The 4th of July is Rainbow's annual peace meditation, twenty-five thousand of us now, joining in a "silence is sacred" morning. Around midday everyone comes together in ever-widening circles, hands held skyward like we're saguaro cacti giving it up to the Arizona sun. Half of us are half-naked (as if expressing some kind of wholer human?), and a Hopi-styled kachina clownguy darts in and out of the circles, fucking with everybody. Cape turns on the mini-disc recorder to capture thirty minutes of Om-ing. The sister on my right in the peasant dress keeps switching her handholds from sun-raised to held-between to the arm-upon-shoulder-drape. She is weighed down by her rings and bracelets, although each position works for me. I feel that I've found the center of the counterculture, after being too young for it in the 60's and feeling too old for it in the 90's.
Then the children come parading out from Kiddie Village in face paint and costumes under the long green drape of a dragon train, breaking down our circle wall with an explosion of holy antics. Kiddie Village is probably the coolest neighborhood/kitchen here, full of flowing food and dirty-faced kids with non-stop smiles running between the trees. There are even a couple of naked pregnant women. (Pregnant women and kids are the first fed everyday at the dozens of kitchens/neighborhoods.)
The rest of the day promises constant partying. However, the sister next to me in the peasant dress does not give me a Rainbow hug. I don't know why. The Rainbow hug is famous world-over for its length as well as its depth. And I'm wearing my fresh, tie-dyed John Lennon tee-shirt today, too.
CBS issued me no bowl and you're also supposed to have a spoon attached to your belt. But I'm starving and determined to get fed in the Krishna Kitchen. A hunk of mush made from yogurt, rice, fruits and nuts gets dropped into the palm of my hand and I sit on some pine needles to slurp it up. Yuck. Yummy. Yuck. But as luck would have it-not luck, "magic"(the total appreciation of chance)-I get to have a pregnant naked woman wash my hands off afterward.
Whenever you look at someone with love in your heart, you are praying.
-Jane Siberry
Everybody here looks better in the dark. A lot of last night's starry dynamos are walking around burned out or just sitting and gazing off stumps today. Poetry, lectures, meditation and massage, and consciousness-raising circles begin to dot the meadow. I go stand in a huge line, I have no idea what for: it's a woman on a chair, giving bite-sized Snickers bars for a hug. This place runs on hugs and chocolate.
I am having a great holiday, but I forgot to bring fireworks. Good thing though, as none are allowed. When some jerk launches a sky-rocket into the crowd, he is quickly surrounded by the Shanti Sena, the Rainbows' internal security force. Some have walkie-talkies, the others you never notice until they surround you, I guess. Non-violent intervention. There are other helpers, healers in C.A.L.M. (Center for Alternative Living Medicine) tents.
Tonight we hang in a great neighborhood: "The Lovin Oven," where a Deadicated band is strumming and harmonizing, and cookies are being passed around. Finding the Lovin Oven is like stumbling into the heart of the forest. Here the Rainbows have built mud kilns in a pine grove, stuck dough inside all that packed-up earthdirt, and then stacked the heated loaves in rows of skinny quaking aspen branches about eight feet high. Close by is another tent where women roll and powder and put all their lovework into the delicious buns, breads and cookies that feed thousands through the night. To come upon this baking bread is surely to breathe in the heart of the forest. And just like that, this is the best camping trip I've ever been on.
Don't try to build another ark; create a cup for your brother to drink from.
-Eduardo Machado
I don't know how they do it-yes I do, by consensus, like the Iroquois Code that Ben Franklin studied while he wrote the Declaration-but the Rainbows seem to find the most beautiful spots on the planet when they come together to pray and play. Every year since 1972 the Rainbow Family has found a different national forest in which to live this collective vision quest in a wilderness of bears and blue dragonflies, and God, of course, on the good clear nights. All they want to do is feed everyone, and every year they run into trouble with the government. Two years ago in Missouri, the Forest Service joined the prayer circle on the 4th, but this year the National Incident Team is putting out press releases detailing the "confiscation of illegally possessed feathers" and other violations of the law.
Presently, I find myself in a stand of trees, serving water to my brothers and sisters. Here by the big black kettle, I fulfill my own Fisher King initiation myth, sharing the cup like it's the holy grail. In this tent I also find my music, the right band to jam with on my Hohner. Folk music, anybody can play with that, so I join in. When everybody is singing Jesse Colin Young's "Get Together," you feel an old revolutionary zeal made new again in this moment. And you know it will be won with affection.
We're all the same person looking in a mirror, trying to shake hands with ourselves.
-Wavy Gravy
In the morning, I hear some frogs in a swamp beyond the parking lot and meet Paul, a software engineer from Provo. "I'm ready to go back and work my life," he says, inspired and accepting at the same time. I go to the It's a Beautiful Day Cafe for some "hot mama" tea and suddenly see cops on horseback, in longcoats like western highwaymen. "SIX UP!" I turn and shout, but way too late. Everyone's gonna be busted. Then one hippie by a fresh green patch of sprouts offers some up to a police horse.
USFS: Oh please don't, I'll never get him back.
HIPPIE: Ohhh I'll bet he'd like them. They're reeeeal good.
USFS: (pause, noticing sprout path) Say, how did you do that? That's pretty amazing.
The hippie starts to explain sprout-farming and how this bunch came up in less than two weeks. And this is the closest I have seen the Rainbows and the U.S. come together this weekend.
It was the media coverage of the Human Be-In that destroyed the spirit of the Haight-Ashbury.
-Flashing on the Sixties, by Lisa Law
Cape backs the Rx-7 off onto the gravel road carefully. We drive back down into Babylon to Superior, where the century plants bloom every hundreds years and the Rainbows pass through in buses and colored vans and jeeps.
How did all that Rainbow prayer affect Arizona? Only one person was killed over the 4th of July weekend. Ten died last year. According to the news, the reasons are, "Driver awareness and increased patrol presence."
There are more Rainbow gatherings scheduled for Greece, Costa Rica, Russia, South Africa, Israel and Quebec. Everyone should go to one once in their lives.
Will I ever really "let it all go," as a Krishna brother counseled? My backpack spilled open in the Krishna meditation tent and he suggested I throw it all in Ma Vishnu's fire. Until I do, I haven't done anything, have I? I haven't let it all go, it's just in my head, in notebook testaments. I certainly haven't committed to living it, and when I get back to LA I'll rip up parking tickets and throw them in the meter maid's face, and yell at a gardener for no good reason. So what happens to our bliss when it doesn't follow us out of here?
We sent CBS 18 reports; they aired a few of them. Our final report should have been: "The 90's are dead. Long live the one good thing from the 60's still going on! OMATAKWEASE! ALL MY RELATIONS. WHOLE!"
Hank Rosenfeld is a folk journalist and light comedian living in Santa Monica, CA. He has written humor for radio and TV, plays for small audiences, and stories for even smaller publications. He interviewed Allen Ginsberg for Pacifica Radio and was later yelled at by Allen for misquoting him. Hank lived on a pirate radio ship off the coast of Israel called The Voice of Peace and was once arrested in Athens for robbing the National Bank of Greece. He was innocent.
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Tibet: Why ask Why? |
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Tibet: Why ask Why?
by Josh Schrei
I remember clearly the first time I saw a Tibetan. I was thirteen years old, and my parents and I were travelling abroad for a year. My parents were Buddhists at the time, so they were visiting sacred Buddhist sites and doing extensive meditation retreats at various ashrams and spiritual centers in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
It was at the end of one of those endless Indian train rides, and I was tired, dirty and dreaming of a nice hot shower and a clean bed. We stumbled out into the Varanasi train station, which reeked of sickly sweet incense and cowshit. Homeless people in rags slept on every available inch of floor space, and the walls were covered with red splatters of betel spit.
Every traveller in India has one of those days, when they reach the end of their rope and are about to go totally nuts. I've seen it many times: a British woman reduced to tears after trying for four hours to buy train tickets. A German tourist lunging at an Indian bank teller who refused to cash his traveller's checks but wouldn't tell him why. As I stepped out onto the platform, I felt it about to happen to me. The heat and crowds and flies and cowshit and noise were too much. I was going to lose it.
Just then I saw two old women walking towards me. They were rosy cheeked, smiling, and wearing the aprons that Tibetan women wear. They were spinning prayer wheels, talking with each other, and seemed totally unaffected by the madness around them.
I asked my mother who they were.
"They're Tibetan," she replied.
Did these women have some secret source of inner calm that I was not privy to? Probably not. Were they any more spiritual or enlightened than the rest of us? I don't think so. But still, I remember the experience. It was this, and subsequently meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Bodh Gaya, that started my fifteen year relationship with Tibet, its religion and its people.
In that time, awareness of Tibet has grown and grown. In the early eighties, when I and a handful of friends were the only Buddhist vegetarians within a five-hundred mile radius, Tibet was barely known in mainstream America. Then more Tibetan teachers began making their way into the West and more travellers were allowed into Tibet. Resettlement projects brought more Westerners into contact with Tibetan culture, as did the Dalai Lama's constant speaking and campaigning on behalf of his people. In the last few years, with more and more grassroots and celebrity support, awareness of Tibet, its culture, its people and its political situation has skyrocketed.
Now hundreds of thousands of Americans know about Tibet. The Dalai Lama has made his way onto billboards for Apple computers; Tibetan monks are being used to sell Airwalks. Steven Seagal has been recognized as a reincarnate lama, and Time magazine calls Buddhism the fastest growing religion in America.
Yes, awareness of Tibet has reached a fever pitch. So much so that scholars have begun debating about why Tibet is so popular and writing complete volumes on the subject. Critics are analyzing the entire phenomenon. Essays and editorials with titles like: "Demystifying Shangri-la" have appeared. Tibet scholars are on NPR, speaking at length on subjects like "the historical evolution of Western perspectives on Tibet."
So why is Tibet so popular? For some it is the religion-a fascination with the colorful deities and elaborate rituals. For others it is the fact that in spite of all the pain and torture the Tibetans have endured, their political struggle has been nonviolent. Jesse Helms likes Tibet because he sympathizes with any country that's been overrun by godless communists. Right-to-lifers have befriended Tibet because they are shocked and dismayed by the Chinese government's policy of forced abortions. Tibet has touched the lives of people in all parts of society, from all walks of life.
At this point Tibet has the support of an almost comically diverse band of politicians, musicians, activists, actors and dharma practitioners, but I believe that to try to analyze why all these different people find Tibet so appealing is really unnecessary. Every one of these people has a different reason for supporting Tibet, and while critics may gripe that these people are not supporting Tibet for the right reasons, the fact is that Tibet has our support. We have all befriended Tibet, and our reasons for doing so are as many as there are faces of Tibet.
Over the years I have seen many Tibets. After that first glimpse of those Tibetans in the Varanasi train station, I became interested in Tibet from a purely religious and cultural perspective. At that time I saw the idyllic Tibet, the one that Hollywood embraces and scholars feel perpetually obliged to demystify for us: the Tibet of the tranquil monks in high mountains ringing bells and meditating on the impermanence of life.
Later, when I went to Tibet, I saw a brutalized land whose people were being tortured and killed. I have seen a fierce Tibet as well: a land of Khampa warriors, wild horsemen and bandits who would just as soon cut your nose off as talk about nonviolence. Over the years, I have been frustrated by Tibet, loved it, hated it, wanted to never hear the word Tibet again, and then been moved to tears by the beauty of its culture and the strength of its people.
I have watched Tibet's increasing popularity and also have participated in bringing it about. All the while, I have considered the ramifications of Tibet being so popular. I have thought about the strange phenomenon of bringing such a culture into contact with modern America and how, inevitably, something gets lost in the translation. At times I have felt sad, longing for the Tibet that in earlier years was more "mine." A secret, hidden place of such beauty that only I, out of all the people I knew, had seen. At other times I have felt incredible joy, seeing first hand the sheer number of people that now know of Tibet.
But never once have I had to ask myself why I support Tibet. I just do, as one friend supports another. Tibet is part of my life. I do not pretend that Tibet was ever a perfect place, nor do I care. In the same way that I don't expect perfection from my own friends, or ask them why they're my friends.
If we are to truly support Tibet, then we must treat it as we would our closest friend. We do not have friendships because we want to "get" something out of our friends. Likewise, we don't sit around and analyze why we have befriended someone. It is simply that our lives are enriched by that person's presence. Tibet and its people have the same effect. They enrich the lives of many people; those of us who've been enriched by Tibet feel obliged to give something back.
If we choose to, we could probably discover much about ourselves in searching for why we are attracted to Tibet, its culture, its people and its cause. We could discover much about our own projections, our fascination with the distant and remote, our idealism, our motivations, and much more. But perhaps that is not what Tibet asks of us. Tibet and its people do not ask: why do you care about us? They do not ask us to see Tibet as either a Shangri-la or as a land of feudal serfs. They also do not insist that our motivations in supporting them be absolutely pure. They are simply asking for our help, and they are glad that we do care, that we do help. Because for them, time is running out. For them, there is no time to sit around and debate about the socio-cultural phenomenon of Tibet's popularity while their relatives are dying.
As Westerners we have the luxury of being able to sit back and analyze political struggles, causes, and social phenomena occurring all around the world. As we do so, we inevitably find truths and we inevitably find hypocrisies. Through all this, we tend to forget a simple fact. Right now, amidst all the hype surrounding Tibet, amidst the endless discussions and debates on whether Tibet was ever really a blissful land of enlightened beings, amidst the congressional speeches and the concerts and the films and the analyses and resolutions and dissertations, a sixteen-year-old Tibetan nun lies on the floor of Drapchi prison beaten half to death by Chinese soldiers. Her body is scarred with cigarette burns and she is weak from being tortured with electric cattle prods.
Now tell me. Why should we help her? Or perhaps that is not the right question. Perhaps the right question is, will we help her before it's too late?
Josh Schrei is a full time activist working at the Milarepa Fund, a part-time writer, and a collector of kung fu movies and old records.
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