Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Poems of peace and war

Members of Seniors for Peace here in Mill Valley gathered yesterday to read poems about peace. I chose a poem by my close friend Richard O. Moore, from his last book of published poems, Particulars of Place (Omnidawn, 2015). The poem is called "Jackstraw," and it's part of a longer series of poems called "Scaffolds."

This morning, reviewing the poems chosen by others, I found myself immersed again in the long-admired poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, who won a Nobel Prize in 1996. I thought I was familiar with her published work, but I discovered a poem I did not know, which could well have been read yesterday. Here it is:

 

Vietnam

 

"Woman, what's your name?" "I don't know."
"How old are you? Where are you from?" "I don't know."
"Why did you dig that burrow?" "I don't know."
"How long have you been hiding?" "I don't know."
"Why did you bite my finger?" "I don't know."
"Don't you know that we won't hurt you?" "I don't know."
"Whose side are you on?" "I don't know."
"This is war, you've got to choose." "I don't know."
"Does your village still exist?" "I don't know."
"Are those your children?" "Yes."

 

 

 

Psyche and spirit: a preface

Psyche and spirit: a preface

When I was creating Reckonings some 15 years ago, I sought a name for one of the subjects I wanted most to explore, the relationship between psychology and spirituality, which I had come, in earlier years, to conceive as deeply and intimately twined − virtually to the point of a single integral experience. And since I was more intrigued by practice and lived life than by conceptual formulations, I chose the phrase "psyche and spirit," and began to explore their meaning in the introduction that follows below. This is the another instance, then, of my circling back upon writing that represents Reckonings in its earliest formative years. As I continue with that project of revisiting, interweaving its pieces with attention to more current themes, I realize, without surprise, that I live now much as I lived then, only a little more awake, a little more knowing, thoughtful and caring of others; there is humility, sorrow and pleasure in that recognition.

At the outset, then: psyche and soul, human development and spiritual development, are one being, one path, not two. It took me well into the presumptive years of adulthood to encounter either of them seriously. But when I did, I had the good fortune to be introduced to them together, in their commonality.

Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Sacred [1917]), is usually translated now as The Idea of the Holy. Otto drew from the words of those who sought to find some way of describing the inexpressible. Doing so, he characterized religious experience as numinous: experience of a reality that is overwhelming, awe-inspiring, at once (or on different occasions) terrifying and ecstatic, always permeated by mystery, “wholly other,” not in the sense of alien but rather different, extraordinary if one can imagine the full resonance, the furthest reaches of that word. His summary Latin phrase was mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which means in English about what one would imagine it to mean. (The Latin word numen became associated in ancient Rome with divine will, but it literally describes a nod of the head, a bow, an expression of recognition or consent, perhaps of thanks. I am fond of that ambiguity.)        

In the wake of Otto’s work, it became common to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, experience possessed of that numinous quality and experience that is not: the dogged reality of every day. The interesting thing about this distinction, however, is that it is never at rest, neither hard nor fast. Any object, for example—a stone, a tree, a sip of wine, a breath of air, an apricot—can reveal itself as sacred or profane, so that its sacredness is not inherent in the object itself, but in the character or quality of relationship between knower and known, a reality requiring both an “I” and an “Other.” 

That is why the distinction is between sacred and profane, not sacred and mundane. Profanity, in its deeper sense, implies impersonality, turning away, withdrawal, rather than turning towards; fragmentation or partiality rather than wholeness, absence more than presence, seeming rather than being; mask (persona) or semblance instead of authenticity, withholding rather than giving, monologue rather than dialogue, collectivity rather than community.

Circle back, then, upon the words of Rudolf Otto. If we would continue to find them attractive, experience them as an invitation rather than descriptive only of some grand annunciation beyond our ken, they must be read with care. The word “extraordinary,” for example, is much like the word “supernatural”: if we use either word carelessly, it is likely to evoke separation rather than communion. Consider them this way: the most completely, authentically ordinary and natural of all, when nothing is withheld.

Those  who know the writings of Martin Buber will have already recognized how much I draw from his companionship and guidance. “Each of us,” he wrote in The Way of Man, “is encased in an armor which we soon, out of familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir it to sensibility. And when such a moment has imposed itself on us and we then take notice and ask ourselves, ‘Has anything particular taken place? Was it not of the kind I meet every day?’ then we may reply to ourselves, ‘Nothing particular; indeed, it is like this every day, only we are not there every day.'"        

Did I really say an apricot? I was remembering W.S. Merwin’s literally lovely poem, “West Wall”:

In the unmade light I can see the world

as the leaves brighten I see the air        

the shadows melt and the apricots appear

now that the branches vanish I see the apricots        

from a thousand trees ripening in the air

they are ripening in the sun along the west wall        

apricots beyond number are ripening in the daylight.

Whatever was there        

I never saw those apricots swaying in the light

I might have stood in orchards forever        

without beholding the day in the apricots

or knowing the ripeness of the lucid air        

or touching the apricots in your skin

or tasting in your mouth the sun in the apricots.

 

BJ Miller - a remarkable man and a true physician

A palliative care specialist at UCSF Medical Center and director of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, BJ Miller connects art, spirituality and medicine in end-of-life care, and has a grant from the Fetzer Foundation to integrate spirituality with the health of mind and body in medical education.

In his sophomore year as an undergraduate at Princeton, an accidental encounter with 11,000 volts of electricity nearly killed him and resulted in the loss of his legs below the knee and his left forearm.

Miller says he has no regrets, not even for the injury. “Too much good stuff has come out of it,” he says. “I was not headed toward a career in medicine before the accident, and I don’t think I’d be as good a palliative-care physician if I hadn’t had that experience. Every day I feel I have a head start when I meet patients and their families, because they know I’ve been in that bed. That can take us to a much more trusting place more quickly.” He walks, hikes, and bikes on carbon-fiber prosthetics that look like supple metallic bones.

When he discovered palliative care, he knew he had found his calling. “You’re encouraged to use your suffering as a motivator and teacher. That was the right fit.” “That’s the most potent medicine, just coming from a place of love and kindness. Medicine traditionally thrives on a hierarchy that I’m happily flattening. I equate the doctor and patient because I am a patient. Sometimes there’s nothing fixable and nothing left to do except bear witness and lend a shoulder, even if it’s handing someone a tissue and not running away when things get rough.”

“After my accident, I came to regard death and suffering as normal. They’re part of the package deal that is being a human being.” After graduating from Princeton in 1993, Miller says he wanted to “use these experiences as a disabled person, and as a former patient, because I knew they were very rich things to work from,” leading him to pursue his medical degree from the University of California.

“Palliative care is many disciplines gathering around a patient and their family with the mission of mitigating suffering and helping foster quality of life,” says Miller. “It is much, much larger than the dying moment. Our job is insisting on dying as a human event beyond a medical one.”

Miller says there’s an immense trust and faith implied by entering into people’s lives at the most fraught and precious moments. “We on the provider side are charged with holding peoples’ vulnerabilities,” he says, adding that interconnectedness is implicit in this work. “You’re invited to feel people’s pain and suffering all the time, so it’s a great benefit and a hazard of the job. Feeling yourself in somebody else is profound.”

Many of the staff of the Zen Hospice Project, including Miller, do not identify as Buddhist. He says they define spirituality as “seeing truth in impermanence and responding to that truth by the cultivation of presence, a delight in interdependence, and an embrace of mystery. People don’t have to pretend to be something they’re not; everything that is in anyone is welcome.”

Miller says his understanding of death and dying has deepened through his work. “I have come to appreciate grief as a very sweet, loving process—hard, for sure, but not something to rush through. It’s where your relationship with what you just lost sets up in perpetuity."

“So if you lose someone, if you grieve them well, you might find yourself ten years down the road still having a very active relationship in your heart with that person or thing that you lost. And that’s pretty gorgeous.”

Probably the best introduction to BJ Miller is to watch his TED Talk, "What Really Matters At the End of Life."

Pico Iyer wrote of his experience doing so in 2015:

“Having heard more than 200 talks at three TED conferences in the past two years, I can truly say that none has stayed with me more piercingly and offered more wisdom and clarity and depth, all delivered with rare humanity and calm, than the address I was privileged to hear from BJ Miller. With each passing sentence, I felt I was being ushered into a grounded, lucid, compassionate and possibly life-changing perspective on dying, living and all that sits at the center of our existence. Many TED talks have offered me exhilarating glimpses into possibility and the new—but this one was the perfect note on which to end a rich and idea-filled conference, coming right after His Holiness the Dalai Lama and teaching us unforgettably about reality and all the changeless truths that guide and steady us in a world of change.”

 

 

Leigh's birthday, June 5, 1945

My dear wife and companion Leigh McCullough would have been 71 today. I miss her deeply.

 

I took the photo above through the mirror in our room at Les Troix Sources, a lovely old B&B in the village of Bonnieux. That was our first vacation together, a month in Provence to celebrate Leigh's 60th birthday, June 5, 2005. Here are a few others among my photos, of Les Troix Sources, of the two of us, of that wonderful month. (Click to enlarge them a little.)

 

"John, stop the car!"

Sunflower among sunflowers

 

Les Troix Sources

 

We toast each other on our balcony:

 

 

Stone steps

 

 

Afternoon windows

 

My favorite picture of Leigh

 

Muhammad Ali

In our sangha this morning, before meditating we spoke a little of Muhammad Ali, who died yesterday at 74.

When I returned to my apartment I found and read a fine long New Yorker profile of Ali written by David Remnick in 1998, the year he became the magazine's editor. It's a lovely portrait, whose central focus throughout is a recent occasion when he and Ali sat together in Ali's farmhouse in the small town of Berrien, Michigan, watching a video of Ali's famous bout with Sonny Liston in 1964. Here is a passage from the article:

"His greatest triumph in retirement came on the summer night in Atlanta when, to the surprise of nearly everyone watching, he suddenly appeared with a torch in his hands, ready to open the 1996 Summer Olympics. Ali stood with the heavy torch extended before him, and three billion people could see him shaking, both from the Parkinson’s and from the moment itself. But Ali carried it off. 'Muhammad wouldn’t go to bed for hours and hours that night,' [his wife] Lonnie said. 'He was floating on air. He just sat in a chair back at the hotel holding the torch in his hands. It was like he’d won the heavy-weight title back a fourth time.'

"Lonnie Ali is a handsome woman with a face full of freckles. She is fifteen years younger than her husband and grew up near the Clay family in Louisville’s West End. When Ali’s third marriage, to Veronica Porsche, was on its way out, he called her to come be with him. Eventually, Ali and Lonnie married. Lonnie is precisely what Ali needs. She is smart—a Vanderbilt graduate—she is calm and loving, and she does not treat Ali like her patient. Besides Ali’s closest friend, the photographer Howard Bingham, Lonnie is probably the one person in his life who has given more than she has taken. In Michigan, Lonnie runs the household and the farm, and when they are on the road, which is more than half the time, she keeps watch over Ali, making sure he has rested enough and taken his medicine. She knows his moods and habits, what he can do and what he can’t. She knows when he is suffering and when he is hiding behind his symptoms to zone out of another event that bores him.

"When Lonnie came into the room where we were watching a tape of the Liston fight, Ali didn’t look up from the television. He merely reached out and rested his hand on the small of her back."

A footnote in anticipation of the primary election on Tuesday

John Cassidy of The New Yorker reminds us that the contest here, "as in all the other [five] states that will vote on Tuesday, isn’t a winner-take-all affair, meaning the delegates will be divided in proportion to the votes. Still, the outcome of the California primary is important. If Clinton wins, Sanders will come under pressure to fold his tent and endorse her. If Sanders wins, he may be encouraged to keep going all the way to the Convention in Philadelphia next month, which would greatly complicate Clinton’s efforts to unite the Party."

June 7: the Democratic primary election in California

The California primary elections are scheduled for this coming Tuesday, June 7. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are running neck and neck. While Clinton's lock on the Democratic nomination appears assured, a loss to Sanders in California next week would be a real setback for her, particularly as she copes with renewed attention to her email travails and her need to turn her attention toward the Republican opposition.

Clinton and Sanders are statistically tied in the most recent USC/Los Angeles Times poll, but Clinton's lead with those most likely to vote (49% to Sanders' 39%) and with registered Democrats (53% to Sanders' 37%) is substantial. On the other hand, as the Los Angeles Times indicates, "Sanders benefits here from party rules that allow registered nonpartisan voters — known in California as 'no party preference' voters — to take part in the Democratic primary. Among nonpartisans who were likely to vote, he led by 48%-35%." In other words, it's a very close horse race in the final stretch.

While I have a lot of admiration for Bernie Sanders and his longtime devotion to economic justice, and I am concerned about Clinton's more hawkish views on foreign and national security policy, their differences pale when set beside the compelling need to defeat Donald Trump, whose ascent to the presidency would be catastrophic for the nation and the wider world. Clinton is the stronger, more practical and experienced Democratic candidate, more likely to extend the accomplishments of Barak Obama, the president who, on balance, I will sorely miss.