We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things.
Eagle Poem
To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you. And know there is more That you can't see, can't hear Can't know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren't always sound but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of All this, and breathe, knowing We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon, within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty.
~ Joy Harjo ~
(How We Become Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001)
It was February or March of 1936. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson. She was 32 years old, caring for her seven children, eking out a living at that moment picking peas in fields near Nipomo, California. Twenty-four years later Dorothea Lange wrote of her memory of their encounter in front of the tent in which the family lived:
"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."
Lange's documentary photographic work during the Depression was funded by the Farm Security Administration.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways, turning the world, moving the air, calling, every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."
The Gift
Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one that your life conceals, the one waiting outside when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at in her crochet design, the one almost found over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.
It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given. You get killed now and then, violated in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.) You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait and pray, and maybe good things come − maybe the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more. You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.
It's a balance, the taking and passing along, the composting of where you've been and how people and weather treated you. It's a country where you already are, bringing where you have been. Time offers this gift in its millions of ways, turning the world, moving the air, calling, every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."
by William Stafford, from My Name is William Tell, 1992
Last week, as I wrote here on Sunday, March 5th, our meditation together focused on the meaning of sanctuary. I've always loved, as I remember writing here many moons ago, the deeply intimate resonance, the sense of safety and nourishment, the diversity of experiences and places, that word evokes. I recall my wise age-mate Parker Palmer movingly capturing its evolution, nuance and importance in his own life. "Sanctuary," he wrote, "is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm: it’s about spiritual survival... [The sanctuary] I need may not be in a church, but in the silence, in the woods, in a friendship, in a poem, or in a song [like that of Carrie Newcomer in her album "The Beautiful Not Yet."]
Used as a noun most commonly, derived from the Latin sanctum, sanctuary typically describes a sacred or holy place, a refuge. Although I find that quality in church and temple services, I like also to sit in churches when no service is occurring, treasuring in silence just those qualities of refuge. And like Palmer, I've found sanctuary among trees, along barely perceptible trails, and in shorelines.
When I first thought about vocation as a child, my two ambitions were forest ranger and architect. In the first, I imagined inhabiting a tower, a simple square room above the forest, and caretaking for the silent arboreal surround, requiring both a soft alertness and a keen eye. In the second, thinking of what I would draw − and later working with board, drawing paper, T-square and triangles − I had most in mind homes, open and U-shaped like a three-sided square or rectangle, with the fourth side a courtyard or patio open to the natural world beyond.
My current home, an apartment in a community of folks sharing with me the later stages of adult life, has close kinship with both of those early images. I look out − through sliding glass doors − upon greensward, a courtyard with trees now in early spring coming into leaf and flower. The courtyard, in turn, leads into marshland with circuitous tidal streams, trails and walking bridges made of salvaged redwood, and hills beyond.
The community part of my circumstances is a relatively new experience for me: starting in Norway at Modum Bad, the last home that Leigh and I shared before her final illness; and then, fortified by the gift of those years and guided by the wisdom of my family, I came to The Redwoods. I occasionally say to others that I taught about community for thirty years before I knew what I was talking about. I wasn't way off the mark, thankfully: a gift of God.
Which brings me finally to my subject, sharing silence. As I recall, The Buddha himself is said to have said that of the triad central to Buddhism − the sangha, the Buddha, and the dharma, the first among equals is sangha: the community of practice.
Gunilla Norris − to whom my teacher sent me − puts it well: "Sharing silence with others is a profound act of trust, love and courtesy. It is a gift, a necessity, a helping hand, a path, and a discipline." I've wished since childhood, in my heart, that I had been raised a Quaker, because its tradition embodies shared silence in community, and is deeply, compassionately political. As Parker Palmer writes, "For centuries Quakers — though few in number — have been disproportionately represented in movements for peace, truth, and justice." Norris says, in words worthy of careful meditation (read contemplatively, as one would a fine poem, more than once):
Within each of us there is a silence —a silence as vast as a universe. We are afraid of it…and we long for it.
When we experience that silence, we remember who we are: creatures of the stars, created from the cooling of this planet, created from dust and gas, created from the elements, created from time and space…created from silence.
In our present culture, silence is something like an endangered species… an endangered fundamental.
The experience of silence is now so rare that we must cultivate it and treasure it. This is especially true for shared silence.
Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act. When we can stand aside from the usual and perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen. Our lives align with deeper values and the lives of others are touched and influenced.
Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses, to our selves. It locates us. Without that return we can go so far away from our true natures that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves.
We live blindly and act thoughtlessly. We endanger the delicate balance which sustains our lives, our communities, and our planet.
Each of us can make a difference. Politicians and visionaries will not return us to the sacredness of life.
That will be done by ordinary men and women who together or alone can say, “Remember to breathe, remember to feel, remember to care, let us do this for our children and ourselves and our children’s children. Let us practice for life’s sake."
I spent the last years of my professional life as a psychologist in Norway, at a healing community the likes of which we have yet to see in the United States. It is called Modum Bad − literally, the baths at Modum − a 19th century spa that in 1957 became a manifold psychiatric center of healing that was designed to embody the integrity of psyche and spirit. Had my wife Leigh not become mortally ill, we would still be there, for it was a gifted environment to teach and continue to learn about human development in ways toward which my training and experience as a psychologist in the U.S. had led me without my knowing.
Leigh was also a psychologist, a researcher and practitioner kin to my work as a teacher and practitioner, so we came as a team, she as director of Modum Bad's Research Institute, I as a professor to patients and staff and ongoing learner of human development, affiliated with the Research Institute (Forskningsinstituttet).
My characterization of our time at Modum Bad is embodied in a monograph I called "Modum Bad: A Resource for Healing and Renewal," available here on Reckonings at http://www.reckonings.net/reckonings/2007/06/modum-bad-a-res.html. The community's own website is available in Norwegian at http://www.modum-bad.no/.
I learned today that my friend Ole Johan Sandvand, director of Modum Bad, who will retire on the first of April, was endowed with Norway's highest honor, membership in the Order of St. Olav, or Sanct Olafs Orden. We in the States have nothing quite like it, but Sanct Olafs Orden is awarded to individuals in Norway as a recognition of remarkable accomplishments on behalf of Norway and humanity. I can only say that it is a recognition he thoroughly deserves for all he has done to realize the deepest mission of Modum Bad as originally conceived, and Modum Bad's ongoing movement as a model of mental health treatment in Norway and in the world. That it bears the name of Saint Olav seems equally fitting for a host of reasons, including Ole Johan's success in uniting the spirit and practice of the hospital, of Sjelesorg, the community's retreat and research center for pastoral life, and of Olavskirken, the lovely small church where he and I worshipped and prayed. The spring of Modum Bad lives and continues to flow, in Ole Johan's life and in the legacy he will have left for those to come.
One day the Buddha was strolling along with his congregation when he pointed to the ground and said, "This spot is a good place to build a sanctuary." Indra [Hindu god] took a blade of grass and stuck it into the ground and said, "The sanctuary is built." The Buddha smiled.
As my teacher Lee deBarros writes, koans bring up living questions −
What is a sanctuary? Is it a place of personal refuge? Is it a community? A temple? A church? What is your sanctuary? When do we need or want a sanctuary? Is there actually a sanctuary? How does it relate to practice?
As we discussed sanctuary in our lives, members of our meditation group or sangha shared a manifold experience of sanctuary: our twice-weekly sangha itself, its safe, companionable and nourishing silence, and our care for each other when one of us is suffering or ill or departs this earth; The Redwoods, the community in which we live and share diverse experiences; our childhood homes and the homes of our grown children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren; the larger enveloping mystery that is often known as the presence of God in and among us.
I recalled vividly my life as a child, when my parents would come into my room to listen to me say my prayers. I told them that in the prayer that begins, "Now I lay me down to sleep," I was frightened and confused by the lines, "If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take." So my father suggested I substitute the lines, "Guard and keep me through the night / and wake me with the morning light." Seventy years later I still say that prayer as I ready for sleep, and remain grateful for my father's gift.
Born in Ohio, Gloria Steinem, 82, graduated in 1956 and became a writer. By 1972, when she founded Ms magazine, she was known as a political activist and feminist organiser. She is the author of many books and essays, including the bestselling My Life On The Road. Woman, her documentary series about violence against women, will air on Viceland UK on 8 March. She lives in New York.
What is your greatest fear? Being about to die, and saying, “But…”
Being held on my mother’s lap while my father drove.
Which living person do you most admire and why? Dr Denis Mukwege, because he is to sexualised violence against females what Mandela was to apartheid.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Waiting until the last minute.
What is the trait you most deplore in others? It’s a tie between an inability to empathise and having no sense of humour.
Property aside, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought? In my 30s, I was staring at a pair of expensive boots in a shop window when the photographer Gordon Parks came up behind me. He instantly understood, because he grew up even poorer than me; he made me buy them on my credit card.
What would your superpower be? To be able to show people that we are linked, not ranked.
What do you most dislike about your appearance? I’ve wished I had a more angular face. Also, it seems odd to be white in a world that mostly ranges from honey to sable, especially since this groups me with too many people who think whiteness has a superior meaning.
Who would play you in the film of your life? As a child, Natalie Wood. As a grown-up, I wish I could go from Audrey Hepburn to Cicely Tyson. I admire Marisa Tomei and Meryl Streep, who both play cross class. Of course, Streep could play anything, human or animal, and is a great political activist besides.
What is your most unappealing habit? Committing myself to more than I can do. My eyes are bigger than my stomach.
What is your favourite smell? Vanilla.
What is your favourite word? “Hello?” as sarcasm. Also, “Fanfuckingtastic!”
What makes you unhappy? Seeing anybody rendered invisible.
What book has changed your life? As a child, Little Women, because it was the first time I realised women could be a whole human world.
What is the worst thing anyone’s said to you? That I was betraying someone or something I deeply cared about.
What did you want to be when you were growing up? First a horse rancher, then a dancer.
What do you owe your parents? My mother, a huge debt for creating a loving childhood for me when she didn’t have one. My father, for being OK with insecurity. As he always said, “If I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful.”
To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why? I behaved badly with two old lovers. Years later, when I took one to lunch to apologise, it made it worse.
What does love feel like? Feeling you want someone else’s welfare as much and sometimes more than your own.
What was the best kiss of your life? Late one summer night in Manhattan, walking from east and west on the same street until we finally met in the middle.
Which living person do you most despise, and why? It has to do not just with dislike, but power to hurt, so right now, there is no one who can surpass Donald Trump; not even Putin or Prime Minister Modi, who are right up there.
What’s the worst job you’ve done? Being a salesgirl in a baby shop where the others said things like, “He’s Jewish, but she’s American.” Also, after college, being a waitress in London, and trying to make change in the old money of shillings and pence.
What has been your biggest disappointment? Seeing the future die, from Bobby Kennedy to dear friends.
If you could edit your past, what would you change? Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.
How do you relax? Having dinner with friends, walking around the city, reading with my cat on my lap. I’ve never done sports: if there were an Olympic team for sitting still, I would be on it.
After 70 or so, all those brain cells that were devoted to sex are available for other things. It’s not better or worse, just different and equally great.
What is the closest you’ve come to death? I’ve had cancer three times, but never felt close to death except when I walked between parked cars on my street and a car sped past my nose.
What do you consider your greatest achievement? I haven’t done it yet.
How would you like to be remembered? As someone who left the world around me a little kinder and less hierarchical.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you? To behave as if everything you do matters, because you have no idea which thing might.
I decided, before sending the message, which question-and-response I would pick as most lovely, distinctive and engaging, and it was the last. My daughter Sara picked the same one.