Despair Isn't All About "You"

Note: I first offered this post about a year and a half ago. It feels accurate for today, and so here it goes again.

I don't have a lot to say today. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Joanna Macy that I really like:

Personal Transformation: In our society, we talk about despair as if it is primarily a psychological matter, coming out of personal life. Your understanding is that despair also comes from a different source.

Joanna Macy: Yes. I learned, when I began to work with groups 20 years ago, that despair arose in relation to something larger than individuals, personal circumstances. There is a complex of strong feelings that I call ingredients of despair. One is fear about the future based on what we’re doing to each other and to our planet. Another is anger that we are knowingly wasting the world for those who come after us, destroying the legacy of our ancestors. Guilt and sorrow are in the complex. People in every walk of life, from every culture, feel grief over the condition of the world. Despair is this constellation of different feelings. One person may feel more fear or anger, another sorrow, and another guilt, but the common thread is a suffering on behalf of the world or, as I put it, feeling "pain for the world."

In American culture, we are conditioned to try to keep a smiling face and remain chipper at all costs. A lack of optimism somehow indicates a lack of competence. Feelings of despair are treated reductionistically as a function of personal maladjustment. This doubles the burden individuals carry. Not only do they feel bad about their world, but they feel bad about feeling bad.

I honestly find myself sometimes really pissed at how much of this reductionism occurs in spiritual circles. It actually brings up anger for me. Whatever people's current positions are on things like nuclear power, one thing I see a lot of is despair. And it's ridiculous to reduce this to some individual psychological attachment or maladjustment, but you can bet this is going on. Maybe you're doing it yourself, or your teachers or students are doing it. Maybe the book or article you are reading is doing it.

In any case, I'd like to offer the following. Instead of thinking things like "oh, this is ego clinging" or "if only I weren't so attached to what's occurring on the planet" - why not just let all of that go. Let every last explanation for what's coming up go. And just be with what is, recognizing that whatever is occurring on the planet is us too. It's all functioning together. And maybe if we listen more closely to the despair and whatever else is coming, we'll know better what our next steps need to be.

Peace to you all.

A Buddhist Take on Food Justice

Somehow, I forgot to post about the article I had published recently in Turning Wheel's online journal. It details an exciting food justice effort that is part of the Whealthy Human Village project I have been working on over the past several months. Here is an excerpt from the article. Thanks to Katie Loncke for including it in Turning Wheel's month of Food Justice posts, which I encourage everyone to check out.

In response to invites from members of the local Native community to collaborate, as well as what we felt was a lack of emphasis in Occupy Minneapolis on environmental issues, an offshoot group was formed in December 2011. The Whealthy Human Village is a multifaceted project that focuses on eco-centric life practices, food justice, indigenous rights, and healing arts. Underlying all of its work, really, is the thread of interconnectedness. Recognizing that we are not separate from each other, all living beings, and the history that shaped the places we live in, the Whealthy Human Village team is dedicated to redeveloping community, and helping people uncover or recover their connections to each other and the planet.

Buddhist environmental activist and teacher Joanna Macy speaks of the time we live in as both the “Great Unraveling” and the “Great Turning.” Many of the old systems and ways of thought are falling apart, bringing with them an enormous amount of suffering and difficulties. At the same time, new forms and ways of being together are sprouting up everywhere, attempting to heal the past, while simultaneously inspiring a brighter future by experimenting with it today. In many ways, Occupy Wall St. is one of the catalysts working to accelerate the unraveling, while groups like the Whealthy Human Village are dreaming up visions of the “turning,” or awakening, and then trying to make them realities.

"Widening Circles" and Spiritual Materialism

In her memoir "Widening Circles," Joanna Macy writes of a time with one of her Buddhist teachers, just after she had finished graduate school. Full of excitement about all that she learned, and an eagerness to show her teacher, Khamtrul Rinpoche, how much of a scholar she had become, she told him of her efforts to learn the Pali language and how reading the teachings in their original language was giving her a whole new appreciation for dependent co-arising.

Upon receiving all this, his first question was "Does this help you to increase in compassion?"

It's a powerful moment, one which can pivot us away from the mind of acquisition that is so strong in our culture.

Like so many other forms of materialism that pervade our lives today, spiritual materialism is everywhere, in all shapes and sizes. From new age groups and teachers focused solely on gaining financial comfort, to mega-church Christians who spread the message that accumulating wealth is a path to God and a sign of spiritual favor, the grosser elements of spiritual materialism are fairly easy to spot.

But what about this more subtle issue expressed in Macy's experience with her teacher?

The human mind loves to inquire, question, investigate, discover, uncover, expose, play with, and just plain learn. And often it's really good at doing so.

Yet, reflecting on Macy's experience, and on moments in my own life, I do wonder how often I (we) land in the game of collecting knowledge in order to protect ourselves, make things a little more comfortable, or to stand above others.

Learning is a beautiful experience when it is freed from the confines of self-serving agendas. It strikes me that Khamtrul Rinpoche was pointing at this very thing when he spoke of compassion.

How can we reorient ourselves every day towards learning in order to manifest compassion and do things that relieve suffering for others and ourselves?

Bone Deep Fear as a Planetary Exprience

I took a trip over to the website of a long time favorite Buddhist teacher of mine, Joanna Macy. Continuing the theme from Wednesday's post, as well as circling it back to the struggles we have individually to truly open to interconnectedness, here is a selection from Macy's living systems writings:

It helps to recall that in the course of our planetary journey we have gone through positive disintegration countless times. The life living through us repeatedly died to old forms and old ways. We know this dying in the splitting of the stars, the cracking open of seeds in the soil, the relinquishment of gills and fins as we crawled onto dry land. Our evolution attests to this, and so does our present lifetime, as we learned to move beyond the safeties and dependencies of childhood. It is never easy. Some of the uglier aspects of human behavior today arise from fear of the wholesale changes we must now undergo.

To let ourselves feel anguish and disorientation as we open our awareness to global suffering is a part of our spiritual ripening. Mystics speak of the "dark night of the soul." Brave enough to let go of accustomed assurances and allow old mental comforts and conformities to fall away, they stand naked to the unknown. They let processes which their minds could not encompass work through them. Out of darkness, the new is born.

As the winter cold and darkness settles in, I find that disorientation quite palpable in my life. Some anguish too, but more disorientation - a sense that I'm walking down a road after having been spun around. Buddhists like to talk about change and impermanence, and yet how often it is that our minds lag behind, sometimes far behind, whatever is occurring? I can feel myself wanting to know what's happening, and what's going to happen next, but all that wanting just keeps me away from it. Whatever "it" is.

Positive Disintegration is an interesting term. It points to the fact that what our minds see on the surface doesn't account for the wholeness of experience. It suggests that the ice and snow that has come, and killed off yesterday's field of carrots and the rabbits that stayed on too long to nibble, isn't a menacing end point. In fact, I think it points to the fact that we don't understand the ice and snow at all.

There are rumblings of war in Korea again. And certainly a deep level concern that the dictators running the North will finally lose it, and unleash nuclear weapons on the South. Menacing is a fair word to apply to all of this as well, and yet even here, we don't truly know what the conflict on the surface is leading the world to. Since I was a kid, listening to U.S. President Ronald Reagan blathering on and on about the "Evil Empire" and it's nuclear capacities, I have had a gut-level hatred of warfare. It was beyond the awfulness of the human injuries, casualties, psychological misery, environmental destruction, and astounding economic waste that come with "regular" warfare: it was all about survival, and a fear of everything we know disappearing. A menacing endpoint.

And yet, even though the horrors of nuclear war are possible, and people should do whatever is possible to avoid it, I find myself also looking at the sky. How many of those stars are already gone, imploded long ago, the light only reaching us now? How many others have been born, and are flourishing, but whose light have not yet come?

I find myself still afraid of the "wholesale changes that must come" in my own life - partly, maybe mostly because I don't know what they really are. How much more so is the compounded fear emanating collectively from humanity around the changes the world itself, perhaps the greater solar system and beyond, is calling for us to make - changes we don't understand, can't put a finger on, and probably won't live long enough to name?