“New Orleans at Dawn” is an 8×10 oil canvas that captures energies collected on my first visit to the historic city on the banks of the Mississippi River.
The year was 1972; the beginning of my Sam Cooke’s, “I Know a Change is Gonna Come,” moments. I arrived with my five month old daughter strapped to my back two weeks before Mahalia Jackson’s body arrived for burial. Although it was bitterly cold, it didn’t stop the round the clock celebration of life for the greatest gospel singer of all time. The death of Miss Jackson allowed me to take shelter with the masses from the grief of learning of my own grandmother’s death.
I’d been summoned to New Orleans by the councils and spirits of the grandmothers. I needed to reconnect to memories long since archived away. The first summons came to me one night, a few weeks after giving birth to my daughter, when my beloved grandmother, who I hadn’t seen or spoken with in over a year, made a spirit visit to me. I saw and heard her as clearly as though she stood beside me as she told me she had died. She left the world abandoned by the one she raised as her own. I kicked and screamed, following her down a long white corridor begging her to please let me die too. She turned and told me, “No, you can’t go, you have that beautiful little girl to raise. Besides, you’ve got a lot of mess to clean up before you leave here. I won’t have anyone thinking I raised you wrong.” She disappeared as gently as she’d appeared.
I knew at that moment the reality of my life for the past several years. The consequences of my past actions and alliances crushed me in sorrow. I knew I had to be a good mother; to break the chain of horror my brother and I endured as toddlers. Our father, coward and fearful man that he was, had killed our mother and himself a few days after my first birthday, plunging us into a near-lifetime of dysfunction. I needed to be shown a path to heal myself to prevent that same dark passage of pain to be passed down to future generations by me. I had to break the chain of torment heaped upon us. I had to slay dragons and the preparation for that required being bathed in rituals of ancient rhythms and vibrations where space, distance and time is still pregnant with spirits commingled in soils and sediments of generational triumphs and sorrows. I had to figuratively breathe in the oxygen of trees and grasses of a richer energy and stir back into the greater universal energy and purpose. I began by leaving Harry, the abusive Machiavellian personality who had once so totally captivated me.
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The other day I was telling my teenage daughter how odd it is (if you think about it — which I do) that if you are having trouble with some object — let’s say a cell phone that loses it’s signal — it’s considered completely normal, perfectly reasonable behavior to curse that object and treat it roughly. You might say something like “You @%&** piece of junk! Why are you doing this to me?!” You might slam it down and push it away from you in disgust. On the other hand, if you were to do the opposite — thank the object, cradle it lovingly, and appreciate it every time it worked — well, then people would think you were a complete lunatic. If you overheard a co-worker at their desk saying, “Good morning, dear pen. Thank you for flowing with ink every time I need to write something. I really appreciate you. I can always rely on you,” you would think that person had gone completely round the bend. But if you heard that same person muttering obscenities at their slow computer, you would feel that they were just acting as any normal, sane person would if their computer were failing them at a critical moment.
Like the mother of the world, touch each being as if it were your beloved child.
I just think it’s odd, I told my daughter, that if we treat objects as adversaries we find that to be sane behavior, while treating objects as friends would indicate your being out of touch with reality. How wonderful would it be, I asked her, if we treated everything in the world (whether a living, breathing creature or an inanimate object) lovingly — as we would a child or a friend.
My daughter laughed and said that just the previous night, she had removed her glasses to get ready for bed (her vision is quite blurry without her glasses) and saw what she thought was her black sweater lying on her bed. She went to grab the sweater and toss it to the floor. As soon as she grabbed the sweater though, it yowled. She pulled back her hand as soon as she realized that this was obviously not her sweater, but the family cat. As she smiled and recalled this story, she reflected that if she had treated her sweater with respect and gentleness, she would not have alarmed the cat.
As she finished telling me the story, she absently picked up a book that was lying out where we were sitting: a small volume called “The Buddha’s Little Instruction Book” by Jack Kornfield. She smiled and handed me the book. “This is a weird coincidence,” she said. I looked at the page that the book had opened to. It read, “Like the mother of the world, touch each being as if it were your beloved child.”
Of course, sometimes the world requires more than a gentle touch. It requires firmness, strength, direction. As I told a friend recently when we discussed this idea of treating the world as beloved: when a child’s bone is broken, it sometimes requires firm force to be reset, then needs to be splinted until it can be healed well enough to bear weight and grow in a healthy direction once again. But this action, though it may be painful, is not done with violent force or the intention to cause harm.
Treating the world as beloved means we touch the world with the intention of bringing healing, comfort, joy, and strength. It requires us to be lovingly aware. And that awareness requires us to have the wisdom to know when we must be gentle and when we must be firm; when we gaze with adoration and when we move to take action.
If we treat the world lovingly, we will never fail it, or ourselves.
photo credit Niall Kennedy
I admit, I spend a whole lot of my time dealing with the ways that the world crashes around and about us all. I don’t have to, but it is the life I’ve chosen for myself. I love what I do, but it gets loud sometimes, deep inside me. It can resonate with a drumbeat compelling, intense and urgent. So, I have learned to give myself the ease of time with me. I am a pleasant companion, in part because I can smile and laugh at myself.
Usually, the place I go to get “far, far and away” is for a long, long walk. I stretch my long legs and just go and let the “Whew!” tell me when I’m done.
Today the wind was blowing the day around with a sense of fun that made me want to stay and play with them both. As I trampled through fallen eucalyptus tree branches and walked through open fields with patches of orange, violet-blue and white wildflowers I moved into a grassy field and there I saw my …… reminder.
I saw a moment counting….
There in that field was a dad with his two kids. One looked about five, the other, well, maybe 3 years old.
There they were.
Here was Dad teaching them how to get their kites up into the magic invisible rivers of air that would carry their wood and paper dream catchers aloft.
Then I was looking at those little ones, tiny bodies of energy and excitement that could not hold still for the thrill of the possibilities happening RIGHT THEN, in that very moment.
I stood and watched, a joyfully captive witness to a grand event to come; the whispers in the air told me so.
Suddenly, up went Batman!!
Up went Snoopy!
And amidst all the giggling, shrieking and laughing I realized I was applauding, tears rolling down my face.
Dad turned, beamed a grin of pride that seemed to paint his entire face with a brilliant light. And I knew that for all of us….. those moments counted for more than any of us would ever be able to properly put into words….but, I thought I would try……
TheLastStation.com
Everywhere you look, all over this country, we are implementing “Zero tolerance” polices for bullying and/or intolerance. Yet the policies are being implemented and ignored. People advocate them and criticize them, demand them and reject them. But “Zero tolerance” can work and does work. Why, then, are there so many examples of it not working?
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