When we adopted our oldest son from Kazakhstan in 2001, he was just a few months shy of his 4th birthday. He had spent all of his days since birth in the orphanage, and in those years he had never owned a thing. Not a book. Not a toy. Not even a stitch of clothing. Everything that he touched was communal property. The best coats, pants, socks, and shoes were claimed by those children who woke up early enough to grab them first. And toys were rare commodities that were fought over during the day and then put away, out of reach in cabinets at night.
One day when we came to visit him in the orphanage, we saw that he had something clutched tightly in his palm. His hand was squeezed so tightly around it, his knuckles were white. When we asked if we could see what he had, he shook his head “No,” and shoved his hand deep into his pocket. What treasure, we wondered, did he have hidden away in his palm? What precious toy had he managed to remove from his living quarters? What did he have that was so important to him that he could not imagine relinquishing?
[click to continue reading…]
“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.
[click to continue reading…]
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.
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?
Click here to sign up to receive The Moments Count Journal whenever new articles are posted
