Mumbai--and Beyond

This Mumbai thing has me thinking, once more, about death. A father and his thirteen year-old daughter sit at dinner at a restaurant and death comes crashing through the door in the form of madmen with assault weapons, firing at random among the tables. He's a former art teacher, a long-time meditator, visiting the country of the Buddha's birth in search of spiritual enlightenment. She is, well, just a teenager. Barely a teenager, who came along on her father's quest because she thought the experience would give her good subject matter for an application essay to qualify for entry to a private school. The last thing either expected was this encounter with violent death. So, too, the rabbi from Brooklyn and his young, attractive wife... And dozens of others like them.

And then... five human beings set off in a SUV for some unknown purpose and drive off an overpass somewhere in Colorado, crashing forty feet to their death on the concrete below; a store clerk leaves for his job at a Walmart store, and dies shortly after the store opens, trampled to death by the stampede of post-Thanksgiving shoppers...

It's not only the randomness of these deaths, and the countless others in Mumbai, that got me thinking: it's the seeming finality that accompanied them. As an atheist and a not-quite Buddhist who finds the whole notion of multiple lives too hard to swallow, I read about these deaths with little to comfort me. I would like very much to believe that this one life is not all there is, and I do have some inkling that the life-force or the energy that I feel within will persist in some form after my death. My struggle really is with the ego part, the ME that clings to the peculiarly human individuality that is the current manifestation of my being and on which I hang the story of my life. I am hung up by that face I see in the mirror, and by which others recognize me for who I seem to be.

I realize that my meditation practice has not yet brought me to the point where I can let go of these appearances. No matter how much I may "understand," up here, that clinging and aversion bring with them equal suffering, that understanding fails to register with the same power in the heart and the gut. The fact of the matter is that I really like being who I am, and the thought of not being me any more is a painful one.

Readers of The Buddha Diaries will perhaps remember that other little problem I have with death: I'm really hung up on the story, all stories, any stories, and I have a lot vested in knowing the end of them. Thw father and daughter started their dinner that evening in the full expectation that they would get up and leave the table at the end of it, continuing their journey. The store clerk, perhaps, had had a row with his girlfriend the evening before, and went to work in anticipation of the opportunity to repair the damage before the day was out. As for me, there are multiple strands of story going on in my life right now, and I realize there are many whose end I will not know. I'm absurdly grateful to know the end of this past election story--especially since it ended in precisely the way I would have written it, had I been so empowered. But now I have to wonder how much of the continuation of the political story I'll be given to know; and it's unlikely that I'll ever know if the planet we live on will survive the abuses we have inflicted on it. That this particular and current story should even have a foreseeable end is pretty scary. Then the events in Mumbai come along to remind me of the fragility of our global balance and the real possibility of human history ending in a forest of mushroom clouds.

In this context, of course, my own little life seems small indeed... but I cling to it none the less for the knowledge of its relative insignificance. So this morning I sit and try to bring my wandering attention back to the breath. For too few moments, I manage to bring my mind into the present and breathe past the gravitational mass of my own body. I acknowledge the unique wisdom of the Buddha and the path to happiness he has laid out for those of us who try to follow it. And yet I find it impossible, today, to reach anything that comes near serenity...

Wise Guy

Oh, I was such a wise guy! (This was a dream...) Somehow Ellie and I had booked ourselves on this group tour with a bunch of, well, rich white folk going who knows where, though Hillary Clinton was among our number in an elegant gray dress and a broad-brimmed hat, and I was anointed (oh, vanity!) the guru of the group, the wise elder to be consulted on all matters personal and philosophical. There was a father, a real jerk of a man, who was having trouble with his son and demanded that I set him (the son) straight. He (the father) decided that I was to be the young man's tutor and I, in my great wisdom, fathomed the situation with my usual brilliant insight: the young man just needed to be listened to and respected for who he was. I lifted his spirits with my great, compassionate understanding, and gave the father a good talking-to. Later (in the same story? I think) our party was to travel on by train and had to pass through a thick crowd of protesters to get on board; I found myself wondering how Hillary Clinton managed to cross the picket line...

That was last night. Today is Saturday, farmers' market day in Laguna Beach. The rains have passed, at least for now, and we are left perplexed by the source of our flood and not a little anxious about the cost of a fix. Working on our "punch list" for the contractor again last night, I realized that there is otherwise not very much left to complete--but this time I'm not going to anticipate completion before it actually happens and the last bills gets paid.

Meantime, I did promise some more before and after pictures. Here's the kitchen, before...




.... during...




... and after...





So we can't feel too sorry for ourselves, can we?

The Aftermath

Okay, Thanksgiving Day. Our daughter arrived. We walked, we cooked, we gobble-gobbled, we played "Cranium"--good for a lot of laughs. We went to bed, we slept. A bit drowsy today. Should you be interested, I was invited to blog at Progressive Buddhism and posted a first entry there today. Otherwise, not much to add. Have a great weekend...

Oh, and... The Ritual Turkey Pardoning

Sorry, me again.  I felt compelled to add this note.  I'm admittedly no expert on turkey pardoning, but at the two rituals I have partially glimpsed this year, the Bush and the Palin pardonings, both turkeys have been, er...  white.  

I'm wondering if there's some special significance to be read in this observation?  I trust that next year our President will not choose a fancy white bird, but a plain old black one.

A Special Thank You...

... on Thanksgiving Day, for those of you who stop by to read The Buddha Diaries. Today--just a few minutes from now, as a matter of fact--I will be welcoming my 50,000th reader since I made the change from The Bush Diaries. It warms my heart that you live in every part of the world, and that so many of you share my hope and concern for the future of our beautiful planet and our own endangered species. Thank you!

Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving morning. We lie here in bed, reading about the Mumbai attacks in the New York Times and watching the rain through the French doors that lead to our back patio.


Despite yesterday's flood, I'm thankful for the rain, much needed in this parched area so prone to the kind of fires that we had just a week or so ago. We have enjoyed a good soaking, these past two days, and the dark clouds still surround us.

I went down to the basement a while ago and found it dry, except in a few areas that had not yet dried out from yesterday's disaster. Our architect and contractor, inspecting the situation, had recommended digging out a trench along the front of the house, to make a channel for water coming down off the roof. Thus far, that seems to have achieved the desired effect. When the rain moves on, we'll need to be thinking about a permanent concrete channel, or "swale"--a rather medieval-sounding word, I thought--to solve the problem. Oh, and another swale down along the north side of the house, at this moment a river of mud.

It never ends, does it? To own a house is to have to deal with these surprises. Still, on this Thanksgiving Day, we cannot but be grateful to have had the foresight to invest in this tiny but truly lovely property those many years ago. Yesterday, too, some of our furniture came back after the remodel, and the living room now looks more like it's former cosy self.

(Before...)


(During...)


(After...) Today, we re-hang some paintings... Today, too, our daughter drives down from the city to celebrate the day with us.

Much, then, to be thankful for... We in our fortunate and much blessed family wish the same good fortune and blessings for yours.

Flood!

Have you been following our remodel saga? If so, you'll know that we have been consoling ourselves with the thought that the job is near completion, and that all major expenses are now behind us. It's not something we would have contemplated from the start, had we known what was to happen to the economy, but the decision was made nine months ago and now we're stuck with it. Still, we thought the end was in sight.

And then, this morning, our architect knocks on the door. He says he always visits his job sites after the first rain--and it rained last night. It came bucketing down. So Kirk, our architect, having noticed that the garage door was unlocked, stopped by there first to check on progress, and found the place flooded. When he brought it to our attention, we imagined just a little leak like the one we had discovered earlier, from one of the light fixtures. No. This one was a flood. The entire floor of the garage and storage area, newly reconfigured as more usable space than we'd had there before, was flooded--inches deep in some areas.

The contractor arrived. The situation was investigated. A mystery. It took a good hour to find the probable source of the leak--and it will take more time and more dollars (surprise!) to get it fixed. The contractor summoned one of the guys who had been moved on already to another job, and he's down there now, in front of the house, shoveling dirt away from the foundations to prepare for a new drainage system.

We have much to be thankful for: a brand new kitchen, much more workable than the old one, dating from the thirties; more closet space in our bedroom, and in the small room that doubles as a guest room and my office; and much more space downstairs in which to store accumulated "stuff." But the problems persist. More rain tonight, we hear. Wish us luck!

A Beautiful Teaching

Here's a beautiful teaching that was forwarded to me yesterday by a friend. Since I have little time to devote to The Buddha Diaries this week, I'll let this one speak for me. Be patient with it, if you will. It runs a little more than five minutes, but I think it's worth the time.

Can't Wait

A few quick words before the carpet cleaner arrives and, hopefully, the painters and the contractor, who has yet to complete some electrical work...

I can't wait. The country can't wait. I note from my trusty Bush counter, in the right sidebar of The Buddha Diaries, that the current occupant of the White House has another fifty-five days, eleven hours and, as of this moment, twenty-nine minutes to wreak his havoc and lay his IED's to sabotage the next administration. Gail Collins was right, in the New York Times the other day, when she suggested that the greatest gift Bush could make to the country that he claims to love would be to resign, right now--well, after, not before his vice-president does the same--and leave the way clear for his successor. Obama, it seems, could not take office before his due time, but at least Nancy Pelosi would be left as nominal president to carry out his programs until January. (First woman President, as Collins also points out!)

We really can't afford to wait. The economy needs urgent action, not a further two months of reactive patching-up by the lame-duck Bush administration, defending the old, failed ideas as though they had not already been proven as bankrupt as the growing list of American financial institutions whose short-term interests they served, at the expense of the vast majority of Americans. We need a vision and a policy, and a team that's capable of realizing them.

Almost as bad as the big picture are the myriad small offenses--the continuing, spiteful, cynical sabotage of decades of environmental protection by administrative rulings that will take months or years to reverse. In full knowledge of the will expressed by the voters just two weeks ago--and of the fact that his successor will work hard to reverse his decisions--this Bush is devoting his final weeks in office to making dangerous and pointless mischief at the expense of the people whom he swore to serve.

There's something wrong with a system that can be so easily abused, that leaves so many of us frustrated by our impotence to prevent the actions of cynical and mendacious leaders. We boast to the world about our freedom and our democracy, yet we are forced to stand by and wring our hands when those leaders make a public mockery of our will. It's disgraceful.

Getting There

We're getting there, with our remodel job. Just a few more tasks to be completed, a few more touch-up jobs for the painter, a few more lights and sockets and we'll be done. True, we have a couple of add-ons that likely will not be done before Thanksgiving--a pair of bookshelves we've decided on for my study, a window box for the front of the house... But we can certainly live very nicely without these for a while, and their installation will not be nearly s disruptive of our lives. Since our arrival here on Saturday, we have been busy putting away and tidying: some stuff for storage, some for the garage sale, some give-aways, some for the trash. Tomorrow the carpet cleaners are scheduled to appear, to clean the mess made in the course of construction--but rain is forecast and already, now at four this afternoon, Monday, the clouds are gathering. We'll see what happens.

In the meantime, we expect re-delivery Wednesday of some furniture that has been out since the job began. Thursday, Thanksgiving, we have a small family gathering, so we hope to be moderately complete by then. Later this week, pictures...

A Relic From the Past

I was going through a box of old manuscripts the other day, recovered last week from our storage bin in Glendale, when I came across the manuscript of the first novel I ever wrote, nearly fifty years ago.




I was living in Germany at the time, having escaped from my first teaching job at a grammar school in Wimbledon--I was never cut out to be a teacher--to write my breakthrough novel while teaching evenings at a Berlitz language school. Chapter I starts out: "Angela stared up at the face of the immense clock set in the facade of the building across from the cafe."

An auspicious start. I'm not sure who Angela was any more, nor what adventure this encounter with a giant clock might have led her to. Browsing through the pages, though, I have discovered that it involved two men, one named Willi [!] and another named Werner, and a woman named Helena. Oh, and there's a Kurt, too. I suspect he may have been a waiter at that same cafe. Here he is: "The casualness of his gesture as he threw the napkin over the rack was exaggerated by his self-consciousness. (Was that right, he wondered? Was that how I usually do it?) He told himself that no one was watching..."



There are an awful lot of brittle, yellowing pages of this stuff, all painstakingly hand-typed (with carbon copies) on a little green portable machine that I remember better than the story that I wrote on it. However, the opus seems--perhaps mercifully--unfinished. Arriving at page 6 of Chapter VIII, I read that "Kurt left the room in silence, and was followed after a brief pause by Bruski [!]" The final paragraph starts thus: "After half an hour, she [Angela? Helena?] flet [sic] more peaceful, and took down her case from the top of the wardrobe, working slowly and steadily at her task, carefully depriving herselfxxxx of any feeling, she..."

We'll never know what she did or where she went, of course. It's easy to laugh at my youthful self, but my dreams for literary fame and fortune were real, and it's poignant to go back to a time when I devoted many hours, days and weeks on end, hunt-and-pecking out this verbiage which was never to be published. Kurt's self-consciousness was of course my own, as was his nervous tic of seeing himself as if in others' eyes.

I think I will not consign this particular heap of paper to the trash, along with all the rest. I think it has a place somewhere until, I hope at a reasonably future date, my daughter finds it tucked away and wonders what on earth to do with it. I hope she has better sense than I, and chucks it out.

From the Dalai Lama, To Barack Obama

Thanks to Digital Dharma for alerting me to this letter of congratulation from HH the Dalai Lama to President-elect Barack Obama. I would have otherwise missed it. I like that His Holiness commends Obama for "the determination and moral courage that you have demonstrated throughout the long campaign, as well as the kind heart and steady hand that you often showed when challenged." That gets it right.

A Very Nice Girl

"Her Majesty's a very nice girl..." Wasn't that a line from the Beatles' charming little ditty tucked in between the tracks of the White Album? Anyway, it came back to me last night as I watched the public television special on the royal activities. A very nice old lady now. I am astounded by her vigor, and her patience with the rigors of a life that demands so much. And--readers famliar with The Buddha Diaries will be as surprised to read this as I am to write it--did I catch a fleeting response of, er, patriotism, in this skeptical old soul? Nah. Maybe just nostalgia. And a recognition of the value of ritual in our lives.

Let's Take a Breath...

... everyone. He's not even in the Oval Office yet. The media are running around like a bunch of chickens, clucking wildly about those things they don't know and those things they do. They need to replace their election drama, I suppose, with some post-election, pre-inauguration drama. It's about the ratings. Meanwhile, the new rooster in the yard continues to play it cool, careful not to crow, and saying nothing when he has nothing to say. I admire his restraint. I admire his smarts. I admire his refusal to be flustered. Once in a while, I find myself in complete agreement with conservative columnist David Brooks in the New York Times. Today was one of those occasions. I started out thinking he was going to be a smart-ass, but he surprised me. His column is worth a read.

Joe Lieberman? I understand that the liberal blogosphere--I don't find a great deal to interest me there, since I gave up on The Bush Diaries a couple of years ago--is up in arms about his rehabilitation. It's said that the Democrats are caving in again. I myself have no great affection for Joe Lieberman, and I agree that he said some pretty ugly things during the campaign. But I still believe that it's possible to be bigger than the offender, and that you always come out ahead when you manage to get past the offense. To get back to good Buddhist principles--or even Christian principles, or even just plain common sense--for me to hold a grudge and nurse resentment does me a great deal more harm than it does the one I'm trying to punish. That goes for political parties, too. I also believe that Obama was wise to stay aloof from that particular battle and leave others to fight it out.

Change? Our clucking feathered friends in the media are making another purse out of the proverbial pig's ear--to keep things in the barnyard. They're fretting over whether Obama's choices for staff and cabinet represent the "change" he promised. His picks are too, well, establishment, too Washington, too... smart, perhaps? In other words, the people have education and experience. Do they--Obama's critics--somehow imagine that to fulfill his promise he needs to bring in people who've never seen the inside of government? Absurd. The change we demanded is better, more humane policies, a proper regard for the Constitution, a new attitude toward the world around us--not to mention greater efficiency. The change I wanted was a change of mind, an ability to listen attentively and weigh up alternative possibilities, a move away from the ideology and partisanship that have poisoned our political and social system. I want the best people available to achieve this, even if I happen to have seen their face before. Even if I don't particularly like or agree with them.

So that's my plea. Let's all be a bit more Buddhist. Let's take a breath. Let's watch how things develop--not uncritically, not without the benefit of thoughtful, wise discrimination, but with a measure of equanimity and balance, a measure of detachment, a measure of goodwill and a preparedness to sacrifice some part of our own petty interests to the common good. Let's watch our words, to be sure they reflect a fitting measure of moderation and kindness. I understand that moderation and kindness are easily sneered at in a world where radical change is desperately needed, but I persist in believing that they are more likely to lead us to our goals than bitterness and intransigence.

We spent a long time making our choice, as a country. The best way forward is not to lose our heads and allow ourselves to be so easily manipulated by small egos that have been absurdly and unjustifiably inflated. Let's all take a breath...

How (Not) to Succeed in Business

The spectacle of those automobile CEOs arriving in Washington on their corporate jets and heading into town in their limousines in order to hold out the tin can at those congressional hearings offered a remarkable insight into the other-planetary thinking of the very wealthy and the very powerful, and their separation from the reality that most Americans are faced with. Were these men incapable of imagining how this might look? Clearly, given the trouble their companies are in, their minds reach no further into the future than the next bottom line--but why make it so obvious? Why play so mindlessly into the most cliche'd impression of who they are?

Which had me thinking about corporate America--from the ethical as well as the practical point of view. Is it greed, as I suppose, that makes them so incompetent? That makes them... well, so devious, not to say dishonest?

Here's my own experience, yesterday, opening up just a couple of the monthly bills. Take American Express (please!, as the vaudeville comedian used to say about his wife.) I found two charges, totaling one hundred and seventy-two dollars and six cents, one for a golf club membership (ME!) and the other for something generically titled "Elite Traveler." I called. The operators were very polite. The charges were canceled. It turns out that in returning one of the company's "Million Dollar Sweepstakes" promotional deals, I had unwittingly signed up for these two unwanted "benefits." Okay. My greed. I had stupid visions of an easy million coming my way. I did not read the fine print. Mea culpa. I succumbed to the come-on. Still, it seems to me that the company had knowingly attempted to trade on my laziness, and that I had been tricked.

Then the Verizon telephone bill. My fault again. I have been paying thirty dollars a month for a totally unneeded feature, which I had been given "free for a month" when we bought the telephone. The catch was, we were supposed to call at the end of the month and cancel this useless freebie, or keep on paying, as I had been for months on end, for something that was of absolutely no value. At least the company gave me credit for the past month, but I still feel conned out of several hundreds of dollars.

Okay, call me an easy mark. I should have picked up on this long ago. I didn't. But am I alone in thinking that I was somehow cheated?

And then there was AT&T, also yesterday. (It seems to have been my day of encounter with corporate America.) My business with this company was finally concluded yesterday, after a month of Kafkan miscommunications, nightmare marathon sessions with digital menus and telephone operators, and repeated delays. It was a month ago, with the intention of coordinating the communications systems in my house--telephone, television, computers--that I rashly responded to an AT&T come-on offering a system that seemed to mesh perfectly with my needs, at less cost than my previous mis-matched assortment of servers.

Talk about ineptitude! The first delay (a week) was my own: I was out of town. On my return, I duly received a visit from an AT&T technician, who was to install my system for me. Hurrah! He poked around the house and finally decided that he was unable to install it because there was a "split" between two lines somewhere under the house or behind a drywall. I needed a "direct line" from the box where the outside line reached the corner of the house to a telephone jack beside my desk. Okay. A disappointment, but...

I called the company--in fact, I think it was the technician who called the company, because I did not have the necessary language skills to communicate what was needed--and arranged for a different kind of technician, the jack-installing kind, to come as soon as possible to fit me up. A few days went by. A technician arrived, unannounced, on my doorstep, I assumed to install the jack. He poked around the house for a while, and announced the the first guy "didn't know what he was talking about"--that the jack was simply unnecessary. More calls. More confusion. More apologies.

Then, early this week, another AT&T tech arrived. This one, to my surprise, had been dispatched to install the very same jack the last guy had decided was not needed. We spent half the morning trying to sort things out, with calls to various supervisors and dispatchers. No one knew what had happened, or why. I told this latest guy to install the jack anyway, to remove all possible doubt--a feat that he managed with skill and much appreciated concern for the interior and exterior of our house. I spoke with some ire to several good people at the other end of the AT&T telephone office, and insisted that the problem be resolved without further delay.

All of which produced, finally, another technician, who arrived yesterday and managed to successfully install the system.

A saga, then. You would think that a major corporation like AT&T would be able to make good on its offer with a certain promptitude. But no. Ineptitude all around. One thing I'll say for AT&T, however. Everyone has been exceptionally nice, from the telephone operators to the technicians who made the house calls. Nice, and eager to please the customer. Every time I called to complain, the apology was accompanied by a little adjustment here, a little adjustment there... Very nice. But inept.

One day in the life, then. Small stuff, perhaps, and personal. But the accumulation of these little symptoms may betray a major systemic disease. If the business of America is business, as President Calvin Coolidge said, I fear that our sickness is only just now beginning to incubate. My quick online search tells me that Coolidge added words less frequently quoted: "A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business"--a thought with which I absolutely concur. If simple ethics and efficiency are sacrificed to the gods of profit, it seems to me, the very foundations of business are gone. It's hardly a surprise to see those corporate houses collapse.

I'd be interested to hear your stories...

Changes...

Today, finally, after a month of absurd miscommunications and false starts, I'm expecting a technician from AT&T to install their U-Verse system, intended to coordinate all the electronic systems in our house--computers, television, telephones--and a smaller overall bill. Ha! Let's hope that the system works more efficiently than the company that offers it. In the meantime, more travails: the hot water system sprang a leak yesterday; and the lights continue to act crazy. We are told there is a fix--at the usual vast expense.

I received this link from a friend yesterday, and offer it in the spirit of fun. Scroll down to enter your birthday if you're interested in finding out how many seconds you have spent on Earth--and other fascinating and useless information. Try it. It's good for a chuckle.

Enough. Here comes AT&T. Wish me luck!

As American...

... as apple pie?

Ellie and I watched the Obama interview on Sixty Minutes on Sunday evening with enormous pleasure. What a thrill to have as a President-elect a man who speaks in whole sentences on every issue put before him, who has clear and well-enunciated thoughts, a serviceable and readily accessible grasp of history—and a sense of humor to boot. What a delight to have as a prospective First Lady (I’ve always kind of disliked that title) a woman who is so evidently smart and well-informed, dedicated to her family, and supportive of the man who will be President. It seems like a long time we have waited for such people in our White House. Apple pie, at last!

Did I mention last week about being asked if I was “proud to be an American”? I answered, No, out of principle, because I have seen in my time on Earth what the nationalistic spirit can lead to, and because I believe with Samuel Johnson that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But just as I can be proud of something I have done rather than of who I am, I can be proud of what America has achieved; and in this instance it has achieved something truly praiseworthy and remarkable.

Alas, not everything American is apple pie. I also watched, later in the evening, a couple of episodes of the Ken Burns-produced documentary, The West, and was confronted with the dark side of the American experience in the wanton slaughter of the buffalo and the government-sponsored decimation of the Native American tribes with a litany of broken treaties, betrayals, and promises unkept—all in the spirit of expansionism and the accumulation of excessive wealth. I could not help but wonder, by the end, whether I was not witnessing some unsavory part of the American character that persists to this day: is it not the same greed that caused the senseless mass killing of animals for the sake of the money their dead bodies represent, and the senseless pursuit of superfluous wealth in the financial world today? Am I being unkind? Unpatriotic? Am I speaking of basic human characteristics, not peculiarly American ones? But then I think of the hapless Indians, who had lived on their lands for centuries, taking from it only what they needed for survival…

I know that I risk seeming down on America, but it’s one of my fundamental and recurring arguments that we must know who we are, as a people, if we are to move forward into a viable future for ourselves and those with whom we share the planet. We have, to put it bluntly, a tendency to indulge rather easily in self-congratulation about ourselves and our country, and to skip the important critical part which leads to the kind of clarity we need if we are to make our contribution to the world. If we fail to acknowledge the truth of our materialism, our insatiable desire for MORE, our willingness to promote our own interests above those of our neighbors, our too easily-aroused instinct to resolve delicate issues with aggression, our role as the world's 900-pound gorilla will be undiminished and I fear for the outcome...

But then, of course, we elect an Obama, which leads me to hope that, this time, we have truly listened to our better angels. Good for us!

Charter For Compassion

Here's an initiative, promoted by the British author Karen Armstrong, which I think worthy of note and worthy of support. It's called the Charter for Compassion, and it seeks to replace fundamentalist differences between religions with a compassionate realization of the common ground. Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous works in the field of comparative religion; I reviewed her biographical study, Buddha, for the Los Angeles Times when it first came out in 2001, and found it a compact and scholarly work which was, at the same time, entirely readable. She has also appeared in the remarkable TED series of lectures, where she initially introduced her idea for this "charter" to restore the Golden Rule to its proper place in religious thought. As readers of The Buddha Diaries will know, I am not myself a fan of any of the conventional religions but this, for me, represents the best of what it's all about. It also represents--religion or no--the best hope for the survival of our species and our planet. At the very least, it's well worth further investigation.

Young @ Heart: The Movie

If you haven't seen it yet, I'm sure that you'll enjoy the movie "Young @ Heart," a joyful romp through the process of aging and dying. As its title suggests, it's the story of the Young @ Heart Chorus, an ensemble of oldsters who, under the direction of the lovingly demanding Bob Cilman, deliver rousing renditions of rock and punk band songs like David Byrne's "Living in a Time of War," the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia."

The Young @ Heart Chorus are a sprightly bunch of seniors, ranging in age from mid-seventies to mid-nineties. It's clear from the film that their longevity can be attributed in good part to the joy they take in their creative efforts, and in the sense of mutually loving community they develop in the process. There's a spirit of generosity, too, in giving out from themselves into the world, as they do in practicing their art form--and a great return on that generosity: their performances, ongoing since the group's inception in 1982, bring cheering audiences to their feet. And a good sense of humor surely contributes to the mix. They have an ability to laugh at themselves, and at each other, that puts the travails of old age into a healthy perspective. Their joy is infectious, their performances a delight. Old age, accepting itself for what it is, need not be the experience of pain and isolation that many of us fear, but rather a time for letting go of the needs, aspirations and pretences of younger years--in a word, a kind of freedom that takes years to earn.

There is, of course, the imminence of death--a fact that the movie does not skirt over in its celebration of old age. In the course of a single week, just before a key performance, the group loses two of its most beloved and most talented members, and the sadness amongst their fellows is palpable and personal. It could have been any one of them to go, we sense: these two were chosen. If they continue with their work and stage their performance, it is because what those who died would have wished and would themselves have done--an act of honoring that is at once admirable and poignant.

Engaged by the marvelous characters and their dedication, we share in their joys and triumphs as well as in their tribulations and their tears. There's a good deal of laughter, a good deal of song, a good deal of exuberance as we become familiar with these faces, wrinkled with age but rich in the character formed by life experience. The Buddhist teachings have much to tell us about aging, sickness and death, most of all that the key to approaching them with equanimity is the discovery of true happiness--the kind of happiness that derives not from the transitory, not from wealth or material possessions, but from the capital of inner resources and the exercise of compassion for oneself and others. These joyful choristers seem to have tapped into those qualities, and to offer us the inspiration of their commitment to life even as they approach its end.

In the context of which, I woke up this Monday morning grateful to have a surplus of writing projects on my mind: not only this entry, but also some thoughts about the Obamas' session, last night, on "Sixty Minutes," the Ken Burns-produced series on the American West, and further thoughts about who we are, as Americans. More on this later in the week. I also have a new segment of my "Art of Outrage" podcast to be working on this morning...

And... I would not wish to close, after this grim weekend in Southern California, without an expression of compassion to those many who have lost their homes to the dreadful fires that have assailed us. We were fortunate not to have been affected. But here's the view of the smoke-filled Los Angeles basin, seen from our balcony...

(Sarah Palin, Again: My Sentiments...

... exactly. This Andrew Sullivan piece was forwarded by a kind reader. It's a reminder that, even if she disappears from the scene, as I heartily hope, her unjustified elevation to the national stage is a matter too fraught with difficult and important questions about our country to be swept under the rug. In case you missed it, see also my own essay on the Palin matter on The Huffington Post.)

Dread: As I Was Saying...

... before I was distracted by those miscreant lights, I was planning to put out some thoughts on the matter of dread. I had taken note of this feeling that persisted, despite the elation of last week's election results. (Last week? Does it not seem like a year ago? And yet we still have sixty-six days and ten more hours of Bush... Time is doing strange things to my consciousness right now.)

Dread, then. It's a close relative of fear, of course. But as I see it, fear has generally a more specific cause than dread, which is the sum of all unexpressed, perhaps unknowable fears. The German language has an excellent word for what I'm trying to get at: unbeweltigt. It means "not brought into the world"--unconscious, in that sense. In the years following World War II, when many Germans understandably wanted nothing more than to forget the recent past, when the memory and the guilt for actions taken in their name was almost more than they could bear and tended to get buried, some spoke of the "unbeweltigte Vergangenheit," the unconscious past. And, like most word-for-word translations, "unconscious" doesn't quite do it. It's bigger, more difficult, more pervasive, and somehow more physical.

I think of dread as a kind of "unbeweltigte Zukunft," as it were, an unconscious future. The word came up for me the other day, on our anniversary, as a matter of fact, when Ellie and I were walking and talking about what was on our minds. And I was much aware of the euphoria that followed the election of Barack Obama, that almost audible sigh of national relief--in part because the too long months of the campaign were over, in part because the result suggested a truly radical change in the way we Americans want to be in the world, and in relation to each other.

I trust that these hopes are true. And yet I confess that there's some part of me that is surprised to find itself still waiting for the other shoe to drop--another neat definition of dread, I think. Not that I have any specific or identifiable fears. Well, actually, I do have some, but they're not what I want to talk about. It's the dread. It's that unidentifiable feeling at the pit of the stomach, the low-level but persistent sense of insecurity, of not-knowing what's around the corner--a feeling that, when I come to think about it, I realize has accompanied me throughout my life. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I can go for months, for years perhaps, without even remembering that it's there. But I believe that I have never lived a single moment without it--at least since those earliest days before I became conscious of my separate individuality.

In the days of infancy, I understand from my readings in psychology, there is a sense of oneness in one's experience of ther world. There is no "I" or "other." And I know that in certain ecstatic moments--and sometimes, too, in meditation--I can come near that blissful state again. And I think that dread has somehow to do with that loss, that separation between self and other, that sense of radical incompleteness. I suspect--though I have no means of determining--that it's a feeling that is common to all human beings, though some may feel it more acutely and more persistently than others. And I further suspect that it's root cause is the awareness of death.

There is something in all of us that wants to live forever. Those of us who remain unconvinced--and unconsoled--by some form of religious belief that there is "life after death" must share in the dread that accompanies the prospect of the end of life. It's the fear of the unknown and the unknowable that provides us with the ultimate, unanswerable question about our brief sojourn on the planet Earth. There may be believers whose faith is so strong that it puts them beyond the reach of dread. I suspect they are few in number. Even among the most devoted of the faithful, I suspect that there is some "unbeweltigt" experience of dread, some vague unease, at moments, in the deepest recess of the belly, some ancient memory of those days when we humans huddled around the fire at the mouth of the cave, surrounded by darkness and danger, vulnerable to the attack of sharp-toothed monsters--or to diseases of which we had only the most primitive understanding.

Come to think of it, things haven't changed too much since then! I sit here, after the much-publicized day of practice, yesterday, for California's Big One, and tremble at the thought that it could happen at any moment. I sit here, in the knowledge that the global ecomony is collapsing all around us, and that tomorrow could knock the financial foundations out from under me. I sit here in the knowledge that the heart that has served me well for more than seventy years could suddenly decide that it was time to quit...

Well, those are my fears. Some of them. Their sum total is, well... dread. Without which, of course--and lest this seem like an unnecessary downer!--I would be unable to experience its counterpart, sheer joy. That's the blessing part.

Lights On/Lights Off

I am being driven not-so-slowly insane by the electric lights in our house. A couple of years ago, we had a remote-operated timer system installed for our garden lights and for certain areas of lighting in the house itself. The system has never worked properly. Mysteriously, whole banks of lights will switch themselves on in the middle of the night. We have a lovely Buddha lamp, inherited from Ellie's stepmother, and another lamp that are both supposed to operate via a remote switch by the bed. Sometimes one will go on and the other not, sometimes both go on together, sometimes neither. And they, too, will happily operate themselves with no prompting from us. I have even known the garden lights to flood the whole yard with illumination in the middle of the night.

Bad enough. Now, yesterday, the motion-sensor light in the garage refused to go off. I fiddled with the switches and found a way to turn it off manually, but then I noticed that none of the lamps in the living room would work. A trip to the circuit breaker board succeeded only in stalling the entire audio and video system, which required rebooting. Miraculously, after much frustration and bewilderment, the motion sensors in the garage began to work again--but the motion sensor lights down by the side of the house now refuse to switch off: they have been burning all night, probably blinding our neighbors into the bargain. They are still burning, and I have been unable to find a switch that will override the sensor manually.

That's not all. My bedside light went on the blink a couple of weeks ago--a halogen job which seemed to have been designed in such a way that the heat of the bulb would corrode the very fixture that held it. No sooner had we had that rewired, than the identical light on Ellie's side of the bed played the same trick. It was rewired last week--at vast expense, of course--and has now gone on the blink again. And when I went to make the morning tea--with the lights at the side of the house still burning in broad daylight--I noticed that the bank of little under-the-cabinet lights had begun to flicker on and off insistently.

Poltergeists? A curse? I'm a complete duffer, of course, when it comes to anything electrical, and am totally dependent on those who claim to know. All I know is that our electrical system seems like a mirror-image of the national economy, where even the experts only make things worse. Trying to achieve a measure of sanity, I ask myself what would the Buddha do? The Buddha did not have electrical systems to deal with--nor in fact any of those technological things that provide us with an ample source of annoyance today. There is simply so much that can go wrong, and frequently does. All he had was a pair of feet to travel on and, I suppose, a candle or two to burn at night, maybe an oil lamp. Our lives today are so complicated, and we are so dependent on others to keep things running smoothly that I find equanimity in short supply when the machinery that surrounds us runs amok. I think that I understand--and value--the concept of not-clinging, of not being attached to outcomes. I understand that how the need to control the uncontrollable serves only to increase suffering. But, boy, is it hard to "return to the breath" when the vicissitudes of life take over!

I missed my meditation this morning--the last thing to do in such circumstances--because I was obsessed with the thought of all those pennies being burned up uselessly by the lights outside. And with what it would cost to bring in, yet again, an electrician who would find, perhaps, a fix that would turn out, yet again, to be only temporary.

Breathe...

"Getting Married"

Looking back over my post yesterday, I was struck by my description of the casual ease with which Ellie and I were able to go out and get married, and by the realization that today, thirty-six years later, thanks to the fearful mean-spiritedness of certain California voters, there are still many in this state who are disallowed from going out and getting married. Not to mention all those other states where such a thing is still inconceivable. I bear them all in mind...

That said, we did have a wonderful day of celebration: a morning walk on the neighboring hill, following a different route from our usual one, engaged in a deep conversation about such things as dread, fear, anxiety, and the strategies we can use to help us live with them; breakfast at home, out on our lovely balcony; a very early, excellent dinner at Gingergrass, a local Vietnamese restaurant that we have not visited for quite some time and rediscovered with pleasure; and finally a meeting with our artist's group--more accurately, with both our artists' groups, now consolidated for the first time into one. A great success. More good discussion, centered mostly on the rituals artists devise to get themselves into the studio and to work.

Ah, and... at the end of our session, a celebration, where we invited everyone to join us in a glass of champagne to toast the day.


One of our number--the artist whose newest work we had just been admiring, a great step forward for her--had also brought a chocolate cake


(seen here with our benefactor...)



... which was devoured with gusto. We ended our session considerably later than usual, and settled down in bed to cackle over The Daily Show before turning out the lights.

It's a busy day today. I have two phone interviews for my "Art of Outrage" podcast, a lunch date, and a dinner date. I'll be back to The Buddha Diaries, I expect, tomorrow... I still need to talk about dread. Any ideas out there?

11/11

Today marks the 36th anniversary of our marriage. Armistice Day. We woke that morning with Ellie eight months pregnant and I said, "It seems like a good day to get married"--or words to that effect. Very romantic. We had been together for three years already and had resisted the idea of marriage for a variety of reasons. But I had been thinking about tax benefits (VERY romantic!) and we were aware that regulations at the Catholic hospital would have prevented my assistance at the birth of our daughter-to-be. And it seemed like a nice day. We called our neighbors, to ask if they'd be our witnesses, and set off for an appearance before a judge at City Hall.

11/11, Armistice Day. The day that the truce was signed to mark the end of the horrors of World War I in Europe, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month--the exact time we chose to raise our glasses in a toast at the Biltmore Hotel, after the official civil ceremony in the judge's chambers. I fired off a telegram (those were the days!) to Ellie's father, a gregarious man who had got a lot of mileage out of boasting to his friends that he was about to be "an illegitimate grandfather." I wrote: "Illegitimate grandparenthood forestalled by downtown judge." (In the days of telegrams, you were charged by the word, remember? It paid to be pithy.) Anyway, he was furious.

The Eurpoean armistice, if you recall, along with the feeling of humiliation it imposed on the German people, led directly to the spirit of vengeful nationalism that one Adolf Hitler later exploited, with consequences even more disastrous than those of the previous war. I'm happy to report that our personal armistice has worked out a lot better than that. We have been fortunate in many ways--not least in our decision to spend our lives together, and the feeling that we share this morning is one of gratitude for so many blessings and for so much love.

The Clock Doc Visits

It's a pleasure to watch a master-craftsman at work. Due to the inclemencies of our remodel job down in Laguna Beach, two of our treasured clocks--heirlooms from both sides of the family--had gone on the blink. One was the substantial mission-style American Seth Thomas, wall clock reliable and plain, which had hung for years in Ellie's mother's ceramic studio and before that on the wall of her grandfather's business office back east in New Jersey. It had ticked away solidly on our dining room wall at the beach for the previous fifteen years.

The second was my own "nursery clock," a lovely French piece with a classic, hand-painted face and an oak body with art-nouveau style inlay in various different woods. Its mellow strike sounding out in our little cottage here in Southern California was an immediate--and improbable!--reminder of my earliest days in the big old Victorian rectory in the village of Aspley Guise in Bedfordshire, some sixty miles north of London, where I grew up. Looking out across the valley from the windows, we could see the distant chimneys of the brickworks near the county town of Bedford; and, during the war years, the beams of searchlights catching the undersides of the fleets of barrage balloons and, sometimes, the bellies of squadrons of warplanes below the clouds.

(I realize now, too late, that I should have taken a picture of each of these two clocks, so that I would have something other than words to describe them! I am so foolish about such things...)

Anyway, we had taken special care to pack these treasures away from the perils of construction jolting and dust. However, quite naturally upset by the chaos around them, both had gone on strike and refused to be coaxed back into normal operation. (Truth to tell, the temperamental French nursery clock had been giving us trouble for some time before.) Last week, in the process of getting the cottage back to habitable condition, we turned to the Yellow Pages for help, and came upon The Clock Doc. He arrived yesterday, Sunday, for a house call, and set to work first on the Seth Thomas.

No major problem there, it turned out. It was largely a matter of oiling, cleaning, and getting things back in balance. Never having seen the works of either clock before, I was impressed by the sturdy brass construction of all the moving parts of the Seth Thomas, the precision of their interaction. It looked, well... American--in the best sense of that word. Practical, unpretentious, well-constructed, honest, hard-working.

The French job was fancier, more intricate--and far more temperamental. The works were smaller, of course, and more delicate. At least two clock people have worked on it in recent years, in the attempt to bring it back to reliable functioning. Both had some measure of success, but each time the clock reverted to its diva-esque refusal to perform as it was supposed to. I watched with admiration as Jordan, the Clock Doc, took it apart and examined piece by piece



with a critical eye before muttering finally, with a certain satisfaction, "Ah, there's your problem."

The problem--and it turned out that he had identified it correctly--was that a single tiny hole in the brass that allowed one of the wheels to spin had previously been replaced with one that was fractionally too tight, with none of the play that the cog apparently needed to function properly. Jordan worked at it with a tool to widen the hole slightly...


... then oiled the works and put the whole thing back together. (I was reminded of the old joke about the man who took his watch apart, then re-assembled it and proudly announced that he had enough parts left over to make another one.) When that was done, there was a further hitch in getting the strike to co-ordinate correctly with the time--another problem that was dispatched with patience, confidence, and the sure hand of an expert. And a bonus: my ear had picked up a metallic edge to the once mellifluous sound of the hourly and half-hourly strike, and our clock doc was able to make a slight adjustment to the striker which brought it back to its original gentle gong.

As I started out saying, it was a pleasure to sit and watch Jordan work. Mass production has done much to deprive our contemporary world of the need for true craftsmanship. This work was more than simple mechanics: Jordan brought to it a very human sense of touch and an attentive ear to the task, along with his sharp eye and finely-tuned intelligence. Like all good doctors, he's as much an artist as a technician. If there's anyone out there in need of a person with these skills, please feel free to be in touch!

More... On No on 8

I need to tell a very personal story here. I received several responses to my entry a couple of days ago about my dismay at the passage of Proposition 8, one of them from a proponent of the initiative who asserted that "Gays are living a lifestyle which is contrary to nature." (A nice referral from Cardozo, by the way, by way of rebuttal: same-sex sexual activity is, um, "natural"!) To support his point, the correspondent from Lion's Share told his story: "I remember back in junior high, changing in the locker room with a bunch of other guys, and I had certain feelings towards a few of them. Did that mean I was gay? NO! It meant that I was going through a change that I needed to sort out, and left to myself, I did." His suggestion was that, had a teacher spoken an approving word or two--or had he acted on his feelings--he might have embraced homosexuality for the rest of his life.

Okay. Now I'd like him to hear MY story. Like many other boys of my generation growing up in England during and after World War II, I was sent to a boys' boarding school. Two of them, as a matter of fact. At the first, ages six to twelve, I was molested by a pederast teacher. From age twelve on, when I was going through those necessary adolescent awakenings to which Lion's Share alludes, I was surrounded exclusively by boys. We all have our share of early sexual experiences. Lion's Share apparently had his own in the locker room at junior high. Let him imagine living in that locker room for his entire teenage. He might, then, as I did, have succumbed to the "natural" hormonal drives and found outlet for them with the only living human flesh within reach: other boys. And of course we attach emotions to our physical needs and contacts. For a teenager, that's what we call puppy love.

In short, after twelve years of boarding school education, I was convinced, by age eighteen, that I could love only other members of my own sex. I had become, it might have seemed, Lion's Share's worst nightmare--a boy conditioned by his environment to become a lifetime subscriber to the dreaded "gay lifestyle"! And then... and then: leaving school for the last time as my eighteenth birthday approached--miracle of miracles! My parents arrived to pick me up from school with a French au pair girl in the car with them, planning to drive her back after a stay in England to the home of her own parents in Paris...

Do you believe in love at first sight? I fell in love with that French girl before I was even a mile from the place of my long confinement. I pined after her passionately and with inordinate sexual desire--I regret to report that the love was unrequited: that was to come later--for two years, before the distance between Paris, where she lived, and Cambridge, where I was rapidly falling in love with a succession of other girls, took its toll.

All this to assure Lion's Share that, despite his fears, in this one living-proof instance at least, no teacher's approval or disapproval could have changed the course of "nature." I am what I am, and am glad to have come to that acceptance of myself. I will confess that I actually enjoyed my early sex life quite a good deal--though with the usual agonies of the adolescent, whether homo- or heterosexual. Had Lion's Share succumbed to his locker-room temptation, perhaps the same thing would have happened to him. Or maybe not. Maybe, gasp, gulp, just maybe, heaven forbid, he would have discovered some different truth about himself.

Lion's Share is who he is, I gladly acknowledge that. But I submit that it's none of his business to decide for others who they should or should not be, nor how they should or should not live out the experience of their humanity. We are learning painfully slowly, as a society and more broadly as a species, to experience our own freedom and allow the same to others. The election of a "different" President of the United States is a triumphant token of how far we have come along one particular path; the passage of Proposition 8 is a token of how far we have yet to go along another.

Why Americans Still Need to Know the Truth About Sarah Palin

I have no wish to be flogging the proverbial dead horse, but I am distressed and angered by the way we are hearing things about Sarah Palin that we should have known before—in scraps of rumor and innuendo, and tidbits of information from “sources who wish to remain anonymous.”

There are three good reasons why we still need to know the truth about Sarah Palin, and only one of them is her apparent wish to remain a presence in our national political arena. We need to know also because we’ll be unable to get past this wretched episode until we know the actual facts rather than the rumors; and we need to know because the time has finally come, has it not, for us to arrive at some clarity about ourselves—who we really are, and what it is about us that allows us to be content with lies, deceptions, cover-ups and the transparently false claims of shameless sales pitches.

The questions about Sarah Palin are both serious and abundant. Why have we never learned the truth about the method of her selection, as one who might well inherit the mantle of the President? Why was she never exposed to a serious, sustained interview or press conference? Is she really as dangerously ignorant of national and world affairs as those tidbits of information would suggest? About the office for which she was chosen? About the Constitution of the country she presumed herself qualified to serve? Why were her medical records kept secret? What did a young and healthy woman have to hide? Is there truth to the rumors about a past abortion? About the parenthood of her Down syndrome child? Has she lied to the electorate about those very issues the she trumpeted so wildly?

There are those who say we should allow the whole McCain/Palin candidacy to slip into a forgettable past. If we do, we are like those abused wives who prefer to remain in denial of their husband’s exploitation in order to maintain the peace. We are addicts of denial. As that hoary chestnut has it, those who fail to understand their history are condemned to repeat it. Because the Palin episode is not just about Palin. For too many years now, we Americans have swallowed lie after lie from those we elect to high office. We have allowed ourselves to be fooled and manipulated by those in power, we have failed notably to demand the truth because we are too lazy or too fearful to be able to handle it. The Bush administration was but the latest, albeit the worst example of this abject abdication of responsibility. What an irony, that the current occupant of the White House should appear between its noble columns yesterday to announce to the press that the election of Obama was a tribute to the democracy he has loudly touted to the rest of the world, while making a mockery of it here at home. I have written before that democracy depends on the education of those who vote. It also depends on transparency and truth, without which we lack the knowledge on which to base our vote.

But the problem goes deeper and is more systemic even than our electoral choices. To really understand who we are, as a people, we should examine the ways in which we allow ourselves to be manipulated and lied to in every aspect of our lives—by supposed spiritual leaders as well as by those who wish to sell us their shoddy, often unneeded goods and products. Here in California, to take but one example, what does it say about us as a people that we allow a handful of religious extremists and the money they control to pervert our human compassion for each other and our sense of fairness. So much for the Golden Rule, when we do unto others what we would certainly not wish to have done to us.

From the Buddhist view, then, we should perhaps treat Sarah Palin as a gift—one whose potential is to teach us more about ourselves than we might wish to know. We should demand to know the truth, not to invade her privacy or subject her to further torture, but because without it we are suborning our own desperate need for some real honesty about who we are, and the changes we might need to make in our lives if we are ever to return to the path laid out by those wise people who devised this country’s constitution, and the implicit promise that we do, yes, still hold out to the world. This, as I see it, is the “change” of which Obama spoke so eloquently and so often. It’s not the superficial ones that are important—how to better my own little life and improve my standard of living. It’s the great inner change of a renewed hunger for, and dedication to the truth. I deeply hope that this was what I heard him talk about.

NO... !

I was so busy yesterday congratulating ourselves and the world on Obama's stunning victory that I passed over the one thing that thoroughly pissed me off: the passage of California's Proposition 8. Speaking of the undeserved power of a mean-spirited and now demonstrably diminished minority in this country, could there be clearer evidence that it still exists? What a blemish on the name of our otherwise moderately liberal- and fair-minded state, that we have allowed this hate-based measure to pass.

I expressed my anger about this to a gay friend at the gym, and he spoke glumly of the gay community as being "the most hated minority in America today." I actually find that hard to believe any more. Especially amongst the younger generation, such things as race and sexual orientation seem to have little interest or influence on the way they think or live their lives. My sense of this particular abomination--as Ellie rightly calls it--is that it was promoted and skillfully managed as a political issue by a very small minority of bigots, many of them Mormons, I've been led to believe.

Another friend--not gay--responded to my previous post about Prop. 8, before the election, begging fellow-Californians to join me in rejecting the initiative. "I vote 'no' to all Propositions, being a firm believer in representative vs. popular democracy," he wrote me, "and will continue to do so until presented with a proposition to end government by proposition, at which time I will happily vote 'yes'!" Nicely put. I came to much the same conclusion myself at the time of the passage of Proposition 13, the first public manifestation of what came to be called the "taxpayer revolt" that propelled Ronald Reagan into office and started the anti-tax landslide that continues to bury the possibility for responsible government until this day.

I trust that our Obama will lead us toward that "kinder, gentler" country promised by the first Bush, and that he will re-introduce a sense of responsibility and accountability not only to our society but to the government that is supposed to represent it.

OBAMA!

Well, he did it! We did it. They did, Obama's extraordinary campaign staff and millions of those who, like my daughter, were inspired to work their hearts out to assure that stunning victory last night. Our neighborhood down here in Laguna Beach, in the heart of conservative Orange County, California, exploded at eight o'clock when the election was called by the chattering media. The sight of the Obama family on stage at the time of the acceptance speech was stirring beyond words. Most moving, perhaps, was the face of Jesse Jackson, tears streaming down, recalling all those years it took to make this happen.

The media commentary this morning--as did the gracious Bush speech outside the White House--made story of Obama's victory to be about race, extolling the fact that a black American could win the presidency and the proof it offered that America is the place of unlimited opportunity. While this is true, I think the historical shift if greater and more important than this interpretation allows. The paradigm shift has more to do with the evidence it offers of a deep cultural tectonic event; it's a repudiation of that mean side of the American character that has been manifest these past thirty years and more, the smallness that has promoted the whole me-first mentality that was reflected first, in my opinion, in the so-called tax revolt of the 1970s. It's a repudiation of Ronald Reagan as much as George W. Bush, of the trickle-down theory of economics that made a travesty of the American notion of fairness and opportunity. It's a repudiation of the politics of division that has pitted Republican against Democrat, right against left, liberal against conservative. It's Barack Obama's appeal that he has insisted throughout on transcending these divisions.

The much-touted change is only partly about these things. But the relief that was tangible in the air last night was not just an American relief. You could almost feel the entire world taking a new breath. Obama's election is also about the realization that America must now take its place again in the community of nations, and that the world at large has much at stake in America's change of heart. I have heard it said that voting for the American President should not be restricted to Americans, since the choice affects the lives of people everywhere. There's truth to that. The world has become so small, so "flat"--to use NYTimes columnist Tom Friedman's term, that we can no longer hope to survive as a species if we cling to our old notion of a collection of competitive nation states. As a man whose very humanity is a complex blend of national and racial identity, Obama has the look of a person who transcends the old categories we must now discard.

I am convinced that the new President will make good on his promise to reach across the ideological divides. I hope that he will find a source of support in the new "old McCain" who made a reappearance last night in his gracious concession speech--a man of generosity and courage and dedication. I fully expect to see and hear more from him. I trust that the same is NOT true of the biggest mistake he made in the course of his campaign, the mistake that undermined the trust he had worked so hard to build in the American electorate. I refer, of course, to the Governor of Alaska, whose hysterical and pusillanimous campaign rhetoric did so much to discredit the ideology for which she stood.

Needless to say, we in this household are overjoyed to enjoy the prospect of a President Obama, and are prepared to do what we many need to do and make the sacrifices we may be called on to make in order to out this country back on track to fulfill its promise to itself and to the world.

One Day to Go

I have been neglectful of The Buddha Diaries in the past few days.  My apologies to those who have checked in and found nothing new.  At the end of last week, Thursday and Friday, I was joining my friend who teaches at Cal State Fullerton in his classes, as I do once every semester, and it's always a demanding and exhilarating experience.  At the same time, these were the first days back in our Laguna Beach cottage--now habitable, but far from finished.  The painters have been working in the house, and work continues on the cabinets.  Everywhere there is construction dust, along with the slowly diminishing piles of furniture and boxes packed with everything from books to kitchen pots and crockery.

And then, Friday night, George the dog came in with mud up to his ankles--spreading it generously around the house and on the carpets and the bed before we noticed--and we discovered the source in a marsh down by the clean-out valve where the sewer leads to the street.  Emergency calls Friday night, the plumber's visit on Saturday.  The snake.  A temporary fix--at vast expense.  And an injunction to call the city in on Monday morning.  The city people have just been and gone.  They promise to "camera" the drains later in week.

And then... the election.  It's the last weekend of this seemingly endless campaign.  Ellie and I both losing sleep over the outcome.  If we were better Buddhists, we would of course be less attached to the outcome.  But we are attached.  As for many others, I suspect, it obsesses our thoughts and feelings.  Yesterday, I sat with George outside our local Trader Joe's--he's not allowed inside because he has four legs and a tail, not to mention a fur coat, so Ellie had gone in to take care of the shopping alone--and watched the people parking their cars and walking in and out of the store.  I found myself absurdly trying to determine who would be voting for Obama, who for McCain.  A Mercedes... did that mean McCain?  T-Shirt and jeans... Obama?  A beard...  A fancy hair-do...  An expensive dress?

And I realized, of course, the futility of the exercise.  It has nothing to do with any of these things.  I realized that there's no way in the world to distinguish from the outside what ideas and intentions any human being might be carrying in his mind.  Or hers.  The hard part in all this, for me, is to avoid projecting ill-intentions or stupidity upon those with whom I disagree.  There is ill-intention and stupidity, surely, on both sides--and still I tend to think there is more on one side than the other!  

These matters arose yesterday at sangha.  What a pleasure it was, after several weeks of absence, to be back sitting with our regular group of friends, the relish an hour of pure silence and an hour of conversation with people who really do think, and really do examine their own thoughts and attitudes.  Among many interesting questions we addressed was this one: how might our practice help us, Wednesday morning, should things not turn out as we all hope?   

I'm going to leave that one unanswered this morning.  The contractor has just arrived.  I have discovered another problem with the exterior electrical, and need to attend to that.  There are calls to make.  There are more boxes to unpack.  There are exterior paint colors to choose, electrical fixtures to pick out.  There are books to be replaced on library shelves, pictures to be rehung...  

And one day to go...  More later.