Firm ground is not available ground.
--AR Ammons "Dunes"
When Tomin Harada returned home to Hiroshima from where he had been fighting in Taiwan at the end of World War 2, he found nothing to greet him. No family. No friends. No ruins of any sort to indicate that Hiroshima once existed, and that once upon a time Harada had a life there. Instead of leaving, Harada stayed and became a doctor and participated in Hiroshima's rise, literally, from the ashes. He dedicated his life to restoring human dignity to the survivors of the atomic bomb.
Throughout his career, he watched more than 3,000 of his patients die. In the midst of so much death, Harada decided that he needed to cultivate beauty and fill his small corner of the world with it. So, he grew roses.When he died in 1999 at the age of 87, Dr. Harada's Hiroshima roses had been sent to peace activists and citizens in the United States, China, Germany and other parts of the world. At the time of his death, a small article--labeled "An Appreciation"--was published in the Los Angeles Times. I was moved by Dr. Harada's story, his sense of duty, the way he rolled up his sleeves and got to work despite the odds, despite the initial bleakness and the constant inevitability of more death among his patients. He stayed to bear witness to the reality of the enduring struggle while at the same time cultivating beauty, that thing which persists despite the struggle. Almost 20 years later, the newspaper article remains tucked into the pages of a book that I have routinely consulted over the years for wisdom and solace--both, I now realize, as ephemeral as Harada's roses. And as essential.
Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence, chant the Buddhists, reminding us that reality is the universal teacher. Reality is the constant on the continuum of beauty--or call it joy, call it happiness--and struggle. The ordinary is the path. The instruction? According to practitioners of Reality Insight, it goes like this: Master the 24 hours. Do it well. Ditch the self-pity. Journalist and satirist P.J. O'Rourke explains the instruction this way: "Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes." It occurs to me that we need to get a lot better at doing the dishes.
On the radio the other morning is an interview I find compelling. Pete Souza, the Chief Official White House Photographer for President Barack Obama, has just published a book of some of his photographs from the eight years Souza spent chronicling President Obama. Souza talked about the access he had, the discretion he employed so as not to be an interloper, the high bar set by the first Official White House Photographer Yoichi Okamoto who photographed LBJ, and the importance of being present when history takes place. Even at the White House with a camera pressed against one's eye, it still comes down to mastering the 24 hours.
Souza talked about the difficulty of being present with the parents who lost their six- and seven-year-old children in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He was there with President Obama two days after what Souza described as the worst day of these parents' lives. Souza said it was difficult to bear, the grief. In fact, what he said was that it was unbearable. Obama would later say that was the most difficult day of his presidency. To be present when history takes place. To bear witness. To bear as in to carry history forward. We do not close our eyes. We stay present, and we see with our own eyes what needs to be done. We find our way, like Dr. Harada, to roll up our sleeves and do the work. This, I figure, is as close as it comes to mastering the 24 hours and doing it well.
If we are lucky, we thrive as humans. Many factors must converge, and still it comes down to our embrace of things: How we both hold on and surrender to the events of our lives become foremost. But, mostly, being human means we endure. Our resilience is a measure of what we have borne. Its capacity? Again, we are lucky to remember the value of treading water, especially when we are tired and the water is level with our heads; the trick becomes not to go under. Or, not for too long.
It sounds too simple--as in trite, reductionist--to say to come back to the breath, inhale, exhale, as I do when teaching meditation, as if breath can build capacity. And yet it does.
Not quite one month ago, I drove several hours through a sea of traffic to attend the funeral vigil for a 22-year-old woman who was one of the 58 people killed in the mass shooting at the outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1. Christiana Mae Duarte was the niece of a friend in my yoga community. While this young woman was essentially a stranger to me, I know her aunt; and upon learning how broken my friend's family had become in the wake of such insurmountable loss, I decided it was important for me to attend this service as one who would bear witness. As Souza discovered in the presence of the parents of the slain children of Sandy Hook Elementary School, there was no safe zone behind his camera lens. The grief was immense and palpable. During Christiana's vigil, I found it difficult to breathe.
To be certain that I am using the correct word here to describe Christiana's service, I look up vigil in the dictionary. It is defined as the act of keeping awake at times when sleep is customary; a period of wakefulness. When the going gets tough, sometimes it feels like sleep is the only true refuge. In the story of the Garden at Gethsemane, even the apostles wanted to sleep through their final vigil with Christ. We want to look the other way; we want another moment of silence; we want sleep to change things, miraculously, come the new dawn.
Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence, chant the Buddhists. Beyond mountains there are mountains, say the Haitians. We do not look for reasons to give up, we look for reasons to go on, say the activists fighting for clean water, clean air, a stable climate. Tomin Harada did not go to sleep when he returned home to Hiroshima all those years ago. And he did not leave. Instead, he chose to come closer to life where the Dalai Lama says there is no pretense. Because in coming closer to life, we come closer to truth. And truth remains the place where beauty resides.
--AR Ammons "Dunes"
When Tomin Harada returned home to Hiroshima from where he had been fighting in Taiwan at the end of World War 2, he found nothing to greet him. No family. No friends. No ruins of any sort to indicate that Hiroshima once existed, and that once upon a time Harada had a life there. Instead of leaving, Harada stayed and became a doctor and participated in Hiroshima's rise, literally, from the ashes. He dedicated his life to restoring human dignity to the survivors of the atomic bomb.
Throughout his career, he watched more than 3,000 of his patients die. In the midst of so much death, Harada decided that he needed to cultivate beauty and fill his small corner of the world with it. So, he grew roses.When he died in 1999 at the age of 87, Dr. Harada's Hiroshima roses had been sent to peace activists and citizens in the United States, China, Germany and other parts of the world. At the time of his death, a small article--labeled "An Appreciation"--was published in the Los Angeles Times. I was moved by Dr. Harada's story, his sense of duty, the way he rolled up his sleeves and got to work despite the odds, despite the initial bleakness and the constant inevitability of more death among his patients. He stayed to bear witness to the reality of the enduring struggle while at the same time cultivating beauty, that thing which persists despite the struggle. Almost 20 years later, the newspaper article remains tucked into the pages of a book that I have routinely consulted over the years for wisdom and solace--both, I now realize, as ephemeral as Harada's roses. And as essential.
Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence, chant the Buddhists, reminding us that reality is the universal teacher. Reality is the constant on the continuum of beauty--or call it joy, call it happiness--and struggle. The ordinary is the path. The instruction? According to practitioners of Reality Insight, it goes like this: Master the 24 hours. Do it well. Ditch the self-pity. Journalist and satirist P.J. O'Rourke explains the instruction this way: "Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes." It occurs to me that we need to get a lot better at doing the dishes.
On the radio the other morning is an interview I find compelling. Pete Souza, the Chief Official White House Photographer for President Barack Obama, has just published a book of some of his photographs from the eight years Souza spent chronicling President Obama. Souza talked about the access he had, the discretion he employed so as not to be an interloper, the high bar set by the first Official White House Photographer Yoichi Okamoto who photographed LBJ, and the importance of being present when history takes place. Even at the White House with a camera pressed against one's eye, it still comes down to mastering the 24 hours.
Souza talked about the difficulty of being present with the parents who lost their six- and seven-year-old children in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He was there with President Obama two days after what Souza described as the worst day of these parents' lives. Souza said it was difficult to bear, the grief. In fact, what he said was that it was unbearable. Obama would later say that was the most difficult day of his presidency. To be present when history takes place. To bear witness. To bear as in to carry history forward. We do not close our eyes. We stay present, and we see with our own eyes what needs to be done. We find our way, like Dr. Harada, to roll up our sleeves and do the work. This, I figure, is as close as it comes to mastering the 24 hours and doing it well.
If we are lucky, we thrive as humans. Many factors must converge, and still it comes down to our embrace of things: How we both hold on and surrender to the events of our lives become foremost. But, mostly, being human means we endure. Our resilience is a measure of what we have borne. Its capacity? Again, we are lucky to remember the value of treading water, especially when we are tired and the water is level with our heads; the trick becomes not to go under. Or, not for too long.
It sounds too simple--as in trite, reductionist--to say to come back to the breath, inhale, exhale, as I do when teaching meditation, as if breath can build capacity. And yet it does.
Not quite one month ago, I drove several hours through a sea of traffic to attend the funeral vigil for a 22-year-old woman who was one of the 58 people killed in the mass shooting at the outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1. Christiana Mae Duarte was the niece of a friend in my yoga community. While this young woman was essentially a stranger to me, I know her aunt; and upon learning how broken my friend's family had become in the wake of such insurmountable loss, I decided it was important for me to attend this service as one who would bear witness. As Souza discovered in the presence of the parents of the slain children of Sandy Hook Elementary School, there was no safe zone behind his camera lens. The grief was immense and palpable. During Christiana's vigil, I found it difficult to breathe.
To be certain that I am using the correct word here to describe Christiana's service, I look up vigil in the dictionary. It is defined as the act of keeping awake at times when sleep is customary; a period of wakefulness. When the going gets tough, sometimes it feels like sleep is the only true refuge. In the story of the Garden at Gethsemane, even the apostles wanted to sleep through their final vigil with Christ. We want to look the other way; we want another moment of silence; we want sleep to change things, miraculously, come the new dawn.
Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence, chant the Buddhists. Beyond mountains there are mountains, say the Haitians. We do not look for reasons to give up, we look for reasons to go on, say the activists fighting for clean water, clean air, a stable climate. Tomin Harada did not go to sleep when he returned home to Hiroshima all those years ago. And he did not leave. Instead, he chose to come closer to life where the Dalai Lama says there is no pretense. Because in coming closer to life, we come closer to truth. And truth remains the place where beauty resides.
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