Flow like a River...
Plum Village, Ancestral Trauma, and the Memory of Water.
For the holidays this year our family took a couple weeks off to join with an international group of friends gathering at Thai Plum Village to practice together in the Buddhist tradition of Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Naht Hanh. There we met with old friends of ours we haven’t seen since well before the pandemic descended upon the world whom we were able to introduce finally to our daughter. Needless to say, it was a joyous occasion. But as are all great moments, it was also met with joys mighty twin; Grief. Families from Hong Kong shared tales of not only the pandemic preventing them from coming together but the hard hand of authoritarian power as well. Friends from Vietnam joined us too and, with tears in their eyes reminded us that in their homeland they still are not allowed to practice their spiritual traditions in the proper ways. We zoomed with friends still locked down in China and heard their roaring cries. Everyones happiness was shrouded too, with sorrow. For those of us lucky to be present physically, we spent our days walking slowly together, sitting peacefully, mindfully observing our breath, the rhythms of our heartbeats and recognizing how always, in time, things change. Everything inter-is..
Master Thay, as Thich Naht Hanh was and continues to be lovingly referred to as, often told his students to “go as a river”, to flow effortlessly with life’s unpredictable, miraculous mystery, to not force anything but to skillfully adapt when needed, to breathe and smile, to change and let go. The analogy of the river seems so crucial now, as all over the world we are starting to realize, quite jarringly so, the awful results of trying to control rivers, to mindlessly extract from them whatever we wish, to rape them with dams and speak of them as though they are somehow less than sentient, little more than a “resource”. Now all water is filled with microplastics and toxic sludge. And so is true of us.
The griefs expressed at our gathering, of war, of hunger, of displacement and fear was all deeply parallel to the cries of the Mother Waters. When we neglect to keep healthy that which gives us life, we all suffer. Rivers, like cultures and his/herstories, are not simple, easily manageable straight lines on maps designating borders but timeless, regenerative narratives that birth meaning and life and take the form of not only the ever flowing waters seen in the narrows of great canyons walls but in the evaporated memory of where once River began Her beginningless journey to an ongoing destination not there. And we, being composed of roughly 99% water ourselves, are all of this too. So, if America, for example, convinces the world through force-feeding its colonizer language which conveniently refers to life as “it” that it’s form of education and progress is best, and over time thus distills all grand mythological lifelines into one straight line of industrialized control where all drink water from plastic bottles more than from sacred water sheds and few thus can remember where said watersheds are, much less how to properly feed the various entities who preside over these once central places of all origin… well, we know we ourselves thus are also dammed. We ourselves thus have clogged arteries and have been reduced to little more than resources for a massive industrialized metasphere seeking to shape us for a convenience that results in, at best, apathy, compliance and amnesia. At worst terror and rage…
Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.
Upon returning to Chiang Mai after our retreat, my wife and I went to see the new Avatar movie. Its focus on water was touching. The poignant portrayal of what happens when our lust for a single thing takes precedence over our caring for the whole, for all the seen and unseen forces that allow the things we want to even exist in the first place was nothing more than truly newsworthy, accurate, elegantly detailed journalism of what is actually occurring now. How arrogant we have become. How dull our memories. How weak or imaginations.
It is good to cry. The Ocean hears our tears as much as She provides us with them.
Does Mother Ocean remember how She was before plastic took over Her core? Do the countless sprites, goddesses, underwater creatures responsible for birthing the two-legged ones so long ago remember when humans honored the original agreements to not take that which does not belong to us? Who can remember now a world before plastic water bottles reigned supreme, when water, the most abundant of all resources was freely available to all?
I can. It wasn’t that long ago. Try…
At our retreat, all of us reflected on our respected countries’ various historical hates towards each other and made space for the gracious power of grief to wrap us in her watery, woolen arms. In ceremony, we bowed to the Animals, Plants and Minerals. We asked for both permission and forgiveness from the ancestors of our own bloodlines, of those of our spiritual tribes, of the land we live on currently, etc. Rivers of salt water flowed from our eyes as we touched the Earth. Elderly from China and Japan walked together hand in hand, aware that but a handful of years ago, blood, not tears would have surely been shed. I too, a nephew of soldiers who killed the uncles of those whom now feed me, looked deeply at the inherited wounds of ancestral hate. We all breathed together, acknowledged and honored our ancestors for the unthinkable traumas they understandably fled from and forgave them for reacting in ignorant, harmful ways. All blessings.
Change. Release. Flow like a River…
We cannot fully remove the plastics from the Sea, nor can we entirely remove the hatred from our past. It bubbles up like mud, offering life to the lotus flower. The violence is in us now, but we too are water. And we flow together as a sea. We will turn into Clouds and Rain. We will rise and fall again. We will take on many different shapes. For we are much more than our prejudice and fear. We are more than inherited narrow-minded views of self. We are the container that contains us, the canyon that carries the stream. As Thay always said, We inter-are.
Unborn and indestructible, beyond time and space.
How grand the union of once enemies.
How curious the marriage between petroleum and H2O.
May we bow before this irreverence and make it Holy.