Ring of Fire
Israel, Palestine and Humanity's Dangerous Loop...
First, my apologies for not posting anything this last Saturday. My mother and father were visiting us and we were all visiting dear friends at the Turtle Lake Refuge, a beautiful high desert farm community that has successfully regenerated land that was heavily wrecked by harsh chemicals and now enjoys an abundant life. That morning my family and I rose early to journey to the edge of Canyon of the Ancients to witness the annular eclipse, offer prayers for peace and reflect over our time spent here on Turtle Island before we begin our journey back to Thailand.
Many peoples of the world, currently and historically, view eclipses not as entertaining spectacles but as ominous celestial events that should not be directly witnessed casually. It is a time of piercing introspection that offers us an opportunity to deeply consider the implications of the actions we take both individually and collectively. Living in these modern times forces so much compromise, and I often fear I have become too rigid with views I have adopted that don’t align well with the yearning of kin more accepting of modernity than I, so, for better or for worse, I am trying to be more fluid and accommodating. Thus, I kept opinions to myself and opted to go with the flow and bask in the rays of Fathers Suns mysterious solar cover up.
Thank the gods for libraries. It is highly recommended of course that humans refrain from looking directly at the Sun. As such, we needed to acquire the appropriate eclipse-ready glasses. Fortunately for us here in America, libraries offer so much to the general population and they did not fail us when we couldn’t find glasses for sale anywhere else. We stopped by the Mencos library in route to Cortez and were kindly offered several glasses for free (as well as warm coffee!). Long live public libraries!
Eventually we found ourselves in the middle of a gorgeous desert canyon, surrounded by the old walls of an ancient people. Giant yucca plants and twisty piñon pines kindly offered us shade from the scorching heat as my family and I began to sing and give offerings to the world that has kept us alive and inspired us in countless ways. We fumbled through prayers, attempting to honor peoples long gone, to pay respect to animals, educations, plants, and life ways nearly forgotten, in an attempt to keep their memory alive somehow as the moon gracefully progressed over the entirety of the sun.
photo by Kevin Florke
I often feel a tinge of awkwardness and guilt, of strange sadness and general discomfort when I try to pray. It’s a terrible, worthless emotional cocktail. All humans, no matter what bloodline we sprout from, are made to make offerings, designed not to be mindless cogs in a consumerist hamster-wheel of endless thievery but ritualized beings who masterfully make beauty for the sake of a Bigger Story. Yet in knowing the horrible atrocities inflicted by “my” people upon the peoples of this land and lands across the globe, I still struggle to confidently sing songs aloud to the Holy, fearing that by in activating such tender, truly human motions is to foster yet another form of colonization and theft somehow. Yet something, someone, deep in my incompetent bones demands I keep singing nonetheless. So on we go, doing our best, trying to be authentic, courageous and true. We fail. We return. We laugh. We cry. We ask for permission, forgiveness and grace. We try…
As the sun became fully eclipsed, I felt in my heart the wailing cries of countless souls the world over. I could hear my dear Israeli sisters weeping of the terrors inflicted on their beloved people. I could hear too the cries of my Palestinian brothers in response to the ongoing horrors inflicted on their families by Israel. I could hear then the people of Iraq and Afghanistan grieve deeply over the destruction of their lands, of their culture, children and home. So too could I hear the sorrowful mourning of the people whose land I then was standing upon right there in what now is arrogantly, ironically referred to as “Cortez”. And I could feel the sadness of those whose families were killed on 9/11 in New York City and so too the cries of those whose lives were destroyed in the aftermath as a result of violent retaliation as well as the evil that originally drove them to attack the twin towers in the first place.
Round and round the circle goes. Violence begetting more violence. Darkness covering the earth. The cycle continues again and again, relentlessly with seemingly no end in sight. Sadness turning into hate. Hate turning into rage. Rage activating terrorism and amnesia, inspiring yet more of the same. Until suddenly, miraculously, the moon, la luna with gentle, patient, feminine grace, passed over the Sun, el sol, presents a full return of Light.
The metaphor was not lost to me. At one point it even appeared that the great gig in the sky was showering upon us a crystalline portrayal of unity, as fractilized imagery of both a Muslim moon and a Jewish star seemed to manifest outwards from some celestial center as if God herself was trying to make it clear that the vicious cycle of fear and ignorant response can in fact be broken, that peace is possible.
My family and I are now spending a few days in Los Angeles, a place we have had few good experiences in. As some of you may recall from an earlier post, upon entry into L.A. this last April my wife was greeted with great disrespect and treated extremely poorly by U.S. immigration. It is easy now to view the entire city of Los Angeles (and the U.S.A. at large) as a terrible, mean-hearted place and vow to never return and only speak poorly of it. Yet, we decided to give it another try. Instead of b-lining it straight through LAX and onward to Bangkok (incidentally another city that, when translated, also means “City of Angels”) we decided to spend a few days in L.A. before departing with hopes of making amends and discovering her beauty.
For the past couple of days we have here met with amazing people from all walks of life who carry with them extraordinary stories of cultural survival and hope. It is not Hollywood that makes this city great but the unseen heroism of a world left in the shadows. It is the trees and the crashing of powerful waves at the edge of a land once lived with in a good way by the Tongva peoples. It is a beautiful place, filled with generous, kind people, as I am certain is Israel, Iraq, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, etc. etc. etc.
As we pack our bags one last time and prepare to return to Thailand, we do so with gratitude in our hearts, for the good that resides in peoples everywhere. May this good be nurtured and made able to grow.
A homeless man I met on the Santa Monica Pier this morning told me what we really need now is faith, the faith of a mustard seed. I will remember this kind man. And I will travel forward with more faith than fear.
My daughter playing in the sand alongside the Santa Monica Pier, the official end point of the fabled Route #66
#maypeaceprevailonearth
Even as they
strike you down
with a mountain of hatred and violence;
even as they step on you and crush you
like a worm,
even as they dismember and disembowel you, remember, brother,
remember:
man is not our enemy.— Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh (excerpt from the poem Recommendation)
A message from Plum Village Monastery, California, USA
October 13th, 2023
…
Dear Beloved Community,
Our hearts are breaking as we witness the horrific violence that is being unleashed in many parts of the world and most recently in the Middle East: in Israel and in Gaza. We know that both Palestinians and Israelis are our siblings—our brothers, sisters, children, our family—who are being killed, and who are driven to kill. In an atmosphere of violence, accusation and retaliation, we have a tendency to dehumanize the other. Once anger, fear, and suspicion take over, it seems like there is nothing to do besides kill or be killed.
Today we shed tears as we witness our Israeli and Palestinian siblings dying, sustaining severe injuries—both psychological and physical—and losing loved ones in the hate-fueled attacks of the very few. Violence can only lead to more violence and diminish any possibility of dialogue and reconciliation—unless we go deeply within ourselves to see that human beings are not our enemy. We need a coalition of wise and courageous people—in Gaza, West Bank, Israel and in the international community—who refuse to give in to this hate: a non-violent army. It is time for violence in all its many forms to end in the Holy Land.
With compassion, love, and wisdom in our hearts we can make ourselves available to listen deeply to the cries of those now in Gaza and Israel and elsewhere in the world—the cries of those undergoing the deep mental crisis of being trapped in a conflict zone, who are looking to keep their love strong in the midst of this horror. We need to lend them our strength. We all need to go beyond the delusive and destructive idea that we are separate from each other.
Let us create islands of non-violence and peace in our hearts, in our homes and beyond, via email, phone and video. Let us live every moment seeing those we think of as the enemy as not separate from ourselves—as our own blood, skin and bones—and let us not allow hatred to take over. Let us come back and take care of our feelings with calm and clarity, holding our sadness, fear, anger, and despair and resist the temptation to blame, punish, and have to choose a side.
This meditation may be challenging at this moment but it is what we as a collective need now in order to awaken from the madness and destruction. Revenge and punishment cannot be the answer. Join us to generate this imperturbable compassion in your own heart, and radiate it out in every direction to our siblings experiencing great loss, fear and pain in this moment. The war is complex and difficult to stop, but it is also impermanent. Its cessation now depends on our capacity, as human beings, to listen deeply, resist polarization and discrimination, and take concrete steps towards lasting reconciliation with love in our hearts. Love, compassion, and courage need to have a place in politics.
With love for all beings suffering in the hell of war,
The Plum Village Monastic Community, California, USA
*another take on eclipses: Honoring of Tradition