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I don’t know if I have good advice for anyone about getting through this time. I am struggling. If pressed to say anything, I’d tell other black people, talk to other black people, as much as possible. You suffer less if you live in a shared reality. Be with wise folks, if at all possible.

An African American Dharma teacher said in a recent online retreat for people of color, people will be having nervous breakdowns. I believe him. I wish it could be easier. He said this in answer to a question from woman who expressed physical symptoms of stress. I have those symptoms. Insomnia, sadness, stomach upset. I get a few hours’ sleep and I think I have this conundrum licked. Then I spend a night without sleep and I wonder if I will survive these times, then I get some sleep and feel a little better, and the cycle starts again.

By the way, white people; don’t go to your black friends or acquaintances or co-workers for any solutions to your angst, guilt, or sadness. We are treading water. We are in a land filled with people who forgo their higher thought processes when they see us walking down the street or sitting across from them in job interviews. You will do it anyway, ask us to make you feel better. I’ve seen it. At the last community where I lived, one of the founders, a white man, asked, after the current president was elected, “Black people have had to deal with a lot of adversity and stress. How do you do it?” He asked me this. I answered “How do we do it? On the whole have high blood pressure, heart attacks and we die.”

We don’t always do that. Some of us persevere because of a simple truth. Some know that we are more than this. I am more than my body. Simple. But it is not an easy truth to live in the day-to-day. Anyone who has tried knows this. I have been meditating and looking at my mind, paying very good attention to it for years for the purpose of healing childhood and inter-generational trauma. I have been saying to my mind, “I am more than this.” And I still struggle with getting through the nervous breakdown and beyond it so that I can get on with the business of healing myself, humanity, and the planet.

If I never thought of meditating, I might be blissfully unaware of any feelings out of the ordinary. But I do meditate and I’m glad that years ago, I had a jump on how to get through this day by meditating. Now is a good time to start a practice if you don’t have one. It is not a great time, but it is the only time you have. I don’t feel at my best right now, but I know I am lucky because I have a practice.

I was listening to a talk where I live here on full presence mindfulness, and I believed that Rinpoche was talking about us having an effect on reality with our thoughts, or that is what I took from the talk on the reading. I’ve heard it before, manifesting reality. And, I’d call what we’ve done with the planet and the culture of humanity ‘feedback on our collective thought processes.’ This culture could benefit from nearly every one of its people trying something else in the way of thought processes, something other than or in addition to what we have been thinking.

This is what I believe and say about these times when I am in a zoom circle, and when I start talking to the black people among us. I say with certitude that we are all prepared for these times, or we would not be here listening and hearing each other’s words in these conversations.

The legend of Harriet Tubman is now a movie, but before she was a movie title, I learned about her in Sunday school growing up. She is not a suggestion that there is someone out there that we must wait for to rescue us. Her legend is about us all having the potential to be despised, enslaved, beaten and hit on the head with a lead weight, and turned into a superhero with eyes in the back of our heads. I understand the problem with the superhero narrative. It simplifies the goings on in the world down to good versus evil, as it declares war on something. Okay. Let’s call her an alchemist of situations and circumstances by way of her thoughts and beliefs. Let us suppose that this time is very critical, and it’s challenging to our nervous systems because we are solving the dilemma of how to save ourselves from extinction by shedding the unsustainable ideas in our minds.

The Founding

There is no way, from my point of view, to ascribe benevolence to owning another human as chattel, unless whoever uses that descriptive suffers from psychosis.

Thomas Jefferson’s mansion stands atop his mountain like the Platonic ideal of a house: a perfect creation existing in an ethereal realm, literally above the clouds. To reach Monticello, you must ascend what a visitor called “this steep, savage hill,” through a thick forest and swirls of mist that recede at the summit, as if by command of the master of the mountain. “If it had not been called Monticello,” said one visitor, “I would call it Olympus, and Jove its occupant.” The house that presents itself at the summit seems to contain some kind of secret wisdom encoded in its form. Seeing Monticello is like reading an old American Revolutionary manifesto—the emotions still rise. This is the architecture of the New World, brought forth by its guiding spirit.

In designing the mansion, Jefferson followed a precept laid down two centuries earlier by Palladio: “We must contrive a building in such a manner that the finest and most noble parts of it be the most exposed to public view, and the less agreeable disposed in by places, and removed from sight as much as possible.”

The mansion sits atop a long tunnel through which slaves, unseen, hurried back and forth carrying platters of food, fresh tableware, ice, beer, wine and linens, while above them 20, 30 or 40 guests sat listening to Jefferson’s dinner-table conversation. At one end of the tunnel lay the icehouse, at the other the kitchen, a hive of ceaseless activity where the enslaved cooks and their helpers produced one course after another.

During dinner Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert an empty wine bottle and seconds later pull out a full bottle. We can imagine that he would delay explaining how this magic took place until an astonished guest put the question to him. The panel concealed a narrow dumbwaiter that descended to the basement. When Jefferson put an empty bottle in the compartment, a slave waiting in the basement pulled the dumbwaiter down, removed the empty, inserted a fresh bottle and sent it up to the master in a matter of seconds. Similarly, platters of hot food magically appeared on a revolving door fitted with shelves, and the used plates disappeared from sight on the same contrivance. Guests could not see or hear any of the activity, nor the links between the visible world and the invisible that magically produced Jefferson’s abundance. Read the entire article

Smithsonian Magazine

Tulsa

The Tulsa race massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre) of 1921 took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.^[1] It has been called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.”^[15] The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as “Black Wall Street”.

Rosewood

Before the massacre, the town of Rosewood had been a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Trouble began when white men from several nearby towns lynched a black Rosewood resident because of accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been assaulted by a black drifter. A mob of several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors from the town hid for several days in nearby swamps until they were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. No arrests were made for what happened in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by its former black and white residents; none ever moved back, they were never compensated for their land and the town ceased to exist.

Whether we know it of not, we are witnessing a shift in momentum for this country and the entire world. An increasing momentum to evolve. This momentum may have started with an unknown man or woman who jumped off of a slave ship rather than be enslaved in this land. It may have been furthered by Denmark Vesey, Harriett Tubman, and Geronimo, furthered by their desire to not rest until they were free.

Continue reading “apocalypse: knowledge or revelation”

I live a hundred million light years away from white people on this planet. I remember when I was about five, a white boy who lived next door to me took a hammer and smashed my fingers as I walked along the side of a fence between our houses. His mother stood on the back porch unflinching with her arms folded in front of her. There were no cell phones with video cameras. So, yes, in answer to any queries, I’m sure it happened. What did I do to provoke him. you ask. What, under the sun, could I have done to deserve that?

This is my America, A hundred million light years away from whiteness.

The founding fathers, all but one, owned slaves in order to amass fortunes. They considered my people chattel. In the same breath, these founding fathers mouthed and penned the Constitution. Most Americans from the dominant culture can’t see the founding fathers as anything other than heroes, and me an ungrateful asshole because I consider them assholes.

I don’t have the capacity to have conversations with people whose eyes are sealed so tight. I wouldn’t have any energy left to live.

As I write this, I am worried that no one is quite like me, while at the same time I am certain that no one is. I want someone to give me a nod of understanding as I speak and I recount my life.

Someone died on the corner where I live last week. I saw the ambulance come, but I didn’t know what the fuss was about. I only heard the reason for the fuss later. The fuss was about an old man who died. He went to sleep on the sidewalk and never woke up.

The next day, I went walking because I woke up tired and groggy after sleeping quite a while. Walking is how I fix groggy. On my walk, I saw another old man lying on some grass next to a sidewalk. I approached a parked AC Transit bus close by. I stared at the driver through the door.  After a minute or so, the driver looked at me and held up four fingers, which meant she was leaving in 4 minutes.

After another minute, she opened the back doors of the otherwise empty vehicle. I saw that the front part of the bus was cordoned off with yellow tape from floor to ceiling, formed into a large X with a box around it. I stepped inside of the bus and pulled my mask down and asked, “how long has that man been laying on the ground?” She looked at me in the rear view mirror as I went on.  “Someone died on the corner by where I live the other day after he fell asleep. He was an old man, and that is an old man.

She replied, “have you said anything to him?” I shrugged and walked out as she watched.  I stood above the man as he lay motionless. I said, “how are you doing?” He stirred in his sleep. He was alive, but I didn’t know what else to do with one man on the street, among many. He remained asleep and I don’t know if he’s dead today.

He was black, and I’m black, and the bus driver was black, and I hate what I imagine privileged white people will feel as I am saying this. I am imagining pity. I just hate it. I ask the universe to transmute my hatred daily. Constantly. I do this for my own personal reasons having to do with healing. Anyway, I don’t regard what happens to us as acceptable any more than I would regard what might happen to someone that I know personally as acceptable.

And, I have many people from my past, including friends and family members that I am no longer in communication with, and I tell myself that I don’t know what to do with them other than distance myself from them for my own emotional health, and this is another story, or perhaps, it is the same story. And perhaps healing my own personal anger is part of the same story.

I passed the bus driver as I continued on my walk and I looked up at her as she looked at me. I shrugged and she nodded.

I remember how my own family’s response to having me live with them last year as I struggled to stay housed was to turn me down summarily.

I had put the old man by the bus out of my mind by the time I woke up the next morning feeling tired even though I slept ten hours. It was hard for me to get out of bed. Since the shelter-in-place orders, aside from feeling next to nothing, I have been feeling my mortality. I ate the coconut yogurt that I made several weeks prior.  I very much wanted to douse it with honey, even thought I don’t need sugars for six or seven really good reasons having to do with my general health and my relatively even-minded brand of sanity.

Technically, the yogurt still tasted good, and technically, I slept long enough, so maybe all of this is hard, even though I won’t run out of money by the end of the month for the first time since longer than I care to admit.

Maybe the black jogger, Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, that those two men shot is weighing on me. Or maybe my reading about that black paramedic, Breonna Taylor, that the police shot in her home after trying to serve an arrest warrant on the wrong residence weighs on me.

Maybe this tiredness ought to be happening because tiredness is my only possible reaction to what I witness with the emotional tools that I possess.

I’m going to talk with my editor about the plot to the novel I’m writing. I say that to help me embrace that this is not always how I will feel because this is a mere snapshot in time.

I want to believe that this time in human history, along with this helpless feeling and this dread, will pass on as part of something divined by the living earth, perhaps. I’m taking it upon myself to go a piece of the way toward my personal recovery from the western culture in which I am immersed, as I witness it stumbling and falling down.

Some days, I say to myself, I love this world so much, I want to watch it burn.

I want this instant to be one of seeing without mindlessly circumventing what is inside of me or in front of me. I want this to be an instant of reacting to things like old men who sleep or die on sidewalks next to empty buses as I wonder and wonder (don’t stop wondering) what I need to do next.

Some part of me, some front and center part, really doesn’t want to write this because I really don’t want white people thinking they understand what I am feeling.

One day when I was either in preschool or early grade school, I was out by the pomegranate tree that grew in the side yard next to the house where I grew up in East Oakland, My dad came up to me and told me about my ancestors. Time moved differently when I was four or five. It might have been the day after the kid hit me with the hammer, It might have been a week later, or the next month As he spoke an epoch had passed because the prior was out of my mind.

He said, “Your ancestors were slaves. White people enslaved us. They stole black people from Africa and they murdered them and they raped them and they beat them with whips and they tortured them and our ancestors had to work all of their lives in fields to make white people rich. He said Mo was mostly an Indian, and Mo’s mother was kidnapped from her tribe when she was four, and he spoke of how white people made her mother clean house for other white people.

I listened quietly, Mo may have been the untouchable person in my life that I looked up to. I woke up next to her at four in the morning the summer when I visited her in her tiny house in colored town in Arkansas. My great grandmother who took me fishing. I sat next to her on her back porch while she plucked a chicken or snapped beans.

I’d follow her to the yard in the predawn while she dug up night crawlers. She piled me into her pickup truck and she took me fishing. I sat at the kitchen table while she made tomato preserves that I would later eat with her buttermilk biscuits. She had a habit of going for hours without an utterance, and that silence lifted a burden from me. Her silence did something to my mind that saved it.

Her house sat on an unpaved street and with infrastructure so bad that some of the people had outhouses. It wasn’t until about a year ago, as I read the story of a present day segregated town in the south with no paved streets or adequate plumbing in the black section, that I realized how intentionally hateful the substandard conditions were. As a small child, I thought that my dad’s relatives merely lived in the country under rural conditions.

On that day with my dad by the pomegranate tree, after he told me about my ancestors, he got up and and he left me alone.

Eventually, later that week or later that day, my mother took my brothers and me to a store up the block called Lucky’s, filled with white people who worked and sometimes shopped there. It didn’t seem that we were particularly disadvantaged, and my dad’s talk gave me context for how the people looked at me. On that day, partly because of my mother’s chronic emotional instability, and partly because of what my father told me, my mind filled the world with a sense that anything awful might happen to me or all of us, and that my parents could do nothing to stop it.

It would take me decades to associate the two incidents, the boy with the hammer with his mother who looked on, with my father telling me of all of those things that happened during slavery and reconstruction, and to Mo’s mother when she was only four. Until I could make the association, I was so angry at my father for scaring me, that I hated him and then pushed the hatred away. Until lately.

Then, ever since I saw the video of George Floyd being murdered, I have been filled with the same sense of inconsolable anger and hatred, This time, with hatred of whiteness instead of my dad for scaring me, I am told by more than one wisdom tradition that hatred is like poison. Still, this emotion persists in my chest, affecting this body which houses my soul. So I ask that the universe, or my higher self or something bigger than me or the situation solve this. I ask that there be an altar that I can place it on.

I went vegan. It was as if the universe was trying to tell me that there will be no simple answers. I don’t have the digestive system to consume grains. I ate wheat for decades, and I got that thing where you can’t eat gluten any more, It got worse, yadda, yah.

I can’t disengage from the oil economy as neatly and easily as I would like to. I would like to heal everything as simply as a slogan ending in an exclamation point. Really, I would. I would like to manifest a cob house and grow my own food, yet, I have no home because of gentrification and displacement.

I would be dead if it weren’t for the oil economy because at age 13, I had to have an operation for a tumor that was disintegrating my jaw. The question for me becomes how do I proceed to save the world after I have completed step one of getting off my prayer and meditation cushion.

I look at people who, with millions of dollars, believe that they can never have enough. Up until now, they can’t stop doing and start being. They have the inability to share. One of them I know intimately. A viral illness infecting our mind states has people with more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime believing that they need more. So this is the dilemma that I find myself in while inhabiting a country that drives this mind states.

As a culture, this country hasn’t cured itself of worshiping the forefathers who owned slaves and sanctioned genocide while proclaiming that all men are created equal. Its citizens are barely cognizant of how America became the cultural force that it is. If the Constitution is beautiful to read, I suspect that the energy of its writers as also infected it, no matter how eloquent, and us.

I’m not nearly done, but so far, I have concluded that healthy mind states can also infect the culture like an advantageous virus as I consider myself to be the earth walking, talking, and taking guidance from the earth under my feet, guidance on how to heal itself and ourselves through me. In my case, I am healing bitterness and cultivating compassion and understanding. In my case, I attempt to hold dilemmas that I cannot instantly solve. For me, this looks like learning more and more every day about how my very existence is devastating to the planet, even while eating mono crop vegetables, which can include soy, a lot of which is grown in what used to be rain forests of Argentine. For me, living means holding heartbreak and choosing to have enough room to also find healing.

And for me, living looks like a lot of my own food prep.  It means considering where my food was grown and how it was treated, for example, bio-dynamic and humanely. I consider the time and the skills that I take in food preparation a gift that I asked spirit for some years ago. When I run out of funds, I have compassion for myself, for all I have been through as I heal my blockages to abundance, and I buy what I need to eat to stay nourished as best I can, as I consider this life I’ve been given a gift.