Author
As surely as sunflowers turn their faces towards The Light, we’re facing—Yes!— The Great Turning:
Praise be! It’s happening! [Please read “Branded #6: ‘The Drop Becomes the Ocean’ for more about Jay O’Hara.]
Let us give thanks.
Let us praise.
And let us, Friends; brothers and sisters, double our efforts!
A regional drama has been resolved: For most of the summer, two cousins, members of the Demoulas family, have wrestled over control of the Market Basket discount-supermarket chain their Greek immigrant grandparents created.
And the good cousin won! The cousin who knew his employees’ names. Who wanted more of the profits shared with his workers. Who believed that working at the local Market Basket could actually be a career path.
I have observed this job viability at the Market Basket down the street. I have seen neighborhood kids trade in their Bruins and Pats tee shirts for Market Basket’s crimson jackets and move up the food chain. So to speak.
Getting back to the drama: In the first few days, as the cousins and their lawyers wrangled and Market Basket employees staged huge rallies in support of Good Cousin throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine; doing The Right Thing as a shopper wasn’t all that obvious. Because this dispute wasn’t really a labor dispute. (Although the Teamsters and other unions might have decided not to support the status quo/Bad Cousin because, pretty soon, the stores’ shelves were pretty much empty.)
“Don’t support Corporate Greed” begged a hand-made sign hung on my Market Basket’s parking-lot fence. So we didn’t. And shoppers across the region did the same thing. And, I’d like to believe, Bad Cousin, overwhelmed by the outpouring of support for his cousin, gave up.
That Good Cousin’s father, Telemachus Demoulas—named after the central character in Homer’s Odyssey, apparently—played fast and loose when he was in power and cheated his brother George, Bad Cousin’s dad, and all of George’s family and thus begat this Greek tragedy unto generations; what a great story!
And one everyone can relate to. Story does that. So I also choose to believe that’s why so many people supported Good Cousin. Because we know this family. They’re just like ours.
B.K.S Iyengar, a beloved and inspired teacher, and credited by many as the person who brought yoga to this country, died last week in India at the age of ninety-five. According to my teacher, Annie Hoffman, Iyengar’s first East Coast yoga “novitiate” was Patricia Walden—my first teacher. And who has studied—and continues to study—with Patricia? Annie.
So, maybe not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking about lines. About how my connection to a present-day spiritual leader has been elegantly straight and simple. And about how the line between me and, say, Jesus, ain’t. (More a “tangled web,” I’m afraid.) And about how blessed we are whenever we can experience the depth and the wisdom and the Truths of another person in person. Soul Time, not “facetime.” A straight and direct line.
Namaste.
*An ancient Sanskrit greeting still in everyday use in India and especially on the trail in the Nepal Himalaya. Translated roughly, it means “I bow to the God within you”, or “The Spirit within me salutes the Spirit in you” – a knowing that we are all made from the same One Divine Consciousness.
My route to yoga class takes me along one of the saddest blocks in my neighborhood. On one side of the street is a sprawling auto-body shop; busted-up, smashed vehicles, each mangled hood or bumper or smashed-in door telling a terrible story, wait their turn outside its multiple, side-by-side work stations. Across the street, next to a couple of derelict, abandoned buildings, lies a beery redemption center where the poorest of the poor redeem cans and bottles; a nickel per’s the going rate. (A tow truck company shares a driveway with the redemption center—not so much a poignant feature of the street as menacing, threatening. God forbid you’re walking past when one of their drivers pulls out of the driveway without looking or stopping!) No matter what the weather, leathery, bloodshot-eyed Hispanic men crouch between the waiting, mangled cars or in the doorways of the abandoned buildings to pass around a bottle of whatever their pooled nickels could buy. Haitian women, Asian women, scarfed women, mothers and grandmothers of every ethnicity push brimming shopping carts past the drinking or passed-out men; some sling giant-sized, bulging plastic bags over their shoulders as they maneuver the crowded sidewalk.
Last night, while at an evening yoga class, an idling car at a red light right outside the studio window played “gangsta rap”so loud our teacher felt compelled to apologize for the intrusion. As she were responsible. As if we, her white, affluent students, might be upset or offended by the rage and grating sounds outside—which lasted as long as it takes for a red light to turn green. As if none of us might be enraged that another unarmed black teenager has been shot dead. As we aren’t perpetually grated, horrified by the obscene gap between women like us and the women who tote bulky plastic bags to a redemption center (!?) to feed their children. As if being yoga students automatically means we’ve earned the right to ignore the reality right outside.
Ha!
[A fountain in downtown Boston]
Just finished Nadine Gortimer‘s Burger’s Daughter; she’d used the above quote by Chinese philosopher, Wang Yang-ming (1472—1529), to introduce Part Two of her amazing and painful and gorgeously written anti-apartheid novel. It just might be my new credo.
If I know that climate change is real but do nothing, I don’t know.
If I know that my country is riven by racism and the dregs of slavery yet do nothing, I know nothing.
If I know that the criminal justice system isn’t just but don’t speak out, I know nothing.
If I know that men and women have equal rights yet fail to act on behalf of my oppressed sisters, I’m an idiot.
if I can remember when water fountains and swimming pools and schools and buses were segregated but fail to exult when I notice that arc of the moral universe has bent a little closer towards justice—in my lifetime!—I remember nothing.
The House by the Side of the Road
by Sam Walter Foss
“He was a friend to man, and lived
In a house by the side of the road.”
— Homer
There are hermit souls that live withdrawn
In the place of their self-content;
There are souls like stars, that dwell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths
Where highways never ran-
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man. –
(Sam Foss, 1858—1911, was a well-known poet in his day and a beloved Somerville resident.)
Aside from an upcoming weekend in New Hampshire with friends, my summer travels are over. So I, like Mr. Foss, will happily spend the remaining, warm days on the side of the road—or, rather, on my front porch or back yard. Grateful that my injured daughter’s on the mend, grateful for kind and loving friends, family and neighbors, grateful for peaches and summer squash and vine-ripened tomatoes, I shall be grateful for this time to be grateful.
Praise be.
[My oldest with her youngest]
Every bloomin,’ freakin’ day are you getting 10 to 15 frantic emails from the Democratic Party and their kin? Do the senders wring their hands about the dire state we’re in and what terrible things will happen if YOU don’t send them 5 bucks? Do some “We’re teetering on the Edge!!” emails also remind you of how many times they’ve already emailed you this past week and yet . . . Do you struggle with this blitz of near-hysterical requests? Do you want to to do the right thing—yet wonder if money is really what’s needed? Do you suspect that your contribution’s simply adding to an already spiraling downward madness in this country?
Yeah. Me, too.
Here’s what I’m doing: If, indeed, raising money is truly the only way to save ourselves from That Other Party, my money’s going to Emily’s List. Because, it’s true, the personal is the political. And Emily’s List supports women candidates who will speak out on the issues that most affect me, my daughters and my grand-daughters; indeed, all women.
FYI, here’s a list that spells out–in part– what I’m talkin’ about:
[Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY, summer of 2013*]
“Either your children are the centerpiece of your life or they’re not. And all the rest is commentary.”
I’d copied that quote so many years ago I can’t quite remember which New Yorker writer, quoting his wife, wrote it, nor know any more the name of his wife. But I do know this: For forty-four years, ever since the birth of my first daughter, that statement is me.
And yet it took a tiny, peppermint-striped, baby’s sunhat jammed into the chainlink fence to really, piercingly understand how true that is!
I’d been walking around Fresh Pond last evening, a reservoir for the city of Cambridge, when I’d spotted that sunhat. Although a popular and well-used wildlife preserve and nature walk, the actual pond is carefully cordoned off. Hence that chainlink fence.
I was there for the beauty and the solace of trees and sunflowered meadows and redwinged blackbirds and late-afternoon sunlight on water, having just gotten word that my grown daughter, who’d had been in a horrible bike accident on Saturday, had just gotten out of surgery. And that it went well.
So much to process as I walked: Lingering, still-heart-racing shock. (She lives and bikes in Connecticut; I’d been in Louisville, Kentucky when I’d heard the news.) Overwhelming gratitude that her sisters and her loving husband have been and are still so hands-on taking exquisite care of her. Relief the surgery, which took hours, went well. Anxiety. Worry. Sadness. A roiling, boiling stew.
And then, suddenly, I saw it, that sweet little hat, tucked into the fence because some baby had lost it and someone else had picked it up and carefully displayed it in the hope it would be found.
And motherlove just flooded me, primal, fundamental, incredibly powerful, central to who I am; the centerpiece of my life, indeed.
* This photo references a well-known children’s book re motherlove. Do you know which one?
Today, a young man wearing a Maid of the Mist tee shirt and I crossed paths on a Somerville sidewalk. Exactly one week ago I was at Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. Had that young man been one of the blue mass of people I’d photographed?
Silly? Of course. What are the odds? Terrible. Nevertheless I’m reminded of a delightful poem by the Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, that speaks of Chance. And wonder. So on this sweltering, pre-thunder storm Tuesday, here it is:
Love at First Sight
They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways –
perhaps they’ve passed each other by a million times?
I want to ask them
if they don’t remember –
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a “sorry” muttered in a crowd?
a curt “wrong number” caught in the receiver? –
but I know the answer.
No, they don’t remember.
They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.
Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.
There were signs and signals
even if they couldn’t read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood’s thickets?
There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night perhaps some dream
grown hazy by morning.
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA (1993)
Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh
Yesterday, with much help from my patient and ever-helpful husband, I moved my writing desk to the third floor—and away from the phone and the distractions of email and the Internet. (Yes. The draft I’m currently working on I’m writing by hand.) To further simulate a writing space where Jane Austen or George Sand might have composed, a brass, wind-up clock I’d bought at a yard sale sits on my desk, too, its gentle ticks calming me as I work.
My desk just fits in a little alcove under a skylight. So when I’m stuck—which happens every five minutes or so—my eyes travel upward to watch clouds or circling swallows or the wind move through the tops of trees across the street. At one such stuck moment yesterday, I noticed a tiny green bug hurtling itself against the skylight screen. The next stuckness; there that bug was, again. Preoccupied with my work—What does this character want? What’s motivating this character?—it took me a few such stucknesses to realize that the bug was trying to get out. Throwing itself against that screen again and again. Moving towards light.
As is, I realized, my character!
Thanks bug. Thanks, Light.
For about a half-hour one night last week, a squall blew through Somerville. Drinking my coffee on the deck the next morning, my back yard littered with tree branches and leaves and a couple of sodden, plastic bags, I heard what I can only describe as a “whimper,” a plaintive and persistent cry coming from, I discovered, a baby cardinal sitting on a rock next to our tiny backyard pond. Could the high winds of the night before have blown this little creature, easy to identify by its downy crest, out of its nest? Quite possibly. And, it turned out, its brother or sister as well. Because, as I watched, two crested fledglings awkwardly moved to a low bush and then to our hammock and then to a higher bush and then to the top of our neighbor’s fence and then to a branch of the neighbor’s peach tree where a male cardinal suddenly appeared to feed one baby and then the other!
Yesterday morning, one of those fledglings zoomed right over my head and landed on the deck’s wrought-iron table—just two feet away from where I was again drinking my coffee.
“Hey, little guy,” I said. “You shouldn’t be there. You’re supposed to be afraid of me.” It didn’t move. So I stomped my foot as hard as I could. And away it flew.
Such a simple act; frightening an animal in order to teach it to be wary of humans. No big deal, right?
Yet this simple (and well-meaning) act makes me wonder about the not-so-simple decisions to do something difficult or unpleasant “for the greater good.” I think about decision-makers who must wrestle with much, much more difficult trade-offs, must weigh the needs of one person or group against those of others, decide who deserves the legislation, the research funding, the right to live; whatever.
(Sometimes I am just so grateful to just sit in my own backyard praising God, not being God!)
Yesterday felt like the first, perfect summer day—probably because I spent it with my precious granddaughter. But also because it’s been rainy and/or gray around here for what seems like weeks, New England’s version of climate change.* Welcome, sunshine!
In mid-afternoon my granddaughter and I went to a shady park near my house where the older children ran in and out of jets of water sprayed by the park’s sunflower-shaped sprinklers. Not quite ready to join the delighted, screaming throng, my almost-two granddaughter hung back to quietly watch at my knee. A deep, male voice behind us, speaking with a middle-eastern accent, I’m guessing, commented on what he saw: “Water is everything.”
Yes, it is. And you—humans are 50 to 60% water—don’t have to be from a rain-parched part of the world to appreciate the depth of that man’s statement, do you!
Let’s let someone else from the Middle East have the last word: Rain righteousness, you heavens, let the skies above pour down; let the earth open to receive it, that it may bear fruit of salvation with righteousness in blossom at its side. [Isaiah 45:8]
* Bill McKibben re climate change in New England: “Rainfall is becoming steadily more intense — if we aren’t getting more rain in total, and we probably are; it is definitely coming in more concentrated bursts than we tend to deal with.”