More Is Being Asked of Us Now Than Possibly Ever Before in Our Lives: We Strive, Not Yet Knowing How, Not Yet Knowing If We’ll Succeed. All We Know is the Need to Act

How do we read the signs that the world and our own hearts and minds are giving us? The universe doesn’t just text us one, clearly typed message, explaining all we’re facing. Would we even welcome such a message? Maybe we do get such messages sometimes and aren’t sure if we’re hallucinating it?

 

I’ve been reading Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji, by Shinshu Roberts, and just started to alternate it with Seaglass: A Jungian Analyst’s Exploration of Suffering and Individuation, by Gilda Frantz. Dogen is a 13th Century Zen teacher and founder of one of the main schools of Japanese Buddhism. I usually read only 2-4 pages at a time, because each paragraph is like a puzzle requiring considerable reflection. But the beauty that can be discovered in doing so is immense. Frantz’s book was recommended by 2 Facebook friends. It’s been a remarkable find, of essays, personal stories, and interviews about facing the difficult in life and revealing the myths and motivations that drive us.

 

And yesterday, after reading a little in both books, a deep realization, frightening in its scope, grabbed my mind and challenged my emotions. Both books synchronistically seemed to be sending one message, a message of something being asked, no, demanded of me. Something more than I’ve already given, to the world, to myself. It was less a regret for something left undone than a glimpse into an opportunity⎼ if I could take it. Frightening in the risks involved, both in the doing or undoing.

 

There’s a sense of inevitability posed by life in these times, hidden between news reports and the sounds of rain. Between bare tree branches, deep gray clouds, and the feel of tension in my hands and shoulders. Between the ordinary, the known, and the extraordinary and unknown. And a question⎼ We know we must act. But how?

 

More is being asked of all of us than probably ever before in our lives. No matter how much I might want this not to be so, that is the reality. We must let go of so much of what’s normal to our lives so we can do what the times require of us. What our inner selves demand of us.

 

How do  we change our lives internally so we can respond skillfully to the fear DT incites and manipulates in us? To the assault on our values and humanity? How do we respond to his blatant assaults on our security as a people and a nation? To our health care? To our incomes? To threats of deporting immigrants of color, from Latin America? Threats to LGBTQ+? To anyone who opposes him? To the rule of law? How do we respond to the expanding climate and ecological crises?

 

How do I feel less the me isolated from the rest of us, and more of the rest of us in me? Doing so might not only reveal how to help others, and maybe help others realize what they, too, can do, but inspire or expose unseen depths in myself. I want to meditate even more than I do. To learn more than I know. To do more.

 

To help me do this, I plan to read poets and writers from Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and the US, about how to face the horrors caused by one group of humans against others. Or read writers from the distant past, in ancient China when the social order had collapsed, or even in Ukraine or Eastern Europe, in the villages where my own family might have once lived⎼ so we can feel any horrors of life can be faced, and the strength in ourselves to act can be found….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Reducing Anxiety so We Can Live Through the Next Few Days. Final Thoughts: In an Autocracy, We as Citizens, Consumers, Patients, and Workers Lose Our Rights

First, a personal concern:

How do we reduce the anxiety most of us are feeling about the election to something we can live with? DT has done all he can to make this difficult. He has worked to make the election as chaotic and threatening as possible. He’s done all he could to try to fix or hold up election results and frighten election workers. He’s promised if he wins to rule like a dictator, use the military against those who oppose him, and violence if he loses. He has falsely claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged, and now he claims this one’s been rigged, so whether he loses, or wins, we won’t know who our next president will be for hours, days or weeks after Tuesday. But the evidence shows that the only candidate in the 2024 race who’s tried to illegally interfere in the election process is DT himself.

 

I’m tired of him. I want him to just lose, again, but this time, disappear from the political stage. I’m trying different strategies to keep my eyes open while keeping my heart rate as comfortable as I can. One strategy is to do whatever and as much as I can to get out the vote, or as Michelle Obama said, to do something.

 

I’m also considering my own health, mental and physical. One way I’m doing that is to study how, in the worst of times, maybe we can get stronger. In the midst of my fright, maybe there’s buried the way to face what frightens me. In a book about the Japanese Zen teacher and philosopher Dogen Zenji by Shinshu Roberts, the author quotes Dogen and other teachers on facing what we don’t like. The mental states that we wish would just disappear, he says, might just reveal the wisdom that we need. We don’t find wisdom in a vacuum. There are things we must put off; it’s difficult to talk about wisdom when our mind is focused on survival. Yet our lives are so much better when we can bring as much awareness as possible to whatever we face.

 

Maybe if we can just stop what we’re doing, and sit, stand, exercise, or take a walk in a beautiful area; maybe take a breath. Feel our feet on the floor. For one minute we can take a holiday and feel this moment, now, so fully we won’t have the space to imagine later. Maybe when it’s possible and with as much awareness as possible, we can write down or dance out the thoughts in our mind or the feelings in our body, without editing or hiding them. Then we will better perceive how to face the next moment, no matter what occurs. And, if we haven’t done so already, we can be relaxed yet alert when we vote.

 

A last argument before the election:

A week before election day, Kamala Harris gave a powerful final argument for her campaign. She said we all know who DT is and what he’d delver, more chaos, hate, and division. More power and wealth to the rich at the expense of the rest of us. For example, his 10-50% tariff on imported goods would raise the burden on most of us hundreds to  thousands of dollars while proportionally reducing the burden on the rich. Many economists warn his plans could crash the economy.

 

But what needs to be said more clearly is that the economy and the cost of living is not a separate issue from that of democracy….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.