Just Sitting

I'm taking with me these words by Barry Magid as I prepare to leave for a four-day silent meditation retreat:

Imagine sitting down in front of a mirror. Your face automatically appears. There is no effort required; the mirror is doing all the work. You can’t do it right or wrong. The Zen Buddhist practice of “just sitting” is like that. When we sit, our mind automatically begins to display itself to us. Our practice is to observe and experience what appears moment after moment. Of course, just as when we look in a real mirror, things don’t stay that simple for long.

White Privledge, Part One

I just finished reading Waking Up White, and at first, I didn't quite know what to think of it. It's a memoir organized around Debby Irving's understanding of race and how it changed. Much of the book involves discovering how much she benefited from being white, a tough, sometimes even taboo subject. So Irving is writing about sometimes cringe-inducing moments. At times I was embarrassed for her.

Feeling confused about my own thoughts, after I finished the book, I read a few reviews at Goodreads.com. Many were complimentary. Some complained that she started out so unbelievably naive that she was disqualified from having anything to say. Others said it was a good book for those (ignorant souls) who knew little about white racism. After this, somehow, I felt a little surer of my own conclusions.

Irving grew up in an elite New England town. Her family had a nice house plus a vacation cottage, membership in a country club, and access to excellent schools. Through her parents and her culture, she absorbed the belief that people like her parents inhabit that position because they and their ancesters have worked hard to earn all that they have. In contrast, people who have less have worked and tried less.

Then, in 2009 at age 48, Irving starts a master's degree program at Wheelock College in Boston and finds herself in a class called “Racial and Cultural Identity.” There she is thrust into a new and disturbing understanding of white racial identity in the United States. The book is the story of her journey plus a report on ways race has influenced life in the United States and its history.

Here is a short excerpt.

Prior to the Wheelock course, my attempts to make sense of racism had been akin to trying to understand a game just by watching the plays. I made guesses based on what I could see. In contrast, the course asked me to study the rules—centuries of law and policy—see how players had gotten into their present-day positions. Suddenly every player appeared in a new light.

The game, it turns out, offers different rules and different starting points for different people. It's drastically uneven contest in which I am among the more advantaged players. Advantage in the game can take several forms: male trumps female, straight trumps LSBT, able-bodied trumps disabled, Western religions trump Easter religions, higher class trumps lower class, and so on. But nowhere, as far as I can see, is any advantage as hard-hitting and enduring as skin color. My white skin, an epidermal gold card, has greased the skids for a life full of opportunities and rewards that I was sure were available to everyone. My notions that America offered a level playing field disintegrated.(36)

I found this an engaging story of Irving's transformation. Also, it provides some helpful information about structural racism. Much of this information was not new, but she presents in a way that is understandable, so that now, it is easier to discuss and explain.  Unfortunately, it doesn't offer a lot of hope for eliminating racism any time soon.

A Soft Heart

I own three books by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. Over the years I've read some of her other books too. It seems I can just open one on any page and find something meaningful. Yesterday I picked up this one, and right away, I wanted to post everything I read.

She talks about war and peace, a bit in the broad sense, but quite quickly, she get personal. “War and peace,” she says, “start in the human heart....as long as we justify our hard-heartedness and our own self-righteousness, joy and peace will always elude us (26-27). She reminds us “that the people who we get so upset at, they eventually move away or they die...but the negative seeds that are left in our mindstream, the impact of our hatred and our prejudice is very long-lived. (27-28).

Here is what she suggests.

[W]hat I'm advocating here is something that requires courage—the courage to have a change of heart. The reason this requires courage is because when we don't do the habitual thing, hardening our heart and holding tightly to certain views, then we're left with the underlying uneasiness that we were trying to get away from. Whenever there's a sense of threat, we harden. And so if we don't harden, what happens? We're left with that uneasiness, that feeling of threat. That's when the real journey of courage begins. This is the real work of peacemaker, to find the soft spot and the tenderness in that very uneasy place and stay with it. If we can stay with the soft spot and stay with the tender heart, then we are cultivating the seeds of peace. (28-29)

This presidential election process we're in the midst of seems like a mini-war. I read or listen to certain candidates, and I do harden my heart. Can one actually find tenderness in politics?

Gail's Little Fantasy

Today Gail Collins is writing about the strangeness of having Trump as a presidential candidate, but it is her little fantasy about going back in time that amuses me most:

Did you ever fantasize about being able to go back in time and tell people from the past what’s going to happen in the 21st century? I like to envision telling Vincent van Gogh how much his paintings will be selling for. Or I inform George Wallace that he never gets to be president, but a black guy does.

Right now, I’m imagining going back to 1990 and telling my colleagues on the Donald desk that they are chronicling the love life of a future presidential front-runner. They were a pretty cynical crew, but still.

Nourish Your Brain

The most recent issue of National Geographic has an interesting article called “This Is Your Brain On Nature” by Florence Williams. She reports on numerous studies showing that people are healthier in many ways if they live close to green space or spend time in nature. They're not sure why, but some researchers suspect that “nature works primarily by lowering stress.”

For me, this just reinforces some of my own experiences.  The morning I walked though city streets and along the St. Joe River, all edged with snow.  Very nice,  And an extreme example of this is the first time I did a long hiking trip in Spain (over 400 miles).  After that five week walk, I felt as if my wiring had changed. It was hard to describe, but I felt more peaceful and happier. It's nice to know that this has been studied and verified. And it reminds me to continue walking in the neighborhood and beyond.

This link connects to the article and beautiful pictures of outdoor scenes. The article says even pictures of nature can help.The picture above is a view of a train chugging over the snowy St. Joe River. It was taken while sitting at the bar of The Crooked Ewe Brewery and Ale House in South Bend, Indiana.

Same As It Ever Was?

I heard this song yesterday for the first time.  It goes well with yesterday's post.

That Damn Whistle

Last week I was surprised to find this book in my mailbox--a gift from my sister.  It's a tough read, dense and long, but it makes the strong point that racism is still strong in American politics and American life.  It isn't always that people are consciously racist, but in many ways we live in a racist culture.
"Dog whistle" refers to political statements that never mention race but are often heard, if only subconsciously, in racial terms.  For example, complaints about welfare and other government "handouts" are often heard as complaints about blacks even though whites may benefit just as much or more from these policies.

Here is a startling statement from page two about the 2012 presidential election that pulled me right into this book.

 If only white people [as opposed to whites and other groups] had voted...Mitt Romney would have carried every state except for Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut and New Hampshire.

I am now reading the next-to-last chapter.  I hope the conclusion "To End Dog Whistle Politics" will offer some hope.

Good Writing

Before he wrote the controversial “Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me, I have been a fan of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.  I have pondered from time-to-time what it is that is so compelling about his writing.  The best I could come up with was curiosity--he writes from a perch of curiosity. Then yesterday, I stumbled across an interview at the Harper’s Magazine site with Osita Nwanevu interviewing Coates.  It strengthened my conclusion that curiosity was a key to Coates' writing.  The question and answer below provides a touching and amazing account of a writer driven by his personal desire to find answers.  

[Nwanevu] You’ve said time and time again that writing is an “internal process” for you, which is to say that ultimately you write about and try to understand history and the underpinnings of race relations in America for your own education. Any effect your writing might have on your readers—positive or negative—is incidental to that project. Has the reception of this book and your more recent writing for The Atlantic changed that at all for you? Is writing still an entirely personal process, or do you think more about how readers will respond?

[Coates] I just can’t. I can’t. I mean, I’m just doing my writing. I’m not called to that. If you start writing in that direction, you’ve gone down a very, very dark path. I just write. I enjoy the process of it. It’s personal to me. It’s very, very important to me. It’s bad for writing, and it’s bad for truth. If you start writing for other people, you start losing your own independence, your ability to come to your own conclusions—like for example in this book. If I were writing to effect change, maybe I would write more about the black church. One of the largest vehicles for the struggle. But then it would have been a very, very different book. You’ve got to speak your truth, man. You’ve just got to. Not what a thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand people want to hear. What you feel. You shouldn’t hand that over. And by the way, people in the movement shouldn’t want you to hand that over. I don’t want them to become artists.

I was introduced to Coates in April of 2012 when Hendrik Hertzberg wrote, “The blog of Ta-Nehisi Coates is one the half-dozen best in the English-speaking world.”  At that time, Coates didn’t have the notoriety he has now.  He did write for The Atlantic, but I enjoyed most the blog he wrote at the The Atlantic online site. (At that time he blogged four or five times a week; now he rarely blogs that much in a month.)

Books Read During 2015

Here, in no particular order, are my favorite books read in 2015. I was surprised to see that most of them are nonfiction.  I read more fiction this year; it just wasn’t that good.

Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

This is an account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a rowing team from the University of Washington, and a government on its way to World War II.