Blessed Be the Children

I ran into some friends a couple days ago, a young couple who were basking in the joy of their first baby, a six-week old little girl with a head of thick, soft, black hair and the easy sleepy contentment of the newly embodied. Rosalia, of course, the little one, was enchanting and perfect, but what struck me even more when I saw these two friends was the gleam in both pairs of eyes.

It was True Love and they understood it.

Transported back to those first weeks of my own fatherhood, I dished out the usual platitude: “Now you know what Love is.” And Iana fired right up: “You know, people kept saying that and I was like, ‘well of course,’ but now I get it.”

There’s nothing better than a baby. And, more than that, there is nothing better than the privilege of walking through this life hand in hand with a child, for however long we may.

As a seeking person who strives everyday (or tries) to be more present and less distracted, more conscious and less habitual, more grateful and less fearful, I value the Buddhist idea of detachment. I realize that things are always changing, perpetually impermanent, and to attach my happiness to anything is to welcome suffering. And the deepest, most twisting fears I ever feel are for the safety of my daughter. It is simply in the nature of deep joy that we want to keep it from slipping away from us as long as we possibly can and cry out in anguish when it does.

And it will. Children die, despite the most ravenous wishes of our minds and hearts. They grow up, they grow distant, move away. Abstractly, we know this, and yet how many of us fall into habitual living, letting the mundane chores of life come to rule over our living? Many people have never known that bliss of being totally present, and so become addicted to their pleasures, mistaking them for joy. Most experience it for those brief, transformative, transient moments and then fall behind as reminiscence weighs our steps. And many of us love so powerfully that we hold fiercely on, letting the fear of future loss choke out our free appreciation of our present gifts.

But rather than move into that anguish before I’ve paid any rent, I strive everyday (or try) to live in the sunlit present. To be as sharply conscious of every moment (especially the only one) as I possibly can. It takes so much more practice than it seems like it should, and I have so far to go. But I thank the Mystery that I have my daughter’s tickling poke, her bubbling laughter, her “I love you Daddy.” These things keep me here and now.

Blessed be the children, and blessed be every moment you have with the children in your life, for they have made it so.

Truth vs The Truth

I recently watched the film "The Invention of Lying" by Ricky Gervais. There were some truly hilarious moments, I thought, but I found myself thinking deeply afterward about the nature of lying and Truth.

Curiously, I noticed in the film that there was a distinction between "lying" (i.e., intentionally speaking "something that isn't") and voicing one's opinion, with which other people may disagree. This is an interesting distinction to me, since I think that speaking one's opinion as fact, or speaking one's Truth, has as much a tendency to shape the perceptions of others as does outright lying. I do think there are plenty of people who purposefully misrepresent what they know in order to manipulate or achieve a personal, perhaps benign, end. However, I also think that many of us become so convinced that reality is a certain way, we tend to assert that view as fact, while it is almost certainly our own perspective. And that's really the crux, and the reason I felt compelled to write about this: what I find most fascinating about the concept of speaking the truth is that we assume that there is one, that the truth is out there, waiting to be discovered. Philosophers call this idea "positivism," the notion that reality is the way it is, fixed and absolute, and humans' job is to discover and describe it accurately. It is a fundamental assumption in Western thinking, and THE foundational assumption of science as we know it in the modern world. I tend to take a slightly different view.

We create the truth by speaking it, at least as much as we uncover something that was already there. This idea is most obvious in emotional relationships between people. One person tells another "You're beautiful," that person begins to believe it, and that belief in turn creates a confidence, a radiance that is indeed beautiful in a way that others can perceive. The negative side of this is obvious as well, when one person tells another that they're a loser and will never amount to anything. The statement that "You're beautiful," or "You'll never succeed," are naturally not "truths," according to any pragmatic definition of the word, but rather value judgments, assessments, opinions. And yet, with enough power behind them, or frequency, they can become reality.

We see the same principle in history, which is so often written by those in power. To say that Columbus discovered America-- a simple truth that is taught to most American children in Kindergarten and 1st grade-- is of course deeply problematic. Not only did Columbus never set foot on the mainland of North America, you can't really "discover" a place where people have been living for thousands of years. The statement is deeply ethnocentric (biased toward European cultural perspectives) and is fairly inaccurate. And yet it has become "fact," or The Truth for several generations of Americans.

My point in all of this is not just to say that the truth is relative to one's cultural perspective, which is true, (ha), but to go even further to say that the truth is at least half ours to create. We must, however, create it together. As William Stafford put it:

It is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.
The signals we give-- yes, no or maybe-- should be clear;
the darkness around us is deep.

Details

This life is so full of lessons about humility and the limits of my power. I feel strongly that I've been put on this planet to heal, to use my tongue, my words, my craft to bring people together. And yet I get hooked all the time, lose patience with those who believe differently than myself, feel that self-rewarding righteousness of indignation when I can see the flaws in the logic of other people that clearly lead to greater harm in the world. And it's all crap. Even when it's true, it's still crap.

The Gulf is still choking.

The Religious Right is still pounding out "pro-family" rhetoric (meaning, f course, pro-a-very-narrow-definition-of-family).

The unmanned drones continue to fly.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been visiting my family in Arizona. I've been fortunate to be able to visit my aging grandparents, my mother, my sister, my nieces. Much of my family stands in a very different political space than myself. I've also been blessed to spend a small amount of time with an old family friend-- the kind for whom the term "friend" has long since dropped off and only "family" remains. He's an uncle, really: loving, kind-hearted, generous. And he's dying from metastatic bladder cancer.

The fact that he's not just a staunch Republican, but one who's always held Ronald Reagan to be one of the great American Presidents, has never really come between us. He and I both have a strong sense of our own opinions, but he's always shown an easy tolerance for my leftist craziness. And now, in the past week when I've been able to catch a few spare moments with him, all of those details seem even less important.

What's important is sharing a smile, a chuckle, or even a comfortable silence. What's important is sharing that simple humanity. The healing that comes from that is deep, nameless.

And it's helped me to remember that it's the details of living that often drive rifts between us. The details are important, don't get me wrong. It's the details that drive our daily decisions and dictate how we live our lives-- how much to consume, how we get our energy, how we build our homes, how we judge other people's appearances. And those decisions are invariable the source of conflict. But in those sublime moments, sitting with an ailing uncle, enjoying the presence of a grandparent, swimming with your nieces, the details fall away, and all the remains is the mystic glow of one spirit reaching out to another.