I was struck by the comment of a dear friend, scholar, and Zen teacher arriving by email yesterday that there’s nothing special about the essence of Zen that you can’t find in other spiritual traditions. That may have been clear to many of you, but I don’t take for granted the spaciousness and generosity of that comment.

I grew up in a Jewish household that certainly didn’t see it that way, and I still remember a Saturday lunch at the Stone Soup Café in Greenfield, where I had helped cook that morning, being told by a fellow luncher that, while it was nice that I worked to feed him, I was going to hell because I didn’t accept Christ as my savior. He had found Jesus on a cruise sponsored by an evangelical church.

“You’re going to hell,” he said. “Don’t take it personally.”

Like my friend, I also think that, in the deepest sense, Zen has nothing that others don’t. I just prefer the Zen conversation (or lack thereof), feel more comfortable with the vocabulary. Since that moment back in 1983 when I first meditated in a room in a writers colony in Lake Forest, Illinois, and knew that this was home, I’ve felt at profound ease with the practices and the training, confusion and doubts notwithstanding. I often see it as life’s greatest gift to me, the call that came at the right time and through the right medium. And I heard it. So often calls come my way that I don’t hear, but I heard that one.

We are offered new ideas and gifts by anonymous people, situations, and activities, and often those offerings have a bigger impact on us than those from family and friends. These last are important, but they come out of the crucial but narrower network of people we know and who know us; the not-knowing world is vaster, and offers more.

Nothing came easy. Ironically, when I really started practicing, I spent much less time with books (though a book had been my portal to Zen); to this very day I’m one of the worst Buddhist students I know. Emptiness was a challenge. The mind creates its own challenges, convincing you that you have so much to get through, so much to figure out. When I hear folks saying that they will “figure things out,” I sometimes wonder if that’s helpful. If life “out there” presents questions, it also presents answers, often in the most unforeseen ways. And as any koan student knows, the answer is often right there in the question.

Like many, I’m appalled by the scenes from Los Angeles. When you send men in fatigues, face masks and guns to go into houses in the middle of the night and take family members away, there will be a reaction. Burning cars and looting stores, however, shouldn’t be one of them.

We’re told that illegal immigrants tax our system. Certainly, when I pay local taxes, I am aware that a very small fraction goes to such things as funding the position Jimena occupies as the link between three local schools and the community. She has her pulse on things, knows many families and children, translates, cajoles, recommends, and encourages everyone to finish school, maybe go to community college, and build a life.

When she provides me with unpaid electrical, heating, or rent bills and asks for our help, often these are accompanied by awful stories: a father fell from the roof of a construction project and can’t work for at least three months; a mother dying of cancer; two families evicted out of their apartment; a man jailed for a traffic violation and needing bail money, otherwise he’ll be deported. Often, I check with her a month or two later: What about the family that was left without heat? Do they need more help? Or the people whose father is laid up, don’t they need more money?

She shakes her head and always gives the same answer: “We helped them with what they needed, and that’s enough. They must learn to take care of things by themselves. Also, there is the community.”

We should all have such supportive neighbors. When someone needs to go to the hospital, neighbors step in to make meals, feed the children, get them off to school in the morning. If they need a lift somewhere, someone with a car provides that.

Down in Hadley, which has several big malls with box stores and smaller shops, someone stands at every single corner holding up a sign asking for money. I have never seen a Latino person do that. Those I know work very, very hard, including two days ago when two brothers re-roofed the shed in back of our house, working for 12 hours on a Sunday in addition to their regular jobs.

The one exception I remember, over all these years, is a man with a little girl standing in the Trader Joe’s parking lot and asking for help for his family, at his feet a bucket of red roses. I saw them as I went in and filled a shopping bag with groceries, but when I went out my heart sank because I didn’t see them anywhere, they’d been chased away by store personnel. But there they were, a block away, and I hurried to give him the bag of food. He was very moved and told me that he had lost his job but very soon would be working again. His little girl, in a green sweater (it was cold) and with very bright eyes, gave me a red rose. I think it was a measure of how uncomfortable he felt asking for money; he had to give something back.

One other encounter is indelible in my mind. When covid began and Jimena and I were giving out $50 food cards to people, a young, thin man in torn clothes timidly approached her and asked in Spanish if he could get a card; also, did she know of a job for him. She asked him who he was, and he told her that he just arrived from Mexico and he needs to work to afford medicine to send to his sick mother back home. We were working off of a list of people coming for cards and she said she couldn’t spare any, but come back next week. He nodded and went away. Jimena is very savvy, and she had no doubt that he was telling the truth.

These are the criminals Donald Trump is talking about.