Today the Supreme Court struck down a crucial aspect of the Voting Rights Act. They paid lip service to the Act but eliminated the provision that prevents states from enacting racial gerrymandering to dilute the vote of African-Americans. The conservative justices emphasize states’ rights, asserting that our federal government doesn’t have a role in guaranteeing equal voting rights even in cases of blatant racism.

It struck me particularly hard because I returned late last night from the Zen Peacemakers’ retreat in Alabama bearing witness to racism. I can almost hear folks say: Why did you go down there? You grew up alongside the Civil Rights movement, you remember the killings (I wrote my first poem after the bomb that killed four black girls in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church when I was 13), you’ve studied the life of Dr. King, why go down to Alabama?

I wasn’t sure, other than that this was one of the main retreats developed by the Zen Peacemakers. But I know now, and it has a lot to do with bearing witness and what that means in today’s world. It has a lot to do with making history personal rather than abstract, with stepping in certain footsteps across the Edmund Pettis bridge and doing meditation underneath it, with planting flowers in a public park that has seen better days in the city of Selma and picking up the trash from adjoining streets.

It has to do with getting recommendations for a really good Southern breakfast, with being addressed as Ma’am out of courtesy towards age rather than because I’m white (I checked). It has to do with meetings and relationships (“Come here for a hug, honey, don’t need that handshake”), and with encountering unimaginable loss, hope, and faith in so many people, and especially (but not exclusively) black women.

It has to do with Zen koan practice because, just like in the extermination camps in Poland, it’s not just about death and loss. Death is not hard to capture, it’s the life all around death that’s hard to describe in words. “You have to go there to understand,” I used to tell people about the retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau. You have to go to Alabama at the next ZP retreat to fully grok, using the Man’s favorite word, the secrets not just of African-American lives, but also of our own.

I guarantee you that if our conservative Supreme Court justices met this history in a personal way, they would have never voted as they did. Instead, they stick to books, precedents and legalese, in service to discrimination and obfuscation rather than to the cause of democracy.

You start with a plunge, and here the plunge consisted of spending the day in Montgomery’s Legacy Museum and the memorial to the thousands of people lynched in Jim Crow days. Books, study, college courses, and numbers don’t begin to capture what I felt there. My body began to tremble from when I first went in and saw those huge Atlantic waves crashing over an estimated 2 million bodies of Africans tossed overboard enroute to enslavement in the Western Hemisphere.

My mind numbed quickly—it knows how to do that—but I couldn’t numb my body, especially at the scenes of women losing their husbands and multiple children, one after another, to be sold for a good price. I swallowed so much my throat hurt. My chest ached even as I was cold in the air-conditioning and my hair kept on falling over my eyes, as if trying to hide something from sight.

I was barely halfway through when the retreat leader told me it was time for us to go. I was confused about time, what century this was. But we had to proceed to the memorial to thousands of lynching victims during the Jim Crow era, which didn’t even include the broader massacres like those that took place in Tulsa or Rosewood. There, too, I dawdled, staring up at the heavy wooden blocks that dangled from the high ceiling, relentlessly spelling out the name of every county in most of our states.

You hold up your head, determined to read every single name, till the muscles of your neck throb, and then you look down, and once outside you take in the flowers, the paths through the grass. Till finally, you take shelter from the heat with the group waiting outside, the wonderful crazy ones among us, from college age to 87, with whom I was already half in love, from the ones I’ve known for some 30 years to those I met at the retreat.

And just when you feel that life doesn’t get any more cruel than this, just when you start losing your faith in—you name it: God, human nature, Buddha Nature—you meet the people of Montgomery and Selma living now, descendants of those same parents who watched their children put on an auction block with a price in dollars rather than a name affixed to them.

You sit down with activist and film producer T. Marie King, who has little patience for religious or spiritual groups who talk about inequality and discrimination, but who don’t do much about it.

You meet Selma Councilwoman Jannie Thomas, who gets you to work at her neighborhood park and who has lived there her entire life. Selma was once a center of the Confederacy and the backdrop for numerous lynchings before becoming famous for its role in the Civil Rights marches. A tornado blasted through this very poor city several years ago, destroying infrastructure and homes, but the state government is not very sympathetic towards its people.

You meet Mama Callie, who organized a rally for several neighborhood organizations, all founded by women. A big woman with blonde cornrows with tiny bows, she welcomes us to the rally and offers T-shirts, pins, literature, food and drink. Her particular passion is children killed by gun violence; she herself lost her children, Venus and Mercury.

Celia talks of having lost both parents as well as her own children, enduring beatings and praying for death because the losses were so great, but finding support and help in her community and reminding everyone not to do anything alone, that there are earth angels everywhere, sometimes wearing the costume of mental health providers, or friends, or pastors, or just fellow sufferers who have found the strength to go on.

Drugs, domestic violence, guns, poverty—abstractions to many of us, and the causes of so much loss and suffering for these women. Still, they praise God. They search for earth angels everywhere. They face the 21^st century equivalent of the horrors of the previous centuries, and they won’t back away. Like their mothers, grandmothers, and great-great-great mothers.

And neither do we. Because there’s life here, loud, cackling, and insistent, one eye on their children and one eye on the rest of us, laughing in celebration.

And just when you think it’s the women, there is Kevin King, bald on top and a rich beard below, who started King’s Canvas, an art studio and gallery for artists who have nowhere to work, with free canvas, easels, and all accoutrements necessary to produce art, making it a communal hub for the west side of Montgomery, right on the trail of the Selma to Montgomery marches. He calls it creative placemaking.

And Rev. Michael Bowen, who was homeless on the streets of Harlem, New York at the age of 14, and now leads Safe Haven Center for ex-cons in Selma.

Kudos to the Zen Peacemaker staff that created and developed these relationships. It’s these people, in Selma and Montgomery, that become our teachers, that tell us there is always life in the middle of devastation, there’s fabulous catfish, yams, and lemonade, portraits to paint, supper to cook, churches to go to (including King’s church on Dexter Avenue). They’re not tired. Rosa Parks, with a statue and museum in Montgomery, said: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

In the coming years, all of us may get tired and be tempted to give in. But there is resilience, and the place to learn it, the place to find laughter, song, dance, and art in the middle of craziness, was right there, in Selma and Montgomery.

And food.

My friend, Roshi Michel Dobbs, told me this story: “Last year we were in Selma on a Sunday and needed breakfast, but everything’s closed on Sunday. We asked Jackie, who owned the restaurant Reflections where we loved to eat, what to do. She came in on Sunday morning and laid out a breakfast buffet for the entire group. ‘I have to go to church,’ she then told us. ‘Eat your fill, and when you’re finished, put your money in that canister over there, turn the lights off, and shut the door behind you.’”

I’d like to live—and leave—just like that.