I continue to be very moved by Ezra Klein’s discussion with Bryan Stevenson in Montgomery, Alabama, on this country’s 250^th birthday. As I said, I’d visited the places he referred to last April’s Zen Peacemakers’ Bearing Witness to Racism Retreat and, without articulating this as well as Klein did, I, too, felt that city was at the linchpin of this country’s history.

It wasn’t about bemoaning this land, putting down the Founders for being both of their time and ahead of their time, it wasn’t about guilt, disappointment or self-abnegation. It was about how remembrance can transform into the inspiration to do better, walk our talk, take joy in the steps taken while recognizing there are more ahead.

Great changes don’t usually happen in one lifetime. You can talk about social media and AI, reflect on how globalized our minds have become and how much more we care and know about events far away. Those are significant, but great changes occur inside. You get a hint of that when someone tells you: “Wow, you’ve really changed!” A country gets a hint of that when it starts changing the basic narratives it was born into and raised on.

In Israel, I told my brother: “I would like to see just one thing. I would like to see the narrative around Zionism (and I consider myself a Zionist} begin to change. I’d like to see it say, alongside with mentioning 2,000 years of exile and prosecution and return to a promised land, that other people already lived in this land, and that many had lived here for centuries, with their religion, culture, and language.” A small change like that could start, in the long run, some big changes.

HH Dalai Lama has said that Americans have a strong path for enlightenment because of the good lives we have. A big majority doesn’t worry about shelter, food, or the instability of war and violent domestic conflict. That gives us the time and energy to practice. Practice what? Justice, love, mercy, and walking humbly on this earth. So much has been given to us, how can we give back?

Imagine that a couple is 250 years old. OK, imagine them being 75 years old. Tell me, did they love each other all the time? Bernie and I certainly didn’t. Like other couples, we argued, fulminated, at times thought we’d each married the wrong person. But as the years pass, you start loving the other person’s fullness.

You’ve seen the rough parts, you’ve gone through times when the two of you drifted apart, when you thought you’d lost a common language. But in the end, if you still love, you love not just the person’s fullness, but also the fullness of the relationship. You’re seeing it to completion.

We haven’t seen this country to completion, but at 250, we’ve made strides. We know so much more than we did before. We’ve known enslavement as well as emancipation, the pioneering spirit of How the West Was Won along with thievery of the land from native peoples, we’ve known wars that didn’t need to be fought and atom bombs that should never have been dropped. We’ve added amendments giving women and black people the right to vote.

We’ve been through the Montgomery and Vietnam, we’ve developed a relationship with this country that isn’t blind patriotism, like a young couple that adores each other and wants to go to bed right away. It was fun then, wasn’t it? It was fun to read in schoolbooks about brave Custer’s last stand, the building of the great railroads and the sacrifices of white ancestors. It was fun to read Gone with the Wind. But we don’t have that at 250, not even at 75. That doesn’t mean we give up on love, only that it’s a different kind of love now, based on fullness, on completion.

Stevenson points out that the world has literally thousands of memorials to the Holocaust. It has almost none to the horrors of that Middle Passage traversed by so many millions towards death (an estimated 4 million died before disembarking) and enslavement. We need those stones under our feet to remind us of what took place even as we move forward.

Progress, says this man who spends so much of his life trying to save people on Death Row and removing children as young as 10 from adult prisons and even isolation cells, can’t be had without fully facing what took place and what’s taking place today. Not just through books or movies, but through connection. Through bearing witness.

At the same time, he defines faith as “the ability to believe things that we haven’t seen, to do things that haven’t been done before.” He reminds me of the Buddhist sutras that describe in glowing detail numerous Buddha lands pervaded by enlightenment, accompanied by typical Indian physical and sensory accoutrements: an earth made of lapis lazuli, jewel trees with leaves, flowers and plants of precious stones that emit music in the breeze, pools of clear, healing water, flowers and gentle rains falling from the skies, scents wafted everywhere, no illness or want.

What the hell? I used to think. But maybe that’s what Stevenson is referring to. And he reminds us of the spiritual leaders who disrupted systems rather than protecting them. So many of us have a hard time with organized religion because it seems, as Klein says, that it prizes order, while spiritual leaders prize disorder and change,rather than stability and calm.

I haven’t been well since returning home, and one night I sat and watched an episode of a British police procedural, Inspector Morse. The inspector revisits a murder case from 150 years ago where two bargemen who conducted barges up and down the Thames were hung for murdering a woman passenger.

The program enacts what that trial would have been like, with the usual British meticulousness to detail. There are the judge and the attorneys in their curled up white wigs and the jury of men in judicious attire. And there are the defendants who don’t understand what’s going on other than that their lives are on the line. It’s hard for them to follow the proceedings, they’re referred to as drunks, heathens (they don’t go to church on Sunday because they work 7 days a week) and the lowest of the low, and when they look at the jury that will convict them no one there looks like them.

I thought of our own court system, where lawyers are entitled to remove certain number of jurors without giving a reason, so that many black people continue to be convicted by all-white juries. I thought of what money buys you, and what a lack of money doesn’t. I thought of the legalese that nobody understands or follows, a language that is almost impenetrable to everyone other than lawyers.

And I wondered what, 150 years from now, people seeing this would say about this great justice system of ours. I was struck once again by how everything is so strongly conditioned, that just as the British were sure they were giving people a good and fair justice system, many of us feel that way about our own because we’re so conditioned not to question certain procedures, language, or the limits on allowable evidence.

Zen Buddhism encourages you to let go of that conditioning, slowly or fast. Its practice encourages you to question what we think of as reality, examine the underlying assumptions and ask the question: Who is being served by this perception of reality? Who isn’t?

I have a wonderful nephew living in Israel whom I dearly love and respect. In past years, when I’d question certain facts Israelis swore were true, such as that suicide bombings began in Israel by Palestinians and no one previously has ever had to deal with something so horrible, and I’d ask him: “How do you know that’s true?” he’d say: “Kol echad yodea.” Everybody knows this.

“You don’t have to believe me,” I’d tell him, “look it up.” He never looked it up. I finally said: “Any question answered by the words Everybody knows is the best question to examine and re-examine, again and again.”

We have our conditioning. But we also have spiritual disruptors: Moses, the Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Jesus, Gandhi, King. Give it up, they told us. Give it up, and be free.

So many millions of people have shown us the way. Think of the people in your life who’ve shown kindness, forbearance, patience. Think of those who’ve gone out of their way to open doors, to reveal those crazy Buddha lands that seem so out of reach, almost imaginary. Think of new political leaders who, following Bernie Sanders’ lead, are not afraid of phrases like Medicare for All and Save this Planet.

I once sat on a plane next to a lawyer who had left his office practice to join the US Army in its onslaught in Iraq in 2003. He believed in George Bush’s war, he believed we were doing great things there and was ready to put his life on the line. I asked him if he ever investigated dedicating his life to doing great things right here. His intensity and idealism resonated with me deeply, I told him we needed courageous people like him not to fight a war no one asked us to fight, including the Iraqis, but right here, to create a Buddha land right under his feet (I didn’t use that term).

He couldn’t see it; he could only see going to Iraq and bringing democracy there, and finally I wished him luck. He wanted to be supremely challenged, he wanted to be disrupted, to put things on the line.

Our wealth often prevents us from seeing how much we could put on the line. Sometimes our lives, as the people did in Alabama, and sometimes not, but we can do things we haven’t done before.

At the end of the conversation, Klein asks Stevenson what does America mean to him now, and Stevenson turns it around: What does it mean to be an American now? What does it mean to be a full human being? What does it mean to be a mensch?

If you do not subscribe to the New York Times but would like to get a copy of this conversation, I could share it with you as a “gift.” Just send me an email (evemarko@zenpeacemakers.com) that will carry your email address, and I will share that article with you. A birthday gift to all of you..

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I got up early yesterday to take the dogs out. We’re in the midst of a bad heat spell, with temperatures climbing well over 100 Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) and, worse, humidity raging into the 90^th percentile. The dense woods protected us from the heat and Aussie jumped and frolicked in the pools, and asked if she could stay there the rest of the day. Alas no, I told her, and brought her home where she tried to lie on her usual perch on the back steps, lasted five minutes, and came into our air-conditioned indoors.

Last night we had a thunderous storm, with heat lightning and rain lashing at the house and trees. Good news: We didn’t lose power, which means our electricity and air conditioning are still on. Bad news: The weather didn’t get any cooler.

Meantime, I watched a Facebook dog reel with one dog saying to the other: “Mom got emotional after a little wine last night. She said: ‘I Love you so much.’ She also said we could be anything we want. So we did. We became a problem.”

That’s exactly what my mother said to me: “I grew up poor, didn’t get the schooling I wanted, endured the Holocaust, fought a war in Israel, never had the advantages you had. You could be anything you want.”

So I became a problem. Turned my back on religious Judaism, got involved in a cult (Zen Buddhism), married the head of the cult, and now live in the woods. I became who I am.

I think parents of rebels should get their due. Mine struggled. This past week I came home to a broken hot water heater, leaving us with no hot water, and it got replaced yesterday for a price somewhat over $3,000. That money will come out of my insubstantial savings, but I remembered what a crisis this would have been for my parents, who usually lived from hand to mouth.

They wanted their children to reach the middle class. They wanted us to have our own home, a nice car and even two, nice vacations, kids who played with  the neighbors’ kids. Imagine their disappointment when I went into a religious community—and not their religion!

I keep in mind that their efforts to reach the lower rung of the middle class enabled me to rebel. I had my schooling, didn’t experience persecution, and lived in a stable country whose national motto was familiar: Here you can be anything you want to be.

I took it to heart, believed every word, and became a problem: an alternative lifestyle, maybe even a member of the counterculture. But it was my parents who worked hard to give me that choice. I think of my many peers in the Sixties who ranted against the middle class and told each other not to trust anyone over 30. But they often went to good schools and grew up in suburban, tree-lined streets. That, too, is part of the story of the Sixties and the choices they made.

Craig Holdrege and Jon McAlice, of the Nature Institute, wrote: “Any time we think of an organism as enclosed and bounded, we are dealing with only a partial aspect of its reality.”

Here we are, a nation celebrating its 250^th birthday. And you know what? We could have been anything we wanted to be, and we became problems, at least for each other. Tomorrow some will hoist up the flag, turn on the gas barbecues and launch a thousand firecrackers. Here, in our Happy Valley, practically every town will have its fireworks. There will be celebrations and readings of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution.

Simultaneously, some don’t want to hear about a 250^th birthday. What democracy, they ask. A democracy when the current president wants to imprint his name, photo, and values (or lack thereof) on every celebration? A democracy that deports immigrants no different from our own ancestors? That wants to corrupt the voting process in order to affect fall elections?

The country was a problem from long before Day 1 because of genocide perpetrated against Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. It was clear from the beginning that white men of financial substance were the arbiters of morality and the engines of prosperity. It took 250 years to break through barriers. It often took jackhammers. In the process, people got hurt. Some gained, some lost.

I read the Declaration of Independence for the first time in a long while yesterday and cringed at the accusation against the King of Great Britain: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions of existence.” Cringed because, among other reasons, I can’t forget that our Lakota friends serve in the military and will celebrate this Fourth probably more than many of my own neighbors here in the Valley.

How ready are we to deal with our problems, which are often each other? In a 1949 letter to George Orwell after the publication of 1984, the latter’s book about a brutal and violent government, Aldous Huxley said: “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that … the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

In his Brave New World, written almost a century ago, he predicted that we could be controlled not by vigilantes, police or an army, but by distraction, deepset conditioning, a lack of books and art that ask fundamental questions, and by drugs. Look around you.

But if I believe in freedom, I must believe in co-existing with “problems”: people who choose to live a life according to values very different from mine. A Filipina playwright friend once mocked multiculturalism by saying: “You here in this country don’t have a common culture, a common history, or a common religion.”

Damn right we don’t, I thought to myself. What we are, are each other’s problems. It’s what makes us unlike other countries, a bold experiment indeed. And we’re no longer so young, we’re older and should be wiser. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, in his conversation with Bryan Stevenson, said: “I think of wisdom as the ability to hold the totality of life. The wiser you are, the more of life you can hold.”

In the next 250 years, our mission might become to live with and accept one another as we are. To recognize the potential for friction, eschew contempt and humiliation, and develop a new vocabulary for meeting each other, maybe a Declaration of Interdependence. Maybe it will include the words we chant in one of our liturgies each month: “May we always see ourselves as Other, and Other as ourselves.”

I would add for tomorrow’s birthday: May we always experience ourselves as one body and know the peace that surpasses understanding and that is always here. There is nothing pie-in-the-sky about it, I have felt this, so have others. May we feel pride in our past and trust in our future, with open hearts and far-reaching awareness. We can do this, I have no doubt about it.

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From the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: “Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a decapitated head, just lying somewhere far away from the body it belonged to …? That’s what we do to ourselves—or try to—when we rebel against what happens to us, when we segregate ourselves. Or when we do something selfish.

You have torn yourself away from unity—your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you’ve cut yourself off from it.

But you have one advantage here: You can reattach yourself … He [God] has allowed us not to be broken off in the first place, and when we are he’s allowed us to return, to graft ourselves back on, and take up our old position once again: part of a whole.”

And always the same question: How do you experience that whole? So many different ways: meditation, prayer, a walk in the desert. And sometimes, by letting go of the big things, which lets you notice the small ones.

My beloved student, Petriana Dantika Monize, passed away a week ago while I was in Israel. I’d visited with her the week before I left, not suspecting it would be my last time seeing her. A beautiful memorial was conducted for her at the zendo, and I listened on Zoom as so many people, especially family members, talked with emotional eloquence about this remarkable being. But nothing stayed with me like the words uttered by her niece: “She loved the little parts of all of us.”

I was in Israel for some 11 days, and the big things can sometimes drive you crazy: Lebanon, Iraq, Bibi, Trump, elections, Palestinians, Jews, Israelis. I relaxed by watching World Cup soccer matches broadcast from this Northern Hemisphere to the television screen in my sister’s living room. That was just going blank, barely paying attention.

What is it to love the little parts of us?

On yesterday’s 12:30 am train from Jerusalem to the Tel Aviv Airport, a 6-month-old baby girl stares at me with wide, dark eyes, a fringe of hair curling above her forehead. The Arab mother is watchful, her father delighted. They’re going to Greece for 4 days. Her feet are bare in her mother’s lap because it’s a warm evening, though nothing like the 105 degrees in the Dead Sea several days ago. It will be hot in Greece, they inform me, never taking their eyes off the little girl.

It’s her first plane trip, they seem way more excited than she is, and it occurs to me that this is the family’s seed. It will bloom, she will grow up, they will have more children, and this 2-hour flight to Greece is just the beginning of a big odyssey.

Before boarding the train, I negotiate my way from my sister’s car across the busy street to the train station with a backpack and valise. The escalators take me down down down, deep underground (I’ve been told that this new train station was built to survive even a nuclear attack). Right by the entrance I look to the right and there sits a thin, bearded man with the black gabardine suit of the ultra-orthodox Jews, wearing black shoes and hat in the warm evening—and a tiny yellow balloon over his nose.

“It’s tilted,” I tell him. I’m too weighed down to give him money.

He nods slowly, as if to say: Of course it’s tilted. What isn’t?

Before that, I run into my sister’s next-door neighbor, an elderly woman, in the apartment building’s hallway. “Parlez francais?” she demands. In that same warm evening she wears stockings and pumps with sensible heels, a knee-length skirt and a button-down jacket over her blouse. Also, a gold choker around her throat.

“English is better,“ I tell her.

She glares at me and says that she must call her children because she urgently needs to leave but can’t open her telephone. I start explaining that my own mobile is closed while I’m abroad—I rely on WhatsApp—till I notice her Indian caregiver rolling her eyes from the doorway, as if to say: You and I are sane; she’s not.

So no, I won’t give you big news about where I’ve traveled these 11 days because, like Dantika, it’s the little parts that I love. Get rid of the big ones—the threatening headlines, the luring advertisements, splashy promises of new technologies, the assertions of politicians and the accusations of perfidy by those who run against them, the posturing and magical tricks that pretend to be leadership. Give me the small parts and I will love them.

At the airport, in the very early hours, the Muslim grandmother is covered in black from head to toe as she happily carries a bag of McDonald’s burgers for her family two tables away. She hasn’t passed my table when she’s followed by the tall man with straight blonde hair waving down to his waist. It seems as if every single human, from little child to the very elderly, is pulling a small, colorful piece of carry-on luggage (they call it trolleys here).

Since the world’s currency has changed from the American dollar to individual attention, with vampire-like governments and corporations vying for every single iota they can suck out of us, the headlines become bigger, the advertisements splashier. The handsome face of Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese soccer star (looking remarkably like Tom Cruise), stares down at us from the round wall of the big food and shopping complex in an ad for a bright red futuristic car.

I look at the cleaning cart pushed quietly by a dark-skinned, mustachioed man, mops and brooms dangling from the side, wandering around the tables as if he’s lost. Is he Arab? An Ethiopian Jew? A Sri Lankan (I saw many working in the dining room and kitchen of our Dead Sea hotel).

When you stop following the big parts, you begin to recognize yourself, masses of us going through the tiny business of our lives, waiting to board the early morning planes, or else serving those us  pulling trolleys or, seated at a table, examining what we bought in the enormous duty-free store. When we follow the big parts, we miss the life force, the vibration under the relentless conversation, the calling out after children, and the confiding asides of couples. We see the clothes and the colors, hear a million languages, and miss the air in between, the presence throbbing in silence.

Do you have to get old to finally pay attention? Do you have to be close to death to see what has always been so obvious?

Here comes the man with his cleaning cart again. It’s 3:45 in the morning, a difficult shift. I think I know why Dantika loved the little parts in all of us. Right this morning, I love them, too: boys slapping hands over World Cup scores, a young Japanese woman wearing a red sweater and searching anxiously for her passport—look closely and see how none of us are really who we think we are, regardless of the desperation we invest to persuade ourselves otherwise.

It’s not our money that brought us into this world, it’s not our stuff we packed so carefully. If we don’t even belong to ourselves, how can we say that the handbag belongs to me, or the purple carry-on, or even the missing passport?

A weary woman waits to board her flight to New York, loving the little parts of everyone around her, drifting, as Fernando Pessoa once wrote, but never straying.

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We left the Dead Sea yesterday. You can see my sister going down the steps from the hotel where we stayed for 2 days. Below her is the road with a stop for the bus that will take us to Jerusalem. Beyond the road is the Dead Sea, its water evaporating in the merciless sun, and Jordan on the other side. The great World Heritage Site of Petra, the red desert city, is in Jordan an hour to the south.

The three siblings have been here countless times, and often somebody says: Let’s go up north this time, to the Galilee, Safed, or to the green hills with gorgeous B&Bs. We always end up in the desert, at the Dead Sea. The desert is like a blank slate. A little like the white screen that mocks me when I wish to write, as if to say: Why bother?

All around us is the turmoil of the Middle East: the impotence in the face of Trump’s agreement with Iran, anger at the local government, disillusionment, fear, and exhaustion. As usual, there are always the few who wonder what this is really about, what this point in time is asking of them. But they’re few.

Across is Jordan, a reminder of the Arab states surrounding this country on three sides, and even as the two countries cooperate in extracting salt from the Dead Sea, with Jordanian hotels on the other side echoing the hotels on the Israeli side, even as the potential for more partnerships across borders becomes more and more obvious, anger, distrust, and hatred persist.

And between them? The Dead Sea. You can’t drown because of the salt, it will hold you up no matter what you do. You don’t have to swim (my sister is now learning the Total Immersion method of swimming), you don’t need float rings or inflatable tubes or even bathing suits. However you go in, the water will hold you, be you a Sunni or Shiite Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, male or female. Just don’t drink the water.

My brother, Mordechai, who spent hours describing to me his meetings in the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Morrocco, walked back with me from tourist shops when I suggested we go into the water. The hotels all contain the salt water pools so only a relative few venture into the Sea itself. With clothes and all, we went in. I felt my clothes billow, warm water licking the bottom half of my body.

“If you have bruises and cuts anywhere, you feel it,” Mordechai said. The oily salt water slowly licks the body and unerringly finds its scratches and splinters, the bumps and bruises, including those you didn’t know you had. If you closed your eyes to them before, if you didn’t want to know, the water will tell you.

But this time nothing hurt me. The skin was whole, unscathed. If there was hurt, it was inside, in the mind, in the heart. And the water soothes those as well.

I have found so much peace in this desert over 55 years of visits to Israel and to the Sinai (in Egypt). The Dead Sea is the result of the 3-million-year-old Syrian-East African Rift that cuts through continents. The peace I find there has nothing to do with any activities of mine. I don’t think I meditated once while I was there. It has nothing to do with Mordechai’s activities cross-countries and religions. The peace in the Dead Sea, like death, is unconditional and absolute. It doesn’t need me, it doesn’t need any Zen master or HH the Dalai Lama, it doesn’t need anyone.

I go there with all the usual questions, exacerbated by my personal karma and being in that part of the world: How can I best use my time on this earth? How can I best live this life? And the Sea and desert tell me: Just live. Don’t add things. Don’t add more tools, more skillful means, more teachings, more study, more practice. Peace is absolute and unconditional. Much of the time you don’t experience life like that but feel it here. Your vows notwithstanding, you don’t need to save yourself or anyone else, for that matter.

Go in in your clothes, stand or float, peace will hold you up. Fly back home in the early hours of Monday, go back to your work, your friends, your students, your teachers, your lonely life in the woods and an aging body, something holds you up. Not my peace, but Your peace, as St. Francis prayed to God: “Make me an instrument of Your peace.” Two brief days in the Dead Sea before we leave, but that primordial water flows in my veins regardless of where I am..

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Back in Jerusalem, walking along the Promenade that looks over a big part of the city, including the Old City. Hard to see from a distance, but what you can see is the Palestinian women sitting in a circle on the grass.

These are the scenes that make me happy. All kinds of Israelis—religious, secular, young teenager couples, grandparents pushing a baby carriage—and different Palestinians whose villages are below the Promenade and adjoin the Old City. Yes, I know the politics of it. I know of the villages that are being commandeered, the houses refused permits and then are demolished. You can read about it everywhere.

What you can’t read, or be told by AI, is the feeling of walking on the Promenade in the early hours of Saturday evening and seeing all these different groups meeting and walking right by each other. Do they smile and wave? They do not. Do they wish each other a happy holiday or Sabbath? No. They simply walk by each other, minding their own business, maybe nodding if your eyes meet. That’s the most you can expect in these tense, anxious days, and it’s a lot.

Gives you a chance to dream: Could it be that in a few generations, they’ll actually smile at each other? Give blessings and good wishes? Arab women could always compare hats and headdresses with orthodox Jewish women. I’m reminded of the great British Airlines commercial featuring Robert Morley, inviting Americans to England: “Come home, all is forgiven!”

A lot has to happen before then. Here in Israel, there is rage and despair over the agreement Trump is reaching with Iran, and more and more people, including Bibi Netanyahu’s most loyal adherents, are finding it in their hearts to finally say his time is up. But he has risen from the almost-dead before and we’ll see if he will again.

“I’ve made bets he’ll resign before fall elections,” my brother told me. Starmer just did that in the UK, didn’t he?

I’d like to counter with a bet that our president won’t finish his term but haven’t yet. Watching my money.

It’s hot but dry here, the desert close by to the east like a white 8×11 paper waiting for letters, drawings, or paint, but always starting out blank. God seems to be everywhere regardless of what kind of believer, or non-believer, you are. A friend told me years ago: “I’m whispering to you that I don’t believe in God because I don’t want Him to hear it.”

Here they don’t whisper. At dawn I can hear the muezzin’s call to prayer from a mosque further east, men wearing yarmulkes and white fringes drooping from beneath their shirts, women in hijab. And jeans and t-shirts and sundresses. Also, excellent coffee.

Construction everywhere: New apartment buildings, renovating apartment buildings, some of the tallest cranes you’ll see outside of China. They might be killing each other but they’re not aging; you can’t miss the youthful energy.

Maria Popova writes: “The great danger is to stand motionless on the bank as the river of your life rushes by. It is not easy, learning how to stop waiting and start living; not easy not to waste your life.”

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I’m writing this on the plane to Israel. I haven’t seen my brother and sister for 10 months, too long. I’ll arrive early morning, met by my brother to bring me up to Jerusalem. Or else I’ll take the train.

They don’t call me Eve there, they call me the equivalent Hebrew name that appears in the Bible, Chava (like Hava, only a throatier H). It reminds me of parents that are gone, old generations, family, and legacy. I’m the fortunate recipient of a very rich legacy, of strength, determination, and love.

The day before I left, I asked the podiatrist working on my foot: “Do you have a library sign in front of your home?”

She hedged a bit. “No. I haven’t made up my mind about it.”

On June 24 our town is holding a vote on whether to approve the construction of a big library, and I’m taken aback by the harsh rhetoric. It will cost some $23 million and the state will supply half, but we will have to pay the rest, which means a substantial increase in local taxes. I won’t rehash the argument here except to say that, from the yard signs, you can tell that the better educated are ready to pay up, while those with a less fortunate background are voting against it.

It’s the anger that surprises me, both sides accusing each other of malfeasance, lying, ignorance, privilege, and even abuse. The last time I witnessed such vitriol here was when we had to vote on removing the name Indians from local sports teams. If anything, this may be worse. It’s about a library, for God’s sake, I want to tell people. But of course, it’s not just about a library.

At the same time, various towns in the Valley have taken votes on calling their towns Apartheid-Free towns, opposing “genocide and settler colonialism” that they see taking place in Israel. Some towns approved this, others did not. I opposed this for a couple of reasons. First, because I think that labels, such as the ever-popular colonialism, conceal more than they clarify. You can call certain of Israel’s actions execrable–I certainly have–without resorting to labels that ignore difference and nuance.

But I also fail to see what good such motions do to the parties directly involved. Folks in town go home and feel good about themselves. There are winners and there are losers, which is not appropriate in such a context. The word performative comes to mind.

You want to change society? You really want transformation? Start with yourself, and maybe get ready to give something up.

For example, consider the lack of affordable housing in our area. A lavish estate went up for sale in an adjoining town when its owner died and the man’s children proposed to develop it into housing. There was potential for lots of housing, including affordable units.

As usual, the town hemmed and hawed. Not that people are against housing, God forbid—but there are issues: It’ll change the town. It’ll change the neighborhood. What will happen to our roads? What about light pollution (a big thing in our area that most outsiders never even heard of)? What about the schools? The maintenance? Who are the people who will live there?

These things come up every time an issue like affordable housing comes up. Nobody in our progressive Happy Valley is ever against it, but then the various what-ifs emerge, all of which necessitate long studies and much committee time, and finally, running out of patience, the relevant estate was sold to another owner and the potential for new housing went out the window.

And repeat this scenario. And repeat. And repeat in progressive town after progressive town all across our country. We’re all for it, but we don’t want to change the neighborhood. We’re ready to change Israel, Palestine, the world, just not our neighborhood.

You can fixate on Donald Trump or on settler colonialism (whatever that means) all you want, but that won’t bring transformation. Real transformation, by its nature, will change things, including the neighborhood. Not all of it, not most of it, but certain things for sure. You may see more vehicles on the roads, maybe more stop signs, maybe even traffic lights. Maybe more “light pollution” from more homes or to illuminate our roads better. Maybe more congestion.

You may have to let go of the placid insularity that characterizes these towns. You might find that the town of your parents and grandparents is indeed changing right under your feet—and is that so bad? Or is it always others whom we want to see transformed, not ourselves?Let them give things up, let them sacrifice. Just not us.

Before I left, I heard from dear friends and students: Be safe. Take care. Take care of yourself. I say those words to others, too. But lately I’m noticing the traces of fear behind them: Take care of yourself; keep yourself together, stay as you are, don’t let anything change you too much.

Intentionally or not, we sometimes give fear to others. It’s nice to say “Take care,” I do it all the time, but how often is the affect, the undertone: Be careful. Don’t let bad things happen. Stay as you are.

Change will happen anyway. And don’t we want to affect that change in a positive, beneficial way, bringing relief from sorrow and pain? Don’t we want transformation for ourselves, our communities, our country, our world? If we do, let’s accept that things will happen, that we won’t stay the same, neither will our communities. Is that a bad thing?

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I returned home from walking the dogs and, turning to go up the front steps, I saw the above picture. Monday is my laundry day, and I love hanging up laundry on the outdoors lines rather than on those in the basement. The colors were gay and proud under the afternoon sun and there was just enough of a breeze to wave the sheets and t-shirts like flags in the air. Laundry loves to dance.

On the side is mountain laurel, with its pentagonal, delicate, pink and white flowers. You can find it this year in the midst of the densest forests. I stood there and thought to myself: Why exactly am I leaving?

Indeed, I plan to leave early tomorrow, Wednesday, to New York, and then on to Tel Aviv in Israel. Yes, the Holy Land that is currently filled with hope, terror, ambivalence, destruction, and confusion. Is that endemic to holy lands? The wild mountain laurel, flowering everywhere with such abandon, and the laundry on the lines dancing in the breeze remind me of the sweetness of domesticity, and I thought: Why go, when you have this?

I often think of Sido, the mother of French writer Colette, who wouldn’t come to visit her daughter in Paris because the rare night-blooming cereus was about to flower in her garden and she couldn’t give it a miss. There’s the world of connections (I haven’t seen my siblings in 10 months), community, and yes, even adventure, and there’s the world of the rare blooming cactus, the fledgling robins in their nest in dense shrubs in front of the house, and the leaves now full of light that, at the end of this coming 12-day trip, will have darkened into their full summer greenness.

What’s to be gained by going here and there to practice when the dharma is right under your feet, asked Dogen. I’m torn this way each time I travel because, slow learner that I am, it’s taken me a long time to appreciate the mundanities of life.

On Sunday, making good use of the money you all sent, I gave the last of three checks to send 15 children to camp for 6 weeks this summer, camp time that provides not just swimming and other activities for 7 hours five days a week, but also relief and ease for parents working in the hot farms this summer. I received this by text:

“Dear Eve: Through these words we want to express our deepest gratitude for all the help you and your friends have given us. Your generosity, kindness, and willingness to extend a hand to us in important moments have been of great value to our family. We are very grateful for every gesture of affection from people. May God bless you and your friends greatly, fill you with health, peace, and happiness, and reward you with abundant blessings for the good you have all sown in our lives. Please receive our respect, affection, and sincere gratitude.”

It was signed by — and her family, the same woman who suffered a nervous breakdown trying to deal with three small children with no family around. I wish I didn’t have to use two dashes in lieu of her name in order to protect her identity. I have told those who receive your gifts of the many people, not just Americans, who donate to help them. I try to explain that you come from Europe, Latin America, and even the Middle East, and they look at me with disbelief and confusion: Why should people so far away, who don’t know me at all, wish to help me?

What a good question that is. Why indeed should strangers take care of strangers?

I’m reminded of what Bernie used to tell me so many times over the years, which I’ve repeated here before: “Eve, we have all the wealth of the Buddha at our feet,’ he would say, even as once I checked our bank account and found that we had all of $3.00 there.

How was this possible, I would wonder. What did he see that I didn’t? How did he experience life in a way I did not even as we struggled together through hard times? The look on my face when I heard that is probably similar to the looks on immigrants’ faces when they hear that strangers in Switzerland, Brazil, Israel, Canada, Germany, and in so many states of this country give money to help them.

It reminds me once again of how narrowly we perceive life, of how our human six senses are just not up to the task of grokking infinite possibilities.

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” said George Orwell, writer of Animal Farm and 1984. Because the irony, or incredibleness of it all, is that the way to perceive magic and mystery is through the most mundane objects of life: the grooves of tree bark, changing sheets on laundry day, the ritual of making an Italian cup of coffee.

All this I’ll take with me to Israel, where I land Thursday early morning and take the train up to Jerusalem. Up to, is how they say it over there, as if that city hovers over the earth. Already I feel some anxiety. What will I say to people who ask me what I think of the matzav, the situation? Especially when, sometimes said and sometimes not, is the accusation that I live a fortunate life, that no one north or south sends missiles or drones towards our home here in the Happy Valley, that I don’t have to raise children to be soldiers. So, what does a person like me have to contribute to the conversation?

And still, they ask. They want to know. The next morning, Friday morning, four nephews and nieces are hosting me for breakfast. We’ll joke around, exchange information about our respective lives. And they just may come out and ask their weird American Buddhist aunt what she thinks.

I know a couple of easy answers. One is: “I Just want to listen.” Since my first time doing council practice in 1997 and realizing what a lousy listener I was, I have made listening a lifetime practice.

“You don’t have to answer anything right away,” a Zen teacher friend of mine said yesterday morning, “take a few minutes. Take your time.” Excellent suggestion, except that folks there are always in a hurry. But in the end, there’s no preparing for those moments, I will have to reply in that moment, not this one as I type this in my office 3 days earlier. I will look around where we’re gathered, see a little child, desert hills dotted by olive trees, or a multicolored tablecloth, and all that will be in the answer.

Like the koan of the man hanging by his mouth from the tree branch and someone comes along, looks up, and asks him the meaning of life. If he uses his mouth to answer he’ll fall and die. If he doesn’t answer he’s betrayed his vow to be of service to all beings. How does he answer?

Yes, we’re fortunate, someone said this morning in a Zoom meeting. Or privileged, as the vocabulary goes nowadays. And instead of feeling guilty or ashamed of our life, the question is how to use it to serve those less fortunate, those less privileged. How, rather than identifying with that privilege, we make it just another tool in the toolbox for fulfilling out vows.

There’s more to say on the subject of fear and transformation. It’s a conversation I’ll try to pick up in another post because it takes more thought than I could freely give now, on packing day.

I’ll walk a lot there, even in the heat, because sage and rosemary will still flower there, as will wild thyme and oregano. Too late for desert hillsides covered in wildflowers, so it’s good I have a personal yen for the barrenness of desert landscapes, like some vast paper still to be written (or drawn) on.

I’m glad for the latest US-Iran truce, if only because it minimizes (though doesn’t eliminate) the chance of missiles coming over Jerusalem or of closing all airspace, making it impossible for me to return home. When I’m there, I’m fully there. But when I board the plane to return home I’m aware of a whole other set of mundanities: green and red hummingbirds, basil leaves in our small spice corner, never-ending walks of the dogs, sitting down to a blank screen.

Will I blog from there? I don’t know. Maybe the conversation already pirouetting in my mind about fear and transformation. Maybe some short items, and maybe nothing. Just take time off, look out towards a horizon blocked by city buildings, stare and stare.

Will see lots of World Cup games.

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You can also send a check to: Eve Marko, POB 174, Montague, MA 01351. Please write on the memo line whether this is in support or immigrant families or of my blog. Thank you.

Make a Donation to My Blog Donate To Immigrant Families

You can also send a check to: Eve Marko, POB 174, Montague, MA 01351. Please write on the memo line whether this is in support or immigrant families or of my blog. Thank you.

The above photo is of Bernie and me in our last days in Santa Barbara, California, before we made our way east to Massachusetts. A dear, dear friend who lived there sent it to me, and at first I had some trouble. “Who’s the woman next to him?” I wrote back. I actually thought it was her, only she’s much taller. She replied: “It’s you, darling. Who else would he look at like that?”

We were part of the Mesa Gang, as we called ourselves, neighbors who lived in the enclave once owned by the Beach Boys. Bernie and I lived in what was referred to as the Love House, because Mike Love had lived there. Before leaving, Bernie decided to throw a goodbye party, but not just any party, a clown party. We all had to dress up.

I put on the world’s frumpiest dress and hat with heavy clogs, Bernie—well, you can see Bernie. The others completely beat us to it, looking gorgeous, foolish, or bizarre, often all three together. Moshe YooWho Cohen joined us from San Francisco and, late in the evening, after food, drinks and laughter, gave a terrific show.

Several days later a convoy of trucks and cars left Santa Barbara in temperatures close to 100 Fahrenheit to roll cross-country to a new era in a cooler, more weather-diversified New England. We honked the horn, waved and shouted goodbyes to the best neighbors we’ve ever had, and on we went.

New beginnings for Bernie, and he, at the age of 64, with so much to look back on, diagnosed with Diabetes 2 and walking on hurting knees, always loved new beginnings (We always start from scratch was his business motto), so he lit a cigar while the dog Muji whined with excitement in the back seat. My own Golden, Woody, had died 10 days earlier, probably figuring that after Santa Barbara it was all going to go downhill anyway.

In some ways, Bernie continues to be an enigma for me. Isn’t that wonderful? You can know someone for 35 years and he’s still the koan that you’ve lived alongside and with, and when you return to it, it only gets deeper and deeper, even after he died, as we often feel towards Chinese and Japanese ancestors.

This part of the koan deals with how he related to people emotionally. I think that had Bernie gone to see a psychologist (which he never did, to my knowledge), the therapist would have concluded that the man sitting across from him/her was the most emotionally defended person s/he had ever seen. Day to day, he showed only a narrow gamut of emotions. He was usually genial, smiled and frowned moderately. He loved to laugh, but loved even more to make others laugh. Almost never got angry. His emotional register was narrow to moderate.

Only in very personal circumstances did both anger and laughter leave the gate and rush out. And he showed a wide range of feelings when he clowned, as you can see above. Otherwise, he was mostly an equanimous person, which is saying a lot given the many trials and tribulations that he faced over the years.

At the same time, people connected with him very, very deeply. I love the photo below, which I only saw after his stroke. It reminded me with a shock of the tremendous life force he emanated and the power of his listening. He reminded me from the get-go that my biggest job wasn’t to teach, but to listen.

I wondered about the connection that so many people reported having with him. He didn’t provide the usual emotional signals and body language that so many give. He didn’t nod in encouragement, eyes didn’t narrow or widen in response to what you were saying; he shook his head in sympathy only rarely.

We are so often told that expressing and listening to feelings is the cornerstone of good communication. We’re even told that it may be the cornerstone to our humanity, to how we relate to others and how we show our connection to others.

Zen training, in particular, didn’t give much place to emotions. They had their place in theory, but there was some kind of understanding that serious practitioners were always controlled and measured. I think some teachers were so uncomfortable with strong sensitivities and passions that they would recommend to the student that s/he see a therapist.

As Aussie might say: “Boring!”

I remember once doing the Myers-Briggs personality test along with other co-workers and practitioners, measuring our personality traits to see how we might fit into 16 different personality types. Only one among us scored high in Extraversion and Feeling. Her comment was: “That describes me well, and that’s exactly why I felt strange in Zen communities. I often felt that having such a personality was not truly acceptable, that real spiritual people were more interior, disciplined, and reserved. I wasn’t sure that I belonged.”

That took place 25 years ago, and I’d like to think that we can now accommodate a greater variety of personalities, not some Western variations on the Japanese stolid, restrained self. But I continue to marvel at the deep connection Bernie had with people—and not necessarily his students. I wonder at whether and how we may over-rate emotions and their role in connecting two different human beings.

Particularly in the United States, there’s a sense of: If you’re free with your emotions, well then, you’re free. You’re not inhibited or repressed; what you show is what there is, so you’re being honest and transparent. Emotional empathy is what powers all relationships, and if you don’t have it, relationships will suffer.

Yes, empathy is very important. But there are other energies at work between people that are harder to describe. When I watched Bernie, he projected an enormity that could take in everything. He knew how to listen, which helped you feel that you were fine just as you were. When it was time to talk—and he could talk a lot—it often came out of a deep silence that enclosed both words and no-words, a huge this-is-itness that made feelings feel small, even irrelevant. And, of course, he loved to interrupt those words with a small joke, a play-on-words, that served as reminders not to take things so seriously.

I think of that now, in a society that often studies a speaker’s every flicker of the eyes, every curve of the lips for hints to what she or he is really feeling. Some use emojis because they feel it’s imperative to show a feeling in response to anything that is said or written.

Why? Does it really enhance communication?

Bernie’s face was no emoji. It was never a matter of whether the corners of his lips turned up or down. At the moment when he responded, looking straight into your eyes, his face reflected a universe that had made room for you, as teensy as you were. There was no need for anything else.

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I came home from a walk with both dogs, entered the kitchen, and saw the above on our butcher block table. It shows the things Lori and I keep out all the time: butter, black ground pepper, canister of sea salt, container with white sugar, black pepper grinder. On top of that, Lori (who had gone) had deposited a slender treat with a flag on top saying Henry.

She’s aware of our custom of giving dogs a post-walk treat. So were the excited dogs. “Sorry,” I told them, “but I have to take a picture.”

It reminded me of my post from last week about John Sprague, a musician and half of the duo The Enchantivists, who now plays flute or his small drum when in the airport or on a plane aisle waiting to deplane. For those of us who would like to board in Zone 1 because we wait less time getting onboard and off, because our time is so important with appointments or else we’re already talking on the phone as soon as given permission, we’re missing John playing his flute.

Or else we miss looking at the eyes of a baby held in her parent’s arms as she stares at us, wide-eyed and dazzled, as if our face is the entire universe. Or looking at the cover of the book held by a fellow passenger and saying: “I read that, too. What do you think of it?” Or else we miss looking out the window one last time and seeing a plane rush by, suddenly slant upwards and leave the ground. A hundred years ago, only a hundred years ago, that was considered a miracle. I still feel that way.

We can leave a dog treat where the other person can’t miss seeing it, or we can put it atop a tower of mundane kitchen ingredients and hoist up a flag. Henry will be happy either way, but in the second alternative I will stand there, smile, maybe shake my head, and develop a new relationship with the butcher block table and the kitchen. Call it art, call it craft, call it an imaginative response to a seemingly mundane moment. Or call it love, because someone chose to present the moment in a way that made it a gift, and I paid no entrance fee.

Sometimes I think I owe an entrance fee every time I open my eyes to a new morning.

George Schaller was the world-famous field biologist who searched for the snow leopard in Tibet, an animal then considered almost a mythical being that no Westerner had ever seen, accompanied by writer Peter Matthiessen, who then wrote a greatly-admired account of their trip entitled The Snow Leopard. Now you can see photos of snow leopards on your computer. Bless their nonexistent hearts, computers tell us so much, but there’s no journey there.

Schaller has been involved in conserving habitats for mountain gorillas, blue sheep, Chinese giant pandas (the first Westerner invited by the Chinese government to study their animal habitats), the Tibetan antelope and red deer, Marco Polo sheep and wild yaks, not to mention many other species, some of whom were thought to be extinct till he saw them. He is credited with being the first animal biologist who, rather than studying skeletons and museum specimens, actually went into the wild to live with, see, listen to, and document animals in their natural habitat. To bear witness, up close and personal.

Back around 2005 or 2006, I accompanied Bernie to a global conference of Buddhists in New Delhi. They purchased him a Business Class ticket to come to talk about Buddhism and social action, and he parlayed that into two Economy Class tickets for him and me. We first traveled to Tamil Nadu to spend time with a few Dalit villages, and then east to Sri Lanka to meet with Bernie’s friend, Ariyaratne.

The conference itself took place in 5-star hotels and, after our other travels, was uninspiring, to say the least, with talks given by the heads of various national Buddhist institutions. There was a buzz about the lack of women onstage (zero) as well as the presence of the young Karmapa who had recently escaped from China. HH the Dalai Lama was to have been there for the entire conference but was sidelined due to Chinese pressure.

Bernie and I sat in the huge hall as speaker after speaker came to the podium. The audience was dozing off, all except for a handsome, elderly, white-haired man sitting on my other side, ramrod straight rather than slouched and sleepy, listening to every word. There was a break and I, rarely sociable, introduced myself. His home was in Connecticut, the US, he told me, near ours, and his name was George Schaller.

“Peter Matthiessen’s G.S.,” I exclaimed, referring to The Snow Leopard. But even I knew by then that Schaller’s reputation hardly rested just on that book. I asked him what he was doing there and he replied that he’d been asked to participate in their programs on the environment. He gave no hint of being disappointed by the dull intonations of the speakers draped in colorful robes; a nonBuddhist, he gave them more courteous attention than anyone else in the big hall.

The next day the Karmapa opened the program on the environment, with half the audience swooning over his every word. The few scientists there crowded around Schaller,; the rest of the attendees ignored him. Here was a man considered the greatest field biologist of his time, left on his own during meals or tours. I made it a point to invite him to join our meals and, most important, to share hard-to-get taxis from one fancy hotel to another.

I hadn’t thought of that in years till a biography of him recently appeared. There, he’s quoted as saying: “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. The panda is the answer. But what is the question?”

Everything we observe is an answer of some kind: a panda, a small Chihuahua mix at my feet, a tick I picked off my arm. Here they are, phenomena all. But what are they? The answers—a panda, Henry, a tick—will always depend on the question we ask, or rather the mind that asks the question. We have our six senses for investigation, and scientists add other amazing tools—microscopes and telescopes, all kinds of scientific paraphernalia, not to mention AI—but those condition the answer we get. That answer reflects my consciousness. It reflects my thoughts about who I am more than my thoughts about the object in question.

In the photo above, I come in and ask: What is this? One answer may be: butter, black ground pepper, sea salt, white sugar, black pepper grinder, dog treat, tiny piece of paper pierced by tiny stick and saying Henry. Another answer may be: an imaginative creation. Still another: someone with time on her hands.

What happens if I don’t ask any question, instead look and say: Wow! Or What the Fu–! As writer Maria Popova puts it: “This whole existence is a bright cry of surprise.” It’s like looking into Henry’s eyes and not asking what is that, or even what kind of dog he is, just looking long enough to spot the shine of resonance in his eyes. The same shine on my wooden desk, on the thirsty green moss outside, on my face.

So what question am I asking? I know the answer to each one: My life, lived.

I would like to make one more request for help to send immigrant children to camp this summer. We have enough to send 12, but three more have come up, and since they’re over the limit, there is no more deal, the cost is higher (over $3,000 for 6 weeks), and we will send them to camp for weeks we have the money for.

It’s a lot to ask, but believe it or not, not all immigrant families came here to build a new and better life. Some are genuine refugees, fleeing gangs, cartels, and threats of death. Two of the three children are siblings whose parents came here due to a gang’s threats to kill the father and the entire family. That night they stayed with his mother, and the next morning the family of 4 was gone on a long trek up north.

The mother has a young baby in addition, almost no family to rely on, misses her own mother and siblings, and had a breakdown several months ago. It’s a dire situation, especially when schools close. If you can do a little more—and I deeply appreciate everything readers have given so far—please use the button below, Donate to Immigrant Families. These three children will be registered separately for the number of weeks we can cover.

To quote the Wizard in the Wizard’s House, who wrote this in one of his middle-of-the-night rants: “Maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen.” I think he was talking about Iran, not about kids affording summer camp, but who cares? I think I’ll miss his way with words.

This is our life, lived. The answer to all our questions. Thank you for your kindness.

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You can also send a check to: Eve Marko, POB 174, Montague, MA 01351. Please write on the memo line whether this is in support or immigrant families or of my blog. Thank you.