I feel funny about the photo above. There’s Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfieldof Ben & Jerry’s, Joe Kenner, CEO of the Greyston Foundation with his family, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Senate Majority Leader of New York State, and a few other guests whose names I don’t remember right now. We’re at a benefit for the Greyston Foundation, which runs the Greyston Bakery as well as other work training and job placement programs, and most important, spokesmen for Open Hiring, employing people regardless of whether they’ve been in prison or not. No need to even apply, just put your name on the list and, when there’s a job opening, you’re hired.

Bernie Glassman took his Zen students at the Zen Community of New York and moved them (at least, those ready to do this) to the southwest corner of Yonkers, just above the Bronx, where the Greyston Bakery created jobs for people in the neighborhood. After that, permanent housing was built for families that had been homeless (most of which were led by single mothers), along with a large childcare center, tenant programs and after-school programs, and that was followed by an AIDS care center with special housing for folks with HIV.

On Thursday night, the Foundation hosted a benefit that showed two gorgeous short documentaries about Greyston in a Bronxville, New York theater, followed by a panel, followed by ice cream ladled out by Ben and Jerry.

And what was I, wearing a crooked smile, doing there? The wife of the founder, as they often referred to me. The one who was part of those original crazy Zen practitioners who made their practice working at a bakery. With the exception of the first years when I solicited orders by phone, you could say I “wrote” my way through those Greyston years, filling in laborious government applications and asking foundations and individuals for money, but also organizing events, identifying potential supporters, and vision meetings with Bernie, management meetings with Bernie, planning meetings with Bernie, meetings galore—and I survived.

In his early years, Bernie was known for his fanatic meditation practice and egging people on to sit just as intensely. He took that same extreme passion into building Greyston, and few of us could match his relentless energy. Often, we’d be tired, overwhelmed, and somewhat bewildered: What has this got to do with Zen practice?

So, there I was, on a panel with Ben Cohen, along with Alison Bartlett and Michael Pirson, who made the wonderful short film Zen Brownie. When I spoke at the end, I said that Bernie had none of the dislike of corporations and for-profits that many liberals had, including some of his own students (a few of whom left). Everything has a function and purpose, and yes, for-profits have to make a profit. But they also provide jobs, medical insurance, and an economy to the local community.

Bernie knew that the whole world is on that bakery floor, I told them, just like the whole world is on the Vermont ice cream floor that makes Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The question is: What kind of connection do you have with the people on the floor? Can you hear their troubles?

I told them that in the beginning, we actually had little children in the bakery, breaking every rule in the book. Why? Because mothers came in to work and had no childcare for their children. You see that and ask: So how do we create childcare? You see that people can’t get jobs because they went to prison early in their lives, that’s the world that presents itself to you, and you ask yourself how to participate in that world, what small action you can do in that world.

The whole world is on that bakery floor.

I felt funny being the old-timer there. I thought of so many others who worked at Greyston in the 1980s and 1990s who weren’t there to witness what had happened to Greyston over the years, how it had become a meme for spiritually-based social change, even a myth. Ben Cohen, who has had his own adventures with Ben & Jerry’s, shook his head as he said to me: “Who’d have thought back in the late 80s when we started working with this small bakery in Yonkers, New York, that all this would come about?”

I sat in the very back watching the two films and thought the same thing: Sure, we worked hard, but this is bigger than anything anyone imagined. Except for maybe Bernie, who had an amazing instinct for what’s to come along with a powerful imagination.

We started our work during the time when Yonkers was deeply segregated. Federal Judge Leonard Sands ruled to integrate the schools, and when Yonkers resisted, he sentenced them to a fine that doubled every day, soon reaching millions of dollars. Not the best time to start work on revitalizing an impoverished neighborhood. But the schools integrated, and something shifted. The local government became more mixed, African-Americans (then a majority in southwest Yonkers) claimed their own power and authority. Sometimes, when you reach the lowest point possible, there’s no direction to go but up.

In that connection, I’m sad not to have a photo of Symra Brandon and Andrea Stewart-Cousins who were there that evening, two tough African-American women who helped Greyston to broaden its activities. They had broken all kinds of ceilings for women and African-Americans, on some years working on the Greyston Board.

We talked and reminisced, wondered at how well everyone was looking. Symra  Brandon is 91 and a few months ago was appointed to fill an interim position on the County Legislature. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, now 73, serves as Senate Majority Leader for New York State. These two were powerhouses and they shook their heads thinking of Bernie, saying, like many others: He wasn’t like anybody else. We were joined by Ken Jenkins, former head of the NAACP who had been on the Greyston Board for many years and now is Westchester’s Deputy County Executive.

I wish I had a photo of us talking and laughing together, but I hate to interrupt a good conversation by stepping away and asking if I could do a photo, even in service of this blog.

 

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I spoke with a friend, a Palestinian peace activist living in the West Bank. His daughter attends an international school in Israel, comprising Israeli, Palestinian, and international students. When the Middle East war began, the internationals and Israelis returned home; the Palestinians had more trouble due to locked checkpoints.

Finally, the school re-opened and students came back. That’s when a post appeared on Instagram accusing the school of harboring children of terrorists.

To call my friend, who’s done extensive peace work for 30 years, a terrorist is ludicrous. To call his work partner, who also sends a child to that school, a terrorist is comical. But the post garnered some 5,000 comments, each more violent than the other: Close up the school. Cancel its certification. Burn the terrorist children. Torch them and the school.

He called the school and was reassured by them that his daughter is not in danger and that they will take care of things. The person who wrote the post wasn’t a student or staff member. He was ignorant, my friend said, but what about all the rage that came up in the thousands of comments?

People walk around with so much fear, he told me, both here, where he lives, and in Israel.

And when we’re afraid, anger is where many of us go.

A week ago, I received a terrific body treatment from Kendra Renzoni, whose classes in Foundation Training I greatly benefit from. I walked out of her studio in the most relaxed, calmest of bodies and spirits, when four footsteps later my cellphone rang.

“I don’t know if you had a chance to see the announcement we got,” my sister tells me.

“I had the phone off,” I tell her.

She relates that our nephew, serving in Gaza, and his unit were staying inside a house when a missile hit the house and some of the soldiers were wounded. He wasn’t. They took the others to the hospital while his own military service in Gaza is being extended at the very time that he was scheduled to go home.

She lost me after the first sentence. The body treatment, with the relaxed joints and muscles, was gone. Instantly, things got super tight.  Neck and shoulders stiffened as I walked to the car against an icy wind.

That beautiful boy almost got hurt! It wasn’t even a conscious thought; in fact, there were no conscious thoughts, just a darkness that dropped over me like my bedroom ceiling in the middle of the night, when I can’t see anything. I sensed it, felt it—and got angry.

Why angry? Because in my case, a whole assortment of feelings—grief, sadness, fear, misery, distress—often turn into anger. It’s an old conditioning of mine and I’ve had plenty of experience with it.

I was grateful for my practice. It hadn’t stopped the anxiety and anger, but it gave me just enough space to see what was happening, just enough distance to marvel at how easily I could still lose my bearings and evenness. How easily my mind can still get swallowed up by blind fury—not at anyone or anything in particular, not even at the Hamas fighters that fired the missile, no, not at anything or anyone, just the world. Rage at life.

And for however much time that lasted—two hours, maybe—I felt I had a glimpse of how others feel, not just in the Middle East but also here. What might cause someone to kill others and then himself, as so often happens in this country. Grief, disappointment, and pain can change into anger in an instant—at an ex-wife, at parents, at parents-in-law, neighbors, old friends, even strangers—and you start shooting, and finally end up shooting yourself. Because finally, who are you most angry at?

It’s my nephew, I thought. It’s not the army. It’s not the people in Gaza. It’s my nephew.

Snow has begun again here. I will work and sit this evening. And then, before finally going upstairs to bed, will open the front door and peer out at the cold and dark, as I usually do.

Only this darkness isn’t like what I felt last week, it doesn’t promise destruction. It’s the darkness of the universe that contains both the Big Bang, giving birth to every single thing, from grains of sand to entire galaxies, and the cataclysmic black holes and conflagrations that devour entire star systems.

There won’t be stars out tonight lighting my way, but that won’t disturb this earth that will continue on its lonely orbit both around the sun and the center of the Milky Way, carrying its magical kingdom of oaks, traffic lights, Aussies, black sand beaches, white foam on top of waves, and flocks of birds. Even illegal chihuahuas.

What are the odds of my being here, alive?

Why can’t I just be grateful?

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“This is the time to be slow,

Lie low to the wall

Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light.

That’s part of a poem by John O’Donahue. Isn’t it perfect for these freezing days of winter, Aussie?”

“I hope you’re grateful, that’s all I can say.”

“Why, Auss?”

“Because it’s freezing outside. Not just freezing, fucking freezing, and who loves you and takes you out on a walk in this weather? Moi.”

“You take me out for a walk?”

“Who else? Certainly not the illegal Chihuahua Henry, shivering inside on three blankets and two pillows with a quilt over his head. Illegal ain’t leaving the house till May.”

“I thought I’m the one taking you out on walks.”

“Please! The Great Man is right, they’re poisoning our blood and making it thinner, like their Mexican blood, that’s why I have to drag you out so that you don’t get fatter than you already are.”

“Give me a break, Aussie.”

“Answer me this: Who has to wait for who to put on layers before she goes out?”

“Whom.”

“Who?”

“It’s who has to wait for whom, Aussie.”

“Right, it’s moi. Who has to wait for who to put on two pairs of socks?”

“You.”

“And the heavy boots with the thigamajigs on the bottom?”

“The yak-trax so that I don’t slip on the snow and ice.”

“That red thing you put on your head?”

“Woolen hat.”

“The thigamajigs on your hands?”

“Gloves.”

“The snake wrapped around your neck?”

“Scarf.”

“Would you be doing this without me?”

“No, Aussie.”

“Who’s the great bodhisattva, taking you out on your daily walks?”

“You are, Aussie. But you know what amazes me? It’s to see Jason and Emily taking down two trees in this weather. Emily didn’t come in today, just Jason, but she’s just as much of a trooper as he is.”

“And he doesn’t wear a hat or gloves. Of course, he’s younger, healthier, thinner, kind of cute with his thick hair and beard. I bet he and I could have a great romp in the snow, unlike me and you-know-who, who recites all that drivel.”

“Poetry, Aussie, is not drivel. I greatly appreciate the people who work outdoors in this weather. Jason and Emily taking down two trees to give us more sunlight, Steve and his crew who will come in to replace our 35-year-old roof, and then Bill’s crew will install solar panels.”

“We don’t need solar panels, we have electricity and oil heat.”

“The world needs solar panels, Auss, but who’d have thought people would be working in ten to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit? Jason said that when he climbs the trees, the wind chill factor is ferocious. And I’m thrilled to see how many women are working in these crews. When I was younger, roofing and tree work were not open to women.”

“I wish they’d stay home; I love having the guys to myself. Did you see Steve’s eyes when he saw me? He was ready to take me home with him—and I bet he loves Donald Trump.”

“How do you know that, Aussie?”

“He was a big guy.”

“Big guys like Donald Trump?”

“Naturally. He wore a heavy flannel shirt, nothing too colorful, a thick red parka without a hoodie. No North Face heated vest for him, he’s no wimp, he’s a guy guy—and you know who they vote for.”

“Aussie, it’s dangerous to make such generalizations.”

“Only he didn’t drive a truck with a dead deer in the back and there wasn’t an American flag hanging out the window.”

“Jason drives a big truck for the wood he cuts down.”

“Yes, but he works with Emily, a woman. They’ll go for Camelot Joe.”

“Camelot Joe, Aussie?”

“Kamala and Joe. Can’t we hire somebody else to take down those trees?”

“Aussie, here’s the last lines of that poem by John O’Donahue:

If you remain generous,

Time will come good;

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning.”

“Sounds like another Camelot voter to me.”

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I came out of the shower this morning and heard Henry scratching on the door: “Let me in! Let me in! Llama Louie wants to give the morning teaching!”

I didn’t want to hear Llama Louie because I caught sight of a strange woman in the bathroom mirror. “Who the hell are you? And how did you get inside the bathroom?”

She smirked.

“You put blue shadow under the eyes rather than on top, don’t you know how to put on makeup?”

She smirked again.

“Your face is lined and you’re too curvy, which is a nice way of saying that you’re overweight.”

“I am you,” she says.

“Don’t give me that Zen stuff,” I tell her, “I have too much on my mind.”

“Like what?”

“I’m feeling dark about this country.”

“That’s because you read the book Prophet Song,” she says. “The reviewers warned you not to read it even though it won the Booker Prize because it’s so depressing. But did you listen?”

“I read it because it’s gorgeously written. Only once I read about how the Republic of Ireland becomes a fascist state and people walk around saying a million times This can’t be happening in our country—only they say that the beautiful Irish way, you know—I got dark. If things like that happen here and we start saying This can’t be happening in our country, it won’t sound that beautiful. Come to think of it, I don’t know why the Irish want to restore Irish when their English is so gorgeous.”

“I think you got down on account of the Iowa caucuses this week.”

“It’s hard to face another election with Trump running. What’s worse is that I don’t know what to do.”

“Just like you don’t know what to do about the Middle East war, not that your input is all that critical.”

“What’s worse, strange woman, is that it’s winter with snow on the ground, frost in the air, and a wind chill of about -100, give or take.”

“It’s getting even colder.”

“And even worse is that Aussie is chewing on something in the back yard; she may have killed another squirrel.”

“Stop bitching,” she tells me. “Do your sitting, toss Llama Louie around with Henry, fill the birdfeeders because they’re empty after yesterday’s snow, do laundry—have you forgotten it’s Wednesday, your regular laundry day?”

“How is that going to dispel the darkness? And tell me again, who are you? Some kind of spiritual teacher or something? And how did you get into this bathroom?”

“I told you, I am but a reflection of you.”

“Like the moon reflected in water? Don’t give me that Zen shtick, I am way younger, way slimmer, way cuter. Only what’s that birthmark at the edge of your forehead? Looks familiar, but I can’t remember where I’ve seen it before.”

“Let go of all that darkness stuff, sometimes it’s poetic but mostly it’s mush. Work on gaining strength for what’s to come.”

“Hey lady, I don’t know how old you are, but I’m 74.”

“Which means you need to gain your strength.”

“I knew you weren’t me. There’s a Zen koan which asks: When the ancients got here, why didn’t they consent to stay here? The Zen master answers: Because they did not gain strength on the road. See? If you got an answer, show me.”

“Put some lipstick on, you look terrible. Now listen to me,” the woman in the mirror says. “There’s snow outside, maybe more coming this weekend. Temperatures like in Greenland. Use the winter to burrow deep, like all intelligent animals. This is the season for regaining confidence and strength, use it wisely.”

“How do I do that?”

“Trace the progress of the afternoon sun on the snow, keep your hyacinth blooming. Watch the juncos outside. If they can make it through a brutal winter, so can you. When the time comes, you’ll know what to do.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“As Mariana Leky writes in her book: You cannot always choose which adventure you’re made for.”

“Huh?”

“Donald Trump, Boris the bear, Hamas, winter squalls, Bibi Netanyahu, dead squirrel on the snow—find a way to meet them.”

“I don’t want them.”

“It’s not your choice, so make it your choice. Create your own rules, play the game. Just one more thing: Use the winter season to gain some strength.”

“Who are  you again? And what are you doing in my bathroom?”

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“Aussie, we got a $1,100 donation from Guerilla Yoga this morning.”

“Gorillas do yoga? That I gotta see. Do they do downward facing gorilla?”

“No, silly. Guerilla Yoga is a Swiss group of wonderful teachers who lead yoga sessions outdoors for free, open to anyone who wants to participate. A lot of people come, and after the class they ask for donations for a particular cause. Today we got a gift from them for immigrant families so that the families could keep their homes and pay their heat bills this cold winter.”

“But they live in Switzerland! Why should they bother with a bunch of illegals in Massachusetts?”

“Aussie, they bother because, in the end, one heart beats for all of us.”

“Oh phooey!”

“Seriously, Auss. How else do you explain that people living in one side of the world feel something for people who live on the other side, people they never heard of, never met, who may not look or live like them—and still they want to help?”

“They’re Swiss. Are you sure this isn’t a loan?”

“You know, Aussie, when I first began to distribute food cards to the families here during the Covid pandemic, I explained to them that we get donations for their benefit from Europe, the Middle East, and even Australia. They couldn’t understand it; they asked me why people would do that. But we’re wired to feel for others, it’s what makes us human. You know what His Holiness the Dalai Lama says? If you want to be happy, help others.”

“I help others, and I’m not happy.”

“How do you help others, Aussie?”

“Haven’t you noticed how nice I am to Henry lately?”

“Now that you mention it, Auss, I have. He got close to your Sunday morning marrow bone, and you didn’t attack him.”

“Grrrrr.”

“I also saw that he slept on the futon cushion in my office, where you like to nap, and you let him.”

“Grrrrr.”

“And last night he slept on your dog bed in my bedroom and—”

“Just for a few minutes!”

“Right, just for a few minutes, but still, you let him, you didn’t fight him and send him yowling off to Lori.”

“Grrrrr.”

“Does it mean you’re sick, Aussie?”

“No, it means I’m into non-violence.”

“Wow! In honor of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.?”

“No, in honor of my getting older. I can’t chase somebody away like I used to, so Henry walks all over me.”

“Aussie, nonviolence doesn’t mean that you let somebody walk all over you. It means that when a threat arises, you respond in a nonviolent way.”

“It means I’m a nothing, a big doormat for him to step on.”

“It doesn’t, Auss. King got into everybody’s face, but he was always looking into how to do it without violence.”

“He was a wimp—just like me.”

“Actually, nonviolence takes a lot of training. It’s the natural thing for us, faced with a threat, to pick up the first thing we see—a stick, a knife, a gun—for defense. Nonviolence requires discipline and that you find ways to protect yourself without hurting the other person.”

“Like what?”

“Like the way you growl but don’t hurt Henry.”

“I want to hurt him so badly when he goes after my bone!”

“There are other ways, Aussie.”

“I want to kill! Kill! Kill!”

“I can understand that, Auss, but—”

“I want to get his head in my jaws and squeeze! I want to grab a hold of his neck and fling him across the room!”

“But you restrain yourself, Auss, which is good and—”

“I want to stamp him down on the ground and maul him with my claws! I want to push him down the stairs to the dark basement and shut the door on him! I want to call the coyotes to tear him apart limb from limb! I want Boris the giant black bear to devour him!  I want to grab his collar with my incisors and throw him up in the air like he does to his toys! I want to choke him and strangle him and maul him and rip him apart! I want to hear him squeal with his last breath!”

“Aussie, I thought you eschewed bloodshed!”

“I did, but I love talking about it. Now I can go back to being nonviolent.”

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Today, Aussie and I broke the law and walked to the reservoir in adjoining Lake Pleasant. The sign prohibits access, but every once in a while, I break the law and take her there. We still have lots of snow on the ground, including ice on part of the water that’s by the main road, so imagine my surprise when we made our way down the hill and saw the large reservoir completely clear, blue-green, with ducks swimming on the opposite shore. No leaden gray surface as it’s been for a long time, just white clouds reflected in the water.

Aussie was happier, too, and I realized that dogs are probably as affected by weather as humans. She pranced around, stopping only to contemplate going into the cold water. Rain starts tonight and will go into tomorrow mid-morning, I’m told.

What am I thinking of this morning? I think of Kisagotami. The old Buddhist story is straightforward:

A young mother in old India loses her baby. She goes crazy from grief, holding the baby’s corpse in her arms and not letting go. Finally, she goes to a teacher she’s heard of, the Buddha, and begs him to bring her baby back to life. He agrees on one condition. First, she has to visit the houses in the village and find one that had suffered no loss, take a mustard seed from them, and bring the seed back. Kisagotami does as she’s told, only to discover that not one house has suffered no loss; they’ve all suffered through illness and death, many losing children, parents, friends. She returns to the Buddha, picks up the dead baby, gives it up for cremation, and becomes a follower of the Buddha.

In the beginning of my years in Zen Buddhism I couldn’t understand this story. Who finds solace for a personal tragedy in the suffering of others? Doesn’t it exacerbate it? Or at least, wouldn’t you feel your own grief denied when someone you describe it to says: That’s terrible. Now let me tell you what happened to me.

As the years passed, and especially recently, the story has deepened for me. As the scholar Peter Hershock described in his book Liberating Intimacy, what happens to Kisagotami when she knocks on doors in search of a home with no loss? The woman of the house answers. The young, grief-stricken mother tells her why she’s come.

“Come in,” the woman says. They serve her tea and listen to her tell the story of her baby—how beautiful it was, how healthy, how it brought her such joy, and the catastrophe of its illness and death. They nod, commiserate, urge her to drink more tea. Then they tell her about their grief. About the father who had a work accident. A daughter who died at childbirth. How they couldn’t take good care of parents because of the lack of money. Kisagotami sips her tea and listens. No mustard seed here, so on she goes to the next house, where the same thing happens.

Finally, she understands the significance of the Buddha’s teaching that life is suffering. Rich or poor, Brahmin or not, suffering is part of being human. You try to build a life of meaning and love, you get old and sick, look back and wonder if it was all a dream, and then die. What a crazy way to live! All life is fragile, no wonder we try to be on top of things, no wonder we’re fearful and impatient. The fragility of being human is what binds us to each other, including the lack of solution and control.

Contrary to what our parents and media tell us, we’re not living in a context of no problem, everything’s good! (with the implication that if your life is different there’s probably something wrong with you). Disappointment, heartbreak, and loss are essential parts of this life–as are laughter, ducks swimming on the water, sneaking our way around the reservoir overjoyed by the blue skies. If we don’t recognize that, we become over-protective and defensive, trying every which way to control things, and when shit happens anyway, we feel like failures. Or at the very least, that something wrong happened.

I’ve seen this in the US more than in any other country, specifically among more affluent white people. I think it’s what causes our fearfulness in one of the securest countries in the world. I can’t begin to count how many people I talk to, upon describing the weather, losing power due to a storm, or a bad work experience, say: “It’s scary.”

It’s all I can do to not say: “What’s scary, life?”

We hear of parents who’ve lost children to illness or violence. Many are dogged by this catastrophe forever, even divorce because their marriage can’t survive the tragedy. And there are a few who find their hearts opening to other children who are at risk, other children who are sick. They’re the ones who start foundations to help other children, who advocate on behalf of a medical cure, who open their hearts to the grief of others. Their personal grief widens to include the grief of others.

I used to think that the word healing meant that you bring an end to someone’s pain. I am not sure any longer. The word is related to whole, and maybe the job of healing is to acknowledge that accidents, illness, violence, death are all parts of the game. They’re part of the wheel of life, co-existing with us, even calling for our attention, a way to live with rather than against all the time. Not fight fight fight cancer or drugs but see how everything has its place.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t seek a cure for cancer, that I don’t protect the people I love, that I don’t care for those without homes or food. I do whatever I can do while recognizing that everything has a cause, that the fullness of being human asks me not to worry so much about good and bad or right and wrong, but rather see that we all occupy the same space, share the same DNA, and one way or another, we also share very similar struggles. Nobody’s outside of that circle, without exception.

The Buddha could have told Kisagotami that death is part of life; he could have given her a teaching. Instead, the Great Physician sent her out to discover this for herself. I feel right now that we’re all Kisagotamis, sent out into the world to bear witness to the breadth and fragility of humanity, admit our interdependence and kinship, and out of that take care of the world.

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Looking back I see more than seventy years

have already passed.

I am tired of seeing through right and wrong

in the human world

Snow in the late night covers all traces

of coming and going

A stick of incense burns by the old window.

I sit.

The poet Ryokan describes more and more of my life.

We still have snow outdoors, though much has melted in rainstorms. Lying in bed last night, I could hear gusts and rain slapping the walls, occasional chimes from the chimes over the remains of a big oak tree. Through a slightly open window I heard the stream below us turning into gushing white water, then the sound of a freight train chugging its way up north on tracks half a mile from the house, Aussie jumping down from the living room sofa, her favorite bed, to hop on the big lounge chair or else the futon in my office. Her nights are full of pilgrimages from one bed to another. The surge of heat as the furnace finally, in the dead of winter, comes into its own.

“You were in Israel a few weeks ago? How was it?” This from the eye surgeon I visited, preparing for cataract removal in my second eye. No, I wasn’t in danger, Jerusalem got rockets just one day the entire time I was there. Looking at his name, I ask him if his family’s roots are in Lebanon, and he says his father’s are. He was born here, but I always love meeting someone from that Fertile Crescent, with its extraordinary culture, food, and hospitality.

 “Do you go back?” I ask him. “Do you take your children?”

The answer is no. He’s afraid of the instability and violence, the destructive, percolating passions.

I’ve felt locked in those passions, too, but winter in this Valley is a miracle. The snow covers the earth and all its cacophony and bedlam. In the midst of glaring headlines about the Middle East, Ukraine, and Trump trials, it whispers: It’s time to rest. Or at least sit in a warm office under the gray, woolen shawl Bernie brought you from Colombia years ago, and remember that you were loved. That you are loved.

Work and repose at the same time. The birds are eating at the birdfeeders, squirrel tracks in the snow, dogs running delightedly on the puffy powder. They find winter boring and lately have been barking a lot.

“What are you barking at?” I shout at Aussie. “There is nothing there.”

“Nothing is worth barking at,” she shouts back. Ahh, a Zen dog.

Some go to sleep forever. Our first winter in the house I came out the front door on an antarctic morning to find a dead coyote on the front path. It lay there, skin and bones, no blood spots of any kind; it had starved to death. Perhaps it had come to the house for a last-minute search for food before giving up and lying down on the snow.

It shook me up. Death had been so close by, starvation right out front, and I didn’t know it? I’d slept through it?

I picked the body up with a big snow shovel and carried it into the woods. Didn’t tell anyone, not even Bernie.

The same thought crosses my mind now: Someone died out there and I didn’t know it? The newspapers announce YES!, big-time. The Council on Foreign Relations says there are some 32 conflicts or wars actively going on now. The numbers of those dead from war climbs up from year to year, never mind millions of refugees. And I will go to bed soon under warm blankets and read, just as I did that night when the coyote came to our house looking for food.

My eternal koan.

James Joyce, too, saw the snow, and wrote how it falls on everyone evenly, covering up the home, the asphalt roads, the bare trees, the graves, traces of past loves and irritations of the present. It nurtures the earth underneath while the earth waits patiently and quietly.

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A good old snowstorm hit us over the weekend. It began around 6 in the evening of Saturday, left some 6 inches overnight, and another 3-4 inches on Sunday. Not a blizzard, not a blow-out of a nor’easter, just an old-fashioned storm that dropped lots of snow on the ground. I remember that when we first came to New England almost 22 years ago, there were many of these throughout the season, but that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.

We woke up this morning to the clearest blue skies I’ve seen since returning from Israel on December 26, a sun so warm it probably came here from Barbados for a brief winter break, only 2-3 white wisps hanging in mid-air that bore no resemblance to the heavy gray skies we’ve had so far. Friends of mine are flying to St. John’s today for a few weeks of Caribbean warmth, and I didn’t envy them in the least.

“You want to hear something stupid I did today?” I wail to my sister on the phone.

Sure she does.

“There was snow and ice on the roads, so before going out with Aussie I got my heavy winter boots out of the closet, then looked for ice cleats to attach to the bottom of the boots and couldn’t find any. Or rather, I found one. I was surprised because I depend on them a great deal, just like I depend on winter studded tires for driving, and I couldn’t find them. I had lots of trouble fitting one cleat on the boot. You listening, Ruth?”

She’s listening.

“The walk was fine except that the cleat came off, so I took it back to the car. I came home and started taking the boots off, and guess what?”

What?

“The cleats had been attached to the bottom of the boots all along, they’d been there since last winter—and I never noticed! In fact, I’d actually tried to put a second cleat under them, no wonder it didn’t fit and finally slid off. This,” I conclude, ”is the results of years of Zen practice. Look at the quality attention and mindfulness I’ve managed to cultivate.”

She laughs, then says, ‘Oh honey, you’ve worked hard to let go of that strong brain of yours. I guess you’re finally succeeding.”

I don’t think she meant that I’d grown stupid or ignorant, though I’ve certainly forgotten a lot of what I once knew (famous enlightenment verse about that). It’s just that once it was so important for me to be bright and brainy. I was critical, fault-finding, proud of my mind, and felt that being smart was the most important thing in the world.

It took me a long time to lay that to rest, to open up to other energies like love and care, to nurturing life around me, and that unnamable, empty essence at the bottom of it all. When I look behind me at various relationships that were on offer throughout my life and the mindless arrogance and silent criticism with which I met them, I shudder. So, I don’t look back too much.

In that vein, or in any vein, a gorgeous winter, when I love trekking in the cold and love even more returning to a warm house, is threatening to many immigrant families living in nearby Turners Falls. A friend calls me today: “Eve, I got a call from Cindy. Her husband’s hours were cut down in the restaurant where he works. You know, they have two little children plus a newborn.”

She doesn’t have to say much more. I keep the house at 65 degrees Fahrenheit; both Lori and I wear layers at home, Aussie has her fur coat, and Henry snuggles between pillows and a blanket when he’s not throwing his toys around. You can’t do that with little children and a baby in the house, they need heat. This morning I visited an old student in her assisted living facility; it was kept so warm I could hardly breathe. But how much heat could they afford in their homes with little children running around?

This is the season of barely enough. The farms—the biggest employers around for families, especially undocumented—are shut down so income takes a radical dip. The heat bills zoom high, as do electricity, as do the rents that here, as in so many other places in this country, know just one direction of travel: up and up and up. Very little affordable housing.

Other charities do what they can. Young kids get winter jackets to go to school, but I’ve seen their mothers come for food cards with bare feet in sneakers and shivering in faded cardigans.

These winters are beautiful for some, like Aussie and me walking along snow-covered fields that once grew corn and pumpkin, and a fearful challenge for these families as they try to make it through another harsh season of unpaid utility bills and eviction notices.

I arranged to provide $500 to the family where the father lost many of his long working hours, but the winter has just begun. Christmas is over, but not the season of giving and caring. Please donate to these families using the button below so that they could make it through another winter, their children warm, their teens in school.

By the way, since someone asked me, most of the families I know are in the midst of a lengthy process of seeking asylum. Yes, they have no documents, but they’ve begun the process of becoming legal even as it costs them years and plenty—and I mean plenty—of money. They’re not criminals.

“Donald Trump says that Henry’s poisoning my good old Texas blood,” Aussie says.

“How’s he doing that, Aussie?”

“If he bites me, I may get his Mexican germs.”

“That little dog is in awe of you, Aussie, given that you’re four times his size.”

“I don’t like it when he talks Mexican. And why does he have such weird toys, like Llama Louie?”

“What toy should he have, Aussie?”

“He should get a Barbie and throw her around. That’s the good old American way.”

Thank you for your help.

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Maybe the little dog had hoped she’d throw it for him, he’d bring it back, she’d throw it, he’d bring it back, etc.—and maybe she did. Right now, there it lies, a simple gift from a dog’s heart that feels truer than my stick of incense, as if it’s saying: Here is my favorite thing in the world, all for you.

Whereas I sometimes sound like: What have you done for us lately? The Middle East is burning up, Pakistan is expelling 1.7 million Afghan refugees, there’s war and famine in the Tigray region in Ethiopia, a quarter of a million people came over the Mexico-US border in December alone—where’s the compassion, man—eh, woman?

She looks deeply at me with humor in her narrow eyes: What’s your idea of compassion? and thereby shuts me up. I have plenty of ideas for compassion, but often they’re just ideas.

Our winter is here, and under the heavy gray, lowering clouds I wonder about my path in life. Not so much what will I do when I grow up but rather: What kind of beginnings are possible for me now? I think of John O’Donahue’s poem:

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge. 

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown. 

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this. 

In Green River Zen’s January newsletter, I announced that I was retiring from teaching at the local sangha as of June 30, 2024. I wished to make space for younger teachers to take over; I also had the vague sense that a page had been standing upright for a while now, ready to be fully turned, and it’s time I turned it.

Not because of better things to do.

“What will I do?” I wailed to my sister when I saw her in Jerusalem 10 days ago.

“You always find something,” she said.

She’s right, of course, I will do things. But I think my more basic question was: What will I be? I feel more stripped down than ever (even while wearing a thick red sweater this evening), less layered than before, all the extras coming off, leaving what?

I think back to a brief conversation I had in Jerusalem with a friend of my brother who’s done peace work for many years between Israelis and Palestinians. A secular man, he asked me what was meant by spiritually-based social change. I described briefly the Zen Peacemakers’ Three Tenets—not-knowing, bearing witness, and taking the emergent action. He listened, nodded, said nothing.

That very moment I felt as though I’d said too much, as though none of that was really needed anymore. I don’t need a recipe for taking action, I am action. Things are moving in me all the time, death, rebirth, death, as part of the roll and churn of life, no need to think things out too much.

When life leaves you alone, no longer tempting you with promises of fame, money, beauty, or a glorious future, you’re being pared down to walk naked in this world, occasionally looking at yourself and wondering whose skin this is, whose lines at the base of the thumb, whose hands cutting tomatoes and rinsing lentils for soup. What is this thing called me?

It’s time to leave something other than another incense stick at the base of Kwan-yin’s feet; the incense feels extra, of another age. Maybe all she wants, finally, is the thin torn branch at her feet, the biggest gift a little dog can give her.

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I’m spending New Year’s Eve at the Deerfield veterinary hospital. Henry, the illegal chihuahua mix, was attacked by a neighbor’s dog a few hours ago. He has two puncture wounds on his forehead, but what brought me here is my fear of internal injuries he may have suffered, causing him to walk with difficulty and unable to go up and down stairs. Lori, his human companion, is away for the long weekend and I feel bad that he got hurt under my watch. I think he’ll be okay, but figured I’d play it safe.

When I came in here in the early evening, I was surprised and moved to see so many people in the waiting room. It might be New Year’s Eve, but folks love their animals, a good reminder of how much people love their families, human, canine, and feline.

There’s a football game on the TV screen that no one looks at. Instead, they seem somber and hopeful at the same time, exchanging stories about why their beloved animals are here. Not for us the boisterous, congratulatory New Year’s hoopla on the TV screen. We leave the new year on a note of care and love, and we’ll start the new year on that same note (I have a feeling I’ll be here through midnight).

That’s the thing, isn’t it? We love our families, but do we love all families. We love our children and animals, but do we love all children and animals?Which, as usual, reminds me of the Middle East.

I experience a deep conflict between loyalty and love of family, love of origins, deep appreciation of everything that brought me to this moment—including a religious upbringing that, despite my opposition, still caused me to wonder about God and how the understanding of God helps me to live—and the caring and sympathy I owe towards all beings, near and far.

I see more clearly than ever the traumatic ingredients surrounding my family, not just from October 7 but from earlier years in Israel and in the Holocaust, as well as the personal continued involvement in this war, be it in Gaza itself, the West Bank, or the mothers caring for children at home while holding fear and anxiety at bay.

In that scenario, caring for the people killed in Gaza almost feels like a betrayal of your own family. It’s the only way I can understand why Israeli journalists, usually so independent and professional, barely talk about what’s happening “on the other side.” I feel a conflict between vision and values, personal loyalty to family and loyalty to Buddha Nature, which is everywhere, all beings.

As Mira Jacob wrote in a graphic column, “I hold rage and love in one single body.” That can be a war all by itself that rips one apart. Or it can be something else entirely, which it has been my practice to explore since October 7.

Bernie talked about bringing as many beings as possible into the mandala of our practice and warned that those we leave out will sabotage our work. We don’t have to love them all; the folks who did what they did to people on October 7, and especially the horrific rape and mutilation of women, I don’t love them at all. I can’t love Jihadist groups with their insistence that only religious Sharia law should be followed or that a certain geography belongs to only them, and that it’s actually a good deed to kill offenders, including hundreds of children, as they’ve done in Pakistan (Pakistan Taliban), Africa (Boko Haram), and as Hamas did in October.

Theirs is a language I don’t speak. I take Bernie’s caution as an encouragement to extend my boundaries as much as I can, calling on deep patience and listening, but at a certain point I admit that I reach a limit.

You can be as Buddhist and humanist as you like, but when family comes in—oh boy, that’s a different matter entirely. Now your attachment is in full force—and I don’t use the word in a negative sense. If anything, I’m trying to negotiate my way. How do I love without attachment? How do I raise children without attachment? How do I love my siblings and their children and grandchildren without attachment?

Is it some enlightened act to mourn the death of Gazans as much as I might mourn the death of a family member? Does it point to a huge capacity for love or to a lack of it, or perhaps to a lack of deep emotional connection? This is what I tangle with now.

What do I wish everyone for the new year? Waiting for Henry, I began reading the latest Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song, and found this sentence about the narrator, a woman, wife, mother, and microbiologist: “She sees how happiness hides in the humdrum, how it abides in the everyday toing and froing as though happiness is a thing that should not be seen, as though it is a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past …”

I wish us all not to wait for this sound from the past, but to recognize happiness in the making of supper, the feeding of family, the hanging of laundry and turning on lights indoors as a winter sun sets. Even in sitting at a veterinary hospital on New Year’s Eve, having left Aussie at home, and taking good care of a very sweet (though illegal) chihuahua.

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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.