The dogs and I returned to Fiske Pond for the first time after winter. The dam that takes us unto the loop trail was impassable due to water, so we went around. I thought we were alone till we rounded a small grove of hemlocks onto a downward path and there, coming down the path on the other side, was a man on a bike with a pit bull.
Henry touched noses friendly-like with the chocolate dog with very dark eyes, but Aussie went into full attack mode and a dogfight ensued. Loud and snarly, the two of them jumped up on their hind legs to take each other down.
“What is this, The Voice?” asks Aussie, her head between the pit bull’s jaws.
“I’m cheering you on, Aussie.”
“This is not a football game, Illegal Chihuahua. Could you please cheer me on in the American way?”
“What way is that, Aussie?”
“KILL THE SON OF A BITCH! HIT HIM HARD! MUTILATE HIM!”
“Kill him, Aussie?”
“BITE OFF HIS BALLS! BEHEAD THE S.O.B.!”
“What’s a terrible thing to say, Aussie. What would he do without his balls?”
“I guess you wouldn’t know,” she mutters, her neck twisted so that she looks in the other direction. “Balls, for your information, are—”
“But Aussie, I’m a nonviolent dog.”
“Didn’t hear you,” says Aussie, whose ears are being chewed on.
“I don’t do violence and I don’t wish violence on anyone.”
“It’s the American way!”
“Martin Luther King was American, Aussie, and he was completely into nonviolence.”
“He was a Black American, an entirely different phenomenon.” Aussie is now on the ground, the pit bull on top of her.
“He was a great man, Aussie.”
“Goddam you, Enrique, I’m not talking about King, I’m talking about a pit bull. Just look at what he’s doing to me, mauling me with his thick paws. Pit bulls know nothing but violence.”
“That’s not true, Aussie,” says Henry, chewing on a biscuit thoughtfully. “The Senora had Bubale the pit bull for 10 years and said she was a wonderful dog. Funny, too. You’re not funny, Aussie.”
“You try to be funny with a pit bull’s teeth around your neck and—”
“Aussie, we’re all the Beloved Community. The Senora came home from Alabama and wants us to be part of the Beloved Community. You know what that means?”
“Ouch, that hurts! No.”
“We have to try to love those who hurt us.”
“Get off me, you monster, you rotten—”
“Now, now, Aussie. I don’t mean that you actually have to love them, but recognize that they have a point of view, that they have stories to tell that we must listen to.”
“This pit bull isn’t telling me stories, Illegal, he’s making me a story! A story in the past.”
“All stories are important, the Senora says. By the way, your fur is wet. Is that blood?”
“Drool, idiot. So far, he hasn’t broken any skin. Pete Hegseth would have fired him instantly.”
“He’d probably fire you, too, Aussie.”
“Me? Hurricane Aussie?”
“You’re a female, Aussie. Hegseth doesn’t like females. I guess you can always transition.”
“It’s not fair, this pit bull’s got claws, Illegal. The vet trims mine.”
“Complain complain complain. Trump hates whiners. You know what you have to do, right, Aussie?”
“Beat the shit out of him?”
“No, make a deal. Isn’t that the Trumpian way?”
“I would, only I got nothing to offer, so the pit bull isn’t making any deals.”
“There’s an echo here, Aussie.”
“Probably because my entire head is inside his mouth. He has terrible breath! I’m afraid this is the end of me, Illegal. I loved my life, gave it all I got, but this may be the end.”
“Come on, Aussie, you can win—and don’t forget, I’m next of kin.”
“Thanks for the poem, Illegal. Do me a favor. Tell the Senora I want a nice gravestone.”
“What should it say, Aussie?
“Here lies Hurricane Aussie. She gave as good as she got. See you in Valhalla, Illegal, where all great warriors go. Don’t fear death, Henry, and don’t weep for me Argentina.”
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.
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I left it in Bradley Airport on my way to Alabama, so I didn’t have it flying down, nor in the retreat, nor upon my return. I don’t have it now. I would have bought a new one if not for the fact that, based on others’ testimony, I’m sure Delta Airlines has it reposing in some central depot, waiting for someone to match it with the claim form I filed. I guess it needed a break.
It’s interesting to be without it, not subject to others’ beck and call. I miss having a camera and access to Voice Memos, where I dictate thoughts and ideas. But now, when I walk the dogs, rather than catching up on calls, I look around at budding trees and at new tracks made by animals coming to life in this first day of May. I no longer wonder whether the place we’re walking in has WIFI or even a local telephone signal. We’ll see who holds out longer, Delta Airlines or me.
Still digesting the Alabama retreat bearing witness to racism, from which I returned home late Tuesday night, and how, the very next morning, this country’s Supreme Court released its decision allowing state governments to gerrymander voting districts in order to lessen the voting power of African-Americans. Welcome home.
Instantly I thought of the Constitution, and how originally it counted black enslaved people as 3/5 of a person for voting purposes. Not that they voted then, those 3/5 of a vote multiplied by one’s slaves actually multiplied the votes of the whites who enslaved them.
Welcome home, indeed. You witness what courageous people did to be allowed to vote, go down the Selma-Montgomery road they took, imagine the police slamming batons and setting attack dogs on them, the events of Bloody Sunday, and you think: Well, at least that battle was won. Till you get home. Till the following morning.
Nowadays, all our Supreme Court justices acknowledge that race matters, but the conservative majority seems to feel that only when it comes to so-called discrimination against whites. The Montgomery Legacy Museum pointed out that, based on decisions affecting people of color, our vaunted court system was one of the most reactionary bodies of government. That may come as something of a surprise to those of us who grew up under the Warren court and assumed that that legacy of inclusivity would be forever the law of the land. Not so fast.
It’s easy to get angry. It’s easy to get angry at the Supreme Court, the police, ICE, etc. It’s certainly easy to get angry at Donald Trump. He generates so much hate. But to my eyes, he’s a caricature. Envy the comedians and cartoonists who are having a ball with him right now, especially after such poor candidates like Biden (rectangular head and bland smile) and Obama (the ears), who weren’t very funny.
But the big question is: What is he a caricature of? The silly words, the circus act, the bullying and hectoring—those make up the performance of a bad vaudeville magician attracting your attention so that you don’t notice what’s behind the curtain. And what is it? A system that plunders the votes of people of color, that robs the poor and lower middle class in favor of the rich, that makes higher education financially unattainable for so many, that makes medical care unaffordable, and soon enough, with the aid of AI, will rob blue- and white-collar workers of jobs, siphoning all that wealth to the big tech companies and their billionaire owners.
Donald Trump is the Wizard of Oz, with his high-volume blathering and meaningless promises. To all would-be assassins: Please don’t bother. He’s the unattractive, easy-to-hate caricature. The important question is: What’s he a caricature of? What’s lurking behind the curtain?
Going down to Alabama showed me some part of it. It showed me why Selma continues to be poor notwithstanding its iconic status in the Civil Rights era. The state government won’t give it money. It likes the city that way, impoverished and disenfranchised. And it’s counting on a President and Supreme Court that are protective of states’ rights to do this.
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.
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Playing, eating, and painting with kids at rally. Photo by Michel Dobbs.
Today the Supreme Court struck down a crucial aspect of the Voting Rights Act. They paid lip service to the Act but eliminated the provision that prevents states from enacting racial gerrymandering to dilute the vote of African-Americans. The conservative justices emphasize states’ rights, asserting that our federal government doesn’t have a role in guaranteeing equal voting rights even in cases of blatant racism.
It struck me particularly hard because I returned late last night from the Zen Peacemakers’ retreat in Alabama bearing witness to racism. I can almost hear folks say: Why did you go down there? You grew up alongside the Civil Rights movement, you remember the killings (I wrote my first poem after the bomb that killed four black girls in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church when I was 13), you’ve studied the life of Dr. King, why go down to Alabama?
I wasn’t sure, other than that this was one of the main retreats developed by the Zen Peacemakers. But I know now, and it has a lot to do with bearing witness and what that means in today’s world. It has a lot to do with making history personal rather than abstract, with stepping in certain footsteps across the Edmund Pettis bridge and doing meditation underneath it, with planting flowers in a public park that has seen better days in the city of Selma and picking up the trash from adjoining streets.
It has to do with getting recommendations for a really good Southern breakfast, with being addressed as Ma’am out of courtesy towards age rather than because I’m white (I checked). It has to do with meetings and relationships (“Come here for a hug, honey, don’t need that handshake”), and with encountering unimaginable loss, hope, and faith in so many people, and especially (but not exclusively) black women.
It has to do with Zen koan practice because, just like in the extermination camps in Poland, it’s not just about death and loss. Death is not hard to capture, it’s the life all around death that’s hard to describe in words. “You have to go there to understand,” I used to tell people about the retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau. You have to go to Alabama at the next ZP retreat to fully grok, using the Man’s favorite word, the secrets not just of African-American lives, but also of our own.
I guarantee you that if our conservative Supreme Court justices met this history in a personal way, they would have never voted as they did. Instead, they stick to books, precedents and legalese, in service to discrimination and obfuscation rather than to the cause of democracy.
You start with a plunge, and here the plunge consisted of spending the day in Montgomery’s Legacy Museum and the memorial to the thousands of people lynched in Jim Crow days. Books, study, college courses, and numbers don’t begin to capture what I felt there. My body began to tremble from when I first went in and saw those huge Atlantic waves crashing over an estimated 2 million bodies of Africans tossed overboard enroute to enslavement in the Western Hemisphere.
My mind numbed quickly—it knows how to do that—but I couldn’t numb my body, especially at the scenes of women losing their husbands and multiple children, one after another, to be sold for a good price. I swallowed so much my throat hurt. My chest ached even as I was cold in the air-conditioning and my hair kept on falling over my eyes, as if trying to hide something from sight.
I was barely halfway through when the retreat leader told me it was time for us to go. I was confused about time, what century this was. But we had to proceed to the memorial to thousands of lynching victims during the Jim Crow era, which didn’t even include the broader massacres like those that took place in Tulsa or Rosewood. There, too, I dawdled, staring up at the heavy wooden blocks that dangled from the high ceiling, relentlessly spelling out the name of every county in most of our states.
You hold up your head, determined to read every single name, till the muscles of your neck throb, and then you look down, and once outside you take in the flowers, the paths through the grass. Till finally, you take shelter from the heat with the group waiting outside, the wonderful crazy ones among us, from college age to 87, with whom I was already half in love, from the ones I’ve known for some 30 years to those I met at the retreat.
And just when you feel that life doesn’t get any more cruel than this, just when you start losing your faith in—you name it: God, human nature, Buddha Nature—you meet the people of Montgomery and Selma living now, descendants of those same parents who watched their children put on an auction block with a price in dollars rather than a name affixed to them.
You sit down with activist and film producer T. Marie King, who has little patience for religious or spiritual groups who talk about inequality and discrimination, but who don’t do much about it.
You meet Selma Councilwoman Jannie Thomas, who gets you to work at her neighborhood park and who has lived there her entire life. Selma was once a center of the Confederacy and the backdrop for numerous lynchings before becoming famous for its role in the Civil Rights marches. A tornado blasted through this very poor city several years ago, destroying infrastructure and homes, but the state government is not very sympathetic towards its people.
You meet Mama Callie, who organized a rally for several neighborhood organizations, all founded by women. A big woman with blonde cornrows with tiny bows, she welcomes us to the rally and offers T-shirts, pins, literature, food and drink. Her particular passion is children killed by gun violence; she herself lost her children, Venus and Mercury.
Celia talks of having lost both parents as well as her own children, enduring beatings and praying for death because the losses were so great, but finding support and help in her community and reminding everyone not to do anything alone, that there are earth angels everywhere, sometimes wearing the costume of mental health providers, or friends, or pastors, or just fellow sufferers who have found the strength to go on.
Drugs, domestic violence, guns, poverty—abstractions to many of us, and the causes of so much loss and suffering for these women. Still, they praise God. They search for earth angels everywhere. They face the 21st century equivalent of the horrors of the previous centuries, and they won’t back away. Like their mothers, grandmothers, and great-great-great mothers.
And neither do we. Because there’s life here, loud, cackling, and insistent, one eye on their children and one eye on the rest of us, laughing in celebration.
And just when you think it’s the women, there is Kevin King, bald on top and a rich beard below, who started King’s Canvas, an art studio and gallery for artists who have nowhere to work, with free canvas, easels, and all accoutrements necessary to produce art, making it a communal hub for the west side of Montgomery, right on the trail of the Selma to Montgomery marches. He calls it creative placemaking.
And Rev. Michael Bowen, who was homeless on the streets of Harlem, New York at the age of 14, and now leads Safe Haven Center for ex-cons in Selma.
Kudos to the Zen Peacemaker staff that created and developed these relationships. It’s these people, in Selma and Montgomery, that become our teachers, that tell us there is always life in the middle of devastation, there’s fabulous catfish, yams, and lemonade, portraits to paint, supper to cook, churches to go to (including King’s church on Dexter Avenue). They’re not tired. Rosa Parks, with a statue and museum in Montgomery, said: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
In the coming years, all of us may get tired and be tempted to give in. But there is resilience, and the place to learn it, the place to find laughter, song, dance, and art in the middle of craziness, was right there, in Selma and Montgomery.
And food.
My friend, Roshi Michel Dobbs, told me this story: “Last year we were in Selma on a Sunday and needed breakfast, but everything’s closed on Sunday. We asked Jackie, who owned the restaurant Reflections where we loved to eat, what to do. She came in on Sunday morning and laid out a breakfast buffet for the entire group. ‘I have to go to church,’ she then told us. ‘Eat your fill, and when you’re finished, put your money in that canister over there, turn the lights off, and shut the door behind you.’”
I’d like to live—and leave—just like that.
Retreat participant, Rosa Parks and me. Photo by Michel Dobbs.
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.
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.
I wrote this story several years ago, and now there’s an update.
Some time ago, can’t remember the year, I was asked by Mikko Ijas, a Finnish member of the Zen Peacemaker Order, to send him a small piece of fabric that once belonged to Bernie and which Mikko could incorporate into the ordination robe that he was sewing. Zen Peacemaker priests sew these robes, called a kesa, from fragments of fabric that are important to them, associated with either a person or a situation that played a significant role in their lives.
What did I send Mikko? The last piece of fabric cut out of an old, worn-out, brown samue (Japanese peasant) jacket that Bernie wore daily, along with a card of congratulations. It never arrived. Every few weeks Mikko, now also a teacher and the head of the Zen Peacemakers sangha in Finland, would ask me about it but I couldn’t track it down, it seemed to be lost. Eventually I told him to forget it and sew his robe without the fabric, which he did, and was ordained by Roshi Frank de Waele.
Six months or even a year later, lo and behold, the package arrives back at our home. It’s taped over several times and, according to the stamps on the envelope, seems to have gone everywhere around the world except Finland. I opened up the envelope. There was Bernie’s fabric and the card I’d sent. There, too, was a small, suede turquoise jewelry bag. I reached inside and found a wedding ring.
I emailed Mikko and thanked him for the proposal, only reminded him that he’s already married to a lovely, talented woman and has a young son. Mikko replied that he didn’t know what I was talking about because he’d never received the mailing.
I looked at the strange ring. Bernie and I had worn the same wedding rings, a set of three interlocked titanium rings we found at a store in Santa Barbara, CA, for $25. We were doing circle work then and figured such wedding rings were perfect. But what arrived this time was a traditional wedding ring, nothing like the work-marriage amalgam that we had worn.
My heart lightened. Is this an augury that my love life isn’t over, I wondered. That somewhere out there was another man who’d want to love me and be loved back, with whom I could build a shorter but beautiful future? I returned the ring to its small bag, put it away, and waited.
And waited.
Several years have passed since then. About a week ago, I found myself in a phone conversation with a friend about love. For the life of me I can’t remember what we said, only that at the end, after hanging up, I realized that there was no reason to wait. Love is not conditioned on our karma, on whom we meet, what situation we find ourselves in, how big is our social circle, our age, our attractiveness.
Put yourself in the path of love, I urged myself. It’s all around, not dependent on any one person, not even dependent on you. Not a bone that a dog finds after digging up the entire yard but an openness that expands and enlivens, and it’s embodied in every creature around me if I pause to pay attention and smile in recognition.
To mark that, I put on the wedding ring that had arrived in the envelope. My hand had more lines and sunspots than in Bernie’s time, but the ring was a perfect fit.
People will think you’re married, a voice warned inside, and then they’ll think you’re not available. Phooey, I said back. I’m available bigly, as Aussie’s Man likes to say. Not like before, way bigger.
This evening, I go to an in-person meeting with immigrants and Anglo activists—not an easy thing to organize nowadays, but Jimena and I are still good partners. They’ve already asked us, on Zoom, to prevent ICE from coming to the neighborhood. We can’t, we’ll tell them, but we can make some trouble. Good trouble, as John Lewis calls it.
Tomorrow early morning I’m off to Alabama for the Zen Peacemakers’ retreat bearing witness to racism. I have the feeling that this will be my last bearing witness retreat, and while I’ve studied the events that took place in Montgomery and Selma, I never walked those streets.
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.
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.
“We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for” is an oft-repeated phrase. Whatever it is we wish for—peace, integrity, care, and compassion in the world—can be achieved by folks like you and me, we don’t have to wait for the right leader to act for us.
Not an easy thing to believe nowadays, when those in power articulate the very opposite: lies, more lies, hate, false promises. I couldn’t help but notice that as Israel recognized its annual memorial day for fallen soldiers, its prime minister didn’t promise any of the things above; instead, he warned that the war with Iran is not over, seeming to wait for a signal from the White House to resume bombings in both Iran and Lebanon. It’s easy for spirits to sink and to avoid the news at all costs.
I have long known people who have stood and acted for peace at the most violent times. When Bernie and I spent 3 months mostly in Israel as well as the West Bank and Jordan, an exchange of artillery fire took place every evening at 8 pm in the southern part of Jerusalem, heard by us loud and clear as we walked on a path looking down at a valley where, Bedouin children walked their flocks. You could set your watch by it, just as you could set your watch by the gunfire that exploded every afternoon when school children left schools and teenagers began throwing stones, met by gunfire from the Israeli side.
As all that took place, we met people who were totally and gloriously committed to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I thought of them as placeholders for peace. They found each other and dialogued, celebrated holidays, and danced together. They went to each other’s children’s weddings and attended funerals of those who were killed “on the other side.”
I think of my friend, Sami Awad, in Bethlehem, Ibrahim Abu El-Hawa on the Mt. of Olives, Rabbi Menachem Froman, who lived in a settlement in the West Bank and insisted that the Holy Land belonged only to God. I think of Iris and Tani Katz, who thought nothing of inviting Palestinians to their home for the Friday evening Sabbath meal and going for Christmas parties to friends in the West Bank. I now think of my brother meeting with counterparts not just in the West Bank but also Turkey, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia, all working towards peaceful solutions.
You might ask how they could work for peace in the middle of such devastation. The answer is simple. Relationship are all around us. Outside, the very early maple buds are holding a conversation with the branches and the still-cold sun. The squirrels are in active relationship with the trees that serve as their highways to the sky. And just look at our own families and the resonance among all members, even the quiet ones.
Relationship is everywhere; the real question is: What do you pay attention to? The adamantine solidity of self and other, or the porousness and fluidity of life? Life comprises a huge storehouse of consciousness, the contents of which we’re unaware until we pay attention to a particular item. Imagine an Amazon warehouse with everything in stock, but only when we order something does someone focus on that item, retrieves it, and sends it on.
Whatever you give your attention to will be enlivened by that attention. It will become not just more visible but also more dynamic, alive, and expansive. The diet of your life will be more nourishing and rich even as for others it barely figures in their consciousness (never mind their activity). They’ll look at you as if you’re weird, but the difference is that you gave it your attention and they did not.
Placeholder is not quite accurate because, one, it implies a substitute and not the real thing, and two, it has a flat and passive feel to it. I think of people here who stand for welcoming and offering refuge to immigrants, people who were dreaming King’s dream before he even articulated it, some of them in the deep South. I think of old abolitionists who steadily worked towards the freeing of people we’d enslaved, even at the risk of their lives, long before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
When peace and freedom come, it’ll be due to those people. You won’t know about them from the media. Public opinion will shift, a new leadership will arise, and the media will crown someone king or queen and tell you that it was because of them that peace finally came to the land. He or she may get a Nobel Peace Prize, he or she may get assassinated, at which point the media will offer them the crown of martyrdom and refer to them as the final, best hope for this or that.
But the true heroes are the anonymous folks who carry on, day in and day out. They proclaim news of peace publicly from pulpits and in the privacy of their homes. They create resistance songs and join others in activities that aim for long-range results, not short-term. Sometimes they give up “real jobs” with salaries and careers respected by the rest of society in order to actively stand for something others have given up on. My brother told me that he, along with Muslim counterparts, are working on a 100-year plan for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Sound crazy to you? One hundred years is not even a blink in the fullness of time. When a great leader emerges or is voted in, we exhale in relief: Finally! That will happen. Meantime, my love and admiration are for those anonymous men and women whose morality isn’t par for the times, but who, stubbornly and anonymously, continue to work towards the great goals of humankind even in dark times. When the next new hero arises, take time to think of them, and give thanks.
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.
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.
“Aussie, I only order from Amazon when I can’t find certain things locally. What’s in the package?”
“You know how you always say that life is a package deal?”
“That’s right, Auss. Life gives you everything, things you like and things you don’t like.”
“And you know how you say that every person is a package deal, and that when you live with them you accept the whole package? Like I do with you?”
“Good for you for remembering, Aussie. When you’re in a close relationship with someone, there are things you like and things you like less, but he or she is a package deal. So, what’s in the package?”
“God.”
“God?”
“I wanted to see if God is also a package deal.”
“Good God, Auss!”
“Could be Bad God, don’t forget.”
“So, you looked for God in Amazon and what did you find?”
“I found Scripture Kitchen Towels, Goodness of God Hand Tea Towels, and Faith Dish Towels.”
“Is that what you have in the package?”
“Am I a fool? Does anyone cook in this house? Lots of bracelets. I liked the one that said With God All Things Are Possible, especially for when I’m hunting squirrels, but I didn’t find a size that fit my paw. I almost got you a present from God.”
“What, Auss?”
“Cappuccino Coffee called Presence of God.”
“That’s not bad, Auss.”
“And you know how you lose your car keys all the time? I considered getting you a keychain that says Make Heaven Crowded, but I wondered if that would encourage you to drive under the influence and kill people.”
“Do you want to go to heaven, Aussie?”
“Depends on the food. I looked for food under God, and there were treats in a box that said Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.”
“You ordered the treats?”
“’Course not. They were vegan.”
“Aussie, they’re commercializing God, don’t you see that? You can’t put God in a package.”
“But you said that God is a package deal.”
“Not like that. And you used my credit card, didn’t you?”
“To err is human, to forgive canine.”
“Divine, Auss, divine. And why would you bother looking for God in Amazon to begin with?”
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.
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.
We’ve had two warm summer days. Some colors have returned, some haven’t.
What’s one of the hardest things I do? Holding different truths at the same time.
What’s the most healing thing I can do, for myself and others? Holding different truths at the same time.
I am always reconnecting with Bernie’s dictum: ”It’s just your opinion, man!” Bernie had a way of teaching in a deceptively humorous, clowning way that sometimes made his words sound easy, even lightweight. I sometimes think that his teaching that there are no truths, just opinions, is one of those that people like to repeat but don’t appreciate. Lately, there isn’t a day those words don’t come up for me.
On Monday, while continuing to bomb Lebanon, attack Palestinians and Bedouins in the West Bank (I know, I know, it’s just a tiny group of young extremists), and continue to dominate Gaza, Israel marked its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. In addition to formal public ceremonies, individuals, community centers and synagogues around the country host private events where the fewer and fewer remaining Holocaust survivors are invited to tell their stories, to testify.
My mother frequently did this before she died four years ago. This time, my one remaining uncle, the last of his generation in the family, testified. He had always been way more reluctant to talk about this. They videoed the session and put it on YouTube.
At first, I was not going to watch. I’d heard these stories from my mother since I was 2 or 3, he wasn’t going to say anything I hadn’t known for a long time. But a quiet voice told me to watch and listen. It’s another truth, the voice said, and even though you’ve heard it all before, watch and listen.
He sat in a chair and spoke into a microphone while they showed photos behind him that the YouTube video didn’t show. His voice trembled at times, he had to pause; perhaps he wept, I couldn’t tell.
This morning a therapist told me that for some people, describing trauma is healing while for others it retraumatizes them again and again. I always felt that the last describes what happened to my mother, and I believe this was also happening to him. And indeed, my uncle said that during all the decades that he pushed the memories away and didn’t bring them up, he was fine. When he began to bring them into consciousness and even to tell his family, that was when his nightmares began.
The pain is so alive, the horror of being a child having to hide underground, warned about danger everywhere. He still remembered how proud he was of himself for not crying when Nazi soldiers shone flashlights through the slats of a wooden wall behind which the family was hiding. He recalled the terror of those heavy boots stomping outside and up the stairs.
When someone from the audience at the end asked him what his strongest memory was of being a child, he immediately said: “No birthday gifts.” They were too poor. “In my childhood I knew not to bother the grown-ups. If I was hungry, I was aware at a very early age not to speak of it because I already knew that they’d given me all they had. If my shoes felt tight on my feet, squeezed them hard, I knew not to speak of it because they had already done whatever they could.”
He’s a wealthy man now, with a family trust that supplies the financial needs of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, giving them an early life he couldn’t even imagine.
But trauma, as I wrote in a past post, is really a two-way street. There’s what happened, and how you react. There are people like Victor Frankl and other, lesser-known survivors who widened the lessons they learned to include all people and all beings, the ones who say that what they experienced should never happen to anyone, ever. And there are those who are almost kidnapped by those same events, irrevocably seized, and can’t see much of life outside that prism.
This is no judgment on my part—there is no way anyone can judge those survivors—but more a description of those dynamics in my family. My heart broke as I listened to him. An old heaviness I hadn’t felt in a long while crept up and soured me on a day that was summery and beautiful. The horror of it is inescapable.
And the horror in the entire Middle East is inescapable. As sure as I’m writing this, just as he described the events of his childhood, others will tell their children about what happened when missiles hit their homes, when entire families were buried under rubble while those who remained began their refugee life.
We all have our truths. How do we respond?
I’m planning a teaching module for the latest cohort of the Zen Peacemaker Order. It’s entitled History and Lineage and comprises 5 meetings. During the years that I’ve taught this module I often focused on the history of the Zen Peacemakers. I also encouraged students to look at their own history and create their own lineage chart.
This year, I told my co-facilitator, we also need to raise traumatic events from their own past, or events that still rankle and destroy a sense of security, that bring on shame as they think of them. Why? Because the dross of our lives can be turned to gold. Remembrances of violence can lead to nonviolence, and poverty can catalyze not just personal wealth but the wealth of nations.
By doing the opposite of what was done to us? Not necessarily, the journey of healing is not formulaic, it has lots of twists and turns. But just as I keep in mind the importance of holding different truths simultaneously, I also keep in mind Kazu Haga’s reminder in his book, Healing Resistance: “Hurt people hurt people; healed people heal people.”
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.
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.
Bugs Bunny approaches a small, weird guy in a helmet and cylinder, standing atop a red stand on a blue, frozen surface of a strange planet, who has just lit a match to light up a huge rocket: “Pardon me for boddering you, Marconi, but did you say you was going to blow up the oith?”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
“That’s what I thought you said.”
Bugs walks away: “Well, adios. One man’s meat is another man’s poison, I always say. It’s his business if he wants to blow up the oith.” He comes to a sudden stop. “Wohh!” Bugs dashes back while Marconi is lighting up the rocket and whips away the big match. “You can’t do dat! All the people I know are on the oith.” He starts walking away. “The noive of this character.”
All the people I know are on the earth. Do you know people anywhere else?
Pope Leo said we’re getting too accustomed to violence. We are indeed greatly conditioned to violence inside, in relationships and families, not to mention between communities and countries. Since slowly reading Kazu Haga‘s Healing Resistance, his book on nonviolence, I’m paying more and more attention to even subtle manifestations of violence.
Nonviolence, as Haga points out, is not non-violence, an absence of fighting or getting into combat, but rather an entire way of life which asks of us to let go of our conditioning towards violence and explore other ways of relating and working. Like so many other worthwhile things, it takes lots of training and practice.
I was conditioned towards violence from childhood. Getting into a fight, I got no guidance on how to work with anger or dissatisfaction other than You mustn’t fight, Say you’re sorry, etc. My mother would often say to me: “You’re too smart to do those things,” and would then add: “When you’re older, you’ll show them.”
Show them what?
And what was I supposed to do with the fear masked by the anger, the resentment at being excluded, or my shame at someone else’s remarks? I’m not talking about bullying but rather about many “normal” interactions between children. Take that into our teens and, let’s face it, we can be merciless. That’s not a nice thing to say is cringe-worthy, not a serious antidote to the anxiety that besets so many of us in the doorway to adulthood.
Grown-ups? Don’t even take me there.
Lately, in the evenings, I contemplate the interactions of the day. Most of the time I can think of at least one conversation that saddens me. Did I shut someone down? Did I interrupt instead of letting her speak? If I listened, did I listen with only half an ear? It may not feel like violence, but at the very least, I know I shut the door on someone else’s needs or experience. I denied people their deepest layers of humanity, the opportunity for self-revelation.
Maria Popova writes: “We encounter each other as surfaces, yet yearn to meet as souls.” And that’s where I go at night: What souls have I touched or been touched by today? How surface-deep have been my words and actions, carrying only information or connected only to some transaction or other, nothing more?
Being human implies that, for the most part, we live out some self-referential drama. We become more aware of it as we grow older, especially if we practice; I also don’t beat myself up for being human. But oh, the subtleties of that ego! In my case, the temptation to show strength, intelligence, and clarity. The difficulty of showing uncertainty, loneliness, or struggle.
Underneath my surface and yours, there is so much soul. In fact, we’re all soulmates on Bugs Bunny’s oith. We think the surface we stand and build on is the whole thing, but for the most part, it’s the outermost crust of the outermost crust.
Sometime last week, perhaps in connection with Easter, I read the following passage in the Gospel of Mark:
“They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, ‘Do you see anything?’ He looked up and said, ‘I see people; they look like trees walking around.’ Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”
Would I like to be a tree walking around, I wondered. I’d have mobility, go in search of sun and rain and run from bugs and disease, but there would be no roots. I could grow tall and blog about everything I see, but without roots connecting with other roots …
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.
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.
Artemis 2 is coming down this evening (local time) into the Pacific Ocean. I watched it take off ten days ago, watched it live as the countdown began, watched the launch abort system pull away, saw all those gases explode at around 5 of the countdown, and then the rocket carrying the Orion capsule shot up. Instantly I was transported back to those first takeoffs in the 1960s.
They were all American launches because, while the Russians preceded them, those launches were done in secret. So there was Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in 1961, followed by John Glenn’s orbital flight in 1962.
Philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch wrote: “Science today is more likely to make us anxious than to make us proud, not only because we are now able to blow up our planet, but because, oddly enough, space travel does not make us feel like gods.”
Bernie, an aeronautical engineer who worked on unmanned flights to Mars before taking off into the more interior realms of Zen, would shake his head as he told me how dangerous those early flights were. “Your phone has more electronic power than we had back then,” he said. “They had almost no control over those things.”
“So why did they do them?” I asked.
“To beat the Russians.”
Unless you’re Elon Musk planning to mine Mars for minerals or to start a Martian colony for human escapees from Earth, most people feel overwhelmed just looking at the night sky, forget being on a spaceship and looking out at that vast darkness we know so little about. We don’t feel like gods. Only the narrowest, most arrogant human mind—or the various Captains Kirk on Star Trek—could look at all that space, with its billions of gaseous bodies, and think of us as conquerors.
But I, and so many others, loved the adventure of it. That’s why the Americans, with their Madison Avenue smarts, figured it was worth showing the whole shebang because the risks were what made the drama.
It’s ironic that I saw the 1968 landing on the moon at the Kennedy Airport in New York City and thought that that was the greatest adventure I’d ever seen, even as a far greater challenge was being met right in front of my eyes.
A good friend, a schoolmate from the religious Jewish school we had both attended, asked me to take her to the airport to be on hand to welcome her boyfriend back to the US and then take them uptown. She was a Jewish woman and the boyfriend was Palestinian, returning from Ramallah where he had gone to visit his family.
Craziest thing I ever heard, I thought to myself one year after the 1967 war, which brought the West Bank under the aegis of Israel. A Muslim and a Jew—is she out of her mind? She was a Barnard student, he was Columbia, and I pictured her mother’s face if she had known of this. Then I pictured the faces of our other friends and former classmates.
My imagination was so impoverished at the time that, while I could imagine a moon walk, I couldn’t imagine love between an Arab and a Jew. I comfort myself with the notion that she must have sensed something unconventional about me because she asked me for help and no one else.
At the terminal, she went downstairs to await him by the Customs door while I remained on the mezzanine, watching Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon on an immense screen dropped some three stories down from the ceiling high above us. It was being shown on TV so naturally, in that pre-AI age, I knew it wasn’t fake news. I gave it more credence than I did to what was happening right before my eyes down below.
She introduced me briefly, then both sat together in the back seat of the car as I drove them up to Columbia. Ordinarily, that would have been a long ride but not that evening; the Manhattan streets were deserted, probably because everyone was home watching TV. I think it was my very first time driving in the city itself and I still remember how the traffic lights all turned green as we sped up Broadway. They were whispering to each other and didn’t talk to me at all.
Reaching out across that divide, loving each other, felt far riskier than what was shown on screen. And even as our technology has vastly improved, to the betterment of safety for the astronauts, I wish our faith in humans’ potential and better nature improved equally. Of course, nowadays there are some, if not many, examples of Jews and Muslims sharing a life together (alas, not my friend and her Palestinian lover back then).
Our evolution has conditioned us to be wary of anyone who looks, speaks, or acts differently from us. This has been accompanied by thousands of years of battles, genocides, enslavement and persecution that reinforce that old conditioning. That person is not like us, not our tribe, don’t trust them. Don’t like them. And certainly, don’t love them.
But the expanding work of love takes us wider and wider. For me, bridging divides continues to be the great adventure. Following the beck and call of love across differences continues to be the main adventure. One small step for individual men and women create one great leap for all humankind.
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.
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.
When I went down to Takoma Park, Maryland, last weekend to spend time with Bernie’s daughter, Alisa, and her family, we talked some about Cesar Chavez and she shared with me a letter she received through a friend written by Marshall Ganz.
Ganz is a well-known activist and organizer who spent many years with Chavez working at United Farm Workers after joining the Civil Rights movement in the South. He also helped organize grass roots support for Barack Obama and now lectures at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I received permission to reproduce that letter, as follows:
Letter to friends, students, colleagues and collaborators
3/22/26
“Last Wednesday I was confronted with a shattering reality. A person whom I had known, learned from, and worked with for many years had, at the same time, been inflicting devastating harm on girls and women vulnerable to his assaults. To Ana Murgia, in particular, whom I knew then, I ask your forgiveness for not seeing you. And I want to thank you and your companions for finding the courage to speak out about your abuse and share your deep pain: choices that we can only meet with care and respect.
Like many of you, I was shaken by what came to light about Cesar’s abusive behavior. So I want to offer my own perspective not because it settles anything, but because I lived some of this history and want to speak honestly of what I saw, what I didn’t see, and what I believe we now must reckon with together.
I first met César in 1965. I worked alongside him, learned from and with him, served beside him for seven years; on the union’s national executive board and admired him deeply for many years. The movement that thousands of us had built had, for a time, transformed the lives of thousands of farmworkers and their families across California, Florida, Texas, and beyond. Boycotts we organized across North America united urban supporters, people of faith, labor activists, civil rights veterans, opponents of the Vietnam Nam war, veterans of the civil rights movement, students, and many others. And the movement brought recognition, dignity, pride and power to the Latino community. Many were immigrants or the children of immigrants, inspired not by political, military, or business leaders but by a movement in which one’s grandmother, working in the fields near Fresno, was now, suddenly, on a UFW picket line fighting for her rights. For the first time in history, a movement effectively challenged the system of exploitation rooted in California agriculture.
The movement also became a school of leadership, organizing and action in which so many found the courage and the mentorship – to risk, to try, and to learn. Any survey of California unions, community groups, elected leaders, educators and more would reveal so many people who got their start as volunteers with the farm workers. I was no exception. I got my first lesson in electoral politics when assigned to getting out the Latino vote in East LA and winning the June 6th California primary for Bobby Kennedy
The people who built the movement also paid the price— – not only by surviving on donated food or serving as full time volunteers supported at only $5.00 per week—but some, their lives were taken. The first person who lost her life was an 18-year old, college student from Boston, Nan Freeman, crushed to death by a truck while picketing a sugar plant in Florida.; Naji Daifullah, a strike leader, an immigrant from Yemen, beaten to death by a Kern County Deputy Sheriff.; Juan de la Cruz, an immigrant from Mexico, shot by a sniper on a picket line south of Bakersfield two days later. And Rufino Contreras, from Mexicali, murdered by a foreman supervising strike breakers in Imperial Valley.
One day, almost five years ago, a young woman earning her master’s at Harvard’s Ed School dropped by my office. She had come, she said, to deliver a greeting from her grandparents. They had been farm workers, had helped to build the movement — a movement that had everything to do with her getting to graduate school.
César’s leadership contributed enormously to all of this, but it was never ‘his’ movement. It belonged to all of us. It was real. It mattered. And it must not be erased.
The truth is always more complex than the mythology. By the mid 1970s as the union was growing rapidly, something had broken in him and the César we thought we knew became a negative of himself: vision gave way to paranoia; courage to fear; relationships to isolation; and curiosity to suspicion. Organizing gave way to purges, witch hunts, absolute personal loyalty, and within a few short years much of the organization we had built was in a shambles.
What most of us did not know— or did not see— was that his abuse of women and girls had been present far earlier, enabled by a small inner circle, so that as his pathology – and power grew so would his circle of harm. To those who have now come forward— and to Ana Murgia, whom I named at the start of this letter— your courage is profound, your pain is real, and you deserved so much better. I am sorry it has taken this long for the world to hear you.
After his death in 1993, a Chavez ‘industry’ had emerged, marketing his image, his deeds, and his story such that one man was portrayed as the source of everything the movement had achieved. In the end, it cheapens the movement that thousands built and allows a leader to cause immense harm without accountability. So today, 40 years after his death, the discovery of this terrible evil in his life—and the pain it caused the most vulnerable— has landed with seismic force. In the last few days people pulled books from shelves, renamed streets, and threw away 40- or 50-year-old pictures that were an honored part of a family’s heritage.
César Chavez was a flawed human being of genuine and historic consequence who caused profound harm — harm that demands accountability, care for those he hurt, and honest reckoning. Our challenge now is not to choose between the good and the harm, but to hold both, unflinchingly. That is harder than hagiography, and harder than exorcism. But it is the only path that honors the full truth, — including the truth of everyone whose lives were changed for the better by what the movement built, and everyone whose trust, dignity, and humanity he betrayed.
This is the work I hope we can do together
With love and respect,
Marshall”
Not much to add to this, except to emphasize his apology for what he hadn’t seen, what he refused to see. How many of us, including me, are ready to acknowledge that in ourselves? What don’t we want to see? And speaking of conflicting truths, how many are ready “to hold both, unflinchingly”?
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.
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.
