Spirituality

Fresh Pennies For Sale, or: A Perfectly Foolish Morning

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A little before 10 this morning I’m headed down the block to the donut shop to pick up our weekly Thursday dozen-and-a-half for interfaith Bible Study.  And on my way back, just a few doors down from home, I see a man sitting on the sidewalk, spreading pennies on the ground and dusting them with baby powder.

“Fresh, clean pennies!  One for a nickel!”

I couldn’t help but laugh.  Now who could pass up a deal like that?  So I ran inside, grabbed a nickel and my camera, and was treated to a long conversation with the salesman, a sweet guy and born storyteller who calls himself Hobo Joe.

Turns out we'd met on the block before and warmly recognized each other. Love when that happens.

And Bible Study was beautiful, too: all the familiar faces, laughing and singing and sharing from our various Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, pagan, and Unitarian Universalist perspectives.

For those who’ve recently tuned into Kloncke, I should explain that I both live and work at this community center/homeless outreach nonprofit/street ministry called Faithful Fools. So Thursday morning Interfaith Bible Study (which follows the morning meditation in our downstairs Street Zendo) is both work and home for me.

From left: Abby, Ra Mu, Gina, and Bobby

Don’t know what brought it on, but I felt especially lucky and honored to be here this morning.

JR and Charles causin trouble as usual
Two great artists, philosophers, theologians, and very cool cats.

Well This Is Challenging

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From A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of Writings By and About The Dalai Lama:

From a deep point of view, while we don’t have our independence and are living in someone else’s country, we have a certain type of suffering, but when we return to Tibet and gain our independence, then there will be other types of suffering.  So, this is just the way it is.  You might think that I’m pessimistic, but I am not.  This is the Buddhist realism.  This is how, through Buddhist teaching and advice, we handle situations.  When fifty thousand people in the Shakya clan were killed one day, Shakyamuni Buddha, their clansman, didn’t suffer at all.  He was leaning against a tree, and he was saying, “I am a little sad today because fifty thousand of my clansmen were killed.”  But he, himself, remained unaffected.  Like that, you see (laughter).  This was the cause and effect of their own karma.  There was nothing he could do about it.  These sorts of thoughts make me stronger; more active.  It is not at all a case of losing one’s strength of mind or will in the face of the pervasive nature of suffering.

Oscar Grant, Audre Lorde, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the question of loving our enemies.

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Cross-posted at Feministe. As the verdict approaches, I find myself thinking more and more about the relationships between state violence and intimate violence. In what ways our focus on state violence, and mechanisms for resisting it, jive and don’t jive with methods for dealing with intimate violence. Aaron Tanaka made a wonderful comment on the original post — as always, Aaron, I’m truly grateful for your insights and questions, and their organic connection to the great work you do.

Just yesterday, only 20 minutes after a conversation about police alternatives, as my friend Noa was dropping me off at home, we found ourselves in an impromptu cop watch. Four officers were arresting three men on my block — two of whom I recognized as regulars on the corner, and one with whom I’ve tossed a football across Hyde Street traffic. When I saw the cops lining the men up against the fence, I just stepped out of Noa’s car onto the sidewalk and inserted myself. After one of the officers attempted to intimidate Noa by calling in her plate number (we’d been stopped and talking in the car inside a red parking zone), she drove around the block, parked, came back and joined me for the next half hour as we watched these three men get yelled at, cuffed, and loaded into a police van.

I’ll maybe write up a full summary tomorrow, because the effect of our intervention on the cops’ behavior was pretty interesting, as well as the conversation we struck up with two male officers. For now, here’s my Feministe piece from Sunday.

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When Blogging, Just Blog.*

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[Cross-posted at Feministe.]

To say that blogging can be dhammic is not to claim that it can substitute for formal techniques of spiritual practice. Those techniques are designed to help bring us face-to-face with the hard lessons — otherwise, it becomes just another feel-good affair (or, as I once heard Mary Ann Brussat call it, “salad-bar spirituality”). Still, with any spiritual teaching, it’s easy to get too wrapped up in literalism and formalism. So we have to remember to engage creatively with the mundane — the materials already before us. Whether that’s blogging or boxing or BDSM roleplaying.

Yesterday I talked a bit about how sexism keeps us from taking journal blogging seriously. Today, 5 reasons the medium suits dhamma practice terrifically, with particular advantages as a new form of spiritual autobiography.

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On Not Writing For A Minute

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reservoir

Friends! The lucky spell continues. I was fortunate enough to go take a hike on Wednesday with Ryan. A recurring joke from me along the trail: Can I borrow your internet phone to check Feministe comments?

But really, as much as I love spending upwards of 8 hours a day engrossed in writing and reading, it’s especially important at those times to be able to unplug, step away, and reconnect with life around me. (Thanks for that reminder, Wisdom 2.0.)

What a beautiful land I’m living in, and how grateful I am to be able to witness it.

reservoir
stairs
me and ryan

“We Are Real”: Violence, Colonialism, Human Suffering, and Reflections of Palestine and Israel in The Last King Of Scotland

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amin-mightyAs you may have noticed if you’ve been hanging around here for any amount of time, I don’t talk much about current events.

Partly because this blog is mainly autobiographical — about my own lived experience — and I haven’t been involved in many “current events” lately. Also, news consumption has been extremely low for me in the past year — on purpose.

Despite my personal media fast, some major happenings (mostly US-centric) inevitably come to my attention. Oscar Grant’s murder. The bp oil spill. Arizona’s racist immigration law. The Gaza aid flotilla killings.

Still, when I am trying to talk about these issues, I don’t try to thoroughly research and analyze them the way I might have two or three years ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with research and analysis: both good and important. But here, for now, I’m focusing on deepening my understanding not of politics, per se, but of suffering. In order to understand suffering, it’s important to be aware of what’s happening around us — including politics and all the harm that’s constantly happening. But there’s more to it than that, I think.

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Friday Words From The Wise

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Stuck right with me this week, these four:

Compassion is not about kindness.  Compassion is about awareness.

~Khandro Rinpoche

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Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

~ Karl Marx

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“But say a man does know.  He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about.  He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today.  He sees America as a crazy house.  He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live.  He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat.  He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted.  He sees war coming.  He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them.  But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie.  And although it’s as plain as the shining sun — the don’t-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can’t see it.”

~ Jake Blount, local madman, in Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

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When you plant seeds in the garden, you don’t dig them up every day to see if they have sprouted yet.

~Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron.

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That’s all for now, friends. Take care; see you next week!

Faithful Fools Street Retreat, Gender Identity Disorder, and Disability As Class

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I heard this radio piece on Tuesday morning because Sharon* wanted to listen to the voice of her late husband.  She was a bit of a nervous wreck (understandably) because later that day she and Carmen would be appearing before a judge who would decide whether or not Sharon qualifies for disability benefits.  With all the tumult of the past year — losing her husband, quitting a rehab program prematurely, entering a better program only to have her housing number come up in the lottery, which meant choosing between completing rehabilitation and having a place to stay when she got out (I know, right?) — this decision felt particularly momentous.  She’d been trying for over a year to secure this income in addition to government assistance, since she can’t hold a job because of her psychological disabilities.

Witnessing our welfare system firsthand through accompanying folks in the Tenderloin is a tremendous eye-opener for me, for sure.  I knew the system was fucked in a thousand ways, including bureaucracy and stigma, but it’s another thing entirely to stand beside someone as they endure the process.  In justifying her need for support by proving her incapacity to work, Sharon had to prove that she was off drugs (because people with disabilities and addictions don’t deserve support?) and recount all the traumas she has suffered in her life, from being born to a mother addicted to heroin, to being molested by her foster family, to being raped while working as a prostitute.  Rather than a celebration of her incredible resilience and survival, the testimony had to be crafted to emphasize inability, incapacity, pathology.

“Break a leg” I said as I dropped her and Carmen off at a downtown Starbucks, where they would meet with her lawyer to review before the hearing.  “Yeah,” she cracked, “maybe that would help my case.”

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Liberation, Social and Spiritual — East Bay Meditation Center

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Hey friends!  Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth so suddenly!  I went into another Vipassana meditation retreat (my third so far under S. N. Goenka), and by the time I realized I’d forgotten to update the blog about it, it was too late: no phone, internet, reading, writing, or speaking for ten long days.  Thanks to everyone who’s visited and written to me in the meantime — a number of delightful messages and comments when I arrived home to San Francisco.  Mmmm.

For the first day or two since returning from the retreat, I’d been experiencing something of a blockage.  A mild panic or depression that left me feeling that all the activities and avenues I had been struggling to juggle up until the meditation course — work at the Faithful Fools; grad school and blogging; political study; and day-to-day dharma practice — were far too hazy, murky, massive, or complicated for me to ever significantly impact or contribute to any of them.  It’s been a long time since I felt such strong pessimism and self-doubt, and the timing — directly after a Vipassana retreat, which usually leaves me feeling giddy and abundant — added to the confusion.

Fortunately, I had just spent almost two weeks focusing at a deep level on the reality of change.  So I did the best that I could do: watched and waited.  Tried not to spin out or magnify things unnecessarily.  Felt and explored the negativity, stayed curious about it, rather than trying to push it away.

And wouldn’t you know — it worked!  Today my feet started coming back under me, thanks to some conversations with Ryan as well as three key pieces of media: one video, one book, and one radio segment.

I’ll share the book and the radio spot in the next few days.  The video, below, is an independent documentary made for this year’s East Bay Meditation Center annual fundraiser.  Seeing it today for the first time since early February, when it debuted at the event with Alice Walker and Jack Kornfield, reminded me just how much this organization inspires me, and how fortunate I am to be able to take part in it.  (Even participating in the documentary making was great!  Met some wonderful fellow members, and the filmmaker was tremendous, too.)

No more introduction necessary, really.  Enjoy!  And if you feel so moved, join in.

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love,

katie