Monday, December 28, 2009

HNY!


¡Próspero Año Nuevo!
Godt Nytår
×åñòèòà Íîâà Ãîäèíà
MELKAM ADDIS AMET YIHUNELIWO!
رأس السنة
Heri Za Mwaka Mpyaº
L'Shannah Tovah
農曆新年
Happy New Year!

Monday, December 21, 2009

Into the light


In South Africa I first heard a quote attributed to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural address. Mandela never actually said these words; they are from American peace activist Marianne Williamson. But the sentiment hasn’t been harmed by the association.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of a higher power that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

It has been a decade since I lived with a black South African family, but watching the township scenes from Invictus yesterday took me back there in a heartbeat.

At 6AM I awaken, shivering against the cold of the Highveld, and stumble into the kitchen. Ma is already awake. She scrapes out the last of last night’s ashes into the metal bucket and hands it to me. I carry it outside and exchange it for a bucket of the coal that is heaped between the concrete house and the concrete fence which encircles the property, the fence which separates our house from a maze of similar houses crowding each other like a heap of squirming puppies. Soon the water to bathe the little ones is steaming on the fire and I walk across the small concrete courtyard to the bedroom. Brian is already up and gone to work, Bongani is still snoring, and I am grateful for the chance to wake Zama, 8, and Wandile, 4. I try to wake them the way my own mother woke me when I was their age: tenderly. In the township, the “location” as it is called by everyone living there, there is precious little space for tenderness.

After bathing the children Ma serves them a hot porridge of oats. Wandile, having momentarily opened his eyes in the metal basin of bathwater, is now falling asleep in his oats. Zama pokes him and Wandile lets out a cry. Soon it will be time for school.

While the children eat I take my daily walk. Our house is close to the edge of the location proper, and soon I am crossing the earthen dam that serves as a walkway across the swamp. The location was built on a swamp. No: it was relocated to the swamp. As I climb the hill on the other side, I walk among ruins. These are the ruins of houses built before Apartheid, houses razed to create a separation between the current low location and the high Afrikaaner farming town. Now, 50 years later, the new Mandela government is trying to erase that separation by once again building on the slope, throwing up a restless but orderly row of brick dwellings.

From the crest of the hill where the railroad runs its load of coal I look upon my home.

In the crisp morning air a pall of smoke hangs over the location. It burns the eyes, dirties the pastels of the concrete houses, sullies the clothes hung to dry. It strikes me that the only thing about the township that is not black are its people. They know: they are children of God. They are not afraid to let their light shine. For generations they have waited for this day. And just as they did during the long years of Apartheid, they will start this day by taking care of their little ones. They will bathe them. Dress them. Feed them. Send them up the hill through the bones of their ancestors, to school, where against all odds some of them will make it.

Monday, December 14, 2009

The dark side


“All of us have this extraordinary capacity for evil, but equally we have this remarkable capacity for good.” —Desmond Tutu, from a speech on genocide

In one week the Northern Hemisphere will experience its darkest day of the year.

It seemed an appropriate time to look in the mirror and explore my own darkness. But this is hard to do with the lights off. I try closing my eyes, and that helps a little.

Desmond Tutu was speaking of the horrors that unfolded in Rwanda and of those that continue to unfold daily in the Sudan. He asserted that to understand these things we must explore the possibility that the perpetrators could be we the horrified. To understand this human capacity for darkness not in order to condone it, but to better bring about conditions in which it is less likely to happen.

And what is darkness but the absence of light?

What is evil? Is it merely the absence of good?

Do I even believe in the idea of good and evil? Certainly my conditioning is to seek out the unmet need behind every act of hurting. This is not to deny culpability for action, my own or others; rather, I find it more productive to think in terms of what might make us as humans more likely to play nicely together.

When I look inside, what do I see? In reflecting on times when I have acted in a way that hurt others, usually I can identify: I wanted food. I wanted rest. I wanted recognition. To be able to contribute, to be listened to, to listen and understand. Sometimes the need was concrete and I just couldn’t meet it. Sometimes it was intangible and I wasn’t able to articulate it.

Certainly it is easy to imagine that everyone would want these things, starting with “basic needs.” But Maslow himself believed that the idea of a hierarchy of needs falsely implies that those needs at the bottom are less important than those at the top, in terms of nurturing a healthy community and not just a living individual. Needs for love, morality, spontaneity, lack of prejudice, etc., are as essential to a healthy community as clean water. In the absence of any one of these, hurtful behavior is more likely to flourish. In the absence of several at once we see war and famine, poverty and exploitation.

My mind wanders into associating pairs of opposites with positive or negative feelings: light and dark, warmth and cold, sound and silence...
...but to a migraine sufferer, it is darkness, not light, that is soothing...freezing is necessary for ice cream.... noise can be music or cacophony...knowledge and ignorance...is ignorance ever good?...certainly knowledge can be used for harm...has our technology outpaced our ability to control our basic impulses...what are our fundamental needs—

—suddenly I look up and an hour has gone by and I’m still alone at the computer and I’ve not furthered my understanding at all with that last paragraph and, and, I really need to pee. I get up and pee. Having done that, I realize I’m needing the opposite of aloneness. I need connection and community.

After leaving a couple voicemails I connect with an actual person. In seconds we are laughing. A happy glow fills my stomach, driving away the winter darkness.

If forced to make a hierarchy and designate one need as the most important, I would say it is connection. Connecting lives, sitting down and sharing laughter and a meal and ourselves with others, has the potential to, if not heal the world, at least take it in that direction.

As Tutu says, “A person is a person through other persons. I would not know how to be a human being at all except I learned this from other human beings.”

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Creativity Part Deux


(written Friday Dec.4th--posted today!) Last week I wrote about creativity. I stated that gratitude and curiosity are essential to creativity. But I did not explain why these things are so important. Nor, beyond offering some quotes and making vague references to the world needing some creative solutions to its myriad problems, did I explain why creativity itself matters.

It is not just that we have myriad problems. It is that we are stuck: our growth cannot continue forever on our finite planet. But we can get stuck in much smaller ways too, and creativity is just as necessary for getting un-stuck.

Right now I am stuck. I need creativity. LL and I just had a difficult conversation about family. I am sad and I am stuck and I want to feel something different. So let me apply my own approach.

I am grateful for—no;

I am curious about—no;

I am sad because—

yes, that's it. Gratitude must start with acknowledging why I feel sad. I am sad because my goal, my hope, is always to increase understanding between people. Tonight I think I did not do that. In what way did I do the opposite of my intention? Perhaps by talking more than I listened. That's often a clue. Perhaps by offering an example of my own sorrow. Instead of comparing, I could have been reflecting back what I thought I heard being said, asking for clarification, confirming that what I heard were the feelings being expressed. Comparison to someone else’s situation rarely helps anyone feel better.

So now I am both grateful and curious: grateful for this moment of reflection which has helped me to see why I did not contribute to understanding, and curious about what LL was and is feeling.

It is tempting at this point to jump from gratitude straight to exposition about creativity. But I somehow think that wouldn't be very creative. A sculpture is not crafted of thin air. It is crafted of thick stone. What is the stone with which I am wrestling here?

Suddenly I feel very small indeed. Like an ant, armed with a splinter from a toothpick, huddled at the foot of a granite mountain. This mountain, this stone, is our family, mine, LL's, ours. I have no more business sculpting something of it than an ant has to carve a sculpture out of a mountain--and thankfully, no more ability. Some things are not meant to be created. They are meant to be appreciated. They are meant to be listened to, explored, loved, allowed to grow, blossom, change with the seasons.

Now I have—

I—

I am so grateful for this family of ours. I am so grateful for each and every one of us. Sitting here at my keyboard crying, I am so curious. I am a tiny ant curious to know more about this daunting and beautiful mountain before me, at once familiar and unfamiliar. How does it change with the seasons? In winter how dark and cold does it get? does the wind howl off of jagged peaks? does the snow fall silently, gently, peacefully, bending the trees to snuggle together under a soft blanket? in spring do wildflowers shoot up daringly between rock and rivulet? on a sunny day is the water of the high lakes cool and inviting? what wondrous creatures call this mountain home? what lives here? what dies? what is everlasting?

Some things are worthy of a lifetime of observation and love. Among these are mountains, and families—and forgive me for such an awkward and potentially distant metaphor! I was fortunate to grow up knowing intimately the mountains above our tiny town, and the above paragraph cannot begin to tell of their warm and familiar wonder.

In such cases the creativity comes in the observing, the loving. The understanding.

As a footnote, this is probably applicable as a great start to our world problems as well: before we go about creating, we would do well to observe, love, and understand.