Monkey See, Monkey Do

just read this obituary from 2002 forthe bus driver who had rosa parks arrested. it included some interesting details i hadn’t heard before.

i’m now an official, authorized meditation instructor in my shambhala buddhist lineage. what an exhausting weekend, but such excellent training and practice interviews. had a great time too.

our program this weekend had a major shock, someone received word that their brother and nephew had just been murdered. we changed our closing chants to be a short service for them, and we practiced a meditation technique called tonglen for the victims, the family, and the assailants. it has been really painful relating to the situation for all of us.

after the service together, it occurred to me that having the service like that was really helpful and quite powerful. we took the situation and had a contemplation about the pain and the suffering, and the result was for me just a feeling of softness, and appreciation for what i have and for the preciousness of life. but when i hear news of bomb blasts and murders normally it brings up a different contemplation, i think about how vulnerable i am, how random these situations are, and the result is a feeling of fear, and suspicion.

presumably the whole world is making decisions unconsciously all the time like that, when things happen it could be an opportunity to become softer, more open, and more appreciative. or we could continue to think in a way that makes us more fearful, more suspicious, and more anxious. same situation, different contemplation, different result.

i’m in vermont now, at a super intense training weekend. this is to practice giving ongoing meditation instruction for students, leading discussion groups as dharma programs, and handling all sorts of unusual things that might come up in one on one meditation interviews. i’m loving the program, but it’s exhausting.

the trees along the charles river are changing. some have dropped all their leaves, the rest are variations of green and yellow and rust. there’s something about being here that’s energizing to me, reminding me of youthful exuberance and what it was like to be a teenager. but it’s different this time. before there was a narrowness to the excitement, like vibrating within a tight container. all that energy was directed to my immediate surroundings, relating to people at school, to my coursework, to life in boston, to a career, but rarely did it extend. now as i drive around i’m overwhelmed by how small i am, how many people there are even just in this city, how insignificant i am in comparison to the tide of humanity. but there’s an openness in that, and i keep considering how we each can nonetheless positively effect the world. how we can do something meaningful and beneficial. it’s such a puzzle, being so small.

it’s fun even just driving around the city. i had one cab pull up and look at me quizzically, because i had stopped and was failing to run a red light that everyone knows you just run. he stopped to squint at me, then raced through the red light with other cars following. i raced up the winding storrow drive and down the meandering memorial drive. i drove over the lauded zakim suspension bridge and through the underground interstate, both constructed after i left.

but mostly i’ve spent my day in and around my alma mater. there’s such a strong familiarity here, it’s comforting. that and there’s free wireless in the student center, a post office, good food, and lots of weird and wonky people mulling about. i don’t remember being this weird and wonky when i was here, but i’m sure i was and still am. there’s a gentleness in the students too - that’s really beautiful - an openness and a lack of pretension. perhaps it is an interest to learn and be molded, to not be fixed yet in opinion.

i love the accent, the windy roads lined with brownstones, and the no nonsense attitude. arrived in boston today, it’s fun to be back in one of my old haunts.

as we honor rosa, kurds in turkey are not allowed to print using their own language. odd story. there is inequality and aggression throughout the world, guess it’s not surprising it would have weird forms like this too.

I remember Rosa Parks. As the civil rights movement was beginning in the United States, one day she said, “No, not today. I’m not going to the back of the bus today.” Day after day she went to the back of the bus, and then one day, “No, not today.” At that moment in that bus on that day I think Rosa Park had meek, perky, outrageous, inscrutable dignity. If she had taken her action without an inner journey, I don’t think it would have had the same impact. Instead, her dignity that day was not simply Rosa Parks’ dignity, or African American dignity, or ex-slave dignity, or a woman’s dignity, or a poor person’s dignity, or a tired person’s dignity. It was everyone’s dignity—black dignity, white dignity, yellow dignity, brown dignity, red dignity, tired dignity, slave dignity, slave owner dignity, young dignity, old dignity, poor dignity, rich dignity. Every human being could stand a little taller because that day, without rage, without animosity, without shame, without a small self, she said, “No, not today. I’m not going to the back of the bus today.”

- Cynthia Kneen in her book Awake Mind, Open Heart.

half of all children aged four don’t know their own name - but two thirds of three-year-olds can recognize the mcdonald’s golden arches.

- jonathan freedland investigates the effect of marketing to children at the guardian.

rosa parks died today, at age 92. many will applaud her contribution to changing our society greatly for the better. she was a standard bearer for civil rights, a strong, courageous leader. i think she was also a spark that lit a bonfire, one that had been built high by generations of inequality and poverty and injustice.

i’ve been reading some marx recently, and his major contribution seems to be the idea that society keeps evolving away from extremes. so as injustice arises, the forces will naturally occur to correct and keep movement in a forward, better direction. from political extreme toward its opposite and back again, over and over again society slips toward extremes and then forces move to correct back toward the center. during that process, society improves.

but is the civil rights movement an example of that back and forth? it’s certainly an example of how the extreme of inequality caused a people to fight for justice and equal participation. but the idea of equality doesn’t sound like an extreme to me, not one that would be approached and then retreated from. maybe i’m just being idealist, and we move toward equality and fairness and then after some progress then inequality and opportunism pops up again for awhile.

for example, affirmative action has had setbacks lately. economic support for the underprivileged has dropped. adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is the lowest it has been in over 30 years. economically the opportunities for minorities are in a downward trend. so in some ways we’ve made great progress with the idea of equality and protection under the law, but the effective equality - having opportunities based on individual merit and not social situation - has had setbacks. does it need to get much worse though before that trend can be reversed? or am i being unreasonable to think that we can make steady improvement without slipping for awhile first?