Twelve by Twelve (30 page)

Then I noticed something at Julie and Yvonne’s, the chicken factory smell. To my horror, beyond a line of trees and over some barbed wire, maybe thirty yards away from where I stood with Julie — rose a chicken factory, white and windowless. It spewed the smell of suffering, the beakless-featherless-boneless chickens dwelling in darkness right beside her shed of a home.

I felt faint and found my way to a rusty chair and sat down. This was how bad it could get. Yvonne and Julie had tried to live in the
system and been defeated, instead creating out of their lives a dark contemporary art piece, throwing society’s blight right back in its face. Is this what would happen to the likes of the Thompsons, the Pauls, even Jackie? Perhaps trying to live on the edge in America is so difficult that eventually, one day, you just free-fall into nihilism.

ABANDON ALL HOPE OF FRUITION
.

This was one of the cards in Jackie’s stack that I always found incongruous with the rest. It seemed far too negative for Jackie. A chicken jumped into my lap, and I petted its stiff feathers. Another jumped up next to it for a little love. And amid the despair I was feeling I began, vaguely at first, to
get
something key to Jackie’s philosophy that had eluded me up until then. Abandoning all hope of fruition suddenly began to make sense, a necessary puzzle piece.

“They lay eggs in our laundry basket,” Julie was saying about the chickens, but her voice drifted to me as if in slow motion. I’d become absorbed by the beauty of their animals. The friendliness of the angora goats and even the hogs; such a profusion of birds and they were constantly at our feet. They lived along with Yvonne and Julie inside the shed — as well as outside, as they wished — and expressed a “suchness,” their proud animal simplicity forming a fierce contrast with the domestication of the chicken factory right next door, where tens of thousands of birds lived in crippled, deformed, genetically modified imprisonment. Three Narragansetts, ablaze in color, pressed against my thighs; Julie petted a goat under the chin, and it pressed tighter up against her huge breasts as if to suckle. Guinea hens at her ankles, along with a cat and a beagle. She stroked a chicken. I stared at the Gold Kist factory, lost in an unusual texture of thought, the swirling sense of a profound growing realization.

Later that evening I lay on the grass under the stars at Jackie’s.
Abandon all hope of fruition
. Just give up and accept the world, factory farms and all? No, that couldn’t be what it means. As I considered this, two airplanes soared above, just an inch apart. No big deal,
planes are common, even out here, little more than heavenly static. These two planes, though, were inching forward
along the exact same line
. Suddenly a shooting star appeared, white hot, and threaded right through those two planes. Of all places in that vast sky, nature’s light blazed between the two dots of human-made light. I sat up in wonder, the shooting star’s trail fading to black.

As if an afterthought, one of Pine Bridge’s ubiquitous fireflies illuminated the shooting star’s tail, tracing a bit of its fading glory before turning itself off amid some heirloom tea bushes.

Just as I thought the show was over, a satellite — an even fainter afterthought than the firefly — followed the airplanes, in triangular tow behind them. Just a dot, trailing across the screen of the sky like a period.

What did it mean, “artificial” light streaking in one direction, “natural” light plying the opposite route? Airplane versus firefly, industry versus nature, Man versus God? Heavens no. I stood up from the hammock, walked down to No Name Creek, which cupped starlight in its eddies, and I knew that there really isn’t any opposition at all. It was a mystical feeling, even deeper than the one I’d experienced that night with Leah, when I felt the house slip inside me. Looking into that sky, I wondered if
all
of those lights were part of the same One Life, and the apparent duality an illusion.

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND
, Leah and I danced at the Shakori Hills summer music festival. At one point we stopped, out of breath, to eat bowls of curry, and then jumped back up for a band from Mali playing kora harps, negoni lutes, and a balafon-style xylophone. The crowd swelled as the melodies did. Black, white, some Latinos, all kinds of colors, a spring gathering. It was Earth Day. The wordless music spoke of birth and death, light and dark in the same breath, and my body moved, the hips loosening, ankles and neck more rubbery, shoulders straightening and falling, torso, hands, fingers — each part of my body found a different piece of that layered rhythm.

“It’s like the blues. Malian music,” Leah said. “It’s got this pulse of joy.”

“And sadness.”

Leah kept dancing, while I went to the side of the lawn and sat down for a moment. As the sun set in brilliant orange, present in that seamless moment, I felt what Jackie had years ago: I must go beyond shame and blame, not just with myself and my personal imperfections, but in relation to the impact my species is having on the planet. I have to let go of my Nazi dreams, my guilt over ecocide, and all of the rest of the negativity that keeps me in a cramped, dim self. This means allowing myself, and the world, to be. When I see unworthiness,
anywhere
, I’m to trace it. To allow doesn’t mean to condone. Jackie had found a more precious jewel still on the other side of allowing, which spoke clearly to me about the nature of resistance to injustice — transform the enemy, not by fighting head-on with blame and anger; this just makes the enemy more powerful. Instead, be so present in the reality that you manifest an entirely different reality. The question is how to transform our anger into the energy of compassion, so that we can see the true cause of suffering. Then we can see more clearly how to root out that suffering.

Allowing is the way to experience the other world inside of this one. It lets us accept all of life’s complexities so that we can come from a place of love at all times, even in a chicken factory, at a nuclear test site, and even, as psychologist and former concentration camp prisoner Victor Frankl observes, in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It’s essential to peaceful, creative resistance and transformation.

On the drive back to the 12 × 12, Leah at the wheel, we passed new subdivisions with enormous, energy-consuming houses in a space that used to be forest. I watched my inner reaction. Neither of my “normal” reactions was present anymore, no rage, no guilt. Still, I remarked aloud to Leah about the destruction.

“Are you sure?” Leah said.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you sure?”

“Of
what
?” I’d forgotten that
ARE YOU SURE
? was one of Jackie’s cards — the one, in fact, I’d put out that very morning.

Leah stopped the car at the edge of a ridge, cut the engine, took my cheeks in her hands, and pointed my eyes forward, saying slowly, forcefully:
“Are you sure?”

From our now slightly higher vantage point, I looked out over a green forest canopy, stretching to the horizon. Just beyond the development hugging the road were rolling hills, forested smack down to South Carolina. We looked at each other for a moment and then back over this natural scene, which still contained so much green. Couldn’t this, at least possibly, emerge as the face of globalization? Our consciousness grows and wildcrafter farms and forests fill the old slave plantations?

I took Leah’s hand loosely, feeling a little dizzy. Patterns of light streaked across my mind: airplanes and comets, satellites and fireflies, the message in the sky coming through more clearly. I had the questions wrong. My questions implied a good and bad, a right and wrong. I thought of Lao-tzu: “Do you want to change the world? I do not think it can be done. The world is perfect and cannot be changed.”

I looked out over a suddenly perfect landscape, saw the Soft within the Flat within the Soft. My greatest teachers are my sufferings. Global warming, hyper-individualism, rainforest destruction, and racism, these things had led me to Jackie’s place, forced me to struggle. The Buddhists put it eloquently: “no illusion, no enlightenment.” I momentarily grasped nonduality, that at the deepest level everything is exactly as it should be at any given moment — including one’s own gradual awakening through the force of apparent evils.

I’ve since found this is a difficult concept to convey. Atheist or agnostic friends and colleagues furrow their brows, exactly as I used
to do before I experienced it directly. Words are mere connotations, pointers at something that must ultimately be lived, felt, breathed. It’s helpful to think of persons who embody it — Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. They come from a nondualistic perspective, from a sense of One Life, while still accepting the existence of oppression and racism
on the level of form
. Instead of dualistically opposing these “evils,” they trace them through compassion and act through love — in other words, the enlightened master’s resistance.

Allowing is the foundation, not the house. As I would soon discover, it is the necessary basis to achieve an even more sublime insight.

ABANDON ALL HOPE OF FRUITION

AS HUMAN BEINGS
, we are suspended between spirit and clay. Spirit is the stuff of allowing, of detachment, of transcending the world. This is Buddha “overcoming the world” or Jesus “transcending the world.” Through spirit, we discover the level at which the supposed dichotomy between the world and ourselves is smashed, giving a sense of fearlessness and joy.

But we are clay as well as spirit. We exist, earth bound, for some seventy or eighty years. The problem I have always had with any overly “spiritual” path is that it sometimes denies life. We have an eternity to exist in the soup of universal energy, but just a few precious decades to savor rich coffee, whether it’s bad for us or not. To plant zucchini; to people-watch in a subway car; to love jazz. To love others, even if it gets messy.

If we take “allowing” to the extreme — detach from our creaturehood, and exalt only our spirit-hood — we may feel blissful for a while, as I did during mystical moments at the 12 × 12 — but we’ll miss out on half of what makes life meaningful: the portion of us that is clay. To me, the tension between spirit and clay is exemplified in a
Raphael painting I saw in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. The Renaissance artist shows Jesus rising out of this world — but with his feet still hanging down into this one. Why doesn’t Christ rise completely, detaching from the suffering of the world to become pure blissful spirit?

The first time I saw it, I lingered in the Uffizi and gazed at Jesus’ feet, about to leave this world. After a while his feet seemed to be wiggling in the painting’s fresh air, then tapping to music. I listened. No, it wasn’t celestial harps. Perhaps Jesus likes jazz. He doesn’t ascend —
not quite yet, those gorgeous earthly riffs
.

I wonder if it was jazz Jackie heard as she walked across the vast Nevada desert to a nuclear test site to utter the word
No
. A person has to love messy, soulful, heartbreaking life to march across a desert to oppose the weapons that could eliminate it. Not too tight, but neither too loose; clay and spirit like to dance. Loving-kindness is the goal, not a disembodied detachment. But we can’t get to loving-kindness through ego-driven love. We can only authentically inhabit ourselves as clay after rising first into spirit.

One of Jackie’s favorite writers and teachers, Thich Nhat Hahn, embraces loving-kindness in the way he names the source of the problem, which is different from blaming, which can be a way of displacing one’s own anger and frustration onto another. Nor does Thich Nhat Hahn refrain from suggesting concrete action for personal and societal transformation. At Jackie’s, I discovered his reinterpretation of the five precepts of Buddhism, in order to cultivate compassion in a way that keeps with the changes in society: “Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compassion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals.”

I read this one morning at six
A.M.
in Jackie’s loft, the silence gathering. I let my feet dangle down from the loft, toward the 12 × 12 cement floor below. My toes tapped to the improvisation of
morning birds, and I was seized with an urge to descend. Down the ladder, mindfully, feeling my big toe touch bare cement. Walk out into the gardens, and into the woods barefoot, the soil now loamy with spring life. How good it is to be clay! To be alive, and to be free to choose a wildly ethical path.

God’s feet linger here because of the human heart. It’s never fully born.
Amaya
, I think, and then feel something catch in my chest. As hot as the blood is the missing of her. God, how I want her little hand in mine. Only another parent can fully get this. It’s completely different from separation from a parent or lover. The clay in me wants to touch that part of myself — my blood flowing through another heart — touch the memories of her birth. The first time I held her, she was the length of my forearm. Her mother’s ecstatic smile over this perfect form that’s come out of her, laced with the courage of giving birth to someone she knows will someday die. Kathleen Norris captured this: