Love

I’ve got a lot on my mind these days. New concerns. New friends. The world ticking down like a schizophrenic clock to redemption and armageddon, grief and mania all at once. The possibility of love. The verity of hate. Truth and consequences, the “or” taken out of everything.

I watched Charlie Kirk’s murder over and over. I watched Iryna Zarutska’s murder over and over. An ex-Marine said, “If you’re taking public transit, just don’t sit down.” I repeated this to a co-worker and he nodded at the wisdom of it. But you can acknowledge wisdom and affirm that you’re never, in any minute of all the days between this moment and the cessation of your pulse, going to practice it.

My co-worker will sit because he’s tired at the end of the day; there’s no parking downtown; and, like all of us, he often takes the bus. I like him very much and I hope he never has to regret sitting in front of an insane man with a folding knife. I would have hoped that for Iryna Zarutska, too. I’d hope that for anyone.

My drama is far less compelling, thankfully. Last night I had a sore throat and sinus cold. Every time I lay down in bed, I felt like I was suffocating. I finally said, “Fine. There’s reading I can be doing. There’s tea I can be drinking. There’s the novel draft like digging a tunnel through the center of the earth with a spoon. There’s morning Zazen. There’s the sun coming up while I sit and wonder about the ratio of cups of coffee to workday hours.” And as I said, so it came to pass.

Neem Karoli Baba (aka, “Maharaji”), Ram Dass’ guru is famous for saying, “Love everyone and always tell the truth.” As much as I’ve enjoyed reading Ram Dass’ books and listening to his lectures, I’ve mostly been a student of the “Paying back is a virtue” school of ethical compensation with a little “It’s impossible to love everyone and you shouldn’t try” thrown in for flavor. But lately, I’ve been rethinking this.

Given the high weirdness and unpleasantness of the news, I’ve begun to think that one either loves everyone or no one. There’s no halfsies possible, since there is no objective basis for who we choose to love. We’re actually not in fine control of that—no “or,” no meaningful choice there, either. We love who we love. We like who we like. And our greatest deepest loves, like our greatest deepest hatreds, must always be ever-unfolding mysteries. But is there a way to love more, to reach the ideal such that, at least for now, we’re a bit less hypocritical in our preferences?

Sometimes, the hardest person to love is ourselves, since the enigma of the self is the deepest puzzle of all. Like a tide pool, it has layers that stretch down into our being. Like a bottomless pit, it can be terrifying. And yet we have to go exploring down there. At some point, we have to look in the mirror and say, “I love you” or “I hate you” and stick to that. We can’t say, “I love you now, but I’ll hate you later” because, as Maharaji says, we also have to tell the truth.

In Polishing the Mirror, Ram Dass writes about being angry:

I said to [Maharaji], “Well, you told me to tell the truth, and the truth is I don’t love everyone.” He leaned close to me—like nose to nose and eye to eye—and very fiercely he said, “Love everyone and tell the truth.”

I started to say, “But …” and at that point the whole rest of that sentence became self-evident to me. He was saying, “When you finish being who you think you are, this is who you will be.” I was thinking I was somebody who couldn’t love everyone and tell the truth. He was saying, “Well, when you give that one up, I am still here, and the game is very simple. Love everyone and tell the truth.” . . . I saw that the only reason I got angry was because I was holding on to how I thought it was supposed to be.

I am not as wise as Ram Dass. I can say I don’t believe I’m somebody who can love everyone. But the only non-hypocritical alternative—to hate everyone—is perhaps even more impossible for me. Maybe I haven’t traveled down into the layers of my inner tide pool far enough. Maybe admitting this is the only way to at least tell the truth as I understand it right now.

Lately, I have been hanging out with a group of librarians, some of the kindest, sweetest well-meaning people I’ve known in a long time. They’re setting a powerful example for me. But, around them, I often feel like a Russian in the synagogue, like my inner darkness could never make it possible for me to be like that and still express my truth.

This morning, I practiced Zazen at sunrise. I quietly chanted the Heart Sutra, which I have not done in a long time, for Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk, not because of who they were or who they weren’t, but because a Zen master once said to me, “Maybe, in another life, I am you and you are me.”

It’s entirely possible. Maybe, when I finish being who I think I am, I’ll be able to say whether I believe that or not. Who will I be then? Maybe I will be Iryna Zarutska or Charlie Kirk or you.

Oda a Frank McCourt

Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Frank McCourt,

he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas . . .

Working at a state university provides certain unasked-for pleasures, certain unwanted fringe benefits, and a wide assortment of things you thought you’d left behind a long time ago, not unlike drinking turned wine instead of putting it in the compost. Why do you do it? You’re not broke anymore. But you have various poor-person habits, which are nearly impossible to kick. You don’t throw the past-date wine out. You drink it or it’ll go to waste.

Likewise, you know better than to have idle conversations with students dressed in black in punishing tropical humidity outside the big humanities building. But you have certain adjunct writing instructor habits, which are nearly impossible to kick. 87% of your digestive system knows better, but the idealistic 13% that’s still refluxing with teaching takes an interest. You don’t avoid an inevitably stupid and pretentious conversation. You start right up.

Oh, you’re MFA students? Fiction writing? I was something of a fiction writer myself a long time ago.

Working Monday through Friday in the admin wing of an academic department far removed from anything you studied, before you got old and late-stage adolescents stopped taking you seriously, adds an unmistakably robust bouquet with fruity secondary notes. But striking up conversations with grad students who actually are in your field—which should be a better experience but isn’t—finishes with a mouthfeel of straight vinegar. You meet Eden and Zan and speak to them about their writing program. You know you shouldn’t, but you do.

It’s hard being the sort of person who can find meaning in anything. Zan explains this when you ask him why he wants to be a writer. He snaps it out, the elevator pitch of a theater kid, which is what he was before he arrived to do a master of fine arts in creative writing. He smiles, condescending and awkward at the same time. He asks what you’re studying and you tell him you aren’t. You’re an admin in Obscure Social Sciences Related Department. Ah. He smiles again and puts his arm around Eden, who has the same smile, though perhaps slightly meaner, and gives off tentative girlfriend vibes or lost soul with boundary issues vibes. Because you are old, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Makes you think of something Harry Bryant says to Deckard in the first act of Blade Runner: “You’re not cop, you’re little people.” In that noir retroclone cyberpunk world, Bryant can back up his elitism with violence. In the insecure incubative MFA world, Zan backs it up by continuing to smile while meticulously rolling a cigarette. You’re a university admin office drone? You’re little people.

College kids these days don’t really smoke, which is why he does. Eden doesn’t, though. Her thing is just staring intensely at you over his shoulder until something happens.

Nothing’s ever going to happen. You ask if their names have always been Eden and Zan or if those are stage names or pen names. Zan says he doesn’t like being limited by personal history.

You notice Eden has a very thin ring through her septum and you try not to look at it. Every other student seems to have one. It’s not so edgy. It’s like a tramp stamp or various pronouncements etched on the upper arm, almost compulsory now. E Pluribus Unum. To thy own self be true. In loving memory of the world’s greatest grampa, Leonard Johnston, 1958-2020. Brad Is My Love. The Truth Hurts. Sure, sure, don’t be a jerk. She might have technicolor Foghorn Leghorn playing a harp on her inner thigh but she’s got the soul of a poet. You’re just old and cynical.

She does have Foghorn Leghorn on her thigh. Or a menacing chicken wearing boxing gloves who looks a lot like him. But you’re not staring at the nose ring. So don’t even start with the thigh. Let the kids smoke and sweat like they’re supposed to and tell you about how much meaning there is in the world.

You make things worse by asking what they’re reading. He’s reading the Marquis de Sade’s stories. Because of course he is. She’s reading We Were Liars, a YA horror novel. Zan asks what you’re reading and in a flash ofpreventive insight you say, “Spreadsheets, mostly.”

He expects something like that. Or, “Nothing. I don’t read,” which would also have been acceptable in the grand calculus of the little people, the wee folk up in some administrative office, who putter about in a haze of Obscure Social Sciences Related data. Neither cast ye your pearls before swine, ye Schweinehund. Cast ye them not. Nay.

She says she’s reading Angela’s Ashes in her narratology of memoir seminar and it’s cool because Frank McCourt was, like, 60 when he published it and then he won the Pulitzer. You say you think he might have been 66, not 60. And she looks at you.

But who gives a shit about Frank McCourt? “Not I,” said the cat.

Martial Arts: Just Start

Something few people know about me is that I’ve practiced martial arts, in one form or another, since 1983. I’ve trained through ups and downs, in sickness and in health, traveling, on my own or in a dojo, in various countries, with weapons and open hands, in good shape and sick, healthy and injured, and with people from every ethnicity, creed, culture, and economic standing, good, bad, and ugly. I don’t talk or write about it very often because, honestly, what’s there to say? Still, this time, I might have something.

Growing up, I studied Tang Soo Do karate in the Moo Duk Kwan with a legendary master, where I trained with members of the local SWAT team, off-duty Marines, and a wide variety of people from all over the world. I honor that tradition, but I have also studied Choi Li Fut, Shotokan, Vo Lam Kung Fu, Chin Na, Taijutsu, and western boxing.

Throughout all these years, I’ve had times when I felt I was very proficient and other times when I felt ashamed of my inadequacies. I also learned to set all those feelings aside. As “Dai E Zenji’s Vow for Awakening” puts it, “My only prayer is to be firm in my determination to pursue the study of truth, so that I may not feel weary however long I have to apply myself to it . . . to be free from illnesses and to drive out both depressed feelings and lightheartedness.”

Feeling good about yourself can be wonderful. And feeling bad about yourself can be horrible. But ultimately these are fleeting states of mind, conditions equivalent to each other, and not that different from illnesses. They distract you from what’s really going on within you and beyond you. Accepting this is the substance of mindfulness and is integral to martial arts and to Zen, which is something I also study, among other things.

To be honest, I am not a great martial artist and never have been. At best, I’m mediocre, especially relative to some of the highly gifted athletes from whom I’ve had the benefit of learning. If my mediocrity were relevant to anything, it might bother me. All that’s relevant is that I continue to practice, day in, day out, because there is only one person on my path: me. The path (the training) is endless. There is nothing to accomplish and there is always more to learn. There is no trophy that means anything, no organizational belt rank that ultimately signifies a definitive stopping point. I’ll never “get it done” or “have it handled.”

Rather, martial arts training is a way of life, a stance toward every moment, such that body and mind are brought together as fully as possible in the here and now. The body and mind are constantly changing. So this training demands continual focus and dedication. Hence, the “do,” the Way. But none of it is remarkable. As Jack Kornfield writes, in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry:

Enlightenment flowers not as an ideal, but in the miraculous reality of our human form, with its pleasures and pains. No master can escape this truth, nor does enlightenment make the vulnerability of our body go away. The Buddha had illnesses and backaches. Sages like Ramana Maharshi, Karmapa, and Suzuki Roshi died of cancer in spite of their holy understanding. Their example shows we must find awakening in sickness and in health, in pleasure and in pain, in this human body as it is.

There is no escaping the fact of our mortality, of our finitude. But practicing martial arts isn’t about escaping. This is why, when I see overheated, arrogant MMA fighters putting down traditional martial arts, I wonder about values and physical limitations. One day, these MMA practitioners, as great as they may be, will get old and will no longer be able to dish out the same beatings to others (and to themselves). What then? Does the training stop? Is it time to hang up the gloves and get a soft serve on the way to the orthopedic specialist? When age and injuries have broken your body, is that when the introspection can start? In my opinion, that would be a very limited way of practicing.

A teacher of mine recently described karate as a form of “moving prayer.” I like that a lot. Prayer is about hope. It’s about putting your best intentions into words and giving them a more tangible form. If you believe in a higher power, it’s about affirming that connection and is therefore an act of faith made with your body and mind.

So I thought I’d write this (very different) piece just to say one thing: no matter who you are, no matter your body type or physical limitations, age, gender, ethnicity, or financial status, you can start studying martial arts—even if it’s at a corny storefront dojo in the mall or in your basement with a YouTube video. Start from where you are. You don’t have to be great. Set aside your egotistical perfectionism (something we all have to a degree) and just start.

I write this in memory of a fantastic martial artist and Tang Soo Do instructor, Master Lloyd Francis, who had a formative influence on me when I was very young.