A few years ago we were taking a road trip home from Colorado when I noticed we were driving through Navaho Nation. They have road markers, you see, just like any other city or state or country. After awhile I noticed that we were still driving through Navaho Nation. A hundred miles farther, still Navaho Nation. When the scope of it hit me, I said “Wow, it really was a nation.”

It really was a nation of distant horizons and majestic mountains and eternal skies that we stole from them. You see something like that and it hits you: the greed, the treachery, the killing, the guilt. How could anyone do that with eyes open? Oh, I know how we do that with eyes open. We do that every day. Ignore the past and destroy the future so we can have what we want today.

One night last week a friend called just before dinnertime and said we should pack our bags and get out. I was skeptical. How can you not be skeptical when it sounds so impractical and unlikely. Even silly, and you don’t want to be silly. Yeah, I know, warnings and sirens and wake-up calls and all that. I sat there paralyzed by the broad daylight and the cloudless sky, and then I got out a backpack, tucked in some underwear, toothbrush, overnight stuff, and oh yeah, don’t forget the important papers box. I didn’t think to pack an extra pair of socks.

Within 15 minutes the evacuation warning came for us, and then after another 15 minutes the mandatory order, and by then we were racing down dark roads with no streetlights, dodging whole trees tossed across streets, looking for any place with a light on, a door open, safe shelter. We drove a long way without looking in the rear-view mirror.

I don’t have to tell you what had already happened in those first 30 minutes. I can’t tell you how many friends, how many homes, how many families, how many yesterdays and tomorrows would disappear before the next dawn, and the one after, and the one after. It’s inconceivable, incomprehensible, unknowable. Even if you drive street after street and mile after mile you still can’t grasp it: entire worlds and generations to come, displaced.

We are lucky. Such a strange word. It’s not as though we got something, or even kept something. We are lucky that we have something remaining to care for, and that we still have so many people to care for and who care for us. The wonder of this madness is how many people reached into themselves to care about godless California and reached out to me to say they cared. If that isn’t miracle enough, there are no miracles.

We are home now.

Our little town was full of brave soldiers, regular folks whose job was to work all day and night for a week inventing ways to keep people from harm. They were helped by firefighters from all over the country and world. I got regular updates from my city telling us to stay away for a bit longer, yes sorry, a few days longer. The winds might whip up. The fire might reignite. There were “hotspots” on the mountain, smoldering embers or deep buried heat, that had to be eliminated.

Not to worry, one message said, the hotspots in the canyon right behind our house were being dug up and put out by firefighters from Navaho Nation. Yes, that one-and-the-same Navaho Nation. It really does go on forever.

Just telling you that makes me cry.

You can forget a lifetime of socks and it won’t matter.

It’s the people. People who lift us up and get us through. Thank you for reaching out beyond yourselves, even if it’s just to care. We can’t let ourselves be turned into the kind of people who don’t care. There are no homes there; there is no nation.

Photo by Steven.T on Unsplash

Having entered this world, now exit it completely. This house is not a place for staying long. — Rinzai

It is a time of transitions. It is that time for all of us, all of the time. Time to let go of what we have held onto. Sometimes the things we hold onto are ideas — hopes, dreams, and expectations for ourselves and others. Sometimes they are the things and people we love. And sometimes what we cling to are beliefs about ourselves: who and what we are. These are hard things to let go of. We don’t want to see the reality of change and the truth of impermanence.

But sooner or later we’re going to come up against this thing that most of us are avoiding or denying: the great matter of death. The intimate experience of impermanence. The Dalai Lama calls awareness of death the very bedrock of the path.

This is a timely issue for me and many of you. My teacher has just died. For some of you, your parents are sick or dying. Your cherished pets have died. Or perhaps we ourselves are increasingly aware of how much shorter our own horizon is. I know I am. In a way, it seems to happen in an instant. A 60-year instant or a 70-year instant, and overnight, we are old. Of that my daughter is so afraid, so she insists, “Mom, you’re not old! Promise me you will live to be 120!”

But I am not afraid, because I know: this house is not a place for staying long.

My mother died many years ago. She was sick with a disease that had mutilated her body. Her death was not a shock or surprise. It was a clear and merciful blessing. What shocked me was not the finality of her death on that day, it was the presence of my life. Life flowing, life ongoing. It seems like a sacrilege to go to the supermarket on the day your mother dies, but there was no other alternative. There was nothing other than that for me to do.

When someone you know has died, you are instantly returned to your ordinary, everyday life, which may seem quite mundane. But that is in fact your awakening: to take care of what is right in front of you, when it is in front of you. Drinking tea, making dinner. That’s it. To see the life, your life, moving and flowing from one moment to the next, and carrying nothing with it.

I have just given a talk on this topic, “The Dharma of Life and Death.” You can listen to it at this link.

Last week I met with a friend on Zoom. The caller said that she didn’t have anything in particular to talk about, but that she just wanted to keep the connection between us. I applauded her. Connection, you might say, is everything.

But you know as well as I do: these days we’ve got connection all wrong. With phones, email, texting, DMs; meeting apps instead of meetings; patient portals instead of doctor’s offices; social media instead of social, well, anything. With instant online shopping and banking; remote working and remote schooling, and so on, and so on. We can’t even list all the ways we have co-opted and confused real-life human connection. Even a connection on Zoom isn’t a connection, although it’s often the only connection we have.

When my friend and I were talking I remembered a line that someone famous had once said, a screaming, crying, urgent exhortation to remedy modern life: “Only connect!” Was it Buddha? Jesus? Oprah? I looked it up.

It wasn’t so modern. It wasn’t so holy. It was the author E. M. Forster in his 1910 novel Howard’s End.

“Only connect! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.”

He was writing about relationships, and the social strictures that keep people distanced. That breed fear and loneliness, that stifle communication and kindness. For all our snazzy inventions, for all our lofty intentions, and against our basic need to meet, gather, herd, commingle, and yes, connect, we have only succeeded in driving each other further apart.

But rarely, I get a glimpse. I get a glimpse when I see a delivery person walking up to my door. Up to my door! And the knock. Will I open it, or will I pretend I’m not home? Will I say hello? Will I say thank you?

I get a glimpse when I’m in a room with other people. It may be a big room, or a small one, no bigger than my front porch. It may be a quiet room, or it may be a noisy room. It may be with people I know, but more often with people I don’t. It’s not likely to be people who think like me; more often it’s probably not. There may be talking, there may be singing, there may be silence, there may be stillness, there may be dance. I feel it in a theatre, I feel it in a stadium, I feel it in a grocery line. It’s in a meditation hall or church, in a hospital waiting room, at the post office, and with total strangers in the airport shuttle. It’s on my street. It’s on your street.

It’s the people, the people, the people! And the invisible, unknowable essence that flows between us, that unites us and defines us, not as separate, but as whole. That’s our beauty! That’s our power! That’s the height of our existence, revealed when we only connect.

I’m hopeful. I’m much more hopeful.

Photo by Keith Luke on Unsplash

I visited Washington DC a few weeks ago. It was 100 degrees; the grand boulevards were all but empty. I walked a merciless mile through patches of shade to the National Portrait Gallery. I’d never been. I’m not sure I will go back or that it will still be there if I do. What will become of this place and its people when all is said and done?

These days we hear a lot of racket about our founding fathers and their original intentions. We hear mostly from people who interpret our history and constitution, indeed all our laws, by the notion that they, and they alone, uphold the narrow meaning of the 4,500 words on the four pages of a 240-year-old document, written in secret and signed by 39 white men.

When I entered the gallery, I didn’t know what was inside. For sure, I wanted to see the presidential portraits, especially those prized for their artistry and originality. I wanted to see them with my own eyes, I suppose, to restore my sagging spirits.

You begin by parading past portraits of colonial, revolutionary and early Americans. Sadly, these do not restore your spirits, because these are portraits of the vain and, mostly, vile. Men who might have escaped crimes or debts to amass or inherit a princely purse. Moneyed men who possessed vast reaches of stolen land, once taken by massacre or manipulation, from which profits were extracted by hundreds if not thousands of slaves. There are room after room of them, generations and venerations of them. I’m no constitutional scholar, but the meaning was clear.

When they wrote “we the people,” they could not have meant people like us. They meant only themselves, because only they enjoyed the inalienable rights of personhood.

When they wrote of freedom, they could not have meant us, only that they themselves were free, and that their freedom was not challenged, but endowed at birth.

When they wrote of equality, they meant only that among themselves they were equal in power, place, and participation in this closed society.

They had thrown off the yoke of a king to make themselves kings. The expansion of rights, freedoms, and equality were granted to the rest of us much later on, only to be taken away at whim. It’s no wonder that we’ve been steered here again.

There is a political and philosophical through-line from the first-floor galleries to the far corner of the second floor where the hall of presidents comes to a stop. It ends with another picture of outsized greed and vanity, a slenderizing photograph of Trump veiled in darkness, posing in Churchillian pretense, draped in a blood-red tie.  It is located on the backside of the gloriously colorful portrait of President Obama by Kehinde Wiley. When I stepped around the edge of the display to glimpse Trump’s image, I was afraid to see who might be standing there admiring it.

But the woman I encountered, off to the side, was like me. She was afraid, but not of me. She was proud, but not of him. We said these things to one another in secret, without betraying the other, because we know we are not free, we are not considered equal, and more than any other time in our innocent allegiance, we are not safe in this country.

But we have each other. And we parted knowing that we are not alone.

My husband and I have been trying to muster the wherewithal to update our will and advance healthcare directives. Twenty-odd years ago, we sat down with an attorney friend and in one evening had the whole thing knocked out. That’s probably because we felt like we were still in the middle of life, where time seems suspended. That can happen with a young marriage, a new home, and a small child. The future was far off, and events that would happen there were just a fuzzy abstraction.

Not so now, for obvious reasons. Not so now at all.

Sometime in the last year my Zen teacher, who is a good twenty years older and infinitely wiser than I am, gave me new instructions for my meditation practice. “Keep your gaze focused on the horizon.” For me, this involved lifting my sights higher off the ground than I’d been used to. And at once, my view expanded and the horizon came closer. I likened the change to watching a sunset on the beach: we can’t take our eyes off of it. It’s instantly relaxing, absorbing, and quieting. Don’t we savor a sunset? The delicious array of color as the light scatters. A subtle cooling in the air. The slow encompassing of darkness. The indescribable beauty, the inexplicable magic, the doneness of it all.

That’s how I see my horizon now. As it shortens, it beckons as a raft to ride beyond the rising swell. I am less afraid of what lies over the edge of time. Trust me, I’m not hasty to leave. There is so much to do right now. I can’t hope to change the tragic and horrible course of ignoble human events, today in this country, in this world, borne of the deepest evil, hatred, greed, and insatiable corruption. But I will try. I will show up. I will support. I will give comfort and care. I will hold fast to goodness, kindness, gentleness, charity and love, as we must, bravely. My time is short, or shorter than it was — a comfort of sorts — but there is not a day to waste. There is not a day that doesn’t matter.

Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash

Women’s stories are hard to believe. And they are hard to tell. They don’t fit the narrative, someone will tell you. They are called exaggerated, overemotional, irrational, and unbelievable. Women’s stories are often horror stories. They terrify us because we realize how vulnerable and powerless women are.

The other day I watched the documentary American Nightmare on TV. It was a story you couldn’t turn away from, although many had.

A man and woman are attacked in their bed in the middle of the night by a masked intruder. The man is knocked out while the woman is drugged and kidnapped. She spends hours tied up and blindfolded in the trunk of a car, then days being assaulted in a blacked-out room.

The police never go looking for her because they don’t believe the story the man tells about what happened. It doesn’t fit the narrative.

When her captor releases her, the police don’t believe her either. They don’t even listen. They’ve already decided it’s a hoax, and that makes her the criminal. Is the nightmare what happened to her that fateful night or what happened to her after?

When my daughter was in college she made friends who were student filmmakers, among them, women filmmakers. Some made films with crews comprised entirely of women: actors, writers, directors, producers, camera operators, editors. These women came together to tell women’s stories, the stories that most often don’t get told. Now she and her friends are trying to tell one such story in a short film entitled There’s Someone at the Door. It’s about how two women respond to the possibility that danger is lurking in the dark. This is a fear that can be present everywhere, everyday, especially in the lives of women.

The artists involved are raising money for the film. They have a far-off goal, but they will make the film anyway, somehow. Perhaps you can help these women tell the story, even in a small way.  (At Indiegogo, click the red button that reads “See Options.) What matters most is that someone believes in them.

Thank you.