Confess your hidden faults.

Approach what you find repulsive.

Help those you think you cannot help.

Anything you are attached to, let it go.

Go to places that scare you.

(Tibetan Buddhist teaching, a good one.)

Here are the first few paras from a piece in the London Review of Books, on the Obama presidency; its depressing horribleness. The bulk of the piece is on the family history reasons and guesstimates as to why Obama is as he is and why his presidency has become a sad echo of the Bush/Cheney years.

Sigh.

…………….

• The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father by Sally Jacobs
  Public Affairs, 336 pp, £20.00, July 2011, ISBN 978 1 58648 793 5
• A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother by Janny Scott
  Riverhead, 384 pp, £18.99, May 2011, ISBN 978 1 59448 797 2

You are invited to read this free book review from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire archive of over 12,500 essays and reviews.

To those of us who hoped that Barack Obama’s election marked a departure from right-wing rule, the president’s failure of leadership has been stunning. Seldom have insurgent expectations – even sceptical, guarded ones – been deflated so swiftly. From the moment he announced his staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental utopian to be disappointed.

In domestic affairs, Obama’s obeisance to the Washington consensus led him to abandon the bold approach he articulated during the campaign in his Philadelphia ‘speech on race’, when he attacked the manipulation of racial hostilities to divide the black and white working class. No one running for high office in America had done that since the 1890s. But once in power, Obama soon abandoned any pretence of promoting social democracy. After pushing through a stimulus package, he quickly (and illogically) embraced the gospel of austerity preached by Tea Party ranters and ‘centrist’ pundits. Indeed, the president played a critical role in legitimating this corrosive creed, which despite its tendency to exacerbate recession has now become orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic. In his first State of the Union address, given in January 2010 when his party still had control of both houses of Congress, Obama announced a three-year freeze on non-defence discretionary spending – a move he had called an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008.

In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions,’ he said. ‘The federal government should do the same.’ His puzzling timidity culminated in his supine response to ‘deficit hawks’ during the debt ceiling crisis of the summer. Recently, Obama’s spine has begun to stiffen in response to the Occupy movement. He has finally started to make a populist critique of systemic inequality, but it remains to be seen how sustained or effective this new stance will be.

Obama’s deference to established power has been even more striking in national security affairs. Yet this was the area where he had promised the most. Having opposed the Iraq War ‘not just in execution but in conception’, he seemed to harbour a healthy scepticism toward interventionism. And he assured civil libertarians that he would reverse the Bush administration’s drive towards executive tyranny. He would renounce torture and the ‘extraordinary rendition’ of prisoners to CIA ‘black sites’ where torture took place. He would close Guantánamo, and end indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance. So we were led to believe.

But in practice President Obama has been far more committed to continuity in national security policy than candidate Obama promised. Despite fitful rhetorical displays of dislike for torture, the Obama administration has continued extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance, while expanding the doctrine of state secrets used to conceal those practices from public view. Guantánamo is still in business, beyond the reach of civil law. Though the phrase ‘war on terror’ has fallen into official disuse, the carte blanche it provided for foreign military interventions remains intact. Providentialist assumptions still lend US imperial adventures an aura of sanctity. Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech dragged out all the old tropes, including a familiar set-piece: the United States on the frontiers of freedom, fighting a 60-year war against tyranny that culminated in the battle for Afghanistan. Apart from the echoes of Reinhold Niebuhr – the furrowed brow, the feigned reluctance to use force – the words could have been spoken by George W. Bush.

Among his apologists, Obama’s capitulation to convention has two main explanations. One emphasises the regimented hostility of his opponents, fuelled by racially charged resentment of a black man in the White House. No one can blame Obama for his reluctance to provoke racist violence, yet no matter how cautiously he proceeds, he can never satisfy his right-wing detractors. The other explanation is that Obama was never that radical in the first place: his approach to politics, shaped by his experience as a community organiser in Chicago, has always been conciliatory. He really believes in the banalities of bipartisanship. But this fails to account for his hasty retreat from boldly articulated campaign positions, which suggests something more complex than a politician backing away from promises he knew he could not keep.

I’m getting set to head into a period of silent retreat here at the remarkable mountain cabin in New Hampshire. Starting mid-week next week I will put the wireless modem out of reach and head into silence for a while.

It’s another one of those moments, for me, of choosing. How this next chapter will unfold. I had some professional work evaporate in a very weird way (power, money, fear, control, greed – all in play and all playing out as they so often do) and I’ve had some relationship moments detonate in my consciousness – in ways that have me wondering and reflecting on a lot of things.

As I look at all this stuff, with a weather eye on economic survival, I’ve also been dipping in and out of thoughtful pieces from people who steep themselves in politics and public policy. Here is a piece by Frank Rich (who was, in my view, the best columnist on the New York Times editorial page until he left for New York Magazine a while ago) on the Republican Party and what is happening here in the world’s only hyper-power. And here is a piece from The Guardian newspaper (one of few media outlets that still does investigative, thoughtful journalism), a year in review of where we are environmentally and ecologically.

I may or may not be writing much here. We’ll see. Always wishing you well, whoever and wherever you are.

I’ve been really enjoying all the teaching I’ve been doing. Probably teaching qi gong is my favourite. But I am also loving teaching the Leadership for Change course at Antioch University. Not really the intellectual stuff, though that can be fun too. It is where I can weave practice and honesty and authenticity and life experience together and offer these in a way that seems to resonate and even help a few people; this is what I am enjoying most about being in the teacher role. Honestly though – it feels more like just being a friend, maybe a bit of a mentor. Much less (if at all) standard professorial stuff.

Last night I had one of those good moments – alignment/happiness. I had given a small lecture and it went well enough. Then we were discussing it in class, kind of open seminar style. The talk I had given was from an intensely political and quite complex (in terms of the policy and partisan political and interest group dynamics interwoven at the international, national, regional and local levels) chapter of my life, before I encountered the Dharma or began to practice. I was talking about how – at that time – I had no real awareness. How my thoughts and feelings completely governed me. How I had little real space in which to reflect and see clearly (call it mindfulness, or choiceless awareness or whatever this is for you). And then I shared a bit about Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) talking about activism and how many activists are fueled by the hot energy of anger. And how whenever we are coming from anger we are not lucid. Cannot be lucid. That the energy of anger cannot be in the same place as the energy of lucidity (Buddhist physics). Of stability. Clarity. Equanimity.

People seemed to get that (the majority of the graduate students in the class are following the advocacy stream in the Environmental Studies department) and they were reflecting on their own experiences and what they have seen in the world of activism.

Right at the end of the class a young woman offered the closing comment for the evening. She thanked me for helping her to what she called a really important Aha moment for her. Where she realized that all of the anger that has been motivating her to address and rectify so many injustices and brutalities and tragedies in the world – that this anger she often feels so powerfully….that this is just an expression of the huge love in her. That, in fact, she is moved first and foremost by love. And that she needs/wants to put energy into cultivating both this awareness and also the energy of love itself.

At this point I just couldn’t help it and I began to smile. And I remembered my own quite late awareness of the same thing in my life of politics and activism and then of spiritual practice, awareness dawning….love growing…..reaching up and through and around all the other stuff. Reaching for the light (not always so easy!).

The young woman talked about how she had been thinking of quitting school. Because she thought she would be feeling more empowered and focused as she pursued her studies and honed tools for how to best understand complex realities and then change them. Instead she had just been feeling anger and confusion and overwhelm. But now she was seeing through the lens of love and it was starting to make sense.

Anyway. It was really lovely. I spoke with her after the class and we’ll try and drink some tea together some time soon. To me there is nothing more beautiful than to be present for someone’s awakening experience. They (awakening experiences) usually have some messy pieces to them (mine did and still does for sure!) – and they are wonderfully alive. This is my very favourite kind of work; helping to create good conditions for awakening and then being present to support the process, wherever it might lead.

The photo is from Santa Fe a couple weeks ago – late afternoon light and a magic little Buddha garden.

Tomorrow I’ll go to Blue Cliff Monastery. In the Catskills, in New York. I left Plum Village on August 25th 2010. And disrobed on that day (entered the monastic Zendo and left my Sanghati robe on the altar). Blue Cliff is a sister monastery to Plum Village. And tomorrow I will see some of the brothers and sisters I used to live with so very closely. Sunday I will see the teacher who has been so exceptionally important to me, Thich Nhat Hanh.

I was working with A today. Doing whatever that work we do together is called (energy work? life changing miracle work? two friends talking about stuff work?). We ended up sharing a lot about containers, since they have been so important and elusive to me these last years. As I quest for the container that will offer the best conditions for living my weird version of a meaningful life.

We also talked about some of the heretofore not quite fully reconciled seeming contradictions that I have carried around since finding deep happiness and meaning in monastic chapters; the tension between life as a man in the world and a monk in the monastery.

It was interesting, where we got to in the exploration; that (of course!) there is no perfect container and there is no static form that is just right. Instead there are values and essences and composites that resonate most deeply. We all want structure and maybe we need some kind of structure to make sense of our lives, to order ourselves and locate, whether we live in a ‘simple’ natural environment or a wild big city, full of overt complexities. And/but where we landed this evening was essence and values. Trust. Compassion. Faith. Integrity. Alignment. Love. I’ll say that last one again; love.

And as we were charting this path, I saw clearly that living any one of these values deeply means to live them all deeply (queue Buddhist teachings on emptiness). I was talking with A about an exercise I did years ago: Look up at the biggest screen in Times Square. And imagine the core of who you are flashing across that screen, in one word or in a simple phrase. When I did the exercise in 2006 the word was LOVE. It still is.

Since then I lived – fairly briefly – the monk form. In a robe I found that I could embody and offer love better and more than any other form that I had been before. And there is the possibility that I will move back into that form. But like all forms, particularly ones that come with a lot of structure (like the ‘Buddhist monk’ structure) – there are both freedoms and restrictions. Freedom from and freedom to etc.

So – what I am just beginning to figure on now is I guess what would be called formless form in Buddhism. Which can be a slippery slope to moral and spiritual relativism if one is not careful. Yes, anchoring in practice and values but not being bound by structure. Not looking for a safe place in a container of any kind. Instead taking refuge in and living solely from the values themselves. The part of me that is still weirdly idealistic sees the wisdom and beauty of this path. The part of me that gets bumped and bruised and ground by life in the world outside the monastery – that part of me can still just want a little bit of safe container to curl up in (like a quasi-normal job, or a piece of land I ‘own’ or something like that).

Anyway. Tomorrow I will step back into the monastic container if even just for a little while. I will hear the sound of the bell. I will drink really great tea with some dearly loved friends. I will open my heart and listen for what happens. What else to do?

The photo: from Santa Fe last week, where I was meeting with a few nuclear physicists on a pretty wild clean energy project. More on that another time.

I’ve been listening to music a lot more often than usual recently. Various reasons and I will write a more hefty post soon, maybe touching on the why of that. For now I just wanted to share a lyric or two from a song I am listening to every day these days. By a band Liam (my beloved 22-year-old son) put me onto, Mumford and Sons. The song is called, After the Storm. If you can lay your ears on it you will be in for a treat.

there will come a time, you’ll see

with no more tears

and love will not break your heart

and dismiss your fears

get over your hill and see

what you find there

with grace in your heart

and flowers in your hair

Go listen if you can. You’ll be glad you did. More coming soon.

The photo is of my friends’ Ann and Rees’ lovely house, known as the Fried Egg. I’m spending a couple of weeks here. I love it here. Yes. I know. I am a really lucky person.

When I was born my feet were heading south and I was heading north. Two feet turned a lot inwards, probably destined to be not one but two club feet (or “worse”). My very own clubfoot sandwich.

The doctors, in consultation with my young parents, decided to break some bones in my feet (legs?) and attach my legs together with a steel brace held by leather buckles (I think? I do not really remember but have asked my folks to tell me the story at various points….I never seem to be able to recall exact details….did they break the baby bones or were they soft enough to bend a lot etc.?). Being brand new fresh in the world and with a voice, but without words, I did not get a vote on this significant decision.

My parents had to do a lot of massage/manipulation of my feet and legs through the first year or two of my life. They tell me that the doctors told them that these manipulations were very painful but that I was sort of saint-like throughout. They (my parents) felt, energetically, that I was trying to take care of them through this experience.

Recently this has all come up via the amazing body/energy work I started doing with a truly remarkable healer a month or two ago. We are finding all sorts of stuff, stored in the body, in the mind, in the soft tissues of the heart. Pretty Interesting voyage and one in which I am getting lighter and lighter. Which is good. Those of you who have known me for a while might have wanted to recommend a bit less of the heavy at various points.

I’m writing about this now for two reasons I guess.

The first is one that came up in my last session with A; where I wondered, in a meaningful way, literally for the first time – what would my life have been like if the doctors and my parents hadn’t made the call they did? If they had just left me the way I was when I came out of the chute? It really just showed up as a question, a line of inquiry, a what if – without burn or resonance to it. But I bet my life would have been very different. Maybe I would have forever walked with crutches. Or maybe I would have had some classic kind of Hollywood Igor limp. People might have called me “cripple” behind my back or to my face. Maybe I would not have been too popular with girls/women.

All of those experiences would have shaped me into something quite different I imagine.

And in looking at life a little differently and in particular looking at ideas of happiness versus the lived experience of those ideas – what would have been better? I suppose both are ok really. Both mark and condition one. Me.

The other reason I thought to jot something down here came from a piece I was reading in Orion Magazine this morning. About queering ecology. The writer talked about his sexuality and his relationship with nature, and with nature writing – that can sometimes romanticize things like life-long pairings of male/female geese and then wax poetic about human parallels.

I was thinking about all my gay and lesbian friends – their experience of being how they are. How they came out of the chute. And how they have come to be understood (and not at all understood) and valued (and not at all valued) in our society.

The human experience is a conditioned one. If not these conditions (my “normal” feet/legs) then another set (my “crippled” feet/legs etc.). If not this sexuality, then that one. I have spent very little time imagining profoundly different conditions, though I have spent a lot of time imagining and leaning toward or away from slightly different ones.

But it has been an interesting experience, seeing this pretty important part of how I came into the world and its tattoo on my psyche/somatic being – to see this in a new and more spacious light. And through the work with A. it has been really wonderful to truly let go and take care of that experience, that little boy who did not get a vote. In my mind’s eye I saw the brace and leather straps burning down to fine ash. I saw scattering the ashes where my old dog Luke’s ashes are scattered, high on a rocky bluff overlooking Active Pass in the Gulf Islands, in British Columbia. Remembering now, for the ten thousandth time, the line from that song in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; “from the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success.” Or something.

The photo: the door to the church (always open, as a church should be) in Monbos. The tiny and exceptionally beautiful hamlet a few kilometres away from where I used to live. In Plum Village. In the Dordogne. In France. The door – walking into the past? Or the future? Or even more wisely – just the now?

And then there was busy.

It is interesting, shifting from having vast acreage of space to planning and lists and meetings and something even approaching deadlines. I like literally everything I am doing and some of it I downright love. Teaching qi gong is really wonderful. As is the teaching at Antioch University (a lot of this wonderfulness is co-teaching with a great colleague; Steve is a Quaker and a wise and funny and smart and incredibly dedicated teacher….pure joy for us to fold ourselves together in the Leadership for Change class we are making happen). Also loving/caring about the Orchard School work.

In general, I like having a lot of space, for formal practice and the simple living that I have actually been able to do for most of the last several years. But out here in the world there is the – um – economy and there is not the daily practice schedule/structure of the monastery. At moments I have searing awarenesses of missing my monk life in Plum Village, even as I am coming to really enjoy my life here in the world. One thing that is coming up for me, a quiet drumbeat under the fullness of the days; purity.

Healthy monasteries generate a precious kind of energy, held in a rare and necessary space. It is a purity that is not puritanical. And it is a necessary balancing to so much that is out of balance in life out here in the world.

I liked being part of that purity, even as I regularly struggled with my lack of purity in some aspects of monastic life (where thought is understood as action….my thinking, along with the thinking of many, could veer in a distinctly not pure direction from time to time). So I have been reflecting on that, as I live my life out here. Keeping my practice, even as I lose the acres of space and the monastic container that I had in Plum Village (and also in me for much of my ascetic time outside Plum Village).

I like Ajahn Sumedho’s teaching on purity: When he was first a monk he often was a bit miserable because he was always trying to attain purity, and then was always disappointed in his mind, which could be quite an impure place from the perspective of the Vinaya (the Buddhist monastic code). Then he realized that purity was always there. Always deeply alive in him. Right there with Buddha nature. And that it is just the nature of the mind to think these thoughts. And then also the nature of the mind to judge those thoughts, to label them (pure/impure etc.), and then to attach to them; this ‘self’, this ‘me’ – wow what an impure and weak practitioner am I. That kind of thing.

I also like what Stephen Levine says about the awakening experience. That more and more it is the experience itself – observing it, seeing what is coming up and firmly/gently applying practice to it (24/7) – this becomes the enlightenment; not needing it to be robed and sprinkled with Dharma pixie dust. To allow it to be prosaic and mundane and then to see that as miraculous and divine. You know? Perhaps not, as I am not being very clear.

I guess what I am trying to say is that it I am having a nice time being human again. And that I remain determined to walk a path of awareness, with discipline and rigour – but not in a way that separates me from life and those around me, whether in the monastery or out here, in this pretty little corner of this very odd country.

The photo: from my room in the monastic residence in Plum Village. I sat right there a lot. Drank a lot of green tea (high mountain oolong if I could get it). Followed my breathing. Many hours. It was good for me. Is good for me.

I’ve been very slowly working my way through Norman Fischer’s Sailing Home, and have quoted from it a bit here recently. I think quoting other people extensively on a largely personal blog is kind of cheesy. But sometimes you bump into such good stuff it is nice to share it out. In Buddhist (and other spiritual) circles, there is great and wise teaching on self. And non-self. And self-view. All kinds of truly compelling and perhaps even scientifically demonstrable gems. So it caught my attention when I read a crisp passage last night that spoke directly to this teaching in a way that resonated. I will sit with it for a while. Here it is:

In some spiritual circles egolessness or selflessness is a major concern. This has never sounded quite right to me. Even the effort to be ‘good’ sounds too idealistic, too much to deny the pungent quirkiness of our human character and the persistence of our wily stories. Besides, it seems quite doubtful that we would ever actually be able to achieve selflessness, egolessness, or goodness. The continual effort to achieve this unachievable goal would make us even more dissatisfied with our lives than we were before. Wouldn’t it be better simply to try to be ourselves, in the faith that doing this with a minimum of confusion will be sufficient?

But this is also no small task. Few of us are actually willing to be ourselves. Mostly we deny, berate, or ignore ourselves, preferring self-deception, judgmentalism, or just plain oblivion. Being ourselves involves awareness and acceptance of our craftiness and imperfection – and this awareness tames us, so that we can understand and appreciate our quirks and the quirks of others. It gives a broader, deeper perspective. Perfection is not our spiritual goal. We do not aspire to be Nobody. We are and need to be Somebody, wily and crafty enough to interact with others, but avoiding the risk of puffing ourselves up and becoming swollen and blind with self-concern. But to be Somebody in a balanced way, without overdoing it as the Cyclopes do, we need to appreciate the experience of being Nobody from time to time.

The references to Cyclopes and Somebody and Nobody are not accidents, and this is the down side of pulling a rich quote from a larger text. Sailing Home is the story of inner and outer journey, using the Odyssey as a rich palette from which to paint; drawing on the trials and tribulations of Odysseus to help us see our own journey. Anyway. It is pretty masterful and insightful, the whole thing.

The quote above may seem painfully obvious to you. But it is sort of news to me. Or at least a gentler take on hewing to practice and the teaching of the Buddha in a way that allows room for our humanity, frailties, great aspirations, nobility and defilements -  the full catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek once called it.

The photo – last week in Ottawa. A little bit broken. A little bit dignified. Uh huh.

P.S. I don’t think the quote above adds up to early 21st century decadent Western moral relativism. That’s not where the wise Fischer is going (I think). More just an encouragement to be deeply human and deeply honest about that weird experience.

Sometimes the signs are unmistakeable. Yesterday we had a small earthquake in Ottawa. Liam (my son) and I were at my mum’s place. I was on the phone and he was printing some files in the next room. Suddenly a wave rolled through the house. The power surged and wiggled. Then another wave. I have been so wobbly in recent weeks, I thought maybe it was just me; a little heart attack or stroke or something that might need some attention. Liam came out of mum’s study and said, ‘is that an earthquake?’ I said, ‘oh, right – yes.’ So we huddled in a door frame for a moment and then went outside in case another bigger wave came through and stuff started falling. But that was all there was.

Not long after the earthquake my sister and I met to talk. She is visiting from Barcelona and I did not actually think I was going to see her, for we had a really painful family schism (pretty much entirely my doing) erupt a while ago and she needed time and space. I thought that she would need a lot more time. But we ended up sitting in a park and talking and listening to one another, learning a bit more about each other (we have not lived in the same country for almost 30 years). It was so good.

So good in fact that we kept on going through the rest of the day and night. Back to my mum’s place. To rally with my son and mum and nieces (who are crazy about Liam). My sister and I cooked and laughed and listened to music. Held each other close. Danced a bit. It was such a beautiful unfolding.

Reconciliation and connection and love flowing in the blood family – this is a gift that eludes many of us; has eluded me for various hard stretches. I am so grateful.

It is one of those moments when things turn. When the rough turns to the smooth. When it is good to notice the tectonic shifts and smile right into them.

The photo: I took this picture at Morning Sun last week. On one of my favourite parts of the land, near Lily Pond. A tree turns toward the light. What could the teaching possibly be?