In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.
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Living a life devoid of ceremony leaves us without allies. Shut out of our reality, they abandon us to a world without intelligence – the very image of modernist ideology. The mechanistic worldview becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy, and we are indeed left with nothing but force by which to affect the world.
In a ceremony, one attends fully to the task at hand, performing each action just as it should be. A ceremony is therefore a practice for all of life, a practice in doing everything just as it should be done. An earnest ceremonial practice is like a magnet that aligns more and more of life to its field; it is a prayer that asks, “May everything I do be a ceremony. May I do everything with full attention, full care, and full respect for what it serves.”
How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?
There is a vital need to return to “the root of the root,” and at the very core of our predicament is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation. Having forgotten that the Earth is sacred, we use it as a resource to be exploited, and human beings have become consumers to fulfill this economic model.
Yes, we will have to learn how to live at the end of an era, at a time of increasing insecurity, disturbance, even chaos. We will see more and more the value of care, compassion, and community, and develop the tools of radical resilience, as we are already recognizing in our response to the virus. But most importantly, we will discover again what it means to work for a future seven generations or longer.
We can’t return to normal, because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.
The Eyak word for rain means “something is happening.”
–Eva Saulitis, Into Great Silence, p. 230
This sentence appears near the end of the book, where Saulitis talks about the Eyak people of the coastal rainforest of Alaska.
The Eyak are a distinct cultural group, separate from the Tlingit, who migrated thousands of years ago from the interior to the coast. Saulitis writes that their language is unrelated to the Tlingit – instead, it is related to Interior Athabascan, and to the Navajo-Apache languages of the desert Southwest. It is a bit of a mysterious arrival to the Alaskan coast, in other words.
The last native speaker of Eyak, Chief Marie Smith Jones, died in the 2000s, so the language is not spoken any more.
“Chief Marie [said] that when she died she didn’t really believe the language would go extinct, because the language comes from the land, and as long as the land, water, and animals survive, as long as the place survives, the language exists in its elemental form. Like a bulb, like a spore, like a rootstock, it lies dormant, waiting. Perhaps it will take a new kind of listening, of living close to the place, to bring Eyak back, ‘to start all over again.’”
So last week I went for a walk before starting work. It was a simple, small walk, just around the block. I was enjoying the sunshine and the blue sky and paused to appreciate the gnarled, massive pepper tree on the street parallel to ours, which I don’t see nearly enough because I usually don’t walk that way. And then, as I was rounding the corner towards home, I walked past a truck.
It was a vacuum truck, with a hose snaking down into a manhole at the corner, cleaning out the sewer. I walked past, taking care to keep at least six feet away from the two workers at the controls behind it.
As I passed the truck, I realized I was walking through a fine mist. I put my head down, held my breath, and walked until I was clear of the mist, then turned around.
I saw that the mist was coming from an air vent at the top of the truck. The mist had now turned to a spray, and the spray was turning dark gray, almost black, in color. It was blasting against a traffic sign, a yellow diamond warning trucks about the height of the train bridge just ahead, and the sign had turned almost completely black.
It was then I realized I had just walked through a cloud of aerosolized sewage. A literal shitstorm.
I walked straight home, took my clothes off directly into the washing machine, and jumped into the shower. After thoroughly scrubbing myself off and then rinsing my mouth with Listerine, I got dressed for the second time that morning and came downstairs to explain to my family what had just happened.
I called the public works department to complain, and then went off to my office to start preparing for the half-dozen Zoom meetings I had that day. But no sooner had I sat down than I heard the sounds of the vacuum truck, closer this time, and over its machine noise, the sounds of my wife yelling.
I ran back to the front of the house to find that the vacuum truck was now parked right in front of the neighbor’s house, and here it was spraying the black sewage mist all over the neighbor’s car and lawn. The mist was also drifting across our front yard and porch. The workers were trying to control things by spraying their truck with clean water, to no effect.
The truck was too loud for the workers to hear our yells, so we called public works again, and I also called up the number listed on the truck’s side. Eventually the men stopped their work and gave us some lame excuses. A little while later a supervisor showed up so we could yell at him for a bit and — between the yelling — give us the back story.
The truck’s fill sensor had malfunctioned, so its tank overflowed, which caused the first spraying incident. The workers dumped half the tank back into the sewer, and then came down the street to try and vacuum up the overflow that was, by then, going down the gutter, past our house, and towards a storm drain, where, if they let the sewer water flow in, the company might be facing significant penalties, thanks to the Clean Water Act. Unfortunately there was still some kind of clog in the pump, so even though the tank was nearly empty, the shit was still hitting the fan.
I appreciate the work these men do — it’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it — but, as I told the supervisor on the phone, they might need to take better care of their equipment, and train their workers on how to handle a malfunction like this. After getting a new truck and cleaning up the gutter properly, the men washed off the neighbor’s car and hosed down our porch (twice). And while I was nervous for a few days, it seems clear I didn’t get sick from the sewage, nor did any of our family members. It’s possible, if it contained coronavirus, that I could still be incubating it. But the black water was from older sludge on the bottom of the sewer line, not fresh sewage, so I think my odds are pretty good.
Still, walking through a literal shitstorm is not what you want to be doing during a pandemic.
Your Zen teachers will have a field day with that story about the shit mist, my friend Susan said, reminding me of the story about Unmon and the shit stick.
I suppose this is a chance to cultivate equanimity. It’s not easy. But in the meantime, it makes for a good story.
Ordinary mind, Buddha mind. Shit stick, shit mist. What’s the difference?
Can you see the Buddha in a cloud of shit? In the middle of a pandemic?
Buddha mind ::
the doctor holds up a nasal swab
One of the last decisions we had to make when my father was in hospice care was whether we wanted a teddy bear made out of one of his shirts. It was just a day or two before he died, and we didn’t know exactly when it would happen, but it was clear he was getting close to the end. The hospice nurse, on one of his regular visits, asked us if we wanted this free service, as it was included in the hospice fees. (If we wanted extra bears, we could order them for $60 each, but the first one was free.)
I imagine there are people for whom this kind of thing would be a great comfort. But for anyone who’s in this situation and doesn’t already have a clear sense of how to answer, my advice is simple: Do not request a teddy bear made out of the shirt of your deceased loved one.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I agreed to let them do this. I was grieving, my father was dying, and I was so focused on his and the family’s needs that I could hardly be bothered with something as remotely relevant and tacky as deciding whether or not we wanted a bear. Or what to do with his body — another awful question the hospice nurse asked us during the same visit. The man is still alive, and he’s lying right there between us, I wanted to shout. And you’re asking whether we want his body cremated or embalmed? Fortunately, my stepmother K. knew how to answer this question.
But for the hospice shirt bear, nobody knew what to say. K. joked about it, because it reminded her of an old Car Talk episode that she and my dad had a good laugh over. In this episode, a caller had described a shared office building in his town that housed both a veterinarian and a taxidermist. Click and Clack had suggested that the two could buy a shared billboard with the slogan “Either way, you get your pet back!”
This hospice shirt bear offer was the equivalent of this veterinarian-taxidermist joke: Either way, you get your loved one back.
But while we chuckled about it, there were looks going back and forth between K., my brother, me, and my wife — and nobody seemed to be actually making a decision. So I said to the hospice nurse: OK, we want the bear. Better to have it and not want it than not have it and wish we did. So K. gave the nurse one of my dad’s blue checked button-up shortsleeve shirts, the kind of shirt he had a dozen of in his closet and which he always seemed to be wearing, with a couple pens and other stuff in the pocket. And I filled out the shirt-bear request form, and gave it to the hospice nurse.
And then my father died, and I forgot all about the bear.
Eventually, though, it arrived. The hospice nurse had to mail it to me because K. refused it. So it arrived wrapped up in tissue paper one day, lovingly packed into a box, along with some sentimental printed notes from the hospice shirt bear maker. And the maker’s business card (in case we wanted more, I suppose).
It was ghastly.
This bear was made out of Dad’s shirt, all right. It had two little button eyes, a button heart, and a ridiculous pair of ribbons tied around its neck. It was just like a child’s teddy bear, except, horribly, made out of my dad’s old shirt.
Nobody would want a bear like this. Those who loved my dad would not be able to see past the absurdity of his shirt being made into a teddy bear. (Not a big teddy bear guy, my dad.) Anyone who didn’t know him wouldn’t want a weird blue bear made out of biology-teacher plaid. There are no small children in our family at the moment and at any rate, with those buttons, it is probably not safe for babies or toddlers. And would you really want your baby snuggling and drooling on a bear made out of Grandpa’s old shirt anyway?
The only member of our family who seemed interested in the bear was our dog Lucy, who was eager to tear apart a new stuffed toy. I wasn’t letting that happen either.
So I set the bear on a shelf next to the stairs, out of reach of the dog. And every time I went up or down the stairs for the next two weeks I saw the bear, and sighed.
Then the shelter in place order came down and we all started living at home all the time. I saw the bear about twenty times a day now. It was really getting to be too much.
Fortunately, the solution soon arrived. My brother pointed out an article from Australia about how people are putting stuffed bears in windows (and hanging them from fences, roofs, etc) so that children who are out on walks with their parents can spot them, as a kind of find-the-bear quarantine game. A few days later, I saw a similar headline in the Chronicle, which confirmed that it was a thing here, too.
So now I knew just what to do. I got some string, and an index card, and a Sharpie, and I put the bear in the window.
It solved the problem. The bear has found its purpose. It makes me laugh, now, instead of grimace. And it’s still out of reach of the dog.
