Roll Over Beethoven

When John Lennon was shot in 1980, I had a dream that he was sitting in a circle in heaven with my father and my Uncle Jerry, two fabulous small Jews who had only just died in the late '70s. He seemed to be giving them some valuable pointers about how to get along in the new neighborhood. Mind you, I don't believe in heaven in the angels-with-harps sense of the word, but there he was with one mustachioed New Yorker on either side of him, holding each by the hand and OM-ing away. It was a great comfort to know that my father, a non-believer, and my uncle, a conventional shul-on-Yom Kippur Jew, would be supervised in the world-to-come by someone with spiritual chops. I'm thinking about John because just recently Chuck Berry and Jimmy Breslin left us and it reminds me that the older you get, seventysomething in my case, the more you experience celebrity loss as well as personal loss. The people who have most impressed themselves on my awareness are at least as old as I am and are, in the nature of things, shriveling and dying off like garden lettuce in mid-summer.

It's always noteworthy when two famous figures die within a few days of one another. It causes a shift in the planetary angle of inclination. Certainly, Carrie and Debbie had that effect. Or Robert Mitchum, the compelling noir actor, whose obituary was vacuumed off the page by Jimmy Stewart who died the next day. The public can only digest one forkful of nostalgia at any given time. At the moment, I imagine Chuck and Jimmy in some smoke-filled celestial backroom chomping on cigars and telling outrageous self-aggrandizing stories. I don't know if Chuck Berry was aware of Jimmy Breslin, but you have to think that Jimmy appreciated Berry's high-wire act on the guitar. Celebrity deaths have the same day-glo vibrancy as unexpected celebrity encounters in life. I once saw Mohammed Ali walking down Seventh Avenue. Not only was he the most enormous person I had ever seen, but the wavelengths he radiated didn't seem to belong to the normal visible spectrum. He was literally larger than life.

Ordinary, finite beings like us are fascinated by death because it's where we go to play catch with the infinite. Otherwise, we have to settle for contemplative practices and certain chemicals that give us a taste of the vast, boundlessness from which we came and to which we will all return. But most people sober up the next morning and go to work or the dentist. Life on this plane imposes a great many demands. Because we don't have the luxury of time to consider death as a philosophical construct, our ideas remain under-cooked and tough from the urgency of fear.

People seem to think of themselves as separate units of consciousness and death as something wholly other, a complete departure from life that comes at the end, in the bottom of the ninth. This is the temporal equivalent of flat earth theory which is enjoying a comeback. You just keep going until you fall off the edge. The story I tell myself is different. I imagine one all-encompassing, integrated web of life and death with colors and forms transmuting in and out of kaleidoscopic designs. Strawberries and tigers come and go. Birds, friends, mothers, rock musicians and journalists. I saw this in another dream some years ago. I'm standing in the middle of a field and all the people I have ever known are flowing past me from the right and from the left like a complex traffic pattern. They keep gracefully arriving and departing. They keep sprinkling me with the fairy dust of their natures. I am the hub of this particular wheel, one of an infinite number of wheels. I am also ephemeral, like you, like all the people coming and going in the dream. Like Chuck Berry's last squealing guitar riff. But the reverberations of that insistent sound, the bridge that it builds out of Beethoven and over the troubled water will go on and on. Moonlight Sonata meet Maybelline.


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Abundance

Almost every day we order pumpkin soup. The soup is such a revelation, we go back for it again and again. Setting down the bowl, aromatic with cinnamon and nutmeg ground fresh from local plants, the young waitress asks the same question another waitress had asked the day before. "Por favor me pregunto, do you think it's expensive here in Costa Rica?" We give a shrugging answer. "Sometimes, but never as expensive as it is at home." She tells us she grew up in Manuel Antonio, but is now one of the many dark-skinned Costa Ricans who can't afford the rent in her own village. Business is good...people speaking English, French, and German are arriving in droves at the hipster restaurant, Café Milagro, hungry for arepas and thirsty for Imperiale. The Servers in black shorts and red t-shirts, the Served in various states of undress. Great Barrington in the jungle.

The tropics are a different state of mind, a different context. Animals and plants in myriad arrangements proliferate as you approach the equator. You can see the density and diversity, the abundance of life forms, when you walk in the rainforest. Packs of monkeys, iguanas and striped frogs, blue morphos and many other butterflies, vines entwining trees interlocking to create the canopy. You can see it in the variety of shells that wash up on the beach. Mother-of-pearl and tangerine and iridescent green. A guide at the reptile preserve where we visit caymans and crocodiles at a safe distance explains. At this latitude, the seasonal variations are not extreme. The temperature only changes a few degrees from month to month. The diurnal rhythms also barely vary, resulting in twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness in every twenty-four under a sun that breathtakingly disappears into the sea every evening at 5:45 like clockwork, as they say. People on vacation briefly detach from their mojitos to watch this spectacle and actually applaud the divine magic trick as if Someone were taking a curtain call. Life seems to flourish when there is enough light and heat to go around, when scarcity isn't the prevailing mindset, unless you're serving tacos or harvesting mangoes. Then, it can be a great effort, a contest, as it is the world over.

Here in Amerika, the struggle for survival - between classes of people, between people and the earth that nourishes them - has now been orchestrated to a crescendo. Everything has been brought to a boil, to mortal combat that comes from the mistaken notion that there isn't enough for everyone. This is a lie, of course. Just look at the fruit hanging from the trees, the fish teeming. It's the lie to end all lies. It keeps us locked inside our own virtual fall-out shelters, unwilling to open the doors of perception to other people, other cultures, other species. Our whole country sometimes feels like a giant kindergarten classroom where for some reason there aren't enough cookies to go around. Someone will be left in tears, empty-handed. No dialysis, no decent schooling, nowhere to go when you're old. The fear of scarcity and the anxiety about diversity travel together. The pressure they exert is stunning.

Why else would Spanish-speaking people be rounded up and herded into vans by ICE agents as if they were less than human? As if they were so profoundly other that their parenthood, their sisterhood had no value? Why else would small children sometimes come home from school to find that their mothers and fathers had been taken away? What's wrong with this picture? Everything. All ways of being that deny abundance promote the distorted notion that there isn't enough, that we are playing a zero-sum game where if you get something it means that I lose something. The rainforest tells a different story. Layers upon layers, generations upon generations of life interweave, giving birth and dying off, providing nourishment for each other, sustaining the whole. Embracing abundance is foundational. It's the first prayer of the day and the first lesson we need to learn if we are to live in gratitude and generosity.


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Rebbe Nachman in Costa Rica

As far as I know, Nachman of Bratzlav did not winter in Costa Rica. The late 18th century hasidic rebbe remained tucked away in Ukraine, warmed by the fires of fervent prayer while the snow piled high on his doorstep. Still, walking on the beach, I thought of his famous words....All the world's a very narrow bridge....The essential thing is not to fear at all. With this in mind, I abandoned all previous identities. I let go of bookworm, acrophobic, fried couch potato...and signed up for a rainforest excursion that featured crossing a series of canopy bridges leading to a waterfall. It was me, Juan the guide, and a young couple from California. I cast myself in the role of the determined older woman who deserved no end of credit for her courage. The hike began with a climb of more than an hour up rough-hewn stone steps interspersed with other steps made out of discarded motorcycle tires filled with dried mud. The journey had the quality of a pilgrimage, something along the lines of Our Lady of Fátima, only upright, without the part where the devotees walk on their knees. The ascent in the sultry jungle heat was definitely a test. It seemed to be designed to wear me down, so that by the time we arrived at the canopy bridges, my resistance was exhausted. There was no turning back.

It's not often that you encounter a spiritual exercise made literally manifest. All the world really is a narrow bridge! I had planned to say the Sh'ma each time I crossed over. This prayer, central to Jewish practice, proclaims the Divine Oneness of all things. It is said every day by observant Jews, but also at the moment of death, to indicate that the essence of the person is about to return to its source, to the All. I imagined that it would balance out the narrow bridge effect, fortifying me with a connection to the sky, the vegetation, the birds, reconfiguring the landscape so the fear couldn't get me. I thought about saying the Sh'ma when I stepped out onto the first span, but I made the mistake of not waiting until Juan got to the other side. The bridge rocked up and down and swung back and forth like a pendulum under his footfall. After that, I forgot about praying and just waited my turn. Everything was still. All I had to do was put one foot in front of the other.

After crossing ten or twelve rope bridges and descending the slope on more improvised steps, we arrived at the promised waterfall. I had already been swimming in the high-saline Pacific for many days, as well as a chlorinated pool in an area that featured a faint septic smell.  Nothing could prepare me for the clarity of the cascading rainforest water, clean like the unmediated joy of a baby's smile. It seemed to be absolutely transparent, with no solid precipitates. It was invitingly cold and regenerating, just the right ritual of purification after the sweaty trials of the day.

Safely back in Manuel Antonio, massaging my feet and considering the spiritual integration of climbing, crossing and immersion, I thought of another of Rebbe Nachman's aphorisms. If you believe breaking is possible, believe fixing is possible. It was noon and I hadn't thought about Betsy DeVos since early in the morning. When the shadow of her malignant presence reappeared in my awareness, I realized that in our current situation, it is no exercise of the imagination to believe that breaking is possible. Everywhere we see the intentional dismantling, the fracturing, of democratic norms and institutions we naively thought were inviolable. Public education, for God's sake! Once it was pretty good, then it became pretty bad. Now it's in danger of falling victim to the wrecking ball....Welcoming immigrants! As recently as 2012, I cried at a naturalization ceremony at the Rockwell Museum when 22 grateful new Americans took an oath of allegiance to our country. Now immigrants are reviled.

It's a stretch in this environment to believe that fixing is possible. In order to get to that place, we will have to exercise our capacity for vision. There will be a long climb over rocky and unfamiliar territory. We may be called upon to put one foot in front of the other and step out onto a narrow bridge that doesn't feel entirely safe and then another bridge and another. Like the mystery of childbirth, getting from breaking to fixing will require faith, endurance and hard labor. We will have to stick together, hold on to the redemptive image of the waterfall and wear good shoes. The essential thing is not to fear.


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Herons yes, humans no

photo by Frank Gioia

Some days, the dread really gets to me. I'm worried about my aging sister in the house on Amador Avenue in Berkeley. I'm worried about the ICE agents reportedly prowling around in Great Barrington. Here in Costa Rica where I'm spending the month of February, I immerse myself in the sea water and the jungle to dilute the anxiety. It's a luxury and it's only intermittently successful.

Much as I think I believe that the natural world is one organism, the body of God, and that we are all its limbs, its ears, I sometimes wonder whether, on the contrary, nature is completely indifferent to us. It goes about its business without a flicker of interest in our preferences. If it feels like snowing, it snows. Screw your travel plans.  I've been thinking deeply about this in Central America where the mangroves and humid forests are teeming with life that disguises itself, often in impenetrable camouflage, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we can see it. Everywhere in the national parks, you see people with puzzled expressions on their faces. They promised me a sloth. Where the hell is the sloth? We catch a glimpse of the occasional iguana and, of course, the white-faced monkeys. The monkeys, like us, their primate kin, crave sociability and seem to have grandstanding tendencies. Do not, however, confuse them with the exhibitionist-in-chief. Their motives are benign and they do not bite off more than they can chew. Most of the animals hide in plain sight or move so fast that your iPhone is always a step or two behind. The obsidian-colored rock along the beach forms the perfect background for the skittering black crabs. All you can see is motion. On the floor of the forest, everything looks like it's been tossed out of the back of a truck, leaves on top of vines, on top of dead wood, on top of fallen coconuts. I see no order in it, nothing that ties it all together. I have learned that the bats eat the mosquitoes, but it would take another lifetime, which I may or may not have, for my born-in-the-city sensibility to catch up to the larger meaning of this other, more ancient reality. From a boat in the estuary, the guide tells us that no humans, including indigenous peoples, have ever lived in the mangroves we see as we pass by. Herons yes, humans no.

I catch the pungent whiff of a theological question lurking here. This sense of a gulf separating me from the ways of nature, this yearning that stalks me wherever I go, feels like the desire to know and be known by an immanent divine presence, by the One who embraces me and allows me to rest and feel finally at home. Especially now. Like everyone else toting cameras and binoculars, I want to be embedded in nature, to be recognized and loved by the kingfishers and date palms as one of their own. Still, in Costa Rica, where the Pacific surf knocks me down, filling my eyes with searing salt, and the relentless sun, despite all precautions, is nevertheless persistent, I am humbled. I have found, like Copernicus and Darwin before me, that I am not the center of the universe. There are other songs and other stories. I have a potent experience of scale, of divine transcendence, of nature's detachment and my ultimate insignificance. I tell you, it's a great relief.

Some days, it allows me to lower the heat a notch on the political boil, carnivorous politicians strutting their blood lust day in and day out. Years ago on tropical vacations, no cell phones, no Facebook, we could escape the Reagan rowdies, the Bush bozos, but now we cannot disconnect. We know all to well what the big crybaby and his friends are up to. But when I look out on the sea, petrels and terns circling in the expanse of sky overhead, something new comes into focus, the glimmer of a new thought about my relationship to the natural world. I see that it's not there to entertain me, even though every night the mauve and salmon at the horizon stops me in my tracks. It's there to live and breathe in spite of the criminal interference of human larceny, the arrogance of rapacious over-development. Let it be, I say. Let it do what it needs to do before it vanishes. Care about it, love it, whether or not it cares about us. Resist the ascendant climate deniers. Make the necessary political moves on nature's behalf, even though the message of nature is the very opposite of politics. The toucans and the bamboo don't speak the shallow language of lies and false promises. They speak a deep truth that reveals itself to each of us from time to time according to our willingness to listen.


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The Empathy Strikes Back

Photo taken at the Women's March in Washington by Wendy Rabinowitz

I read in Real Simple magazine that empathy is trending. But those streams of people hurtling off the Van Wyck, those pro bono lawyers camping out cross-legged in the terminal, the magnificent Judge Donnelly....that's not a trend, that's a major spike. That's the yeasty conscience of America rising up and saying NO. The news will not continue at that exhilarating pace, but something is definitely happening here. The action that some people are taking is lifted up by the empathy bubbling up from a great many more people.

Of course, like hot yoga and the paleo diet, empathy isn't for everyone. In his recent Tikkun article, "Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism is Not an Option," Henry A. Giroux writes that the perpetrators of the invasion of Washington are engaging in "a demented appropriation of Ayn Rand's view that selfishness, war against all competition, and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals" and further, that going forward "compassion and respect for the other will be viewed with contempt." Up until now, it's been greed that has stumped me, left me shaking my head in bewilderment. How much is enough? How many Lamborghinis can one person drive? But this, this is a new frontier, beyond greed, beyond racism and misogyny, to the core of a Darwinian universe. Not only don't I care about you, but I have nothing but disdain for anyone else who might care about you. It's the twenty-first century law of the jungle, complete with twittering fiber optic cables strung from tree to tree.

Everything disseminated from Pennsylvania Avenue can now be traced back to a deep aversion to mercy, considered a symptom of womanish weakness. Pre-existing condition? Too bad. Immigrant from the wrong country? Shoulda been born in Omaha. Think you're entitled to free public education? Guess again. Take notice. There will be no more liberal mewling over equity or the plight of the less fortunate. Ridiculing a disabled person is now an acceptable form of theater. From now on, success will be calibrated in units of high-rise real estate and wattage of celebrity. If you don't measure up, your speech will be drowned out by the jingoist brass band and you will be herded into the stadium to cheer for the all-American winning team. If you don't fall in line, you will not only be considered a loser, but an enemy. Nikki Haley, the new American ambassador to the UN, made this clear when she intoned about the expectation that countries will either support any and all US positions or be put on a list. All communication contains an implicit "or else."

But the empathy strikes back. This is because it is fundamental to our humanity, as old as nursing mothers, as ancient as nourishment itself. Anyone who has ever been fed or offered sustenance understands the essential connectivity between people, the hunger to know and to serve. Right now, empathy is coursing through our veins after a consumerist dry spell. Lao Tzu says "Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield." Think of Steve Bannon as a boulder. Think of all of us eroding him until a few gifted and determined people knock him off the precipice.

Empathy is a bio-spiritual condition of being, a process that normally ebbs and flows like desire. It's always there waiting to be aroused, constantly on the alert for opportunities to replicate, to insinuate itself. Here's how I think it works in the everyday. A seventysomething friend tells me that after a period of uncertainty, she has decided to devote her remaining time to fighting for social justice. I feel the tears welling up in my eyes. This takes place in between dance numbers at someone else's 70th birthday party and I am taken entirely by surprise. I have forgotten that empathy is the reason that people cry just as much at weddings as they do at funerals. Because it is not only about being willing to see other people's suffering. It is in the first instance about recognizing our shared humanity and how much we are alike, warmed by the same sun, breathing the same air. Palestinians in Dearborn breathe. Mexicans in Phoenix breathe. When cowboys in Washington try to round people up like so many farm animals, we all feel fenced in.

These days, empathy is a contagion that has spread rapidly, starting with our smallest private gestures and already resulting in millions of people marching on January 21st.  It is a flood of human connection, biblical in its proportions, already sweeping the country. There will be no reconstructing the city of indifference.This is how the species survives. This is how the planet survives. Empathy is the foundation of the resistance to tyranny.

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Citizen Kaufman

Four Freedoms march, photo by Lee Cheek

I am an American, although I've always secretly suspected that I'm not a real American in the Sarah Palin sense. As an aside, I find that I'm missing Palin's goofy Duck Dynasty style. Sarah, after all, was looking at Russia across the Bering Strait, not playing x-rated games or joining caviar-eating oligarchs in the baroque anterooms of Moscow's finest hotels. Still, long before mama grizzly broke onto the scene in the 2008 election cycle, I struggled to convince myself of the authenticity of my national origins despite the fact that both of my parents were born here. Last I looked, New York City is part of our country. I've always felt like an outsider. No Santa Claus in my childhood, no Easter bunny, no tendency towards flag-waving in the family. At the same time, I have, mea culpa, taken my citizenship for granted. In this regard, I am very different from my Congolese friend who was granted asylum here several years ago or my Chinese friend who jumped through many hoops to get his green card. Now, in the light of the present catastrophe, I am re-evaluating my identity and laying claim to being an American, to being a citizen. Please join me.

Last week, I paid a visit to the district office of my congressman, Richard E. Neal. I was relieved that he wasn't there. Not because I was intimidated by the prospect of speaking with him. I had heard him address the rally after the Four Freedoms march in Pittsfield a few days before and he seemed harmless enough. I was glad he wasn't there because there was such a banquet of political poison in Washington that I wanted him down there serving up the antidote. I spoke with his staff assistant who quaintly produced a pen and a pad that looked like a giveaway from an auto parts store. She took my name and contact information and asked me to tell her why I had come in. I said I wanted to be assured that not only would Rep. Neal support the Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act, but that he would get dirty doing it, that he would actively go after the perpetrators of grand larceny now about to assume power in our country. I realize that the system is mired in corruption and that that won't change as a consequence of my little field trip, but it felt empowering and demystifying. So this is where Richie Neal hangs out when he's in town!

The march itself featured some 2000 people walking in solidarity down North Street from St. Joseph's to the First Congregational Church on a bitterly cold day. It commemorated the 1941 State of the Union address in which FDR outlined the Four Freedoms - freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear - ideas illustrated in the famous paintings by Norman Rockwell of Stockbridge. Gathering to celebrate the foundational ideas of our deeply flawed democracy generated a kind of giddiness, even as we recognized the urgency of our situation together, the collective peril we are experiencing. For this particular newly awakened citizen, the march and the standing room only rally afterwards lifted me up, expanded my vision beyond the limits of my own concerns to include the wellbeing of the larger community. Real people shivering in the January cold. Not an abstraction. The march and the rally brought the issues off the page and demonstrated what is at stake in this fragile historical moment, the right to assemble in support of free speech, to defend religious liberty, to provide for the basic needs and protections that are our entitlement. We, whatever our individual stories may be, however committed to our democracy we may have felt previously, must now be part of the resistance. This is not a time to sit out the dance. This is a time to bring down the house, to twist and shout together, each of us for all of us.


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In a Beginning

In a Beginning, because really we have no idea if this was the first time God woke up with an itch that needed scratching, a burning desire to create, a sort of Jackson Pollack moment where all the colors just had to be splashed on the canvas...In a Beginning, the energy of the infinite inhale became so concentrated, so intense, that God couldn't contain it another second (even though you understand, of course, that there were no seconds, there was no time or space before Creation).  With an enormous exhale, out came all that is and all that would be. It was dark, dark like a threatening, shadowy  back alley and suddenly gusty, that city wind that traps you in between tall buildings on a side street going west to the Hudson in January. Fierce and unwelcoming. But God said, to no one in particular, yehi or, let there be light and there was light. Unbelievable. Mind you, the light came out of nowhere, without a source. No moon, no sun, no stars. Just the really good idea of light, the idea of nurturing and growth. God saw that the light was good and decided to give it a name. After that, everything that seemed warm and open and childlike and white was called Day and everything that was sinister and hidden and mysterious and black was called Night. This caused a range of problems.

That seemed to be enough work for one day. On the second day, it became necessary to create the sky. You would think that would have come along right from the getgo, but apparently back in the day there was water everywhere kind of like after your pipes freeze and burst and it was necessary to form the sky as a way of separating the water below like Lake Superior and the Ganges from the water above, whatever that is. Now things were starting to take shape. So God called forth the Earth to form out of the water and imagined vegetation of all kinds growing on it, apricots and arugula, bamboo shoots and bok choy, watercress and avocadoes and Granny Smiths were created and God was like YES! because who doesn't like salad?

All this happened, mind you, without photosynthesis. Pretty amazing but maybe not sustainable in the long run. So, on the fourth day, God put lights in the sky because this was before iPhones with flashlights and it was really hard to see where you were going. So the lights, the sun and the moon, were created and with them the cycles of time. Weeks, months and years were set in place and provided a structure for nostalgia for the past and anxiety about the future which, as we shall see,  would soon become essential. On the fifth day, the whole project really started to pick up steam with cardinals and blackbirds appearing in the sky, trout and catfish swimming in the rivers. God was delighted, clapping the divine hands and jumping up and down on the divine feet. P'ru ur'vu, God shouted. Be fruitful and multiply. Have lots of avian and underwater sex...which isn't as easy as one might hope.

Seeing the potential fecundity of the animal kingdom, on the sixth day, God just went for it, just went all out, calling for cattle, creeping things and wild beasts of every kind. Imagine the first rhinos lumbering around, the first leopards stalking. Must have been a sight to behold. But there was something missing. What was it? You can imagine God pacing up and down, trying to come up with a Big Finish. Suddenly, a radical idea just popped into the divine mind. What if God were to create thinking beings called humans, made in the divine image, beings preoccupied with the past and the future, who were capable of feeling and problem solving and art making and put these exalted beings in charge of the whole show? What could possibly go wrong?

It could be that God had some misgivings, because just before deciding to give it a rest some last minute items were thrown into the cart, some afterthoughts that needed to be included before all activity stopped for the first shabbes. And one of those items was the rainbow which was designed to explain to humanity that light is made up of many colors and to make it clear that the sun will shine through the rainiest day and the dove of peace will survive the flood. And God saw all that God had made and found it pretty good, but with room for improvement. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.


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