Man, I can’t recall being more excited to sit down and share a story with you. In this case, there is at least one story within this one and probably several more, depending upon how I tell it. Let me start at the beginning, which goes back to the start of the week. After I post a piece, I automatically begin thinking about what’s next and there is usually something knocking around between my ears.
This time, I had a very dark story I felt I needed to share. Everywhere I looked, there was not a single reason for feeling optimistic. I am not going to itemize a laundry list of all that is going wrong, devouring our future of any hope at all. Show me a shred of daylight and I’ll step on it with steel toed boots and the brown uniform of hatred and disdain that is epidemic.
I few nights ago, I watched a film, called The Eichmann Show. For those of you, who don’t know, he was directly responsible for carrying out The Final Solution, the elimination of all Jews. It mixed the actual b&w footage of the 1961 televised trial into the storyline. It was the face of Eichmann, stoically sitting in a bullet proof glass box that ripped my heart wide open. It featured many Auschwitz survivors, who gave graphic testimony of their experiences. I was sitting by myself, in the quiet of my space, watching this horror unfold before me. It was scenes of the camp that crushed my wind pipe and had me screaming out loud in complete shock. The images of hundreds of stick figures, a single layer of flesh covering their pencil thin skeletons, all of them bulldozed into ditches, felt like an unbearable weight crushing my chest.
I was going to call this story, Eichmann et al. Like today, this kind of insane cruelty was not the isolated handiwork of one country or one people. Mussolini killed many Italians, because they were viewed as a threat to his megalomaniacal excesses. Generalissimo Franco laid waste to any opposition in Spain. If it is possible to imagine anyone more demonic than Hitler, Stalin and his gulags, accounted for the deaths of over 20 million Russians.
I started this story yesterday and I couldn’t get past the darkness of then and now. Did you know that Jared Kushner, the slumlord, son-in-law of our fearful leader, decided that our Federal government should not institute a national Covid-19 policy, because the vast majority of States grappling with this pandemic were Democratic? Callous Mitch McConnell has a face that reminds me of Eichmann’s. I found myself sinking into the choking, quick sand of the complete absence of compassion in our government.
Miraculously, the most wonderful thing happened to me this morning and it relates to someone else’s story. Finally, I got a chance to swallow my own medicine. I truly hope my stories will somehow touch you and give you pause. This morning, I read a piece by Charles Johnson, which dealt with his book, called Grand, a story for his grandson. I was drawn to it, because the only reason why I have been writing all these years is to leave foot prints on the path of my life for my darling grandson to track and sort out. My whole story turned on the dime and all of a sudden, there was light in the darkness.
He wrote about a guy named Guy Murchie’s and his book, called The Seven Mysteries of Life. Rather than paraphrase, let me give you this mind blowing quote, “ Your own ancestors, whoever you are, include not only some Blacks, some Chinese and some Arabs, but all the Blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Malays, Latins, Eskimos and every other possible ancestor who lived on Earth around AD 700.” According to him, we are joined to everyone once in every fifty generations!
The darkness of my thinking disappeared under the bright light of our complete interconnection as human beings. As if this revelation wasn’t enough, he brought in D.T. Suzuki, one of the great Zen minds of the last century. I know I have written often about how the Buddha rocked my world many years ago and subtly continues to do it, when I least expect it, like right now. In this same story, he recounted how someone asked Suzuki to recount the difference between Self and Other and he paused, put his head down, and eventually said, “What other?”
Storytelling is this wonderful, living way of communicating, embodying a fluidity of the moment. My God, I was almost going to share a terrible, hopeless story with my grandson until I read someone else’s story. Our grandchildren need to understand how we are all inter-connected and that color, ethnicity and religion have no hard boundaries and that humanity is what we share. We need to care for each other and lift up those who need our help.
Teach Your Children Well.
Thank you so much, Larry. I needed this today. I was drowning in darkness today and your story brought tears to my eyes and light to my life. I knew I met you for a reason when I visited Kaua’i and I felt connected to you somehow. I left wanted to hear more from you because I somehow knew you had a lot of wisdom and many stories to share. Strange isn’t it? Have a great day,
your friend,
Maria 😊
Scientifically, there is only one race of humans. We are all Homo sapiens and at some point in the future, if we survive long enough as a species, we will all look alike. Let’s hope we learn to all get along with one on other long before then.
You know, I never thought about that, but you are right. At some point, we will look like one race, but there is a problem. This takes thousands and thousands of years and we are still early in our evolution as a species. Frankly, at this point, there is really no reason for optimism. When my pal, the Buddha spoke about “greed, hatred and ignorance” being endless, it was not a reference to anyone other than all of us humans. There are loads of reasons why indigenous cultures have suffered at the hands of dominant societies and I think some of them may have been, and still are, exceptions to the rule. I think of owning land as one of concepts that was difficult for them, thinking of themselves as stewards. The road map for the future is based on our past and it is hard to be hopeful. Like you, I am trying to look for the light, surrounded by so much darkness. Maybe this is where faith comes into play. I don’t know. On a lighter note, thank you very much for taking the time to read and comment.