Thoughts Happen

My Cavewoman Sheeba

 "Are you in my clan? ‘Cuz if you’re not in my clan, I’m suspicious. Do you look like me, talk like me? Even if you do, I’m still suspicious. Are you different at all? Are you small, or tall, or fat or thin? Are you injured or ill? Or do you just have a funny look? 

 Because I can’t trust you if you’re different. If I get too close I might get what you’ve got — your fatness or smallness or illness or just plain weirdness. Life is hard, and I don’t have a lot of time to waste figuring you out, so it’s just easier this way. I can sum you up in a fraction of a second. Don’t bother me after that."

 I did not actually have these words going through my head last week when I was one of 65 people involved in putting on a week-long day camp for 120 kids.

But I might as well have, for all the judgementalism I exhibited.

I found myself making snap judgements of people, especially the kids, all week long, based on minimal evidence. He’s lazy. She’s weak-willed. He’s immature. He’s boring. She’s weird. Things I would never, ever say out loud, or even usually admit to thinking. But for some reason I became aware of these lightning-fast assessments. At least I kept them to myself.

One child, a girl who is incredibly small for her age, with a tiny, pixie-like face, triggered something in me I can only describe as akin to revulsion. I don’t know why. I’ve seen her before, and had the same reaction, where I can’t stop looking because of a repulsed fascination.

This time, I had a sensation of watching myself and saying, “WTF? What is wrong with you? She’s just a little kid! Aren’t you more mature than that?”

As the week went on and I paid more attention, I noticed my reactions more and more.

I was horrified. I think of myself as a well-educated, empathetic, open-minded and tolerant individual. What the hell was going on?

After the week’s end I kept pondering it, and came to the conclusion that it’s my inner cavewoman showing her face. I’ll call her Sheeba.

Sheeba has to struggle for her very survival. She doesn’t trust very many people because, frankly, trust takes time and energy. She has to be on the alert all the time, so a snap judgement is very useful.

Problem is, Sheeba is a bit, well —misguided. Or at least overzealous, as I discovered as one after another my snap judgements proved hasty and one-dimensional.

The “lazy” boy was actually quite helpful, and the immature one showed a completely different side one-on-one vs. in a group. The “weird” girl had a deformed lip that just gave her an odd expression, and my pixie was simply a tiny child who I had absolutely no reason to dislike except that Sheeba had a problem with her.

The next day I came across a Pema Chodron passage that spoke right to the heart of it. “In that painful moment when we don’t live up to our own standards, do we condemn ourselves or truly appreciate the paradox of being human? Can we forgive ourselves and stay in touch with our good and tender heart?”

Sheeba means well, so I try not to be too hard on her. Just knowing she’s there is the first step to appreciating that paradox.

Photo courtesy ArtfulDanni by Creative Commons on flickr.

Dishtowel Memorial—Goodbye, Amber

 My hand halted a fraction of a second over the stack of towels in my kitchen drawer. I was about to pull out the dull sage green dishtowel that matched the stripes in its cream-colored hand towel mate, but I hesitated. Because they found another girl this week. Or rather, they found her body. The one who had been missing for so long, eyes peering from behind a shock of glossy brown hair asking “Have You Seen Me?” for over a year, was finally heard, calling her seekers to a remote, rocky grave near the Pala Indian Reservation.

And I just couldn’t bear to pick up that drab dishtowel. It was too heavy.

Heavy with a parent’s grief, heavy with generations upon generations of brokenness that plays itself out in sickness and violence, heavy with the collective load of a community that wonders if it can absorb just one more sorrow.

So I reached beyond to its neighbor, red and orange, purple and green in its vibrancy. And the colors said, “Believe in me” and I realized that I did.

And I hung the dishtowel which was more than a dishtowel on the oven door next to the pale hand towel with its heavy sage-colored stripes, to remember.

And then I realized—her name was Amber.

Salt of the Earth—Goodbye, Chelsea

A 17-year-old girl, Chelsea King, went missing last week after leaving on a run from a neighborhood east of here; her parents were on TV, pleading for any information. Search parties went out for days, and then the headline in the paper. Arrest made—man charged with murder and rape, although they still didn’t know where the girl was.

The more I meditate, the more I feel things. And it’s damn uncomfortable. No wonder more people don’t do it.

In the past few months I’ve noticed a shift in my perception. I think my boundaries are starting to blur, like the salt paintings I remember doing as a kid. We’d wet a piece of paper, sprinkle salt all over it until it stuck, dab a moistened brush into our watercolors and lightly paint onto the salt surface. Any design we made would instantly expand, the colors wicking through the salt for a blurry kaleidoscopic effect.

I feel like I’ve got too much salt on me.

 I’m sick to my stomach. The girl is a straight-A student, plays French horn, is on the cross-country team. “The kind of girl who wants to change the world,” her father says on TV. I think of my own daughter, and I just can’t take it all in. The parents aren’t strangers, Those Poor People, but for a few moments, they are me, and she is my daughter. My daughter missing. Not as if she is my daughter. She is my daughter.

Other people are seeming less Other to me lately. We watched the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics from Vancouver on TV, the day after the girl went missing, and a choir from Sochi, Russia, all tuxes and deep blue gowns, came out to sing their national anthem as part of the passing-the-flag ceremony. Before, I would have thought, “Look at those Russians,” but what went across my mind this time was, “Aren’t people interesting.” Their sapphire blue started to bleed all over me.

Yesterday, they find the body, buried in a shallow grave at the edge of a lake. Oh God, is all I can think. The Parents. But sadly, they have become Those Poor People again. My defenses have kicked in, and once again they are separate from me. What a loss.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/katietegtmeyer/ / CC BY 2.0

Facebook | Thoughts Happen: Salvation at Trader Joe's

Salvation at Trader Joe's facebook note

This week's post, "Salvation at Trader Joe's," was published as a note on the facebook fan page of Thoughts Happen. You don't need to be a fan of the facebook page to see the post, but if facebook is your thing, I'd love to see you there. The direct link to the fan page is http://www.facebook.com/ThoughtsHappen

Can I have compassion for someone who calls women "tootsie"?

He was large—fat, really, in a yellow polo shirt tucked across his girth into the groaning waistband of expansive khaki shorts, and wore a USS Bushnell ball cap. And he had just called a grown woman a “tootsie.” That we were in a small theater simulating a nuclear explosion just added to the surrealism. I was finding it very hard to tap into my compassionate, “We are all one people” inner Buddha-child.

 I was at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, which I had happened to see from the car window while my dad drove us to their house from the airport Thanksgiving morning a few days earlier. That’s not something you see every day, I thought. So on an otherwise lazy afternoon I lobbied for a trip to the museum, dedicated to all things related to the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles from Las Vegas.

I figured there would be kitchy fallout shelter Public Service Announcement films and ads for Atomic Cocktails, but other than that I wasn’t really sure what to expect. There was indeed a display of toys and pop culture artifacts from the America of the Fifties’ fascination with anything nuclear, but the majority of the museum dealt with explaining the mindset behind the decision to test nuclear weapons at the site from 1951 until 1992, and the practicalities involved.

 We converged with the Large Man at the creepily named Ground Zero Theater — “Immerse yourself in a multi-sensory experience that simulates an above ground test and explains the history of Atomic Testing.”

After the initial explosion, complete with white flash, rumbling seats and an air pressure blast, the movie continued with interviews with scientists and technicians who worked at the site. Coming from the generation and culture that abhors anything nuclear out of hand, (and having grown up near Three Mile Island, which scared the bejeezus out of me as a sixth grader), I was surprised and a bit discomfited to hear an oft-repeated opinion that the testing at the NTS may have kept us out of the greater evil of a Hot War with the Soviet Union.

This made me feel weird. I’ve never been a No Nukes protestor, but I’ve always considered them to be Not a Good Idea, and the thought that I might owe some of my current liberty to something so abhorrent was unsettling.

One NTS testing engineer, referring to protestors at the site, said that he got frustrated seeing them, “Because the thing they are protesting against is the very thing that enables them to protest.” (At this point the Large Man started talking back to the screen, saying, “That’s right. Good for you.”) Another scientist said he felt that he was on the front lines of the Cold War, and that anytime you are on the forefront of technology there is a risk. A woman scientist from UNLV, wearing a light blue jacket with a Nevada pin on the lapel, said that she did believe the NTS testing helped win the Cold War, but at what cost? Was it worth the risk to the people who were exposed?

As we left the theater, the Large Man turned to his lady companion. “That tootsie that spoke near the end there. I worry about people like her.”

Tootsie? Is that a fitting description for a nuclear scientist, just because she voices some compassion? And what does that make me? Can I aspire to a world that’s more than either/or, where compassion for the few isn’t negated by the greater good of society? And can I really have compassion for someone who would undoubtedly call me a tootsie if he only knew?

(Atomic Testing Museum photo courtesy of Marcin Wichary via Creative Commons)

(Fallout Shelter sign photo courtesy of suttonhoo via Creative Commons)