Looking back on a year
On March 14, 2020 Devon and I were scheduled to teach a daylong retreat at Kagyu Sukha Choling in Ashland, Oregon.
A couple weeks before the event, we started to hear more about a virus that was filling hospitals in Seattle and New York.
Two days before the retreat, we realized the virus was serious, that it would be global, that it was going to turn the country on its head . . . and we switched the format: anyone who wanted to come to the daylong could come in person; anybody who wanted to join on Zoom could join on Zoom.
About half the participants gathered that day. The other half attended online. And that daylong retreat, with the 20 or so of us meditating in the shrine room at Kagyu Sukha Choling, was the last time we came together with others to share dharma.
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We had a book tour planned. Forty or so events scattered across the country from New York City to New Orleans to Madison to Boulder to Portland.
I’d just bought us a van to live in as we were driving from dharma center to bookstore to dharma center.
I sold that van. We moved all our events online. We launched our book online. We taught online through the waves of deaths in New York (my hometown), through lockdowns around the country.
We taught to a group in Minneapolis the week after George Floyd’s murder. We taught to people who were grieving losses in twenty states. We taught through the ineptitude and hypocrisy of an administration hellbent on undermining scientific consensus.
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So how has this year been for us? How has it been for me?
And how do you even answer a question like that anymore?
Has there ever been a year where the political was more personal, the personal more political?
On one hand, this year has been, for us, a kind of culmination. The year when half a decade of planning and work came together, when we were able, finally, to keep a semi-retreat schedule most of our days, and also spend three months in cloistered cabin meditation retreat.
On the other hand, half a million people died of COVID in the US alone, ten million are still unemployed, protests rocked our cities, there was a literal insurrection at the Capitol Building . . . .
Every day this year seemed like a harbinger of the apocalypse.
Every day we lived with the very personal fear that someone close to us would end up on a ventilator, or worse.
Every day, too, brought home the continual, searing recognition that our own relative stability stood on the foundation of racial and structural inequities, and that we were mostly okay because American life is built for people like us to be mostly okay.
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Meditation practice, of course, framed most every moment of my days this year. Practice on the cushion. Practice at the grocery store with my N95 mask. Practice while talking to a mentee who had just lost someone close.
In particular, the tonglen meditation has never been far from my heart.
As I breathe in the pain and sorrow, the grief, the anger, the darkness and stupidity, as I breathe out whatever is going well, whatever I have that’s maybe needed, and also goodness and kindness and compassion and love, I know in my bones that this body is not an island, that this heart quivers and shakes with the quivering and shaking of the world, and that I am only as whole as the wholeness we share.
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Is that enough? Of course not.
But with three million deaths in one year from a single virus, what could ever be enough?
With yet another murdered black man just this week in Minnesota, what could ever be enough?
And another mass shooting? And another wave of Anti-Asian hate crime?
It’s never enough. It never can be.
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Still, this year has been a year, for me, of not turning away.
I know that I want to face the realness of it all squarely. Even if there is little I can do in the face of the turgid ocean of grief and badness, I do believe I can encourage a courageous heart . . . in myself, in those I’m close with . . . and I try to do that, I try very hard to offer what I can.
And so maybe that’s what this year has been for me: waking up every morning. Breathing in the pain of the day. Sharing what I can, as I can, with my tiny web of influence. Taking a step forward, and then another step forward, living by vow, remembering my deepest intentions, again and again and then all over again, as we move, all of us, unsteadily, but inexorably, forward.
Sending love,
Nico