What if we see one another instead of label
What if we listen instead of get annoyed
What if we communicate instead of complain
What if we wait instead of rush
What if we share instead of take
What if we encounter
Instead of
Category: Love
Rwandan Genocide Remembered – 22 Years Later
The following post is from something I wrote in 2012. Though dated, it’s still apropo for reflection today.
Eighteen years ago this month, the Hutu genocide against the Tutsis began in Rwanda. In just 3 months nearly 1 million elders, adults, children and infants were brutally slaughtered.
Earlier this month leaders gathered at the United Nations in New York City to commemorate the International Day of Reflection on the Genocide. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated “…the only way to prevent such atrocities from occurring again is to learn from history.”
http://allafrica.com/stories/201204130120.html (the post associated with this link has since been rewritten.)
While somewhat reassuring to hear a statement like this from an individual in power, I’m skeptical as to whether it can influence positive change in the future. Here is why. Of course we should learn from history so as not to repeat it. I’m sure if I surveyed 100 people outside my door on the street, most would claim they believe that. But if we want to be really honest with ourselves then the more clarifying question is: If it were 1994 again would we have done anything differently than what we did, as citizens, as a country? Would this have changed with the benefit of hindsight? And if we believe that knowing ahead of time the tragic events that were about to unfold would be enough to move us from bystander to actor, then the next question is: How do we know for certain?
I was traveling to South East Asia at the time of the Genocide. For April and June, I don’t think that I watched television or the news even once. I’m certain that I didn’t read a paper or listen to the news on the radio during this time. I was completely wrapped up in my own world. I was leaving my boyfriend of 8 years and our shared apartment. The first afternoon in my new flat in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, I got an invitation to be part of an international venture. I leapt at the chance and after a week of frenetic shopping, packing of luggage and unpacking of moving boxes, I found myself in a first class cabin bound for Singapore.
The plane took off, I reclined in the cushy first-class seat and pressed the “on” button of the mini-screen t.v. to see the news for the first time in months. That’s when I learned about what was happening in Rwanda. There were scenes of masses of people walking down dirt roads, refugees fleeing for the border. There were other scenes of streets strewn with corpses. There were headlines with quotes from government officials and there was a number, an estimated death toll.
I sat, stone silent while watching. My mind raced with what to do. I had no idea. Nor did anyone around me who had just become aware of the news as I had. I dived into my overseas assignment moving my impression and shock from the news to the back of my mind but not forgetting. In three months I was back home in San Francisco. And that’s when I let fade the news of what I’d heard in early April. Life got busy, I had more responsibilities – shock morphed into memory and nothing changed. And there was nothing to remind me of what was happening in Rwanda in my beautiful neighborhood.
I’ve felt woefully complicit ever since. Not just personally but as an American. There is no question that our country, amoung many others demonstrated a clear and intended lack of leadership and humanity. I’ve asked myself what would I have done differently, had I known? Would I have written my Congressman, and Government Representatives? Would I have started a petition and gathered signatures to try and urge action? Is there anything else I could have done? None of this is enough, of course, but is it better than nothing?
Now, every year in April I make it a point to remember, not just what happened, but also what did not, namely, any form of action by me, as well as any form of intervention on behalf of the Rwandan victims, by one of the worlds most powerful countries, the United States.
Perhaps the most humane act any of us can do is to admit that we, in fact, do not know how we would behave. What we can have is an intention and a commitment to staying awake in front of that commitment. Maybe someday more of the worlds leaders will follow suit, and in so doing, start to build a plan to respond to future threats based on co-responsibility instead of co-denial.
Listening is love
When I was 7 years old I made a trip to England to meet my grandparents on my fathers side for the first time. It was a special trip for many reasons, including meeting my friend Tom Spriggs.
Tom was a trusted neighbor and friend of my grandparents. He and his wife were the first to welcome them to Sway when they relocated there to retire. Sway was and still is a quaint and lovely village in Hampshire England, large enough to have a grocery store (or maybe a few by now), but small enough to formerly qualify as a village according to English standards – larger than a hamlet, but smaller than a town.
My grandmother told me that Tom was a soft-spoken and private man made even more so after the loss of his beloved wife a few years earlier. She had taken it upon herself with characteristic British cheerful dutifulness to include Tom in her day-to-day life and social engagements. My grandfather, who I called Grandpop, built a doorway in the wood fence between their houses to make this easier and encourage visits for afternoon teas’.
I met Tom the second day of my trip while swinging on the fence in front of my grandparents’ house. I don’t recall our first conversation but remember that his gentle manner made me trust him immediately. For the afternoons that followed, he’d invite me for tea or show me his green room with rows of thriving tomato plants or we’d walk the two blocks to downtown Sway where there was a bed and breakfast and pub with pigs and chickens in the backyard.
It may seem odd that a 7 year old child and 60 year old man would have enough in common for a conversation, but we did, and we had many of them. We’d talk about all kinds of things. I told him about the dirt farm I made back home for lizards and slugs that despite its 3 inch mud-clay walls, failed to stop the creatures from escaping after an hour or so. I shared my love of sitting amongst the cornhusks in our garden, munching raw corn while dad hacked down the dead dry grass in the summer time. And that the reason I pressed wild flowers was so I could look at them when I felt sad to remember feeling happy.
Tom, a retired train conductor, told me about his travels throughout England and the interesting people he met along the way. He confided about his life before, when he was a soldier in WWI and how he endured trench warfare for an entire month without food. He was a teenager, one of 250,000 volunteers under the age of 19 to answer the call to fight. England had only 700,000 in the armed forces at the beginning of the war, compared to Germanys’ 3.7 million. He didn’t say much about his experience, just that it was hard to say anything at all.
The thing I remember most about our conversations, more so than what we talked about was how they felt. I was free because Tom was never in a rush. He always had time to chat, or at least, he seemed to. Not just for me, but anyone who crossed his path. Talking with him gave me the same feeling I had when watching the ocean or looking up at the sky through the branches of a cherry blossom tree.
I felt this calmness in nature all the time, but rarely in conversation and almost never in conversation with adults, with their agendas, and assumptions, and hopes and interpretations. With Tom it was different. I remember saying something, then waiting for his response and having the distinct impression of him reflecting on what he was going to say in a way that was both connected to our conversation and me and simultaneously connected to something within him that was also impersonal, infinite. The pauses between our interactions and even his tender and authentic delivery of his words gave me an entirely new experience of what conversation could be like.
Before leaving England, Tom and I agreed to continue our conversation through letters. Decades before the internet existed and at a time when long distance phone calls could get expensive, this was about the only option we had. Thank goodness…I doubt email would have been an equally satisfying replacement to the experience of reading a good letter.
We would write one another for many years to come until Tom’s death at 78. I was twenty-five.
Our correspondance of 18 years taught me about the power of consistency in love and friendship. In a word, patience.
A Rare Kind of Dialogue
I happened upon the late physicist and author, David Bohm while conducting research for my Master’s thesis. Bohm wrote a ground breaking book called, Wholeness and the Implicate Order in which he introduced his interpretation of Quantum Physics. His writing about the nature of life at the sub-atomic level was lyrical but concrete, rational but intuitive. It captivated my thinking and informed my thesis proposing a non-dualistic way to think about the nature of experience.
Bohm was also actively engaged in applying his insights from Physics to the realm of communication in the form of dialogue groups and conversations with philosophers and spiritual masters. One person in particular with whom Bohm had several dialogues was with the world-renowned spiritual teacher, J. Krishnamurti. Below is one of many of their dialogues, titled “Krishnamurti & David Bohm on The Future of Humanity.”
I watched this and many other videos of his dialogues over and over again each time hearing something new and different than before. Not only did I hear something new with each viewing, but I experienced a change in the quality of my own thinking. I noticed, for example, that in watching Krishnamurti’s and Bohm’s ability to reflect before responding to a question, I began pondering/pausing before responding in a knee-jerk manner to a question.
Watching the two great thinkers interact was refreshing, even inspiring because it seemed to have nothing to do with being nice or polite or smart or better than, (or less than). In other words, nothing typical, in fact, quite atypical. And at the same time, there was something so completely normal and human in the way they conversed.
It planted a seed in me for that a certain kind of dialogue, one focused much more on listening than telling. Or at least, trying to listen more than tell/explain/prove/defend. The challenge I found was not so much to find others with whom I could dialogue, but to experiment and model aspects of Bohmian dialogue myself.
I’ve discovered that at the core of this challenge is the act of listening. It may seem counterintuitive to think of communication in terms of listening, but I’ve experienced it as an essential aspect. And not only that, learning to listen well is an ongoing challenge with infinite learning opportunities. At least it is for me.
The Need to Be Right Makes Me Stupid
A Typical Day
It’s 2 in the afternoon on a Sunday when I see Mei-Lian, my landlady’s Gardner, squatting beside the bushes outside my apartment. A quiet 60-something woman from Mainland China, she greets me with a warm, “hay-wo.” She’s holding a pair of long arm plant clippers in one hand and fresh plant cuttings in the other. Over the years, I’ve noticed that she’ll prune a plant that’s not overgrown but ignore the one beside it with dead leaves. I glance at the blooming Bougainvillea just to her right and feel a slight shiver run up my spine. The thought crosses my mind that it could be the next victim of Mei-Lian’s hit-and-miss pruning approach.
I moved into my current apartment from the unit below, despite it being smaller and more expensive, in part because of the view of this Bougainvillea. I loved how its cinnamon-magenta flowers fill the left side of the window, blocking my view of the Hollywood Squares-like apartment complex across the street.
“Hello,” I say back to Mei-Lian with a slightly forced smile. Normally, I’m happy to see her but the thought of my Bougainvillea getting over-pruned triggers a kind of rigidity inside me. I go inside my apartment and pour a glass of chilled green tea, hoping my mood will do the same – chill. But for good measure, decide to c
all my landlord to check that he remembers our agreement that the Bougainvillea not be cut down. Minutes later, after a short but pleasant conversation with him, I’m assured by him our agreement still stands. Relieved, I go take a nap.
Interrupted
Thirty minutes later a buz saw wakes me up with a jolt. It can’t be…I think to myself, rushing outside in a surreal combination of post-nap daze and hyper-alertness.
“What are you doing!!?” I yell, “This bush doesn’t need pruning!!”
Mei-Lian, standing at the top of her ladder, moving the saw through the Bougainvillea from left to right, turns it off to answer me. Smiling she says, “is k, is k…bett now.”
Enraged and a bit nauseas, I can taste the bitterness of adrenaline. “What are you doing!!!!???,” I repeat, in the vain hope that words, if conveyed with intensity, can be as effective as actual physical action to stop her in her tracks.
But it’s no use. With a nervous laugh, she turns on the saw and finishes the job until the once blooming beauty is reduced to a woody nub.
I walk away, feeling betrayed and disrespected. How could this happen? I had an agreement? I went back to my apartment, dropped onto my couch and sobbed, feeling unheard, disrespected and powerless to protect something I cherished. I thought bad things. Hurtful things. I knew that Mei-Lian was not malicious, and that there may well have been a miscommunication between her and the landlord. (In fact, this turned out to be the case).
In thinking about it a short time later, I don’t know what was more painful, not having control to stop someone from doing something that was hurtful, or feeling rage toward a peaceful and gentle person.
Her action, whether wrong or right, brought out the worst in me. I got a taste of the animal within. I think this is what was MOST painful, that the thing that enraged me, Mei-Lian’s unwillingness to stop an action that was causing distress, was the very thing that I did toward her in response.
During our interaction and moments afterward, I continued a verbal assault on Mei-Lian in my mind. At one point, even referring to her as “those kind of people don’t care…”
Thinking further, I realized that by framing our interaction in terms of them/us I felt better about myself.
What an ugly and important thing to see in myself, how easy and convenient it is to objectify another person so I can feel better. Not a great moment for me, but actually a really useful moment to remember.
Slippery Slope to Intolerance
Isn’t this a kind of slippery slope from indifference to intolerance that can lead to hate and even hurtful action. Slippery because the smallness of it makes it so subtle, as to tell oneself – I’m only human, I have the right to be upset…blah, blah, blah. And there’s truth to that, a lot of truth. I am only human – we are all only human. Feeling emotions is are part of being human.
It’s what happens after that, the story we tell ourselves and hold on to over time that’s the tricky part. The slippery part.
Have you ever noticed that it’s often victims who speak up against injustice – as they should. But the voice that’s often missing is that of the bully accepting responsibility.
Would that change, I wonder, if more of us saw our part early on?
Time Heals All Wounds If…
They say time heals all wounds. Maybe so. But I think in order for that to happen, we have to be diligent to try and see our part BEFORE and INSTEAD of blaming others. We have to take care to not hold on to the boxes we put others in. It’s our choice whether or not we keep them there in our mind and hearts.
As of today, the Bougainvillea has completely grown back. But as for my pride, I’m working to keep it pruned, not to a woody nub, but not overgrown.
The Power of Presence
This video caught my attention because I was curious about the person behind the Mr. Rogers of my childhood memory.
I was irritated at first at Mr. Rogers’ slow pace – I went immediately to judgement, thinking, here we go he’s going to talk the same way he does in his children’s show? I’ll never get through this!
But in just a few minutes of listening to him speak something changed. I found that the more I focused my attention on listening, the more I heard both the words as well as the energy surrounding the words. I heard more, something beyond, or before words. Also, in slowing down to listen, I slowed down. Tension that I wasn’t even aware of, lessened. A different, energy replaced it, helping me not just hear what he was saying, but encounter something calmer inside.
It seems that something shifted for Senator Pastore, the person Mr. Rogers is addressing in the video, as well. The power of presence. What is this quality of presence that inspires us to not just hear but to listen?