(This post is Part III of a three-part series on loving the world inspired by, and including poems from, my newest poetry collection, Pebbles, coming June 1st. See Part I and Part II here.)
There are a lot of crises in the world today. War in Ukraine. Impending environmental collapse. Income inequality, racial injustice, and threats to reproductive rights. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the weight of it all. What could one person possibly do?
Well, if you have been paying attention to any of my previous posts, you probably know the answer is also to pay attention. It is our ultimate task to not shy away from the issues at hand, to not run away from the individual and collective work that needs to be done.
This is the final lesson on loving the world and cultivating our loving presence: taking it all in with a wide-open heart and keeping it open even in the midst of difficulty. We must walk head-on into the pain and see what is on the other side. This is why the noted environmental activist Joanna Macy wrote that “the most radical thing any of us can do at this time is to be fully present to what is happening in the world.”
Activists throughout history have repeated the same lesson, pointing out that the real impediments to progress are not those who work against it, but those that sit on the sidelines. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously put it, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” While it might be easy to avoid the news and turn a blind eye to the suffering of the world, problems do not disappear simply because we ignore them.
My newest poetry collection, Pebbles, talks about the importance of having the courage to face whatever challenges through which you are struggling. This final lesson about what it means to love the world involves finding the courage to meet this moment by finding the courage to meet all moments.
I wrote a poem called “See the horrors,” that ended up being too long for Pebbles, which features short and sweet poems. So I thought I’d post it below (and here):
The meat industry knows
if you saw the horrors
you would turn vegan.The military knows
if you saw the horrors
you would be a pacifist already.The loggers know
if you met the family of owls
full of hopes in their new nest and
the oil companies know if you saw
the seal gasping for life and
the lithium miners know and
the diamond sellers know and
Nestlé knows and
and
and
andthey all know.
So I beg you.
open the eyes
in your heart
and the hope
in your eyes
and see the horrors.
While the poem might seem pessimistic, to me it points to a fundamental goodness of all human beings. We care. We are wired to love and be compassionate to other sentient beings. No one wants to suffer or believes that others should suffer for no reason. And industries that are based on violence and destruction know this, and will do whatever they can to prevent people from knowing what is really going on. The meat industry has made a tremendous effort to ban cameras from their livestock plants and prevent whistleblowers from speaking of the horrors.
The first step to justice is acknowledging injustice, which too many people tend to remain blissfully unaware of. Whether it’s Nestle draining the water supply of poor Nigerians and Pakistani people, Coca Cola funding Colombian Death Squads, or the child labor and slave labor behind lithium mines and cacao plantations, we must have the courage and compassion to sit with the challenging reality that we too are part of an exploitative system.
Paying attention means seeing the horrors. But it also means keeping hope and love in your heart. It means observing bad actions without judgment for the people taking those actions. It means trusting in the inherent goodness of all people and the possibility of winning people over with love.
One of my absolute favorite lines of the Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa’s is, “Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.” It so accurately describes how we exist on more than one plane of awareness simultaneously. On one plane, there is much suffering in the world. There is poverty, sickness, violence, and oppression. And on another plane, there is joy. There is love and connection and birth and ecstasy. While we may only want to experience the good parts, we are here for it all, the joys and the sorrows, the pleasure and the pain. Living with a wide open heart means being able to take it all in. Only then can we make a proper cup of tea, which to me is a lovely metaphor for the important work that we have to do in the world.
Your proper cup of tea might be writing to your congressman or attending a protest. It might be going vegetarian–even though it’s hard–out of compassion for all living things. Maybe it’s supporting the communities in your backyard, volunteering at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Or it might be helping those across the world in Ukraine or Palestine, or donating money to indigenous causes.
While many of the posts these past few weeks have featured my own poems, I want to finish today with somebody else’s.
In Pebbles, there are a lot of references to flowers and whenever I wrote about them in a beautiful reverie, I would mentally come back to Noor Hindi’s poem, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”
Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.
Loving the world does not mean sitting idly by while everything burns. Appreciating the color in the flowers does not mean ignoring the plastic in the ocean. Although finding peace in ourselves first is a crucial prerequisite for cultivating peace in the world, we can never fully be at peace until the world is too. Because we are part of the world, not separate. Loving the world means committing to making it a better place and seeing our own connection to all peoples.
Everywhere, there are people that need help. Pay attention to both the good and the bad, and seek to alleviate the sufferings of others, big and small. And don’t forget yourself. Handle your own pain and suffering with the same compassion as you would a dear friend’s. We are here to leave each other, ourselves, and the sacred world.
