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Finding Grace in Tragedy

March 3, 2010 by locksandlox

So much can happen in one week.  I flew to Seattle unexpectedly at the end of a quick trip to San Francisco because my grandfather was not doing well.  As it turned out, I was able to be by his bedside for the last few hours of his life — he passed away shortly after 7:00pm last Tuesday.  It was the first time I had ever seen a body that has just had it’s soul depart.  At first I tried to make sense of the event, but death is precisely that part of life that resists a production of meaning that is calcified, hardened, final.  And it is because we live in a state of mystery that the meanings of our lives and of our deaths can be continually re-signified.  It is this state of mystery that seems to both come from and produce grace.

The earthquake in Chile bears much the same lesson for me.  For all the toil we put into building up and dominating this earth, it takes just a moment for the hills to shrug their shoulders and undo our work.  In that moment, we are rendered powerless, we are put out of our homes, our cars strewn across roads like toys on the nursery floor, we are laid out on the ground, ever vulnerable, ever humbled.  It is amazing.

Creation and decreation, life and death, happening all around us all the time.  Grace is what links these two elements of the cycle: it is because of grace that they are entwined and continue to give over, one to the other.  And grace preserves the mystery of the cycle, even as we determine to pull out meaning after meaning, like rabbits from the magician’s hat.

Posted in death, fam, grace, lessons, tragedy | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Are you a Leader?

February 16, 2010 by locksandlox

Two weeks ago I sat in on Marshall Ganz’s course on organizing at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Since then, I have been thinking a lot about the difference between a leader and leadership.

One definition of a leader I have liked very much appeared on my twitter feed a few days ago: “A leader is not the person who says ‘FOLLOW ME,’ a leader is the person who says ‘I’LL GO FIRST.’” Being a leader means having a few things: courage and bravery, yes, but also vision, and also guiding light.

I plan to be a leader.  I’ve been lucky enough to have had a number of leadership experiences in my life.  As I wrote a couple of months ago, my father has called me an Icebreaker: going through things that are new, that are different.  Living life differently than anyone else has.  It is the vision and the guiding light that helps you navigate your path in a way that no one has navigated it before.

Leadership, at least according to Marshall Ganz, is something different (at least when it is functional).  Leadership is not a function of an individual: it is the function of an organized, healthy body of people who can come together and be facilitated to make coherent, effective action.  Leadership, when it works, requires a team.  It only happens properly when there are networks of communication (two-way, not one-way communication), when there is accountability for the relationship in two directions, and when responsibility for successes and failures are shared amongst all.

I certainly plan to live as a leader.  But I also want to live in a world where leadership is successfully cultivated and maintained.  What that means to me right now is that I lead myself: I go first to blaze my own trail.  It also means that I can enter into relationships of accountability and co-responsibility for the work and projects I commit to.  And through both of these actions: following my own inner light, pursuing my vision, while building relationships to others and to the projects of others, I can be a leader and also contribute to leadership that is bigger than me.  It’s a balancing act worth pursuing.

What do you think good leaders are about?  What is good leadership about?  How are those things the same, how are they different, and how are they potentially in conflict with each other?

Posted in Boston, career, definitions, lessons | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments »

Learning Service

February 11, 2010 by locksandlox

I am applying for a job as a server / back waiter at a Boston restaurant (to the horror of my parents — who are appalled that after years and tens of thousands of dollars worth of education, I would want to enter the service industry).

I really really want this job, however.  A few things are coming together for me in terms of next steps.  One of them, catalyzed by some amazing help from self-described “outsider instigator” Dyana Valentine, is that career-wise, I want to be in the business of service.  This is why the academic route wasn’t working for me: I was feeling too far from service, from working for others.

Now that I’ve left UC Berkeley, my online access to the Oxford English Dictionary has been cut off (boo), but I was looking up the word service this morning, and the online etymology dictionary had some good notes.  Right away, the historic and linguistic connections between service and slave are apparent: the Latin servire is in fact to be a slave.  Look up slave, and the dictionary notes that Old Slavic term is related to orphan, and bears a sense of “that which changes it’s allegiance (in the case of the slave, from himself to his master).”  The Slavic term is also the source of the term “robot.”

It is not difficult to see why my parents are shocked and dismayed by most recent job aspiration.  As a Jewish woman and the descendant of slaves in Egypt and as an African American and the descendant of slaves in North America, entering into service might seem regressive, damaging, foolish, or even destructive.

This, however, is really not how I see it.

I’m profoundly curious about how we enlist ourselves into any kind of service, because what I believe is actually damaging or foolish is to believe that we live in a world that is not interdependent.  We serve our parents, our partner, our children.  We serve those we love.  We pledge allegiance to others in all kinds of ways: whether in formal legal agreements or just in the happenstance of our relating.

The question and challenge that I am posing to myself is: how can I broaden my horizon of responsibility and begin to serve people I hardly know?  Can I serve them with the same love and respect that I give my family and friends when I cook for them (not just acting like I respect them, but really holding respect alongside my own integrity as the foundation for every interaction)?  I know that I can: I’d love to practice it more.

My high school’s motto is Non Sibi which means “Not for oneself.”  I don’t think I understood what it would mean to really live a life that was not for oneself until very recently.  It means giving your allegiance over to someone or something other than you.  It is a powerful way to live: to dedicate yourself to others.  It’s not for everyone.  But I believe it is for me.  Any professional or educational step that I take going forward will, I think, need to conform to this criteria: will it help me serve better?

[If I were a teacher, I would ask my students to write me a few paragraphs about why they think that the word service/slavery and the notion of working for others has been so maligned historically, when we know that some of the greatest luminaries (Ghandi, Mother Teresa) have lived precisely for others and not for themselves.  If you'd like to share your thoughts, I would love to read them.]

In any case, I am realizing that the more I serve in this life, the happier I will be.  That’s different than mindless slavery: that is conscious service.

Posted in Boston, career, food, restaurants | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

The H Bomb

February 6, 2010 by locksandlox

Yesterday I met with Dr. Walter Willett, head of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard School of Public Health.  I’d first been introduced to him at a holiday party back in December when I first moved here.  He and his wife know my parents, and my father introduced us.  At the holiday party, I mentioned that while I am in transition, I know a few things about the career I’d like to have: that it be in holistic and integrative health care, wellness, and healing; that it involve education (and operate at a broader level than just one-to-one transactions between me and an individual); but that I have a private practice at some point.

Dr. Willett shocked me yesterday.  I’d come to the meeting expecting him to talk to me about the Master’s in Public Health, which frankly I’ve been looking into.  Instead, within the first minutes of our meeting, he was telling me that medical school, while a luxury, would be a strong foundation for the kind of career he imagined I was talking about.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, if there were ever a career move that is precedented by my parents and by my upbringing, it would be medical school.  Both my parents are doctors — most of their friends are doctors.  I’ve grown up around medicine.  There are medical journals and textbooks stacked in almost every room of this house.  As a child (and still now) our dinner table conversations were mostly clinical in nature — discussing diagnoses, the latest psychopharmacological treatments…

But honestly, if  I became I doctor, I would have to remain an outsider.  I more or less despise big pharma, which is such a huge part of the medical establishment.  Pharmaceutical companies control mainstream definitions of health, of what healing looks like, of the healing process.  Dr. Willett did say he teaches a course to medical students on the importance of nutrition to health maintenance — but he said it’s part of a tiny program on “preventative medicine.”  In other words, it seems that nutrition is ghettoized in medical education.

This is precisely my problem: that health care in western medicine is so preoccupied with illness actually.  Even to see food as quantified by Kcalories, fat, carbohydrate, vitamins and minerals isn’t the kind of nutrition I practice anymore or could comfortably advocate.  Food is nourishment at a much more fundamental and spiritual level.  Eating is what connects our bodies to the universe.  Eating is holy.  What we eat connects us to practices of either contributing to the welfare of larger communities or the destruction of them.  I insist that food practices are the foundation for wellness at individual, family, community (ultimately the national and global) levels.

I asked Dr. Willett whether there was a medical school at which he thought I could maintain my kind of holistic beliefs.

“Well, this is a great place, to be honest,” he said.  ”The students have access to a great range of training, and they really can go on to have whatever kinds of careers they’d like.”

Hmmmm…. Harvard Medical School… it’s not something that I can just dismiss.  Last night I tried asking my higher self to give me some guidance about whether medical school in general or Harvard’s program in particular is something I should pursue right now.  I’m just getting radio silence.  Of course, my ego loves the idea: “let’s go to Harvard Medical School!  How prestigious!”  But I’m wary of that voice.  It’s not the voice I’m looking to cultivate.  I’m looking for what the servant in me thinks would be most helpful.

Could my inner servant go to medical school and come out still able to serve others, not HMOs or pharmaceutical companies?  What if I got a Master’s in Divinity to help counteract the western medical healing paradigms?  If I did that, though, then I’d be exactly like my father… and I’d also be, something like forty years old before starting my own work…

Posted in Boston, career, community, food, healing, medicine, western | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

When you give you receive

February 4, 2010 by locksandlox

I’ve already tweeted this, but it is powerful enough to deserve its own blog posting.

“I slept and dreamed that life was happiness. I awoke and saw that life was service. I served and found that in service happiness is found.”

- Rabindranath Tagore

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Love::light.

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Eat, Play, Love

February 2, 2010 by locksandlox

I’m blogging from 34,959 feet, returning to Boston after seven glorious days seeing friends in the Bay Area. I was able to fit in two massages, a drive to Sonoma, dinner at Pizzaiolo, lunch at Chez Panisse, breakfast at Cafe Fanny, a couple good long walks, rock climbing (my first time!!), trips to both Berkeley Bowls, the Berkeley Farmer’s market, the SF Food Wars “Yeast Affliction” event, lots of full, rich moments with friends eating, drinking, laughing. I don’t regret a word or a bite. I’m full: my belly, my heart, my soul.

So to Boston I fly: juicy and excited for the next thing. I’ve got lots of material for this space and am looking forward to sharing it with you.

Posted in Bay Area, food, friends, restaurants | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

On mindfulness

January 22, 2010 by locksandlox

There are (perhaps tens of) thousands of books, of gurus, of teachers great and small, of koans, of musings, of opinions and counter opinions, that address this.

But I’m not looking for answers from the outside.  I’m looking for my own inner truth about this, just as I look for my inner illuminated path.

Mindfulness, insofar as it is a mode of being present, of turning awareness and quiet alerness to, insofar as it is represented by the mechanisms of sight and attention, is not a process of the mind.

Mindfulness is actually a process of, or movement towards experiencing consciousness.  Consciousness is greater than the mind.  Consciousness is the matrix in which the mind (and thence the ego) arises.

My father at dinner last night mentioned that the latin word for womb is matrix.  Hence we have the words: matrice, maitre… eventually, mother (right?  I need to double check the OED.  Will confirm later).  A matrix is the web, the field, the coordinates in which things are nutured, are housed, and can grow.

I’m working with the idea that consciousness is the matrix in which our minds are situated.  Our minds are the engines of ego, of all the voices angry and loving, and afraid and fearless, generous and miserly, all those voices that whisper to us daily, at the conscious and unconscious levels.  These are the the urges that drive our impulses, our desires, our fantasies.

There’s nothing wrong with these voices and urges.  They’re all part of being human.  They are given to us to use and to learn from.

Nevertheless, I think we begin to open ourselves to our higher selves when we use mindfulness to come away from those voices, from the mind.  Mindfulness begins to reveal the mind in both its power and its limits (indeed, aren’t our minds amazingly powerful and frightfully limited?!).  Mindfulness as stepping back to contemplate the matrix of consciousness, and our own consciousness, which exceeds the work of our mind, of our body.

Someone told me yesterday that he lived in a house briefly that had very strict rules at dinner.  One of them was that the entire meal was to be conducted in complete silence.  Complete.  Not even so much as a “please pass the salt.”

I asked him what purpose that rule served, and said that it really opened the space for contemplation.  At dinner, as you ate, you would think back to your whole day: the good and bad parts, your thoughts about the next day, your intentions.  You had to really encounter yourself.

I’m still struggling to cultivate the daily spaces of silence and quiet, where I can slow down and listen to myself, to all my many voices, in order to step back and place them in context, in the matrix of my consciousness.  I invite you, if you’d like, to share your experiences on working toward mindfulness, on your practices.  I’d love to hear where you are, how you are, what you do, what you’d like to do better.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Pray with your feet

January 18, 2010 by locksandlox

It’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and all over the country groups like Citizen Hope are doing great acts of service.  Over the world, individuals and groups are continuing to send funds and help to Haiti.  I hope that you are finding a way to pay homage to the legacy and the promise that the Civil Rights leader opened for us, that you are finding some service that you can do for another human.

On Saturday, I went to Shul with my parents.  After the service, my father and two other members of the congregation spoke about some of their experience in the allegiance between the Jewish and Black American population in the Civil Rights Movement.  I learned that Jews were disproportionately represented in the whites who were involved in the movement (of course white Christians also made up a large portion of white Civil Rights activists), but that also, disproportionately, the Jews who were involved in Civil Rights were closely related to Holocaust survivors (i.e. were the children of survivors).

Exactly one week ago, January 11, Miep Gies, the woman who was responsible for hiding Anne Frank and for saving Frank’s diary, passed away at the age of 100.  Of her heroic act to help preserve the life of another, Gies has said that she did it because she couldn’t imagine living otherwise.  ”We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need,” the BBC quoted her as saying.  During the Holocaust and during the Civil Rights Movement, there were a great many individuals who risked their lives to help other humans.  Standing with the oppressed is never just a political act: it is also a spiritual one.

On Saturday at Shul, one of the congregants spoke about Rabbi Abraham Heschel and his work in particular in allegiance with Dr. King.  To the chagrin of some Jews, Rabbi Heschel marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama in 1965.  When asked why, as a spiritual leader, he would involve himself in the political, he responded that when he was walking with Dr. King, he was praying with his feet.

For me, increasingly, political work is not possible unless it is fully imbricated in a spiritual dimension.  The service that we do for others — our work toward a more socially just world — is of utmost spiritual importance as well as being politically expedient.  The work of Miep Gies, of Rabbi Heschel, of Dr. King reminds us that as spiritual beings we must also serve.  Service to others is praying with our hands, with our feet, and with the whole of our being.

Happy MLK Jr. Day.

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What are your obligations to the pain of others?

January 14, 2010 by locksandlox

Of course, like so many, I’m thinking about Haiti right now.  I dreamt last night of a man holding his blood-covered, dead daughter in his arms.

Every human life is precious.  All life is precious.  We are lucky to be here, even turned around as we may be by adversity, by false beliefs, by the wrong priorities.

We certainly have a duty to hold each other together, to hold each other up.  What are you doing for the suffering of those who are far from you?  But more to the point, what are you doing to help with the health and healing of those who are close to you?

I was speaking to a hypnotherapist tonight — I’m going to see her at the end of the month to see about doing some past life regression.  (I’m really curious about where I might have lived before, about what I might have experienced, about what I have carried over from before to heal in this life.  I’m also curious about my connection to others in my soul group in general, and about my work in this life with my family, specifically.)  Anyway, what she said to me, when I mentioned this last part, that it sounded like I was curious about my responsibility to my parents.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want to figure out,” I responded.

“Well,” she said, and I swear I could hear her brow furrow over the telephone, “I’ll just say this: that your only responsibility to your self, to your soul’s path, is to heal yourself.  Your work is to learn your lessons, and your parents’ work is to learn their lessons, and so on.  Just as my work is to learn my lessons, and the work of my children is to learn their lessons.  That is your only responsibility.”

“Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t practice Reiki on others,” she added.  ”But it is different.  You don’t sacrifice your core for another.”

I hear exactly what she is saying.  On the one hand, it sounds right.  But the problem is that I don’t know what it translates to, in terms of attitudes and actions.  In other words: when I see someone struggling, do I offer to help?  Do I just watch with compassion and listen with an open heart?  When do I give advice?  How much advice do I give?

This applies to many situations: to the relations that are close to home, like my family, as well as the relations that seem more distant.

Posted in adversity, evolution, lessons | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Ventures in the capital

January 13, 2010 by locksandlox

I went and checked out the ICA right down on the Boston Harbor today.  The gallery spaces are pretty nice, they have some interesting Damiàn Ortega, some Nan Goldin on display.  But my favorite was a series of photographs by photographer Rineke Dijkstra, which documented a young Bosnian refugee between 1994 and 2006.

And then just fifteen minutes before the museum was going to close, we turned a corner and saw the most inspiring view of the Boston waterfront.

Posted in Boston, art | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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