Like many of you I watched as the people of Minneapolis responded to 3,000 ice agents flooding their city in what the federal government termed the Metro surge. Community members left their warm homes and walked out into the freezing snow filled streets in the thousands to protest and bear witness to the plight of their immigrant neighbors. What is it about Minneapolis that not only spearheaded the black lives matter movement but came together courageously to oppose ice raids? While exploring this question I had the good fortune to attend a talk given by Ben Connelly, a Soto Zen teacher living in Minneapolis who was involved with community activism in Minneapolis from the start. He described some of the seeds that were planted long before the ice raids, seeds that came to fruit when the community was threatened.
I’ve been taking a course on botany for botanical Illustrators this summer and amazing things are happening. It’s been ages since I’ve taken a science class and I entered the experience with trepidation. But it has borne unexpected and thrilling results. I had forgotten how science invites us to look more deeply at the world. I walk out into my backyard and really see the Oat grass and dandelions and Ox tongue (which cleverly imitates its next door neighbor, the dandelion, so I won’t pluck it out.) Each plant is so unique and each one has adapted to numerous challenges to their existence on Earth. Many plants and animals have lost that challenge to survive and gone extinct. But these plants, these mustard weeds, wild Oat, mint and lemon balm are the victors, the survivors. So many adaptions have been made, so many experiments went into creating the form they currently inhabit. I can only wonder at the brilliance of these plants, and all life forms including humans.
m always on the lookout for examples of people who have gone through great challenges and came out the other end stronger and transformed. This month I’d like to share someone with you who is an answer to my prayer for guidance during these tumultuous times. I’m not sure how I found out about the book, The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eva Eger. Sometimes these gifts just seem to appear at the perfect time. At the age of 16 Dr. Eger was arrested by the Nazis along with her family and sent to Auschwitz. She bravely describes the hell she lived through during the holocaust. Like her fellow survivor and mentor Victor Frankel, she had the ability to bear witness during the worst conditions imaginable. She miraculously survived Auschwitz and other horrors then, after being liberated at the brink of death, faced the ordeal of finding her way as a refugee in America with no money, few resources and unable to speak English. But she persisted through it all being a wife, a mother, then a single mother and eventually, in middle age, she got her doctorate in psychology. Dr. Eger became known for her ability to help people suffering from PTSD and other difficult cases. She died last year at 98. Her stamina and ability to survive is hard to phantom.
A friend pulled out a picture of her three children and I noticed that all of them had eerily delighted smiles on their faces. I asked her how she got them to all smile at the same time and she said, “I did it through Chat GPT”. On her wall is the image of this happy, perfect family who looked like they just got off the polar express movie. I’m watching friends enjoy the latest AI toys with wonder. One friend got free medical advice without having to see a doctor, one an airbrushed image of herself 40 years younger in a leather jacket that convinced her that she would look like this if she bought the jacket, one a well- organized dharma talk with charts put in logical order that was devoid of the juicy human errors that make a teaching so compelling. Some even find an AI boyfriend who doesn’t snore or have any past trauma to deal with. I get it. It’s fun to enter raw data into a computer and be given a clean, ideal version of reality, a reality of certainty where messiness, blemishes and nuances are not a factor. But with all its attraction and usefulness, AI has its limits. Something essential is missing in everything it touches.
Today is Friday, or as it is known in my home, Christmas. Every Thursday night I go to bed with a certain glee that in the morning I will awaken, step out of the warmth of my bed and go to the front door where my CSA box awaits me. For those of you who don’t know, CSA stands for community supported agriculture. It consists of a group of local farmers who form subscription packages. The consumer pays a weekly price and each week the farmer harvests whatever is growing in their garden then delivers the fruits and vegtables and sometimes grains, meats and dairly, to their patrons door. You never know what will be in the box. It’s a brilliant business model that maintains a steady income for the local farmers and provides the very freshest produce, often picked that morning, to the consumer. No middle men, no food designed more for shipping and shelf life than for taste, no destroying the land to obtain the greatest profit.
Indulge me if you will during our brief time together with a game of What If? It’s a game I play by myself regularly and thought it would be fun to share it with you. This is how it goes; we ask the question, what if?, and then use our imagination to pretend, as best we can, that what we are imagining is true. So find a quiet moment to sit back, relax, and enter the world of your imagination. When you feel you are in a good space of mind and body to do so, sit with these questions and take the time to imagine your responses are as real as any other world you inhabit (remember-just reading this list is like eating dry cardboard and will not give the same sensation as applying your imagination to each inquiry):
