Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

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The Pandemic of Grief and Hatred

We are living with the coronavirus pandemic. And we are also living with a pandemic of grief and hatred underlining the virus. Every morning we wake up from our dreamworld, after a minute we realize that something has died. That something is the world as we know it. There may be no words, just this sinking feeling in the gut that life itself is being threatened by the very act of breathing. And yet we must continue to breathe to live. As we yearn each day for the nectar of sounds, tastes, smells, and sights of life that we are used to, we are also heavy with grieving the losses and rising hatred.

“What we are up against is asking to be discovered.”

Teachings of what the pandemic offers us as human beings, pales against the reality that there are more than a million deaths due to the coronavirus and more to come in the future. At the same time there are intentional killings as hatred is being tolerated, if not promoted as a legitimate way to protest. Our tolerance for death is being pushed to a new limit and there are no outlets for ceremonies to grieve our losses or a foreseeable way to stop the widespread hatred of supremacy of all kinds. Even with new leadership, the pandemic of all kinds will remain.

We already know what is in front of us but at the same time what is occurring in the world is unknown. What we are up against is asking to be discovered. What is it and what is being asked of us? An answer in this moment would be unseasoned.

Medicine will come that will keep us alive from the coronavirus and then something else will show itself as something to be reckoned with. We are in the continued mystery of life. Take time for the uncomfortable feelings of grief. Take time with the rage that surfaces when acts of hatred appear. Within the grief and the rage something will open in us that will help us reap the abundance of the darkness. It will take a long sit in our caves. Can we trust that?

Excerpt From The Deepest Peace

poetic solitude, poetic justice

In a Zen temple for the first time sitting in the dark, listening to a symphony of birds, earth turning towards the sun, the place suddenly is familiar. The place is inside, an inner knowing of peace that comes with entering a silence beyond quiet. A reaching into the unknown that is frightening. Sitting in this poetic quiet is a force of solitude that rises. Suddenly, there is a different kind of inner monastic life  — one without the monastery. A profound witnessing of life that wants to be laid down in words as an offering to the altar of silence.  Do I write? I have since the age of eight. How could I not share the times when the sun bursts through the rain clouds and it is my whole life?

The action of writing through the chaos of the world is to engage the sun and the rain. The struggle of the world melts into the beauty of itself. I see it and feel drawn to write from it. It is ancient to write from being steeped in the essential. It comes natural without the knowing of such a thing as Zen.

The evening caused me to pause and read Phyllis Wheatley, an 18th century poet. Her words sit before me. I can feel her words were from a place of silence and not history as her work is viewed. She is not only the child removed at seven years old from West Africa and sold. She is the child bought and perhaps rendered speechless from which the essential erupted into poetry.  Her words:

 

Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main

The pealing thunder shook the heav’nly plain;

Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing,

Exhales the incense of the blooming spring.

Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes,

And through the air their mingled music floats.

(excerpt from Hymn to the Evening)

 

Like me, Wheatley takes pen to paper for solitude. Her words breathe into the chaos of a world weighed down with slavery. Yet, she attends to the experience of the sun, the thunder and the wings of a zephyr. The birds renew their notes from their morning songs. No one knew in teaching her to read that her life would be a conduit of radiance. Listening to the evening, her words came, taking up temporary but available solitude. She is without any need to be heard. She lives in the inner silence from where the poetry comes to her. Her need is not to be a poet. Her need is to listen. It is where breathing takes place and sanctuary emerges. Refuge is in the silence. Her poetic solitude is poetic justice. Peace without peacemaking.

In my inner monastery, space is made for what will show up. To write is to make a bed for my words as unknown travelers. Will anyone show up? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter when or how. The time and space will open the door. The tea will be ready. The food cooked so not to disturb the meeting of silence to silence. So, when the words rush in and I am swimming in them, the satsuma sweet potatoes will have already been boiled in lemongrass.

Candlelight accompanies the stillness. Sitting at the desk, the travelers have arrived. My fingers move over the keyboard trying to settle down for the ride. The pecking rhythm joins the transportation of words from the places of arrival and departure. These places are moments that happen without my standing or walking. I am writing to hear.

What is there to hear when the fire burns down the churches? What is there to hear when the temples empty? What is there to know when the old teachers die?

A silent justice speaks. Its message rises through the movement of birds, the running of water, the moonlight on barren land. Justice is open — empty space and time to gather a collective song without words. The silence is doing something to us. We are not doing the silence. Poetic action is and doing what comes from the depth of the earth.

My words go back into the silence once it is heard. To cling to it leaves little space and time for the new message, the new witnessing, the new poetic solitude and action.

Which way does the water flow after the storm?

Words chattering on by themselves. If I let them run all over it will be a mess. I pause.  I chop the onions, garlic, and mincing the ginger. Sauté. Mix with the boiled and peeled satsuma sweet potatoes. Pureé with the boiled water scented and flavored with lemongrass. There is nothing to do but let the meeting of the senses happen.

 

 

Pre-Sale – The Deepest Peace: Contemplations From a Season of Stillness by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel  – Parallax Press – December 1, 2020

Slipping Into Peace

It’s dark. The wake-up bell rings for morning meditation in the zendo. Feet hang out the side of the bed. The time has come to do the mundane— wash the face, brush the teeth. The bath in the hot springs will come in the afternoon before tea.

For now, it is morning. The birds crowd on branches to sing near the hall of silence. Meditation has already met me at the door and has entered my body. I breathe slow. Stillness, a must to enter darkness. My feet erase the footprints of yesterday. A humble daughter of former slaves, I have come to a practice I know the old Africans, sold and bought, understood. They knew the importance of silence, of listening for guidance in a life filled with hardship. The gateway to peace came to those who did not give up, those who did not give in to their imposed circumstances. So, I walked the cold floors of the zendo (meditation hall). No one knows I am being escorted by ancestors to my seat. I understand this is where they have brought me to see them, to see myself, to see life.

There is no teacher in the room, as of yet, because the teachings begin with walking and then a bow. Not the bowing of submission but that of recognizing and acknowledging life. Bowing is the silent language of peace. It speaks to the person who is taking their seat with me. It says, we will sit alongside each other with nothing of the world to do, except breathing in the way humans have done long before our birth, long before ancestors. When we bow together, it says let’s begin again, seeing only what we see of each other without looking or knowing each other. As we breathe, we are in a profound moment of stillness, inside a peace we could have never conjured on our own.

An unprescribed, non-religious Zen is an invitation to a ceremony. We know we are to bring ourselves. But we come asking, is there anything else I must bring? Nothing. What must I do? Nothing but be alive. It is a ceremony that mimics life, the breathing of deer, the trekking of bears, the aging of cedar trees, or the dying of eagles. There is no healing to be done by any of the chanting unless you are fortunate enough, in the middle of a chant, to experience the shallow breath of deer, the weary trek of  hungry bears, the sudden illness of cedar trees, or the decline of eagles. You wake up without the superiority of being human; you wake up in the middle of chanting, in the middle of life.

Our bravery to join the ceremony searching for peace inevitably leads to heart-wrenching and heart-opening. Is it possible to return from the grace, terror, sorrow, and beauty of sitting with nothing? If we let it, the silence shakes us. Still, we accepted the invitation to sit because we are daredevils willing to die in the silence if we must in order to live again.  We are thrilled by the possibilities and dangers of silence. We experience silence removing shields so that the earth can speak out loud or whisper in our ears. The danger is that deep silence leaves everything out — all of what you know and think you have.

Imagine being barefoot when the rising tides of life hit like a tsunami in the dark. There will be no need to pull shoes off your feet when you are drowning in your seat with how much of life hurts or how you have no solutions that last longer than a year. The teacher or teachings may come, not to deliver you from your suffering, but to walk with you to the gate of tranquility which is a long walk out into the middle of the ocean, which is to say, you will be walked to the middle of your vast life without drowning. Expect to arrive still seated, older, much older than you were when you first took a seat.

Ah! A few more deep breaths to settle upon bones that have reshaped themselves over the years. One kind of fly eats at the mucous of the eyes, another, bites at the skin, and still another one finds a home in the crevices of ears. The only way to survive torture is to sing, if only in your head. The only protection is nothingness. Nothingness does not hurt.

The bells bring tears — not of sorrow. They are tears of utter love. In-love with radiant darkness and the greater mystery of being. The big bell in the hallway causes the howling coyotes on the hill to yelp. Mating rabbits to scatter. Feet to move in place. Voices hushed. Heads bowed down. Everything is calling in silence, even justice calls us to the quiet so that we can hear with clarity what it has to say.

On the last bell ringing and drumming, we sing the song of liberation. It is not a liberation from what traps us, not liberation from life–but liberation to life– all of it. Free to come to life, to be in it and see it. Liberation is the freedom to awaken where our feet are planted. Awakening is freedom that cannot be given, legislated and then taken away. Liberation that comes with fear that we might not make it is not liberation. In awakening we can trust that our actions will not lead us to our demise. Awakened freedom is living out what we expect of others. What do I choose for my life? Who am I waiting for to give me whatever? Am I enough to bring a freedom of awakening? When asking am I enough, I am not promoting much-needed emotional recovery from the experience of inferiority or unworthiness. I am asking am I, are we, free enough to awaken and then take action in life that might disrupt everything old and unnecessary? Are we free enough to abandon any sense of ourselves being better than anyone else? Are we free enough to resist with love?

Sitting in the open meadow of the zendo I look back at the gate entered. Zen means nothing in itself and there is nothing in this meadow — only what is brought to it. We bring the voices of unabashed pride and ego-driven wondrousness, an idea of Zen, hopes, and the need to not suffer from our own ignorance. And thank goodness this human life can never be known, so that we can’t manipulate it to our own small desires or our ideas of what it should be.

Who is it that crawls through windows? It is the morning dawn. She parts the sea of darkness so that the center of light within it is revealed. The bells ring and the wooden drum knocks calling out ignorance.

The earth speaks silence. It breathes nothing but time and space. Make anything of breathing and you’ll wake in the middle of the dive.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel – 2019

Where The Heart Lives – The Relationship Between Home and Sanctuary

We are specks of dust on a strand of Mother Earth’s hair. There is no need for us to “save” the Earth; we sim- ply need to let her discard what has become stale. We need to release our planet of our wanting and begging, our ignorance and confusion, and be weaned from her breast, even when it feels we won’t survive. When we stop exploiting the Earth, she will return to sustainability on her own and share her bounty generously.

In November 2016, America and the rest of the world were stunned when a candidate whose platform included harming immigrants and discriminating against certain citizens won the presidency. When I learned he’d been voted in, my heart sank, realizing that America had become even less of a place I can call home. Many of us had been living under a constant threat of harm for decades. Now, the blatant hatred ignored by so many others could no longer go unacknowledged. Many would recognize and join a shared sense of homelessness.

My parents were born and raised in southern Louisiana at the turn of the twentieth century, not far from the plantations where their ancestors labored as slaves, and where lynchings of their neighbors occurred often. While I’m certain they did not feel at home in that environment, there was sanctuary among others who embraced the black Creole culture. Because of their cultural sanctuary, I am able to experience a sense of home in my heart. Although  I wasn’t born or raised in the homeplace of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, the bayou, swamps, music, foods, and eloquent Creole language were transmit- ted to me through my parents’ very being. The cultural, ecological, and social life of Louisiana is in my bones, and whenever I’m there, I feel a primal sense of home — despite having never lived there.

Finding home, feeling home, and being at home are complex, multilayered, spiritual and cultural experiences independent of the place we live. Where is home? What is my true nature, and what does it mean to be at home with it? When I don’t feel at home, where can I find sanctuary? These questions become critical when our lives are under threat.

In the early twenty-first century, groups are still being terrorized because of race, religious choice, physical ability, class, sexual orientation, and gender. Legendary radical feminist and academic Angela Davis points out that racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, hetero-patriarchy, and xenophobia are, in fact, the ghosts of slavery. We have returned full circle to what catalyzed the civil rights movement and forced the creation of political and spiritual sanctuaries for those who were hunted by people trying to maintain white supremacy. In this book, I explore home and homelessness, sanctuary and refuge in the light of such terrorism and its impact on life, death, identity, and peace.

In spiritual communities, especially in Buddhist ones, the teachings on finding home are profound, but they often leave out the experiences of those who are dehumanized  in their own homeland. Spiritual teachings like, “Home is within the heart” can be off-putting when loss and disconnection aren’t also acknowledged. Those who have such experiences can feel homeless spiritually and physically, and finding refuge, or sanctuary, from acts of hatred must be offered along the path of finding our true home.

I was invited to give a talk at Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, California. When I arrived, I saw a sign in Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful calligraphy that said, “I am home.” When I saw it, the words rang through me as though I were hearing a temple bell. I felt relieved, and my heart knew I was home. I don’t live at Deer Park, but reading the Zen master’s words, I felt deeply at home. The home I felt isn’t on the earth; it dwells in my heart. How was I able to recognize a home not visible but felt? Is a home like this momentary, or can I feel it wherever I go?

Deer Park, with its tree-covered hills, is a place where prayer, meditation, and song shape the sense of place and bring the visitor peace. It’s a true sanctuary, offering immunity and refuge for troubled folks in troubled times. Sanctuary, from the old French sanctuaire and the Latin sanctuarium or sanctus, meaning “holy,” is essential for those of us who live day in and day out in chaos and oppression, where belonging is never guaranteed. As I walked the monastery’s paths, I affirmed in my heart that my true home must have peace.

What leads a person to homelessness? What happens when your home doesn’t have the peace you’d hoped for? If we look at the impact of history, culture, and ancestry on finding home, we begin to understand the vastness of homelessness. The words “I am home” don’t resonate for many who are marginalized by society. When we recognize the profound influence of social factors upon homelessness, then compassion, forgiveness, and similar virtues can carry us home.

If you have a sense of not belonging based on prolonged, systemic mistreatment, if you’ve been a target of hatred and violence, that disregard affects your well-being. In a relative sense, those who are dehumanized are never home. In the absolute sense, home is in the heart and cannot be touched by any outside force, even the most oppressive. Both senses are true. Oppressed groups live with the paradox that we are and are not home. While we are encouraged to make a home in this country, manifesting such is a struggle.

When I was eleven-years old, my family was having a tough time. One evening at dinner, the meat was stringy, and I asked, “Daddy, what’s this?” My father proudly answered, “Possum. I caught it in the backyard.” I didn’t know what a possum looked like. All I could think of was the blood that might still be behind the house. I dropped the meat from my fork. My father, from the back roads of Opelousas, was doing what he’d always done to survive hard times. It wouldn’t be long before we received our first—and last—bag of groceries from the welfare office. We were too proud to continue.

I remember saying to myself, I will never be as poor as my parents. I wanted to feel that I could get what I needed. And I know that when my father promised each of his three daughters a Cadillac and a house, he meant for us to be better off than he was. First, second, and third-generation African Americans who migrated north were supposed

to succeed, and our progress was measured by external appearances. Most important was to have a roof over our heads. When you lose your house, you feel like a failure—a disappointment to yourself and your family.

Owning a home is a marker of stability and success, but today it’s impossible for many of us to purchase property in the places we grew up. Imagine the assault on the heart when you are living in a homeless shelter or on the streets. How can we own the home we know and love? There are many ways to overcome physical homelessness. One is to redistribute wealth and return stolen territory. Another is  to heal and disrupt the disconnections that result in disproportionate wealth, colonization, and occupation. When you consider the destruction of others’ homelands and cultures and how it impacts their quest for home, the difficulty in overcoming spiritual homelessness is clear.

Enslaved Africans did not immigrate to America. In fact, many black people were here before the first colonists or slaves arrived. Native Americans did not give away their land; it was stolen. Holocausts for Jewish Americans, Armenians, Rwandans, and others did take place. Rape is used as a weapon against women. Muslims are harassed and annihilated. Perpetrators of all races murder transgendered people. What if those who have been pushed to the economic, political, and social margins were seen and their true histories revealed while presenting the teachings of finding one’s true home? Would that help us understand the depth of our connections or disconnections to each other and facilitate the quest for an authentic home?

As I explore the epidemic of homelessness andthe urgent need for sanctuary historically and in our time, I taste the tears of so many. How much longer will those who have been pushed out be able to survive? Is there too much water under the bridge to reconcile our disconnections from one another as people? If we are not paying attention to who and what is unacknowledged, we’ll always have dangerous demagogues who shake us loose from the illusion that all is well. They are a curse and a blessing, as they help us remember what matters. Patience is more than waiting and hoping. Patience is taking the time to love what is difficult to love.

Sanctuary is the place we can go when our lives are under threat, where we can consider love in the midst of oppression. It’s a place for those who speak a language not of the dominant culture, a place where anyone can say, “I am home.”

Taking sanctuary is an act of saving one’s life from the suffering of the world.

After one receives Buddhist monastic vows, homelessness and sanctuary become one and the same. This homelessness is an intentional disengagement from the chaos  most people on earth endure daily. Monastics take refuge, and the spiritual life becomes their sanctuary.

I once met a nun of Buddha’s forest tradition. I asked, “Where are you from?” She said, “Nowhere.” I followed with, “I mean where do you live?” She said, “Nowhere.”

My teacher was sitting nearby and overheard us. She said, “Ask where will she sleep tonight?” The nun lived nowhere but would be sleeping somewhere. The home- less mendicant smiled, and the conversation was over. Like Buddha, the earth was her pillow, the place upon which  she would claim no territory, no country, no land, and no house. Instead she would trust the Earth as her mother to care for her. No matter where she lay her head, she wouldn’t claim that place as her own. To some, this sounds romantic, to others too great a hardship to imagine.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are monks and nuns who have been exiled from their native lands, including the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. They were forced to leave families and sanghas and create new lives in foreign lands. To their credit, both have created potent sanctuaries for millions in duress and both became prolific in articulating the spiritual path. They did it as a direct response to the hatred and homelessness they themselves experienced. Sanctuary is a place you create when you are “missing” in the scheme of humanity. Establishing sanctuary is critical to finding home.

In this book, I explore a broad perspective on homelessness, physical and spiritual, and the act of creating sanctuary as a response to the hunger for home. I try to expand the spiritual teachings on finding home to recognize societal influences, the longing for connection to the earth and each other, and finding spiritual and cultural sanctuary. Along with this inquiry on sanctuary, I examine several kinds of home and homelessness including urban displacement; historical and political loss of land, culture, and language; as well as religious and spiritual quests for home. I dug my feet into the mud and waited to see what would emerge concerning the homeless condition of every living being—our insecurities, experiences, and threats to our sense of belonging.

Ultimately, this is a book about sustaining peace. I share from my heart the experiences I’ve had and the teachings that have settled in me. Please join me in entering the Dragon Gate, so we may each emerge with our own true face.

This is Chapter One of Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging

by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel (copyright)

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