Art! Slam us to the ground!

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Patricia Z Smith

Having lunch with a friend who has been targeted for assassination is one way to up your appreciation of art. De Kooning after an omelet tapa with tomatoes and olives. Diebenkorn after grilled cauliflower. Matisse after a cappuccino.

When the furniture glue coated on the wires under his car didn’t explode because it was the coldest week in the Middle East in years, the assassins settled for Molotov cocktails and exploded his car after he returned home.

Kenneth Noland after talk about moderation in actions and politics. Robert Motherwell after consideration of Aristotle and the Golden Mean. Helen Frankenthaler after talk of “psychos” – his word – from France, Belgium, and Germany joining ISIS because it gives them license to kill.

The Phillips Collection, an exquisite private gallery, was halfway along my walk from the restaurant to my home. If not now, when?

Mondrian after sorrow for the distortion of Islam. Sam Francis after re-commitment to hope because the other options would be fatal. Adolph Gottlieb following recognition of how fear strips most people of courage.

I stood in front of the paintings with the most aggressive colors – not a day for meditative studies – and challenged them to “Hit me with your best shot. Fill me.”

Many years ago I meant a young man at the Phillips. He was set to have an exhibit there before everything went topsy-turvy when the director was found to be selling paintings from the museum to fund his personal life. The young man and I became lovers. I took LSD with him once. We became bear cubs and romped and rolled. I didn’t realize he considered LSD a basic food group. It fueled his amazing mind and art. He painted white on white and it got whiter and whiter over the years, though he and I were together only a few months. He invented a written language for me. The pieces he wrote were exhibited – an iconography of love on yellow paper.

He said, “If art doesn’t come off the wall, hit you behind the knees, and knock you to the ground, it’s not good enough.” I believed him then and I believe him now, though I believed then and believe now that there are subtle ways to be knocked over. Sometimes a feather will do. Maybe he believed that to. His paintings got very white.

But today was not a day for gentleness. I asked the strongest, most colorful, most daring art to hit me. Come off the wall. Slam me to the ground. Fill me. Show me – prove it! – that humans are greater, are larger, are better animals than we seem. We are not just people who kill, people who try to kill my friend because he educates people in the truth so they will stop killing each other, people who kill innocent Muslim students, people who bomb Syrians, extremists who capture and rape young women. That there needn’t be more bombs, more killing, more blood, more freezing cold, more lack of shelter in the freezing cold, more stupidity, more justification, more ignorant savagery. That it need not be! We are better than this. We have artists, we have voices, we have kindness in us.

Slam us, art! Save us from ourselves! Keep red on the canvas and off our clothing and bodies. Give us meaning and perspective and hope that, despite the horrors we commit, we can find our way to compassion and care for each other. Knock us to the floor so we can rise in hope.

Helen Frankenthaler

Sam Francis

Adolph Gottlieb

Wassily Kandinsky

Richard Diebenkorn

Willem de Kooning

Henri Matisse

Human Rights, or Dinosaurs Can Fly

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Patricia Z Smith

Human rights are not like the laws of gravity or relativity. They can be violated without bodies launching into the cosmos even though it seems possible that souls may ascend as the bodies that held them fall.

Human rights can be denied without affecting the passage of time. Time will continue on its neutral way even though one moment of savagery can change everything in a person’s life and then freeze into a painful continuous “now.”

Nor did human rights arrive on a tablet of commandments or in a holy book or as words written on a wall or across the sky. If human rights had divine origins, the god that initiated them was late by millennia and still doesn’t have an enforcement plan. Where you go after you die is not adequate for the here and now.

Instead, human rights were created by humans through conscious evolution. They are concoctions of our better natures, the codification of empathy. Most people feel suffering inside when others suffer. We want suffering to stop.

We also recognize the pragmatic value of protecting others from harm and supporting each other for good. Human rights embody the living conditions we wish for everyone, especially the weak and vulnerable. To engrain the concept of human rights in the consciousness of the majority of people helps us unite against those among us who are short on empathy and long on greed and cruelty.

The movement for universal rights of equality, justice, education, health, and safety may seem to be evolving at the same speed that fish found their way to land and dinosaurs to feathers, but it is real, alive and unstoppable no matter how terrible its prospects look at the moment. It is, in fact, gaining speed.

Just to be sure on one thing: Human rights are larger in scope than the rule of legislated law. Such laws are needed, even as tools to enforce human rights, but they focus on punishment more than opportunity, are often poorly thought out, and are invariably tilted in favor of people with the money and willingness to hire morally dubious lawyers. Specifically, human rights are about not being feral. The mapping and near-universal acceptance of human rights is a triumph over the impulses of humans who want what they want when they want it and to hell with anyone else.

Yet, because human rights are not physical laws but rely on the better impulses of humans to make them real, they are constantly assaulted by the lesser impulses of humans – greed, lust, control, violence, self-righteousness, prejudice, and hate. The two sides can seem pretty evenly matched.

But the belief in, and the struggle for, universal human rights will win because most of us want to love each other. We want to share our lives, thoughts, arts, visions, music, dance, food, stories with each other – and that is what love is.

We will unite in kindness and protection and opportunity because we want to be family and we will not allow our family members to be starved, sold, voiceless, homeless, violated, or bombed. We will demand that all members of our family be respected and that all have protection, education, housing, health care, and justice.

Love is the ultimate right that encompasses all other rights. No religion, no belief, no cultural heritage is more important than honoring the human right to love and to be loved. Love is the law above all others. To disobey it is to fail at your turn in life.

It is time to bring love into the conversation about human rights. It is time to recognize why we care for each other to begin with.

“. . . for unto us a child is born” or what constitutes a miracle?

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Gold, frankincense, myrrh. Three wise men from the Orient on camels followed a star that led them to a manger in Jerusalem. There, a newborn lay in the arms of his virgin mother surrounded by animals – most likely cows, sheep, and a donkey.

RH-Wisemen2 We do not know definitely where the men came from or even if they were only three. Most Biblical scholars say they would have come from Persia (Iran) and been followers of Zoroastrianism. As wise men, i.e. magi, they would have been of an educated class steeped in the belief that a person of holy origin was on his way. It was a widespread belief of the time. People were on the alert.

Since only three gifts were mentioned – glorious as they were! – it is usually assumed only three men came to the manger even though more learned men would have been in the region and vigilant for the arrival of a baby of the highest importance.

Shepherds also came to the manger, but they were from nearby fields where they were “keeping watch over their sheep by night.” An angel appeared to them and told them not to be afraid, but instead to rejoice for “This day in the city of David a Savior has been born to you. He is the messiah, the Lord.”

The shepherds went to Jerusalem where they found a babe lying in a manger, just as the angels told them they would.

I sense a timing issue. The shepherds were nearby, but for the wise men to arrive while Jesus was still in the manger, they either started following the star before he was born, or were, in fact, just over in the next village, or were beamed up. Given the appearance of angels, beaming up seems possible, as in “Beam me up, Scotty.”

It is a beautiful story of hope and wonder, one laden with miracles.

One star guided the way of three men 2000 years ago in a cosmos of more than 100 billion galaxies with an estimated 300 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, which is a relatively small galaxy but the one from which we can observe a universe with a radius of 13.7 billion light years expanding at an accelerating rate of 46 miles per second per megaparsec* and laden with black holes that attract anything near them into them, including galaxies, to potentially parallel cosmos that we cannot see but that, like ours, move through folding time warps and space twists, all of which is made of atoms that mimic really wild solar systems but are too infinitesimal to measure, further complicated by that atoms behave in uncertain ways influenced by the expectations of their observers and that atoms are made of even smaller elements called hadrons that are made of quarks that are divided into categories named up, down, strange, bottom, top, and charm, which may indicate quarks are made of even smaller elements, and in any case we know that quarks have been here since the beginning of everything 13.8 billion years ago when a single point exploded in a big bang and, from quarks to cosmos, all of it is held together by unseen forces named the strong force and the weak force that hold quarks together to make neutrons and protons that make atom nuclei, while magnetic and gravitation forces hold the earth together and hold humans on it.

Beaming up is a piece of cake in comparison.

Yet, so far as we know the cosmos doesn’t deal with human feelings of hope, joy, fear, guilt, or wonder. It does not ponder itself except possibly through entities like us, and surely it has no need for miracles, being itself beyond comprehension.

It is we who require miracles and long for what is just beyond our comprehension. Just beyond. We like our miracles guiding star-size, manger-size, angel-size, virgin-birth size. We like our miracles to bring joy and create wonder. That is an observable truth, and it is a fine truth, and it is a start. We should all be guided more often by the stars.

_____________

*A megaparsec is the distance of 3 million light years. Hence, every distance of 3 million light years in the cosmos expands by approximately 46 miles every second.

Making God in our (racist) Image

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

My initial understanding of racism arrived deus ex machina when I was 14 standing in the back of a empty country church in Iowa. Years were still to pass before I met anyone whose ancestors weren’t northern European.

While I didn’t know any blacks, Latinos, or Asians, I knew “my people” well – good people, farming people. I was a keen observer from an early age. I knew “my people” were insecure about how people outside of the Midwest saw them. Farmers, bumpkins, clodhoppers, country folk.

The tenet that we were “made in God’s image” was spoken often from the pulpit and it was reassuring. Yes, humility might be praised and promoted – we could take pride in how humble we were – but knowing we were made in God’s image was a private pass in our back pocket if life went from humbling to humiliating. It was an assurance of value. We had affinity with the Almighty.

Alongside the push-pull between humility and God-heritage was the question of the nature of God. Our black earth, hogs, corn, and cows inclined us to believe in God as embodied, as a being with our senses but over-sized, while the vast formless sky revealed infinity. The trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit tried to meld these concepts, but anyone looking at the symbol can see it is too complex – this is part of this which is not part of that. It is contrived. Truth has to be more elegant. But that’s looking at it from now.

Looking at it from then, my people assumed Michelangelo got it right regarding God the Father. White, male, mighty. And we knew the Holy Spirit from the miracles of nature around us and by the feeling inside when we were being saved. Salvation was pure spirit, a visitation of light.

And Jesus, well, . . . Jesus made the whole thing human. We could relate to Jesus. He was a shepherd, which is a kind of farmer. And a carpenter, and a fisherman. Jesus was an all-around capable amazing guy. He would have made a great neighbor.

But we weren’t told we were created in Jesus’ image. We were told we were created in God’s image, and God, we understood, was the Father – a Father who played favorites, kept score, and wanted allegiance; and He watched us. “His eye is on the sparrow” was not entirely reassuring. He held all the power, as in “. . the Power, and the Glory forever and ever. Amen.” Good thing we were in the same family – white and Christian.

He had to be white. We were made in His image and we were white. This special standing elevated us from backbreaking labor. If other races were equally loved by God, then we were no longer special – and we needed special.

At age 14 I melded the psychological premise of “I feel better about myself if I think less of you” to the priority of believing you are created in the image of a God that favors you, and that it did not allow for people who did not look like you to be equally favored by God. Standing alone in the back of that church, I understood that prejudice attached itself to the belief that you were in a special relationship to God.

While I could not have said it at that time, what this means is that instead of being made in God’s image, we made God in our image and we made Him racist.

Christians don’t have a monopoly on claiming special status as God’s chosen people. It is a self-serving fault line of extremists of the three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Extremists use it now and have used it historically in the name of (so-called holy and definitely unholy) wars, forced conversions, justification of violence, the Inquisition, genocide, prejudice, ghettoes, the Crusades, pogroms, expulsions, and occupation of other people’s land and property.

Terrorists of these three religions believe they are God’s, Allah’s, Yahweh’s favored children. They believe they are superior, privileged, and – having kinship with their racist and vengeful God – can act with impunity. They are on a mission of the highest calling.

It is, of course, only a small minority of people of any religion who become fanatics, and what I am saying is, we all know, only a sliver of the multiply causes of evil enacted in the world. But among those causes, we must examine the ideological seeds that are planted in people.

Speaking only for Christians: If we had been taught that we were created in the image of Jesus who loved and forgave and didn’t suffer pomposity perhaps life on our communal planet might have turned out differently.

Or if we had been taught that we were created out of the Holy Spirit, perhaps more of us would have felt and found the light inside us. That flame has no ethnicity, no favored people, it burns from love.

But many of us, instead of finding our light, judged ourselves as inferior, sought – and created – an all-power father, and gave ourselves permission to harm and kill “lesser people” in his name.

It is a cyclical internal process that becomes institutionalized and fills our world with horrors. Syria, Gaza, Ferguson, torture, drones, Guantanamo, rape, injustice, police brutality, destruction of the planet, child abuse, slavery, prejudice. This list goes on, and it breaks our hearts.

It is revealing, isn’t it, that human hearts break from the harm we do to each other? Is this how the Holy Spirit makes itself known to us? Is this how we wash away false gods?

The Bird That Hit My Window: truth and metaphor

Posted on November 16, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

A few days ago the sun shone just right through the glass doors between my living room and my balcony. A few inches above eye level is a white imprint – a startlingly elegant image, a Rorschach test in the middle of two lines that curve upward six inches on both sides.

It is the impact print of the mourning dove I found dead on the balcony a couple weeks earlier. Even the trace of its feathers is visible.

The dove was folded in on itself under the small marble-topped café table. I determined to remove it before the woman who comes once a week to clean my house arrived. It was my dove, my balcony, my responsibility. Removing dead birds is not part of her job description.

But Onelia arrived too soon, before I had gathered myself to crawl under the table with an improvised bird body bag. Thinking she would not see the body from the living room, I decided to remove it later rather than draw attention to it.

Yet, when I looked later, the body was gone. Onelia had removed it without telling me. We were each protecting the other. Well, she protected me, and I had intended to protect her.

We didn’t speak of it then. We still haven’t. Between us, I am the designated weak one and she the strong one. Whether this is true or not, it is okay by me. People arrange their perceptions and assumptions into relationships without using words, and we do it in ways that tend to bond us, at least for awhile. Strength is her pride. It has gotten her through a difficult life. If protecting me adds to her sense of power and capability, I will not disturb that.

But I will not tell her of the mourning dove’s imprint on the window. I want it left there and she would clean it away. I want it there for a long time. It is flight. It is the moment before leaving.

We are alive and giving and flying until that moment. We leave imprints on each other. We burnish, scar, embellish, and decorate each other. We deepen character in each other. We take on each other. We are a Rorschach test of insights, memories, rituals, and of shared and opposing emotions. We impact each other, interpret each other, and live through each other.

In the last six days, a close friend called to tell me he had had a serious heart attack so wouldn’t be able to have dinner next week. Another friend was moved to a hospice after more than a year of treating her fifth bout of cancer as a friend rather than an enemy invader.

A few days earlier a friend told me he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and my dearest friend for the longest time simultaneously has a cousin dying and a roommate in his twenties being tested for lymphoma.

Two days ago I was with a precious friend at the offices of her primary doctor for management of her chronic lymphoma leukemia. On the table was an issue of National Geographic with a cover photo of a newborn and a lead article titled “This Baby Will Live to be 120.” I realized I needed to look closely at what is going on with people who weren’t born yesterday.

I am surrounded by people who are handling diseases and the threatened end of their lives with such grace that I am slack-jawed. It is enough to accept that you will die, but to plan for it in real time and to be absolutely gratefully alive until that moment is the accomplishment of a lifetime.

One friend with terminal illness was, when we last spoke, gathering her strength for one last trip to Tuscany. Why not? Tuscany is beautiful.

My friend with the cousin who is dying just completed papers for her body upon her death to be donated to a hospital for research. She sent the records to three of us for safe-keeping with the words “I’ve always wanted interns exploring my body.”

I hadn’t given any thought to where my body would go. I live as though I have decades to decide such things – and maybe I do. I know only that I don’t want to be ashes on someone’s fireplace mantel.

I think I’d like to be a print on someone’s window, captured in full flight, until the rain and snow remove me.

Was the mourning dove part of a couple? Was she or he missed? I think so, I believe so. Maybe not so long as humans grieve for each other, but enough that it bothered the other birds who live in my garden. One mourning dove has had a nest in the wisteria the past two years. Was it that bird? Will there be a nest there next year?

People leave, but their imprint remains. A whisper in the mind, a feather, a stranger’s turn of phrase, a holiday tradition, a poem, a piece of lace, an old Valentine card, a farmer’s winter wool hat, a photograph imprinted in the mind more than on paper, a mother’s remembered stroke across a cheek, a bit of arthritis in your pinkie finger that reminds you of your grandmother’s crippled hands, the upper lip of your grandchild that matches that of your mother and all her siblings, a fountain pen with a gold nub, a feeling on a day when the wind, temperature, and humidity are just so, fireflies on a summer night, being alone when winter arrives, being alone when the crocuses come up in spring.

We carry people with us – both as blessings and as scars. As humans we can turn those blessings and scars into lessons. I am a student of my friends. All of the people I have mentioned are peace builders. Every single one. And they are all at peace with their lives and its end.

Is there a correlation between ease with dying and how you lived your life? Has it been full? Has it contributed? Did you live with integrity? Have you no apologies yet to say? Have you no angers yet to release? Did you dare? Did you fly? Have you been loved? Were you able to feel the love that was offered? Did you love? Were you nurtured by your loving?

Yesterday I bought two see-through black lace blouses. I don’t intend to die soon. I plan to make love, eat well, hug people every single day, care for my friends, play with them, create art, go to the theater, write an opera, and learn the capitals of every nation on the planet.

I plan to exercise, snuggle with my dog, swim, dance, finally learn decent (and indecent) French, eat chocolate and candied ginger, and listen to my women peers who have fallen in love for the umpteenth time. I plan to fall more and more in love with my grandchildren and their parents. I plan to be as transparent as the see-through blouses.

I will die, but that is all I will do for death – Edna St. Vincent Millay. (Quote courtesy of another friend and peer – an activist, healthy, beautiful.)

Finding Yourself in a World of Need

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

A few years ago I began an experiment that I thought would take me only a year to complete. The goal was to regain a sense of myself aside from more than a decade of peace work as founder and first Director of Peace X Peace. I had entered the field of peace work one week after September 11, 2001. I entered it from many years in the arts as a photographer, poet, and playwright. I was midway in writing a book tentatively titled “Diamond Woman: achieving clarity and brilliance in a world still dominated by men.”

Peace X Peace usurped all that. For the first four years I worked every day except Christmas. Long hours every day. Long hours with teams of women that I brought together. We made an impact. Ultimately we had members in more than 120 nations and 20,000 plus members in our Global Network of women talking privately to their “sisters” around the world through the Internet. We were the first global social network for women before the term “social network” was used.

We also made a documentary in Afghanistan, Burundi, Argentina, Bosnia, and the US that debuted at the UN and aired on PBS. We did a book, “60 Years, 60 Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women,” (available on Amazon) that was gifted by the president of the United Nations General Assembly to each member state ambassador.

As a team, we made a significant impact on the rising women’s movement, but after a decade I was so burnt out that when I was asked to speak somewhere a wave of nausea went through me. Not every time, but usually. Peace workers get burnt out, and peace activists often submerge parts of their being in order to tend to a larger whole.

Peace work is the most necessary and honorable work in the world, and there are people who every single day give of themselves to help others, whose compassion drives them to dedicate themselves to others. The result can be a strange mix of both being fed and being depleted by the work. It expands your soul even as it nibbles at it.

I was ultimately depleted and needed to “re-find” the essential “me” that prefers – and naturally tends – to describe everything somewhat poetically, that needs silence, that mixes my sight with sound with words with wordlessness. I trusted the essential “me” was hunkered down inside, waiting, even though it had hardly been nurtured in years.

It felt – and feels – selfish to tend one’s self when others are suffering so much; but it is necessary. We have one life and we have the right – something close to an obligation – to make it beautiful and to grow in gentle impassioned ways. If we were given the ability to sing, we should sing. If we were given the ability of paint, we should paint. If we were given the ability to dance, we should dance. Disaster in the world is not helped by our ignoring our creative impulses and the sweet light at our center.

(It is also not helped by perennial sadness. The world is glorious and we are animals that can be stunned by awe and convulsed by humor. These are our right, but that is a different blog.)

It took me much longer than I expected to come back to feeling viscerally, daily and always, the “who” of who I am. I thought it might take a year, then two years. But it has taken more like three years – three years of stripping down and stripping down and stripping down and shedding of self-definitions. It required doing less and less peace work, of not doing anything that made me nauseous, of spending time with my family, grandchildren, and friends, and of writing again where I didn’t need to be politically correct but could be factually correct instead.

I made it here. I’m not particularly productive artistically or socially. I haven’t launched into a book, little or large. I haven’t resumed photography. Arbitrary actions and projects seem suspect to me, as diversions from facing up to continuing to go to the heart of the “who” of who I am.

This is not a self-indulgent journey. It takes courage to give up self-identification, to not distract myself with work or pleasure, to simply be – albeit with some sputtering on my blog or on Facebook.

I say all this for two reasons. 1) I encourage everyone, particularly as we age, to have the courage to give up self-identification. You are not a businessperson, an athlete, an artist, a meditator, a teacher, even a parent or grandparent. You are you. You are larger than what you do or have done. Getting to that visceral knowledge of “me” is to have removed all the adornments that cover who you really are. It is to sit within the terrifying you without the identifiers of what you have achieved, what you have lost, and what you believe. It is to give up history, knowing, strength, and weakness. It is being.

I say “terrifying” because when you get rid of self-definitions you get rid of what binds you in, what containerizes you. Your boundaries disappear, and you can feel like a large amoeba. At first, that’s a vulnerable state. Then it becomes a place of all potential – of ease, relief, and laughter. Joyous, poignant, encompassing surprise.

I am not saying this is easy. It’s a marathon that is not only frightening, but means giving up the angers, fears, and wounds that also identify you. Doing that means acknowledging them to begin with, which can hurt. Plus, there’s your righteous indignation: “Let them go! But . . . but . . . but . . .” Un-huh, let ’em go. They’re boring, actually.

The key to this aspect of achieving freedom is to feel the pings of pain with the intent to let them go. Then give yourself time. It’s an organic process that takes time and you don’t control it beyond holding the intent to find yourself, naked and beautiful beyond definitions.

2) On the personal level, I made it back to the “who” I knew, but with more than a decade of peace work, expanded knowledge, and some personal traumas thrown in the mix. It is an amazing place to be, and not easy to explain, and speaking of it brings some tears of gratefulness.

But something unexpected has happened. The need to be more active for justice, to tend the earth and its people, has risen again and it is being a real nudge. If I rest in that place where I am – blessed as it is – it will become hollow.

I am aware that undoubtedly every person who reads this is already a person who works hard for the good of others. Some of you are my heroes and heroines. So perhaps I am talking to myself, but please indulge me:

Having one life to live, we must each find our essential “me” in order to live fully and come to wordlessly understand why we are here and who we are.

Having found that, we must then find what is uniquely ours to do to help others. It’s not a free ride. Our souls – that word works for me, change it if you need – are meant to be felt by ourselves and joined with others.

I don’t know why it’s like that, I only know it is.

So over the next few months, I am searching with a few others as to what is uniquely for me to do. I invite those of you who are peace workers to talk to me privately or through comments about where you are, how you see what I wrote, and to tell me what you think is important for our world right now. Thank you, my sisters and my brothers.

Vicodin Dreams, Existential Realities, Joy, & Happiness

Posted on October 27, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

A few days ago I had minor surgery. I’m memorizing the nations of the world in order to regain neural synapses after the anesthesia. I’ve come to think of my surgery as the Lesser Antilles.

I’ve also come to think of the capitals of Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Montenegro, and Moldova as corollaries of the scrambled parts of my brain that have not checked back in. Towns with names that cluster consonants, especially p’s and j’s, are beyond my command.

Part of it is the Vicodin. Like anesthesia, it takes time to get out of your system. I appreciate pain killers as much as the next person and I relish dreams where people sing, dance, fly and do absurd things in technicolor. Yet, there is the pull to clarity.

I like my awake world crystal clear. If you are of a certain age, think of the old Hamm’s Beer ads set in Minnesota to the tom-tom beat of “from the land of sky blue waters.” Surely I think of that because the family of my first love, from when I was 11 to 17, owned those islands, but I digress. I have to be pretty disoriented to leap back to the sureness of that adolescent love as he is now a far right conservative who lives in San Diego and says “any woman who can skin a bear is my kind of woman.” All hail FaceBook! All hail the unfriending feature!

But I digress.

For the past few weeks I have been mulling through the difference between joy and happiness. It is of a different nature than learning the capitals of Europe or Africa. More subtle, more vowels, fewer consonants.

Bobby at the front desk and I decided two nights before the surgery that joy originates from within while happiness comes from outside of one’s self. We did a high five on that one! Bobby is the Buddha Incarnate of our building. His eyes have that look.

To be clear – ha! – joy is a light inside that pervades and grows, pushing outward and seemingly from an endless source. Continually expanding, it proves that love is in the DNA that created life. (Don’t get all ruffled up if that is too airy-fairy for you and you want to say I’m still on Vicodin. I’m not. Well, I’m on the existential downside of Vicodin. I have just enough left in my system to speak my truth.)

Happiness is – and I realize I’m into semantics that don’t hold true for everyone, but, hey, stay with me – what we feel when something more or less concrete and measurable is added to our perception of our lives or ourselves. Something – or some perspective – comes to us that makes us feel bigger, better, more attractive, safer, more loved.

That is, joy comes in the package – though sometimes latent, waiting your discovery – while happiness is an add-on.

Both are good. We are happy when we receive a bonus, a compliment, a new basketball, a kitchen renovation. We are happy when we go places that are nice, see a comedy, buy new boots, take a selfie that flatters us, make a sale.

Some things both make us happy and enliven joy. A new love affair, a grandchild, holding hands, a great meal and wine with old friends, dancing, singing.

Some things simply blow our minds. Looking into the eyes of a newborn and seeing the universe.

Joy is the real thing of it, however, and joy is more than I can write of now, or possibly ever, and that is okay because the joy of which I speak cannot be defined. It is enough to know that it exists and to learn that, when you are grateful for it, it increases immediately. Becoming conscious of your joy allows it to release from a private chamber inside you and to emerge from you into the world. It has no borders.

[Serious note: I have never been chemically depressed and I apologize a thousand times over to every reader who has been and who finds what I write to be naive. I hope it still has some meaning to you.]

Yet – dum-dum-de-dum, here comes the existential part – we live inside bodies, minds, and emotions that go through time and space, interacting and often clashing against each other. The downside of Vicodin is that when the high is over you may find that it has shaken out the harsh parts of your history and current reality, the coarse sandpaper times where you were hurt, misguided, angry, and unhappy.

This morning I realized that the characters in my dreams post-Vicodin have all been lesser people who have betrayed me. Not the big betrayers – large as China – but the forgotten ones, who are more like Kansas or Uruguay or East Timor.

These dream visitors had become dull shapes, ragamuffins on the edges of memory – the teacher who thought I cheated and gave me a D for the semester despite having all A’s in her course, the friend who wouldn’t testify for me in court because she was afraid, the man who got me pregnant when he was 40 and I was 21 and fresh off the farm. Real people. People who fail us and our trust. Normal average people.

Why one asks did they come visiting? And the answer comes that it is because these are the people who surround us, then and now. They must be accepted, they are us.

Acceptance of flaws is a demand of joy that must be met. Joy sets the terms and guides us to meet them. It demands that we learn to love as it does or, rather, as it is.

Yes, people are confused, opinionated, distrustful, and afraid. In extremes, we kill each other. We are Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Gaza and Israel, Bosnia, Columbia, the DRC. That list goes on and on. No high fives there.

I dreamt of these people unpleasantly – a slight grimace in my sleep, a concern about my survival – but we are each other’s life condition. Such glory and careless haphazard meanness!

Joy comes from within and one thing it cannot help but do is to show what is dark – the blood flecks, scars, forgotten disliked people. It also heals, if we are willing to be healed and want to be clear.

So I memorize nations and capitals, learning where people live, who they are and what they do. Next I’m moving on to rivers and lakes. Did you know the Caspian Sea is huge? I want to go there someday. On a boat from port to port. In the sun, in joy, with friends.

Shoot first or never shoot?

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

For a brief period in the fall and winter of 1975 I simultaneously dated two men. One was David Hume Kennerly, the White House photographer for President Ford who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his photography in Vietnam and Cambodia. The other was Richard (“Flashlight”) Gordon, a member of a religious commune in New York state and former teacher at Smith College.

David was a little miffed. I don’t remember it being as much about my seeing another man as by the choice of Richard, a dropout with long hair, drawstring pants, and sandals. The Vietnam war was over by only a few months. David had been on the frontlines, he had photographed death.

Once he called me from San Francisco and said there had been an assassination attempt less than an hour before on President Ford. His gut had told him to demand that Ford go around the back of his waiting car, not the front – a move that surely saved the President’s life. The bullet skimmed by David, who credited his gut with saving his life then and in Vietnam.

“Ask that guy you see,” David said, “what he would do if people were running at him and shooting at him.”

Me: “Flashlight, what you do if people were running at you and shooting at you?”

Flashlight: “If I had a gun, I’d shoot them first.”

This issue of shoot first or not at all is a tricky one. Just because both the Pulitzer Prize winner and an imitation yogi agreed on shooting first did not mean to me that it was the best thing to do. (I had also started going to the commune, which centered around universal love. The mice were caught in humane traps and transported off grounds.)

Most significantly, death is permanent. I’m not making a case for no life after death. I am saying that when your body dies you no longer walk, talk, eat, feel, think, dream, kiss, hold hands, study, go to school, go to theater, feed your children, have children, dance, sing, raise a family, make love. You’re dead.

We tend to slide over this fact in regards to other people, especially when the number of dead gets large, especially when we kill by drones, especially after we decide to hate them, especially if they have killed people we like or identify with, especially if they believe things we don’t believe, especially if we are afraid of them, and especially if we think they want to kill us.

Yet we never lose sight of the fact that we personally don’t want to die. We are fully and always aware when it comes to ourselves that death means the end of being here.

So, is it all about clearing the way so we feel we won’t have to die, at least not soon? Some Israelis said of Gaza that it occasionally needs mowing. It’s not that Israelis are meaner than other people. It’s the position they are in that includes fear, historical beliefs and harsh realities, isolation, and having the power at hand to “mow.”

Circumstances, real and imagined, affect how people – individually and collectively – perceive. In turn, what people perceive affects what they are willing to do to others, including to kill them. Given a potent dose of the “right” circumstances many, maybe most, people lose empathy. They become empathetically illiterate.

Look at ISIS. They perceive – literally live in – a different reality than most of us do. Their beliefs, which are circumstances, seal them inside a “truth” that gives them a mission and radical zeal. They want power and territory to bring the world into line with their image of truth and they will kill for it. You and I may not buy into their vision but they are pretty intent about it. They believe their perceived reality.

We could also say that we in the US perceive people are coming at us, and our friends and other good people, with the intent to kill us. It seems real from here. What can we do except shoot before they get here or before the number of dead becomes even more astronomical? Hold that question.

Why two beheadings was a catalyst instead of more than 140,000 dead Syrians and 900,000 Syrian refugees and displaced people is another question. Well, we know why. The beheadings were two from the US home team. Our empathic literacy only spoke English.

In the midst of this violent catastrophe we forget that all people are people are people are people and killing means real people die.

Our major flaw as human animals is that we forget that each of us is potential and future and love and art and creation and compassion and beauty. We forget our existence is an incomprehensible miracle, and it ends.

Given the stakes, you would think we would put more thought and action into creating circumstances where people perceive their good as invested in the good of others, where we give each other what we all need so we become friends and family, so it becomes unthinkable to kill each other.

But once the horror is underway, . . . Well, I, too, would probably pick up the gun and shoot first if the option were between them and me. Certainly I would if it were between them and my family or friends. Now, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to save myself or family or friends if faced with murderous assault.

I know that in reality this is a moot point since I personally will never fight in a war and I will never own a gun, but if I am hypothetically willing to kill in some circumstances, how can I say my nation never can?

And I believe, faced with a choice between my death and that of a member of my family or a close friend, I would go on the sword. Hopefully this is never tested.

But it is tested endlessly around the world, isn’t it? Parents are constantly giving up their lives to save their children due to real and desperate circumstances. Average people do heroic things.

Can we average people do what is needed to prevent future wars and lessen the wars now around us?

Average people brought an end to the war in Vietnam even if it was late in the game. Such a futile stupid war.

Has there ever been a wise war? President Carter referred to war as sometimes a “necessary evil,” which raises the pertinent question of if wars can be prevented in advance by actions taken by you and me, average people.

Assuming the answer is “yes,” the most pertinent question is, are we willing to build communities across cultures, to minister to each other’s needs, and to become empathically literate in all languages?

It would take conscious evolution of our consciences, voluntary opening up, leaps of faith in ourselves and others, and going against our impulses to shut down and shut out. Many good people do peace-making work now. How do we build on their work to create a massive coalition of the willing? This is the question. What are the answers?

The question “shoot first or never shoot” must become obsolete, a relic of when we were more primitive. War photos of dead, wounded, and dying men, women, and children should only be seen in historical archives.

Ode to Thrust Bearings: getting unstuck

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Humans progressed from sticking twigs into holes in the earth and then licking off the ants to inventing thrust bearings, glorified wheels that opened the way for the industrial revolution, advanced agriculture, and travel in outer space. Can we not find the equivalent to change our human interactions and bring harmony to the world?

. . . . .

The world needs more thrust bearings. Thrust bearings allow things to be mobile and flexible while remaining stable. They allow large heavy things to turn, move, and realign. They allow juxtaposed things to stay in connection with each other while one – or both – is turning, moving, and realigning.

We need more thrust bearings in world politics, we need them for social mobility, we need them to manage the relationship between finances and education, we need them to unstick prejudices, we need them to navigate clashing attitudes on abortion, same-sex marriage, minimum wages, health care, gun control, immigrants, and housing for everyone. We need them in the U.S. Congress. We need them between religions and cultures. We need them wherever there is war, poverty, destruction, or hate.

What is a thrust bearing? It is a human invention, a thingamajig with only one purpose – to allow objects to turn in relationship to each other on a axis. It is, in effect, a flattened ring of multiple ball bearings that fits between a same-size washer on the top and a same-size washer on the bottom.

Yes, there are tools for almost everything – give me a large enough lever and a place to stand and I can make the earth move – but my heart belongs to thrust bearings.

The thrust bearing that thrills me most is 15/16” in diameter with a center hole 5/8^”in diameter. It is a 304 stainless steel alloy mix of iron, chromium, nickel, and small amounts of other things. (See photo of my actual thrust bearing.)

Thrust bearings are put to use by slathering them in grease between their two washers. Think lox slathered with cream cheese on both sides between two toasted bagel chips.

After this photo was taken my heartthrob was slathered, layered, and placed on a small rod – an axis – atop a stainless steel pole 2” wide by 3’ high. A matching stainless steel “top piece” of pole 3” high was placed on top of the thrust bearing.

This 3″ top piece is attached to a “cradle” with finger-like prongs that hold a 120 lb. angel’s wing of Carrera marble. The wing is 39″ long. The concept, construction, and installation for the support pole and cradle were all done by museum installer par excellence David Graham alongside Patrick Burke.

The thrust bearing allows the wing to turn on a horizontal axial plane 4′ high in my garden. Not like a windmill, it is too heavy for that. But I can turn the wing easily to view it from different angles.

Very few things look the same from difference angles. Very few things are not metaphors for something else.

My thrust bearing has the capability to allow an object of up to 3000 lbs. to rotate on an axial plane at 10,000 revolutions per second. Try that, junior cadets.

A nearly life-size terra cotta woman titled “Waiting for an Angel” sits nearby. She is serene, sure that angels exist and, if she waits long enough, one will walk in to reclaim the wing that fell to the ground and turned to marble. (The wing’s sculptor is Elizabeth Turk. The name of the creator of “Waiting for an Angel” has vanished from my records. There is more about both on my blog Returned: One Angel’s Wing.)

Her dream is ethereal but the thrust bearing that allows the wing to move is concrete. It is not a wish, a notion, or a longing. It is real. We humans need both the dream and the tool.

We need interior and exterior tools to bring us into equilibrium with each other so we can be flexible, creative, and work together to overcome inequalities such as food for some and not for others, medicine for some and not for others, education for some and not for others, safety and equal rights for some and not for others.

We are stuck. We confuse our selected morality with absolute truth. We trumpet the mythology of our own religion while mocking that of others. We justify killing as though we have no other option. We give precedence to one sex over the others. We favor some races and cultures over others. We imprison people unequally and label it protection of the rest of us. We think guns make us strong.

We entrench. We find it difficult to change our positions and beliefs. We close our doors and our borders and our minds and our hearts. We build walls against each other and then we bomb our way through them to kill each other. We feed our hate and fear and memory of harm done to us until it turns into harm and horrors we do to others.

We lack the courage and vision – or perhaps only the will? – to reconsider our stuck positions. We like thinking we are right, we like not questioning ourselves. But if we are to live in peace then we need to find and use our inner thrust bearings. We need to change our perspectives on what exists, what is possible, and how to get there. We need to do it individually and collectively.

So what does a thrust bearing look like? They are nouns, verbs, people, states of being, qualities.

For starters: Pope Francis, Jane Goodall, Desmond Tutu, neighborhood soup kitchens, dedicated teachers, fair trade agreements, cat videos, chocolate, inner-city gardens, deep listening to each other, forgiveness, reunions, interfaith outreach, art in our schools, nonviolent protests against injustice and inequality, paid maternity leave, respect for the homeless and poor, neighborhood libraries, smiles, increased minimum wage, diversity.

Love, education, and medicine are thrust bearings. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is the Golden Rule thrust bearing.

Many NGO’s are thrust bearings. Top of my list are Search for Common Ground, Doctors Without Borders, Bereaved Parents – Family Forum, Women for Women International, Chime for Change, and World Pulse.

Countless thousands of women in Africa are thrust bearings. UN resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace, and Security” to get women at negotiation tables and in the enactment of peace accords is a thrust bearing. Any book by Jean Shinoda Bolen is a thrust bearing, including the just-released “Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Everywoman.”

We need countless more. But to have more thrust bearings in our individual and collective lives we must first believe in goodness and possibility. We must hold tenaciously to the vision of living together in generous harmony.

We must accept we can be kind and still be safe, we can reach out and not be harmed, we can give and not be destitute, and we can listen to those we think are our enemies until they become our friends. If we do not, we will continue to grind against each other. There will only be friction between us. We will continue to be afraid in a fracturing world.

The woman in my garden has waited for an angel for nearly two decades. She is patient, loving, and kind. When we humans become more adept at using the thrust bearings inside us – love, patience, and kindness – heaven has a chance.

If a thingamajig 15/16″ across can hold something 3000 lbs while it rotates 10,000 revolutions per second, shouldn’t we as flesh and blood and passion and visionaries be able to find our way out of this stuck place?

I think we can. I believe it is possible.

My Cyber Stalker, tsk tsk

Posted on October 5, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Nearly a decade ago now a former employee began stalking me through the Internet, though she didn’t restrict herself to the Internet. When “Family Circle” magazine wrote an article about Peace X Peace, the nonprofit I started in 2002 to connect women to women for private conversations through the Internet, the article centered on an interview and photos of me. Immediately after publication, the editor contacted me because an anonymous hate note had come to them. She forwarded it and said, “This sounds like a disgruntled former employee.” That it was and it wasn’t the first time.

The ways in which stalkers can say nasty things about you and to you include by email, texts, posts on websites, comments on blogs, and more. She has used all of them.

All one needs to do this is enough tech savvy to keep getting new email addresses so you can circumvent the bans against your old ones and the willingness to use your precious time and energy to track a person and say ugly things. I say “precious time and energy” because to me everyone’s time and energy are precious and shouldn’t be squandered – exempting necessary downtime and chocolate.

My personal stalker is a master of “ugly,” laden in snark with a dose of cackle. Nothing is taboo for her to create, hinged on some thread of historical “fact” (is it real to her?), and say.

My tech people and I thought we had her banned from my ever having to see anything from her, but – voila! – a change of her email address and a comments section to blogs, and she’s back and active. Who knows how much she wrote over the years that went directly into one of those little trashcan icons with no one knowing the better.

Her comments on my blogs cannot go public without my approving them, but in the past two weeks I have read several – skimmed more like it – on how my husband told her immediately how he wanted to divorce me, what an ego-maniac I am, and so it goes. I pay enough attention to make sure it’s her with the same old same old. Then I photograph and file before deleting to provide the future option of bringing police action for harassment.

Through the years I have not responded. She’s hardly been a ripple in my life except to remind me that there are people who falsify their resumes both before and after working for you, who lie to your face and about you to others, who can hate you and rage. It’s not pleasant but it is true.

And it is sad. And I wish it weren’t true. But it is. And after a decade of silence I am looking at this a bit and with a longer lens.

I know her troubles and rage go beyond me. It should have been a signal to me that she was in two lawsuits when I hired her. Well, I only knew of one of them then, but, alas, I was taken in. Mea culpa.

It raises questions about her:

Does she know she lies? Surely she must.

Does she know she is a stalker and classic harasser? I suspect she doesn’t.

How does one hate so hard for so long? Does she not long to write me off as a monster and go on with her life? As horrid as she thinks I am, I shouldn’t be worth spending time on.

It raises questions about me:

Is there a grain of truth to her charges? It’s not popping out to me but surely she’ll remind me. Is it egomaniacal of me to write blogs that tell of my life, circumstances, and foibles? Isn’t that what most blogs do?

Do I monitor what I say or write, knowing she will read it? I hope not.

Why does someone hate me so much? My answer to this, from life experience, is that people run their own interior movies and they cast you in roles that work for them. We might want the good roles, but they might cast us as bad.

It raises questions about the people around us. Let’s look at the large scale:

How do peacemakers find techniques to bring harmony when some people don’t have the same thought processes, rationales, beliefs, values, or methods of discernment as most of us do and/or they have no taboos? Particularly when such people are most likely a disproportionate number of the rulers of nation, factions, and sub-cultures? Particularly when they often tend towards hate and harm?

This last question is the most important. That is, if there are not commonly held concepts of respect, compassion, honesty, mutual good, and trust, how do we progress? How do “enemies” move toward peace without the currency of common values on how humans should behave towards one another?

Taken to its logical conclusion, this is how wars start and continue. We cannot find a common set of values and beliefs. We are bombing right now because we do not have an answer to this question.

Coming to this understanding of seemingly impossible divides was not easy. I was a committed advocate of deep listening and seeing myself in others but we must find new answers to what to do about evil in the world. Not everyone wants peace.

Given this, how do we or our nation or our ally nations neutralize evil – real or imagined – without becoming the monsters we think we are fighting? And then embrace the conscience-appeasing rationale that our actions are justified and it is our right to defend ourselves? No nation can kill with impunity and not harm their soul.

The “me” we see in the other becomes a circle of “others” who hate, and choose to destroy.

I don’t have the answers. But I do still believe the divide is “seemingly.” This hope is reinforced because I see good people rising everywhere for better lives. I trust the people on the ground more than the people running nations.

For my little issue, forgiveness for real or imagined injuries and moving on would seem to be an answer, but that’s not up to me. I hope some day it happens.

And, no, dear harasser, I will not post your comments to this blog. Know that in advance. This is all you get. I will write no more. You have to come to your own interior peace just like everyone else. Write me a new role in your movie, maybe that of a bit part bystander who walks away, wishing you well.

Traveling Light

my fierce freedom

Category Archives: Peace X Peace