Zen Strawberry

One of my first blog exchanges was with with Jory Des Jardin discussing how women’s heads (or at least our heads) seemed continuously busy in an inner dialog about what’s going on, what we should or should not do, what’s right and what’s wrong.

Often, these annoying inner voices are talking about us. Like in those embarrassing situations in which a group of people talk in third person about somebody who is in the room, our voices discuss our performance, appearance, or an inappropriate comment we just made. Sometimes it’s just one loud voice, either disappointed with us, angry with somebody else, or sweet talking us out of taking a responsibility or achieving a goal.

It’s not always bad, though. A few years ago, I was going to a doctor appointment by subway. I was worried about the results of a medical test and I was trying to distract myself looking at the few passengers on the train. Suddenly, somebody was with me. Not a real person, but a real presence. She looked at me smiling and she told me not to worry, that everything would be OK. And she was right. It turned out that everything was OK.

At that time I was reading a lot about Kwan Yin, so I felt that she was a Kwan Yin kind of presence, loving and compassionate—she who hears the the cries of the world—who was reassuring me.

It was a strange experience. I’m a secular person. I was raised catholic in a country were saints routinely talk to people, but no saint ever talked to me before. I am into Buddhism, which is a non-theistic religion, and rather into the godless Zen version than the god-full tibetan version. Yet, that day somebody sat with me on the train, smiled, and told me that everything would be OK.

Of course the most likely and skeptical interpretation is that it was just me. If it was, it was a very different me than the voices in my head that I usually have to listen to, day in and day out.

Yesterday, I had another unusual aural experience. I was climbing a very steep hill on my bike, a stretch of road that only rarely I can climb without dismounting my bike. And I heard this voice, out of the blue, saying: “You can do it.”

Now, my usual voices would have said something like: “I think this is enough, maybe you want to get off your bike before you fall down or have a heart attack.” But this voice, firm yet supportive, just said “You can do it.” And guess what, I did it.

I feel that I’m still with the after effects of that experience. It’s a sweet supportive feeling that makes me feel good, gives me permission to love myself, and believes that I can do it.

My familiar bickering voices mean well, in their own ways. They are there to act out my fear of failure. Debating forever what’s right and what’s wrong provides me with endless justifications for all my actions. It’s hard for me to deal with the idea that I failed and it was my fault. I’d rather drown any perception of failure with the thousand reasons why I made a certain choice. Perhaps my choice was wrong, but I was right to make it.

Deep inside, I know it would work much better to take a little bit of time to weight the options, consult with others, do what I think it’s best, and learn how to apologize if it turns out that my decision what not the right one. Because in the end, all that debating doesn’t seem to produce better decisions, just better justifications.

But these other voices, the good ones, the loving ones, the supportive ones, the voices who believe I can do it, those I don’t yet recognize as part of myself. They talk to me with a different voice, one that I’ve missed for a long, long time.

Andrew Hinton writes a thoughtful and passionate post about George Bush’s first veto that will prevent the use of frozen embryos for stem cell research. In his post, Andrew questions where life starts, where life ends, and who decides it.

He also touches on the issue that I find the hardest to digest about this so-called culture of life:

This is a way for an administration that has championed so much death to doubletalk their way into being all about life, to hold onto their shredding political base by pandering to the ignorant, superstitious and misguided who keep putting them in office.

What does culture of life means for an administration that is perfectly fine with capital punishment, has started two wars, and at the present doesn’t seem particularly compelled to stop the killing of civilians (including children) in Lebanon? Why is the life of a fully formed human being worth less than that of a frozen embryo? Why is the concept of life so much more valuable than the reality of life?

It’s true, the practice of life is much less pure, innocent, and holy than the abstract concept of life. Real people live real lives, make mistakes, do stupid things, hurt, humiliate, threaten, and sometimes kill other people. Real people, differently from frozen embryos, do not symbolize the appealing concept of eternal life; they are born, grow up, get old, and die. They don’t represent the purity of the concept of life; they sweat, bleed, shit, smell bad, and get fat. Real life is a continuous dance with real death; growth is the other face of decay.

But real people also love, nurture, and protect other human beings. They are loved, nurtured, protected by other human beings. They miss other humans beings and they need closeness and physical contact. They are part of a net of relationships, human connections, and social exchanges. They line up in a temporal sequence of births and deaths for generations and generations and hold the memories of those who came before them.

Whatever philosophical reasoning or ethical believe we hold, we cannot dismiss the smelly, bloody, sweaty, and infinitely endearing nature of our messy life. This is the life that a frozen embryo, sadly, has never experienced and almost certainly never will. This is the life that we can and must protect.