A New Name

I am happy to announce that Monday Mindfulness has a new name: On Purpose: Stories & Insights from Mindfulness, Dharma and Waking Up Each Day. The blog is now hosted on my website, www.heidibourne.com and is linked to its own Facebook page of the same name, On Purpose...

You will continue to receive an automatic email whenever a new piece is posted as the email address you provided when you subscribed has already been transferred to the new site. If you feel like you're not getting the post, please go to www.heidibourne.com and re-subscribe, though this is very unlikely. Also, all of the archives from Monday Mindfulness are on the new site and available any time. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me anytime at heidi@heidibourne.com.

Be well,

Heidi

Showing Up

Today I want to pick up where I left off earlier this month when I wrote that true mindfulness does not afford us the luxury of camping out within the gated privacy of our own hearts and minds. Mindfulness invites and requires us bit-by-bit, to take in the full range of our experiences from the beautiful to the painful. All of it, every little bit. Joanna Macy says we’re not required to be hopeful or hopeless; we’re just required to show up.

A lot of people showed up this weekend in New York City for the People’s Climate March, more than 300,000. I imagine some were hopeful and some were not. But they were there, there demanding action on climate change, willing to see things as they are. Most of us who weren’t there also know how things are. In California, we’re in a horrendous drought and fires are burning throughout the state. The rivers are drying up which means the fish will die. Hopeful or hopeless? Just show up? I have to choose hope and show up. It’s just much too frightening to be hopeless and hide.

The Buddha taught that Right or Wise Action is action rooted in non-harming of ourselves and others, and this includes our environment. If you’d like the five specific guidelines that support non-harming, check out the post from August 30th, Ferguson. Lately, I’ve especially been thinking about the last guideline; maintaining a clear mind by not using substances that cause heedlessness. Does this include fossil fuels? Or the way we use water? Does it include the media? How about the food we eat? How does what we take in and what we use affect our thinking, decisions and actions?

I don’t know how to stop using fossil fuels. Everything needs to change in order to do that; our entire orientation to our lives, our habits and understanding about the consequences and impact of our actions. That will require a seismic shift. But I can try. And I can stop letting the water run down the drain while I brush my teeth. I’ve done that for years. I can also stop watching the news, checking Facebook or reading the New York Times first thing in the morning. All three cloud my mind with tragedy, violence and greed leaving me scared and sometimes numb. They do not support my well-being which certainly affects the well-being of those around me.

A guideline from the Buddha that does support my well-being is “What when I do it will be for my long-term welfare and happiness?” I love this question because it lets me access my innate wisdom and take wise action. I choose to believe that given a choice, most of us will not make decisions that intentionally cause harm. It takes a lot of mindfulness to keep this question alive, and it makes me hopeful.

The Fond Good-Bye

Last week when I ran into a friend at the Farmer’s Market, she said “Wow, I haven’t seen you in such a long time. Where’ve you been? Some other country?” I said I had just returned from visiting family in Wisconsin. We spent 10 days in a small town along Lake Michigan rated in June by Business Insider the most conservative town in the state. If you know anything about Arcata or Humboldt County, Calif., then you just might think Wisconsin is, indeed, another country.

It’s a lovely setting; the cottage at the end of the wooded gravel road sitting just a few steps from the beach, the lake’s vast horizon, the endless color changes and the perpetual gentle shushing of the water on the shore.  Summertime family dinners on the screen porch are the norm, often with at least ten of us at most meals from grandchildren to grandparents along with any neighbor wandering by. 

The conversation commonly includes the latest news of friends, the varying health ailments at the table, the on-going efforts to maintain some semblance of a beachfront in the face of unstoppable natural forces, and always and eventually circling around to politics, tenderly avoiding the galaxy-sized black holes between our views.

                                 

During dinner on the day of our arrival, my mother-in-law, sitting at the head of the table, made a very matter-of-fact comment about “Skin-Heads” in Idaho. And I, in-turn, said I thought there were also a lot of Libertarians in Idaho. And without skipping a beat, my father-in-law reared back from the opposite end of the table and said “Hey! Wait a minute! I’m a Libertarian. So you think I’m a Skin-Head?” Oops. “That’s it!” said my mother-in-law in her incisive let’s-keep-the-peace voice, instantly putting a stop to the conversation. And that really was the end of it, until about five days later.

It was a perfectly lovely morning walk along the paved cattail-lined path, ponds on either side, and in the distance the biggest American flag imaginable waving high above everything; each stripe alone was 13 feet wide. I’d never seen anything like it. 

My father-in-law was talking with my husband about the growing Muslim population around the community, Islamic laws and customs, and the general culture of fear spreading far and wide. I decided to keep my mouth shut, enjoy the scenery and just listen. I saw it as an opportunity for a little walking meditation. Just walk and listen, I thought, walk and listen.

After a while, and I will admit feeling proud of myself for keeping quiet, my father-in-law turned to me and said “And you called me a Skin-Head the other day.” In a heartbeat, I felt myself take a breath, feel my feet on the ground, and step into the morass. 

I started by apologizing for giving him the wrong impression with my own leap from Skin-Head to Libertarian and assured him that I in no way think of him as a White Supremacist hate-monger. I was relieved when he accepted my apology with a tip of his head and slight smile, and then asked me if I knew that Webster’s defines him as a heathen – as someone who does not believe in God. I said maybe he didn’t have to believe in Webster’s. Now I got a bigger smile.

As we walked and he talked more about Libertarianism, the Constitution, lobbing some challenges to other ways of thinking, it was clear that neither one of us really wanted to cross the great divide onto the other’s side of the galaxy. But this is my husband’s father, my children’s grandfather, a man I’ve known for 30 years, and I love him. 

So I stopped, looked him in the eye and said “You know, we’re so loyal to our opinions. How would it be if we suspend our loyalties long enough to ask ‘Would you be willing to tell me what you mean by that?’ Can we talk with each other with curiosity and let our knee-jerk assumptions go for the moment?” He said that of course he and I can do that, but the rest of the world can’t. Well, I said, let’s just you and I try. And in that moment, something between us shifted, leaving both of us feeling a little triumphant.

For the rest of the visit we didn’t really talk politics or about anything else too controversial. On the quiet early morning of our departure as we said good-bye, this lovely man of 82 looked at me, gave me hug and said “We did good, didn’t we?”