Letter to my students from Chislehurst, Kent, England

from Frank Bowling's painting "Remember Thine Eyes"

Letter to my students from Chislehurst, Kent, England                          June 10, 2019

Dear ones,

I am sitting in the kitchen at my elderly friends’ house, where my sometimes-called-Godmother June, her husband Bruce, and their daughter and her two adult boys live. It’s a rainy day - very rainy, sort of un-English actually, as the rain keeps coming and coming, rather than just sort of spitting and passing. But I am happy for them; the last summer this area of England - near London - had massive droughts, and a very dry winter this last winter meant they might be headed for the same. Climate chaos doesn’t hit England any harder than any other country, but when I have people I dearly love - family - in a place, I think more about how the climate affects the weather and the lives of the millions of strangers in the British Isles more than I would otherwise.

Ilana and I are now halfway, two weeks, through our trip. We’ve been in England this whole time, first in the northern part of the city, in Highgate, near the famous cemetery where Karl Marx, Douglas Adams, and George Eliot are all buried, amongst hundreds of others. We then went to Devon, which is in the southwest, and had the good fortune to stay with a friend who lives in a village inside Dartmoor National Park. Neither of us had been to Devon before; on a vast scale Devon reminds me of our Driftless Region in Wisconsin - ancient, green, and rural in a progressive way. 

We then came back to London area, and have been a week at June and Bruce’s in Chislehurst. Today we go to south London, Crystal Palace, to stay with another friend until Wednesday, when we head north to Edinburgh, followed by Holy Isle off the west coast of Scotland, where I will teach my first course. 

This time with June and Bruce has been the heart of the vacation portion of our trip. I am still on vacation when we are in London and Edinburgh, but after that, I am teaching two weekends in a row. I love teaching weekend programs - they are deep and quick and intense, and this one on Holy Isle has people coming from all over Europe and the British Isles - Ireland, Greece, England, Scotland, and more. Some of the people I know and some I don’t. It will likely be very deep, very wild, and very powerful. I have been preparing slowly, doing lots of reading and practice, and running in the rural paths in the National Trust land near June and Bruce’s house. Lots of conversations with Bruce, who is a somewhat well-known painter here in England, and June, who is a priest in the Anglican tradition. We have read about and discussed Frank Bowling’s paintings, Impressionism versus Abstract Expressionism, Loving-Kindness meditation and praying, Lee Krasner’s paintings, and the very nature of perception and art themselves, as well as much historical family reminiscing. Their daughter who lives with them and I have also had many lovely conversations: real talk about death and dying, of her parents and in my family, as well as light banter about Brexit, Trump’s visit in our first few days here, and personal struggles with anxiety.

Ilana has struggled with anxiety here, but all of our hosts have been understanding and gentle. She has often not gone on day trips to see this thing or another, and in some cases, we have foregone them entirely to stay in and watch movies together. But each day in the countryside, here or in Devon, Ilana and I have gone for walks where there are few people, and enjoyed sheep and cows and horses grazing close by to the footpaths which web far and wide all over England, free for anyone to use. 

It is only in the last twenty-four hours that my own panic has kicked in - a symptom of my PMDD, but also of the fear of loss. June has just turned 87, Bruce 93. I never know if this is the last time I will see them, or be in this house, or be able to talk to them. Bruce is losing hearing and sight in particular, quite badly, and communication can be difficult. I am straddling, through lots of Bardo practice, that thin line between appreciating and being present for this very moment, which will never be reproduced no matter how much time I have with them, and panic about loss, the truth of impermanence, which reminds me I have zero control over what happens, especially once I leave. As many of you know, I have experienced a great deal of trauma around death and dying in the past, because of so many early deaths in my family. I can feel, having had a twenty year respite from the death of someone very close to me, that I am handling it more easily now. I still get panicky and overwhelmed, but I can practice with it, feel it, let it pass; love the child parts of me who worry this means I will be alone forever.

Headed “back out into the world” in a sense - eg going back to London - also makes me aware of how much of a “retreat” I have taken here. While this is a well-informed household, with copies of the major newspapers read and discussed daily, and the BBC news on many times a day, I’ve been taking what I know is a privileged break from thinking much about or dealing with anti-racism and unconscious biases. There are rare exceptions - an Instagram live chat with Leesa Renee Hall, in particular - but mostly I haven’t been reading about, thinking about, or looking at these issues at all in the last week in particular. I felt guilt about this initially, once I realized what I was doing, and I am also glad I can simply be aware that is what I am doing. My reading is focused on dharma and art, which, as you know I have tried, and am committed to continuing to try, to tie to anti-racism in particular. The environments where I am going to be teaching and the contexts are ones which will likely be all-white, if not mainly so, and the expected content is to be absent of politics, or light on them. This is true of many of the situations where I teach, and I have historically followed that trend myself, not bucking it in any way. 

I name this knowing I am not perfect, not a perfect ally, being white and being able to “take a break” from heavy issues that don’t always affect me directly. Similarly to thinking more about how climate chaos affects people in Great Britain because I am visiting, I have only really been thinking about race, when on vacation, when I think of someone I love who is impacted by it, mainly those who are People of Color. I am not proud of this, and I don’t suggest it; I simply wish to name and own it with as little shame as possible. This is part of what it can mean to be white: to opt out of racial discussions and not be impacted by it directly, or ignore its impact.

The fact is, I *am* impacted by race, even without many People of Color around me. I am in a house on the edge of National Trust land; that land is available to all, but there is a tacit relationship to who is welcome and who is not set in part in place by location - where I am is a very white village - and part by class and station, which are especially opaque and racially subtle mores I barely comprehend in the States, much less here in Britain.

Tommorrow, I am going to see the Abstract Expressionist work of Frank Bowling, an amazing pond-crossing Black artist who still paints daily at 85. I commit in the next two weeks, as I am teaching dharma and creativity first on an island in rural Scotland, out in the sea, to continuing to connect, consciously, all I am doing to race, naming privilege, feeling the effects of being white, getting clear at how I came upon the privileges I, as well as those around me, do have. I commit to not vacating the cause, as much as it can be easy to ease away from awareness of “such issues” as I expand my awareness into nature, which is my explicit command in the upcoming programs. 

Humans are not different from nature, and some of my favorite haiku were written by the Black writer Richard Wright when he was in exile from the US in Paris, often overlapping identity and nature in the same haiku, such as this one - 

I am nobody:

A red sinking autumn sun

Took my name away.

I use this letter, these thoughts, as a reminder to gentle return, as we do in the Return community coaching program, to my full intentions - not just dharma, not just art - including working towards social justice and in particular, a critical but compassionate understanding of race. 

I wish you all a delightful June, whether it is summer or winter where you are. I am thinking of you often on my travels, seeing some of you online and some of you in person in the coming weeks at Holy Isle or in Paris. We will be back in Wisconsin at the end of June, and I look forward to retreating with some of you - retreating meaning fully going in and out, not just “hiding from” or “escaping” - on Washington Island in Wisconsin in early July.

Much love,

Miriam