Conversation with my mother on the 25th anniversary of her death

Good morning, Mama*. I can feel you here, on the couch, a being who is both present and takes up no space or weight. I think in the past you have needed me – or I thought you had needed me – on these death anniversary days. I thought you were an ancestor who was not yet well in spirit.**But perhaps it was more that I was not yet well with you, and with ancestors overall.

 

Anyway, regardless of who was not well then, here we are now – both well in spirit. It’s sad to me still, that this is how we are able to be together now, but I am grateful. Grateful grief.

Homage to Love and Magic

On December 16, 2021, Dylan and I chose to put our beloved fifteen year old Burmese cat, Drala, to sleep. It was a hard decision, as it always is; even though the doctor made it clear it was the right decision, as his kidney disease had accelerated rapidly to a place of no return. 

Drala was a beloved being, quiet, shy, and easily startled; snuggly, affectionate, and soft. We miss him a great deal.

Split Ends

 

Bright spring sunlight

pours into bathroom window - 

revealing split ends.**

Last week Wednesday was the one year anniversary of my last live class before moving entirely online, where I continue to teach to this day. 

Today is the thirty-first anniversary of my father's death.

The pandemic anniversary date snuck up on me fairly quickly; of course I've seen North American and European folks* posting about the year anniversary of many aspects of the pandemic in social media. Of course it's come up in personal conversations and in my classes. And yet, I am deeply affected by anniversaries (as regular readers of this blog know) and this one is striking me quite deeply.

This Year

Amaryllis this year, in front of painting by Mom from her early adolescence.

On Friday January 24, 1997, early morning, I stepped out of the Blue Bus STD Clinic on the UW Madison campus, my negative HIV test results in hand. Out of what I thought was relief, I turned quickly to a bush and threw up my freshman dorm breakfast.

I was in an open relationship, my first, with a woman and a man, both of whom had other lovers. I had been unsafe a couple of times, and was convinced I had contracted HIV. Feeling deeply relieved, I took my time getting home, walking in the sunny crisp winter day.

Back at the dorm, my roommate looked at me morosely and told me to call one of my brothers before doing anything else. Just then, the phone rang, and I knew something was up. It was one of my oldest friends, calling to ask if I’d talked to that brother yet. She said to call him then call her right away. Neither the roommate or friend would tell me what it was about.

Ten minutes later, I sat on the floor of my dorm, aghast after a quick exchange with the brother. My mother had died of an aortic aneurysm that morning, just as I was leaving the clinic. I called back the old friend. When I started an ugly, angry cry, she was confused and asked if my test results had been positive. In utter shock, I had forgotten she was waiting to hear the results. 

The roommate left as soon as the old friend appeared with a bowl of requested mac and cheese from the cafeteria. I poked at it as the friend made plans to get me home that evening, Super Bowl weekend, when a bunch of our other  friends from Appleton were headed back anyway.

Once I was back, I wandered around my childhood home, now rendered a brand new place due to my brand new orphan hood. I talked in low voices with my brothers and godmother. I looked at all my mothers plants, a hundred or so, and began wiping them down, paper towels and bowl of warm water, cleaning dust from their leaves. It felt good to help something non-human but living.

When I got to the end of the plants, I found my mothers prized amaryllis, bright red. Every year my mother tried to get it to bloom around Christmas; it was late this year. The last of four blooms had just opened that morning.

Today is January 24, 2021. For a few years now, I have tried, and failed, to get an amaryllis bulb to bloom around this time of the year. They always leaf out, but never with stalks or buds. This year, I bought another one and it took off immediately. On January 20, the first big bloom opened, and every day since, another has opened. Today, the fourth bloom opened.

Mama, we had a hard run of it. But I have grown to miss you and wish you could know my wife, my life. I feel more connected to you now than ever. This is for you - four blooms going, and a second stalk budding, as if to make up for years of bloomlessness. I celebrate you on this 24th anniversary of your death.

As I mourned, and still mourn, those in my community killed too young by the AIDS pandemic - but more dead than should be because of discrimination and negligence - I now mourn those dead from the ignorance and denial of the COVID pandemic. 

When you died, Mama, I didn’t know any other orphans. Now I do. Now I know I am not alone in traumatic loss, whether from oppression or isolation. I am finally feeling out the difference between the trauma from loss, versus garden variety grief. 2020 was a rough year for death, for me and so many. And so it is I need this amaryllis bloom more than ever this year specifically. It is helping me remember to celebrate as I weep.

Letter to Dad on Father's Day

Dear Dad,                                                                                                     Father's Day, 2020

Michael Amos Hall, my father, at work, where he often was, 1987ish .

You have been dead for just over 30 years now, since March 15, 1990. You died ten days before your 53rd birthday. Sometimes, I would hear Mom say "work killed Dad"; it seemed to be a trend in our family to blame outside forces for deaths: I heard Mom say that her mom was "killed by that modern monstrosity the neighbors built next door".

Besides a deep abiding love of puns and an affectionate nature, workaholism is one of the characteristic I inherited from you. I used to find comfort in a the false control overworking can bring me. Over the last fifteen years in particular, as I have practiced and taught Buddhism, alongside writing and photography, I have found the insidious grasp of overworking to help calm any doubts I've had about the worth of my work and myself. But I have also learned to push back and recover from overworking, as best I can, one day at a time.

You were a different generation, and you were male. You grew up in a house with two women; one of whom was able-bodied and single mothering you and her sister, the other woman, with crippling Rheumatoid Arthritis. So certainly, you got a lesson from Alberta, your mom, my grandma, about working hard - it was necessary for survival. Your father, Amos, whom you write about in the few journals of yours I have found, was intensely overbearing, a distant man, 100 miles away who worked (and lived, it seemed) as a judge. You had it modeled from both lines in your family.

My mom didn't work most of her adult life, and the few jobs she had early on in adulthood were adjacent to yours: scanning Fortran cards or filling out paperwork and/or correcting papers with you. By the time us three kids came along, you were living the home-owning, single income, three kids life promised to white middle class families. Except you seemed to believe you still had to prove yourself.

An Open Letter to Fellow White Buddhists

Dear Fellow White Madison-Area Buddhists,                                               June 1, 2020

I am writing this letter specifically for Madison-Area white Buddhists, but it is very relevant for white Buddhists everywhere, especially in the United States.

I write to you as protests and riots for justice around the deaths of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and too many other Black people fill our streets and newsfeeds. I feel in myself a curiosity and hope for change for the better, matched with a fear of status quo resuming, or changes for the worse. There is so much grief to feel, every day. It is a time where I can easily open and connect and feel, or just as easily, shut down and despair.

Though I began my early years as an anti-racist activist, and remained one into early adulthood, I accept that in my first ten years after taking refuge in the three jewels as a Buddhist, I took refuge from anti-racism. I used the peace-seeking of Buddhism to cover up my natural conflict aversion. Anti-racist work seemed paradoxical, the violence too incongruent with my relatively sheltered white life and desire for global peace. I feel sick writing this now, but there it is.

It was an entitled take, one that lots of white Buddhists take, because we can, and because the way we have interpreted Buddhism seems to support personal refuge from violence. I feel grief about that take now, and I also understand it.

I invite you to pause, as you read, and feel how separate you feel from efforts to fight anti-Blackness. Do you worry “they’ve gone too far”? Are you averse to the violence and feel there must be some other way? Are you feeling overloaded by the news and words? These are inherent gaps, and our tendency as suffering human beings is to take one side or the other, and decide we are right and others are wrong. Instead, I encourage you to feel the gap. Is there guilt there? Confusion? Fear? Anger? If you can feel these, see if there’s any grief underneath? Grief is where we can enter and begin to make personal and societal change.

When the police killed 19-year-old Black youth Tony Robinson on Willy Street in Madison Wisconsin just over five years ago, something in me shifted. I found myself impatient with focusing only on practices of loving-kindness and Tonglen, with an emphasis on an equanimity that was suspiciously similar to ignoring the systemic issues. This was not the response I needed mirrored in Buddhism, while facing the slaughter of Black people in our own community. I knew the practices were relevant. I knew Buddhism could help. I didn’t yet – and still don’t always – see how.

Gradually, humbly, I have found (and continue to find) a personal connection between interbeing and racial justice. Mine has been an ugly path, strewn with harm and confusion, hope and fear. In particular, I used to feel quite angry at other white people, especially fellow white Buddhists, because I didn’t understand “other” white people don’t seem to want to do this work. Now I understand better how hard it is, and feel how sometimes I don’t want to do it, either. I feel the heartbreak we have to work through in order to commit again and again.

Increasingly, I am determined, for the long haul, to see what change I be a part of, especially alongside Black people who also engage in Buddhist or Contemplative practices. This means personal action – study, reflection, contemplation – and also larger scale social action, which quite a few white Buddhists are especially averse to.

I want you to join me. To take a step over the perilous-seeming edge, out of the safety of white Buddhism, and into a more interconnected world, where we explore together the shadows of interpreting Buddhism to uphold White Supremacy, in the most subtle and insidious ways. The grief here is fathomless, wide and deep. It is uncomfortable as hell. But we are in here together, interrelated and holding one another up. It is a far richer place to be than in our separate ivory towers of conceptual practice. 

Buddhist practice has prepared us for this kind of work. 

Because of purposefully availing myself of many Black Buddhist teachers, I am becoming more and more directly aware of the interdependence between Black Liberation and spiritual liberation. Upon reading statistics that still blow me out of the water every time, I still feel shock and wish to turn away. But I can no longer turn away, and explicit acts of violence against Black people are making it impossible to not speak up. When I try and ignore the grief of the damage my role in whiteness plays in anti-Blackness, I only feel worse. 

I’d rather stay awake.

I hope this sounds fundamentally familiar to you: a hallmark of Buddhism is to realize ignorance is not bliss, and in fact, feels worse than really seeing what is. White Supremacy begs us not to look, not to feel, not to feel connected, and it has its claws sunk into white Buddhism. As much as we know we need to pay attention and stay awake, cultivating mindfulness and awareness, a siren song of passivity encourages us to spiritually bypass.

It is especially important during this time of the uprising of Black leaders and allies, that we step in. Not out of reaction to a particular incident, but out of a desire to help support the ongoing visions of our Black leaders and all Black people. We have been silent far too long.

Fellow white Buddhists, please act now, in ongoing, sustainable, community-building ways. Don’t hold back because you can’t participate in, or are not comfortable with marches, riots or protests. There are other, more contemplative options. For starters, you can deeply explore your own relationship to racism via writing with Leesa Renee Hall or Layla Saad. You can take courses with Resmaa Menakem, Rachel Cargle or White Awake. You can follow/read/listen to Black dharma teachers like Lama Rod Owens, Reverend angel Kyodo williams Sensei, and director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Katie Loncke. 

Does ending violence against Black people sound like too big a goal? Please consider your vows – your Bodhisattva vow in particular, if you have taken it. If Buddhists and Bodhisattvas in training are prepared for anything, it is to dream the impossible and bring it as close to reality as we can in our lifetime. Not individually, but collectively, and with commitment and dedication for the enlightenment of all.

In particular, for folks in Madison, I invite you to join me in the writing letters for the Campaign to End Violence Against Black People, which is being organized by the Transformative Action Network, a Black-lead organization that explicitly combines meditation, contemplative practices, and racial justice and abolitionist work. 

In particular, writing these letters stretches our tendency to shrink away from taking stands, encourages us to see the deeply interconnected violences of anti-Blackness and our privileges as white people, and makes demands of our white leaders that may not feel safe to demand. Why? Because it is scary to put our names and voices on the line. But we must do that in order to be active co-conspirators in taking down violence against Black people. If our commitment is to end suffering, then aiming at the anti-Blackness is a powerful root to cut together.

The demands TAN has compiled are direct, powerful, and specific. They are specifically for Madison-area, but applicable to any community. They come from voices of Black people who are horrified by being repeatedly dehumanized. We, too, should take the time to really feel horror about this dehumanization. Join this campaign, so you too can add your voice to the choir.

Demands from the Taskforce to End Violence Against Black People:

· Support restorative justice approaches which are empowered with 360 degree accountability for structural, cultural and physical harms as manifested in mass incarceration. 

· Support and fund a committee designed to address needs of repairing damage around racist violence in the form of structural, cultural and physical impacts

· Using the recommendations of the committee, launch a public awareness campaign to decriminalize Black adults and youth 

· Support reparations that repair the damage of white supremacist culture through creating alternative culturally enriched schools for marginalized youth and other autonomous or black-led cooperative efforts 

· Support reparations for black land trust and other remedies for gentrification and hyper-segregation

· Create a truth and reconciliation process to replace the punitive criminal justice system with restorative justice

· Adopt the demands developed by the Movement for Black Lives

If you feel at all ready to begin exploring your own relationship to anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and your role in the perpetuation and liberation of both, please begin acting now. Listen. Learn. Watch. If you feel resistance to what you are being told, sit on the cushion and give it space. Watch for a tendency to demonize violence. Hold non-duality, the both/and of this all. Paradox is truth, and a larger picture is needed here to shake us out of complacency.

Please, take some time – but not too much time - to consider, reflect, and contemplate how you can commit to looking at these issues as part of your practice. Get involved now, in whatever – even small – ways you can. Invest in the long haul of unpacking of whiteness in Buddhism, and towards group actions for the liberation of all, which only comes when we honor Black lives.

May this letter benefit all beings,  

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Miriam Hall

Control and Chaos

Collected wisdom from my Return groups during this time.

Hello. It's been awhile since I have posted here. I fell out of habit, then I began my Patreon journey to post a chapter from my book-in-progress, Being Writing, each week.

But this week, as most of the United States and Canada has dramatically adjusted to COVID-19's impact, and my students from all over the world - really, all over the world - have reported in via live classes, and as I have watched and read social media and news media, there are some trends and insights I hope will be helpful for me to share here*.

Plus, at the end of this post, I share a link to a half hour audio practice called "Four Step Practice: Embracing the Energy of Emotions" from Karuna Training, which I offered for free on Sunday, March 22 on Zoom.

Climate Striking as a Sensitive Person, Equinox Reflection

Near the equinoxes, I like to contemplate equanimity. With the climate strike tomorrow, it would seem equanimity is the opposite of what I need to be contemplating. But as I age (I am only 42, but no longer an 18 year old, that's for sure), I realize I am a highly sensitive person. It's possible I have always been this sensitive, or somewhat sensitive and I just didn't recognize or respect it; it's also possible I am getting more sensitive as I age. It could be a combination of the two. Regardless, I don't see it as a problem, but it does make me less likely - less able, really - to go out and protest on the street in the same way I once did. So what do I do?

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. 

Reflections on Identity

I am going through a training to become authorized to facilitate workshops with Leesa Renee Hall's Unpack Biases Now program. I am really excited to be able to use such powerful tools, developed by a whipsmart and compassionate highly sensitive Black leader, in writing. Not only do I not have to re-invent the wheel myself, and I can use her amazing tools, but I also get to support and emanate out her style and approach, which has greatly impacted me in the last year or so.

Over time, I am investigating identity more and more with my Contemplative Writing groups. This has been a blindspot in my teaching practice in writing - not going directly for or into identity, especially ways in which access via identity privilege some of us more than others. My students are majority white, cisgender female, middle class. While I have a high percentage of queer women in my classes, in terms of sexual orientation, I have found for myself and others that "being queer" can only carry us so far in terms of compassion and direct understanding with People of Color. More often than not, it can actually serve as a bargaining tool, an "oppression Olympics" player piece. As in: "Well, I may be white, but I am also a woman, and I am queer, so I know what it is like to be oppressed," said in a defensive tone, especially when called out for having expressed a racist view.

There is so much wisdom in exploring our identities, especially the dominant identities, with a contemplative lens and deep curiosity. So I wanted to share, along the lines of blog posts I used to do more frequently, some of the reflections which have come up. These are anonymous, only occasionally direct quotes (when the person's articulation was stunning) but other than knowing they come from my classes over the last few weeks, I have removed any identifying factors. As a lot of you know, I so prefer to tell stories from first person, or relate them to a specific person. I generally avoid, "you," or "one," or "we," in writing, because I don't want people to feel if they don't fit into the description there is something wrong with them. However, when I am protecting identity, I generalize a bit in order to protect identity. So please keep that in mind.

Here is a wisdom culling from reflections on identity in class a few weeks ago. The prompt was on what we see in the mirror - and what is not shown in the mirror.

Spiritual Shadows in Whiteness Work

Trigger warning for People of Color: This post deals with the anniversary of Tony Robinson's death, recent assaults by a white teacher of a young black girl in Madison schools, and white spiritual bypassing. Please read at your own discretion.

For white folks, this post is likely to make you as uncomfortable to read as it made me to write. So please, read with kindness. But read it. It's essential.

What seemed separate suddenly wasn't.The new hashtags #blacklivesmatter or #blm had, previously, felt important, but far away. Distant. Not that I did research to see when any Black people had been shot by police in Madison. Not if, but when. Police violence against Black bodies seemed conveniently elsewhere, even if Ferguson was in the Midwest depending on who you asked, even if it was the hometown of one of my longest running students, a white woman shaken to the core by how close it suddenly felt to her.

But checking twitter that night in March four years ago, I swear - though this may be 20/20 in hindsight - I could feel the walls falling, the distance closing. Seeing at first the bare descriptions - a young black man, an older white male cop - then the name: Tony, called Terrell - Robinson. Then there was a face, too, varying depending on who was putting it up - local Black community or police department. There were no pictures of him where he looked like a thug. No, that difference came in description, evocation of the incident - mentions of drugs, possibly being armed, uncontrollable.

***

Ilana is reading the 76 page police report - with a lot of redaction - about an 11 year old black girl whose braids were pulled out, who was dragged on the ground, and hit by teacher at Whitehorse Middle School a couple of weeks ago in Madison. Reading the report is bringing it closer, clear, even with all the details protected for privacy. That feels important, because the white male teacher won't be returning to Whitehorse, but this week our Black District Attorney announced he will not press charges against the teacher.

When Dharma (and/or Dharma Teachers) Seem/s to Say You Suck

I just got done teaching a weekend program in Chicago with Acharya Charlene Leung. The title was Healing Harm for Vibrant and Just Community: Exploring Social and Personal Power.

It was a revision from a previous program she has been working on for a few years, a version of which we did in Minneapolis awhile back. The version she had been developing focused more on unconscious bias, especially with race, and social conditioning. How to shake that social conditioning to build more vibrant Shambhala centers with true inclusivity and equity.

However, we were making the final course description when the Shambhala situation broke, and it became clear to both of us immediately that the program needed to be able to more directly include what was now a big part of our community. Thus, the new title - and new focus - was born.

The program was rich and deep, and we both learned a lot, as well as the participants, about all that goes into all three components: power, harm, and healing.

However, what stays with me most, and what I want to write about today, is an insight Charlene had towards the end of the weekend, as the two of us discussed our plan for Sunday's portion of the program. It relates to the hairy territory of intention versus impact, both in regards to teachers, and in regards to teachings.

Wide Open Heart Failures

Welcome to Miriam's Now-Monthly Missive on the Shambhala Situation,

I am writing to you again (Letter #1 is here and #2 is here) because regularity and requests have helped me assemble my thoughts and share them. As I find is often the case with practice,  structure helps create a container to show up in. Without structure, I would be overcome by doubt, or give in to the idea that I will just do it "eventually." Instead, I know folks are waiting to hear from me, and get a sense of what I am experiencing, what my questions are, and what resources I have to share.

I offer none of these letters as answers, instead, as a showing of my path of exploration, with hopefully some angles you haven't yet considered, and information you haven't yet tracked. There are a lot of things to track, and endless ways to think and feel about what is going on.

So please, listen to yourself first. May my sharing help you share - both with yourself and with others.

This edition consists of three parts. 

The first part is excerpts from readings I've done this summer from books and information sources I had read before, but now with a new context. The three books are Eyes Wide Open by Mariana Caplan, The Great Failure by Natalie Goldberg, and A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield.

I discovered Caplan's book through another Miksang teacher around ten years ago and was blown away by how she described relationship to practice. Her insights now about relating to teachers have taken on a whole new level with what has happened this summer in Shambhala.

Goldberg's book is her memoir about coming to terms with the imperfections of both her birth father and her dharma master, Katagiri Roshi, around sexual inappropriateness/misconduct. I read this also when it came out, and had a feeling of relief that Sakyong Mipham wouldn't do anything of the things described in the book that Katagiri Roshi did. More on that when we get to it....

Kornfield's title is one I have read portions of for Karuna Training, but someone on Facebook pointed it out it has an entire chapter on troubled relationships with teachers.

The second part is more personal reflections on leadership, holding space, and more.

The third part is similar to what I have shared at the end of each of these missives - further resources for reading, digesting, contemplating.

Please enjoy. Take breaks. Think and feel for yourself. I thank you for reading and for asking me to write about this. I take that assignment deeply inside and share back out what I find. Please feel free to share in comments - respectfully, thoughtfully, and with some space around what you have to say.

Love,
Miriam

Here Comes the Flood

It's been a very intense week in Dane County, Wisconsin.

On Sunday, I returned from co-teaching a week-long Karuna Training retreat at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico:

View of the road and Pedernal in the distance. Note the dryness, despite flash floods the first night we were there.

And on Monday night, we had severe and rapid enough thunderstorms to cause serious mass flooding not two blocks from my house in Madison. This is after one night of rain and a few days of having to release Lake Mendota to preserve the dam into the river that flows south to further, now overflowing, lakes:

What's in the middle of the photo is a bench and what's in front of it is normally sidewalk. Yahara River in Tenney Park.

Here are more photos to help you get a sense of what it is like around here right now.

If maps are more your style, check here. We live at N. Baldwin and E. Washington.

As you can see by the maps, we live on an Isthmus, which is a strip of land between two lakes. While Lake Mendota and Lake Monona are not "Great Lakes" (EG Superior or Michigan, which do border Wisconsin), they are pretty substantial. Not ponds. And over the last few days, I have learned a lot more than I used to know about these lakes and the land on which I live. Namely, that the lakes are kept extra high for recreational purposes; that the Isthmus was once and really should still be a marsh in most places (including where my house stands); and that our storm drain system is poorly managed.

We are facing what could be called a natural disaster, but actually, it's a man-made or man-contributed-to disaster. Of course, many have warned of this for years, but most of us weren't listening. And those who were listening (those in charge) were ignoring, for all the reasons we ignore things - money, denial, opposing interests.

A projected map that's been shown on and off for years, which is re-surfacing now. When it has been shared, it has mostly ignored by those in power repeatedly.

Of course, this land used to be cared for by native people who were driven out centuries ago in order to make a state capitol in this precarious but beautiful city. I am feeling all the layers of our mis-management, climate change, and colonialism coming home to roost this week, as we sandbag my house and those of loved ones and strangers nearby.

Ilana is currently wet-vacing the "normal" amount of water we have in the basement (when you live on an isthmus, you do get wet basements; at least that we are aware of) so we can re-seal the sewer drain (lest it pop up and fill our basement with shit, which it will do if too many houses flood) and hunker down for storms beginning this afternoon.

Ironically, because of where we live, we are both part of the current problem and also subject to the results of the solutions. They've been draining Lake Mendota, which is top in our four lake water system, and so the Lake closest to our house (by a hair, we are nearly equidistant between Mendota and Monona) is "safe" as you can see in this animation, where it remains below 100 year flood levels.

However, we are also very close to the Yahara River (two blocks) and the even bigger issue is that we are at a low spot on the Isthmus (around 851 feet above sea level) which means our storm drains are full right now and ready to burst at the slightest increase. We are less likely to flood because of either the lakes or rivers, but because our storm drains can't drain into either of those bodies of water. In fact, the last few days, water has been coming *out* of the drains and filling our streets. This is all really well explained historically in this incredible document (long read but worth it if you want to see how we got to this point in Madison).

So we are as ready as we can be, and now we wait. Will it rain? Too hard and too fast? Will they have to release Lake Mendota again, flooding the system and pushing water up out of our storm drains? Or will the storms pass to the North and West, which won't effect us immediately but a few days down the road? Or will it all dry up, like rains do in New Mexico?

Let all this preparation be in vain. Only some already have experienced the consequences, so what we are waiting for has already passed in Madison and surrounding areas recently. I am scared that so few of my neighbors - including those in much more direct possible impact from flooding - are doing nothing. The National Guard is standing by, filling more bags and forcing them on to streets that are already flooding.

All we can hope for for now is that none of it will be needed, that there won't be worse damage. And all we can hope for soon after it is over, if not during this time, is for the uppity ups to pay the fuck attention and work harder on our water system.

Critical Devotion: A Second Letter from Miriam on Shambhala

Dear reader,

I have wondered if there was another letter in me. The first letter, and the following piece came out like a birth and afterbirth - I wrote them quickly, while still in the full pain feeling strength of the beginning of the situation. Since then, I have noticed my feelings dulling a bit, not because the situation has gotten less intense, but because my need to feel so deeply has modulated itself. Not to mention the fact that more complex emotions and thoughts are layering on top of each other now.

But then a student told me how helpful the first letter was - in fact, she and other remote Shambhalians (those without centers near them) had used it as basis for a conversation about what is happening, and others wrote their own letters after reading mine. I realized I do have some things to say, but mostly I have confusion to report.

Why should I report confusion? Because if I do it clearly, others will possibly see their own confusion mixed in mine. And, even more likely, others - or even I - will see the wisdom mixed in the confusion, because that is how wisdom and confusion roll. So here is a mix of experience, emotion, and thought, offered to you in order to help you find some resonance and consolation, clarity, and direction. Please take what you can and leave what you can't; it's not offered as debate, really, more as a sense of what a leader/teacher in Shambhala is thinking and feeling about all of this.

In a conversation with a meditation student this morning, she offered that this situation is like a muddy river - which is an analogy we use a lot in meditation instruction in Shambhala. Our minds often seem more like muddy rivers, but when we sit, the true nature of the water begins to reveal itself: clear, so long as we let the mud not disappear but settle into place. This situation won't settle for awhile - we are going to be in a muddy river a long time it seems, but that doesn't mean we can't work with our minds. In some ways, that's the main thing we can do now.

If you haven't read the first letter, please do. Respect the time and effort I put into writing these and see the context. May they all be of benefit.

1. War Zone/Apocalypse
A couple of weeks ago, a senior teacher told me I am now living in a sort of war zone. I blinked. What on earth could he mean? He explained how it was for him, when he lived through CTR's death and also the awful incidents around the death of VROT. The situation was constantly changing, with very little predictability. Important people would suddenly drop power or be put out of power, and news hit like bombs, blowing apart communities. Infighting, confusion, mass chaos. Ergo, war zone.

A few days later, without my repeating that line, an Acharya I was speaking to repeated the same thing. Clearly there was some resonance here, as these two teachers don't even know each other.

Where I Am

(This is a further exploration - this time more felt sense - of what is "going on right now in Shambhala." See this previous blog post for the details/what is going on, and resources/links. I think this likely stands on its own as writing, but context can help. "Where I Am" is a default prompt from Saundra Goldman's #continuouspractice community.)

Revised image:
Sandstorm by Linda Mead (shared with me, and given permission to me by the artist,
because she thought of this piece she made previously while reading this writing). 

          
I am in the desert. I thought this was an oasis, a placed beyond place, a respite from all the loss, the losses of all these years. Fear kept me here, in this mirage, convinced of that "What you see is what you get."  

A Letter from Miriam on the Current Shambhala Situation

A drawing I made this week when I couldn't write about this yet.

I am writing today as a teacher, Vajrayana sangha member/student, and lineage holder in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition. Most of my life is deeply entwined in Shambhala; all I teach has at least some if not a lot of contact with Shambhala. Today is the end of a very long and hard week for those of us in Shambhala, and I want to write to you about some of my story this week with my feelings (first) then thoughts (second) and resources (last).

Some of these things have appeared elsewhere – in Facebook conversations, in personal exchanges with others – some of these are new. I wanted to compile them all together for myself, for my fellow sangha members who are suffering, and for those confounded by the news and outside the circumstance all together. Everything I say here is in my own words and my own experience, however, I don’t exist in a bubble and I have been greatly inspired, and supported by many folks this week, especially my Shambhala Office of Social Engagement peeps this week.

I will insert a trigger warning here, because there is mention of sexual abuse and clergy sexual misconduct. I myself am a sexual abuse survivor, though I have never experienced abuse in this lineage. Please read with care – lots of self-care and also care for me and for other survivors who tell their stories. 

The Surprise - and Not Surprise - of Death

This last Sunday, one of our long-term Madison Shambhala sangha members died. Fred Mather had ongoing health issues, heart ones amongst them, and so his death wasn't a surprise in a sense. Yet, of course, when we think someone might die soon and they don't, as happened a couple of times with Fred in the last few years, actual death comes as a surprise.

A friend asked today if I know how to handle death - then answered her self by saying I must, considering how many deaths I have been through. But I told her I don't really. I am not sure we ever know - she and I wondered over what "death skills" would be and how one acquires them - because each death is unique. And in addition, all the deaths I have experienced have either be traumatizing or re-traumatizing, so what I associate with death is trauma, not just grief and loss.

What is Contemplative Writing, Again?

Recently I had an experience in an online class where I found myself going off in a way different direction, while writing, than I expected. Actually, I didn't know what to expect, and I ran into a trigger - a memory which carries trauma associated with it. I made the decision to *not* write about that, and came up with this piece. The prompt was "What are birds saying?"

It helped *me* clarify some things about how contemplative writing relates to formal contemplative practices. So here, for your exploration, is the piece as I wrote it, with very little alteration.

What are the birds saying when? Immediately my mind scatters in many directions. I could write part of this memoir or that project. I could use this time to write about writing. But can I just be here, in my weekly air conditioned second floor home office, with a huge fan blowing semi-cool air around the room?             

There are no birds in here.            

Oh. Fuck.