Sunday Letters – Page 22 – Notes from the Woods

Even the Smallest Breathing

In last week’s letter I mentioned my friend in West Africa. I want to tell you more about him today.

His name is Modoulamin, and he lives on the outskirts of Brikama, one of the few large cities in the nation of The Gambia. He’s twenty years old.

Our conversation began in early March when he responded to a post I made on a social media site, and before long, we became friends, exchanging messages almost daily. I was guarded and cautious, being well aware of online scams. But our exchange was cordial, and he asked nothing from me. He told me about his family and his country and asked about mine.

His English wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to understand for the most part. He came across as a warm, direct, and remarkably intelligent young man. Only later would I l see how remarkable he truly is. He had made it through the 10^th level of school, he said. Then his life took quite a turn. His father disappeared.

Out of sympathy for his circumstances, his school allowed him to continue for a while. But given its own limited resources, the extension of time came to an end, along with his education. He wanted to be a tailor, he said.

The family never learned what happened to the father. Modoulamin’s mother was pregnant when he disappeared, and shortly after the birth of her child, she contracted malaria and died. It was a devastating loss, and it left seventeen-year-old Modoulamin as the head of the household, with a newborn, three siblings ranging in age from two through twelve, and a grandmother to care for.

Raising enough money to provide food for all of them was a great challenge, and soon the family found themselves homeless. They remained homeless for three years. Only a month ago were they able to rent a humble house, with no electricity or water, that serves as shelter.

To support them, Modoulamin walks for two hours each day to a forest where he chops wood to sell at the market so he can buy rice and, if he’s lucky, maybe some small fish and vegetables for their meal. Then he walks home, exhausted, and tends to duties there.

He sent me a photo someone took of him drawing water in a bucket from a stone well to fill a large plastic jug. It would have been, I thought, very heavy to carry. In another photo, he showed me the children sleeping in a huddle inside a torn mosquito netting draped from the limb of a scrawny tree.

“Here we don’t have a tent. We just sleep like this, and at night it is cold, and we have many mosquitoes that cause malaria, which easily kill people,” he said. And the mosquitoes weren’t the only threat. Thieves sometimes killed the homeless, too, just to take their food or money.

When they finally moved into the little house, Modoulamin told me it was the first time the three year old had ever slept under a roof.

Life for him is tedious, an endless struggle to keep his family together and alive. But he perseveres. “Family love is the strongest love,” he told me.

When the corona virus made it to his country, it went into lockdown. Now soldiers were guarding the forest, and to go there would mean a beating and arrest. Meanwhile, Grandmother injured her foot and it became infected, compounding what seemed to be symptoms of malaria. Only with the charity of friends have they been able to survive.

“Such is life, Susan,” Modoulamin said. “God will decide what will happen. But as humans, we have to consider each other’s life and value it as the greatest asset.” This! From a 20-year-old!

The one thing Modoulamin’s parents left to him was their life-long dream. They wanted the family to have their own patch of land, where they could construct a shelter and put in a garden so they could be safe and have food. They worked for it for over twenty years without success, and their dream burns with a passion in Modoulamin’s heart.

This past week, someone in town put a small plot of land up for sale. It’s cheap for the area, only $8,000, near the market, away from the criminal threat, and it has electricity available. If he could buy it, Modoulamin said, he could construct a shelter and the children could work a garden, and he would be able to extend his range in search of work that would provide a dependable living. “Always,” he told me, “I think about how can I get the children into school.”

He hasn’t slept for days, wracking his brain for some way to raise such an impossible sum of money. Was there anything I could do, he asked, knowing that my own circumstances are barely sufficient to cover my needs. Land is demand. He would need to act soon before the opportunity is lost. Did I have any ideas?

To Modoulamin, and to me, $8,000 sounds like eight million. Plus, he tells me, he would need several thousand more to build a protective wall around it. But every day I read about donations far larger being made to causes far less worthy than that of helping my brave and humble young friend achieve his precious dream.

I have set up a GoFundMe page for him now. Maybe it will keep the family fed, pay the rent on the humble shelter he managed to secure, and keep his internet connection intact while he saves toward his dreams.

He uses the Net to work on his education. He’s registered to take classes for his West African Secondary School Education Certificate, and he and I are working together to help him earn his GED. He learned clothing construction in school and loves to design and create clothes. He would like to make that a career.

I know we have around us so many in desperate straits right now. But I think of the starfish story. Remember it?

A young boy was tossing stranded and suffocating starfish into the ocean after a large wave swept them far onto the sand. “You can’t save all those starfish!” a passing man said to him.

“I know,” the boy answered, flinging one into the water. “But I can save this one.”

Maybe Modoulamin can be our starfish. I figure If enough of you reading this toss in a contribution, maybe his whole family can be free to swim. He would do everything in his power to build good lives for them all. And if we can’t raise enough to purchase the little plot of land, at least we might be able to provide him with enough to rent a house for a time. The rainy season is coming.

I told him I would ask you, but that I could make no promises.

“No matter what, we have to be grateful for what we have” he said. “Even the smallest breathing from God is a blessing.”

Please help if you can. And even if you can give no more than your prayers, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Warmly,
Susan

Use Your Words

Like you, I am greeting the morning with a heavy heart. The events unfolding before us are stunning, to say the least. Who would have believed we would see so much violence, destruction and pain erupt so suddenly to engulf our entire nation!

A friend of mine in West Africa messaged me to ask if I was okay. He had heard about the troubles and that they were racist in origin. I assured him that I was well and not in any immediate danger. I told him there is a phrase, “fog of war,” that means things are very confused when violent events are unfolding, and that we are wise not to leap to conclusions or cast early blame. Especially when events are as large as this, the causes are complex and multi-layered and will take time to sort out.

Then I told him a story a neighbor told me. She and her husband had gone to a nearby town on some errands today. It’s a small town of about 9,000, with a racially mixed population with low to medium incomes for the most part. On the grassy median that divides the main street, my friend told me, a white woman was holding a sign that said, “Free Food,” and a couple black women were handing boxes of groceries and produce to anyone who asked for it. That’s the America I know and believe in.

Even in the midst of the riots that are raging in our cities, I have seen videos of people coming to the aid of those in need–protecting them, offering comfort, working in teams to clean up debris. At our core, that’s who we are, and we will see Americans of every stripe step forward in the days ahead, coming together to rebuild and restore.

It won’t be easy. We are, after all, still coping with the pandemic, and we have no idea what course it will run in the days ahead. And we need to create a unifying vision to bridge all the rifts that have divided us on so many fronts.

One thing we can all certainly agree on is that violence and destruction offer no solutions. No matter how much frustration or anger we are feeling, we need to find creative and constructive ways to deal with each other.

Another friend of mine told me a story that holds one key to how we can do that. One of his relatives has a toddler who is still in his “terrible twos.” He wants what he wants, and he wants it now, and he screams when he doesn’t get it. He’s sort of a microcosm of what’s going on in our society. His mom, as it turns out, is a very smart woman. When he begins to get upset, she tells him, “Use your words. Use your words.” That’s what we all need to learn to do right now–to find the words to say what we want, to express to each other what we need and to talk together about we can help each other meet our needs.

In the meantime, we need to remember that all of us are suffering. We need to exercise patience with each other. And above all, we need to make every effort to be kind.

We’re all part of the human family. We all want peace, however strained it may be from time to time. And the only place peace can begin is within each of our hearts. Be kind.

The Diamond Necklace

“You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck.” ~Rumi

It’s the lesson I’m learning again and again as I practice being a joy-warrior: Joy is always right here. And the only that keeps me from seeing it is the cloud of stories I stir up as I trip into one of life’s potholes. I’ve learned how it works. You hit a bump and a little wash of emotional discomfort seeps into your system. To explain it, your mind pulls out a story you have associated with the feeling in the past. Focusing on the story, you generate more of the associated feelings and fill in more details of the story, and round and round you go until reality interrupts.

I’ll tell you the most embarrassing instance of this that I remember. I was sitting on the couch in my living room remembering an argument I had the night before with a friend. I was still mad, and I revived the argument in my head, getting madder by the minute, arguing more. Finally I decided I needed a cup of coffee and I went to the kitchen and poured two cups, one for me and one for my friend, still arguing all the time. Not until I walked back into the living room with the cups of coffee in my hands did I realize my friend wasn’t even there. The whole argument was nothing more than a figment of my imagination. To my credit, I remember laughing at myself as I realized the reality of the situation.

I was looking for the diamond necklace. In this case, it was a desire for restored peace between my friend and me. And the fact was our friendship was as secure and sparkling as it had ever been. I had allowed the memory of one little argument to catch me up in a story that I built into a a blinding war. In truth, it didn’t matter that his opinion was different than mine. We loved each other anyway. Our friendship was big enough to accommodate some differences.

Life handed me another exercise in remembering my diamond necklace this morning. It wasn’t nearly as drastic. I simply woke to a piece of irritating news and was stewing over it as I went to the kitchen to start breakfast. But outside my windows, the azalea’s bright pink blossoms were glowing against the fresh green world beyond it, and suddenly a little hummingbird appeared and darted from blossom to blossom. No mere story could stand against such a sight. Joy was right there, right that very moment. All I had to do was let in its radiant light.

That’s always the case. It’s only our stories that get in the way of remembering our joy , the tales we spin in our mind, roaming from room to roam, looking for the diamond’s sparkle when its with us all the time. This week I ran across a little set of instructions for getting to the space where the diamonds shine. It’s from an ancient Indian teacher named Tilopa. Here’s what he says: “Let go of what has passed. Let go of what may come. Let go of what is happening now. Don’t try to figure anything out. Don’t try to make anything happen. Relax, right now, and rest.”

I wrote the words “Let go of what is happening now” on a card and set it on my desk. Seeing it, I smile. It’s such a gift when reminders come along, isn’t it?

May you find them dropping into your life this week like gentle flower petals. And may your diamonds always shine.

A Breath of Fresh Air

The clouds were heavy and low and had been hanging overhead for days. Whether they were a mirror of my mood or I was mirroring them, I didn’t know. But I was stuck in a world of negativity, feeling oppressed, obsessed with the darkness, railing against it, forgetting how to be free, or even that freedom from it was possible.

Then, one morning, after a stormy night, I woke to sound of a bird singing from a branch outside my window, and I opened my eyes to see the sun rising into a clear, blue sky from a horizon drenched in gold. It startled me. And all at once I realized it had been there all along, this clarity, this light, just beyond the clouds.

From the time I was a child, nature has been my teacher. I grew up on the shores of the vast Saginaw Bay in Michigan, and one of the first lessons I learned was the one the waves taught me. Life has a rhythm, a constant washing in of waves. Sometimes they’re slow and gentle. Sometimes they rage and crash against the shore. But it’s always a dance, always in motion. And I was like the shore, a partner in the dance, responding the rhythms and moods of the waves, whatever they might be, harmonizing with them, and welcoming them, for they always brought gifts.

The midweek sunrise reminded me of that again. Storms end. Above the clouds, the sky is clear and sparkling with light.

Like everybody else, I fall prey to fighting against the clouds that engulf us from time to time. I forget that they have a purpose. Their darkness pulls us into ourselves, to experience the darkness within, to find the judgments and pain that are obstacles to our joy so that we may understand and release them.

That’s the key to freeing yourself from negativity’s oppression. You have to accept that it comes to you with gifts, to sit down with it and ask it what it has come to show you, what it needs from you, what it is asking you to see and understand.

On the morning when the sun returned to my life, I looked back on the clouds that were disappearing into the night to see what gifts they had left behind. Where had my thoughts been focused while they were oppressing me? What was it they wanted me to see and understand?

I had, they told me, been battling against, instead of reaching for.

Oh.

That was quite true.

I thanked them, and sheepishly smiled, glad for the reminder, rolling my eyes over the fact that this was a lesson I seemed to need to revisit again and again and again. Then I laughed. Such is the life of a joy-warrior.

But at least, for this beautiful morning, I was seeing the sunlight once more, and breathing in the springtime’s fresh air. I would take this day, I vowed, to be joyful, and grateful, and glad, and to share its light with kindness and a smile for whomever it brought my way.

Today, that’s you. And I look into your eyes and tell you, “Life is good.” Trust that, No matter what.

A Word About Freedom

“No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
— Edmund Burke

I want to talk with you about fear today–the one we’re being programmed to adopt because of the COVID-19 virus.

I’m not at all in the mood to write my usual encouraging piece, except to encourage you to wake up and realize that our freedom is being taken from us. And if our freedom goes, here in the United States, it goes for everyone, world wide. It’s time to stand up and reclaim our lives and our liberty. It’s time to open our factories and businesses and stores, to resume our social interactions. It’s time to demand our freedom.

This is no longer about a virus, and perhaps it never was. But that’s a topic for another day.

For now, let’s just look at the facts that contradict the narrative we’re being sold.

The virus kills less than 1% of the people who are affected by it, and between 30-50% of those who have died with it are elderly with underlying medical conditions, living in nursing homes.The risk is far less than that posed by the ordinary seasonal flu and yet we’re allowing ourselves to be imprisoned in our homes as if contacting each other poses a life-threatening risk.

In Ventura, California,where a total of 19 people have died, teams of up to 20,000 workers are being assembled that will go home-to-home testing everyone for the virus. If you test positive, and if you live in a home where you share a bathroom or any other room with another family member, you will be forcibly taken away and quarantined “in other kinds of places we have available” under the team’s watchful eye with daily visits. They will question all who test positive to determine the names of anyone they may have contacted in the last two weeks, and those people will be tested and quarantined , too, if they happen to test positive.

And how reliable are these tests? This week, samples of tissues taken from a paw-paw fruit and from a goat were given human names and sent to a lab for testing. Guess what? They tested positive. A fruit, for God’s sake! And on the basis of this test, you, or your wife or husband or child could be forcefully removed from your home.

We are told we must wear masks, in case we might cough and contaminate everything around us. You might think your cough is an allergy or a response to some nearby odor, the argument goes, but many who have the virus are “asymptomatic.” They show no signs yet of being sick and still may have the virus. Or they were previously ill and recovered, but could still be shedding the virus. Maybe. We wouldn’t want to take any chances. So if you do not wear a mask, you could be fined or jailed. Even if you’re in the wide open spaces of a park with no one within 20 feet of you. Even though the masks are easily penetrated by the virus. Even though they cut down on the oxygen available for you to breathe. Even though most people end up touching them frequently and often wear the same mask repeatedly.

It makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s irrational, and nothing more, at this point, than an effort to train you to comply with authority, even though that authority is acting illegally and, as the courts themselves have rules, in violation of your essential constitutional rights.

“But we have to be safe!” you might argue. From what? From the potential of contracting an illness that, while unpleasant, to be sure, is far less threatening to your life than the flu to which you have been exposed every single year of your life. And for this, we will put a third of our work force out of work, forcing people into bread lines, causing them to lose their businesses and life-savings, their retirement accounts, and their homes?

Some will continue to be afraid and will argue that associating with each other as we did mere weeks ago could cause infections to increase. The fear-mongering has been incessant after all. Let’s compromise with them. Let’s put aside arguments in favor of building immunity through exposure. Let’s allow those who believe it wise to wear masks and keep their distance from each other do so. But let’s allow those who choose to mingle freely, turning their bare faces to the sun, breathing in fresh air, to live as they decide as well.

I saw a sign at a protest this week that said, “My freedom doesn’t end where your fear beings.” And I must second that notion. I agree with Ben Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” and are bound to lose both.

The Compass

Let’s face it. We aren’t going to fix the world in our short days here. But we can contribute to its betterment by filling our days with the choices we make for goodness, hour by hour, in our own lives.

Inside us all, regardless of the form our beliefs take, is a compass that guides us toward the recognition of beauty, and goodness, and truth. We may not always succeed in following that guidance. We’re all too easily distracted by the promise of satisfaction of less worthy desires. We give in to anger and resentment, to the glitter and thrill of false gold and false gods. We grab at immediate satisfaction of passing desires instead of taking a more long-range view and aiming toward higher goals. We choose ease over effort.

But our inner compass continues to guide us nonetheless. Its light cannot be extinguished. And in that fact lies our hope.

I may have fallen short of my ideals today. But the ideals themselves survive. And at every moment, I am free to choose to make choices more in alignment with them. Even when I don’t feel like it. Even when I’m tired, and worn, and discouraged or depressed. And something in me knows, absolutely knows, that choosing the thoughts, the words, and the deeds toward which my inner compass points will bring me deeper satisfaction and more joy than persisting in my mistaken ways.

I can choose to act with kindness and respect even when I am awash with irritation or disgust. And doing so will shift things. It will expand my capacity for patience and open me to the possibilities for compassion, and forgiveness, for friendship, for love.

As it to prove my point, the outer world suddenly throws my train of thought off the tracks. Interruptions are the greatest enemy of the writer I once heard a fellow author say. They can make you want to pull your hair out.

I decide to take a break to gather my thoughts and to walk outside to greet the beauty of this mild spring day. Tulips and a daffodil are blooming in my garden, and wildflowers grace the hill. I stoop to take photos of them and of the unfurling ferns. Then I return to my laptop, a fresh cup of coffee at my side, and begin to focus. Before I can type a single word, I become aware of a slight tingling on my upper arm. It’s a tick, burrowing into my flesh. I race to find the cedar oil to spray on it, causing it to back out, and the tweezers to remove it.

I notice a wave of anger and resentment rising in me. The toxicity of the ticks we have here is, my research has led me to believe, man-made, much like the strain of virus that has set the whole world into a tizzy. The evils we face are horrendous and pervasive. As you become aware of them, it’s tempting to sink into despair. But that would be a surrender to them. And as a committed Joy Warrior, I refuse to allow them to win.

As I return to my writing, I pause for one last glimpse out the window. The chipmunk has come to eat the walnut meats that I set out for him on my walk. Behind him, the growing leaves of the lilac bush dance in a gentle wind. I let myself drink in the loveliness of the scene and it acts as an elixir, extinguishing my anger, replacing it with an awareness of omnipresent grace.

It’s a choice. We can be conscious of the wrongs that assault us and rail against them. Or we can open ourselves to the abundance of goodness that surrounds us and find in it hope that we will yet overcome the forces of darkness. If we can do that, if we can look for the good, we can build on it. We can allow it to clarify our understanding of what nourishes life and decide to play our parts in furthering those things.

Each of us has our own unique role to play, our own unique set of weapons to use in the fight for goodness. It’s our job, our duty, to discover and develop our most suitable roles, to hone those strengths that are most suited to us individually. And we do that by attuning ourselves to the guidance of our inner compass and determining to follow it. Yours will likely be a wholly different role than mine. We need us all. We are in this battle together. And every choice that we make counts. Even the smallest, the ones we make moment-to-moment.

Be strong. Be determined not to give in. Be honest. Honor and respect the roles that others play. Do good wherever and however you can. Forgive yourself and others when we fall prey to the weaker sides of our nature, and lift each other up. Believe in our resiliency. Believe in your inner compass, and know that its name is Love. Then fight on, choice by choice. We’re counting on you.

Got a Minute?

Every now and then I like to pull a book from my shelves and see what’s waiting on the page to which I randomly open it. It’s a fun game, and more often than not, the words I find seem surprisingly relevant to whatever is going on in my thoughts or circumstances at the time.

On a whim, I did that today. And what I found was this little verse:

Life is just a minute
Only sixty seconds in it,
Forced upon you, can’t refuse it.
Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it,
But it’s up to you to use it.
You must suffer if you lose it,
Give an account if you abuse it,
Just a tiny little minute,
But eternity is in it.

For those of us who are still spending our days closed in our homes, every minute just might feel as if it lasts for eternity! Somebody made a comment on social media this week that she felt she was living in the movie “Groundhog Day,” where every day was exactly like the one before.

But the truth is that every minute is wholly unique. Everything is constantly changing. And it is our choice how to view that minute, how to use it. Like our breath, it’s a precious gift. It’s a moment of our life, holding all life’s mystery and potential. And we are completely free to choose how we will spend it.

We can let it pass by without notice, our attention lost in dreams of moments past or in fantasies of moments yet to come. Or we can use it as a stepping stone that moves us closer to accomplishing a goal we have in mind. We can see it as an opportunity, a invitation to move in a new direction, a door opening to a future where we get to be exactly who we want to be.

We can see it as a vehicle to carry away what we no longer want or need–our sadness, our pain, our anger, our despair.

It’s so malleable, so open, so completely ready to be whatever we choose to make of it. Isn’t that absolutely amazing?

It’s easy to think that this minute must wear the colors of the moment that came before it, that it must continue the same line of thought, the same mood. But that simply isn’t true. This minute, this one we’re living in right now, is wholly subject to our will. We’re free to make of it anything we choose.

But not only are we free to do with it as we will, we’re responsible for how we will choose to use it.

We can choose to let it be a moment of clarity and excellence and purpose. We can use it to fuel ourselves, to give ourselves rest. We’re free to stand still in it and see its incredible beauty, or to dance in it, or to fill it with love and kindness or with laughter and joy.

We’re free to waste it, too. But don’t do that. A minute might seem like such a little thing. But you only get so many of them, you know? And you never know when the next one might be your last. Make ‘em count.