Bringing It All

Learning a Lesson from Ducks

I need not remind you of what we’re going through. It feels like being assaulted with a nail gun, with sharp objects shooting at us non-stop at tremendous velocity. It feels like our skin is crawling with revulsion, our stomachs doing acrobatic stunts. The vulnerability index is rising in direct proportion to the decline in the democracy index. Last night, I made the mistake of tuning in to Bill Maher, always provocative, occasionally funny. This time wearing a thoughtful, choir boy expression on his face, he reported on his dinner at the White House. How gracious DJT was, how hospitable, how open to criticism. He said they laughed together. That’s when I lost it. Do you suppose Kilmar Abrego Garcia is laughing? Do you suppose he believes the person inexplicably running this country is gracious? Every hideous possibility that we thought could not possibly happen seems to be happening. And that’s without being incarcerated in El Salvador.

We are called, Thich Nhat Hahn says, to be warriors, as well as meditators and artists. The meditation grounds us in a larger, more spacious reality. The art opens us to new ideas, creative responses. The warrior in us keeps us from folding under pressure, in a word….from quitting. I’m searching for an image that allows me to envision a warrior figure that’s not violent, destructive, dehumanizing. Sure enough, the ducks have come out on the pond outside my condo in Minnesota. Ducks, you say?

Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash

I’ve only been back for six days so the ducks and I are getting re-acquainted. We are both new in town this season and have much to learn. I observe them gliding along, their iridescent green heads held high. It occurs to me that the effortless gliding is an illusion. They’re actually propelling themselves by pedaling with their rubbery feet under the water. So much is happening that is not visible. So much motion is unfolding under the surface. I remind myself of resistance movements past, of the dismantling of apartheid, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, of women’s suffrage and the Freedom Riders, to scratch the surface of the long history of warriors rising up in the face of oppression. The warrior in us is crucial but it’s the artist in us that cultivates the imagination to see what might be possible and the meditator in us that elevates the capacity for patience until what might be has become. Or, another way of looking at it…The meditator opens us to what is. The warrior engages in the struggle for something better. And the artist mediates between the two, allowing us to be present to the future.

We can’t barrel through this. We have to look like we’re gliding even though under the surface we are animated by determination. Each of us will have a different way of surviving, a different way of contributing, in keeping with who we are, how we identify ourselves. This is true even though my Buddhist side reminds me that there is no such thing as the separate self. This is true even though my Jewish side finds all the matzoh a little tough on her particular digestive system.

Everything changes. I visited the Berlin Wall in 1964. The Wall was not a rhetorical phrase like “Iron Curtain.” It was a concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin and featured armed soldiers on guard towers. I experienced my visit there as a a deep encounter with history. I was just an American college kid touring around Europe the year “A Hard Day’s Night” was playing in all the movie theaters. I wasn’t trapped. I wasn’t imprisoned. But for some 200 East Germans, the Wall was a provocation that called out to them. They died trying to get to the other side until the Wall came down in 1989. And then everything changed. The land on the outskirts of the city was still there, the linden trees were still growing, but the meaning of that place was forever altered. Think of reading the same Torah portion in the annual cycle and hearing a different meaning each time. Think of the seder this year, reading the same story in the haggadah, eating the same horseradish, but knowing that something is radically different. Different is sometimes good and sometimes bad but is always the heart of things. When it’s bad, as it certainly is now, we have to bring all of ourselves. We have to glide like meditating ducks paddling their warrior feet under the water while looking out through artist’s eyes.

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