No Islands in the Stream

A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him. Even when he tries to do good for others his efforts are hopeless, since he does not know how to do good to himself. In moments of wildest idealism he may take it into his head to make other people happy: and in so doing he willl overwhelm them with his own unhappiness. He seeks to find himself somehow in the work of making others happy. Therefore he throws himself into the work. As a result he gets out of the work all he put into it: his own confusion, his own disintegration, his own unhappiness.

-Thomas Merton
No Man Is An Island (1955)

I found this passage from Thomas Merton in a little pocket collection of his writings that is published by New Seeds Books and which I picked up at the Catholic bookstore in Old St. Mary's Church in San Francisco's Financial District (as oppposed to New St. Mary's Cathedral… down the hill on Geary) where I was on Palm Sunday looking for a small pendant that a friend of mine has and which I have been trying to find for some time. The pendant is a beautiful miniature metal sculpture representing a crown of thorns, and my friend wears it every year throughout Lent as a reminder of the suffering of Jesus and the call for us all to take up our share of that burden as well (at least that's how I interpret it, Mary may have a different pespective, and after all, it is her pin).

I never did find the pendant, but I did find this little book, and though I almost didn't buy it (I've already got quite a Merton collection that I have amassed over the last 30 years) I decided to plunk down the six bucks and take it along with me to read on the ferry as I road it over to Marin.

In the eight weeks since, I have read bits and pieces throughout the book, picking it up at odd times of the day when it sort of leaps out at me for some unconscious reason or another. This morning I began reading in a section that I started yesterday; a section entitled "A Theology of Love." It starts out non-threateningly enough with a look at the basic ideas that a theology of love would require, a sort of soft-edged liberation theology where the powerful are expected to live peacefully just like the poor are always forced to. It's a lesson that, it seems to me, should be taught right now to all the rabid christian activist types who keep proclaiming a "culture of life" while advocating everything from more war to a greater enforcement of the death penalty, to an anti-abortion stance that doesn't answer the basic question, "what about the baby after it's born?"

That section, coming from the book "Faith and Violence," and published nearly 40 years ago, was something I could shout "Amen" to while pumping my fist in the air and pondering the many ways I would like to see this gospel preached in our time. I could also picture any number of people I would like to personally confront with the idea. It was a satisfying image, a well-conceived rant.

It wasn't until this morning when I picked up the book after my morning meditation and paged through the next part of that section to find a new crucible for the day that I hit the passage above.

It stopped me dead in my proverbial tracks.

In one hundred twenty seven words, written a year after I was born, Merton has pinned my tail on the donkey. This could be my mini-biography, my lifelong manifesto, and my epitaph. Ebeneezer Scrooge, cowering at the feet of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, begs him to explain his vision: "Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead, but if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"

I look at the words and my life literally flashes before my eyes.

I see the day in Arizona when I shuttled everything I owned out of my parents' house and into my little car with the determination to be out and done… to get on with my life and away from the oppression and restriction of my parent's house; a task which, on certain occassions, my parents no doubt wish I had more adequately completed.

I see the day on Waller Street in San Francisco when I picked up a large bag of laundry and slammed it on the ground while screaming at my wife at the top of my lungs (about what I have no idea)... she walked back into the room, centered me with a look straight in the eye and said, "You're an asshole." She was right.

I see a night – a series of nights – in Sonoma where I screamed and raged with a fury that frightened my lover, and her children, so much that they felt the need to escape me, to run away and stay somewhere else. It frightened my own daughter so much that she recently reminded me of those nights and how sad it made her feel that she had been left behind with the monster that was me.

I see another occasion, when in a similar fight, I raged through our bedroom breaking things… lifting up a large beading table and smashing it to the floor. The rage was so extreme that Jennifer came to the door of the bedroom where I was slamming things around, and crying she screamed at me, "Please stop daddy!"

I see times when my daughter was unable to open her mouth to speak as she sat next to me in the car on our way to some supposedly important thing or another. She wouldn't speak, because she couldn't speak; her father screamed at her and berated her for being silent so much that the words she might have formed if she'd been given the chance, if her angry father could have been silent himself, were stolen from her, leaving only silence and a fearful tear in her eye.

I see bad decisions in business and horrible fights with old and dear friends. I see arrogant and selfish proclamations and self-involved angry, sometimes (but not always so easily explained) drunken declarations about what's obviously right and wrong. I see more misery than it's possible for me to even contain in the box of my life that I've been carrying around with me for the past ten months. And rightly so… because I've really been carrying it around for 52 years; I've only begun to catch a glimpse of what's really there during the last ten months.

It's not like these are the only scenes I hold in my mind; these aren't the only realities of my life. There are wonderful, celebratory meals, joyous laughter, good jokes, fun games and funny times. We had a lot of laughter stuck into the middle of so much sorrow and anger. I know how to celebrate as enthusiastically as I can argue, or at least almost.

But the thing is, it is in the words of Merton that I find the source of both the joy and the pain, for he's right; my motivation was to make other people happy. My reason for living, for as long as I can remember, for what seems like every day of my life, has been colored by that goal, and that complication, that Merton describes when he so perfectly describes what I have done so much, because I could do nothing other than "overwhelm them with [my] own unhappiness."

In another passage from the little book, this one taken from his 1971 book "Contemplation in a World of Action," Merton expands his analysis and in so doing, gives a glimpse at what can – what must – be done by a person like me. "He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others." Clearly, this is the key. In order to have something to give, one must find it, and nurture it, inside oneself first.

As I have been working on this reflection, I've been listening to Springsteen's new album of American folk classics, "We Shall Overcome." One of my favorite songs on the album is the old spiritual, turned civil rights anthem, "Eyes On The Prize." Beginning with the story of Paul and Silas in prison and then magically released, it moves to a declaration of both the personal and collective grasp at freedom: freedom of mind, heart, body and soul.

"The only thing I did was wrong
Was stay in in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold On
The one thing we did was right
Was the day we started to fight.
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold On"

I have indeed been in the wilderness too long and I've packaged it up and brought that wilderness out to too many people, in too many places, over far too long a time. I am sorry for that, and I want to aplogoize to everyone of the people who I have hurt in ways that only they know, whether it happened long ago or just last week.

Today I am beginning that journey again. The thing I know (from studying the labyrinth and living my life) is that the journey won't be a straight line or a smooth road, but today I am seeking to do that one thing right. I will fight a new fight; the fight to see the good, the true, the joyful, the hopeful and the best, inside myself and out in the world. The fight to live it out… every day. I really have very little idea what all that actually means, and I have some big questions about some of it (for example how does one express the sort of peace that Merton is talking about while also keeping a personal edge… an edge which I happen to value as a particularly significant part of my personality).

I also don't expect it's a fight that's easily, or rapidly, won, but it's got to be better (or certainly no worse) than the one I've been engaged in for the past 52 years.

Hillary Clinton runs for mayor of New Orleans

The great debate happened on Tuesday night and it might really have to qualify as the worst hour of television ever conceived... even more bizarre, and certainly far more boring, than the last episode of that weird show where they buried a group of people underground and made them argue about who was going to get a million dollars.

Slow Hand

I actually wrote this piece a couple of months back and I wasn't really sure that I wanted to put it (and it's somewhat depressing message) out into the world... but sitting here on the edge of hurricane season, following what I am sure will prove to be the last great hurrah of New Orleans before sometime close to Christmas, it feels as appropriate as it was back then, and perhaps more so.

The basic theme remains for sure... "Ain't nothin' rapid in New Orleans."

I heard that line on the street car on Canal Street back about two years ago on my way out to Jazz Fest one morening. You see the official name for the New Orleans Tranist authority is the REGIONAL Transit Authority… or RTA. When you come fomr other parts of the country and see RTA in reference to public transportaion you tend to think the "R" stands for Rapid (e.g. BART – Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority), but not in New Orleans. When a person on the streetcar made the comment that RTA must stand for Rapid Transit Authority, a local sitting next to her laughed and commented with the line above.

The good and the bad reality of the statement, is that it is absolutely true. Somewhere areound about the same time that I heard that comment I was given a book by Lafcadio Haynes, a french writer from the 19th century who wrote what was, at the time, a definitive look at New Orleans that continues to this day to be an extremely interesting window into the reality of the Crescent City. Early in his book, Haynes says essentially the same thing. He even uses a sort of pseudo-scientific analysis that suggests the fact that the heat in summer is so extreme that it absolutely requires a person to move more slowly and once you begin to move in this way, it becomes virtually impossible to change it.

The fact of the matter is that this is pretty much true.

It is both the boon and the bane of The Big Easy. Whether battling the all-encompassing oppressive heat of summer, or the infuriating sluggish resistance of FEMA, thre is something to be said for taking it easy. If you take a breath, sit a spell, or have a drink you can gain a better perspective, you can gain a sense of rhythm. As a former anxious obsessive, this was a lesson I first learned 6 years ago, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in San Francisco, when my daughter lectured me about not having a heart attack over my interaction with an asshole bus driver.

This lesson, which I only partially took to heart at the time, has been reinforced for me on the long term training program that I have been subjected to for the seven months since Katrina attacked my home and the federally built levees failed and flooded the city.

In any case… as I was saying… I have over the seven months since Katrina learned a real lesson in patience and slow progress. It's a way to stay sane when nothing is going on or getting done. It's a survival mechanism in this situation as much as it is in the heat of the dog days of summer.

BUT… and here's the kicker… it is also the death knell to progress.

Walking around New Orleans on this beautiful sunny but cool weekend I was astonished (as I always am) at the ridiculous amount of trash that is still lying around. Debris that coulda, shoulda, woulda been picked up six months ago in any city where people actually possessed the ambition to make their city look good. Maybe I'm talking through my hat here, but I don't think so.

When the storm hit on August 29, I had evacuated to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and the house I stayed in was completely inundated by falling pine trees. The house itself lucked out and sustained almost no damage, but the surrounding yard was a complete jumble of uprooted trees, and broken limbs; a tangle of debris like I had never seen before in my life (and as bad as anything I've seen in the non-flooded areas of New Orleans). The very next day (while New Orleanians were just trying to survive the rising tide) I was out in the yard (in 95 degree Mississippi heat and 90 percent humidity) with three other people, a 51 year old woman, an 80 year old grandmother, and a 20 year old man. The four of us together, over ten hours one day and about eight hours the next, cleared all that we could from the yard, chopping, raking, and lugging everything from bags of leaves to huge stumps. Without air conditioning, enough water, ice or very much food, we picked up everyting we could. By the third day, when I left Hattiesburg for my trek north, a small crew had been hired to cut the rest of the debris and haul everything away to the dump. The place was fixed up before the end of the week.

There's only one reason for this (and I didn't have anything to do with it). The homeowner - the aforementioned 80 year old grandmother – was determined to get back to normal as quickly as possible. She took the devastation in her yard PERSONALLY and decided that she was going to do some PERSONAL about it. It was an astonishing (and sometimes annoying) demonstration of determination, but it was motivating and revealing. Hell… if the other three of us hadn't gotten out there to help her, she would have done it by herself and then we really would have felt ashamed. Her neighbor from across the street kept wandering over and staring at us in disbelief. He even tried to convince us not to work so hard. For all I know, the big tree in his yard is still there.

In New Orleans right now there is an abundance of large trucks that could haul 90 percent of the remaining debris from the houses, curbs and yards that still stand piled ten feet high in garbage, but on a cool, comfortable day like this past Sunday, I saw not a single truck moving through the city hauling anything. There are some folks who are putting their backs into it and cleaning up large sections of the city and the day that I volunteered with Katrina Krewe to cleanup a section of Claiborne Avenue it was extremely exhileratinng and enjoyable. I keep planning on going back to help some more, but even I succumb to the overwhelming tendancy toward lethargy. There is just so much to be done, and far too few people actually bothering to do it. Seven months after the storm these piles of debris really have no reason for still being here except for the fact that the ongoing perception, whether local, state, federal or personal is that somebody else, at some other time, will take care of it.

In three months the weather is going to be hot as hell and the work will be moving even more slowly than it is now.

The piles on the street will still be there.

Ain't nothin' rapid in New Orleans.

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[SIDE NOTE: As Harry Shearer continues to point out on his radio show and in his blog on HuffPo, it wasn't a hurricane that killed New Orleans… that would have been bad enough… but it was the protection system built by the Army Corps of Engineers, a protection system which they continue to discover faults in, that failed the city.

People in other areas who condescendingly view New Orleans with disbelief and can't figure out why we haven't gotten over our issues need to remember that these levee systems, built and maintained by the federal government, were what failed New Orleans (followed rather closely by the complete inability of FEMA to step up to the emergency and help). YOU ARE IN DANGER… Whether from hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, or terorism… The feds are your line of protection and their protection is none too good. So, before you start (or continue) to spout off, like the guy from Berkeley I read on Sunday, about what OUGHT to be done with New Orleans… put yourself in our place. You may be there sooner than you think.]