2004 Fall<\/p>\n
Katy Butler searches for the Buddha on the campaign trail.<\/em><\/p>\n ON A WINDY SPRING EVENING last year, shortly after the 139th American soldier had died in Iraq and President Bush had declared an end to \u201cmajor combat operations,\u201d my partner, Brian, and I drove to our local Borders bookstore, met up with a bunch of strangers huddled around a truck in the parking lot, and signed out names to a petition on the clipboard someone was passing from hand to hand. Within a few weeks, I was standing outside a summer arts festival wearing a button reading \u201cHoward Dean for America\u201d and trying to give voter registration forms to passing strangers.<\/p>\n I had never volunteered in a political campaign before. Partly because I came of age during the Vietnam War, and partly because I was born in South Africa and have never felt completely American, I had long defined \u201cpolitics\u201d as going to peace demonstrations, writing checks to the Sierra Club, and, almost as an afterthought, voting. I had been far more devoted to my practice as a Buddhist than to my practice as a citizen.<\/p>\n In my thirties, I hadn\u2019t thought twice about rising each day before dawn, putting on a white jubon (undershirt) and a heavy black kimono, and driving through half-deserted streets in my odd, un-American clothes to sit facing a wall in the basement of the San Franciso Zen Center. In my forties, I\u2019d willingly spent $700 every year or so to fly from California to France and study with the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Nowadays I consider my time well spent when I get up early to sit alone, or recite the lay precepts with others at our local community center.<\/p>\n Bur before the Iraq war, I had never written a substantial check to a political candidate or given a single hour the mindfulness, detachment, and calm cultivated on the meditation cushion. It fostered greed, hate, delusion, and an overwhelming desire to just plain win. Better, perhaps, to simplify and quiet one\u2019s outer world and thus quiet and simplify the inner one. Better to be kind to one\u2019s neighbor, to smile at the man in the next car on the freeway. Better to make a nest in a parallel culture, as separate as possible from the violence and corruption of the larger one.<\/p>\n But by the time Brian and I found ourselves in that parking lot, such sentiments no longer spoke to me. Brian has two nephews who are serving as helicopter pilots in Iraq. In photographs taped to our refrigerator, they grin out at us, strong and bright-eyed, their arms <\/p>\n I WANTED TO REMOVE PRESIDENT BUSH FROM OFFICE FIRST AND PONDER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE IN THE HUMAN HEART LATER.<\/p>\n flung around the shoulders of other members of their traditional Catholic and military family. Their faces remind me of a retreat I once attended in the orange groves outside Santa Barbara, with Thich Nhat Hanh, other Vietnamese monks and nuns, and a dozen Vietnam veterans. The veterans were strong men, but not cocky. They looked as if they\u2019d had the corners knocked off them. During the retreat, one former Marine asked forgiveness from the Vietnamese attendees for having torched villagers\u2019 homes; another told me of murdering children; a third of finding family photographs on the body of a man he\u2019d been forced to kill.<\/p>\n Thar is why I signed my name to that clipboard\u2014not because I thought of electioneering as an ideal expression of the bodhisattva ideal, or considered Dean an embodiment of mindfulness in politics. (In fact, 1 was afraid I\u2019d lose my practices of mindfulness and self-care, and Dean reminded me of a short, well-muscled kid who wasn\u2019t afraid to get in the face of the class bully. ) I signed because I wanted to do something to directly affect the fates of Brian\u2019s nephews, the Iraqi families their helicopters fly over, and the 660 unnamed men living in converted cargo containers at Guant\u00e1namo Naval Base. I signed because I was sick of reading the newspaper and having helpless, repetitive, disempowered, angry conversations with Brian in which we called President Bush names.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t want Buddhism to be my excuse for sitting on the sidelines any longer\u2014it hadn\u2019t kept me, after all, from shopping at Banana Republic, or buying a house, or driving a half-ton car. I didn\u2019t want to do something indirect, like teaching meditation in a prison or doing a walking meditation for peace in a public park. I wanted to remove President Bush from office first and ponder questions about the roots of violence in the human heart later. I wanted to get down in the mud and wrestle with the pig.<\/p>\n I remembered a conversation I\u2019d once had with the Zen priest Issan Dorsey\u2014a street bodhisattva and former female impersonator and speed addict who started Maitri Hospice in San Francisco. \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t been practicing Buddhism, I wouldn\u2019t have been so deeply involved in the AIDS crisis,\u201d he\u2019d told me. \u201cBefore, 1 didn\u2019t like uncomfortable situations. Now I can\u2019t stay away.\u201d<\/p>\n UNTIL THAT SPRING, I had lived quietly in Mill Valley, outside San Francisco: bicycling to my office, spending the day writing, walking in the hills, and bicycling back to our house in Homestead Valley, a forested canyon on the edge of town. In the mornings I\u2019d rise before dawn, leaving Brian asleep in our bed, to savor the silent hour when the day stretched before me like unblotted snow. With a mug of green tea in hand, I\u2019d look out of my study window and watch the morning light creep down the canyon ridges, illuminate the big willow above my neighbor\u2019s rooftop, and bring color back to the world. It was a precious hour, before I\u2019d even meditated, before I\u2019d spoken to anyone or heard another voice, before I knew of a single mistake anyone else in the world had made, and before I\u2019d made any of my own.<\/p>\n That medicative hour did not survive the summer.<\/p>\n In August, when U. S. military death count in Iraq was up to 287, 1 became chair of the local Dean public relations committee. Before long, I was starting each day at my computer in my nightgown, posting messages on the Dean blogsite and answering an hour\u2019s worth of emails. I slept badly. Brian started calling me Mrs. Dean. By September I had written Dean three $100 checks, handed out leaflets, set up chairs at meetings at a community center, written and edited press releases, and was volunteering twenty hours a week. That month, a member of our public relations committee quit, saying that under my leadership, \u201cIt just isn\u2019t fun anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n I was up against the raw edge of the personality I wish I didn\u2019t have: easily agitated, sometimes arrogant, and wedded to my own notions of how things should be done. Six months earlier, I had withdrawn from my local sitting group because I couldn\u2019t agree with my coleader on whether to pass a basket for contributions or leave it on a table by the door Now I was arguing with a Dean committee chair (a fellow Buddhist, as it happened) over whether to hold a Meetup at the community center or at a Mexican restaurant downtown.<\/p>\n Via the emails that I sent, received, and was copied on, I was plunged into a river of aroused emotion\u2014of others as well as my own. I got a furious email from someone who didn\u2019t like a flyer I\u2019d designed, and another one five paragraphs long after I ran a classified ad without an RSVP. \u201cPlease don\u2019t yell at me, Marianne,\u201d read one email I was copied on by a member of my committee. \u201cWhen you send an email in ALL CAPS, that\u2019s yelling.\u201d<\/p>\n Thirty years of practice\u2014sometimes shallow, sometimes deep\u2014did not stop my mind from racing, my breath from quickening, and my heart from pounding with hurt, anger, and fear. If Buddhism is a three-legged stool composed of ethics (shila), meditative awareness (samadhi), and wisdom (prajna), the leg of meditative awareness was collapsing under me.<\/p>\n In my difficulties I was not alone. Many of us in the campaign were prime examples of the phenomenon the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah (see page 52) had described in his noted 1985 book Habits of the Heart: uprooted people beached in a secular culture where there was little to counterbalance the values purveyed by the media, the marketplace, and the contractual and expressive ethics of psychotherapy. Pew of us had ever been active members of unions, churches. Rotary Clubs, or sewing bees, where we might have learned the essence of community: the ability to set aside our own agendas and stay productively connected to people we might not have chosen as friends.<\/p>\n Bellah had warned chat the day might come when we might forget how to work and think together, and thereby lose our democracy. As we Deaniacs came together with potluck dishes in our hands, we were trying to rebuild it. But we weren\u2019t aware of how long it takes to attune physically to other people\u2019s rhythms\u2014especially when we were half mad with grief, fear, and rage over the direction of the country.<\/p>\n I am grateful that at about this time I stumbled across a wonderful Internet site, www.buddhaweb.org, listing what it called the \u201cEssentials of Buddhism.\u201d The summary included a list of the ten paramitas, or \u201cperfections\u201d: generosity, morality, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, persistence, kindness, and equanimity.<\/p>\n These aids to practice were compiled the first couple of centuries after the death of the historical Buddha as a useful guide to practice outside formal meditation. Christians might call them \u201cvirtues.\u201d In essence, they were attitudes that I could cultivate in the midst of upsetting action.<\/p>\n In all my imperfection and in all the imperfection of the Dean campaign, I did my best to practice the paramitas. I stopped reading email in the mornings. Instead, I\u2019d go to my study, look at my willow tree, and, if I was embroiled in conflict, imagine myself in the other person\u2019s shoes. If I had arranged that Meetup at the Mexican restaurant and it hadn\u2019t worked out, how would I feel if\u2019 someone went over my head to complain? I\u2019d think of the opportunities I\u2019d taken (or missed) to be tolerant, truthful, and kind. When needed, I would call the other person, apologize, and do my best to forgive myself.<\/p>\n When I was a child in England, after my family had left South Africa, an old ferrywoman had once transported us on a flat-bottomed raft across a river to a pub on the opposite bank. She pulled the whole family silently and easily across the water, moving her hands along a smooth strong wire strung from one bank to the other. The paramitas were like that\u2014a wire that I pulled on, hand over hand.<\/p>\n IN JANUARY, WHEN DEAN was leading in the polls and 529 American soldiers had been killed in Iraq, I flew to Des Moines to knock on the doors of strangers in the week before the Iowa caucuses. I\u2019d assumed I would find a cow town, but Des Moines contained acre after acre of bungalows once kept painted and proud by union factory workers who built John Deere tractors, Amana refrigerators, and Maytag washers\u2014factories and jobs how long gone overseas.<\/p>\n On my first day, a man in his underwear peered out from a door and said, \u201cI\u2019ve got two words for you: George Bush.\u201d Others tottered out on walkers as I stood at their open doors, asking them to drive to the caucuses in eight-degree weather. If they told me they were voting for Kerry, Gephardt, Kucinich, or Edwards, I sometimes came close to haranguing them.<\/p>\n By the second day, I knew that Dean would lose. Involuntarily or not, I began to experience the gift of the paramita of nekhamma, often translated as renunciation, which I like to think of as letting go of outcomes. I began to say, \u201cThey\u2019re all good men. Any one of them would be better than what we have now,\u201d and \u201cJust go to the caucuses and vote, that\u2019s the important thing.\u201d One woman couldn\u2019t go because she took care of an autistic grandson while her daughter worked. Others said they\u2019d be at a second job, or at night school. A man with long glossy hair and a thousand-mile stare told me he was a felon and couldn\u2019t vote.<\/p>\n By the third day, I was aware that my preference was just a view. 1 could request, invite, and offer, but I could not tell, teach, or persuade. I was begging, the way some monks beg, door to door. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I felt gratitude for living in a democracy where I could travel two thousand miles to talk to strangers about the direction of our nation, and gratitude that so many of them invited me in.<\/p>\n I could practice generosity and equanimity here as easily as I could in the zendo or the laundromat. All the world is a Buddha-field, even a national election. And Iowans who had never heard of a single Buddhist precept practiced generosity, patience, kindness, and equanimity toward me when they found me on their doorsteps, shivering, full of enthusiasm, nervousness, and hope.<\/p>\n The night of the caucuses, when his defeat was clear, Dean spoke to his supporters in an old ballroom in West Des Moines. What I remember most about the occasion is not Dean\u2019s purported, repeatedly televised \u201cscream,\u201d but the moment before it, when campaign workers passed little American flags from hand to hand. It felt like a foreign object in my hand: It\u2019s been a difficult symbol for me ever since, at the age of seven, I ambivalently pledged my allegiance to it as a newly arrived immigrant. No longer an onlooker, I cook a flag and waved.<\/p>\n I flew home vowing to bring balance back into my life, got ready to transfer my efforts to John Kerry\u2014and came home in a deeper way. Politics, it turns out, is informing my Buddhism just as Buddhism is informing my politics. I\u2019d learned a lot from Dean: As governor of Vermont, he had cried to get universal health care coverage through the state legislature. When that failed, he had spent the next decade widening eligibility for existing state programs until 99 percent of the children in the stare were covered as well as the bulk of the working poor. Much can be gained, he taught me indirectly, by abandoning idealism, accepting what is, and cooperating with so-called \u201cenemies.\u201d I wonder what might happen if, rather than dismissing fundamentalist Christians as backward and hypocritical, I had a respectful and curious conversation with one of them.<\/p>\n Knocking on doors in Des Moines, I remembered that Buddhism is a practice of penetrating and accepting the here and now\u2014not only the bliss of meditation, but the irritations of mundane human interaction and the pain in the morning paper. Just as the lotus needs muddy water to live, the pain of the world can inspire compassionate and effective action. The imperfect, as the poet Wallace Stevens said, is our paradise.<\/p>\n I returned home aware of my rootlessness\u2014rootlessness I share with many an American Buddhist who has packed up a car or a knapsack and moved to Dharamsala or Thailand or Boulder or Barre or Halifax or San Francisco to join a religious community. Those days are over for me. I am thoroughly a householder now, sharing my life with a man I love and acting as honorary stepmother to his two sons. I am not a monk or a Boating cloud. It is time I stopped pretending to be a home-leaver (a concept more spiritually useful to would-be monks in medieval Asia than to young people in a fragmented modern America, anyway) and got rooted myself<\/p>\n I am writing these words at 6:15 in the morning in my study, drinking my ritual green tea in the house Brian and 1 have shared for the past three years. Last month, I saw Brian\u2019s nephew at a family wedding; he had just returned from the fighting in Fallujah and was holding his eight-month-old baby, whom he had not seen since she was two weeks old. His wife\u2014who now vehemently opposes the war and wants her husband out of the military\u2014whispered to me that he startles when he hears a car backfire, and cannot sleep. More than eight hundred of his fellow soldiers have now died in Iraq, along with countless Iraqi men, women, and children.<\/p>\n This particular morning the moon is still our\u2014a bright communion wafer-\u2014and the wind reminds me in some ineffable way of the deep nights I spent in Plum Village a decade ago. In the darkness, I can see only the black outline of the willow. I slide back the window and bring in the air and the sounds of the day\u2014a truck backing up, probably at the Whole Foods down the block, a finch trilling, another bird whistling, and then the crows setting up a racket. The wind rustles the trees. I feel amazing pleasure.<\/p>\n This is the moment when I simply live, before the morning newspaper and my anger and worry. My life swings between these two poles: from stillness to action, from activity to recovery. It is a bellows, in and out, with the breath.<\/p>\n The willow quickens and turns green in the light. Behind me on the wall is the flag I was given in Des Moines and a photograph of a tree in winter, with a quote from the French political philosopher Simone Weil: \u201cTo be rooted is perhaps the most important and least understood need of the human soul.\u201d<\/p>\n I am willing to take the bitter with the sweet. To take refuge now, in this minute, in this ragged, imperfect breath. I owe this country more than voting and paying my DMV fees and as little as I can of my taxes. I owe it my heart and something of my identity. Like the monk in Zen\u2019s famous ten oxherding pictures, it is time for me to enter the marketplace with bliss-bestowing hands\u2014and receive the bliss that others, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, bestow. I want to root myself in this imperfect, good-enough suburban place. In this flawed, adopted, beloved country that is my home.<\/p>\n \u00a92004 Katy Butler. All Rights Reserved. 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