I’d like to think that I can calm myself. I know how ~ breathe in, hold, breathe out. Repeat. But these days it’s so hard. People I know, even like, are filled with fear and loathing. They aim it at my beliefs, at my core values, as we seem fond of saying these days. Leaders of our country ~ MY country ~ spew vitriol at women, at people of colour, at Muslims and others. All in the name of ‘safety.’ Read: fear.
I try to meet people in their good intentions (years of teaching teaches the teacher). I understand that hate emanates from fear. I am taught daily ~ it used to be student by student; now it’s mistake by mistake ~ that no one gets up in the morning wanting to hate, wanting to mess up, wanting to ruin someone else’s day. Or life. The difference between my intentions not to hate, mess up, or ruin someone’s day (or life), and what I see as other people’s intentions, is who we see as ‘someone.’ And what ‘hate’ means to each of us.
It’s not hate if your minister tells you it’s okay. After all, s/he would know, right? So if the church says that my gay niece and my many dear gay friends are hell-bent sinners, it’s not ‘hate’ to taunt them, goad them, drive them to suicide. Is it? Because after all, this representative of God urged that we punish these ‘wicked,’ right?
So people who are ‘different’ from us ~ by skin colour, religion, dress, sexual preference, whatever ~ aren’t really ‘someone.’ Instead, they are wicked, or terrorists, or somehow ‘other.’ Not the wonderful, lovely people I know. My niece Mary, my friend Soha, my friends Ben & Dewayne…these people I love dearly, they aren’t ‘someone’ to many many Americans. Soha makes people uncomfortable with her hijab; dining out w/ Dewayne or Ben (tall, elegant black guys) is rife w/ studied inattention from waitstaff and other customers. Mary’s wonderful partner, whom I love like another niece? She is a bad person, too.
This makes it so hard for me to breathe. I mean that literally: I catch myself w/ breath held, sometimes, and have to breathe out, then in. Yet I’ve been working for a very long time ~ years & years ~ to balance the dragon warrior in me (speaker for the voiceless) and the novice seeker. I know so very little about how things work, about why we are the ways we are… I’m both the speaker and the infant, the child who has just hatched.
My son had asthma as a child. Still does, but as a baby, it almost killed him. Coupled with severe croup, he was turning blue from lack of oxygen on late night. I held him in my arms as my mother drove at lightening speeds to our hospital. She made the 6-mile trip in right at 7+ minutes — through the dark streets glistening with rain, as I crooned to the baby I held carefully.
At the hospital, there were miracle drugs they could administer. Drugs that cleared my son’s lungs, and let the bright air fill him with life. I lay beside his crib that night, listening to his breathing, and thought of what a miracle it is, just to breathe.
These days, I feel as tight and starved for light and air as that infant, struggling for each breath. I’m once again driving down dark streets, it seems ~ looking for a way to breathe. And I know there is no magic medicine to ‘cure’ this ugliness, this lack of breathing space. In fact, I’m the only one who can get me through this. I understand that this is my own tight place through which I must somehow pass. Somehow, I have to figure out how to see beyond the hatred and the fear that tears me up to the human hearts beneath that darkness. I don’t believe that any of us is innately dark, even those of us roiled with violence and spilling ugliness and hatred. No child is born with hate in heart. And somewhere, there is love — there must be love, within these dark dark hearts.
So I’m trying to breathe again. Catching myself as I slouch at my desk, sitting straighter. Remembering to throw my shoulders back, remembering that the imperial dragons once were humans (hence their five toes…:)). So the anger of my inner dragon can be turned to light, as fire lights darkness. I just have to figure out how.
Tea and Breath 