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This I Believe

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Fabric with the words "Absurd times call for Absurd Amounts of Love" embroidered on it

Brad Montague

I am so fortunate to be part of a group of people called the Conversation Collective. During the lockdown in 2020, the Charter for Compassion teamed up with Citizen Discourse to offer a weekly meditation and coming together of individuals from all over the world who wanted to just be together in a way that felt real and soothing and solid. I began to mark time in terms of the Thursday morning meetings and really look forward to seeing some of the same people every week and deepen my connection with them.

They have expanded the offering to twice a week and on Monday afternoon I joined the group anticipating yet another really wonderful discussion prompt and I wasn’t disappointed. Karen from Citizen Discourse asked us to take a few minutes to reflect on one or more of our most deeply held beliefs (in the style of the NPR program This I Believe) and then we broke into pairs on Zoom to share our thoughts with each other. I wasn’t going to write much, as I’ve written to this prompt before, but I pulled out a sheet of paper and thought I’d jot down a few thoughts to share with my partner. In the end, I surprised myself with what came forth:

I believe in the power of connection.

I believe in hugs as a transfer of energy and a way to show solidarity.

I believe we all know each other better than we think we do, and that when we focus our attention on love and relationship, we feel a deep resonance that is the only thing that really matters. 

I believe that fear drives us apart – away from each other and ourselves.

I believe trust leads to love and that we are safe in each other’s arms.

I believe we are more a part of the natural world than we will ever know, and when we do begin to know it, we feel safer than we ever thought we could. 

I was grateful to have the opportunity to speak with and listen to two extraordinary people about our beliefs, and when the group came back together, I was reminded why this is such a special place. Because we focus on relationship and what is important to us, because we listen deeply and honor each other’s perspectives, because we allow the full range of emotions and reactions – anger, frustration, laughter, tears, joy – this is a place for humanity and solidarity and friendship. I’ve met people from Canada and Cape Town, Kentucky and California and Portugal and the UK, and I have deepened my belief that we know how to be together with peace and love and joy just as much as we know how to isolate ourselves in fear and anger. I am reminded every single week that choosing peace and love and joy is a gift to myself and others, and this is one simple way to do it.

We belong to each other, whether we opt to acknowledge that or not. We are designed to be together, to share our thoughts and feelings with each other. We get energy from one another and hold each other up. So despite all of the other cultural messages we get about fear and independence and not burdening others with our struggles, the natural state of us as beings is to belong, to seek out others and find ways to collaborate and cooperate and be in community. It is there that we can begin to feel secure and in harmony with our natural rhythms. I am so grateful for this and other collectives that are holding me, that have welcomed me, because they allow me to remember that I am not alone. I am never alone.

The Conversation Collective is open to anyone who wants to join. Click the link to find out more if you’re interested.

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Concentric Bubbles

I am regularly reminded of the bubble(s) in which I live.  The mostly-liberal-Democrat bubble of my town and neighborhood (and daughters’ school). The I-can-pay-my-bills-and-have-money-left-to-eat bubble. The our-family-has-health-insurance bubble.  I could go on, but you get the gist.  We are blessed, privileged, incredibly lucky.  I drive and walk past homeless people almost daily. I live in a country where running water and electricity are the norm.  I am aware of how comfortable my life is and am grateful for it every day, all the while doing what I can to make the lives of others more comfortable as well.

But every now and then I am really struck by the possibility that there are other bubbles out there smaller than mine.  I tend to ignore the news of mega-millionaires (I couldn’t pick a Kardashian out of a line-up and most Hollywood insiders could stroll right past me without prompting a glance) and actively discard news reports of egregiously selfish behavior on the part of filthy rich corporations because they turn my stomach.  And then there are stories like this one on NPR that make me feel not that I live in a bubble, but in some alternate universe.

The abbreviated version is this:  Major pharmaceutical companies have apparently devised new methods to hold the exclusive patents on their drugs just a little longer than the law allows.  You see, when the original patent expires and other drug manufacturers are allowed to begin making generic forms of medication they often charge up to 85% less than the original price of the drug. Nobody in their right mind (especially the incredibly bottom-line-concerned insurance industry) would pay for the original drug at that point, so the profits for a single drug can go down significantly in one year.  That obviously gives these enormously rich pharmaceutical companies incentives to disallow generics.

Enter the “reverse settlement” or “pay to delay” tactic.  These companies often apply for new patents, changing perhaps the source of an ingredient or some other minor tweak by way of reason, and when the generic-manufacturers sue, they are offered a gross amount of money to go away for several more years, thus enabling the original company to continue to rake in piles and piles of money.

From whom? The insurance companies and hospitals.  Which means, ultimately, consumers. Those who are paying the hospital and insurance bills.

In one case, the settlement for a single drug was $42 million per year for 15 years. If it was worth that much to the pharmaceutical company, how much do you think they are profiting from that one drug in a year?  On the backs of the American public?

I understand that these companies have to pay for their R&D and that they deserve to be making more money for discovering these drugs, but there has to be a better way. And there also has to be a middle ground somewhere.  Is there such a thing as a company making too much profit?  Call me an evil anti-Capitalist, but I say yes. Especially when it is the American public who is forced to give these companies their hard-earned money, in many cases, far beyond what the drug is actually worth, because they need the medication to survive.  Especially after most of these companies have already utilized taxpayers’ money to create these drugs in the form of tax breaks.

Other countries (Canada, European Union countries) have figured out how to pluck these pharmaceutical companies out of their pockets and put them in their place and the world hasn’t stopped spinning yet. Here’s hoping the US Supreme Court will follow suit.

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Driveway Moments

Just in case you hadn’t heard the term before (clearly you are not an NPR-listener if you haven’t), “driveway moments” is a phrase used to describe what happens when you are en route to a particular place with the radio on and become fully engrossed in a story or interview that is happening on NPR. So fully engrossed that, despite reaching your destination, you are loathe to leave the car and miss the end of the story/interview/program.  In our family, we have our own version of this, compliments of the move to the city.

Last year and the year before, I drove carpool to and from Eve’s school in the city several times a week.   On any given carpool route, I could have between three and six girls in my car who ranged in age from eight to 14.  Oh, the things I heard!  (Just as an example, check out this post from last year.) And we had fun. I always provided snacks because the trek from school to home was generally around 45 minutes and for a middle-school-girl to wait that long after school to eat is, well, impossible.  On Fridays, I always had chocolate which somehow became known as “carpool love,” and it wasn’t long before my car was officially named the Party Bus. I was always teasing the girls and asking them irreverent questions about their day and sometimes I was really quiet and hoped they would forget I was there and talk about things they didn’t especially want their parents to hear. It worked.  I really miss that this year.

But…

This year, the trip to and from school is only eight minutes and the only girls in my car are Eve and Lola.  And it rocks.

You wouldn’t think (I certainly didn’t) that we could have much of a conversation in the eight minutes between school and home, but we can.  There is something about having us all in the car, looking in different directions that feels informal and open.  Generally someone will ask an innocent question or share some snippet from a book they’re reading or play their favorite song for us and that’s all it takes to get the ball rolling.  More and more, as I pull up to the curb outside school and watch girls pile out of cars and run toward the building, Eve and Lola and I are snug in our car finishing up a conversation about life or teachers or just about anything else you can imagine.  More and more, I have to urge them to gather their things and head inside before they are late, not because they are resisting school, but because we are having a “driveway moment” of our own.

It’s a beautiful thing.

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Free to Be (You, Not Me), Revisited

NPR strikes again!  This time it was a program on race that played an interview conducted many years ago by Studs Terkel where he talked to writer James Baldwin about his newest novel, “Nobody Knows My Name.”  At one point, Terkel laments a societal framework that sets Baldwin up to feel ashamed of his rich cultural heritage – one deeply steeped in gospel music, family, and food among other things – simply because he is “accepting of the white man’s stereotype.”

Baldwin:  “It is one of the great psychological hazards of being an American Negro….One is born in a white, Protestant country where one was once a slave, where all the standards and all the images…everything you see, none of it applies to you….I obviously wasn’t white. It wasn’t even so much a question of wanting to be white, but I couldn’t accept what I’d been told. When all you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be.”

At this sentence, my breath caught mid-way between my gaping mouth and my lungs. It simply stood still in my throat, unable to move forward or back.  I realized that I could not begin to plumb the depths of how damaging, how alienating it must be to feel as though you are at once pitied, reviled, and set aside simply because a vocal, powerful group of individuals sees you as shameful or less than. Simply because they have no idea who you are and no intention of learning who you might be. And no care for the fact that you had no hand in finding yourself in this color skin.

The next thing that struck me was the sincere knowledge that, today, the word homosexual or disabled or, in some countries female could be easily substituted for black.  And I began wondering how often I have been guilty of seeing another person as limited by something they cannot control, placing barriers around what I think they might accomplish or how they might feel. Stereotyping or pitying them simply because I did not see who they truly were beyond my own ideas of what they were.

The ultimate theme of the interview was that James Baldwin found the resolve within himself to dig deeply and find his own notions of himself and who he was.  He gave himself permission to own his American Negro status, to revel in his rich cultural history, to express himself beautifully in his novels and poetry.  He did this, in part, by looking to other black people around him who led by example. Who owned who they were without reservation or apology.

I came away determined to remember that breath-stopping feeling of acknowledgment. To force to the front of my consciousness my own preconceptions of what it must be like to be _____________ and realize my part in stepping back and encouraging others to own their own stories.  Not as some sort of reaction to any perimeters I draw around them, but as a wellspring of personality that finds its source within each and every one of us.  I live in hope for a world where none of us ever feels as though the over-riding message they are receiving is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be whomever they are.

*The entire interview can be found here. There are two other stories first – sorry I couldn’t find the interview as a stand-alone, but you can jump to the final third of the audio and hear James Baldwin’s rich, cognac-smooth voice with a steely edge of self-knowledge behind it as he answers Studs Terkel’s questions confidently and thoroughly.

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From Catholic to Buddhist in 40 Short Years

Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Klamath Falls, Oregon

My spiritual journey has been, well, a journey so far in my life.  I’m certain that on the day I was born, nobody expected me to have a spiritual journey. They expected to baptize me in the Catholic Church, raise me in the Catholic Church, and bury me after a lifetime spent in the Catholic Church.  I guess, technically, that’s a journey, but it stays pretty well within the same track, or at least I (and my mother) always thought so.

Until I was eight or so, this worked out pretty well.  Enter: divorce.  We were fairly rigorous Catholics, going to Mass on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, taking confession (at least my parents did) and signing us kids up for catechism classes.  The path was preordained.  Until my folks split up. And the Church politely asked us not to return.  Bad example for the rest of the parishioners and all that.

Until that point I hadn’t questioned much about religion or faith. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t go to church on Sunday and I frankly loved the ritual of church, if not the time spent there on sunny mornings.  I loved dipping my fingers in to the font of holy water at the entrance to the church and crossing myself like I saw the adults do.  I loved genuflecting before entering a pew and memorizing the steps that went along with different prayers – when to sit down, kneel and stand.  I loved the music and the stained glass and knowing when to say a solemn, “Amen” or “and also with you.”

After my folks got divorced, Dad seemed to have no issue not going back to that church and sometimes, especially in the summer, took us to his version of church on Sunday mornings – a short hike near Crater Lake or up Mt. McLoughlin with a few quiet moments to stop and enjoy the view while he prayed and thanked God for our time together.  I much preferred that kind of church to the ones my mother tried out thanks to recommendations from friends – a new one every weekend we spent with her.

By the time I was in high school I had thoroughly catalogued the hypocrisy I saw in my own family and friends Monday through Saturday and decided that church and religion seemed ridiculous.  I still liked the music, but there was little ritual in any of the churches we attended and I cringed at some of the messages of punishment and anger I heard over and over again.  I was relieved when I got a job at a local resort that held a huge Sunday brunch because I could beg off of church – we needed the money more than Mom wanted to admit.

I had also become increasingly interested in science and liked the ordered, logical view of the human body as a machine.  I renounced religion of any kind and decided I was an atheist.  I didn’t see any reason to think there was an afterlife and was openly disdainful of anyone who seemed to be simply tolerating their time on the planet until they could get to some paradise. I was determined to create my own paradise now – hedge my bets because I would be really pissed off if I discovered there was no Heaven after I had waited decades to get there.

Philosophy classes in college further solidified this view for me.  I took a comparative religion class and was astonished to discover how many really strange theories there were about different leaders and prophets and how malleable morality could be depending on which one you adhered to.  Couple that with the more complex science classes I was taking and I was definitely convinced that humans were basically machines.  Yes, we have emotions, but I was certain there were discoverable physiological processes that could account for those.  This view did not diminish the wonder of nature for me a bit – in fact it increased it more than anything.  The notion that there were so many variations in this mechanistic view of the world – that DNA could be expressed in so many different ways from a strawberry to a hyena to a human with Down’s Syndrome – that was truly miraculous to me.  And, ultimately, explainable with enough scientific knowledge.  Who needed religion?

And then Buddhism hit me.  It was not one of the religious views I had learned about in college and I knew very little about it, but about six years ago I started writing book reviews for Elevate Difference and was assigned a few Buddhist texts.  I also began taking yoga classes and heard more about Buddhist beliefs there.  The entire idea that a spiritual world view could exist without worshipping some deity or other was fascinating.  The tenets of peace and equanimity and love appealed to me greatly – especially in their inclusion of every other sentient being on the planet.  I was determined to learn more.

Today, I guess I would say that my spirituality is more deeply rooted in Buddhism than any other world view.  And while I still love the idea that the human body is a machine, and live that reality every day by trying to feed it well and rest it appropriately and work all of its parts with some regularity, my notion of it has expanded to include a spiritual component.  I don’t know exactly how I would describe it – a soul? some invisible connection between all sentient beings? I’m not sure.  But I heard an explanation on NPR (where else?) a few weeks ago that has slowly been settling in to my bones.  I can’t for the life of me remember what program or who said it or even what the context of the conversation was, but the question was whether animals have souls or not.  The answer came by way of analogy:  If you have a computer that is broken and you take it apart to discover why, you can fix it and put it back together and it will work (assuming you knew  at you were doing) the exact same way it did before.  If your pet (or your sister-in-law or your favorite dogwood tree) is ailing and you take it apart piece by piece and put it back together exactly the way it ought to go, it won’t come back to life.  There is something more, something extra, something intangible that we sentient beings have that defies mechanical explanation.

In my atheist days, this explanation would have thrown me.  I am certain I would not have known what to do with it, given that I had an entirely mechanistic view of humanity. You die and you’re dust. Period. Nothing else.

Today, I’m not so sure. Some might say it’s because I’m getting older and facing my own mortality, but I would like to think that one day I’ll be back in some other form to finish this journey of mine.  If I get to choose, I’d like to be a very pampered indoor cat who spends its days chasing bugs and sleeping in the sun patch at the end of the bed.

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It’s Your Words That Matter (Stupid!)


As I puttered around the house doing laundry and tidying the kitchen and fluffing pillows yesterday morning, my local NPR station was on in the background. The host was interviewing Barry McCaffrey of Clinton-era war-on-drugs fame and I found myself intrigued. I recall him taking a very different tack from the Nancy Reagan “just say no” campaign, but couldn’t really remember many of the specifics, so my ears perked up and I slowed my tasks down in order to pay closer attention.

It is easy to pay attention to General McCaffrey, given that he is a career military man and speaks with 100% authority. He has very strong opinions on seemingly every subject in the Universe and speaks about them with no equivocation whatsoever. When callers or the host disagreed with him, he was not condescending, but so sure of himself that I wonder if he often causes others to question their own rationale. I found myself agreeing with him on a few issues and disagreeing about others, but glad I wasn’t in the room with him admitting my dissent.

Until he began talking about the drug policy his task force crafted for the Office of National Drug Control Policy during his time in the Clinton White House. It started innocently enough, with him advocating for developmentally appropriate approaches to drug resistance education. Okay, fair enough. I can see the logic in that.


Saying, “You don’t tell a 17-year old who is smoking a joint that they will get lung cancer or throat cancer. They don’t care about that. You say, ‘Hey, Stupid! You’re going to get pregnant or drop out of school and never get a job!”

Huh.
Really?
How is calling someone “Stupid” a way to change behavior?
How is belittling someone and trying to frighten them a way to motivate or encourage?
How is making someone think you see them as an idiot going to help you understand them?
As a former teenager who smoked a lot of pot (thank goodness my kids don’t read this blog), I can tell you that by the time I had made the decision to engage in this behavior, I had already written myself off. I didn’t need anyone else to. The reasons I used drugs were several:
1. There was a community of other potheads who accepted me into their group.
2. On some level I felt invincible (common among teenagers, and doesn’t bode well for Gen. McCaffrey’s fear tactics. I was sure I wasn’t the one who would get pregnant or get caught smoking pot).
3. I was trying to escape some of the difficult realities in my life.
4. I felt somewhat hopeless about my life.
Luckily, stronger drugs weren’t really available to me at that time. Couple that with the fact that I was a control freak and I had some pretty strong notions of which lines I wouldn’t cross, which is why I never drank alcohol.
Also luckily, I had a few supportive adults in my life who may or may not have known I was smoking pot, but who believed in my ability to live my dreams. They encouraged me to get to college which afforded me a different way to escape the difficulties in my current situation. I saw that as a clean break and a way to reinvent myself somewhat and I was able to separate myself from the drug culture I had immersed myself in.
I certainly hope that General McCaffrey’s drug policy is not standard operating procedure in most of the schools around the nation. I believe that the only way to really change the way we treat illegal drugs and alcohol is by understanding the reasons people turn to them in the first place and supporting them as they learn to deal honestly with the challenges in their lives. I understand that game plan isn’t nearly as clearcut as a military man might like, but I am certain that berating and belittling and attempting to scare people is not the way to go.
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