Tag: Roberta Laurie

50. Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step

I’ve been practicing mindfulness in a small way since the beginning of January, mostly by practicing guided walking meditation, and I realize I’m at the very beginning of understanding it. I’ve learned from those guided meditations, and from podcasts, but I haven’t read much about it, and since reading is the primary way I take in information, that’s a significant problem. For that reason, on the train to Ottawa yesterday I opened the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step. I thought it would help me understand more about mindfulness, and it did.

Born in Vietnam in 1926, Hanh became a monk at the age of 16. He came to the United States in the 1960s as an anti-war activist. The Vietnamese government wouldn’t let him return home, and he established the Plum Village centre in France. Peace Is Every Step is a collection of published and unpublished writings, lectures, and informal talks, edited by Arnold Kotler and others. It probably shouldn’t be read in one go, as I did; instead, it should probably be read one chapter at a time, like a daily devotional text. The advantage of reading it the way I did, though, is that it might be easier to take in what makes sense and leave the rest out. At least, that’s my claim.

Peace Is Every Step is organized in three sections. The first, “Breathe! You Are Alive” is like a mindfulness primer, with short chapters on breathing mindfully, walking meditation (I’ve been doing it wrong by walking too quickly, although I’ve found it helpful anyway), and approaching other daily activities, like driving, cooking, washing dishes, and eating, in a spirit of mindfulness. The second section, “Transformation and Healing,” considers personal development, with a particular focus on dealing with anger and other difficult emotions by accepting them with love and compassion, and then looking to find their root causes. It’s good advice, and it echoes the way some psychologists, like Tara Brach, suggest that we recognize, acknowledge, investigate, and nurture ourselves and our emotions when we are in the grip of powerful feelings, instead of taking them out on ourselves and those around us.

The final section, “Peace Is Every Step,” applies mindfulness to larger social or political issues, such as the environment, war, and various forms of inequality. There, Hanh advises readers to carry themselves according to their political goals, so that people advocating for peace ought to avoid anger or hatred, and people advocating for sustainability ought to focus on the interconnectedness of all things. “Our body is not limited to what is inside the boundary of our skin,” he argues; it includes the air we breathe and the sun that allows everything on this planet to live. “There is no phenomenon in the universe that does not intimately concern us,” he writes, “from a pebble resting at the bottom of the ocean, to the movement of a galaxy millions of light-years away.” That emphasis on relationship reminds me of the Plains Cree or nêhiyawêwin word wâhkôhtowin, which means something like “kinship relationality,” although that dry phrase misses all of its nuances, including the way it suggests a physical attitude of walking while bending over towards the earth’s living creatures. I’m not claiming any stronger connection than what my mind creates, and I’m aware that my interest in both wâhkôtowin and mindfulness could be written off as a form of appropriation, even though I think both might help us avoid destroying the world around us and, thereby, ourselves. I saw parallels between Hanh’s discussions of dying rivers and Robert Macfarlane’s recent book Is a River Alive? If a river can die, then it must also have the capability of being alive, too. It only stands to reason.

I’ve picked up other books by Thich Nhat Hanh, mostly (like this one) with titles that suggest (literally or figuratively) walking, and now I’ll make a point of reading them. I also want to thank my friend Roberta Laurie, whose Facebook posts about Hanh introduced me to his thinking. Imagine, social media as a force for good! Don’t tell the techbros, or they’ll block the word “mindfulness” the way they’ve blocked links to Canadian news media.

18. Casey Plett, On Community

Last year, I shared a terrible essay with my writer’s group. One of my colleagues asked, “what is this really about?” (Excellent question, Roberta!) I thought about that for quite a while. Community, I decided–or, to be more specific, my desire for community. I wasn’t sure how to proceed with that essay, and so I let it sit while I wrote and revised other things. But now, looking at the list of things left to write for my second book (the manuscript is due in June–wish me luck!), I can see that it’s time to start working through the scattered research materials I’ve been collecting. I decided to start with Casey Plett’s wonderful little book, On Community, partly because another colleague, Tanis MacDonald, posted about it on Instagram. I could not have chosen a better jumping-off point.

On Community is one of Biblioasis’s Field Notes series–short books, or long essays, the titles of which all begin with the word “On”: On Class, On Writing and Failure, or the forthcoming On Oil. So far, I’ve read two in that series; both were excellent. A new item has been added to my bucket list: write a book for that series. I doubt that’s going to happen, but you never know. As the Victorian poet Robert Browning wrote in one of his dramatic monologues, “Andrea del Sarto,” “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?”

So, what makes On Community so good? The breadth of research, for one thing. Plett includes people I’d heard of, like Robert Waldinger, but she also brings in others I knew nothing about, or who I didn’t know had written about community. But also I appreciated Plett’s acknowledgement of the complexity of community–the way it includes and excludes, the way it is “equally capable of cruelty and health in the way of many ordinary things, mundane actions that happen every day with the capacity for both salve and sickness,” to quote her thoughtful words. “Humans need community, but there’s no good assuming it’s always a conduit for goodness.” As Plato says, and Derrida through Plato, it’s a pharmakon, both cure and poison. As a trans woman, Plett has experienced a lot of exclusion and rejection from communities, as well as inclusion and acceptance, and she is aware of how complex and fraught and necessary community is. The alternative, bleak and lonely isolation, is unthinkable, even if that’s what many of us experience now, given the epidemic of loneliness in our culture.

I loved Plett’s notion that community is a verb, too, and her argument that we are entitled to be wary around strangers even as we need to be open to them as well. And I loved the call she makes to her readers at her essay’s conclusion–that we should try to do the unthinkable, which includes working towards becoming part of something larger than ourselves.

I’m happy I read this, and if I can make that terrible essay into something worth reading, and if it ends up getting included in my book, and if you happen to read it, you’ll see the influence Plett’s On Community has exerted on my thinking.