ex.vee.aie

Workers Prayer in Grief and Service:  an experiential field report

I feel it's safe to say that extended family gatherings can be emotionally chaotic.  In order to deal with this chaos, people often develop coping strategies.  In my family we gather once yearly in the Fall to spend a long weekend in a funky old beach house on the coast just north of the foggy buzz of San Francisco.  Plus or minus a bakers dozen of us Falconers usually spend the weekend eating too much, drinking more than normal, playing word games and solving puzzles, reading quietly in corners, lying on the floor with (the ever increasing number of) dogs, laughing at old (often embarrassing) stories, and missing relatives who are no longer with us in the flesh.  Naturally, as with most tribal gatherings, the closeness can turn up the volume on whispers of tensions which normally circulate under the radar throughout the year.

    Every year at this annual clan gathering (we're Scottish, so I feel OK writing that) my coping mechanism is to carve out some alone time for myself.  This year it was Saturday that I felt the call to walk solo on the beach for a couple of hours.  It was stormy but the rain had broken and the sun was still behind clouds.  I set out, dog-less, companion-less, and silent down the path to the beach that I have been walking each Fall since I was a babe (that Scottish thing again).  When I got to the end of the path, and over the small sand dunes which emptied out to the flatness of Stinson Beach I saw my mother, two of my aunts, and a cousin heading back toward me carrying garbage bags filled with trash.  The storm had been washing up lots of forgotten items and they had gone out earlier to clean up the waterline a bit.  I took an empty bag from them and my plans for a serene meditative walk changed into a solo beach clean-up.

    I walked near the water, stopping every few feet to gather up candy wrappers, swisher wrappers, broken bits of beach toys, styrofoam cups, rusty lighters, lengths of plastic rope and other evidence of the anthropocene.  I thought of when I was a child and my mother and father taught me that if a job was hard or you had a feeling that you would rather not do it, a workers prayer was a good way to make the time pass more smoothly.  A workers prayer could be a song or a chant or a mantra (done out loud or in silence) - anything that would facilitate a mindfulness toward the task and a love for the action of working.  So, as I gathered garbage, I also sang. 

    I sang an old song from Scotland.  A song that gives me the feeling of being rooted in the earth through my bloodline.  Singing old songs (often called traditional or revival) from Scotland and Ireland make me feel like I am unraveling some karmic trauma of uprootedness and voicelessness embedded in the spirals of my DNA, put there by the melting pot invisibility of the American Dream of which my ancestors were both victim and victor.  I sang aloud on the beach that day, partly because there weren't very many people around and partly because it just felt good to meet the wind and the fog with my own voice.  It was work bending over and over and over to gather the trash.  It was work spotting it in the bits of sea grass just above the water line.  I walked in circles down the hard wet sand making my own erratic spiraling pattern of prayer and service and annoyance.

    As beautiful as it was to be singing my songs and acting in service to this beach that I love - a beach that I see as my relation - it was also annoying.  My annoyance waxed and waned like the rolling of the small grey waves and the rumble of the ocean.  I felt anger toward my species, toward the plastics industry, the petroleum industry, and my own consumerism (how many of those tiny candy bars had I eaten at Halloween?).  I was angry and annoyed.  Why weren't there more people out on the beach collecting garbage?  There was so much of it, there was no way that anyone could walk by and not notice.  I watched passers by step on candy wrappers while making prayer hands at me, mouthing, "bless you," or, "thank you," with sad, drooping eyes.  I watched passers-by step gingerly over pieces of rope, styrofoam cups and rotting seagull corpses while avoiding eye contact, taking photos of the horizon or themselves with their smartphones and having unnecessarily loud conversations with their equally avoidant companions. 

    As I was walking I thought about the annoyance that I was feeling.  As I sank further into the feeling of it I began to realize that at its root was actually grief.  I was grieving.  With each piece of trash that I spotted and gathered there was also a pang of guilt at being a member of the species who had put these scars on the Earth - the Earth who is our relation!  I was grieving.  It was not easy.  It was not convenient.  It was messy. 

    As I walked and gathered and sang and felt I noticed that the common thing coming from each of these passers-by was also grief.  Stages of grief can be categorized spectrally as ranging from denial to despair and I was seeing this all in the faces of the people on the beach.  Even as they threw balls and bits of wood for their dogs.  Even as they talked off their turkey hangovers (it was the Saturday after Thanksgiving).  Even as they made prayer hands at me.  Even as a few of them asked if they could put the bits of garbage that they had gathered on their own into my bulging bag.  They were grieving. 

    Grief is messy.  I've said it before and I will say it again.  I walked away on that day with two things:  a bulky, heavy bag of damp, sandy, smelly trash, and the realization that if humans are grieving, they must be waking up.  Maybe the anthropocene is just the unavoidable mess we need to wake us up to the wounds of our relation, Earth.  In grief, it is commonly thought that anger, denial, depression and bargaining will eventually lead to acceptance.  But what are we accepting?  Are we supposed to accept that suffocating the Earth in a layer of plastic is an inevitability and therefore impossible to avoid?  Or, do we accept the task of cleaning it up with help from a workers prayer?  I cannot speak for anyone other than myself but I know my own answer to that question.

    My parents and I often talk about compassion.  My mother loves Pema Chodron, who encourages us to have a compassion toward ourselves as we would have toward a child.  Pema tells us to be kind, firm and loving toward ourselves in our constant growth and to extend that compassion toward other humans as they also walk the path of suffering and desire.  My father is a Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche kind of guy.  Chogyam Trungpa talks about the difference between healthy compassion and idiot compassion.  He says that while it is important to have love and understanding toward ourselves and others, it is also essential to have discernment between what it right and what is wrong.  What is smart and what is stupid?  What should we allow to remain, and what should we call out from the darkness into a re-evaluation under light? 

    I can have compassion for the prayer hands people who aren't ready to get their own fingers dirty plucking plastic from the sand.  I can have compassion for the loud-talking avoiders.  Here in Northern California it's a pretty safe bet that both of these kinds of people donate some portion of their yearly income to either Greenpeace or the Sierra Club.  I can have compassion and have anger at the same time.  That is where grief starts.  I love therefore I feel.  It's the same with the sad-eyed prayer hands and the loud talkers.  They feel, therefore they pray as a way to separate themselves from their problems.  They feel, therefore they construct walls of their own sounds to deafen themselves to the creaking pain of their relations.  I feel, therefore I sing and pick up garbage, not missing the irony of taking trash from one place and then putting it in another - a bag, a bin, a landfill - how far does it have to travel to be gone?