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?
