Not what we planned, but better

One of the reasons I've been missing from Blip is that I was planning, with Portland Buddhist Peace Fellowship, a public meditation for Black Lives to be held in person with social distancing on June 13; after it was announced, we had such enthusiastic response to it that we began having frantic conversations about how to maintain safety for a mass of people in pouring rain. Then I was having Zoom talks about our intentions and our fears of Covid-19. Finally I had to cancel the event and notify everyone involved and all those who had wanted to attend.

Because we didn't have our meditation, we were able to join an online half-day retreat created by Reverend angel Kyodo williams.  She offered four hours of organized online silence punctuated by a half-hour talk during which she offered some healing for racism, "the second pandemic." She urges white people to "disarm" and "disavow white culture," to do the deep inner work of knowing our own suffering and making a commitment to "do no harm;" to learn self-belonging; to recognize our own wholeness; and to see that there are only two possibilities for us: opening and contracting.

As a step toward opening my heart more fully, I disavow white culture, which to me means disavowing the racist notion that there is such a thing as "white" people. "White" is a category created by those who upheld slavery, a way to keep poor people of various European cultures from finding common cause with slaves and freed slaves. 

Until "white" was created as a concept to describe people, pale-skinned people might claim Swedish, Italian, Welsh, German, or any of a variety of cultures. Once "white" was created, a specious set of values was created to go with it: superiority, domination, otherness, and fear that "black" people were inherently both inferior and violent. That obscenity became the justification for "white" violence and domination. I totally disavow all that.

During one of the brief walking meditations, I went outside in Sue's back yard and photographed her picnic table, where the dogwood petals fall into a bowl she made years ago, half-full of rainwater. Then later in the day, police in Atlanta killed another African-American man for sleeping in his car in a Wendy's drive-through, and protesters set that Wendy's on fire.