Please support the Plum Village Community with a purchase of The Mindfulness Bell Autumn 2020/Issue 85 and read the Venerable Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh‘s guidance for cultivating “Peace, Love and Happiness” during these challenging days. Plus, you can read my contribution, “Peaceful Warrior,” about how I’ve coped with COVID-19 in my new city.
This Quarantine has been an unprecedented and unforgiving time for many of us. Most people are feeling at least a little isolated; anxiety and depression are on the rise. Everyone needs a way to deal with the feelings that this period in time has brought. Teens and young adults, like me, are presented with a unique challenge, as they deal with the already jarring transition from childhood to adulthood. Towards the beginning of the quarantine, I was feeling alone and overwhelmed by all sorts of negative emotions that I did not know what to do with. Now having to adapt to adulthood, along with the changes our world is facing, it is understandable that many of us are feeling increasingly stressed out.
While we cannot do much about the hand the world has dealt us, we are responsible for how we react. All of our negative emotions are augmented by the loneliness and stress that have been stacked on top of us. Many are unfortunately turning to unhealthy outlets to rid themselves of those pent up emotions. However, some of us are using this time to grow. People are overcoming their negative feelings in a myriad of ways: they are learning new languages, picking up new skills, devoting themselves to a project etc. There are no limits as to what you can do to help you manage the negative emotions that have accompanied this quarantine, different strategies work for different people. For me, the way to weather the storm of negative emotions that I faced was by rekindling my love of reading.
I was an avid reader growing up, and I always especially enjoyed stories set in fantasy worlds. I believe that reading so much as a young child helped me become a more curious and thoughtful person. However, as I got older, I began to be obligated to read things, especially at school. While I understood that it was necessary, this change in mindset completely derailed my enjoyment and turned me off to reading. Recently, looking for a way to pass the time, I started reading a couple of web novels. Almost immediately, I fell back in love with reading. As I swiped through page after page, reading about fantasy worlds filled with magic and splendor, I was provided with what so many of us need right now: an escape. Reading does not stop us from feeling, as many try to accomplish to get through these difficult times. Instead, books introduce us to, and let us feel a whole new slew of positive emotions. Good books allow us to live vicariously through their characters, they allow us to feel happy when they succeed and make us root for them when they struggle; they give us hope.
Fantasy Book Recommendations for Teens:
Jaydon is a senior in high school who lives in Pacifica with his family and his dog.
Don’t you love a good book? Whether you bathe in the bloody world of bigotry and vampires with Octavia Butler, explore a new practice, books have it all. There are too many books to love and this list is designed to distract, absorb and focus your attention. Well-written and fun, provocative and insightful, here’s a short list for your COVID-19 stay at home.
A Confederacy of Dunces by the tragic John Kennedy Toole, who won the Pulitzer Prize. You’ll laugh so hard you’ll need some of the extra toilet paper you’ve been stockpiling.
Reminiscent of current times, the hero of this enthralling historical fiction, survives the plague and goes on to bust the ultimate glass ceiling: Catholic Pope. Pope Joan, exquisitely takes you through the middle ages, making you grateful for modern sexism. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the events of Donna Woolfolk Cross’ page-turner really happened.
In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic is the true adventures of Valerian Albanov’s unintentional arctic quest. That he survives the impossible journey on a scale unimaginable to most of us is made sweetly harrowing by Russian officer’s beautiful prose, written in his dairy and saved for posterity.
Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees will first break, then break open, then re-break your heart open. This laugh, cry, turn-the-page novel describes the personal costs of being a transitional character.
Jack Kornfield’s guide to mindfulness offers up small meditations in his workbook The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace. This time of self-isolation can be turned into the space for self-reflection, healing and growth.
Become an expert of the undertakings of underworld with Anne Rice’s juicy and irreverent read: The Vampire Lestat. This fast-paced is speculative fiction at its most delicious. So loud, sexy and powerful, you may want to read the entire series and then watch the movies afterward.
Katherine Dunn’s weird and wild masterpiece of creation looks at how social insulation can lead to annihilation. From start to finish, Geek Love is the brutal story and definition of “toxic family”. Home-spun freak carnival is the backdrop for this home-grown American fiction about a transient family making their own sideshows attractions to survive.
Audre Lorde’s timeless essay collection Sister Outsider still proves relevant in the Me-Too era and the current surge of xenophobia and strife we’re experiencing. Lorde’s wisdom continues to be a balm for souls who hunger for impassioned prose funded by hunger for social-justice.
Witty and sleek, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov brings a fresh take on an old Faustian tale. It’s a short book, but vivacious, smart and
Beloved by our Toni Morrison—poetry, prose, history, magic realism wound tight with collective social-historical memory. You can spend time with our beloved you get ahold of the audio recording read by Morrison herself. t Pulitzer?
If you still looking for something else to read, try my essay about social-justice warrior Ernestine Rose in Fierce: Essays by and about Dauntless Women, edited by Karyn Kloumann. This anthology of 13 brilliant essays earned us a spot in the non-fiction finals for BookLife where we’ve earned 10 /10 in every category so far.
I have been thinking about whether we humans can heal themelves for some 35 years now. In truth I’ve been healing myself all my life and continue to deepen my understanding of healing and myself. There are so many things that I’d like to know, heal and accept in myself. Suddenly COVID-19 is giving me an accelerator in which to look at and heal myself. So let’s begin with a question: Can we heal ourselves?
I believe that we can. It’s not easy, but it is possible. Healing is a radical, positive change on a physical, mental, metaphysical or spiritual level. The problem is that we humans naturally fear change so we have built up resistance to it. Only a few powerful masters can probably heal something like a infectious disease, but most of us may be able to manage chronic conditions with which we live. This Coronavirus outbreak is making space for personal intimacy, which a wise massage therapist named Gordana once explained to me thus: “Intimacy really means: “In-To-Me-See”. Essentially, intimacy is the actual seeing deeply into the beloved. Who, then, could possibly be more beloved than the self? What kind of love exists in the absence of self-love?
In fact, we cannot love another if we cannot truly see them–(and I definitely don’t mean with our weak eyes). Seeing here, is the embracing, accepting and understanding of the beloved. By using this time of isolation to look at areas within ourselves that need healing, we can resolve situations in our lives in ways that bring radical change to an area using our consciousness–our applied awareness.
We can then use the ability to see into ourselves, the practice of intimacy, to study and learn from the situation as it manifests in us and apply new behavior or mental conditions to alter an area through meditation, touch and or visualization. Using this technique, I plan to look at two areas of my body: in the middle and inner ear and the feet in order to transform pain in the latter, and chronic illness in the other.
Please join me on the journey inward into ourselves. You can do all of this at home. Get comfy; we’ll be here for while. Email me your questions or respond directly to the post. Here is what you will need:
Hundreds of years after Deborah Sampson, a gender-bending Revolutionary War soldier, trod the earth, Jessie Serfilippi traverses Sampson’s exact footsteps around present-day New York State. By cinematically documenting Sampson’s life, Serfilippi finds self-agency in her own deliverance by a historical investigation that does not always align with desired outcomes about modern representations of sexuality in “Under the Cover of Breeches and Bayonet.”
In “Audacious Warrior: Ernestine Rose” Edissa Nicolás-Huntsman creatively envisions an unexpected intersection and overlap between herself, a 21st-century Black, Third-World Feminist with Caribbean roots, and Ernestine Rose, an audacious 19th-century ex-Jewish, European, freethinking Abolitionist. Through her activism, Rose established the groundwork for better-known Feminists such as Susan B. Anthony.
Available from Nauset Press on Amazon (ISBN-13: 978-0-9907154-4-3): https://amzn.to/2DWVGgE
For whatever reason, it started in high school. I knew the answers to the teachers’ questions, but didn’t raise my hand to share them. When I was called on, I blurted the quickest response possible so as to avoid being the center of attention. This is when my fear of public speaking took root, the kind that made me suffer through classes all the way through graduate school, avoid certain social events, and ultimately, feel as if I was living below my potential.
It’s not uncommon to feel your palms sweat before a presentation or the rapid beating in your chest before delivering a speech. But throughout my young adult life, I often skipped out on the presentation or speech altogether just to avoid that uncomfortable feeling.
The result was to feel bad anyway. Worse, even, because in addition to the anxiety, I now had a heaping dose of guilt and regret to pour on top—for missing out on knowledge and growth, overlooking opportunities to collaborate and share, and letting myself or others down. To this day, I often regret that I didn’t attend my MFA program graduation, denying my family—and myself—the chance to celebrate this milestone. (My parents still ask why they didn’t get to go to a ceremony.) And all because I couldn’t fathom reading from my thesis to an audience.
Years later, when it came time to go on tour for my first published novel, I had to remind myself of the way my particular anxiety feeds on itself, hurting me rather than protecting me. Because this time, I was determined to show up.
Those prone to listening more than speaking still have a lot to share. Writing has been my salvation, providing me with an outlet for that reflection. The Hour of Daydreams represented seven years of writing and believing in my words, and I had to give it every chance to find success. This meant public speaking engagements, sometimes in front of more than 100 people. How did I tame my anxiety beast?
I didn’t. I had to accept that it was there and plow forward anyway. It’s all too easy to wait until you’re “ready” before taking a leap, large or small, but “ready” can be elusive, and one can wind up staying stationary for too long.
I don’t believe in changing for others’ sake. I believe in choosing the spaces where one is comfortable, where one thrives. Readings are not a requirement of being published. As much as my publisher encouraged my journey to becoming a public author, the desire to share the background, process, and inspiration behind my work ultimately came from me, not the press. That’s how I knew it to be genuine.
Before stepping to the podium, I knew there were things I could do to make the process easier. I opted to sign on for a small number of key appearances versus the quintessential 20-city tour. I came prepared for each of these events, practicing my excerpts aloud and reviewing the themes they cover. I cleared my schedule before a reading, making time to relax and breathe, to enter a space of mindfulness and quiet. I found little things to bring out the joy of the occasion, like wearing a new dress (always blue or purple to match the book cover), or planning a special dinner. Along with bookmarking the passages I’d read from, I tucked Kleenex into the pages of my novel, because nervousness makes my nose run. Through all of this, as many times as I felt nervous or afraid, I also felt excited and grateful, and came to realize how much these emotions are intertwined.
And even though my heart felt like it might explode before those readings, as the words came out, it calmed. I’ve found that like writing, sharing aloud brings out a whole new energy, opening up others to share of themselves in turn. Again and again, I’ve found renewed appreciation for friends, family, peers, and strangers with whom I share the love of literature and stories. One of my fears has been to make mistakes, and I’ve made many in this process. I try not to replay them too often afterward. I try to forgive and accept my limitations.
Speaking in front of a crowd is easier now, but still feels unnatural to me. Perhaps it always will. And that’s okay too.
Renee Macalino Rutledge’s debut novel, The Hour of Daydreams, has been dubbed “essential reading” by Literary Mama, “one of 24 books to get excited for in 2017” by The Oregonian, and a “captivating story of love and loss unlike any other” by Foreword Reviews. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works as a nonfiction book editor, writes the “That’s So Alameda Column” for Alameda Magazine, and regularly explores the tidepools and redwoods with her family.
But what of imagination? When the completion of a thing, a work, a compulsion burned out in form from within into the world, made manifest for the world to see, a spell descends.
It is said that humans are the inventors of the animal world—the king of kings. Crows and ravens make objects of beauty, juxtaposing our discard with stolen and indigenous artifacts. It’s as if there is not enough art in nature for these black birds. We, no less than the crow, must also continue to integrate, overcome and pacify our environment. We do it with art. That is why we object to broken windows, discarded people—anything that reminds us that we are not in charge. Disorder corrupts the notion of control. We like our boxes neat. The first thing that is denied the poor is art, cut out like a vital organ, and grafted into the institutions of the affluent.
But give us a song, a poem, a wall or a canvas, and in that opening we will pour our souls, in blood or colors, out as if we could pay our fare in creation. The great artists of our time and before have known this. They have not kowtowed to the influence of means, driven by the force within, the powerful Beast that must be silenced if the earth will continue to spin on her great axis. This can be said of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Michael Jackson, Vincent van Gogh, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sohei Nishino, Frida Kahlo, Marguerite Duras, Leo Tolstoy, Ai Weiwei, YSL, Nina Simone, Ingrid Bergman, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Misty Copeland, Alvin Ailey, …truly, there is no room in this essay to name them all. When we awaken to this reality, it is easy to see that art drives civilization forward. It is the fuel and the engine; the fire and the wood.
Of course, I may be wrong.
This painful truth has always been true and has also always been ignored. In History and fiction, the mythical truth/fabled realities of White people has been heavily documented in books like Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath and The Sound and Fury. When we examine these texts with our eyes toward the realities excluded and unnamed, the whites people who thrive and prosper are far removed from the poor whites whose only privilege was their status as free people, a situation that has not entirely changed in the century and a half since Emancipation.
I’m reminded of Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto, which 150 years ago cut through the collective conscience of people in various states of revolution with an ideology that spoke of liberty, a human ‘worth’ beyond economic measure; our election is an apparent resurgence of a similar hopelessness and the need for change. It was a referendum on the standards of living, which if we look around leave too many of us destitute, homeless and disenfranchised. What I don’t understand is why the lines are drawn across color lines. These conditions have only ever improved with a unified front, as indicated in the numerous measures implemented during the 1970s.
What has changed?
I have spent years looking at color and studying history through the lens of art, attempting to make the world around myself beautiful. Certainly, what we create is deeply influenced by what we see: the fragmentation or wholeness of life begins within. My walls burst with a vibrancy I believe reflects my deepest nature. The collective images around me emerge into a singular experience of my own story, retold.
In times of despair, art is no luxury. Essential to the healing of the psyche, beauty in her many forms is a conduit for soothing inflamed pathways, a distraction from our own external or internal whirls, a meditation on purpose. Through our eyes, the story of the extraordinary other, the Beloved, is transmuted into wordlessness, a state of suspended ego. Go there.
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” ~ Toni Morrrison
Thank G-d for television, Netflix, cable, video games and movie theaters. Remember when lynching Black Americans was a form of entertainment? During the days of Jim Crow law, after Emancipation, our government allowed White Americans to kill black people with impunity. Some of them even mailed photographs with family members and friends gathered around the defiled bodies, subverting decency, undermining justice and using the federal mail system to send evidence of their crimes. To be fair, some White Americans were also lynched outside of the formal judicial process, but those murders seldom involved the nudity and corporal mutilation that were common singularities of their Black counterparts.
Don’t take my word for it. Learn American History. We have a complex story that needs to be examined, discussed and remembered. Otherwise, we may just repeat the same mistakes.
