Just a few days ago, thinking I might celebrate the late bell hooks in a reading in one of my classes, I happened on this 2000 account of her relationship with the great Buddhist teacher of our time Thich Nhat Hanh. And now Thay (as his students call him) has left us, too.I've been as surprised by the remarkable range of people lamenting Thay's passing as I was at the outpour on bell's passing. In what seems a season of devastating departures, the moving on of these two cuts particularly close. I would wager that hooks has been the most widely assigned author at Lang for as long as I've been there. Her visions of "teaching to transgress" shape all that we do. (And it's nice that Lang hosted the residencies for bell which have become the most important visual legacy of her remarkable and dialogic presence.) In tributes I learned how even more personally her work and witness inspired women, especially women of color.
Tributes to Thay make clear he was profoundly inspiring to many kinds of people, too, for all sorts of reasons, from practices of everyday mindfulness (he's the source of the tangerine-eating meditation, as well as the slow silent group walks I've done with many classes of students over the years) to the engaged Buddhism of his "action precepts" and the profundity of "interbeing." Many of the memorials I've seen are from people I had no idea were Buddhist or had a practice. I suppose we feel so bereft - and yet, in another way, not sorrowful - is because we hold Thay in our bodies, in our very awareness and interaction with the world. He taught so many how to breathe in and breathe out and breathe in again, and that each of these breaths linked us with all the world.
I was pleased to be reminded of this poem, and that it was posted on FaceBook by my pash Rebecca Solnit:
Call Me by My True Names
Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
.
Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.
.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.
.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
,
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.
.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
