by Alice Walker
Marley was born December 19, 1995. She shares a birth sign, Sagittarius, with my mother and several friends and acquaintances. At times I feel surrounded by Sages and enjoy them very much: they are fun to be with, outspoken, passionate, and won’t hesitate to try new things. They also like chicken. Marley has all these qualities, though I didn’t know that the morning I drove out to the breeder to look at the litter of Labrador retrievers I was told had arrived.
Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge a friend and I joked about whether I was in fact ready to settle down enough to have a dog. Who would feed it when I was distracted by work? Where would it stay while I was away on book tours? Had I lined up a reliable vet? I had no idea what would happen. I only knew this friend was about to go away on a journey of unknown length. I would be unbearably lonely for her. I needed a companion on whom to lavish my overflowing, if at times distractible, affection. I needed a dog.
On entering a place where animals are bred, my first thoughts are always about enslavement. Force. Captivity. I looked at the black and the chocolate labs who were Marley’s parents and felt sad for them. They looked healthy enough, but who knew whether, left to themselves, they would choose to have litter after litter of offspring? I wondered how painful it was to part with each litter. I spoke to both parents, let them sniff my hand. Take in the quality of my being. I asked permission to look at their young. The mother moved a little away from her brood, all crawling over her blindly feeling for a teat; the father actually looked rather proud. My friend joked about offering him a cigar.
I was proud of myself, too, standing there preparing to choose. In the old days of up to several months before, if I were going to choose an animal from a litter I would have been drawn to the one that seemed the most bumbling, the most clueless, the most unamused. I saw a couple like that. But on this day, that old switch was not thrown: I realized I was sick of my attraction to the confused. My eyes moved on. They all looked much alike, to tell the truth. From a chocolate mother and a black father there were twelve puppies, six chocolate, six black. I’ll never get over this. Why were there none with spots?
I asked the woman selling them, whom I tried not to have Slave Trader thoughts about. She shrugged. They never spot, she said. That’s the nature of the purebred Lab.
Well, I thought. Mother. Once again doing it just any old way you like. “Mother” is my favorite name for Nature, God, All-ness.
I settled on a frisky black puppy who seemed to know where she was going—toward a plump middle teat!—and was small enough to fit in my hand. I sometimes wish I had chosen a chocolate puppy; in the Northern California summers the dust wouldn’t show as much, but I think about this mostly when Marley rolls in the dirt in an effort to get cool.
After seven weeks I returned alone to pick her up, feeling bereft because my friend had already gone on the road. It didn’t seem right to pay money for a living being; I would have been happier working out some sort of exchange. I paid, though, and put Marley in my colorful African market basket before stroking the faces of her wistful looking parents one last time. In the car, I placed the basket in the front seat next to me. I put on Bob Marley’s Exodus CD and baby Marley and I sped away from Babylon.
We wound our way back through the winter countryside toward the Golden Gate Bridge and the bracing air of San Francisco. Before we had gone twenty miles Marley, now about the size of my two fists, had climbed out of the basket and into my lap. From my lap she began journeying up my stomach to my chest. By the time we approached the bridge she’d discovered my dreadlocks and began climbing them. As we rolled into the city she had climbed all the way to the back of my neck and settled herself there between my neck and the headrest. Once there she snoozed.
Of the weeks of training I remember little. Dashing down three flights of stairs in the middle of the night to let her pee outside under the stars. Sitting on a cushion in the kitchen, before dawn, her precious black body in my lap, groggily caressing her after her morning feed. Walking with her zipped up in my parka around and around the park that was opposite our house. Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on foot, her warm body snug in my arms as I swooned into the view. She grew.
Today she is seven years old and weighs almost ninety pounds. People we encounter on walks always ask whether she’s pregnant. No, I reply, she’s just fat. But is she really? No matter how carefully I feed her or how often I downsize her meals, she remains large and heavy. And she loves to eat so much that when her rations are diminished she begs, which I can’t stand. This is one of those areas we’ve had most work to do. I’ve settled it lately by taking her off any slimming diet whatsoever and giving her enough food so that she seems satisfied. I did this after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, had surgery, and I realized I might lose her at any time. I did not want her last days to be spent looking pleadingly at me for an extra morsel of bread. To make up for giving her more food, I resolved to walk her more.
The friend who went away never really returned. Marley and I ceased expecting to see her after about the first year. Marley was an amazing comfort to me. What is it about dogs? I think what I most appreciate in Marley is how swiftly she forgives me. Anything. Was I cool and snooty when I got up this morning? Did I neglect to greet her when I came in from a disturbing movie? Was I a little short on the foodstuffs and forgot to give her a cube of dried liver? Well. And what about that walk we didn’t do and the swim we didn’t take and why don’t I play ball with her the way I did all last week? And who is this strange person you want me to go off with? It doesn’t matter what it is, what crime against Dog I have committed, she always forgives me. She doesn’t even appear to think about it. One minute she’s noting my odd behavior, the next, if I make a move toward her, she’s licking my hand. As if to say: Gosh, I’m so glad you’re yourself again, and you’re back!
Dogs understand something I was late learning: when we are mean to anyone or any being it is because we are temporarily not ourselves. We’re somebody else inhabiting these bodies we think of as us. They recognize this. Oops, I imagine Marley saying to herself, sniffing my anger, disappointment, or distraction. My mommy’s not in there at the moment. I’ll just wait until she gets back. I’ve begun to feel this way more than a little myself. Which is to say, Marley is teaching me how to be more self-forgiving. Sometimes I will say something that hurts a friend’s feelings. I will be miserable and almost want to do away with myself. Then I’ll think: but that wasn’t really the you that protects and loves this friend so much you would never hurt them. That was a you that slipped in because you are sad and depressed about other things: the state of your love life, your health, or the fate of the planet. The you that loves your friend is back now. Welcome her home. Be gentle with her. Tell her you understand. Lick her hand.
Animals teach us to be reliable and how to serve without judgment or complaint. They depend on us for food and shelter, exercise and affection, and we commit ourselves to the discipline of never letting them down. They teach us humility.
Consider how you feel when you are cleaning up after your dog or cat. There you are, plastic baggie or scoop in hand, not knowing where the poop is going to drop, but knowing you will have to find it and remove it out of regard for others (and of course for yourself and Mother Earth). It may be firm and easy to collect, or there may be evidence of diarrhea. This is a moment of deep learning of how to be. Patient, compassionate, prepared. In this moment we glimpse our own possible infirmity, as we age; our own decline and mortality. We understand the importance of being able to help our aging parents or grandparents, or ill and incapacitated relatives and friends, in just this accepting way.
Cats, in particular, teach us to be ourselves, whatever the odds. A cat, except through force, will never do anything that goes against its nature. Nothing seduces it away from itself.
Contemplate ways we can strengthen our resolve to live our lives as who we really are. See the beauty, for instance, in foregoing an “important” meeting or gala event in favor
of a warm fire at home and a restorative nap. What makes us purr with contentment? Find it and let it, easily, find you.
6.
This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations: Suffering Too Insignificant For the Majority to See
Dharma Talk
African American Buddhist Conference/Retreat
Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Woodacre, California
August 16, 2002
This was not an area of large plantations, since the land is hilly with some bottoms of rich soil. Whites usually had small or medium-sized farms with slaves, but one pervasive thread of “southern life” ran through Leake County history. White masters raped black slave women who bore their children, as Winson Hudson tells in her own grandmother’s story. The treatment of these children varied, and sometimes they were accepted or acknowledged as relatives of the white families.
And other perversity was always looming. Percy Sanders, a descendent of an early black family in the area, recalled hearing as a child about George Slaughter, a white farmer’s son by a black woman, who came to a horrible death because he “didn’t keep his place.” Ambushed by white men, including his own father, he was shot while riding his horse because the saddle horse was “too fine.” The story goes that when he was found, “the horse was drinking his blood.”
—Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter by Winson Hudson and Constance Curry with a foreword by Derrick Bell
When I went to live in Mississippi in the Sixties and to work in the Civil Rights Movement, whose aim was to emancipate and empower African Americans who were still, thousands of them, treated as badly as and sometimes worse than slaves, I met Winson Hudson. She was trying to write the story of her life. I helped her, until I left Mississippi to live in New En gland. We sat under a tree and I wrote what she dictated. Today her story has become a book.
I begin my talk with this harrowing quote simply to ground us all in the reality of being African Americans, African-Indians, African Amerindians. We are that mixture of peoples, brought together very often and for centuries in the most intense racial confusion, hatred and violence. This horrible story, which has haunted me since I read it, is typical of the kind of psychic assault we endure, while it is exactly the kind of assault today’s white majority takes no notice of, just as it took no notice two and three and one hundred years ago. This story, so chilling—The horse was drinking his blood? His own father was one of the assassins? His crime was that his horse was too “fine”?—unfortunately is one in a storehouse of such stories those of us present might hear or expect to hear, on any given day of our lives. What do we do with the shock? What do we do with the anger? The rage? What do we do with the pain?
When I read this story last month I was sitting in a federal courthouse, preparing to do jury duty. I felt ill immediately. But not as ill as I would feel an hour later upon entering the courtroom, when I was confronted with the fact that three young men of color, one Asian, two Latino, were to be tried for the murder of a policeman, whom they allegedly killed when he interrupted their burglary of a steak house. One glance at the accused trio revealed the faces of malnourished youths, barely out of their teens. The choice before the jury would be life imprisonment without parole or the death penalty. The judge, white and middle-class, well fed and well educated, seemed prepared to impose either choice.
Here were the contemporary brothers of George Slaughter.
My first version of this talk began with a poem by Bashō:
Sitting quietly
Doing nothing
Spring comes
And the grass
Grows
By itself.
I was thinking of how I found my way from the backwoods of Georgia as a young woman into the company of the finest poets. It was a route of unbelievable, serious magic. As a child my family had no money to buy books, though all of us loved to read. Because I was injured as a child and blinded in one eye, the state gave me a stipend which meant I could buy all the books I wanted. When I went north to college, my first stop after settling in my room was the bookstore, where I entered a state of ecstasy seeing before me all the books of poetry I was hungering to read. It was there in the Sarah Lawrence College bookstore that I encountered Bashō and Buson and Issa, Japanese Buddhist haiku poets who had lived centuries before. And also a book called Zen Telegrams by Paul Reps. We connected on the profound level of Nature. That is to say, in these poets I discovered a kindred sensibility that respected Nature itself as profound, magical, creative and intelligent. There was no hint, as there is in other poetry, that simply because humans are able to write about Nature, they are somehow, therefore, superior to it.
So this is the way I was going to start. But then I thought: it is more honest to start with the harder, more collective stuff. The stuff that makes addicts and slaves of Africans a hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. For I knew while sitting in that courtroom, having read the story of George Slaughter and acknowledging the young men before me as today’s version of him, that the pain I was feeling is the same pain that sends our people reeling into streets and alleys looking for a “fix” to fix all that is wrong with this gruesome picture. It is the pain that undermines our every attempt to relieve ourselves of external and internalized white domination. The pain that murders our every wish to be free. It is a pain that seems unrelenting. A pain that seems to have no stopping and no end. A pain that is ultimately, insidiously, turning a generous, life-loving people into a people who no longer feel empathy for the world. We need only listen to some of our African American comedians to see that our traditional compassion for Life has turned into the most egregious cynicism.
We are being consumed by our suffering.
We are a people who have always loved life and loved the earth. We have noticed Earth. How responsive and alive it is. We have appreciated it. We have been a nation of creators and farmers who adored the Earth even when we were not permitted to own any part of it larger than our graves. And then only until a highway needed to be built or a condominium constructed on top of them.
I remember distinctly the joy I witnessed on the faces of my parents and grandparents as they savored the sweet odor of spring soil or the fresh liveliness of wind.
This compassionate, generous, life-affirming nature of ours, that can be heard in so much of our music, is our Buddha nature. It is how we innately are. It is too precious to lose, even to disappointment and grief.
Looking about at the wreck and ruin of America, which all our forced, unpaid labor over five centuries was unable to avert, we cannot help wanting our people, who have suffered so grievously and held the faith so long, to at last experience lives of freedom, lives of joy. And so those of us chosen by Life to blaze different trails than the ones forced on our ancestors have explored the known universe in search of that which brings the most peace, self-acceptance and liberation. We have found much to inspire us in Nature. In the sheer persistence and wonder of Creation Itself. Much in Indigenous wisdom. Much in the popular struggles for liberation around the world, notably in Cuba, where the people demonstrate a generosity of spirit and an understanding and love of humankind that, given their isolation and oppression by our country, is almost incomprehensible. We have been strengthened by the inevitable rise of the Feminine, brought forward so brilliantly by women’s insistence in our own time. And of course by our own African American struggle for dignity and freedom, which has inspired the world. In addition, many of us have discovered in the teachings of the Buddha wise, true, beautiful guidance on the treacherous path life and history set us upon.
Having said this, let me emphasize that I did not come to the study and practice of Buddhism to become a Buddhist. In fact, I am not a Buddhist. And the Buddha would not have minded this in the least. He would have been happy to hear it. He was not, himself, a Buddhist. He was the thing Itself: an enlightened being. Just as Jesus Christ was not a Christian, but a Christ, an enlightened being. The challenge for me is not to
be a follower of Something but to embody it; I am willing to try for that. And this is how I understand the meaning of both the Christ and the Buddha. When the Buddha, dying, entreated his followers to “be a lamp unto your self,” I understood he was willing to free his followers even from his own teachings. He had done all he could do, taught them everything he had learned. Now, their own enlightenment was up to them. He was also warning them not to claim him as the sole route to their salvation, thereby robbing themselves of responsibility for their own choices, behavior, and lives.
I came to meditation after a particularly painful divorce. Painful because I never ceased to care for the man I divorced. I married him because he was one of the best people I’d ever encountered. However, life had other plans for us both. I left my home, as the Buddha left his two thousand and five hundred years ago, to see if I could discover how I at least could be happy. If I could be happy in a land where torture of my kind was commonplace, then perhaps there was a general happiness to be found.
The person who taught me Transcendental Meditation was teaching out of the Hindu tradition and never mentioned the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths (about the fact of human suffering, its causes, the necessity to engage, endure and transform it) or the Eightfold Path, which provides a guide to moral, conscious living. What she did teach me was the deeper value of sitting quietly, doing nothing. Breathing. This took me back to childhood days when I did this without thinking. Days when I was aware I was not separate from the cosmos. Days when I was happy. This was actually a place where poets, time out of mind, have frequently lived. No wonder I felt at home there.