Jean Gendreau

“I eat rice. I do not eat lice. Rice-lice. River-liver. Rook-look.”
My students are Japanese adults learning English. As they try to repeat, one older student looks resentful.  At break time, he finally comes to my desk.  “Teacher, I am sorry – but we think this is rude. We think you are… mocking… making fun.  We feel….” He looks embarrassed. “You are laughing at us. There cannot be two different sounds.”  
Eventually, I set up an experiment where two teams of native English speakers test each other to see if they can hear that “rice” and “lice” start with two different sounds. Of course they can hear it.  Every time. Eventually, my Japanese students admit there must be “something.” It’s not that they refuse to believe me.  It’s that, no matter how hard they try, their ears and brains do not hear these sounds. To them, it is simply impossible for “r” and “l” to be different.
You and I are the same. We think we know what’s real. But no matter how hard we try, there are many sounds we simply do not hear.  There are images we do not see.  
This is not a physical difference, not like dogs hearing a dog whistle. It’s because our brains learn to sort what matters. Eventually, with years of practice, a Japanese speaker will hear the r-l difference. But until then, to them it is not real.
From birth, we all learn to think and perceive only certain things. Our minds and our hearts learn to ignore what does not seem to matter. No matter how hard we try, there are realities that we do not perceive – even though they are as real as rice and lice.   
When we meditate, we begin to experience new things. There is “something” there. We discover this by practicing.  In the beginning, we stare suspiciously at the meditation teacher who talks about compassion, spaciousness, and refuge. Some of us think “what a lot of hooey.”  I sit silently, my eyes closed, and my mischievous “monkey mind” jumps around, thumping and hooting so that peace seems impossible.
This summer, our monkey minds have not stopped screaming. What of the innocents in Gaza?  Will there be midterm elections? How can we live under this government? Everyone I know is talking about how they are managing the assaults from news and from our daily lives.
The great meditation and spiritual teacher Stephen Levine taught that one way to begin to overcome monkey mind is to start by seeing your thoughts as train cars rolling past. At first, they simply roll past.  After a while, you can look between the cars and sense “something.”  There’s no need to name that something. What matters is that you come to accept – like the Japanese students – that it is possible that something is there, even though at first we cannot name it, hear it or see it.
Last week I was in Madison, Wis. It’s the morning after the wedding of a transgender member of my family. In the traffic on the beltline, a police siren shrieks and wobbles, coming up fast. A cop car roars past, screaming.  A minute later, we see it. Oh God. Police cars stopped helter-skelter on the road, cops with guns aiming at a young black man with dreadlocks.  He stands with his hands up.  I only see it for a second as we pass.  I start to sob. It is real. I have not gone numb at all.
How do we bear the unbearable? 
I go back to my meditation, back to looking between the train cars.  Stephen Levine taught that “pain tears the heart open.” There is plenty of pain, and it’s tearing our hearts open. People of color have always known how dangerous it is when the powerful go after the powerless. Now, with the destruction of universities, medical research, and government jobs, the pain is real for the middle class, too.
Here is a place to stop and breathe.  We can allow what is unbearable to change us.   Stephen Levine’s life work began in about 1980, when he counseled the first victims of AIDs. Once, when he was counseling a young girl dying of cancer, they talked about her overwhelming new compassion. She felt that her heart had never been so open. As Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” 
It doesn’t matter what storm I am in –addiction, cancer, cruelty, injustice. What’s in my line of sight is compassion. What lies ahead is hope. Refuge. Safety. Goodness. 
Like a sailor in a storm, this is how I lash myself to the mast. I can hold firm by sitting silently, lifting my head, looking between the train cars for “something.”  Not fancy stuff –not chanting in lotus position, not saying foreign words. Simple breath counting in silence.  One and two. In and out. I trust this line of sight. And it’s all I can manage right now.
There is something in that silence that is real.  This is how I find my line of sight.
My deepest intuition recognizes goodness that is holy. This is the shiver at a loon’s call, my tears when a prisoner walks out the cell door. People bowing as an organ donor’s body rolls past.  An old hymn.  Children holding hands. Dawn on a calm lake.  
I give thanks for not being numb. I keep my eyes on the space between my thoughts. When goodness sings, I’ll hear it.  When the light rises, I’ll be there.