PRIVATE TEACHING | EVENTS | TALKS | WRITING
Dear friends,
I mentioned last time I’m working on another book, this one on Right Relationship. Some of the writing you’ll receive will therefore include excerpts of this manuscript in progress, and I’m grateful for your eyes and ears. Another big project I’m working on is changing my website. For some time I’ve wanted to switch it so it foregrounds the Ocean Mind Sangha, and we’ve finally begun working on it. Both of these projects require quite a bit of time and labor, so if you’re willing to sponsor this newsletter to help fund that work, I’d be very appreciative. Know that for the monthly price of a deli sandwich and a coffee, you can make quite a difference— or, you can make a different donation on the website. Either way, thank you for your practice and support.
Happy Thanksgiving.
With love,
Zuisei
Right Relationship starts with a simple premise: none of us are; we inter-are. No creature, no matter how hardy or resilient, no matter how strong or “independent,” can be itself by itself. Every thing and every being needs everything else, all the time.
Before I sat down to type these words, I ate an apple. It was a plump Pink Lady, the first apple in the US to be branded by name instead of variety. I don’t know where this particular apple—which I will affectionately if misguidedly call “my apple”—came from, but for the sake of argument, I’m going to say that it traveled from a farm in Yakima, Washington. On a fall day in early October, my apple was carefully hand-picked by a woman named Adele, who handed it in to be packed with bushels of other apples very much like it, making a long journey across the US and on to the south of Mexico, where it found its way to a supermarket and my table.
I don’t know all the hands that touched my apple, but I’m certain they were many, and that those, in turn, connected with hundreds, thousands of hands in an ever-widening net of connection. Let’s take Adele, for example. I’m going to imagine that Adele is a native Washingtonian, and that she lives in Yakima with her husband and two kids, one of whom suffers from autism. Adele has been picking apples since she was a teenager, and now she’s so good at it that she consistently comes in with the fullest baskets. She favors comfortable clothes when she works: denim overalls and well-worn plaid shirts with colors faded from the sun and multiple washes. She usually buys her clothes second-hand in a thrift store on Main Street that donates part of its profits to an organization protecting women against domestic violence. Violet, the owner, is a survivor of domestic violence herself or, as she likes to say, “a thriver after.” Violet sources her clothes carefully, and still, most of the items she receives are originally made in Vietnam or Cambodia or Honduras. The red and white shirt that Adele’s wearing when she picks my apple was in fact made by a young woman in Tegucijalpa, Honduras named Fabiola. She is the youngest of five kids, and she’s worked at the clothes factory since she was eighteen. She’s now twenty, and although she wouldn’t say that she loves making shirts, she also doesn’t dislike it. It keeps her busy and adds to the family’s income.
On the morning that Adele picks my apple, Fabiola’s thinking about mangoes, her favorite fruit. During mango season she gets a few every day from her neighbor Neon, whose trees are so plentiful, neighbors stop by his house at all hours. But the season was over months ago, and sometimes Fabiola’s craving for mangoes for is so strong it’s like a physical ache. She’s a little embarrassed by it, and has even told Neon, who just nodded when she described her longing. Neon has always had a soft spot for Fabiola, who reminds him of his late daughter. He’s never said this to her—he doesn’t want the neighbors to misunderstand—but he’d do a lot for this young woman. He wants to see her succeed, and at night, when he’s lying in bed with his wife, Cármen, he tells her that he thinks Fabiola can do a lot more than make clothes for rich Americans. Cármen listens to her husband with only half of her mind since the other half is planning the birthday party she’ll throw for her eldest son, who’s turning 28. He loves baseball, and Cármen has been saving to get him a Yankees jersey. She thinks that if she’s able to make one or two more dresses in her shop, she’ll be able to afford it. Then she’ll ask her cousin, Luis Fernando, to bring it from New York when he comes home for Christmas.
Back in Yakima, Adele is also thinking about her son, Henry. He’s been quieter than usual and she’s afraid this means his medication is no longer working. She decides to go see the doctor later that afternoon, knowing that he’ll make time after the last of his patients, since he’s a friend of the family. Adele doesn’t yet know she’ll need to switch Henry’s medication to one that’s not available in Yakima, so once a month she’ll have to drive two hours each way to Seattle. She’ll ask a neighbor to take her there (since she doesn’t drive herself), and to thank her, she’ll bake a different pie each month. The ingredients for those pies she’ll buy at a farmer’s market that pops up downtown every Saturday, where she loves to go for the food and conversation. But before that, Adele will bring her bushel of apples to the back of the barn at Washington Family Farms, where two brothers, Adam and Daniel, will pack them into crates to be shipped out.
The brothers are competitive, Adam especially, and he loves to outdo Daniel whenever he can. During apple packing season, he swears he can fill boxes faster than anyone in the farm—and he’s mostly right, except for those days when he has a migraine and has to stay home, lying as still as a corpse on his small bed, a cold compress over his eyes and all the lights off in the room. In a few year’s time, Adam will meet a woman from Portland and fall head over heels in love. He’ll follow her to the city against his brother’s advice, certain that he’ll never find another woman like her. By the time I turn sixty, Adam will have a child and another on the way. He’ll be mostly happy, though his competitive streak will rear its head now and then, turning him into a “dog after a bone,” as his wife often says. Those days, he will not be so happy.
But he’s happy the day Adele brings my apple to the farm, since he’s packing more crates per hour than his brother. Wearing a pair of deerskin gloves made in Canada by a Québécois glover named Albertine, Adam will carefully pack my apple in a crate that will make it to the truck that will transport the apples to Mexico City, then Cancún, and finally Playa del Cármen. After fulfilling the required quarantine at the border, my apple will be trucked south, then stored in a cooling facility, but not before passing through hundreds of more hands: of treatment facility operators, quality controllers, quarantine officials, cool room technicians, truck drivers, customs officials, and grocery store employees. Some of them will know each other, most of them won’t. But all of them will be connected by the net spreading outward from Yakima.
Finally, one warm October day in Playa, my apple will be chosen for display at the Chedraui a few blocks from my home. An employee wearing under her work vest a Taylor Swift hoodie made in Vietnam by will carefully stack my apple with fifty or so others in the produce section. The next day, a Wednesday, I’ll come to the grocery store after my morning run, choose a few apples, and bring them home to enjoy during an afternoon break. I’ll be sitting on the purple and blue cotton throw on my couch (a throw someone sewed and hand-dyed in Costa Rica) and share slices of apple with my French bulldog Lucas whose life, although a bit quieter than mine, is no less enmeshed with that of countless other beings and things. His eyes half closed in pleasure, Lucas will chew on small pieces of Pink Lady, then lie down on the terrace’s cool tile while I go to my desk and begin writing.
Everything we see is in continuous relationship, always interacting with and being shaped by everything else. As my teacher used to say, we’re in a constant state of becoming. Nothing is fixed, nothing exists in isolation, just as no action stands on its own. From the perspective of Right Relationship, the question is not whether we affect one another—we do. The question is how. Because ideally, we want to carry on those relationships in such a way that they’ll contribute something good to us, to everyone else, and to the world—so that those relationships will help and not harm. This is an important point, and one I’ll make often. As I mentioned before, the “right” of right relationship doesn’t stand in opposition to wrong. It’s not a moral judgment. It simply points to the right way of conducting relationships so that we’ll help one another and, as much as possible, avoid harm—which is not so easy to do. Sometimes it seems that despite our best, most noble and careful intentions, we do the very thing we don’t want, which is to hurt others (if we do want to, we have a different problem). It’s not easy to square our wants with another’s. But it’s possible. Taking Right Relationship as our ground, we can inject our interactions with a bit of clarity and, hopefully, a good dose of love. One way to begin is to slow down and really pay attention. To investigate instead of assume. To ask instead of affirm. And to wonder whether what we’re seeing accords with our experience.
Coming full circle to the beginning, let me then define Right Relationship as “interbeing,” to borrow the late Vietnamese Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s well-known term. If we can keep in mind that everything we do, everything we say, and even everything we think affects others, then we step into our relationships on a more solid footing. It may feel like a big responsibility to know that every one of our choices affects the whole, and it is. But if we look closely, we’ll also see that instead of being a burden, this knowledge is a blessing. It reminds us that we’re never alone. We’re responsible, yes. Wholly responsible. But so is everyone else. Instead of fighting or resisting one another, we can lean on each other for support. We can even act as each other’s refuge. We can be each other’s ground.
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