Apologies to the Goddess

Kwan Yen--our little goddess of compassion.  We found her in a local nursery.  She is slim

and stands only four feet tall but weighs close to two hundred pounds from molded concrete.

A concrete goddess…how’s that for an oxymoron?  She is coiffed and clothed as a Chinese girl should be and would even warrant the adjective demure but for her small right foot—all five perfect little toes--boldly presenting themselves from beneath her floor-length skirt. Is it because she is going somewhere?

Did the artist capture her in the midst of a small but sure step or is this a subtle offering, a promise of a different kind of divine delight?  I guess we will never know.  Her lips are sealed.

When we stood her against the small arched wooden bridge in our front yard we thought it the perfect place for her energy to emanate and envelop our entire acre.  And for a number of months it was so. This goddess of compassion made compassion reign.  Flowers bloomed, fruit appeared, birds and butterflies filled the air.

But then, the plague arrived, the plague of oak moth caterpillars gnawing their way through our luxuriant oak canopy, rappelling down from the heights like an endless gang of warriors.  They covered   our walls and walkways with their skinny black and green bodies and copper helmets and their poop—which scientists have given the dubious name frass.  Frass descended from the leaves above blanketing everything, its smell spoiling every inhale.  A biologist friend told us this is a once every six or seven year phenomenon.  If you don't do commercial spraying (expensive!) right at the first sign, it's a waste.  The oak trees, though utterly stripped, will rebound. The caterpillars will become pupae and the pupae moths but once hatched they will move on and even if they don’t their children, the next generation of caterpillars, will die at the hands of a tiny parasite that takes but a single generation to catch up to its prey. Isn’t nature wonderful?  The balance!  Ah!!  It only takes one year for the parasites to overtake the marauding worms and set things right. So our friend, counseled, since we woke up to the invasion too late for commercial spraying, we should “become one with the caterpillars.” In other words, let Kwan Yen’s spell of mercy abide.

Alas, we could not. The smell of the frass was too “in your nose”, the sight of the caterpillars too icky.  Yes, so icky that a couple in their sixties had to reach back to the childhood word icky to describe them. And the final straw floated down when they covered Kwan Yen’s tiny toes, nose, eyes and ears.

Now you might say they were showing her affection.  One of the stories about her tells us that animals had an affinity for her, even helped her do burdensome chores in a monastery hundreds of years before St Francis spoke to birds in Europe.

You might say they were showing her respect.

You might say the caterpillars were worshipping at her feet, on her feet, limbs, hands, face and hair.

And you might say they were a dastardly pestilence

that needed to be mercilessly wiped

from the earth.

Believe me, we tried to be good students of our goddess, to be one with one with the worm, one with the frass, one with the pupae.  Unfortunately, like all humans except those who attain godly status we were weakened by our anger.  We attacked those worms and their little sleeping pods with environmentally friendly death sprays, wire brushes, power washers, blowers and outdoor vacuums strong enough to uproot an oak.  We sucked, squashed, smashed, blew and blasted them off our walls and deck.  As each day passed we embraced our murderous mission with greater zeal, driven to the precipice of madness by the pungency of frass.  

But finally, it was over.  

Every last worm was either dead or had spun its tiny sanctuary of transformation in the branches beyond our reach.  Then and only then did we approach our freshly washed goddess to ask for compassion when we had given none, mercy when we had been merciless.  For the legend tells us she refused to go into heaven because she heard the cries of the world and wanted to return to assuage them.  Weren’t those cries now coming from us?   Yes, but our cries, were not at first for forgiveness, because we did not seek it.  We did not feel guilty, initially.  After all, if we had not done the killing, wouldn’t the parasites?  How would that have been preferable?

We felt ambivalent and confused. We were both sorry and not sorry.  That's what we cried to have lifted from us--ambivalence and confusion.  We cried over our low tolerance for frass falling from the sky, sharp smells, gangs of insects that, unlike the migrations of monarch butterflies, had for us no redeeming qualities whatsoever; a low tolerance in general for beings—human and otherwise—that were different, and neither beautiful nor useful in their differentness.  We cried out not only for mercy and understanding.  We cried out for the the spell of being human to be re-cast so that compassion would live in our hearts, not just flop on the couch for a week from time to time.  We cried out for the strength to  trust more, allow more, witness more.  We cried out for our capacity for anger to be reshaped into a greater capacity for love that we might be one with nature and one with mankind and our wars against both might finally come to an end. 

Only weeks after the moths left, the canopy was full and lush again, in fact, more luxuriant than it had been before the caterpillars arrived.  The irony weighed heavily upon us.  Heavily.  We stood in the shade surveying our little piece of reborn heaven, trying not to notice that the ground was littered with tiny graves.

C 2014 Bob Kamm

And What of Courage?

   Clearly, great leadership involves courage, a word from the French meaning
"an act of the heart."  Courage is a companion of Conviction, which not only means a powerful belief but by extension, the determination to act in accordance with that belief, to bend the world to that belief. The word, "conviction" comes from a Latin root that means "subdue"...so to believe and to subdue reality in alignment with that belief. 
   An obvious person who comes to mind here from my teens is Martin Luther King, Jr.  This man had an exquisitely fierce belief in the rightness of his cause.  While his first and immediate focus was securing the rights of blacks, he fought for the rights of all humans.  He went into the streets...was arrested, threatened but undeterred.  This was Courage and Conviction operating together for maximum potency, girded by King's Clarity and his Consciousness of the broader issue. In fact, we can readily see all of the C's operating in him, as we do in Gandhi, the man who so deeply influenced him.
   Some might ask, "What separates such a leader from, say, a monster like Hitler, et al?  Aren't all these men marked by most of the C's you're talking about?   The answer is actually quite simple:  they are lacking in Compassion.  And this returns to the point I've made earlier that the C's are not a menu but an ensemble and that all are necessary to achieve great leadership.  A great leader has Compassion, even respect,for those who oppose his efforts.  He knows that if we sacrifice our compassion to hatred in defeating another, we will be ultimately little or no better than he. A great leader lives in accordance with the deepest teachings of all the wisdom paths humanity has given rise to: to live thy neighbor as thyself, to turn the other cheek, to live thine enemies.  To the degree that we fall short of those teachings, we still have plenty of work to do.
   King was a man, so I would not be surprised if people close to him saw flashes of anger, sadness, even bitterness.  All leaders experience such things and those experiences are not a negation of their compassion but just a mark of their humanity.  If we demand absolute purity from our leaders, we are denying their humanity, and our own.  In fact, the longing for heroes may, to some unfortunate degree, be driven by such a denial of the complexity of our emotional nature. Beware of absolutes.  No one can measure up to them over time.  So the question is not, "Are you compassionate every second every day towards those who oppose you?"  The question is, "In the long run, what is your disposition towards all humans, including your enemies?"  King demonstrated a rare Constancy in his practice and portrayal of an all-encompassing compassion that ultimately is the only true path away from violence in our species.