Twelve by Twelve (17 page)

As I thought back on the three gangs that attacked me, I realized that, to an extent, I had turned the other cheek. After I was attacked by the gang in Providence, I wrote an op-ed piece for my college newspaper encouraging Brown students to volunteer as Big Brothers and generally climb down out of the ivory tower and get involved solving the problems that were the root causes of such attacks. After my Boston attack, the prosecutor tried to get me to press charges against the principal assailant, but I wrote a statement forgiving him, brutal as the attack had been. Had I prosecuted, he would have been denied entrance into the navy. In my statement I wrote that his anger would be better channeled into discipline in boot camp than festering and growing in prison.

As I returned to the 12 × 12 after my long walk, however, I realized there was a key difference between myself and Jackie. Whereas she, from all indications, had evolved beyond anger, I still had it lodged firmly inside me — as I had just witnessed. Eventually, the stay at the 12 × 12 would help me let go of it for good. Yet everything on Jackie’s four tiny walls, including the photographs of her father, spoke of only one thing: love. I could not see a negative emotion anywhere. When Jesus said to love your enemies, he of course meant: Don’t have any enemies. Instead of letting racism and other forms of negativity inside you, transform them through forgiveness.

DRIVE ALL BLAMES IN TO ONE

DOWN BY NO NAME CREEK ONE DAY,
I read aloud to Leah from Jackie’s copy of the
Tao Te Ching
, Lao-tzu’s famous book of Chinese wisdom: “Do you think you can improve the world?”

Without hesitating, Leah said: “Yes.”

I paused, and then read on: “I don’t think it can be done.”

In unison we broke into smiles, and I continued: “The world is sacred, it can’t be improved.”

“Hearing that,” Leah said, “I feel a pressure lift.”

“It’s our training,” I replied. “ ‘You can save the world!’ It goes on to say, ‘The master sees things as they are without trying to control them. She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.’”

I turned my head to look at Leah’s profile. Neither of us said anything.

Then she slid the book from my hand and continued reading from it: “Know the male, yet keep to the female. Receive the world in your arms…. Know the white, yet keep to the black. Be a pattern for the world.”

I felt lighter, in a deep well of time, the forest around us growing more roomy. “I like that,” I said, “about being a pattern for the world.” The opposites were bouncing around in my mind: male-female, white-black.

“ ‘Pattern’ is so much better than ‘model.’ ”

“Who said anything about model?”

“Exactly. But we always talk about role models. And model citizens. Sounds as plastic as a model airplane, when we’re talking about an interwoven whole.”

“Are you a pattern for the world?”

Her cheek tilted toward her shoulder and she shrugged. “Your turn,” she said, handing me the book.

“He who defines himself can’t really know who he is. He who clings to his work creates nothing that will endure.”

“Lose your shtick,” Leah said. “The more deeply we try to carve an identity, the less we’re ourselves.”

“We’re cheapened. It’s like trying to reduce God to one of its metaphors — the religions.”

“Heresy!”

“Perhaps, but the finger that points at the moon is not the moon. You know,” I continued, “I had an artist friend in New Mexico. She’d paint these beautiful watercolors on homemade paper. Work on them for hours, for an entire day. And then she’d leave the finished paintings by the river bank to blow into the water and disappear downstream.”

“And thus they endured,” she said.

This is the type of conversation Leah and I had during those spring days. On the surface these philosophical discussions were ironic because we were at the very same time gazing deeply into the dark waters of industrial chicken factories, at an underclass in sprawling trailer parks, and even at the possibility of racial violence among Jackie’s direct neighbors. Did we believe “The world is
sacred, and can’t be improved”? Quite the contrary; it needed infinite improvement.

As we walked along No Name Creek, I considered this contradiction. According to Eastern thought there is no contradiction because of nonduality: everything is exactly as it should be at any given moment. I couldn’t quite accept this. It seemed too easy a way out. Did that include the Holocaust? Six million Jews plus four to six million homosexuals, gypsies, Catholics, and communists dead in Nazi Germany — is that exactly the way things should be? Part of a lesson humanity has to learn? It seemed too much of a stretch.

But gazing into No Name Creek, I realized the creek was two things at once: a crazy pattern of noise and texture on top and a quiet stillness below. Some parts of its surface were particularly rough, and some parts of the bottom, like pools near the banks, completely still. So Leah and I, as we became more immersed in Jackie’s home and philosophy, began to become more like the creek: rougher on our surfaces and stiller in our depths. We experienced more forcefully the distinction between
maya
(the illusion of sensory perception as reality) and
dharma
(the invisible, spiritual path). In its deepest essence the creek is neither rough surface nor still depths: it’s water.

THE FOLLOWING DAY,
walking far up along No Name Creek, I came to an abandoned sharecropper’s house. I’d seen them before. In fact — for reasons nebulous to me — it was all the fashion in certain Southern lefty circles to translocate, renovate, and inhabit a former slave or sharecropper house. But finding them abandoned in the middle of nowhere was something quite different. I eyeballed the hardplank structure to be about twice the size of Jackie’s: maybe thirty by twenty-four, far smaller than the abandoned farmhouse I’d seen several days before. The roof had long since caved in, but the walls stood firm. I walked inside.

What was it like to be a sharecropper? In 1874, say, with slavery
over but life largely the same? You’ve got freedom but can’t exercise it. That freedom must have seemed scary. You’ve always lived as a slave, as your parents and grandparents did. It’s the way things were done. Now, what options do you have? So you remain on the master’s plantation, in a house like this one, receive a little salary; in theory you can leave, but for all intents and purposes, life remains what it was, in bondage.

The woods encroached in and around the place. But I could see that it had been fairly recently inhabited, maybe a decade back, judging from the junk around it. It even had an electrical line, now severed, running up to it, probably pirated electricity. I could hear the gurgle of No Name Creek and see patches of blue through the forest canopy overhead. It struck me that maybe most of us inhabit the awful no-man’s-land of sharecroppers, suspended between slave and free. Between Gold Kist and free-range; between 100,000 square feet and 144; between Wal-Mart and homemade.

Recognizing the bind we’re all in together, I decided while at the 12 × 12 to experiment with practicing nonjudgment of others. One day up the creek, I saw the most beautiful buck leap a farmer’s fence into a corral of four horses. Sensing me, the buck returned to his mate and three babies. There, they grazed, the smallest doe rubbing its light brown face against the mother’s, a perfect little kiss. Suddenly:
Bam!
A shotgun rang out in the middle distance, and the deer fled into the forest. Not ten minutes later, the owner of the shotgun blast appeared — a camouflaged hunter in a shiny Silverado pickup. As he passed, we nodded to each other, both of us equally trespassing, so no problem there. Then I saw the bulk of a light brown deer in his pickup cab, and I felt judgment rise. He’d come to shatter some skulls. But I thought: Were I him, I’d do exactly the same. Perhaps he has kids at home to help him skin the deer and roast it. Perhaps they use every single part of the animal. I pictured my
own dwindling rations (with no car for a supermarket run) and thought of the pleasure of venison roasting over my own fire.

As I tried to practice nonjudgment, things worsened with the Thompsons. Several times Mike referred to his Honduran and Mexican neighbors as “the Habitat Mexicans.” Then I was told that the African American woman who lived in the third Habitat for Humanity house hardly ever came, preferring to stay in her Siler City rental, partly because “she was afraid of Mike and his guns.”

When I heard these things, anger would creep in. Then I’d think of something Jackie said to me, a little cryptically, that first day in the 12 × 12: “When you see worthiness, praise it. And when you see unworthiness, trace it.”

IT WAS NEARLY TWILIGHT
the next time I was with Mike, a week after the standoff with the Latino teenagers. He told me a story as the day faded, with his family gathered around. Michele had their baby to her breast, and the other five kids lingered on the porch in front of the pond, Kyle’s shoulder pressed up against mine. Only Mike stood, and he told us about the wolves that came to their farm one night. His family knew the story of the wolves — they’d lived it, just a year before. But they listened as intently as I.

“Half-breed wolves,” Mike said, the sun’s afterglow giving his eyes a sparkle, “took out a thousand dollars in livestock one evening.

“Two of them, male and female, snuck into our farm when we were in town and ravaged the place. We came back to find bodies everywhere — turkeys and ducks strewn there, there, there, all the way up the road!”

I could imagine the carnage. Imagine how he must have felt to see so much of his work devastated by those half-breed wolves.

“They even got three goats and a hog.”

There was a silence. “Did they eat any of it?” I finally asked.

“Nothing,” Mike said. “Killed for killing’s sake. One of the
Habitat Mexicans captured a half-breed, the male. He’d collared it and came to tell me I should shoot it. Out of revenge. I grabbed my gun, loaded it, and raced over with my finger on the trigger.”

He paused, the suspense before the blood-soaked ending.
When you see unworthiness, trace it
, I could hear Jackie whisper. Don’t judge. Trace anything you don’t like in someone else back to their unique history; then trace it back to yourself because anything you dislike in others is somewhere in you. Mike was trying, against the odds, to live as an organic farmer, Gold Kist becoming more poisonously efficient every day. He and his family were fresh out of a drug-riddled trailer park, trying to make a quixotic dream of sustainability come true in an era of the big, the efficient, the flat. He’s quick with a weapon and suspicious of other races, but in his situation, would I be any different?

“When I got to José’s, I pointed my gun at that half-breed wolf. My hand shaking, I —”

Just as he was about to finish his story, to deal the deathblow, an eagle’s shadow passed over his face. We all looked up; the eagle soared right past on a warm current, in a slow arc over No Name Creek, toward the sharecropper house and out of sight.
He said “José,”
I thought to myself,
not “the Habitat Mexican.”
It was the first time I’d heard Mike use his neighbor’s name. Beside the porch, tiny white moths rose up in lazy flutter, seeds falling from the trees around us, and I could hear insects crackling in the dead leaves below our feet.

“I looked at it through the sight of my gun,” Mike continued. “The wolf was all huddled up and whimpering, and I lowered it. I said to myself: ‘I can’t kill him. He’s just doing what he was born to do.’ So I put down my gun, called animal control, and they took that half-breed away.”

THE TENSIONS LEAH AND I DISCOVERED
at the 12 × 12 — the creek’s rough water and its stillness,
maya
and
dharma
, that the world
is evil and the world is perfect — seemed entwined with another apparent duality: sacrifice and seduction.

To reduce her carbon footprint to the level of the average Bangladeshi’s (that is, to one-twentieth of the average American’s consumption), Jackie had made some considerable sacrifices. Ciao, airplanes; hello, Grey-dogging. She also said good-bye to electricity, to home heating, and to piped water. I was living these sacrifices on a temporary basis, but could I make these changes permanently? It was more than a bit scary to picture.

Leah and I talked about what would really change in our lives once our time in the 12 × 12 was over. I’d gotten rid of the car and begun to bike and walk everywhere — put on Jackie’s garments, as it were, for a retreat — but my international twenty-first-century life, my
flat
life, was still waiting for me. I knew that unless I changed, nothing would change. That’s the biggest test, the only test of the worth of an experience — is the change atomic? Does it get down into the very pattern of your psychological, emotional, and habitual DNA?

I didn’t know what would happen. Like a caterpillar, I’d gone into a cocoon and felt my inner world shifting, but I had no idea if a butterfly would emerge or a stillborn half-creature. Would I be wise enough to identify the changes I’d need to make to align my life with the health of the planet? Even if I identified the changes, would I be strong enough to follow through on them?