I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reason—to learn—but dropped out at nineteen for the best possible reason—to become a writer. Those of you who have read my work know that instead, I accidentally became a Kelly Girl for a while. Then, in a dazzling career move, I got hired as a clerk-typist in the Nuclear Quality Assurance Department at Bechtel, where I worked typing and sorting triplicate forms. I hate to complain, but it was not very stimulating work. However, it paid the bills, so I could write my stories every night when I got home. I worked at Bechtel for six months—but I swear I had nothing to do with the company’s involvement in the Bush administration’s shameless war profiteering. I just sorted triplicate forms.
It was a terrible job, at which I did a terrible job, but it paid $600 a month, which, augmented by food stamps, was enough to pay my rent and grocery bills. This is a real problem if you are crazy enough to want to be an artist—you have to give up your dreams of swimming pools and fish forks, and take any old job. At twenty, I was hired as an assistant editor at a magazine; I think that was the last real job I’ve had.
I bet I’m beginning to make some parents nervous—here I am, bragging of being a dropout, and unemployable, and about to make a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what parents want is for their children to do well in their field, to make them look good, and maybe also to assemble a tasteful fortune.
But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to live it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are.
At some point I started getting published, and experienced a meager knock-kneed standing in the literary world, and I started to get almost everything that many of you graduates are hoping for—except for the money. I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled—all the things that the culture tells you, from preschool on, will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you. I got some stature, the respect of other writers, even a low-grade fame. The culture says these things will save you, as long as you also manage to keep your weight down. But the culture lies.
Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams—what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred—I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money.
I’d wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she’d been chasing for so long—discovering it was merely metal, wrapped up in cloth. It wasn’t alive; it had no spirit. It was fake. Fake doesn’t feed anything. Only spirit feeds spirit, your own and the universal spirit, in the same way that only your own blood type, and O negative, the universal donor, can sustain you. “Making it” had nothing that could slake the thirst I had for immediacy, and connection.
From the wise old pinnacle of my years, I can tell you that what you’re looking for is already inside you. You’ve heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can’t buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can’t give it to you. Neither can success, or fame, or financial security—besides which, there ain’t no such thing. John D. Rockefeller was once asked, “How much money is enough?” and he answered, “Just a little bit more.”
It can be confusing—most of your parents want you to do well, to be successful. They want you to be happy—or at least happyish. And they want you to be nicer to them, just a little nicer—is that so much to ask?
They want you to love, and be loved, and find peace, and laugh and find meaningful work. But they also—some of them, a few of them (not yours—yours are fine)—they also want you to chase the bunny for a while. To get ahead, sock some money away, and then find a balance between the bunny chase and savoring your life.
But you don’t know whether you’re going to live long enough to slow down, relax, and have fun, and discover the truth of your spiritual identity. You may not be destined to live a long life; you may not have sixty more years to discover and claim your own deepest truth. As Breaker Morant said, you have to live every day as if it’s your last, because one of these days, you’re bound to be right.
It might help if I go ahead and tell you what I think is the truth of your spiritual identity. . . .
Actually, I don’t have a clue.
I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, or whether you start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn’t what you do, it’s . . . well, again, I don’t actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher; I should have stuck around. But I know that you feel it best when you’re not doing much—when you’re in nature, when you’re very quiet or, paradoxically, listening to music.
I know you can feel it and hear it in the music you love, in the bass line, in the harmonies, in the silence between notes: in Chopin and Eminem, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, Bach, whomever. You can close your eyes and feel the divine spark concentrated in you, like a little Dr. Seuss firefly. It flickers with life and relief, like an American in a foreign country who suddenly hears someone speaking English. In the Christian tradition, they say that the soul rejoices in hearing what it already knows. And so you pay attention when that Dr. Seuss creature inside you sits up and strains to hear.
We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it’s a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that’s often when we see Spirit most brightly.
It’s magic to see Spirit, largely because it’s so rare. Mostly you see the masks and the holograms that the culture presents as real. You see how you’re doing in the world’s eyes, or your family’s, or—worst of all—yours, or in the eyes of people who are doing better than you—much better than you—or worse. But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You’re not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You’re here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill—and we’re all terminally ill on this bus—what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them.
So how do we feed and nourish our spirit, and the spirit of others?
First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping. Every single spiritual tradition says that you must take care of the poor, or you are so doomed that not even Jesus or the Buddha can help you.
You don’t have to go overseas. There are people in this country who are poor in spirit, worried, depressed, dancing as fast as they can; their kids are sick, or their retirement savings are gone. There is great loneliness among us, life-threatening loneliness. People have given up on peace, on equality. They’ve even given up on the Democratic Party, which I haven’t, not by a long shot. You do what you can, what good people have always done: you bring thirsty people water, you share your food, you try to help the homeless find shelter, you stand up for the underdog.
I secretly believe that this makes Jesus love you more.
Anything that can help you get your sense of humor back feeds the spirit, too. In the Bill Murray movie Stripes, a very tense army recruit announces during his platoon’s introductions: “The name’s Francis Sawyer, but everybody calls me Psycho. Any of you guys call me Francis, and I’ll kill you. . . . And I don’t like nobody touching me. Any of you homos touch me, and I’ll kill you.” The sergeant responds, “Lighten up, Francis.” So you may need to upgrade your friends. You need to find people who laugh gently at themselves, who remind you gently to lighten up.
Rest and laughter ar
e the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. Some of you start jobs on Monday; some of you wish you did—some of your parents are asthmatic with anxiety that you don’t. They shared this with me before the ceremony began.
But again, this is not your problem. If your parents are hell-bent for someone in your family to make a name in the field of, say, molecular cell biology, then maybe when you’re giving them a final tour of campus you can show them to the admissions office.
I would recommend that you all take a long deep breath, and stop. Just be where your butts are, and breathe. Take some time. You are graduating today. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is trying to shame you into hopping right back up onto the rat exercise wheel.
Rest, but pay attention. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is stealing your freedom, your personal and civil liberties, and then smirking about it. I’m not going to name names.
But slow down. Better yet, lie down.
In my twenties I devised a school of relaxation that has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the ensuing years—it was called Prone Yoga. You just lay around as much as possible. You could read, listen to music, you could space out or sleep. But you had to be lying down. Maintaining the prone.
You’ve graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it’s a fool’s game. If you agree to play, you’ve already lost. It’s Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And—oh my God—I nearly forgot the most important thing: Refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you’ll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you’ve just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without having your pants get in on the act, too.
So bless you. You’ve done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you are capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It’s what you are made of. And it’s what you’re here for. Take care of yourselves; take care of one another.
And give thanks, like this: Thank you.
twenty-four
market street
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before a recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing, as I’d hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between the sad elegance of Virginia Woolf, and Wavy Gravy. Instead, I was angry that our country’s leaders had bullied and bought their way into preemptive war. Hitting first has always been the mark of evil. I don’t think one great religious or spiritual thinker has ever said otherwise. Everyone, from almost every tradition, agrees on five things. Rule 1: We are all family. Rule 2: You reap exactly what you sow, that is, you cannot grow tulips from zucchini seeds. Rule 3: Try to breathe every few minutes or so. Rule 4: It helps beyond words to plant bulbs in the dark of winter. Rule 5: It is immoral to hit first.
I tried to pray my way out of the fear and hate, but my mind was once again a pinball machine of blame and hopelessness. I had planted bulbs a few months before, but they had not bloomed yet, and I did not want to get out of bed. Like everyone I knew, I was despondent about the war. And I wondered if I actually even believed in God anymore. It seemed ridiculous, this conviction that I had an invisible partner in life, and that we were all part of a bigger, less punishing and isolated truth. I lay there gnashing my teeth, sure that what you see is what you get. This was it. This earth, this country, here, now, was all there was. This was where all life happened, the up and the down and the plus and the minus and the world of choices and consequences. Not an easy place, but a place full of significance.
I clutched my cat as I used to when my parents fought, a life preserver in cold, deep water.
But then—a small miracle—I started to believe in George Bush. I really did: In my terror, I wondered whether maybe he was smarter than we think he is, and had grasped classified intelligence and nuance in a way that was well above my own understanding or that of our era’s most brilliant thinkers.
Then I thought: Wait—George Bush? And relief washed over me like gentle surf, because believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God seems almost rational.
I decided to start from scratch, with a simple prayer: “Hi!” I said.
Someone or something hears. I don’t know much about its nature, only that when I cry out, it hears, and moves closer to me, and I don’t feel so alone. I feel better. And I felt better that morning, starting over. No shame in that—Augustine said that you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday’s faith does not wait for you like a dog with your slippers and the morning paper in its mouth. You seek it, and in seeking it, you find it. During the Renaissance, Fra Giovanni Giocondo wrote:
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest
in it today. Take heaven!
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in
this present little instant. Take peace!
And so I roused myself and went to meet some friends in San Francisco.
We milled around the Embarcadero, where you could see endless sky and ocean, and a Möbius strip of the ’60s, a massive crowd gathered once again on sacred ground. Haranguers harangued us from various sound systems unimproved in the last thirty-five years, like heavy metal played backward at the wrong speed. But the energy and signs and faces of the crowd were an intoxicating balm, and by some marvelous yogic stretch, we all stopped trying to figure out whom and what we agreed with, and who the bad elements were: The socialist haranguers? The Punx for Peace, who had come prepared with backpacks full of rocks? The Israel haters? The right-wing Zionists? You just had to let go, because Market Street was wide enough for us all, and we began to march, each a small part of one big body, fascinatingly out of control, like protoplasm bobbing along.
The sea of people looked like a great heartbroken circus, wild living art, motley and stylish, old and young, lots of Buddhists, people from unions and churches and temples, punks and rabbis and aging hippies and nuns and veterans—God, I love the Democratic Party—strewn together on the asphalt lawn of Market Street. We took small shuffle steps, like Zen monks in a crowded wedding procession. It was like being on a conveyer belt, overwhelming and scary, because you might trip and get stepped on, but once you were really on the street, you could sit by the curb and sob, or adjust to it. It’s disturbing to not walk with your usual gait, to move at once so slowly and with such purpose. I felt I was trying to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time.
The “I” turned into “we.” You shuffled along with your friends, moving at the pace of the whole organization, moving to the heartbeat of the percussion. You saw people you knew, and hung out awhile, and then they moved away, and new people fell in step beside you, and offered you comments and gum. Whoever came along came along. The goodwill gave you a feeling of safety in this mob, a fizzy euphoria despite the grim reality of these times. Songs I’ve loved for decades were sung—“We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Study War No More,” “Give Peace a Chance”—and then we’d tromp along, and the peace-march wave rose again, a joyful roar of solidarity rippling out from the front, over us, then picked up by those behind.
There was gaping, and a lot of volition; you were swept along, but the crowd had a self-correcting mechanism—it kept letting go of what wasn’t quite right, the more raw, angry elements, the strident and divisive. It was a Golden Rule parade—you acted the way you wish the government would act, with goodness, and tender respect, and this held the peace. The splinter groups that went crazy later and trashed everything were peaceful when they were with us. I saw only friendliness, sorrow, goodness, and great theater. My favorites were the people dressed as sheep on stilts, who resembled huge silver masked-ball aliens, with horns and curly tinsel wool, like puppets that Louis XIV might have commissioned. No one had any idea why they were sheep, or why they were on stilts. Ma
ybe they were peace sheep, and maybe they just wanted to see better.
The Women in Black moved solemnly in the middle of the throng, steadfast and profound, witnessing for peace. They dressed in black, like the Madres in South America. They stopped you with their presence, like punctuation, made you remember why you were here.
Two things carried the day: regular people saying no to power, and glorious camaraderie. We were sad and afraid, and we had done the most radical thing of all: we had shown up, not knowing what else to do, and without much hope. This was like going on a huge picnic at the edge of the fog, hoping you would walk through to something warmer. The mantra you could hear in our voices and our footsteps was “I have a good feeling!” The undermutter was silent, spoken with a sort of Jewish shrug—“What good will it do to do nothing?”
The barricades were broken down for once, between races, colors, ages, sexes, classes, nations. There are so few opportunities for this to happen—at first, it feels like us versus them, and then you’re shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people, reading one another’s signs, signs that pierce you or make you laugh out loud. You rub shoulders, smell the bodies and the babies and pot and urine and incense and fear, and everyone’s streaming past, including you. For once, you’re part of the stream, and in that, in being part of it, you smell the pungent green shoots of hope. The feeling may be only for the moment. But it’s a quantum moment: it might happen again, and spread and spread and spread; and for a moment and then another, there’s no judgment, no figuring out, just an ebullient trudge, step, step, step.
People sang, and babies cried, and your feet started to hurt, and you wanted to go home, and just then the broad-bottomed Palestinian women started chanting, “This is what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.”