Nobody is more well-equipped than Nick Cave to open this week’s piece.
“My religiousness is softly spoken, both sorrowful and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true. It is worship and prayer. It is resilient yet doubting, and forever wrestles with the forces of rationality, armed with little other than the merest hunch or whispered intuition. The defining characteristic of my belief, and which I consider to be a fundamental imperative in my life, is uncertainty.”
-Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, No. 262.
Uncertainty. The defining characteristic of my belief.
In the presence of ubiquitous, continuous uncertainty, I do know how it felt to be next to my mother while she prayed in synagogue as a child of thirteen. I know the direction her belief offered her, the commitment to her family despite their intermittent ridicule that was somehow called love. I still feel the tears she’d shed during the Shema.
Her heart’s vocabulary quietly became mine in those moments.
Can you recall when someone else’s heart was mysteriously transmitted to you?
Four decades later, consistently practicing zazen and studying Zen Buddhism, I’ve no divine promise to trade for my humble, bumbling practice. I keep steadying myself; no expectations, no endgames. My heart’s vocabulary quietly, wisely reminds me:
Unity. Peace. Comfort with uncertainty.
Stay with stillness when things feel severe.
For the record: I don’t support war of any kind, not this one, not any time. I don’t support the destruction in Israel, nor the destruction in Gaza. I don’t support the presidents of prestigious American universities shrinking in plain sight from key questions on policies intended to protect their communities. And I don’t support abject harassment hurled at me from humans who’ve never even met me.
But.
Together we can choose our priorities. Here’s a short list.
And below, you’ll find the video reading of this note, with a brief meditation to close.
Elena Brower, Migration, 2022, collaged quote from Joy Harjo.
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