Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

I published this on my Patreon page last weekend:

I liked the line I read in the summer that this year, the UK had its election on the day the US has its big fireworks celebration, and the US is holding its election on the day the UK lets off the fireworks. 

I can’t say that I have been feeling good about the prospects here in the US; after the double shock of 2016 (Brexit and Trump), I am feeling pessimistic and resigned, while still hoping that I am wrong. 

When I have been talking about this in meditation classes, I encourage people to stay close to their fear and anxiety, to do what is within their power to do (whatever that looks like), and to acknowledge how little control they have over the bigger picture. To avoid sounding partisan, as I would not want to make an assumption about how all my attendees vote, I always speak through the lens of reducing suffering or increasing suffering: which are the candidates we think are doing one or the other? (Personally, I have no doubts about the answer to that question).

We may not know the results of the presidential election for a while, but perhaps there will be a big irrevocable shift happening, right as we move into winter time here in the US.

Stepping back, I think of the series of triggers for the general malaise that people seem to be dealing with, and which is informing their voting choices: the free trade agreements of the 90s which outsourced so much manufacturing away from the US and UK; 9/11 and the Iraq War; the financial collapse of 2008 and the limited help that ordinary people got; and finally the pandemic, from which I believe we are all still traumatised. All of which is filtered through the lenses of social media, for which we are all the first-generation guinea pigs.

At times I have hoped for a swing towards more equitable solutions, with less emphasis on money and power and more on the common-wealth; perhaps this will still happen before we all get engulfed in the climate breakdown. 

All in all though, despite my faith that everyone has awakened nature within them, it is hard to see it being manifest to any degree in humanity at large.

All of which brought to mind something I wrote in my blog at the outset of the Russia – Ukraine war:

I read an interesting New Yorker article about Kim Stanley Robinson. I haven’t read science fiction since I was a kid, but I appreciated this view of the world and the thought experiments that we can undertake. That night I dreamt about a world where men were no longer allowed to vote, because of how badly they had messed up the world since time immemorial, and the feeling of the dream, of the society that was being created, was so optimistic and happy.

I woke up wondering how much of the state of the world, with its constant thirst for acquisition and aggression, can be blamed on testosterone.

And, just because I am quite proud of it, a snapshot of my sardonic Hallowe’en story on Instagram, which I tagged the local New York Times corresponded on, who promptly reposted it.