This Still CAN and DOES Happen!

    This powerful true story was told by Naomi Shihab Nye, Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, & novelist, born to a Palestinian father and an American mother. Her story was posted (more than once) by Joel & Michelle Levey (WisdomAtWork.com), a well-known American Buddhist couple of Jewish heritage. 
    Enjoy:

Gate A-4
by Naomi Shihab Nye

    "Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed for four hours, I heard an announcement: 'If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.'

    Well -- one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

    An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. 'Help,' said the flight service person. 'Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.'

    I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. 'Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?' The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, 'No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let's call him.'

    We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her -- Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours.

    She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag -- and was offering them to all the women at the gate.

    To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

    And then the airline broke out free beverages from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend--by now we were holding hands--had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

    And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped -- seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

    This can still happen anywhere.  Not everything is lost."

 

     A decade or so ago, a young woman in one of my (then in-person) mindfulness classes shared a true story about her young daughter. 
    Once when the little girl was very upset, she had told her to be a big girl, behave etc. The little girl admonished her that that didn't help at all. "When I'm upset, I need you to hug me, tell me you love me, and bring me my teddy bear." 
    So, the next time her daughter became upset, Mom did exactly as requested, and both of them were quickly soothed & happy.

 

    “In love it often feels as if we’re glimpsing the hidden architecture of the world …” 
    Pico Iyer. “Aflame. Learning from Silence.” Riverhead Books, 2025.

    In the above quote, the author might be comfortable exchanging ‘architecture’ with ‘force,' 'energy' or 'lifeblood’. 
    And 'love' is not only romantic, but perhaps even more applicable in the love one feels for everyone & everything, like heat radiating out of one's chest. Loving Kindness Meditation is a superb practice to help gradually melt the protective shield around one's heart. http://www.johnlovas.com/2022/12/deeper-dimensions-of-acceptance.html .
    Gradually, our heart & mind become less-and-less dominated by fear, and more-and-more guided by unconditional love. 
    We MUST take unconditional love seriously and actually practice it. OTHERWISE its opposite - fear, anger, hatred & violence dominate, and the meltdown of civilization begins.

 

"The Divine is not high above us. 
It is in heaven, it is in earth,
it is inside of each of us.”
Morihei Ueshiba Sensei, 
"The Art of Peace"

 

"Active Hope" - Joanna Macy

Importance of Feelings

     “When our feelings become free of emotional reactions and dwell in love and compassion as their natural abode, our mind will be open to the great truths of universal significance.”

       Ayya Khema. “Being Nobody, Going Nowhere. Meditations on the Buddhist Path.” Wisdom Publications, 2016.

 

Intimate Relationships & Realizing Our True Nature

     What happens when we recognize that we are awake loving timeless, limitless awareness itself?

     “The implications of this recognition is that the happiness – and by happiness I don’t mean that we always have to be smiling or laughing, it’s more like the peace, the sense of fulfillment, the absence of any sense of lack – the happiness that we previously sought in activities, substances, states of mind, relationships, and never fully found there, has now been discovered to be a quality of our essential nature – this sense of fulfillment, this sense of absence of lack. 
     The motivation to seek happiness in any kind of objective experience doesn’t disappear overnight, because there is a habit that we have been rehearsing for decades (seeking happiness in substances, activities, relationships). That habit doesn’t come to an end overnight, but it winds down, because the source of happiness in oneself or as oneself has been touched, known. And that has an impact on the desire to find happiness in any kind of objective experience. It winds down slowly. 
     That, for instance, has a profound effect on relationships. Anyone who believes or feels themselves to be a separate self is seeking one thing alone in life, and that is happiness. The reason, in relation to relationships, a separate self seeks relationships is not because they want the other. It’s because they want to be happy. If you knew the person you are dating was going to bring misery to your life, would we go on dating them? No way. It’s not the person that we want, or the activity, or the substance, it’s the happiness that we believe will be derived from them. So if we are no longer seeking happiness in activities, in relationships, does that mean that we simply stop having relationships? No, of course not, because we can have relationships either to fulfill our need for happiness, or to express and share and celebrate the happiness we already feel. We still have relationships, but we relieve the other person of the demand to fulfill our our sense of lack, to fulfill our sense of emptiness. So we’re not using the other as an object to continually fill up this sense of emptiness, which of course another can never do. And that is why relationships fall apart, because sooner or later we realize this other person is not fulfilling me, no person can fulfill us. As soon as we realize they’re not fulfilling me, the conflict begins and the relationship begins to fall apart. 
     But now, we don’t want to be in relationship with the other for the purpose of finding happiness. We relieve our friend of this impossible burden of providing happiness for an insatiable self. That attitude gives our relationship the best possibility of being truly intimate, truly loving, open, undemanding, and an expression of our shared being. It’s not a guarantee that an intimate relationship, for instance, will work, because there are many elements that go into the make of an intimate relationship, but this is the most essential part – the recognition that the other is not there to provide love for us or happiness for us. 
     That’s just one example of how it has a profound effect on relationships – relationship with our neighbors, with our children, with our parents, but particularly intimate relationships. I would go further and say that it was the prerequisite for true intimacy; that as long as we consider ourselves separate entities trying to derive happiness from one another, that position, and true intimacy are mutually exclusive. There cannot be true intimacy if we are demanding the other to fill up our sense of need, or lack, or want. 
     Isn’t true intimacy what everybody wants? Isn’t that why we have relationships? Because we all have this deep intuition of real intimacy – that’s what we’re looking for in a relationship. We all know deeply at some level the potential of a relationship. And over and over and over again we find that our relationships are spoiled by our projecting our needs and our fears onto the other person.”                 Rupert Spira

Above transcribed from this video: