Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 68

This morning I manage to get up early enough to meditate with my partner before they have to start working.

My eyes seem to want to stay open so I sit for thirty minutes doing pure awareness practice. All the senses completely open, all the orifices of the body and pores of the skin open and receptive. The mind open to thoughts, images, memories, emotions flowing through in a broad, open, loving, non-judgmental awareness.

This is my preferred method of sitting, although when needed I will go back to breath awareness, particularly when the mind is busy. I also find breath awareness and the joy, tranquility and clarity of mind that comes from it deeply pleasurable.

I also love tonglen.

I take advantage of a long, quiet morning to update my website. I am exploring creative ways to keep engaging with people online who want to go deeper in their practice in community with others.

I have lunch with my partner and then in the afternoon am back on the phone with my Dad for another interview. It’s our third call and we haven’t even gotten to his childhood memories of spending summers at the family farm.

He thinks his adoptive grandfather bought the farm but he doesn’t know anything more about the history. It was a huge project. 1500 acres of land nestled between two rivers that converged at the southernmost border of the property.

They grew wheat, corn, and grapes for wine making. They probably grew other things, but my father doesn’t mention them.

They kept thousands of animals including horses, cows, pigs and chickens.

There were 26 families who lived and worked on the farm. My grandfather, when he took over the running of the farm from his wife’s family, was instrumental in improving their accommodation and ensuring fairer wages. The children all went to school on the farm until the age of twelve when they would continue their education at the local village school.

There was also accommodation for migrants who would come through during the harvest for a couple of weeks at a time. They stayed in open air dorms right next to the fields.

My father refers to the farm mechanic as a genius. That he could fix anything. He couldn’t tell you what was wrong with it or explain to you how he was going to fix it, but regardless, when he got his hands on something broken and tinkered with it long enough, it came back fixed.

I ask him to tell me a story I’ve heard a hundred times before. It’s about one time my dad was racing horses with his brothers and cousins. By racing I don’t mean on a fancy track. I mean galloping as fast as you could through wide, open fields.

He was desperate to win so decided to ride the fastest horse on the farm, which was also the craziest. At some point he completely lost control of the horse and it took off into the forest. The last thing my dad remembers is a huge pine tree coming right at him and then nothing.

He thinks he must have been unconscious for at least 45 minutes. Long enough for his cousin to ride all the way back to the farmhouse and alert his mother who then arranged for a flatbed tractor to go pick him up. He came to as they were lifting him onto the tractor.

Again, I marvel at how many events had to go right for me to come into the world. My Dad easily could have died from massive trauma to the head that day. But luckily, he came out unscathed.

Towards the end of the call we start to cover more sensitive ground, the election of Allende and transition to socialism, an event that eventually led my parents to emigrate to the USA.

Over the years it’s been a fraught topic, as I tend to agree with at least the principles behind Allende’s policies, if not how they were carried out. Its complex, because I believe the version of history in which the US interfered to first undermine Allende and then support the military coop that resulted in Allende’s death and the dictatorship of Pinochet.

A perfect example of out of the pan and into the fire.

It’s deeply painful for my Dad. His family lost their farm during that time, as well as the family home in Santiago. And he ended up never going back. In a way, he lost his country for good.

But today we don’t go there. I’m intent on listening closely to my Dad’s first-hand experiences of what happened and the complexities and nuances of the situation. I learn more from that then I ever knew before.

He also tells me about how he first met my mother. He was doing rotations as a medical student through different wards of the hospital. One day, with three peers, he entered the paediatric ward and there was my mother, who was training as a nurse with the Red Cross.

Apparently, my dad turned to his friends, pointed to my mother and told them he was going to marry her. Seven months later they were wed and within a year they had moved to Boston.

We have to stop there so we arrange to speak again next week.

An hour later I’m back on Zoom for my drop-in meditation class. It’s tonglen again. I’m interested in how to make the practice playful.

I invite folks to imagine breathing out the very thing that someone they know who is suffering would want. Whatever they think might help ease their suffering, like ice-cream or a day at the beach.

I also want to give them permission to not feel like they have to breathe in all the suffering all at once. I remind them that they can simply take it one breath at a time. A little bit at a time.

I lead the practice and then we talk about it. A lot of folks are tired. I’m not surprised. We’ve been on lockdown for almost nine weeks now. I encourage them to simply witness the suffering of tiredness, rather than resisting it.

Breathe in tiredness. Breathe out rest.

After the class I have dinner with my partner. We are both tired and decide not to go for a walk. We’d rather stay in and watch a movie.

I draw a bath and as I’m about to get into it I get a text from a friend saying they’d like to speak ASAP. Then the phone rings and it’s another friend wanting to talk.

Turns out they are both upset about the same thing and want to talk to me about it, so I spend the next two hours speaking to one and then the other. I try my best to be empathic and supportive, without getting upset myself, as what’s happened to them sounds deeply unfair.

By the time I get off the phone its 10pm and my sister is texting asking if we’re doing family cocktail hour. I open the Zoom room and all my siblings are there, waiting.

My sister’s in Maine sitting by the lake in her bathing suit, sunglasses, and sunhat. I have to work hard not to get jealous. She keeps flipping the camera so we can see the lake, shimmering in the early evening sun.

My father and step-mother are not on the call, as they’ve taken my six-year-old nephew fishing. The next thing we know they’ve arrived at my bother’s, no social distancing going on there. I start to worry, as my sister-in-law has recently gone back to work as a veterinarian, so there is a chance she could be contagious and passing it on to her kids and/or my parents.

But they all seem to have given up on all that.

I think to myself that I’m glad I’m interviewing my Dad about his life because if he got coronavirus and died I would never forgive myself for not doing it sooner.