Preoccupied

Sunday I find myself in the local plant nursery selecting pink and yellow primulas to take to a neighbor undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma. What better place to be on a winter verging into spring day, I think, and what better thing to be doing than bringing a little color home to a neighbor? — Downtown, perhaps, site of Occupy Oakland’s latest action. I was listening to news of  it on Free Speech Radio on my drive to the nursery and was chagrined not to know anything at all about yesterday’s attempt to take over a vacant public auditorium. I put the picture together as I listened to one incensed caller after another, but it was a picture like one gets from any report: distant and as different from the experience at the epicenter as a seismograph. I hadn’t been there, and short of that can't sort out whether the action was disorganized and provocative or the police out of hand and "brutal." Certainly, listening to Free Speech Radio, I'm getting the message with considerable spin.Flowers arranged in a capacious ceramic pot, I drive home listening to ­­­Ry Cooder singing of "walking all night until we set things right." It sounds to me like the Battle Hymn of the Republic in a modern key, not militaristic but definitely militant: the 99% on the march to take things back from the 1%. One of the 99% , as I assuredly am, where had I been? What happened to this one-time conscientious objector, sign-carrying protester of the Vietnam War?  400, apparently, have been arrested, the largest civil (not so civil, as it sounds, from the break in at City Hall, the smashing of window cases, the burning of the flag) disobedience arrest since the ’82 blockade of the Livermore Labs, our local nuclear weapons research facility, where a thousand of us were arrested and taken to the Santa Rita detention center—same place as these 400 occupants. Deja vus all over again, except that then I had been one of the thousand and proud of it and now I’m feeling guilty, or at least left out, at having kept my body out of the line of action. Cooder’s song is a call to arms that pulls on my heart. The music, the camaraderie, the satisfaction of having  a common enemy (the banks, the corporations, the prison-military-industrial complex, the nuclear weapons industry), the promise of putting things all right in a world so wrong. Compared to that grand project, inhabiting my little life dwindles in significance.I recall the conversation I had yesterday evening with a long-time friend and fellow zen student. From our vantage point, we could see all the way downtown, scene of all that struggle and strife earlier in the day: tear gas, flash bombs, “less lethal” bullets, batons, encirclements and stampedes, but from here all we saw was a skyline rosy in the sunset. My friend, like me has gone from being, back in the day, a political activist,  to a solid citizen, or as solid as the marginal likes of us will ever get: he a father, owner of a landscaping business and  resident of a quiet, comfortable, backwater Berkeley neighborhood; me a gardener, homeowner and board member of the Rose Drive Neighborhood Association. I questioned him about his engagement with Occupy Oakland. “No way can I get with that,” he said. “The family is in a more precarious position than ever. We’re spending more than we’re earning and whatever I’d give to protest would be at our expense. It’s hard enough to balance being there for the kids and doing what we need to do to keep us afloat.” Like me, he is too preoccupied to occupy.I allow that there may be rationalization in our decisions to stay in place and out of trouble, keeping our noses to the samsaric grindstone. As we’ve gotten older, our counter cultural edge has worn down to something approaching the blunt conservatism of the culture we were once counter to. As our physical eyesight has dwindled, so some political myopia may well have set in. When I asked Peter, thinking of this sangha’hood blog, what connection he saw between practice with the Buddha Sangha and practicing as a family man and neighbor, he replied, “I’m just giving my attention to what’s in front of me, same as ever, trusting the whole is in the parts.”But can we trust ourselves and our all-too common attachment to familiarity, comfort, obligation? Perhaps we’ve been hypnotized by the parts, with age and the times the whole having become too complex for us. To the extent that might be so, we owe a debt to Occupy Oakland and the occupy actions all over the nation and world, for forcing us to look up and around, whether or not we agree with this or that strategy. And to the extent that we aren’t fooling ourselves, marching on with our pedestrian lives and changing society from within in slow and  hardly visible ways, Occupy owes much to us, we who tend the home fires while it walks all night. We are all, indeed and at best, parts of a whole.I drop off my pot of flowers on the porch of my ailing friend. I don’t ring the doorbell, suspecting that this might be one of her “pajama days,” as she calls them, a euphemism for feeling too bad to come to the door much less entertain company. Her porch seems to signal the general deterioration of an individual life and an ailing society: peeling paint, dead plants. Will these primulas, too, die of thirst? As I walk away, I look back to see those spots of pinks and yellows, brave, hopeful, fragile. Cooder’s song still plays in my head. We need our own song here, the Hymn of the Battle Republic as it comes down to Rose Drive.I’m staying, if it takes my life,Joining my neighborIn sickness, pain and strife.