A Revolution On Its Way

Zuccotti Park: A young girl reads alongside a painting. People gather in twos and threes to talk about politics, the priorities of the day. A group begins to drum. It isn't the kind of drumming you dance to. It's the kind that announces something important, demands that you listen, reminds everyone, near and far -- we are here, we are not going, it is time for a change.

Young, old and middle aged from all walks of life and places around the country have converged on Wall Street to speak their mind, turn the page on greed and corruption, make a mark, be heard. A musician stamps t-shirts. An articulate Vermonter who has come all the way here for the day, stamps dollar bills with "99%," 99-percent being the number of Americans who "have not," at least according to the American ethos, which is like no other -- for, where else in the world, would protestors be bestowed 400-plus boxes of food and supplies daily, and upwards of $300,000 in donations? A middle-aged woman who lost her pension tells her story. Some people have been there a day; others, a month.

Andre, 19, from New Jersey, said he arrived four days ago. He is tired of things being the way they are. What things? "Everything. Greedy people are taking too much away." How long will he stay? "As long as this lasts."

Catherine, a retired airforce officer, now a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, the mother of two teenagers, has a pension, a good retirement fund, but wonders how her children will go to college and how they will be able to afford retirement. She said the movement in the park is "organic. One night, when it was time to close down, I watched how people settled, the tarps lifting and falling, one by one, it was like an undulating wave, a sea of flowing movement. That's how it is here."

Those in Zuccotti Park have a sense of purpose and jobs to do. There is a huge chalkboard with "Work Schedule" written on it. Everyone, even those who have never held a job, takes on tasks, contributes. Some serve food. Others take donations. Some work on laptops. Many stand at the periphery of the park with signs that explain why they are here.

Plenty of food has been donated, and money is pouring in. What will be done with the donations? What next?

At five o'clock, a march begins. Some young women start a chant. I ask an elderly bearded marcher, "where are we going?" He doesn't know.

Does it matter?

Just now, the heart of the movement burns strong, and we march undeterred.

(To see a visual journal of Zuccotti Park, see the "Occupy Wall Street" album under the name, Arya-Francesca Jenkins on Facebook).

True Acts of Revolution

I am a revolutionary at heart and I come from a line of activists on my mother's side, so I am with the protestors on Wall Street. I support their trying to wake up the financial district and those running our lives, or, I should say, bullying the poor around America and the globe. Like many of my closest friends, I've carried signs for peace and social action in many states for many years and spoken out for peace and social justice causes whenever it felt right to do so. I'm glad youth has finally gotten wind of the fact that riches and opportunity of the sort most people cherish are not waiting for them down the pike, and that it's time for a change. It's high time everybody realized this. It's time to wake up and acknowledge the damage of greed and ignorance at home and abroad. But how are we going to do that effectively?

We can plot out new strategies with which to approach the moneyed, as New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has. His video may illuminate and help some. But essentially, we are all going to have to start looking at our half empty glasses in a different way if we expect to distinguish ourselves from our oppressors or find any peace and resolution in the midst of this madness.

I think it's important to be happy, but we have to change our ideas about what success and happiness are, since for most people these are synonymous with having a lot of money and a lot of things. I can't imagine anyone protesting on Wall Street handed a $1 million bucks right now not running to the nearest bank and starting to invest and build a life, much in the same way that most of the rich people in this country have and do. I am not sure that while anger drives the protests about what has happened in this economy and society, there is much of a difference between those protesting who have not and the fat cats on Wall Street -- as both groups are placing ultimate value on the almighty dollar.

A true revolution will involve devaluing what the fat cats value most. It will mean not caring so much about going to universities that charge $40,000 to $60,000 a year; or about having jobs that will allow you and your partner a 10-day cruise on the islands once a year. Basically, it means altering the order of the echelon by which most of us have lived most of our lives, maybe eradicating it altogether in order to embrace just being, instead of doing. Being with ourselves, nature, one another. After all, given the direction in which we are headed, these are the prizes we stand to lose most. At the very least, we are going to have to slow down, become more caring and less competitive, focusing more on people and less on acquisitions.

Those of us who are so sure we are on the right side, the progressives, the democrats, the radicals are also going to have to rethink what it means to be a revolutionary and really change things.

One of the things I detest more than anything is watching how our habit of doing things in a rush for the sake of making money faster tramples over the needs of the most vulnerable among us. I hate watching cashiers rush the elderly because they can't wait to get to the next guy and take his money. If I'm lucky enough to stand behind an elderly person just trying to make a payment with dignity and being ushered away rudely, I'll stand up for my elderly friend. I'll make sure the cashier knows I'm on that person's side who is trying to engage in a little bit of conversation, perhaps the only conversation of the day, while clumsily trying to put away credit cards or money with arthritic fingers. Guess what, that person will be you in a few years -- if you are lucky.

Why not view acquiring patience and tolerance as an act of revolution. Refuse to honk back if somebody honks at you. Support the little, constant injustices in your immediate world that affect the way everybody thinks and acts. Get rid of your own oppressive habits, cultivating virtue instead of avarice, impatience and intolerance, which, after all, grow rampant among those we would call our enemies.

Being a true revolutionary means supporting a quieter, kinder world with every gesture.

Maybe the poorest among us, the homeless, those who don't care whether they obtain a house are the people we should think about emulating. I know the mother of a very famous singer who has gotten rid of all her money and credit cards and is on a three-year mission to survive without any money at all. Now that is brave, truly an act of revolution.

Instead of beating up on the rich, and hollering down institutions whose walls will always stare back at us blankly, we should try a different tack, approaching with kindness and humility those who have nothing at all and ask them how they survive and if they are ever happy. We might be surprised by their lessons and answers.

Food and Killing in American Culture

I've said some of this before, but I need to again. I think we're in trouble, deep trouble, and it doesn't have to do with vegetarianism versus carnivorism, and this isn't just a complaint.

Let me start with Anthony Bourdain's cold-blooded "capping" of a pig, two quick shots to the head, on camera during his recent New Orleans episode, an episode that not only featured the brutal killing of this poor pig, but its evisceration, while it was still alive.

Bourdain has said more than once he is proud to be part of The Travel Channel, which also features a couple of other winners. Adam Richman, for example. A big boy getting bigger all the time and there is no need to wonder why, as, on his show, Man v. Food Nation, he goes around the country on an eating spree while diners cheer him on and applaud his gluttony. When I say Richman eats a ton, I am talking pounds and pounds of beef, potatoes, and sometimes ice cream in a single sitting, sometimes within a required time frame of say, 20 minutes to half an hour. The point of the show is that he is competing with food -- Huh? Exactly. Also on this channel is Bizarre Foods, with Andrew Zimmerman, who goes around the world tasting weird creatures and things that generally would make anyone go, "ugh!"

Then there is the new show on the Food Network Channel, Sugar High, which features a bald, pasty-faced chef -- looking blanched no doubt from all the sugar he has consumed -- going around the country 'getting high' off pies, cakes and other rich desserts. The logo for the show is sugar strewn across a road. Who needs sugar after all?

Another new show on this network has a Mexican chef I had previously respected and his buddy going from locale to locale, sampling ridiculously, dangerously hot and spicy foods. I'd like to see their large intestines in about a year. Competing with these shows on this network are similar shows such as Sugar Rush, Glutton for Punishment, and Extreme Chef.

The Travel Channel was launched in 1987 by Trans World Airlines (TWA), in the hope it would boost business. Maybe the best way to stop supporting the network and its really nasty shows is to stop choosing that airline. The Food Network Channel was bought from A.H. Belo Corporation by E. W. Scripps Company in 1997 and has essentially launched into the stratosphere the careers of chefs Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay and Mario Batali, among others, while promoting the idea that chefs can be superstars too.

For much of this blog I've been caught up with the idea of the super chef, how this person in the kitchen can make a world so right and good. But I've also seen travesties of this, and the shows I have just listed are chock full of them. They were launched with the intent of appealing to the most stupid and gullible aspect of ourselves, that aspect that agrees with commercials about what is right and best for us to eat. And in the same breath, shows us ads about how to curtail the consequences.

We never do see ads for tofu, or raspberries, or sprouts, do we? Just meat and cheese, because companies think they have the right to own animals and to eviscerate and shell them out to us, packaged nicely of course, because the habit of eating meat is so rife and profitable.

There's a vegan activist named Gary Yourofsky whose been arrested something like 10 times for protesting for animal rights. He has a compelling argument regarding how we are taught to be cruel to one another and to animals, although we start off being loving and protective as children. And he has a powerful argument for choosing to harm less by not supporting the killing of animals -- who, like us, possess a sense of smell, taste, touch and hearing, have eyes, ears, noses, mouths, arms and legs, and, like us, procreate, have families, mothers and fathers -- and therefore, a very good argument for not eating meat, or its products.

But this isn't just about eating meat, and the process involved in getting to that so-called delicious plate of steak that so many would "die for." It's about sheer waste and hubris. How dare we indulge in tossing even sugar across a road when the world is in the state that it is regarding the issue not only of starvation, but our resources. There are millions of human beings dying in Somalia right now for lack of food and water.

I realize Somalia seems far away, and television isn't bringing images of that devastation to our televisions, even those televisions with 1,000 plus channels. It's too busy advertising for meat and its products, too busy showing us brutal reality shows about trapping and killing animals and feeling good about it. 

You know that maxim your mother used to tell you when you were a snotty-nosed kid, "Eat your food, there are hungry people starving in Africa." Well, it's true.

We have so much food compared to the rest of the world. Why can't we respect that, really appreciate it, and start treating food and ourselves and other sentient beings better. We're not even at the point where we can consider having healthy relationships if we are still stuck, dealing properly with the basic ingredients that keep us alive.







 

FEMINISM AND BUDDHISM -- TOGETHER AT LAST -- ?

For a long time I've been wanting my dear spiritual friend Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo to meet Gloria Steinem. Jetsunma is a British born Tibetan Buddhist nun, who started the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery Project in northern India for nuns of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage. I met her in 1995, when she was touring the U.S., teaching the Dharma and expressing her wish to build a nunnery for nuns of her lineage. She reflected often on the poor conditions in which a female spiritual seeker in the East must thrive. Nuns are rarely given equal treatment to monks, and are rarely supported in their spiritual development -- although that situation, due largely to cultural norms, is changing now.

Tenzin Palmo traveled to India from England at the age of 20 to find a spiritual teacher, and spent close to 14 years in retreat in the Himalayas. Some time before he died, her teacher, Khamtrul Rinpoche asked her to set up a school for nuns. I met Tenzin Palmo on the occasion of her giving a teaching at the Namgyal Institute of Buddhist Studies in Ithaca, New York, where I was studying at the time. As a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, I was thrilled to meet someone who was not only thoroughly versed in Tibetan Buddhism, but seeped in the cultures of East and West, and, to top it all, a woman who spoke English! Not only is the combination I just spoke of very rare, I can count on one hand the number of individuals who have impressed me profoundly with their level of kindness, sincerity and depth of spiritual knowledge. She is definitely on that list. So anyway, after attending a couple of her teachings, I felt compelled to help her with an east coast tour and had the privilege of traveling around with her for a few months. Subsequent to that, a biography, A Cave in the Snow, by Vicki MacKenzie, and a compilation of teachings, some of which I transcribed, became Reflections on a Mountain Lake, Practical Teachings on Buddhism, by Tenzin Palmo. This year, Jetsunma published her second book, Into the Heart of Life, which I just finished reading. It is available through Snow Lion publications, and is a startlingly lucid and beautifully practical account of what we must all do in order to be happy in this lifetime. One can only ask oneself at this juncture, who wouldn't want to read it? My quick answer is, lazy people who do not wish to be responsible for their own happiness. Hopefully, the individuals reading this article, are of the other variety.

I have kept in touch with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo through the years, maintaining a proper level of astonishment at her remarkable accomplishments while I trudge along in Western samsara. Now and then I have had the wish that she meet Ms. Steinem, someone who clearly has influenced women's development in society in the the West, and particularly, after noting in recent years that Steinem has been plumbing and writing about her own inner life. We are all indebted to Ms. Steinem in the West for her many efforts to help elevate the status of women. I was very pleased therefore when I heard that she and Jetsunma were going to be meeting for a talk at the Rubin Museum in New York this June. The talk, part of Jetsunma's recent tour, went swimmingly, although I was disheartened to hear afterward from Ms. Steinem that "Buddhism has absolutely nothing at all to teach feminism."

On this point, I have to disagree. Feminism has mostly been concerned with freeing women from the shackles of society. Buddhism is concerned with freeing all beings. If feminists had launched out with the latter attitude in mind, we would have come further. Secondly, anger, often part of the activist agenda, and certainly part of the feminist agenda, has done no good whatsoever to advance causes. Buddhism recognizes the devastating consequences of this emotion, and has practical methodology for dealing with it. Feminism does not have such strategies, has not cared to employ them, and therefore, we are, arguably, suffering the 'two steps back' at this time after the big step forward made by feminism in the last century.

What the discussion between Ms. Steinem and Jetsunma proved above all is how two accomplished masters who understand the importance of 'keeping the peace,' can agree to disagree.

There were many interesting points shared, and it was illuminating to attend the discussion between Jetsunma and Ms. Steinem at the Rubin. What it boils down to is this: You can come to the Buddha within, the Christ within, from the outside in, as Ms. Steinem did, or from the inside out, as Jetsunma did. The proof is in the pudding. I'll opt for the latter, and for smaller steps backward.

A Guide to Healthy Eating in Manhattan

When I think of the best cities in the country in which to dine out, Chicago and Manhattan come immediately to mind. I live near Manhattan, and until recently had never come across a healthy guide to eating out there.

I was fortunate to run into Jared Koch, or rather, happen by his table at the Fort Lee Arts and Crafts Fair a week ago. He has what is dubbed as "the only nutritionist and food critic-approved Manhattan Restaurant Guide" there is, a portable baby blue compendium that is really a must for anyone like me who likes dining out frequently in the Tri-state area.

Before you carnivores panic, know the 'best of' list considers you too. The (long) title of this handy little bible is Clean Plates Manhattan, A Guide to the Healthiest, Tastiest and Most Sustainable Restaurants for Vegetarians and Carnivores. Koch, a nutritionist and health coach, co-wrote the book with critic Alex Van Buren, once a food writer for Time Out New York, although several more critics have since come on board. The book, says Koch, can be used to "find healthy and sustainable restaurants in Manhattan, to learn how to change your eating habits when you dine out -- and in, and to transform your life by seeing how eating healthier can be pleasurable and startlingly simple."

I rarely read a book in straight fashion front to back, so soon as I had Clean Plates in hand, I went immediately to see if some of my favorite haunts are listed. Caravan of Dreams, a vegan hippie-friendly eatery we like to frequent at 405 East 6th Street, is. I have eaten at a few vegan joints in the city, and this one is the best. The worst one can say about it is that sometimes the service, however friendly, is uneven, but the quality of food is the best I've ever encountered in the vegan realm. And that includes desserts and espresso.

Caravan of Dreams features performers of every variety and once even a Tarot reader. I indulged, having once been one of those myself. I realize there isn't much I haven't done in my abundant life, save cater to the Mob and shoeshine. And I am serious about that. The Tarot reader was nice enough, and mysterious with her vibrating blue eyes and shockingly red hair, but she was off the mark and pissed off my mate, who didn't like hearing that I was attracted to three different men and trying to decide which one to go with. A word of caution to fortune tellers, 'Think about what you are saying and to whom you are saying it, and keep it simple and broad.'

I was also gratified to see Candle 79 mentioned, where we dined recently with a friend from Florida. You can't miss with salads of just about any variety at either of these two restaurants, but I personally find the clientele at Caravan of Dreams a little more discrete and easier to take. Something about a six-foot-two father walking in out of the rain with his five-year old sitting on his shoulders and expecting to be seated immediately at Candle 79 made me realize that those who eat there are not only hippy-ish and young, as at Caravan of Dreams, but yuppy-ish, older and entitled too.

What I love about Clean Plates is it has a broad, interesting and eclectic selection, from the "solidly American" Gramercy Tavern to the macrobiotic Mana to the Natural Gourmet Institute, the vegetarian cooking school at 48 West 21st Street. I notice Van Buren has a penchant for chocolate, so I now have a nice selection of new places to go for my favorite desserts as well.

Clean Plates is available for a mere $14.95 on Amazon.com and via www.cleanplates.com, and the esteemed Deepak Chopra has this to say about it: "Jared's nutritional advice in Clean Plates has the power to transform your individual health and our collective well-being." What more could you ask for in a guide for healthy eating?