• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 479 0

Not many meals missed by that one, except by accident. Quietly glancing down at the program on the floor beside her, she saw he had grown up in an upper-middle-class home, had had educated and cultured people as parents and as grandparents, had studied and lived in Europe as well as in the East. Was now a prominent professor at one of the country’s most famous universities. Easy enough for him to dismiss the brown and black and yellow and poor white people all over the globe who worried constantly where their next meal was coming from, she thought. How they would feed, clothe, and educate their children. Who, if they did sit down to meditate, would probably be driven up again by the lash. Or by military death squads, or by hunger, or by . . . the list was long.

Looking around her she noticed most of the meditators shared the teacher’s somewhat smug, well-fed look. They were overwhelmingly white and middle- to upper-middle-class and had the money and leisure time to be at a retreat. In fact, she noted, she seemed to be the only person of color there. What was wrong with this picture?

Her mind, which had been clear as a reflecting pool just minutes before, now became cloudy. This was exactly what meditation was meant to prevent. She took a deep breath, labeled her thoughts “thinking,” as she’d been instructed to do if her mind wandered during meditation, and settled herself more firmly on her cushion. She would listen to this teacher, whom she indeed respected very much, and she would not be critical. Besides, she knew what he meant. There was a way in which all “hot” revolutions defeated themselves, because they spawned enemies. Look at those crazy ex-Cubans in Miami, for instance, who never recovered from having some of their power taken away, and the endless amount of confusion, pain, and suffering they caused.

After the talk she began to think in earnest. She felt she had reached an impasse on the Buddhist road.

That evening and the next day and the next she found herself unable to meditate. She kept looking out the window instead, just as she had looked out of the window of the Church of God and Christ, as a child, when she had been unable to believe human beings, simply by being born, had sinned. The redwood trees looked so restful, their long branches hanging down to the earth. Each tree created a little house, a shelter, around itself. Just right for a human or two to sit. She hadn’t realized this before, how thoughtful this was. But on her very next walking meditation she slowly, slowly, made her way to the largest redwood tree and sat under it, becoming invisible to the dozens of people who continued their walking meditation and slowly walked all around her.

When everybody else returned to the meditation hall, she did not.

To Kill or to Thaw the Anaconda

She dreamed she was emptying her freezer and there among the forgotten leftovers lay an alive but perfectly frozen anaconda. A huge orange and spotted snake, ashen, until she poured water on it and its ice sheeting began to melt; the color of the sun. She felt she must kill it before it thawed. She ran to others for help. None could help her; they were busy with their own lives. Their own anacondas. She cried out to one person after another: Necesito ayuda! Puedo? I need help! Can I help? She thought she was saying, Can you help? But she wasn’t. Only on waking, all outside help refused her, did she realize dealing with the anaconda was an inside job. Whether to kill it or let it thaw and live was entirely up to her.

And wasn’t she always saying what Grandmother Yagé had taught her: We are all on the back of a giant anaconda. It is slithering and sliding, darting and diving, like anacondas do. That is the reality of the world.

She woke up remembering a story from her days in the Black Freedom Movement. When she and her companions sought to encourage voting in a population that had been terrorized all their lives for trying to do so. An old woman had said to them, as they walked their weary miles across Alabama and Georgia and other outposts of the