OTHER'S DAY
Appreciation seems quaintly old fashioned now, if it doesn't come, say, gift wrapped in a Neiman Marcus box. Before credit cards and shopping malls--even before the invention of Mother's Day, you could find it almost everywhere. In that fired up Fatherland, Germany, Goethe appreciated women as closely bound to art, referring to creativity as a talent innate in the female body. Obviously. While it may take two to tangle, females alone get to nurture and bring forth living beings. Woman is the giver of life, and we acknowledge that in many ways, starting with Mother Earth, Motherland and Mother Nature. Sorry, but that which takes away is Father Time.
Mother's Day was in fact created in the wake of war specifically to honor women as the givers of life because this gives mothers a huge vested interest in the upkeep of the world. The founders of Mother's Day figured women to be natural peaceniks, anxious to protect from the tomb the creations of the womb. The honoring is essentially an anti-war protest.
Motherhood is such a universal metaphor of creation, it was the only way the men who transmitted Dharma could figure out how explain the way that knowledge enters the world. The Great Mother, Prajnaparamita, Transcendent Wisdom, they said, gave birth to Dharma and all the Buddhas, just as the great Tibetan Dharma sages, from Guru Rinpoche to the Karmapas, are enlightened by female wisdom goddesses. God sent Jesus out through the body of Mary, and the educated go into the world through the gates of Alma Mater, fostering mother.
Did you ever look on Mona Lisa's smile and wonder what does she know? In every language spoken by man, wisdom is feminine. You can't get away from that. Knowledge may go either way linguistically, but never the word for wisdom. My grandmother often reminded me of this semantic difference when she'd complain, "educated you are, smart you’re not." My Ivy League diploma never impressed her, I finally figured out, because knowledge can be purchased by memorizing, experimenting, observing or asking—by doing. Wisdom is earned by being. It's the knowing from experience that settles down into your bones, making you rooted and unflappable. Since that kind of gut wisdom is associated with the female, males who need to soothe seekers with an aura of invincible expertise willingly cross dress in robes priestly and judicial robes, in wigs, and in medical coats that look suspiciously like my grandmother's old housecoat.
Nowadays with grudges going on display every day, wisdom gets belittled and dismissed as women’s intuition. The Old Testament doesn't have much room for females, after it accuses Eve of screwing things up, but it begrudgingly calls women tents that provide stability and shelter for nomads. It calls us the tree of life, giver of shade and sustenance, creator of fruit. The New Testament reinforces the idea that a supposedly male God created heaven and earth, then adds that Jesus redeemed human kind, but, it just shows you, Mary simply offered her body and self to give birth, and everyone has always loved her most. The protector of
The late, great Isak Dinesen said the difference between the sexes was: “The woman’s function is to expand her own being. …the man creates something by himself, but outside himself and often, when it is finished, abandons it and pushes it out of his consciousness in order to start on something else.” This week the newspaper reported twenty-somethings moving from law school to law firm are getting $160,000 in transition. This is 160,000 times what is offered for not abandoning or pushing out of consciousness and moving on, for naturally staying put as a mother.
On the very midwinter solstice day newspaper headlines proclaimed Wall Streeters were awarding themselves $16 million bonuses for making money, my childhood friend’s daughter put her life on the line for free to make a human being. Because the fetus was big, breeched with no room to turn around, this was a medical event. At the hospital, she was swept into a prefabricated disassembly line, besieged with questions, needles, requests for signature. She was stuffed into a hospital gown, propped onto a gurney in a defiantly sterile room, nonstop monitored, infiltrated and initiated. Her husband was busy practicing on his camcorder when a doctor came in, and coolly recited a litany of anesthesiology procedures, starting with this: delivery is the only surgery for which the patient is not pre-sedated. Then comes the spinal and here is how you bend. The various grandparents -to-be argued about who should go into the operating room, paying no more attention than her husband. “I’m freaking out.” she whispered shakily to me. But when the call came, she transcended her fright to shuffle to the operating room. Her courage made the money men getting their $16 million seem pitifully worthless.
It's been said: “Scholars assume that for a man what is an ideal is for a woman a natural thing.” At that solstice, it seemed if all the heroic soldiers who earn purple hearts and medals didn’t rush again into bombed buildings and burning bushes, life would still go on, just as it would still go on if that newborn's father didn’t engineer machines and worry about getting from the hospital to the gym. But if women did not find the strength to get over freaking out and risk their life in the horrible magic of childbirth, there would be no world for them to do any of that in. None of us would be here now to say: Be Here Now!
Two weeks ago in
This week the paper featured an echo, a story about how noted cartoonist Berkeley Breathed in his new book Mars Needs Moms! “zeroes in on this profound truth” he just discovered. “The instinct for self-sacrifice is precisely what differentiates mothers … .” They are willing not just to lose sleep at night, but to die to save somebody else’s life. That, as it happens, is precisely the model for Bodhisattva compassion: treat everyone as your child. Motherhood is the Buddhist model.
Of course this is not our business model. We've changed that just the way we changed the horse and buggy to the Hummer. We’re about the individual, the rugged do-it-yourself, answer-to-none type independent as all get out, who screams: Get out! It's very profitable for a consumer based GNP to push the idea that each of us casts our own fate, has it our way which “is not your mother’s.” That's why there isn't a parent on prime time TV any more except perhaps as an object of derision. What do they know, those outdated buggies? The leitmotif of the ‘90s was friends, people you can shop with. Where in all that high falutin’ anomie of Sex and the City was anybody’s mother, any voice of been there done that experience?
Is there any difference between a rugged individualist and a loner? One syndicated opinion columnist just summed up this decade’s newspaper version of Friends, the Bush Administration, by quoting the late Kurt Vonnegut: "they are stunted human beings, mutant creatures with no conscience, absolutely no sense of the value of others." They certainly did get a bit prickly, didn't they, when grandmother Barbara Boxer asked the childless Condi Rice how she could justify sending other people’s children to die in a pointless war.
Our culture continues the long Western tradition of glorifying the one over the others, glossing over dependence and interconnectedness in favor of "individuation." We suckle on notions like virgin birth. Today’s version is evangelicals exhorting folks to be born again, this time the right way, which is not through the gory female birth canal, attached for dear life by an umbilical cord to somebody else.
Then there are the scientists who want to get rid of mother all together and switch to cloning. They’re abetted by the massive surgical industry dedicated to taking away all the female body attributes, especially that girth around the butt and hips kindly provided by Mother Nature to help in childbearing. That’s why young women are pathetically trying to starve or Stairmaster themselves into lean, mean male bodies and I, built womanly like a pear, can’t find a pair of pants that fit.
We are do-do deep into the Friedan feminist business of addressing Henry Higgins plaintive complaint: why can’t a woman be more like man? Over the past 40 years, women have put on pantsuits with bow ties, left home for a paycheck, gone to war, padded up for soccer, and obsessed over their pecs. When net worth is self worth, portfolio value personal value, women believe their priority should be earning money, taking care of themselves. After all, when much money is being passed around, people believe high cost means high value. Motherhood, being free, seems worthless.
Dharma is, refreshingly, about making a man be more like a woman. Buddhism finds supreme value in motherhood. It doesn’t just acknowledge the awesome uniqueness of birth. It insists because we have been born over and over again countless times, it’s a good bet everyone has been our mother at some point along the karmic way. Everyone has had a hand in bringing us into being here now. We are therefore related to and indebted to everyone. It is incumbent on us to show gratitude to all, to be prepared to put others before self. “Other before self” is actually the mantra given to monks and children.
Not long ago, the British born Buddhist nun, Tenzin Palmo, pointed out someone born into traditional society automatically becomes part of a large network. Generations and siblings, cousins, in-laws and neighbors provide a continuous safety net, so nobody stands alone. there is always someone to turn to, to take you in. These others may be a pain in the neck or some other body part, but their surround provides ballast necessary for a single being to stay afloat. The clearly defined duties and rules of interacting can be burdensome, but pay off by clarifying doubts about how to behave in the world at large, what is expected every day, what to do in relation to others. Connection is valued for the security it provides, the assurance it affords, the discipline that can set you free. Belonging to something larger than one’s self is the self-defense of potlatch.
Sadly, when Dharma teachers encourage Westerners to generate compassion by thinking of all beings as our current mother to whose generous body sacrifice we owe our life, we individualists start right away to complain our Mother was not ideal. She was too preoccupied or too critical or too absent, whatever. In our have-it-your- way consumer paradise, we seem annoyed that we can’t just pick out a mother on Match.com. We can’t return her for credit or trade her in for a more upscale model. All we can do is divorce her, and live independently, as if she didn’t exist. That’s why Tenzin Palmo says we in the West are all homeless, emotionally living on the streets, and have to rely on drugs or drink or dieting to deal with this disaffection. We are all panhandling for attention or affluence, any way to soothe the terrible feeling of being alone.
My mother and I did not actually have a sunny relationship, mostly because I was still rebelliously young when she died. It really irked me to find her sitting up at midnight sipping tea, waiting anxiously for me to be in sight. I complained bitterly, ordering her to stop it. And all she ever said was: “One day you will be grateful somebody cares where you are in the world.”
My mother and her GPS are gone, yet the memory is a bind that ties. I try to pass the watched over, anchored sensation to others who seem blowing in all the wind of advertising and punditry. Being there for others seems to make a positive difference in their world, so maybe it would in ours. Maybe we could all learn again to appreciate what Mother means, the wisdom of ye first, if someone would please take out the cultural garbage.
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posted by Sandy Garson @ 3:07 PM
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