TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)
October 8, 2023
Hello. Aloha. Shalom. Nihao.
I’m here at an Indigenous People’s Day Gathering Celebration (in NYC, Randall’s Island).
Just waking up to a friend sharing what’s going on in Israel.
My heart has a deep connection to Israel, having lived there for over 3 years (2014-2017). It was in Taiwan (2012-2013) when I met a few Israeli’s (one of them I ended up being in a very close relationship with for six years), that I started connecting to that region of the world again, in this lifetime at least.
It’s a complex history, and being someone who tries to understand the history of humanity, it was just almost unfathomable to me to really grasp how that nation of Israel came to be: all the different pieces, the dark, the ugly, the light.
(I had ongoing conversations about this reality with my Israeli partner, with his family – one of his brother’s was a commander in the military – with our friends. I shared written thoughts about it throughout the years, sensing that the violence would only escalate and that the situation would likely reach new, horrific heights.)
And here I am in NYC, in this country of the United States which also has its bloody history.
Every part of the world has blood on it, and every human at some point or another in our generational history has blood on our hands.
And we’ve been both the perpetrator and the victim.
It’s hard for me to understand this human experience sometimes, but I’ve gone deep enough into the spiral of feeling that it never sits right to me to consider any one group of people as “evil” and another group of people as “not evil”, or as “good.”
My mind simply cannot look at things this way.
I can look at forces of darkness, forces of evil, that then inhabit human hearts and take it over.
I see groups of people having that darkness come over them…
We see this with the colonial virus that has swept the globe for hundreds of years already, destroying everywhere it goes, destroying the earth, destroying people, language, and culture… Taking, raping, pillaging.
What do we do with this history and how this history eventually and always seeps into our present day reality?
What do we do with that?
Nothing comes from nowhere.
So, is the solution to kill everyone who has blood on their hands?
Well, then we should fucking kill all Americans, myself included, I suppose!
Who is exempt from the sins of humanity?
What is the solution?
I just can’t wrap my mind around any solution that doesn’t come through the transformation of consciousness.
I just can’t get behind any solutions that call for more destruction, and more murder.
Then again I think about “in the moment” if someone is coming to kill and rape and destroy, then what is to be done?
I’ve been thinking a lot about Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who was living during the Vietnam War. At that time during the war, a few monks began setting themselves on fire in order to protest the killing.
That was their cry to stop this madness of humans killing each other!
He always called for peace: peace with every step, peace with every breath.
He saw a lot of killing, and a lot of young people being murdered.
He was in conversation with Martin Luther King, Jr., and I’ve heard him talking to Oprah about his conversations with him.
It’s just so heartbreaking because… we all cry out against war and the destruction of innocent life. And it’s like what to do?
Sometimes I wish I had this simple stance: “We just need to give more money to the Israeli military, and call on American troops to go out there and destroy Hamas, being an arm of Iran, etc…”
Ok, so that’s it? Then it’s over?
We try to kill as many people as possible, disarm, destroy their resources?
But where does that energy go?
Energy is not destroyed.
Energy remains.
So what happens when we believe that somehow this madness of the human mind (that takes over the heart) can be solved through ending a certain amount, and a certain kind, of human life?
As if we could precisely target that…
It’s like people think that cancer can be simply eradicated from the human race by lasering in on every tumor in every human’s body and killing it, as if that’s gonna be a lasting solution.
What about the water we’re drinking, what about the food we’re eating?
What about the emotions, our energy, that are condensing in our organs?
What about the stagnancy of these human bodies?
What is it that is contributing to these tumors, these cancers?
Is the solution to just keep targeting it?
“Yep, let’s just take that out! Destroy that! Chemo that!”
Is that a true, organic, holistic solution?
Or are there much more systematic layers to this problem that need to be addressed on every single level?
I believe it’s a collective revolution that needs to occur.
Because look, how did we even get to this place where our bodies are turning against themselves?
Bodies turning against themselves = disease.
People turning against each other = murder/war.
Is the solution more murder?
I say NO. That is NOT the solution.
I will never support sending more money for weapons to destroy people.
I’m sorry. I can’t support that.
I genuinely can’t say that only one side wants to destroy and the other doesn’t want to destroy. Because, absolutely, the other also wants to destroy, but they just feel they have a moral authority to do so, right?
And the other ALSO thinks they have a moral authority to do so!
My whole heart-wrenching feeling is:
Can we really solve war by war?
I really feel that we need to call for peace.
I see people (in Israel/Palestine) going to the streets, in the line of fire, just like those monks immolated themselves, and saying NO. Because people are being sent out to their death anyway!
What if we could stand in the face of death to say that we want to see life flourish on this planet.
Can we come to peace??
I know that I don’t fucking know shit.
I don’t know the complexities of the politics.
Even if I was studied in it, I still wouldn’t know because there’s so much going on behind the scenes (corruption).
These things get planned for a long time, and there’s governments and people involved in ways that our blood would BOIL if we really could see. It’s never as simple as it looks.
And that is precisely why I just can’t get behind “good guy vs. bad guy” and “let’s send money to the good guys!”
I can only feel deeply, and send love, and try to cultivate compassion within myself.
And to talk to people, and to be here, and absolutely acknowledge that I don’t know anything.
I really don’t know anything.
But I do look for patterns in human history… and like I said, here I am, Indigenous People’s Day tomorrow here the U.S. Here i am, with all these beautiful indigenous people from all over the world, knowing the histories that they’ve experienced and realizing how few numbers are really truly remaining of them.
What if we could turn back time?
What would we do as these conquerors were coming in and taking land, murdering people, raping women, and taking away children?
When this land was occupied, taken over in all these various ways, they thought that they were doing the moral thing, the holy thing, the righteous thing! These people were considered to be less than human, barbarians, backwards.
All over the world it’s the same story.
There always has to be an excuse to kill.
I don’t know anything….I don’t know anything.
But when I tune into the energy behind the attacks on Israel, which has accumulated for a few generations now… I imagine it is quite murderous. I imagine it is quite rageful.
But is it inhuman?
Are these people not human?
Where does this energy/rage/hatred come from?
And what do we DO with this energy that cannot just go away by trying to eliminate as many people who are carrying it as possible?
Because, listen, there’s a lot of fucking people carrying the energy of hatred, and it will only grow with more war.
How can we support the transformation of this energy?
I know that my words may not apply on the ground there right now, and that I’m in a crazy “privileged” (that’s the word used these days) position from this safe tree to be saying these things that probably sound absolutely ridiculous to so many people, experiencing so many different realities.
But at the same time, this is where I stand.
This is what I think. This is what I feel.
And I don’t believe that extermination, more killing, is going to solve anything!
But I also know that people are terrified and feel that they have to defend themselves, and that the creation of Israel was largely a response to centuries of hatred, exclusion, and violence towards the Jewish people (culminating in the Holocaust).
It was that same darkness and “evil” that we speak of today, now, with various sides throwing that around that word – each calling the other “evil”.
I see how that country of Israel was developed (well, from my own eyes, research, experience, anyway).
I lived there for only 3 short years, but when I arrived on that land, two weeks later, there were bombs being shot from Gaza. I got to feel for a little while what it was like to be “under attack”, with life genuinely threatened.
Man, why do we watch horror movies?
We’re playing out what’s within us, within humanity.
We are all children of war.
What do we do? How do we evolve?
How do we cultivate love, forgiveness?
How do we not let this poison take over and just destroy and destroy and destroy, until people are like “um, that’s a little too much destruction, I can’t fucking take it anymore, let’s somehow stop these wars”? Those stops are only temporary pauses if there is no true transformation.
WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq.
So many civil wars too!
I am the grandchild of civil war in China (1930s and 40s).
The Chinese people fighting each other with different ideologies – one side saying to the other “No, you’re guys are fucking backwards! You got it all wrong! We need to modernize, we need to make things equal, we need to make things better. So you know what, we’re gonna kill you! We’re gonna call you traitors. We’re gonna “re-educate” you, and if you’re not willing to be re-educated then you’re gonna have to flee to Hong Kong, to Taiwan. Or we’re gonna put you in jail, or we’re gonna send you to the countryside.”
So many millions of people were killed in China over this.
And you know the Chinese even paused that civil war temporarily when the Japanese came over and started killing all the Chinese people. Yep, the Chinese said to each other “TRUCE! We gotta pause our civil war.”
And they paused the civil war for almost 3 years to fight the Japanese together, until the bombs finally came down on Japan and ended WWII.
But as we know, the ending of WWII was already in motion and those bombs were dropped as some crazy fucked up experiment to just see what we can do with that atomic nuclear power… sacrificing, killing, murdering so many innocent Japanese lives…
So, that great war ended and then the Chinese got back to fighting each other.
The Communists were ultimately victorious, and millions of the Nationalist party and others fled, including my mom’s parents who moved to Hong Kong in 1947 when she was 1 year old. They didn’t want to stay in that country that was gonna be taken over by a different kind of thought (that would have likely gotten them killed because they were of the “intellectual” class).
There were millions of people behind this thought.
It’s a crazy history.
It’s a sickness of the mind, and a darkening of the heart, and I have no idea what to do about it except to continually look at myself, and look at all the places of pain within me and attempt to heal.
Where have I not forgiven? Who have I not forgiven in my life?
Where am I carrying these wounds of all these wars?
Of the war between men and women also?
I am absolutely the product of that war between my own parents.
I literally saw a man and a woman who birthed me at war with each other for the majority of my life.
How do I transmute that within my consciousness, within my being?
That has been so much of my inner work the past decade.
I go from macro to micro in a split of a second.
I move from observing the individual and people close to me, and having conversations with people and clients, and then I go to the macro and I look at global history, the patterns.
Sometimes, when looking from the macro perspective of the big global problems, when I talk from the micro about my personal issues it can feel like: [eyeroll!] “This is so insignificant what you’re saying and so concerned about!”
And then sometimes moving from the micro/personal and zooming out to the macro, its like: [eyeroll!] “What – you think you’re gonna save the world or something? Why don’t you address your own pain, girl? Who are you in conflict with in your life? Take care of that. Or you think you’re gonna go save the world over there, and there, and there?”
I just have to voice all of this.
I have no answers – this is just me feeling these feelings… standing on this land (Randall’s Island, NYC)… having just lived on Big Island, Hawai’i for three and a half years – the latest of the occupied places. That was such a mind fuck…and it’s a mind fuck being here today, I swear to God.
I think it’s just a mind fuck wherever we go!
Because this is 2023 and we’ve been thrown together in a way that was not even possible a few decades ago.
All these different cultures and people coming together and talking to each other about what they’ve been through. Arguing with each other, yes. Forming alliances, yes. But, I hope, also learning from each other. I hope also trying to repair all the destruction, the stealing, the lying, the cheating that has taken place among people.
And – sorry to go to micro again – but I think about people’s own families, and how often marriages don’t last (I myself am divorced), and how often children, blood brothers and sisters, are fighting over inheritances.
So, although it is so shocking and horrific when we see the reality of war among rival groups breaking out across the globe, at the same time, we just have to look at ourselves, or our neighbors, and we see that same kind of war playing out on a much more immediate level.
And then there’s the war within our own bodies… so many diseased bodies that are prematurely dying… and it doesn’t have to be this way!
Why is this terrain of the body so polluted, so inflamed, so on fire that it cannot balance itself?
(It is my life’s work to heal this body, to help others heal their bodies, and hopefully to help us heal the conflict in our lives.)
I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.
Peace.