The Guest House

I have been musing, recently on the complexity we human beings manage to hold within our individual bodies. We each  have within us the unbearable lightness of being (as described in the novel of the same name by Milan Kundera) and the unbearable weight of our shadow self, those parts we don’t like to name, and like to acknowledge even less, though they are always there.

As the Sufi poet Rumi put it:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
[…] The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in….
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Recently, I’ve seen only the darker angels clamoring at humanity’s door: the strident denial of the need for saner gun ownership legislation in the wake of an onslaught of gun violence; the people who entered evacuated areas of Santa Rosa to burglarize empty homes; the white supremacists with tiki torches held aloft,  wearing their hatred and bigotry like a badge of honor.

These are times when I can only look at the capacity we humans have for death and destruction, out of the corner of my mind’s eye; to view full on would, surely, like the sun’s total eclipse, blind me with hopelessness and despair.
But just when I’m about to give up hope for humanity, I see other visitors to the collective house we call the human race: interfaith clergy forming a line of love in front of the white supremacists in Virginia; the footage of hundreds of vehicles towing boats, crawling along the freeway towards Houston to help in the rescue and recovery; videos that show men rescuing an exhausted dog from a deep well of water, or men helping a hawk covered with cactus bristles, unable to fly.

Those are also guests in our being human: guests of compassion and tenderness and inclusion. Guests of love.
I get it. Sometimes it’s easier to let the other guests in—guests of fear and hatred and intolerance. Those guests can free range over our hearts and spirits without asking anything of us. Love costs. Love fiercely demands that not only do we let love in, we let love renovate the place, throw out the dusty old curtains we used to hide from the world, remove the mirrors that only showed us what we wanted to see.

A New York Times article suggests that all it takes to fall in love with a stranger is to stare unblinkingly into one another’s eyes for four minutes. There is science to back this theory and the results have been intense for those who try it. I was thinking maybe we should have gazing cafes set up around the city, the nation in which we invite people to gaze into the eyes of someone different from them for four minutes.

What would happen if a white man with a white pride tattoo gazed into the eyes of an African American? If someone who voted for Clinton stared into the eyes of a Trump supporter? What if an ICE agent dared to look for four minutes into the eyes of an immigrant? What could happen if we allowed the differences we fear to be guests in our humble human home?

I don’t know but I know we must try something. Our children, our children’s children, our planet depend upon us no longer slamming the door on that which we fear but welcoming it all in with laughter, with gratitude, with grace.