Loving Lent: The Desert Is Itself the Spring We Need

Me circa 1975 as referenced below.

The Heart Sutra is one of the most foundational Mahayana Buddhist texts, often called the essence of Buddhism. It gives us that religion’s central tenets, emphasizing the achievement of enlightenment to liberate all beings rather than solely oneself – in poetry that we chant.

“Form is not separate from boundlessness, boundlessness is not separate from form / form is not other than boundlessness boundlessness is not other than form / the same is true of feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness…” 

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I love the Lenten season. And most especially that it starts with Jesus intentionally going into the desert not only to face temptations but to lose his self – to fast, pray, and realize his own boundlessness in the relentless emptiness of his surroundings.

Maybe it is because I am Catholic, or maybe as a person long in love with the notion of “radical,” or going to the root of things, I hunger to enter the desert of both discernment and repentance.

I yearn for every one of us to have opportunities for metanoia – the Greek concept for fundamental change of mind – in which repentance is rooted.

Repentance represents a total reversal of direction from sin toward God, acknowledging not only what we have done but what we have failed to do. What I, and we, fail to do every day. A shift from the self-justifications of our ego-selves to a heartbreak named God that produces not the self-centered, useless emotion of guilt, but rather an actual change in our behaviors and actions.

Repentance is humbling, and this humility is the pre-condition for asking for and receiving forgiveness.

From my perspective, we need a lot more repentance, forgiveness, and mercy in our dominant, white U.S. culture.

And not just from or for those who use their powers to treat others badly.

We need forgiveness from and for each other, who in our quests for comfort, convenience, and a sense of security fail to do enough.

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Boundlessness describes the reality that we are all the same cells, all breathing the same air; that these impermanent physical forms we currently take are, as Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck might say, “nothing special,” no-thing. Just here, now, for our particular purposes.

In its lack of distractions, we recognize the desert’s boundlessness and hopefully our own, wishing as we do at times, especially when ill or otherwise circumscribed by our bodies, that like Shakespeare’s Hamlet this “too too solid flesh would melt.”

The Desert is Itself the Spring We Need.

Here in the U.S., our culture of consumption seems often to have swallowed up our very understanding of the model and teachings of the Christ. We are encumbered by our attachments to so many things, to so much STUFF – as well as to the notion that we are entitled to it all as long as we “work hard.”

We need to do some spiritual Swedish death cleaning, as it were, to make conscious – to discern – our true purposes here and to change our actions.

We need the desert just as Jesus did, for fasting and praying, to burn away all that is unnecessary and get to what is real. Not individual egos but god’s beloved sons, god’s beloved daughters, god’s beloved children, each with our purpose here.

Here in the desert’s boundlessness we realize our dream of a better world, where there is no separation between you and me, between me and that blade of grass, between me and that piano – or between us and god.

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When I was 14 in 1975, I first cast myself into the desert of exile.

I received my confirmation from the Catholic Bishop of Norwich, CT, then promptly stopped attending church. 

I already knew that as a young queer woman I was exiled by this church, in which women could not be leaders and homosexuals were condemned sinners – but I wanted the choice to be my own.

My mother cried. My godmother rejected me.

I was still too young, then, to understand that living gracefully and mercifully with suffering and contradictions is the heart of Jesus’s messages and actions.

And neither my family nor our weekly CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) classes did anything to help me better understand Jesus’s complex lessons.

As young Catholics, we were taught only to obey the rules, and to follow. 

But follow what?

Had I better understood Matthew 4:1-11, in which the baptismal spirit leads Jesus into the desert wilderness to overcome the temptations of his suffering, I might have grown more productively within my own exile.

But I was a white U.S. teenager. I suffered in isolation, surliness and – rebellion.

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Father Richard Rohr recently quoted professor Rachel Wheeler on the desert: “The desert occupies a powerful place at the heart of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spiritual traditions. Simultaneously, the desert is a place of resistance, refuge, and revelation…Many men and women, who came to be known as desert fathers and mothers, experienced the wilderness as a refuge from an empire increasingly inhospitable to them…. Its association with the powerful and wealthy was inconsistent with how many desert mothers and fathers believed they ought to live out their Christian calling.”

We go to the desert to peel away the layers of abundance that cloud our minds and hearts. To step to the side, to allow god to lead.

The world’s suffering, and our suffering with and for it, is our “desert” only when it causes us to step away from our selves, away from abundance and comfort, to ask for forgiveness for all we have done, for all we have failed to do – and then to act.

How do we take up our crosses?

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I was a radical lesbian feminist living as a writer and editor in New York City in the midst of the AIDS holocaust of the 1980’s and 1990’s.

My friends, peers, and colleagues were becoming horribly sick and dying around me, every day.

The Reagan Administration refused to acknowledge the AIDS crisis.

We were again cast into an unmerciful and deadly exile.

Silence = Death.

In the midst of this I followed some of my fellow feminist activists from the streets of ACT UP and into a simultaneous Zen practice.

Sitting on the cushion, I learned to identify the stories to which my mind was attracted and attached, and then practiced letting those go. This has helped me to have compassion for those who would deny our existence, as well as the courage and love to act with purpose.

Mercy for those whose words and actions would kill us. Action to change it.

I was still very angry. I am still very angry. And again, not only at failed leadership. 

My anger burns for how so many of us, myself included, choose daily to participate in a culture that robs so many of their basic human dignity.

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My mom at the rehab center with our dog Jack.

Once a year, my mother would take the train from Mystic to the city to visit me for Mothers’ Day.

My mom was born in 1923 and was defined by growing up in a family of Bohemian and German immigrants through the Great Depression. She had a high school education, multiple eye operations and a full hysterectomy at age 17. When she finally met and was accepted by my functionally deaf, first generation father, they adopted me. She was already 39. 

She gifted her Catholic faith and values to me. It took me two decades to go back to church, to face the institution that, similarly to the Reagan administration, was determined that a woman like me could not exist.

Very few of us wish to venture where we are not wanted.

But Zen had taught me how to enter into my own boundlessness.

And entering into that boundlessness, I was at last able to understand the Old Testament’s prophets and the lived example of Jesus.

During one visit, my mom and I were passing by a beautiful Catholic church on 6th Avenue in Park Slope. I had poked my head in – I missed the magical smells and sounds and silences of my youth – and discovered it to be the worship home of Haitian refugees.

I told my mom I had tentatively started to return to Mass.

She was quiet until we reached the corner by the bodega whose cafe con leches and plantanos I craved.

I don’t go any more, she said softly.

Remembering how tortured I had felt in my youth, being awakened early to get to Mass and forced into religious education classes with priests I actively considered assholes, I was pretty sure I had misheard her. I asked her to repeat herself.

I don’t go any more, she said. You’re right, in what you write. The church is just made by men, men who change the rules. Whether or not to wear a hat. Whether or not to eat meat on Friday’s. Those are men’s rules, not god’s.

God is in my raspberry patch. 

We stood there on the Brooklyn sidewalk, the current of languages and colors swirling around us. 

Together, my mom and I were able to step aside from the rules of men and re-connect with the profound faith and humility with which she had always lived.

Connect to an understanding that we do our best work when we are able to step to the side, centering not our selves, but boundlessness.

Connect to a faith that god is best found in our raspberry patches, because we ourselves are no different from that thorny bush, or that delicious fruit.

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My beautiful wall-eyed mother.

It is actually not that difficult to practice both Catholicism and Zen Buddhism as they share an important core paradox: that we must live in and through suffering to find heaven.

As Christians, we know this as Jesus dying on the cross and then rising to new life.

As Buddhists, we know that trying to escape from inconvenience, discomfort, accumulated habits and assumptions, conflict, exile and death only deepens suffering.

In our boundlessness, there is no separation between suffering and love.

This Lent, how are we each entering and embracing the desert that makes discernment possible? What actions are we taking to de-center ourselves and our own experiences?

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Zen master Shunryu Suzuki famously said: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few."

I am writing this in part during the eclipse of the full blood moon, with coyotes howling along our shore.

Boundlessness – including the boundlessness of the desert – is the place from which all arises.

The desert itself was Jesus’s spring, as it is ours.

In barrenness, in self-imposed hunger and solitude, Jesus experienced his boundlessness and was able to resist the very human temptations that cause us to harm others – which is to sin.

In our boundlessness, we do not live on bread alone. We are more than these physical forms.

In our boundlessness, we do not need to prove our power by testing god.

In our boundlessness, everything is of god and nothing is more important.

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My Gram with her girls:
my mother at left, godmother at right

The “wisdom beyond wisdom” of the Heart Sutra is realized in the boundlessness of the desert, in which we are nothing special.

As many of you know, when I left New York City more than 25 years ago to return to Maine, I did so to work first in the nonprofit and now in the public sector.

There are always differences of opinion on how to reach shared goals. Always conflict. Always opposition. Too often negativity.

My hope is always, always, to find and serve our common good.

I try to bring my mother’s values – of faith in the interconnection of all things, in humility, in not knowing – into my work and fail more often than not.

As Roshi Joan Halifax has said, “Suffering and failure bring us to practice and teach us about our strengths and our interconnectedness with all beings. Our failures can become transformed into understanding and compassion.”

And so we just keep trying.

The desert is itself the spring we need.

Taxes. Basketball. Spring -- and Hopes Eternal

With Town Meeting swiftly approaching on the first Monday of March, there are three topics on all our minds: Taxes. Basketball. Spring.

Let’s be hopeful about all three – and read on for four suggested strategies you can use to better impact local budgets and taxes.

On Monday, February 9 the Town of Stonington held a public meeting to walk residents through the local budget items up for approval as warrant articles at this year’s Town Meeting. The week before, the Town held a public hearing to hear from the nonprofits whose “third party requests” make up approximately $80,000, or 2%, of this budget.

The local tax bill you receive is made up of these and also the Hancock County tax assessment, by which residents pay for county services including but not limited to sheriff, jail, courthouse, and transportation services; as well as the consolidated school district (CSD) budget.

This year’s estimated county tax bill for Stonington has been assessed at $240,000, or about 5% of your total bill.

The school district operates on a July 1 - June 30 fiscal year so are just beginning their budgeting process. School costs annually make up approximately 45% or more of your tax bill. Deer Isle-Stonington is known as a “low receiver” of state education funds due to our high coastal property valuations: the state does not cover 55% of our school costs as it does in other areas of the state. Our small towns are annually responsible for the bulk of an almost $8 million school budget on our own; if school funding formulas worked for towns like Stonington, we would be responsible for less than half that total.

#1 strategy for taxpayers seeking lower local costs: attend school and municipal budget meetings.

The Town’s proposed operating budget makes up the final half of your taxes. This year’s proposed budget is $2,299,781, which represents a $106,981, or 4.88%, increase over 2025.

However: the selectmen have offset that increase by appropriating funds from surplus to make the local share flat this year, causing no increase to your tax bill.

The only increases, therefore, that Stonington residents will see to property taxes are from school and county budgets.

The Select Board’s decision is based on their knowledge of the relationship between property taxes and year round housing for our work force to keep Stonington a vital, year-round community.

Thanks to our beautiful coastal properties we are a “high valuation” (and thus “low receiver” for school funds) community. As property taxation, school funding and local revenue sharing are structured in the state constitution the Town is prohibited from accessing much of that value without harming local workers: we cannot levy targeted local taxes, or differentiate the tax rate between seasonal and year round residents.

#2 strategy for taxpayers seeking lower local costs: advocate for changes to state tax policies through your local legislators.

Despite our isolated location and small population, Stonington, thanks to our standing as Maine’s #1 lobster port, functions as a service center for our fisheries and marine economies. With our commercial fish pier, public doc, three working waterfronts, access to Acadia National Park and public utilities, Stonington is more of a “tiny city” than an ordinary coastal village. Unlike many surrounding communities, the Town, thanks in large part to its former population density, manages a public water company and sanitary district. These are real assets that make Stonington the envy of many towns, as housing development costs within these public utility districts are lower than outside of them. Sadly, during the real estate rush of the pandemic, year round residents lost control of over 50% of this historic housing stock. Now the Town is working on a number of strategies to make it possible to invite and encourage year round residents to live downtown again. The Town succeeds in its required operations thanks to dedicated grant seeking, writing, and awards totalling in the millions of dollars of investments to infrastructure and other improvements.

#3 strategy for year-round residents to lower taxes is to be signed up to receive the state’s Homestead Exemption reduction. Recently, we became aware of citizens who mistakenly believed this exemption is only for elderly residents. The Homestead Exemption provides a reduction of up to $25,000 in the value of your home for property tax purposes for all permanent residents of Maine whose property is your primary residence. Because the exemption applies to any residential property assessed as real property, it also covers mobile homes even if they are on rented lots. To qualify, file an application on or before April 1 with the municipality with the Town. And let’s advocate with our state legislators for getting that exemption amount increased! And P.S.: if you have sufficient assets to pay your taxes without this exemption – please don’t apply for it. All property tax exemptions like this and including those for nonprofit properties erode the overall tax base and thereby increase costs for your neighbors.

Finally, the transfer station is the second largest cost center for the Town. The millions of pounds of waste we ship out daily cost taxpayers dearly. You can help to reduce these by following the updated recycling and waste reduction instructions available at the transfer station.

#4 strategy: the more we reduce material waste, the more we can also reduce the costs of removing it.

The Town is here to help and your questions, ideas and actions are important. Please connect with us via email at econdev@stoningtonmaine.org; by stopping by the Town office; or by calling 207-367-2351. 

Money Talks - but it Don't Sing and Dance and it Don't Walk

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson in "Song Sung Blue"

"Money talks.

But it don't sing and dance and it don't walk

And long as I can have you here with me

I'd much rather be forever in blue jeans"

- Neil Diamond, "Forever in Blue Jeans"

These past couple of weeks, we've been trying to catch up on Oscar-nominated films in anticipation of the 98th awards ceremony on March 15.

This is an old habit, from when we ran a movie theater, and a sad one as we no longer have a local theater at which to enjoy these films, and the conversations before and after, with others. It's the conversations with friends and neighbors that make the movies more than entertainment to be consumed -- but rather culture that helps us grow and strengthens our bonds.

"Money talks

But it don't sing and dance and it don't walk..."

Our favorite of the movies we've screened so far is "Song Sung Blue" starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, who is nominated for Best Actress. Not at all clear why Hugh Jackman was not also nominated for this one.

I was never much of a Neil Diamond fan growing up. His music lives in an uncomfortable nexus between the hard rock we loved in the 1970', the soft pop to which we danced, and the country that was our parents' fave.

Not to mention that "Sweet Caroline" is forever embedded in my cells as it was the #1 tune of our marching band. "Ba ba ba...good times never felt so gooooddddd..."

"Play wiht all you've got:" me marching in 
a high school football game in
Stonington, CT circa 1977-78.

Yeah. We hated marching band, but it was required to be in concert band.

"Song Sung Blue" is actually the true story of a Milwaukee-based Neil Diamond/Patsy Cline tribute band, Lightning and Thunder.

It's Milwaukee. It's working class. Mike (Lightning) and Claire (Thunder) Sardina have a blended family and tough lives where money is short but the songs sing and dance and thus so do they, triumphant trough one tragedy after another.

And it may actually be one of the most honest and moving movies you'll ever see about being in recovery.

We need this now. Check it out.

But instead, the other movies we're getting tend to focus on money and the lives of despicable characters. "After the Hunt," for which Julia Roberts won a Golden Globe but failed to get an Oscar nod, takes on the still-important #MeToo movement within the elite environs of Yale in a way you know that we as women will never see justice in our life times.

The NYTimes called "Marty Supreme," which showcases the excellent acting of the still young Timothee Chalamet, "one of the most exciting movies of the year" -- mostly, it seems, on the basis of it being a terrific love letter to NYC's now lost, once-seething with life Lower East Side.

I miss it, too.

But not enough to praise yet another story of a young man on the make, striving for money and running roughshod over the married women with whom he has affairs to obtain his own goals.

It's an all too familiar story, and one we need to stop lionizing. #MeToo anyone?

The world we're living in is farther from perfect than most of us would presently like.

Movies like "Song Sung Blue" show us the lives and fights of those too often invisible to decision makers. The lives of real people who matter. And it might even give you a new appreciation for the hidden treasure's in Diamond's ouevre.

"Money talks

But it don't sing and dance and it don't walk

And long as I can have you here with me

I'd much rather be forever in blue jeans"

- Neil Diamond, "Forever in Blue Jeans"

In Grief, Reflection and Action

Nellie was a yes girl.

A go girl.

A girl with a dedicated focus, a fierce sense of purpose, and action.

Only death could finally stop her - and we had to say yes to that, while she staggered on at 15-years-old through the harsh winter snow in her "Help 'Em Up" harness, doing her very best to honor her purpose with us.

Grief is a critical time for reflection. 

It is so difficult to stay in it in our action-packed world.

It's a time for integrating heart with head, for being present so that our resulting actions come not only from anger at the world's injustice, but from love.

Actions that arise not only from our pain at loss but from our heart breaking open vision for a different world.

It is crazy difficult not to be angry right now, furious with the way wealthy men are swinging their power around in ways damaging to everyone else.

They are making their purpose very clear: to exploit us and the planet for their own gain.

The U.S. President has made himself and his family $4 billion richer in just the past year.

He has put armed thugs on our streets in response to our First Amendment rights.

He and his staff speak about others as if they are nonhuman.

And there are so-called "Christians" who support this!

It would be not only impossible, but wrong, to not be furious.

So we must act.

Like Nellie, we must know our purpose and be fierce, focused and dedicated in saying yes to life and love in relationship to other living beings. 

Living in a consumer-focused culture has caused too many to lose their purpose.

Why me? Why here? Why now?

Our purpose here is not simply to acquire things and to accrue wealth.

It is not even merely to take care of our individual selves and our families.

We are an integral part of this planet -- however you believe it was created -- and therefore of each other and all living beings.

"To become holy," a spiritual leader I love said recently, "we are called to commit fully to who we are called to be. Be a Light."

Not just a flashlight for your own self interest.

For others. For our planet/home.

As Bad Bunny said at the Grammy Award's: hate only builds more hate.

What does it take to say yes to love-as-action?

The fierce, dedicated focus of Nellie, who knew her purpose.

It is not enough to say the word "love" over and over.

Love is action.

Love is fiercely, directly, actively dedicated to our purpose here.

Our grief is important. It reminds us of the immense power of our love and also how impermanent it is.

I am grieving every day at all that is lost.

Let us all be focused, dedicated, persistent, fierce and loving members of our communities and planet.

Let's be like my Nellie. 

I'll Keep Doing the Work You Were Doing as if I Were Two

Photo of Hadestown: Youth Edition
courtesy New Surry Theatre

This Sunday, I am struggling to live in my broken heart and not in my rage.

So having had the joy of seeing New Surry Theatre's awesome production of Hadestown: Teen Edition last night, I am reflecting on the power of live theater not only to entertain but to move us, to change hearts and minds. For the record, if you are in this area: do not miss this show! These teens are so excellent -- amazing choreography, great voices, stellar acting. Kudos to all who worked on it for a real community triumph, the type of theater we need more of in our communities, and especially to director Lori Sitzabee for bringing out the very best in her young cast.

This also causes me to reflect on why it is so important for children (and adults!) to learn to read fiction, and stories about those different from ourselves.

The arts at their best are not mere entertainment to be consumed.

Theater, literature, visual arts are the actions by which we build imagination, which is in turn needed to empathize with those not-us and then to have compassion and even to take action on behalf of others' suffering.

Imagine if instead of unrestrained male violence and a lust for power over others we fostered these things in raising our kids: imagination. Empathy. Compassion. Action. Art: the creation of beauty. Every day, a living process.

These are the human powers and skills that Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin and many other peacemakers called for and taught.

Too often, our specific culture, which continues to be dominated by white men, guns these teachers and models down.

Our power, and our trick to bringing a different future forward, is that for every individual gunned down 10 more of us step into their place.

"It could have been me, but instead it was you,
So I'll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can work for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can work for freedom I can too."

- singer songerwriter Holly Near, after Kent State, in 1970 and the 1973 torture and assassination of Chilean theater director and poet Victor Jara by the junta who overthrew, with U.S. support, the Allende democracy in Chile

We've been here before. We will be here again. Those of us who believe in peace can never let up.

And if history is going to repeat itself -- let's hope we see a repeat of Nixon's 1974 resignation.

As opposed to a repeat of 1985's Iran-Contra scandal in Nicaragua -- another attempt to overthrow a democratic effort in opposition to the U.S.'s colonialist interests.

Let justice prevail, with each of our active support.