9/11:A Running Commentary

September 11,  2001  Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

Past Present Future

Taking heed from the moment by moment breaking news about what has occured in lower Manhattan this morning; that's still unraveling and  unclear as to who and what done it, I walk over to Myrtle Avenue, the shopping strip in my neighborhood. There I will  buy candles, water, canned tuna, sardines and other canned  goods that can be eaten out the can at the Korean Bodega and to withdrew money from the bank. These precautions are  in case everything goes down. In the meantime, my neighbor downstairs has rushed over to another part of Brooklyn where her son and my grandson go to school to bring them home.

I was born in the mid 1940s and grew up in 1950s. It was a time of Senator Joe McCarthy a right-wing Republican's  witch hunt for Communists  hiding under the bed, the A-Bomb Scare and watching black and white World War Two movies, starring Audey Murphy Yellow and black signs indicating bomb shelters are "Here",  I am well informed about what to do when you're under attack.

Given the circumstances of the day that continues roll out in undulating shock waves of horror and stagnatingly awesome  truth, I  suggest to my landlord that he unlock the door to the basement in our building.  "We might have to go down there for shelter,"  I reason  He chuckles. 

While shopping for supplies to hold us over until this 'thing' blows over,  in a sudden burst of inspiration, like birds set free from a cage,  out of my mouth flies,  "Did you know that the end of Manhattan Island has bad vibes? I can feel it when I am there?. I am  directing my opening line and eyes to a woman -- a virtual stranger whose the only other person in the store besides me. She's  standing near the dairy section,   The owner, is in the front of the store, gaurding his cash register.

I continue. " It was once a place of terror. It was African Slaves  whose white owners had them build a wall to  keep the Indians out, so they couldn't attack them and  steal their money ? That's where the name Wall Street comes from." 

My unsolicited history lesson rings out in the store like a shot in the dark, and begins to fall  like mist spraying over the bunches of collard greens, kale,  spinach  and mound of red cabbage.  The woman now gives me an indicipharal nod, a juandice eye and twist of her mouth, as if to say,"What are you talking about lady? She moves on and begins  picking over tomatoes on the vine.

Between her quizzicle look , and the owner's happy smile, which supplants for his limited knowledge of the English language, I wedge in, "They shouldn't put office buildings there anymore. A park for peace to redeem the area's dark past, would be a better idea, I believe."


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9.11.01 a running commentary

Live With The Ease of Your Heart

to all the people in the world,

did you ever think about the fact that love can't be measured in amounts --  too much or not enough because its more about a person's capacity to give herself/himself/themselves to the other(s), wholly and unselfishly. but first there is self love, which is not to be confused with self-importance. 

anyway, do you realize that every person on this planet are souls, hauling around our bodies (the spacesuits we need to live/survive here?). further no matter how dire one’s life is, humans for the most part, will fight to the bitter end not to die. and more so, that no matter what the circumstances: war, famine, drought, genocide, sickness we are fiercely addicted to living, even though we harm ourselves in so many ways.  

my other thought is that i equate all grown  up people to children. that no matter how old we are, in some ways we never grow up. say we might bump into each other. we get an attitude over this, or something that’s so unimportant and we begin to make  a mountain our of a mole hill. one shouts out,   “you did this. i hate you." i am gonna kill you." how often have you heard yourself say this? hummm. or :i don wanna play this game with you anymore!” and then  other one shouts back even louder. so we fight to make a point. if we’re in a relationship we might separate, or get divorce. o r if we’re a country our government  simply drops bombs on the other country to make it clear about how much we don’t like the other one.  in the process no one wins. we all get rubbed out and robbed of something.

as no two thoughts can occupy the same space, there can never be two winners of anything unless both players are seeking the same end game. say its a war for peace (a totally oxymoron). and besides,  your peace might not be my peace. it’s a loosing battle.

anyway,  veering  way off the subject, if in fact there was one to begin with,   this morning, very early when the sun was not up yet,  i woke up. it was around 4am. i stumbled to the back of my huge mansion heading toward veranda, when suddendly i paused in mid-stumble to  listen to a mediation cd. actually i didn't make this decision it was more that it was made for me.  i picked up the disk.  I said  lets' do this! (to myself.)

i listened and followed the voices of the people who were recorded on the disk.  each one was  smooth, warm inviting and loving. i sat in a chair as i was instructed. opened my eyes to no more than a slit and stared  through  my eyelashes (which are mine).   i breathed in and out.  i was asked to sit up on my sits bones. not to lean my back against the chair so that i could feel myself in a different way --  and to just allowed myself to be.

one minute then two minutes and then more and more time passed by in silence,  except there was the sound of me breathing -- conscious breathing that is.   then i stood up and began walking ten,  fifteen steps through my home: back and forth,  leading up to the finale of the meditation. and then i sat down in the chair again.  while doing this i was instructed to say repeatedly, “ i am safe. i am healthy. i am happy. i live with the ease of heart. " 

lastly,  i was to tell all the people in the world to be safe, healthy, happy and live with the ease of your heart. 

stay lovely

moi,
mahmoudah

my thoughts written in lower case

dear friend,

thank you for sending me the email regarding the gardener you’ve asked me to pass along and were you stated: "i hate doing this, but…”.

i find it interesting, how often we do things we hate doing. case in point is how you and all of us at some point when we’re faced with the task of not breaking the chain of these well-intended blessings, prayers, jokes, money angels, psalms, buddha wisdom and now the flowers, which my friend had sent to me against her better judgment recently.

though in our heart of hearts we really don’t believe our lives will change by doing this frivolous and simple act (which we hate doing),  our fear causes us to dither back and forth on the chalk line. invariably we succumb to the task.  conversely, should we decide not to play this game which causes us to do so in ten secs flash, where we scurry around in our memory banks to hustle up the names of our dearest and best ten fav friends, to whom we must send this sort of email on to, in order to assure ourselves that the circumnavigation chain of these valuable missives will not be broken.  in turn, the recipients will do the same. most will begin by saying, “I hate to send these kinds of….” eventually the blessings or money might come might back and bite us all in the ass. so far, i have not won any money from this type of lottery!

on the subject of fear,  is our growing old. we know we can't do a damn thing about it.  to this, the other day i was listening to the leonard lopet show on national public radio. or perhaps i was watching tee vee. as you can tell, my confusion as to which form of media i was engaged -- listening to/or watching, has completely left the room!!!. with certainty my lapses of memory is a clear sign of me lacking daily large doses of gingko.

anyway, as i move further into life, which  i prefer to say rather than using the "o" or "a" words --  that somehow by me not uttering these three letter words is my way of veiling the truth about getting older. further, by me not mouthing the truth, might somehow miraculously stall  life's progression. and then i think to myself, "well honey what about old money and old cars (as in vintage ) or wine and the old country? none of these seem to bother me. so how is it that when i speak about time’s passing, do my thongs get all twisted in a bunch! um i am not referring to my havaianas flip flops here! 

are you laughing yet?  

anyway, the other day there was a wise woman on lopet’s show, as i began to say a few paragraphs ago. she spoke about  the tick-tocking of our personal clocks that will undoubtedly stop one day.  she asked the listening audience, "why are we so afraid of growing old? adding, can't we get it that aging is a gift, rather than something we must fear and fight to the teeth. the teeth by the way, which we habitually and ferociously whiten to look younger.  btw have you ever watched old movies on turner movie classics, say one starring charlton heston, playing god or one of those old dudes from biblical times, who’s teeth are as yellow as lemons!  just wondering.

further, how is it that we use hair dyes to cover ‘the grey” and diet pills to get back to the clothes size we wore when we  were ten years old, and potions of anti-aging creams, which we smear on our faces and bodies in such a frenzy that one would think our minds were slightly bent toward the left? (or right). this is not political thinking on my part, but something that runs straight down the middle of the aisle of life and  death.

eternally yours,

 moi mahmoudah

ps: omg!!! its suddenly , lightening and thundering outside!!!!! i wonder if is this a sign from god,  aka charlton heston, that i will be damned for the rest of my years, because i broke the chain by not sending the flowers from the gardener my friend had sent me even though she hated to do so, on to someone, which I utterly hate to do and therefore have refused to play the hold my breath and wait game any longer!

oh well.

in our own time

of  late, i've been spending time with four of my 11 grand children, ages 15 - 19, who are working with me on a project that began before summer arrived.

it’s been a gas, as we used to say back in the day. and intense. but,seeing them interact with one another in a group effort, which has required them to  problem solve and systems think is an amazing experience for me and them as well.

i hear the music  they listen to as they work. sometimes a lyric jumps out at me affronts my senses, or the stinging verbiage of profanity might do this as well, causing me to completely lose my cool. particularly when i hear a reference to a female's  body part that totally misses the mark of her actual anatomy. this level of ignorance  causes me to think about the miseducation of young people in america, to the point i to want to puke, as my rebuttal to the wholesale dumb leading thee blind syndrome is pandemic in our society.

i am a bonified elder 'cause i've been around the block more times then i can remember and i do cuss at times. at the same time, i don't think i 'm a poster child for the older person, chomping down on a wad of tobacco and rolling it around in my toothless mouth with my tongue and waiting for the next day to come and go.  actually i consider myself to be quite youthful and liberal and hip and open minded and inspired about life for someone my age. and so with my grand kids, we talk about everything from sex to economics to politics and the wars. we cover the gamut of  rap music and revolutions. we also dither over our questions about strife and storms occurring all over in the world these days, and then moving onward to religion and upward to god or billions of people's idea of 'a god' and the quandary this still imposes on human beings leading to bloodshed and annihilation in the name of god.


my grandchildren are all smart and wise and good looking and talented and creative. i love learning from them. for example the symbolism of the Buddha’s' long ears that often appears in statues of him, or how political polls are created from samples of imaginary groups of people and not actual people who we are led to believe just happen to be standing on the corner of main street or wall street when a pollster appears from out of nowhere and starts counting. i worry about some of the stuff they take into their senses and pores from society on a daily basis , such as genetically reorganized food, petroleum in tooth paste, corn syrup that the human body has no idea how to digest; the terror of cell phones and the damage they are doing to their brains. or  the games they play incessantly  on the internet and their pads;  or the disembodied social networking  that has done away with true human connections (as i am guilty of doing right now).

further, i am concerned about the more far-reaching dangers that lurk about in the dark minds of men who run/ruin the world, all of which has given me an opportunity to chime in with the kids some story or political view point i might share with them or an historical reference that somehow is stored in my brain, as if i were a lending library and suddenly a hidden memory or piece of information i learned ages ago, presents itself as a thesis for our conversations. whew, was that a long run on sentence or what?


any way, recently, i heard about the danger of listening to music through ear phones. i shutter at the thought that the next generation will be hard to hear folks, which will include my grandchildren. Humm 

also in our talks, while we work, my grandkids and i  might cruise along the road about safe sex, or the recently passed gay marriage law, and then suddenly jump over the divide and talk about visual art, or skate boarding as a sport or theater and then we  might  switch over to the opposite lane going against traffic, where i tell them stories about my childhood and the simple games i once played growing up in harlem, and how my friends and i would  get so excited when one person in the neighborhood got a television set or when the watermelon man, who drove a  horse drawn-wagon, laden with ice and melons that used to have seeds! and that people who had telephones used a party line (to mean that your neighbors could listen to the person on the other line gossiping about them), and most people didn't have phones because they were a luxury item back in the day.

or i might tell them a story about the night i spent in the great pyramid in egypt in more recent years,  which  inspires them to want to travel,  or i might retell them a story my mother told to me when i was a girl, that has stayed with me all my life.

so the kids know stuff about racial segregation and martin luther king, jr's d march on washington and about  slavery ,which they are taught in school. to them this information is somewhat of an abstraction, which causes me to understand that they live in the world now, and to speak about these things of the past , might make me  seemed dated to them! but i know when they are older they,  like me,  will look back to this moment in their lives and might recall what we shared this summer.

to this, it was two summers ago that one of my younger granddaughters, whose bi-racial, came to visit me at my home in brooklyn precisely to learn about my side of the family. oh, before i go further, the kids are color blind when it comes to 'others'.

anyway, my granddaughter took notes as i told my stories to her!  she also shared with me what her great grandmother, whose  of spanish and caribbean indian decent on her mother's side, had told her about her past. that my granddaughter. then age 11, had the mind to inquire about her history on her own volition amazed me!. I was esthetic to be able to share with her what my mother had passed down to me about the our family.

at times  i think back to my youth and when my mother would say to me, "jazz what's that noise? you call that music?" well i try not to asked this question of my grandchildren in the same way or tone in which my mother spoke to me. but if rock music is being played on my bose, as it was the other day while they were here working, i offered, "you see kids the difference between the artists of today and back in the day, musicians and singers knew how to read music, and play a real instrument. and they sang not yelled; and did you know that rock used to be called rock and roll and that white people stole this music  from us?....blah, blah, blah. sharing this really put me in my place as an elder. i think.

i also feel though that my grandkids and I , meet somewhere in the middle. we are standing on a common ground of intergenerational diversity, and as i offer them stories about the past,  they school  me about the present. together we are all moving  toward the future in our own time and rhythm. with our own reasons for being here at this time in the human story we all share.



 moi,
 Mahmoudah

Just(ice) for Fathers

Father’s Day is celebrated in countries around the world at different times of the year. Here in America the first Fathers Day was celebrated on July 15, 1906. It was organized by Grace Golden Clayton, in response to a deadly mining accident in Monogah, West Virginia that claimed the lives of 210 men including her father.

However, it was over a sixty year period beginning, in 1906 that Clayton and two other women, Sonora Dobbs and Margret Chase Smith who in this span of time, fought to make Father’s Day a legal holiday in this country. Collectively these women’s efforts had required the involvement of four U.S. Presidents (Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Bain Johnson). Finally in 1966 Johnson signed a bill that made Father’s Day an official holiday that falls on the third Sunday in June.

While Iam on the subject of Father, I thought you might find it interesting that non-human males who have offspring, for example the Waterfowls (geese, swans, gulls and loons) are very protective in raising their off spring and that Empress Penguins incubate their eggs (not the moms). If you saw the movie, “Happy Feet” you already know this. Beavers fiercely protect their off spring (along with the females during the first few hours of their children’s lives.  It’s not long after they are born, that the father begins to teach them how to search for materials needed to build and repair their own dams, this of course is a lesson in survival. Wolves are known to help feed and protect and play with their off spring as do Dolphins. Then there are the Silverback Gorillas, who’s  role  it is to protect their families from harm as well.

On the opposite side the father protection coin, male bears leave the female bears shortly after mating with them and they are known to kill and eat their cubs.  Geeze.   Obviously this fact totally kills the image of the friendly Papa Bear (as in warm and cuddly children’s story “The Three Bears”) or the Northern Toilet Paper television commercials!

Moving on.  Domestic dogs couldn’t care less about their pups. Unlike Wolves they are more likely to abandon the mother’s of their children right after mating with her. Hmm.

Male Lions, barely tolerate their cubs. Some are even mean and cruel to their young. But the cuddly Rabbit have more tolerance for their kits, though they tend to be a bit rough when playing with them, especially with their sons. Horse Stallions are in complete denial about their roles as fathers.  With some  species both the father of mother couldn’t care less about for their off spring, leaving them to their own devices to survive in the wild.

And lastly, I thought you might be interested to know that International Men’s Day (celebrated around the globe) falls on November 19^th each year!  

To all you dads out there, please enjoy your special day!

Moi,

Mahmoudah

From Darkness to Enlightment

The Buddha once said, "Even a theif loves his family."

What remains in the wake of Osama bin Ladens's uncelebrated and unattended burial by water, is the suffering and grief of his widows and children, which allows me to think that somewhere

within this tourtured soul, there must have been at least a molcule of love.

I am in no way, condoning his actions. Rather I am wanting to think that Osama bin Ladin reflected something dark in our world, in order for humanity to wake up to our light. That's a tall and and impossible concept for many people to injest. I know. 

Buddism also teaches about the karma of a people and the country where they are born and live. And that what goes around comes around as we Westerns say to explain the implacable Eastern Religous concept of the deeds of one's past life circling around and showing up again in other incarnations somewhere in the Universe.

About compassion, which is the basis of Buddhism, I offer my condolences to the wives and children who have lost a husband and father. For to put Osama bin Laden outside the context of the human family  as this relates to his private life,  is as if to suggest we ourselves don't exist.

Regarding bin Laden as the orchesrator of the Holocust that consumed the lives of nearly three thousand people at the World Trade Center in New York city,  this year the Memorial to the descesed will rise like Pheonix with cinged wings out of the flames of the past during the unveiling of the Memorial on 9/11/11.

When I look at the archtectual renderings  of the memorial I am uttery astounished by the immesity of this project and the awewome beauty that has come from such pain and grief.

This past week our President Obama gave orders for the take down of Mr. Bin Ladin. The next day his body was intered in the sea. Two days later, our President was in New York City laying a wreath at the foot prints of the WTC memorial site.

It is through our pain and suffering that one achieves enlightment, the Buddha also teaches us. 

                               "Imagine"- John Lennon