The most rigorous truth of Buddhism is that everything is of everything else. The Vietnamese Monk Thich Nhat Hanh coined the word “Interbeing” to denote this terrifying truth. Now, when I used to go to Grateful Dead shows, I enjoyed being at one with everything around me. At one show in 1990 at Autzen Stadium under a cloudless June sky I experienced (sober) ecstasy as the boys broke into Uncle John’s Band at a particularly perfect moment and what followed was a moment of the most intense unity I’ve ever experienced.
A cry of deep joy rose up from all present and I had this expanded moment when I had a kind of magnified vision and seemed to be able to see the individual faces of each reveler across the two sides of the stadium and the music engulfed me and I abandoned myself to dancing and laughing and joy. It was as if I were the Grateful Dead and for a moment I experienced something like spontaneous, unconscious universal sister and brotherhood.
But when the sulfur dioxide from the other roasters poured into Stan’s and my workplace and engulfed me in a blinding rotten egg sea of gas, suddenly I was at one, in the deepest union I have ever known, with the entirety of manufacturing zinc. Suddenly,the toxic byproducts of smelting zinc invaded my mouth and throat and bronchial passages and lungs and the cells of my blood and the vessels and the capillaries.
I felt like I was a zinc plant.
It was as if the miners whose labor extracted the ore along with the manifold dangers of their work and the diesel powered Union Pacific trains that transported the ore to Kellogg and the concentrated fires that heated the ore and the metallurgical expertise that made this smelting possible encamped themselves in my vital organs, chased sweet oxygen out, and usurped my entire body. Poison took over.
I was the Zinc Plant. The Zinc Plant was me. Labor, wages, strikes, technological advances, environmental damage, the choked vegetation of the Kellogg landscape, my anger and hatred for being in a job I didn’t know how to do: it poured inside me. The gas and the mineral dust I had breathed daily as a citizen of Kellogg now choked me, its concentrated levels of toxicity thrust the Industrial Revolution inside me.
Never had I or have I since felt so immersed in anything, so overtaken by forces of history, economics, by the American Dream of luxury and material goods, so undivided from the way of life we live that demands that workers labor in danger, workers die, workers put their lungs and limbs at risk so we can enjoy the benefits of a life driven by coal, electricity, gasoline, hard metals, plastics, microchips, chlorine bleach, inexpensive shirts, pants, shoes, sweaters, socks, gloves, caps, jackets, and coats and the countless other products only made possible as faceless workers inhale fumes, dust, threads, toxins, and break bones, cut open skin, pull muscles, tear r rupture disks, tear rotator cuffs, suffer concussions, and sometimes die.
It all came inside me. It lives there now. I hear it when my lungs whistle. I hear it when my lungs crackle and pop. I thrust it out when I cough and clear my throat and spit. In July and August of 1973, I spat chunks of labor and zinc manufacturing out of my insides, globs of dusty and green and yellow infection. Now I just cough. Not like I used to. Much has healed. I never thought I'd live this long.
But as long as I live, I live in Interbeing with all that is. Some of it, I'd like to disconnect from.
********
If you'd like to read the first six parts of my series "On My Blindness", you'll find Part 1 here, 2 here, 3 here, 4 here, 5 here, and 6 here.
I wrote last year about my assumption I'll one day contract cancer here.
I have also meditated on the look of suffering I have always seen in people from the Silver Valley where I grew up. I wrote about the Silver Valley Look, here and here.
My first blog was entitled, "Kellogg is My Paris". It began this process of writing of looking at this place I love, that I took so deep inside me. You can read that first post here.
No comments:
Post a Comment