”I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are good at heart.” —Anne Frank

Kim Mosley

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Human nature?
It’s complicated, the anthropologist said.
We all have within us the capacity
To be kind, loving, caring, protecting.
We all have within us the capacity
To be brutal, cruel, violent, destructive.
We all have within us the capacity
To choose.
Although sometimes that capacity
Is taken away by circumstances.
In all circumstances, humans desire
To be treated with
Kindness, love, care, protection.
And that is why
Goodness wins.

—Donna Birdwell

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But like the giant
in the fairytale,
some people placed
their heart
out of harm's way,
never noticing
that with no heart
they
are harm's way.

—Jeffery Taylor

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My first thought, when I came across this quote yesterday, was that I wondered if the quote was still true. Is this a worse time than it was 70 years ago? When I read her diary in high school I don't remember questioning whether people were really “good at heart.” I asked my neighbor what he thought this morning, and he said that it was true if the person hadn't been indoctrinated. I wanted to ask him whether Christ would agree, but I didn't, assuming that he'd say that he didn't know.

Why would someone whose life had been turned upside down say that people were good at heart? Is it because the frontal lobe of her brain hadn't developed and that's what led Anne to such a ridiculous realization?

What was amazingly similar for Anne Frank and perhaps the rest of us who are under the mortality death sentence is that we tend to live pretty normal lives even though the death gremlin could knock at our door at any moment. i think the book is read in high school not because it is about the holocaust but rather because it is about a normal adolescent girl. Her unusual circumstances don't shift her life. She has the same thoughts, crushes, and insecurities that most of us did at her age (and still do).

So I've been evading the issue about whether I agree with her statement... And why? And how? On the one hand we have bands of people who not only hate others but proceed to kill them mercilessly. If all people were good at heart, then we have to include those people who were indoctrinated.

There I go again, avoiding the question about what I believe. I started thinking about my student who killed his teacher (not me). My mother, trained as a social worker, asked me if he was violent. "No," I said, "just confused."

Anne's statement struck a chord for me. Do I believe it, or just want to believe it? Would I believe it if I was in hiding? I don't know.

I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are good at heart.

—Kim Mosley

To be alive ....

Havana, Cuba—the National Afro-Cuban Dance Company
photo by Donna Birdwell

Just to ....

Donna Birdwell

The prompt:

“Just to be is a blessing

Just to live is holy.”

—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Donna Birdwell

Just being is a blessing.
Just living is holy.
The child wakes
between you.

—A Participant

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Donna Birdwell

My cousin in Houston passed away just over a month ago. We were never close. She married just out of high school and had two daughters who are now in their fifties. In Ireland you’d call them spinsters. One sister is disabled and has never worked. The other sister works five days a week sitting with a neighbor’s Down’s Syndrome sister from 6:30 am until 2 in the afternoon. They’re barely scraping by. I wonder how they would understand these words. Do they feel that “just to be” is a blessing? Or is it a burden? Sitting in their sparsely furnished apartment adorned with pages torn from magazines, “holy” was not a word that came to mind.

Two nights later, I sat in a friend’s tenth-floor condo in Dallas, just off Turtle Creek. There were real paintings on the walls, a vase of two dozen red roses in the center of the table and good wine in cut crystal glasses.

Is my friend more blessed than my two spinster second cousins? Whose life is more holy?

Just be. Just live. If you can find a few moments of holiness in that, maybe that’s the blessing.

—Donna Birdwell

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Donna Birdwell

The second precept that we take in Soto Zen is “do not take what is not given.” At the San Francisco Zen Center they added a line to each of the precepts to give them a positive spin. “2. A disciple of Buddha does not take what is not given but rather cultivates and encourages generosity.”

Perhaps it should be, “we should take what is given.” Someone suggested that I should add an only to that: "we should take only what is given."

In any case, I thought it would be an interesting generosity practice to focus on taking rather than giving. Rabbi Heschel's statement suggests that being on earth is a blessing. Appreciating that seems transformational. I feel, “Thank you, universe, for letting me be. Thank you for the innumerable gifts that you shower on me every moment.” (This may introduce a dilemma: as a generous and loving person, do we thank the coyote/universe who enjoys our neighbor’s yelping dog for supper?)

I imagined myself starting to focus on these blessings. How lucky I am to be surrounded in my life by so many jewels! How lucky to live in an environment so conducive to my interests!

The second line of the Heschel quote, is “just to live is holy.” In Buddhism we talk about the rarity of being born human. It is the rarity of the possibility that one tortoise would rise to the surface of the ocean and its head would go through one floating oxen yoke. That's how lucky it is to be born in human realm.

In the Torah, God says that you shall be holy for I'm holy. Here, too, it is a recognition of what it is that which makes us special. It doesn't matter what you call that which created us. It also says that we should revere our mother and father. We revere holy things, and  that makes us holy, for we came from holy parents. And our mother and father, metaphorically, are everything that comes together to give us this life.

What a great tattoo this would be, with each line of Heschel’s quote on a different arm! Then the words could be easily shared when we reach with both hands to accept what is given to us.

And we can smile and say thanks.

—Kim Mosley