LEVITY AND THE LAMA
I love this picture. It tickles me. Kai took it with his Instamatic in 2000, when a few of us decided to join the masses set on getting a peek (and an energy high) during the Dalai Lama’s visit to Minneapolis. I guess it’s the hokey marquee on wheels, with the black plastic letters and teensy bulbs in that makeshift parking lot that makes me laugh. The mundane lighting the way to the sublime.
As I’ve said before, his countenance smiling from the magazine cover over my desk invariably lifts my spirits. One morning the picture went missing, and you’d have thought I had lost my car keys, or my car! I searched everywhere it couldn’t or shouldn’t be. I phoned family members to ask if any had seen it.
Two days later, I unearthed his likeness in the oddest spot – the underside of my desk. I wondered how — without a crack between built-in and wall — it could have made its journey across the desktop, around the edge and over to the drawer bottom, where somehow it attached itself as securely as an egg sac to a spider web. In our family, this kind of cosmic joke occurs regularly, defying rational explanation. “Good one,” I thought and restored Mr. Lama (as my friend Sooz calls him) to his place, front and center.
The real Dalai Lama was front and center last week when I traveled to Constitution Hall in D.C. with Peter, my mate, to spend two days in his presence. Life handed us one of its little miracles when he was invited to join a small group of experts ranging from neuro-scientists to psychologists to monks at the Mind & Life Institute’s conference on “Educating World Citizens for the 21st Century.” These experts got to share some of what they’ve discovered in their respective fields about encouraging compassion in the young, answering any questions he posed and asking some of him as well.
The Dalai Lama gives a prayer shawl to each presenter.
Here was the kick for me… watching, along with two thousand others, the real deal – his eyes crinkling, face beaming, this bodhisattva breaking into laughter, again and again. He would invariably turn to someone seated on the stage, then to another, to draw them out. He seemed eager to multiply the delight…. a joy that the image of him has brought to me on so many mornings at my desk.
In Philip Gerard’s Writing a Book that Makes a Difference, he speaks to writers in general, but I think, to writers for children and teens, in particular, when he observes: “You don’t for a moment underestimate the importance of the undertaking. Somewhere, someone you’ve never met will be exalted, shamed, enlightened, shocked, overjoyed, vindicated, frightened, amused, confused, disheartened, surprised, angered, or given courage by your words.”
“It matters that you find the right words,” he adds. “The quality of your struggle to find those words, to make the best use of your God-given talent in service of a subject, earns you the right to be its author.”
Later, Gerard paraphrases John Gardner in The Art of Fiction: For him, “writing well is a matter of life and death – your reader may be desperate for the truth of your book. Gardner recognizes that great books – like all great art – are great precisely because they change lives. They have an indelible effect on the imagination, the conscience, the intellect of those who experience them. This is thrilling – and terrifying.”
Terrifying, yes, as one contemplates the odds of achieving anything remotely like the ideal. This may be why writers like me come to the task on some days feeling a certain heaviness. Gerard says that the humorist illuminates human nature by finding levity in dark moments – lightening that felt heaviness. This is what I find most helpful and most holy about the Dalai Lama’s eagerness to make light of so many moments and what we bring to them. As Gerard points out, such comfort is like a candle in the dark.
October 19, 2009 at 11:36 pm
What a rich and enchanting post!