The Flow of Suffering and Joy
We are sharing a series of journal entries that the author, JH, contributed following an invitation from Insight Myanmar for publication on our website. She includes the following message: The following entries from my journal along the Burma-Thai border were first shared more than 18 years ago. On the advice of a respected teacher, they were distributed only on paper, so as to protect involved parties while raising awareness. Later, when the Internet became available, many of us still hoped in our hearts that these descriptions would soon become obsolete. Finally, I offer these words here in realizing that certain details remain far too accurate. May they bring benefit. Please forgive my youthful ignorance and arrogance. Errors are my own.
“Suffering is like this. It flows through here, it flows through me, as does joy. It is a quivering of the heart, the same heart. Given our attention, it turns every cell alive.”
Burma Border Journals #14
Fridays the eye clinic has a noon feast. A woman at one of the refugee camps up north has sent two great bowls of fish head soup this week. The optometry kit is cleared from the table; an unnamed hand wipes the plastic tablecloth with a rag. The charts of ‘E’s, ‘3’s, and ‘W’s remain on the wall as reminders of teenage faces lighting up, hunched elderly folk straightening when they see clearly for the first time. The white plastic shopping bag just set down is lined with the biggest green leaf I have ever seen in my life; its edges spill out both sides at the handles. I have never seen one up close. This is the same leaf woven between bamboo poles into panels and affixed on top of huts. They dry light brown and rustling, works of collective art and craftsmanship, protecting the inhabitants from sun and rain. Each completed roof lasts one to three years depending upon the spacing and tension of the weave. To me, the teak forests are Thailand, and the huts house its people; the soft scenic backdrop and its content would be forever altered in absence of these trees. This very species allows people to build village life directly from the land, but with deforestation, there is a dependence increasingly upon corrugated metals.
The leaf today holds a huge, white, brain-like mass. We pull long plaits of thin, round noodles from it into manageable strands, placing them upon a second recycled bag for easy access. I hear us chopping green onions, smell the stemming of fresh cilantro, more so than seeing. We pour all sorts of gold and burnt oily fermented things into separate condiment dishes; with crushed red peppers we do the same. Scooping food with our fingers we fill our bowls. The slosh of pouring broth. Steam. Then there is only the breeze of quiet breathing and the gentle smack of lips. Afterward we drink cola from plastic cups. When people are full, then they talk. Karen sounds like French; Burmese is more nasal. The spreading warmth of the food and the warmth of congenial hospitality are indistinguishable. How could I ever have not shared a meal? The medics are trying to marry me into the culture. Their efforts feel so friendly and inclusive. “You like independence now, but who will take care of you when you old age?” “Maybe you take some religion vow and then when you forty years you think, ‘What have I done?’ Even then you need a family, a community. You need ties that pull you in. You contribute. There always people appreciate you. You get your ‘provisions,’ see?” Environment Day will be Monday; they shall close the clinic to celebrate, plant, clean, and play. Zay Eh and her family have gone back across the river. It is the last day of this rotation.
On the way home, I walk down a side road toward my first real Thai massage. I round the corner to an entire family foraging in a cluster of trashcans and recall how the dump was described to me, an entire human village living on garbage. Can we open to this resistance too, and how different is it really from tightness in the personal body? The next morning on the VIP bus, rather than the open-air slow chicken bus on which I arrived, the attention shifts back and forth between voiced-over Star Wars the movie and passing fields out the windows below. Is it the air conditioning or the absurdity that makes arm hair stand on end; can we contain it all? I look to the rearview mirror for trinkets, and there are none; I comfort myself by imagining a Nat shrine in the glove compartment of this naked beast.
From the airplane, vivid clouds, only I’m no longer torn. Their shapes are both constantly becoming and nothing but a shimmer. The focus or object of attention arises appropriate to each moment. The whole is one continuous breathing, of form into dissolution, dissolution into form. This flowering of human atrocity along the Burma Border elucidates a stream, present throughout life, only sometimes more subtle. Injustice amplified reminds us. In polarization manifesting, we see the conditions for the kaleidoscopic unfolding of life in this way. It’s like this, the pain, of those being born, those dying. It will appear again, only through different peoples, at different times, in different places. Repeating, changing, repeating such obvious dynamics, until we learn.
You and I do not possess the suffering. This is our collective endowment. We contribute to its perpetuation and learn from it. Some cannot stand such trouble and immediately try to do something about it, anything, adding their own confusion to the situation. The opposite approach is the deluded notion that we must make ourselves to suffer along with them. There is plenty of discomfort moving through this world of form already, without augmenting it with further creations of the mind. We live and pass away regardless; in these bodies, we can create for the world what is miserable or what is beautiful. It will not make a refugee, or anyone, any happier to see you paralyzed, depressed, or distant. Can we have gratitude for this opportunity rather than despair; can we learn about the nature of patterns in ourselves and in the world? Given limitations and capacities how can we align ourselves with this streaming and shift conditions incrementally, thereby effectively, in awareness of brutal desperation?
I see it in driven faces, in the language of eyes, in new grass between cracks, the stench of decay, in the completeness and perfection of what is. The senses can synchronize with the essence of such stuff, and we find rest. We can hold it all in grace, bear witness, and then, only then, may we be moved to act courageously from the point of stillness. Suffering is like this. It flows through here, it flows through me, as does joy. It is a quivering of the heart, the same heart. Given our attention, it turns every cell alive. I have finished with the journal and put it down, free now to hold hands.
May this writing heighten awareness about the plight and great beauty of the people from all parts once called Burma. May it bring benefit to all who are described herein and to all who read it. May you be truly happy.