Ancient Streams

Shortly after I hang up the phone, I walk to my village post office, a decaying building painted in yellow. There, a middle-aged clerk picks up a phone which has just started ringing. After a moment of silence, she yells into it: "I’m not interested! Why are you calling me again? I didn’t ask you to call me! Stop calling me!" She seems to be on the verge of tears. For a moment, I wonder if she has just spoken to the same person I did earlier at home. During that call, I had to explain that I didn’t want to share my age over the phone and that I wasn’t interested in any marketing offers. The clerk sights and we exchange understanding smiles.

Poem: outside the window
lazy clouds in the summer sky
a clerk slams her phone

Such a brief moment taking place in an insignificant village in a small country, yet packed to the brim with one message after another. A single phone call, a representative of so many life situations seemingly leaving no other option than to turn to anger as means of protection. One thing deeply misunderstood, even though our red skins, clenched teeth, anxious hearts, and minds in turmoil are literally yelling it. It’s the angry ones who get burned first.

Even though I have no doubt that anger rooted in hatred is damaging for oneself and others, things are not black and white, and it is certainly not my place to judge anyone. I heard of stories where energy of anger was needed for people to make a step they needed to do to help themselves out of harmful situations. I too know what anger feels like. At the same time, when I am honest with myself, I recognize that if there’s enough clarity, it is possible to offer a response from a place of freedom and stability. Sometimes perhaps with a gentle whisper and other times with a loud shout, but always without the pain of hatred or fear. And I ask, what’s preventing this?

Running away from the pain underneath, hardening and hardening, it can never really heal. Misconceiving kindness as weakness and anger as strength, softness is underestimated. However, it is a river that wears away rock, not the other way around. Arising from the clarity about the nature of experience, how could true kindness ever be shaken? This is much more than mere politeness. Watching the water meeting the stone at this moment seemingly reveals nothing, and so I wonder if it’s short-sightedness that makes it hard to understand.

Poem: fulfilling
entire canyons—
ancient streams

There is no need to wait millennia though. Leaving behind all the ideas about what anger and kindness mean, if there were two people standing next to each other, one kind and another raging, just simply by looking at their bodies, where is tightness, and where is space? Which one stands like a mountain and which one is trembling? I am suspicious that human confusion often arises from relating to our experience through habitual thoughts rather than allowing ourselves to fully experience. Standing in the skin of those two people, how does it really feel? What it is? Perhaps a next phone call can reveal this.

I wouldn’t like to forget about those on the other end of a telephone line. One can never know who’s calling. Yes, it might be a person who wants to steal information or money. It could also be coming from a call center employing a divorced mother who is struggling to provide for her children, like my mother did. Rejecting a marketing offer or even reporting someone in cases of malicious activity doesn’t need to mean rejecting a fellow human being.

Poem: digits
three jobs, two kids
one mother