Yin: feminine, shadowy, receptive, compassionate.
At this moment, slicing pears for a vinaigrette dressing, I think that cooking is yin. I feel like I am receiving the grace of Annapurna, the goddess of kitchens and food. Kitchen wisdom has traditionally been thought of as feminine.
Not being a scholar, I don’t thoroughly understand the concepts of yin and yang. Years ago, a therapist told me I was too yang, that I needed to be or have more yin, more feminine energy. I did not tell her to go to Hades. That would have been too yang. But when a boyfriend told me that the only time I was soft was in the bedroom, I did not bite my tongue. Is it yin to express my personal thoughts, or is it aggressively yang?
What did that therapist mean? Was I too aggressive in my desire to be liked? Was it my anger (and at that time I was quite the angry woman)? Too pushy in my efforts to participate in an unbalanced culture while looking for work? I did not see myself as having such an overabundance of male energy. I thought I was pretty soft. Truth is, it seemed like I was unhappy a lot of the time. Ah. Shadowy.
I’ve thought about her words over the past couple of years. A serious illness puts a certain spin on things. Thanks to my overabundance of aggressive energy, I have been able to stay afloat emotionally and physically. (Lord knows, the health teams in the nursing facilities I experienced were not capable of helping folks to really heal.) Thanks to my compassion, a yin quality, I was able to help make things better for other patients.
I think this therapist meant to say, “you are out of balance.” She saw my aggression in my efforts to not have people take advantage of me. I went overboard and gave up my ability to receive the good that was being offered. The world appeared to be all or nothing, a flip-flop between angry defensiveness and tearful resignation.
Ah. Desperately seeking balance. I’m following the foggy path, pushing aside emotional weeds, and looking for the bright clearing. Yin and yang are the male and female of all things: light and dark, positive and negative, sunny and cloudy. We exist in a world of opposites; sometimes opposites attract, sometimes they repel. But we cannot exist without both.
If we are to survive and thrive, we must be balanced. It seems to me that balance is an inside out proposition. There can’t be balance on the outside if it doesn’t exist within.
I once left a retreat pissed off at the expressions of unconscious racism. Things were out of balance. There were only a few African-Americans present, and I have always been impatient with the fact that white people assumed we all lived the same kind of lives in the mid-20th century. We did not, oh, we did not; our lives were very different. Things were not equal. Communities were separate. And so, I lost my patience, not only with the expressions of yet more unconscious assumptions, but with trying to be an educator.
So. I drove to a spot near the bay and screamed at the sea, the rocks, and the trees that had bent almost to the ground from surrender to the wind. Surrender. The trees were able to surrender, and they bore their evidence of — beautiful, too — survival. There was balance in that surrender. But to what would I surrender?
I could not scream at people and achieve what I wanted to achieve, so I screamed and cursed at the sea. I got out of my car. I got back in my car. I got out of my car. There were a million stars in the black sky. The mist wetting my face was cold. The night was both scary and lovely.
I was fed up with trying to please everyone around me. I was tired of trying to replace people’s ignorance with information. I was angry and wanted to receive — something. What? Everyone around me seemed aggressive, and hard — filled with what I identified as male energy.
“I just want softness around me.”
That was my voice. It wasn’t the first time I heard my voice and those words. “…softness around me.” Softness, compassion, the ability to receive and accept love. A little more yin. Perhaps that’s what the therapist was saying.
The night provided a quiet opening, a soft space wherein I recognized both my power and my surrender. As the ocean was both yang and yin, so was I. Balance. Before that night, I loved the ocean. Now, I swore to worship her.
Ours is a society of pushing and aggression, an amazing hermetically sealed bubble in which we are prone to swing to extremes: prohibition or uncontrolled excess; compassionate sharing or the complete hoarding of resources so that only the wealthy thrive. We have not been raised to live in balance. It is a concept as foreign as yin or yang.
I, for one, am of the opinion that in the stillness of making pear vinaigrette dressing lies surrender to the softness of balance.
Pastoral scenery. An all-black campus. These were my desires. I’d spent so much time in rural countryside that I deeply looked forward to the nature of things. I love this country landscape. But this is what I do not understand: with all of my love for the rural, how have I always resided so close to the city? More on that another time, but the fruit of my fertilization by both cultures cannot be underestimated.
Sala
wordshavecolor.com 
On Service: Today’s Reflection
“Why would a poor person go to work for nothing to help other poor people?”
I was the hapless prey cornered by an angry tiger. I had no answer, and Mom wouldn’t budge.
Poverty and racism had made her bitter. She’d watched her dreams of a Northern safety net turn to smoke. I’d decided to move west and serve as a volunteer with a government organization dedicated to helping those in poverty. It would be my first trip on a plane; I would meet people from places I’d hardly heard of in America. It was one of the things I had to do to find my way.
“Are you getting paid?”
“A stipend.”
They say silence is the better part of valor. No one could give a demeaning snort like my mother. But I continued on my path to service anyway because…service is in my DNA. My father served: in the armed forces, in the community, in church. He was committed, in spite of his faults, to making the world a better place. On the subject of committing time and action to help others, however, my mother and he did not agree.
I have never understood how someone could watch another suffer and not feel the need to serve. Today, watching the news of children crossing the border from Central America, that memory came up for me. Perhaps it’s because I recognized within me that same desire to make things better for others. Perhaps it’s because after all these years I still wanted to see that we, as a country, would come forward with compassion, integrity, and dignity.
I was glued to the television, disappointed with the images of people carrying signs and spitting at buses. They held their fists in the air, and their mouths were little anuses with the feces of hate pouring forth. Had we gone back in time to the 60s? Seriously? These were the folks that had the media’s attention? Later, I learned that there were only about 50 of them. How could so few burn up so much oxygen?
I once heard a television news editor express his disappointment that, in today’s news room, he could find as many sales as news people. Broadcast news is bought news. My take away was that sponsors, not people, choose what we will hear and see. So, here I was watching a bunch of ignoramuses supported by commercial interests.
The truth.
People of all faiths and people of no faith are coming forward to serve. Hundreds are are opening their hearts and their arms to help. From all over the country, in Dallas, Texas and San Diego, people are offering shelter, food, clothing, money, time and prayers for these children and their parents.
I suppose, the haters will never go away; they have existed throughout history. They appear in some form in every millennium, taking up precious oxygen that’s needed to do the work. Blessedly, it seems that the Lovers are in charge, if less visible.
Back to my mother. Back to me.
I got on the plane and arrived on the West Coast. I was filled with courage, enthusiasm, and curiosity. We received training, cleaned streets, fed preschoolers, assisted with adult literacy classes, and met the most dynamic group of Catholic activists ever. I sent her letters and made phone calls, but Mom could never understand. Not then; not now.
One thing I came to understand, however, is that her resistance did not come from hate. Even if she didn’t know it; even if I didn’t know it, the gap between her and haters was wide. I learned in later years that she sent money that she didn’t have to organizations making life better for others. Although she would never tell me then and cannot tell me now, I think that her resistance was one of coming from the legacy of southern violence. Violence, as I know well, leaves the worst of scars in our cellular memory.
Will the children and families coming to our borders see us as allies or friends 10, 20, 30, or 40 years from now? If we choose to serve, the answer is clear.
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Posted in Writing from the heart
Tagged children, Commentary, editorial, essay, Reflections, service