Last night I saw Wisdom & Compassion: Pema Chodron and Jack Kornfield in Dialogue, moderated by Michael Krasny.
S took me shoe shopping at lunch and convinced me these really cute orange open toed shoes actually went with my suit. I really do love them, and imagined wearing them on dates with tall men. Or out with friends and catching the attention of tall men who would buy me drinks and then I’d leave without giving them my number. Until the one tall guy with the broad shoulders and dark hair pulls out the bar stool for me to sit down while he buys my drink, stands when I leave to check in with friends and is generally so warm and intelligent that I’m inclined to give him my email address… years from now you will all be invited to our twins’ graduation from Harvard as Valedictorian and Salutatorian. The party will also be a bon voyage for their work with Doctors Without Boarders. I’ll post in my blog when they win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oh, excuse me, I think I got carried away for a minute. Back to the reality of the shoes.
My toes have blisters and my left foot was going numb. I probably should have taken them off before I tried to find the end of the Will Call line for the woman in the green sweater. I wasn’t having any better luck than she was. I ditched the shoes before we went in to the theatre for the main event and never put them back on, even for the cab ride home. (I did have my feet up on the seat with me, though; not knowing what ick might be on the floor of that taxi!)
Will Call was a nightmare! We thought, at first, it was poor planning. A thousand people bought their tickets within the past week and they all showed up at the same time to pick them up. Turns out there was also a computer glitch of some sort preventing the box office from sorting things in a quick way. They also wouldn’t let anyone from Shambhala or Spirit Rock help with the tickets.
The foyer was packed. Almost all of it was the Will Call ‘line’. I never did find the end. I just put the woman in line at one point in front of a couple people who also couldn’t find the end and had just declared themselves part of the line. People weren’t even all facing the same way. You couldn’t tell who was behind whom!
Thirty Five minutes after the talk was supposed to begin, the people who make those sorts of decisions finally decided to let everyone in without tickets. If they’d been waiting in line that long, it was proof they had bought something!
I’m learning I’m not as much a fan of the ‘dialogue’ format as I am of straight out teachings. I’m all for discussion which gets further into teachings, but these things tend to touch on so many aspects it’s difficult to get too deep into any of them. That said, there were the themes of Wisdom and Compassion.
Jack shared a story he’d heard from a seat mate on a train from DC to Philly. The man worked with people who had been in jail for murder. One young man had killed another boy in cold blood as part of a gang initiation. The victim was not someone he knew. He was caught, tried and convicted.
When his sentence was read, the mother of the victim stood up, looked right at him and said, “I’m going to kill you.”
The boy was taken to prison. In about six months the woman came to visit. She began visiting him regularly and would leave him money sometimes. As he got closer to release, she asked him his plans. He had no idea what he was going to do.
She thought she had a friend who could get him a job.
Later she asked him where he would stay. He had no family to speak of, so he didn’t have a plan for housing.
She had an extra room he could use.
One day she called him into the living room, “Do you remember when I told you I would kill you?”
“Yes ma’am,” he replied, “I’ll never forget it.”
“Well,” she said, “I did. I killed you. You are not that boy anymore.”
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She is just an ordinary woman. A real woman who had her son taken from her suddenly and violently. And she responded with a level of compassion I’m fairly certain I can not muster.
I am in awe of her. And of the boy who let himself be touched in that way, who was open to changing himself.
We are, at the end of the day, all worthy of love and all suffering and all have the potential to be just like either of these normal, everyday, extraordinary people.