.authored by something.of.substance.
.does your past cover all?.
My final college English course centered around religion. Weekly, we read short stories that incorporated or exemplified various Western and non-Western spiritual points of view. One story that remains particularly vivid in my mind is “I Am the Grass” by Daly Walker. In “I Am the Grass”, the author uses the backdrop of war to track the narrator’s attempts at atoning for wrongs he committed. At first glance, such violent settings seem contradictory toward the overall yearning for peace and forgiveness that the narrator wishes to achieve. But, war is not just about violence. War is about conquering and destroying. War is about achieving a goal. War is about control. In these ways, bathing this piece in such strong war rhetoric is an excellent place for the narrator to begin his journey.
On his journey, the narrator (who remains unnamed throughout the story) travels back to Vietnam, decades after killing Viet Cong and Vietnamese civilians for the United States army, and works as a plastic surgeon responsible for facial reconstruction. His decision to go back is not forced; he willingly donates of himself as a means of rectifying past transgressions and absolving his guilt. The title, “I Am the Grass” comes directly from the narrator’s favorite line of war poetry: “Shove them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all”.
It is this attitude of control the narrator wishes to exert over his life that both characterizes his Western attitude and pervades his longing for atonement. He feels that if he can simply control the experiences that he has, he will be able to control the way he feels about them. In the past, he controlled his situations through violence and by continuously trying to move forward, to get away from what he did. In essence, the narrator was always trying to escape who he was so that he could live with who he is. But, he found no peace.
The opposite of violence is peace. And, if violence and war are two aspects of control, then peacetime and atonement come through losing control- giving control over and allowing that peace or forgiveness to happen. To be forgiven is to receive that sentiment from another party; you cannot make someone forgive you. They are in control of your forgiveness. As the narrator learns this and comes to accept it, he is slowly able to give over control, both violent and non-violent, and achieve the atonement he has been longing for.
Coming full circle, physically, does not always allow you closure and peace. Forgiveness begins when you find yourself changing your actions even in the face of familiar reactions. Forgiveness does not happen linearly; taking a step back before finding peace comes naturally. We may need time to re-evaluate our situation and mindset. We may deny to ourselves that we are ready to hand over control to find peace.
In Western philosophy and spirituality, people believe that the hand of God continuously moves them forward. An oft-quoted expression goes: “If He brings you to it, He’ll bring you through it”. The implication in this rhetoric is that God pushes people, linearly, down a path and that once you circum an obstacle on that path, with the help of God, you will continue on until the next challenge is met. People always feel that they are moving somewhere- and that somewhere is nowhere they’ve been before.
However, many of us, like the narrator, have found that Western religion does not account for the cycle of life. Eastern philosophy dramatically departs from our idealized beliefs in personal progress by suggesting, over and over again, that life is cyclical; you must come full-circle to find tranquility in your situation. But, if we’re always traveling in circles, how can we ever expect to get anywhere?
Thinking that life is a straight (or slightly curvy) path we must walk is what keeps us from finding what we really need. Our sense of truth stems, not from tackling every issue head-on and leaving it in the past, but acknowledging we have no control over our situations, leaving the past with us. It is the past that defines us but also that defines our future. We should not remain in the past, but know that, because life is a circle, we will meet with it once again. When this happens, we usually base our actions or reactions on what happened before; we attempt to control our situation by feeling that “we’ve been brought to it” previously and therefore can predict its outcome. However, when we return to similar situations or people over and over again, it is not because we simply cannot get out of our own- or their- way. It is because we tried too hard to control the outcome. Not until we give up control and face ourselves and the weight of our past decisions can we really know the true meaning of their reoccurrence.
Not until he has no control over his circumstances does the narrator finally find the peace he is searching for. The American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes how, after finding out her second husband had an affair and wanted a divorce, she hung a sign in her office which stated: “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us”. When we fail to move forward, we think we are stuck in an endless cycle of annihilation. We constantly suffer the same result. Yet, not wanting to be destroyed, we control the sameness of the circumstances to hopefully bypass the previous result. And, what do we find? That nothing changes. This is not true annihilation because we haven’t considered that there are alternative results, positive or negative. We cling to our decisions from before. We’re afraid to truly step out on a limb. We don’t learn our lesson because we haven’t been open to it.
Sometimes, it’s not peace we are looking for. We are looking for revenge or love or, simply, a way out. We confront the sameness as some fatal flaw in ourselves, some inability to “move on”. But, what exactly is it that we’re moving on from? Our old habits, friends, jobs, lovers? Our old selves? In Western civilization, we equate the all-important “growth” with linear progression. In Eastern culture, they measure growth by how many times you’ve had to face the same situation before you realize that you cannot control its outcome, that by simply willing a different conclusion does not leave you open to the truth of the scenario. Only by leaving yourself open to annihilation, as Pema did, and admitting you have no direct effect over others or finality do we finally find what it is that has been throwing itself our way since the beginning. Only by leaving ourselves open to the past, repeatedly, do we find the path we are truly meant to travel.
Recently, a friend told me that he was getting back together with his ex. Cheating had occurred on the part of the ex and everyone thought him crazy to take his ex back. However, by revisiting his past, he found his ex open to the annihilation of whatever might be said. Instead of a falling back into exactly the same controlling patterns, both of them entered a space of groundlessness and made the decision to move out of state together, immediately. When I spoke to my friend, he told me that everyone was against this decision. “Why can’t you just move on?!”, they all wanted to know. He couldn’t “move on” because his past was, at this moment, his future. He had to open himself up to the possibility of losing everything by making no definitive judgment about the situation. He opened himself up to the very real idea of getting hurt; he also opened himself to the very real idea of love.
When life presents us with patterns it is not because we have somehow failed to “move forward” and “grow”. Instead, it is because we have failed to open ourselves to possibility of anything. We have not successfully mastered ourselves in that situation. We were not open to the risk of the ride. If we find ourselves moving linearly for a while, it is because we have learned what we needed to from the past; we have opened up to the teaching presented to us. We have no “old” self that has been conquered and buried! We have only ourselves and these selves include the summation of our experiences. It is not out of boredom or anger or despair that we re-visit our past. Instead, the past invades our present because it has a place in our future. Whether this place is permanent or temporary on our journey, we cannot know unless we’re ready- and willing- for anything. When the narrator in the story finally opened up to the acceptance offered by returning to Vietnam, good or bad, he was able to find what he needed: peace. When we open up to the possibility that our past “mistakes” repeating themselves are not mistakes, but the inability to get it right, we are frightened and exhilarated by the idea that there is a different and substantial outcome. And, like the “risky ride” the narrator acknowledges as he leaves the country for a second time not knowing if or when he will return, he knows only a single truth: there is no risk not worth its reward.
