Turning Wheel is a magazine published by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Berkeley, California. It is an organization focused on nurturing compassionate social action as well as meditation. The Summer 2010 issue includes an essay of mine, entitled A Buddhist in Hoosier Country: Finding Harmony through Politics and Basketball.
A Buddhist in Hoosier Country
Once or twice a year I travel from the west coast with my wife to visit her family in Indiana. I come each year as a sort of cultural anthropologist—this is the running family joke—since I am a Buddhist visiting a conservative Christian state, a therapist and poet hailing from the liberal town of Santa Cruz, California, whose University mascot is a banana-slug, whose city council regularly protests nuclear weapons, or the war (there always seems to be one), and whose downtown mall hosts the likes of the pink-umbrella man, who inches his way each day up and down the main street sidewalks in pink tennis-shoes smiling at everyone. But I come each year eagerly, feel at home in a certain way, growing up as I did in a small conservative town in California that was very much akin to the small Indiana town of Madison in which my wife was raised. We both have a little blue and a little red in our veins, our history, our political leanings.
Last year we drove through southeast Indiana over rolling green hills to French Lick (home of Larry Bird, the great Celtic basketball icon) and the French Lick Springs Hotel. It is a resort rich with history, site of the Democratic national convention that nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President at a time when the country was in demise, when the average working person was skirting despair. Much like today. My father-in-law Roger—who has always voted Republican because his father did—voted for President Bush, but just shakes his head now. That man has ruined this country, he says, and it’s time for a change. Says he might vote Republican again, but likes this Barack Obama, the way he brings people together, and won’t be sure till he’s facing the little lever in the privacy of the voting booth.
Roger was first-string guard on the Navy’s basketball team—serious business. His son-in-law Jim is a long-time high school basketball coach at St Henry’s in Erlanger Kentucky, a few miles from Indiana. All three of his sons play, and the youngest one at ten years of age just won the state AAU tournament in his age bracket. Indiana is Hoosier country, home of a particular kind of basketball that is also a way of life, a set of values, an obsession. I love the old Hoosiers movie, where Gene Hackman finds redemption and new life in a small town with big dreams. I love the game too, and have played in a dad’s pick-up game ever since my kids were born. So it’s natural that Jim and I take to the court with our sons and daughters. It is one place where red and blue families easily meet, sharing the teamwork of the court, the joy of competition, the camaraderie.
As a Buddhist, I practice the art of Suchness (Tathata), a recognition of the nature of things as-they-are, the beauty, if you will, of the world when seen-experienced-felt beyond the human tendency to judge everything, to approve or reject, like or dislike the unceasing phenomena of life. I’m not very good at it, but glimpses come and go. Buddhism also posits the “dependent co-origination” of opposites (Pratitva), that things which seem polarized arise in tandem, dependent on each other for existence. Much like the Taoist notion of Yin and Yang, the seed of each embedded in the other. When I visit Indiana, I think of such contrasts—how the polarized red and blue map of America turns mostly shades of purple when voters in each county are illustrated by person, rather than the Electoral College’s all-or-nothing vote count. I try to bring my Buddhist eyes, my ecumenical heart. To find the ties that bind in the opposing strings lacing us together.
This year, we return in the winter, the election over, and I sit in my father-in-law’s kitchen over eggs and toast. He asks about the children, I ask about his heart, how he’s faring after his fourth heart attack. He says these last years have been hard, and it’s not just his heart. Confesses well, I did it, voted for Obama. Time for this country to get back on track again. Reaches down and pets his little dog Duke, opining that the furry guy seems to accept him just as he is. Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—it may take the rest of my life to be smart as Duke, I say. And after Roger adjourns to his recliner, I close my eyes, see purple everywhere.
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