Never underestimate the strength of a group of angry Cantabrigians.
As long as I can remember, there’s been a mural on the backside of the Microcenter store on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA commemorating the 1970s freeway revolt that is the reason why Interstate 95 goes around rather than through Boston. It might seem easy to pave a neighborhood: who in their right mind, after all, would stand in the way of the bulldozers of progress? Some twenty years before I moved to Cambridge to live for two and a half years at the Zen Center that’s only about a mile from this mural, a bunch of residents stood up to the road builders and said “Not in my backyard.” In a very real way, I owe the ongoing existence of the neighborhood that once was my neighborhood to folks I never met apart from their symbolic representations on this wall.
I was back in Cambridge yesterday giving consulting interviews at the Zen Center, a role that still feels foreign to me. I’ve been a Senior Dharma Teacher in my Zen school for four years now, but I still expect to be sitting on the student rather than the teacher cushion in the Zen Center interview room. Who am I to be giving anyone advice about anything, I wonder every time I pick up the bell that says “Next!” to Dharma room meditators awaiting an interview. On a good day, I’ll try to share a glimpse of what I’ve experienced during some eighteen years of Zen practice, and I let the person on the other side of my mat decide what to keep and what to reject. On a bad day, I take the tenuous job of “teacher” too seriously, saying more than is technically helpful and breaking the Number One Zen Dictum, “Open mouth, already a mistake.”
Spending any amount of time in meditation–on a certain level, eighteen years, eighteen minutes, or eighteen seconds are merely microcosms of the same immeasurable experience–feels a bit like standing up to an oncoming bulldozer. When I first began meditating, I’d often experience bouts of panic where I thought I’d literally die from the terror of simply sitting and watching my own karmic crap. In daily life, there are countless ways to ignore, drug, or drown out your inner insecurity, insanity, or inanity. When you’re sitting on a meditation cushion, however, you can’t reach for a drink, the TV remote, a bag of fattening snacks, or your preferred Distractor of Choice. When you’re sitting on a meditation cushion, the only defense you have against whatever you’ve spent your conscious hours ignoring is your own breath, and that’s a shield that feels as flimsy as air.
One of my favorite Zen sayings (and one I observe much more faithfully than “Open mouth, already a mistake”) is “You’re stronger than you think.” I suspect that had those nameless Cantabrigians who saved what would eventually become my erstwhile neighborhood seriously thought about how big a task standing up to a bulldozer is, they might never have undertaken it. Instead, activism starts with one action, and one action leads to another. The way you sit out a Dharma room panic attack, I’ve learned, is to use the mantra of “One more breath” like a lifeline: you can live an entire life surviving from breath to breath. I suspect the secret to a successful freeway revolt is something similar: signature by signature, you fill your petitions; moment by moment, you refuse to be moved.
Today, some twenty years after the citizens of Cambridge said “no” to the freeway that would have bisected their neighborhood, the citizens of Boston’s North End, who have lived in the shadow of Interstate 93 since the 1950s, saw a long-promised park open where the Central Artery has since gone underground. There’s one sort of strength that says “Hell, no”; there’s another sort of strength that says, “Someday, this too shall pass.” The citizens of Cambridge earned their freeway-free neighborhood; on a sunny Sunday, even Memorial Drive is closed to vehicular traffic so locals and visitors alike can walk, jog, push baby-strollers, roller-blade, escort dogs, and otherwise move motor-free down a normally busy thoroughfare. The residents, too, of the North End amply deserve the parks that have replaced the freeway there. The last time I was in the North End, I kept looking slack-jawed at the sky, shocked to see air where an ugly Artery once stood. It’s been a long time coming.
Each of us, individually, is stronger than we think; collectively, gathered into neighborhoods and united by even the smallest vision of what could be, our strength is greater than bulldozers. One breath is the merest tickle; many breaths become a mighty wind. Heaven help the power that tries to fight that strength.
This is my belated contribution to last week’s Photo Friday theme, Strength.
Nov 6, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Lorianne, I love this post, love where you went with it.
(I used to live on Magazine Street and saw that mural often.)
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Nov 6, 2007 at 4:44 pm
You know, when I lived in Cambridge at the Zen Center, I never stopped to look at this mural. I passed it all the time, of course, but I never really paid attention to it.
It’s funny how easy it is to ignore things that are familiar & oft-seen.
Depending on when you lived on Magazine Street, we might have been neighbors! (I lived at the Zen Center from July 1995 through February 1998.) Just imagine the times we might have passed one another birding at Mount Auburn, or going to/from the T in Central Square…
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Nov 6, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Hmm, no, I think I moved in there in early 89, left the following year to move a few blocks away, then over to Ellsworth near the Hospital. (And finally Huron Ave, on the way to Fresh Pond.) But we no doubt tripped over the same bricks in the sidewalk that were being displaced by tree roots…
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Nov 6, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Ah, yes. The same streets & sidewalks, but at different times.
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Nov 7, 2007 at 9:31 am
this is so inspiring – how you interweave meditation andactivism. Wonderful post.
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Nov 7, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I love this. I love getting glimpses of your practice. Totally inspiring.
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Nov 7, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Very nice. It reminds me of all the murals I saw in Mexico in the municipal buildings – really beautiful, wall-covering murals, with their own propaganda messages, of course. Lots of celebration of the land and poor farm workers.
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Nov 7, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Actually, I think I meant to reply to your last post, with all the Trader Joe’s foods! The colors, particularly reminded me of the Mexican murals.
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Nov 7, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I’m glad, Crafty Green and rr, that you enjoyed this. The very word “practice” suggests you’re warming up to do something. It suggests you’re preparing for something else as well as doing something for its own reward.
And yes, Leslee, the bright colors of those TJ murals look downright Mexican…and this WordPress template makes it really easy to comment on the wrong post since the comment tag is above rather than below the post… 😦
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Nov 18, 2007 at 2:22 am
I think it is funny that in the mural, the fellow driving machine appears to be a white business man wearing a suit.
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Jan 3, 2008 at 7:39 pm
I’m glad you linked to this, Lorianne, because I hadn’t read it, and it’s important and simple both. Thanks.
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