“The bottom line is this — when you get up in the morning you have to take your heart in both hands,” poet and storyteller-turned-activist Grace Paley's father told her what remains the best advice growing up. “You must do this every morning.”
Meanwhile, a Vietnamese Zen monk and peace activist turned poet Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022), just a few years younger than Paley, conveyed the sentiments of kindness in one of his poems as he watched the world being destroyed by the old evil in the human breast, in a war that broke countless hearts and robbed countless lives of growth.
When he heard that the city of Ben Tre had been bombed and heard an American official proclaim, in his memory, “that he had to destroy the city to save the city,” Thich Nhat Hanh saw the war clearly for what it is – the peak of anger with which we people tend to hide our loneliness, a loneliness that dictators often use to spread fear.
A healing medicine, a solace, a powerful spell against anger – the basic and basic war against us – this poem reminds us of the poet May Sarton's beautiful view of anger as “a great creative desire turned back.”
It was published decades later Call Me by My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh (public library), as the world was about to be absolved anew of the so-called “war on terror,” is read here by Thich Nhat Hanh himself in the original Vietnamese, then by Krista Tippett in English, as part of their brilliant 2002 discussion about the practice of mindfulness and compassion at the heart of our humanity:
WITH WARMNESS
by Thich Nhat HanhI held my face between my hands.
No, I'm not crying.
I held my face between my hands
to keep my loneliness warm –
two protective hands,
two hands feed,
two hands to prevent
my soul do not leave me
with anger.
In his own In life interview with Krista, Thich Nhat Hanh presents an abridgement of the poem to reflect on the basic practice this verse speaks to – mindfulness (which in 2002 was far from common in the West) as an effective way to curb anger:
One must be aware of the fact that violence cannot end violence; that only understanding and compassion can reduce violence, because through the practice of loving speech and listening with compassion we can begin to understand people and help people remove wrong ideas from them, because these wrong ideas are the basis of their anger, their fear, their violence, their hatred.
[…]
We must always be human so that we can understand and be compassionate. You have the right to be angry, but you don't have the right not to practice to change your anger… If you notice that anger is rising in you, you must practice mindful breathing to generate the power to think, to see your anger and embrace it tenderly so that you can bring relief to yourself and not do and say things… that can hurt. And by doing so, you can look deeper into the nature of your anger and know where it comes from.
Fill up on Ursula K. Le Guin on anger and its cure, then revisit Thich Hhat Hanh on the art of deep listening, the four Buddhist sayings to turn fear into love, and her beautiful teenage account of the epiphany of a library where she lost herself and found herself.
