Liquid Love and Human Evil
Written on May 14, 2021 (since that date is important),
As any breastfeeding mother knows, milk is liquid love materialized.
Thanks to my German genes, I am able to live on my goat’s daily offering of milk (fresh and fermented as yogurt, kefir, and cheese) as the mainstay of my diet, supplemented with eggs and the harvest from the garden and forest and sea around me. This has been an important gift for my financial and physical health, keeping me out of grocery stores in the middle of the pandemic during this past year. Every morning, as I milk my beloved Xiaomei, who has made an incredible comeback since I brought her home from the brink of death from mastitis and starvation, I get to meditate on the physical manifestation of mother’s love. I spend at least half a precious hour massaging her beautiful healthy udder, lovingly rubbing her forehead and cheeks, holding her steady gaze for minutes of cross-species communication that goes deeper than most human conversations, and getting my dose of physical affection in return. This morning, I wonder how this consumption of 1-2 quarts of raw fresh goat milk every day for much of my adult life might have affected me physically and spiritually. I have no idea.
As I am sitting here translating Sun Simiao’s formulas for longevity and immortality, with ingredients like pine rosin, stalactites (literally “stone bell nipple” 石鐘乳), and mica (literally 雲母 “cloud mother”) and considering the application of this information to my personal life, it occurred to me that I am living on liquid love, with a bit of “normal” food thrown in. Maybe because I am female, or modern, or just a lot more mundane than my medieval Daoist heroes, immortality is not high on my priority list. But Sun Simiao’s text does inspire me to look at my life and my environment in a different light. So I did spend a special hour picking young pine needles for tea yesterday. And make time for quiet, for cultivating this beautiful quality of 清靜 “puritiy and calmness,” that the ancient texts describe as the sage’s basic state, as best I can in this busy modern life.
This morning, my mother and I had the first conversation ever about her experience as a girl in the war in Germany. It came out of nowhere and I am still reeling from the fall-out. And I know she is too, on the other side of that crackling phone connection, on a far distant continent yet so close to my heart. To provide the context, two things happened yesterday:
First, I received my second COVID shot and will officially be fully vaccinated and able to make plans to see my family in Germany again in two weeks. Given that my parents are rapidly approaching the end of their long and healthy lives, that we are in the middle of a pandemic that has had me fear for their lives for more than a year now, and that my only blood relative on this continent has felt a need to create distance between us this past year, this is HUGE. I haven’t cried this long and hard since dropping my daughter off on her first day of college.
Second, I am keenly aware of the explosion of war in Israel and the horrific suffering and trauma on both sides. Because of the strong appreciation for classical texts in the Israeli Chinese medicine community and a number of teaching trips I have taken there, I have many close Israeli friends who are healers, parents, residents of mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhoods, community leaders, and yes, grandkids of holocaust survivors. Years ago, my friend and Wang Fengyi sister Sara met me at the bus stop, walked with me on one of the most difficult walks I have ever done, held my hand as I stood crying over the box of shoes from a concentration camp in Yad Vashem, and then helped me process with hummus, olive trees, and new sandals. With her silent help, I was able to look the evil of human nature in the eye, fully and calmly, as a German and descendant of proud Nazis, to let the healing in my family begin. As Wang Fengyi has taught me, nobody gets to judge another person’s trauma. Nobody knows what an individual is experiencing in each moment’s maelstrom of individual, family, and ancestral karma. And nobody gets to rush another person’s process along the long painful steep stony path to healing.
So here we are, many decades after my first ignorant and arrogant attempts to force a conversation on my mother that she was incapable of having at the time. In a casual phone call to check in about my recovery from the immunization, all of a sudden the conversation turns to Israel. And my mother describes sitting in the bomb shelter scared for her life, asking her grandmother to hold her hand. A grandmother who she has never ever even mentioned before, whose existence has never even registered with me other than rationally, I suppose she must have existed since some mother must have given birth to my own grandmother. A grandmother who I know nothing about. And my mother, my daughter’s grandmother, in turn knowing nothing of that poem I wrote last year for her mother called “Our Grandmothers’ Hands.”
And here I am, on my beautiful peaceful island, in my oasis of peace surrounded by the cat playing, hummingbirds chasing me, goats ruminating, bees buzzing around the last apple blossoms, butterflies dancing, and chickens clucking. How do I make sense of life?
Today, I sit with love, I hold love, for the children holding their grandparents’ hands, who know not what is happening. Who have no tools to process the bloodshed, so once again, trauma gets perpetuated down the ancestral line. I hold love for my Arab and Jewish friends, the mothers and fathers and healers, the sons and daughters and lovers and neighbors and friends. May God send you a tiny moment of strength, and love, and beauty, in spite of it all… to give you the ability to go on. May there be peace, some day, as far away as that appears today.
Salaam Shalom
