Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping

Threads of my life

This week I've enjoyed watching different threads of my life weave together. If you asked me to list the themes, issues, places and practices that are part of my life today that list would include: writing; meditation; yoga; practicing peace; social justice and human rights activism; environmental activism; Gaza; Afghanistan; film; books; ethical consuming; food revolution; photography; feminism and gardening.

There are a lot of different things going on in that list, and sometimes they feel a bit disjointed. But little by little as I follow a more natural flow for my life (which is shorthand for not working a crazy, 24/7 day job), I'm finding the natural linkages and synergies between them all. So here are four little vignettes from this week, which show how some of those themes have been coming together in my mind, in my life and in the wider world.

1. Photography, feminism, practicing peace, human rights and Afghanistan

My photos of women and girls from Afghanistan have been used as part of the revamp of this great site, 'Women say No to War', amen. Most of my images are on the afghanistan page.

2. Yoga, activism, practicing peace

My friend Kara-Leah writes about the current global 'crisis' - which in the mainstream media is somehow framed as a crisis of financial credit, but which in my humble view is the natural and inevitable collapse of an unsustainable consumer system, and a chance to rebuild on a fairer, simpler, kinder foundation. Kara-Leah explores how yoga offers us a framework for changing our perspective on this crisis and for finding a better way forward.

3. Writing, meditation, mindfulness

Karen of Momma Zen/Cheerio Road posted these links to a great New Yorker article about the late, great David Foster Wallace. I've been a huge fan of Wallace's writing since 1996 when I first came across "Infinite Jest" an extraordinary book that Wallace himself was oddly unsatisfied with, but which opened up whole new worlds of possibility in the narrative form for me. Wallace died leaving behind an unfinished novel about boredom and mindfulness that will be published next yea. In 2005 Wallace said that true freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” Amen, again.

4. Mindfulness, meditation, activism, social justice, environment, film

On Thursday mornings, early, I sit in meditation with a small group of friends. We sit together because we all believe the world can be a kinder, more compassionate place and we agree it has to start with each of us. This week we got up off our cushions and went for breakfast. Over breakfast we decided to work together to make a video/story that will wake up Wellington and the world to the change that they can be part of. Preparing for this project I've been inspired by this, and this and this. Stories can change the world, one reader/listener/viewer at a time.

Human rights animation from Israel

An old friend of mine, one of the many wonderful Israelis I met while I was living and working in Gaza, now works for Gisha. Gisha is an Israeli human rights organisation that focuses on the right to freedom of movement for Palestinians.

Recently Yoni Goodman, the head animator from "Waltz with Bashir" (award winning animated documentary about Israel's war with Lebanon), made a short animated film for Gisha. I think it is a simple, eloquent illustration of the impact of Israel's closure policy in the Gaza Strip. Watch it here.

Book extract: Gaza

Tahir wasn’t a stereotypical angry young Palestinian man. He was gentle and intellectual and very sensitive. He had travelled on a scholarship to Norway to do his masters degree in political science and now worked at PCHR as a political researcher and analyst. Having spent those years living in a Western country, staying in a dorm and having the anonymity and freedom to go out and do what he pleased, returning to Gaza and moving back into his shared bedroom in the family home had been tough on Tahir. He sought me out, the only foreigner in the office, as someone who would understand that part of him, the part that had developed a taste for privacy and solitude, of independence and freedom. I understood this and was happy to sit with him the office library listening to him talk about his life in Norway, about the people he knew and the places he went.

As we came to know each other better Tahir told me more about his family. His elder brother had been killed by a shot from an Israeli soldier during the first intifada. He was at high school when he was shot and Tahir, a young boy at the time, heard about his brother being shot before he got home. When he got home his father and other brothers were already gone, rushing to the border in a frantic effort to get his gravely wounded brother out of the Gaza Strip to one of the better hospitals in the West Bank. They were blocked because another brother had been involved in a resistance group in Gaza. This collective punishment of families for the activities or associations of one member wasn’t uncommon but when Tahir told me his story I began to understand just how cruel it could be. Unable to get him the emergency surgery that may have saved him, he died.

Gaza: something to read and lots of things to do

In response to my last book extract, which was about my time in Gaza, a few people have asked me for recommendations of good books that could help them learn more about the situation in Gaza or for ideas for what they could do to help.

The first book I always recommend is Drinking the Sea at Gaza, by Amira Hass. Amira is likely to appear in my book since she is one of the more extraordinary characters I met in my time in Gaza. A Jewish Israeli journalist, Amira chose to live and work in in the Gaza Strip in order to be able to report accurately about the Israeli occupation of Gaza in the Israeli press. She is one of the bravest women I've ever met and she was a good friend of Khalid, from my book extract last week. Please read her book, or at least do a Google search of the articles she has been writing for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz over recent months.

Another book worth readings is Sara Roy's 'Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict'. Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and has been writing about Gaza for more than 15 years. Like Amira, Sara is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and although I certainly don't think that is a necessary pre-qualification to be able to write about Gaza, it has given both these women a particular insight and perspective on the Israeli occupation that I think is worth seeking out.

In fact, since most people don't have time to read a whole book, please at least read this speech by Sara Roy. In my book she, like Amira, is a woman of enormous moral courage and I wish more people in the world had access to the writings of these two women.

The third "must-read" on my list is Edward Said. He has written so many books, essays and articles that I would find it hard to select just one. Instead I recommend that you explore his writing a little bit, he writes not only about Palestine but also more generally about the relationship between the West and the 'Orient'. His book 'Orientalism' had an enormous impact in academic circles but is also quite accessible and interesting to a lay reader.

I could go on all day with ideas about reading, the main point is to research your reading list. Find out who the author is, where does he/she come from? What kinds of institutions or publications does he/she write for? Who is the publisher? Who owns the publisher? Know as much as you can about the implicit biases of the text and then read with that in mind. As I see it, we are all learning to be intelligent, critical readers anyway as the internet opens up more and more avenues through which to access information, the provenance of which may not always be clear. Good luck!

Actually - reading about Gaza in order to better informed about the situation is the first of the actions that Laila, over at Raising Yousef and Noor, has proposed in her fantastic list of ten things you can do to help people in Gaza. So I recommend strongly that you check that out and see if there is anything that sounds right for you.

Plus: Come back tomorrow for a new book extract!

Book extract: Gaza

It has been a while since I published a book extract. I developed some concerns about the privacy of people who appear in the book and haven't yet decided how best to handle them. But here is an extract I wrote this week where I've chosen for the moment just to use random names. Although most of the book will be about my time in Afghanistan, these past two weeks I've been working on a couple of chapters about my life in Gaza. Obviously events in Gaza over the past month have brought these memories to the top of my mind, but I also decided that the experiences I had and the people I met in Gaza had such a strong impact in shaping the person I was when I arrived in Afghanistan that I needed to tell some of that story to set the scene for what came after.

Enjoy, feel free to comment, but please do not reproduce anywhere without my permission. Thanks!

"My first friend in Gaza was a 36 year old Palestinian man. He worked with me at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and I had met him there once or twice in my first days. My first impression of him was of a face that was a little too worn by life to be handsome but that, when he smiled, which was often, burst radiantly into life. Khalid also had the first pair of literally twinkling eyes that I had ever come across and in time I learned to trust the goodness in that twinkle to get me through whatever hellish dark thing we were dealing with in our work.

Khalid had introduced himself to me, warmly, on my first day in the office and I had seen him coming and going from the office. He was a field officer, which meant he spent most of his time out in the streets and camps of Gaza gathering information about human rights developments. I didn’t know much about the detail of our work yet, but I knew enough to realise that he spent a lot of his time talking to very unhappy people about very sad events. Despite this, when I saw him in the office he was usually laughing and there was a warmth and ease about him that I found both comforting and mysterious, under the circumstances.

When I had been in the office for only a couple of days I was invited to the leaving party for Sylvie, the young French woman who had been volunteering with PCHR up until my arrival. I go along with a Spanish woman who has also been invited and who works for the same British NGO as me. The party is at Sylvie’s apartment, which is in a typical apartment building in central Gaza city. Most of the other inhabitants of the building are middle class Palestinian families and as we arrive I wonder what they think of this party, with men and women mingling together, music playing and alcohol being consumed. As I spend more time in Gaza I’ll come to understand how tolerant most of the residents are, and how inappropriate the Western stereotype of the intolerant, fundamentalist Muslim is for this place.

New year, old stories

Early sunrise, 2009. Waipero Bay, East Cape, New Zealand.

I've been away for a long time. Today I think that I might be back, in the sense of an actual return to regular posting here. But these days I'm increasingly likely not to do what I say I'm going to do, it seems to be a reaction against all those long years of discipline and dogged persistence, so who knows what will come of this return to blogging.

I've been away from the computer a lot lately. First up was a trip home to the farm for Christmas with my family. Then I hit the road for a road trip and camping adventure in the remote East Cape where I remembered that I could surf and, even better, that I could sit still in the shade with a book for hours on end.

But the best thing I remembered on that trip was the feeling of being in community. We were eight in our camp. For the days we camped there together we became each other's entire world. No phones, no radio, no papers and no internet meant that there was nowhere to be and no-one to engage with except the place where we were and the people we were with.

I got to know my own friends better than ever before and I felt like a real person, a human being in community with others. Our days took shape around the dictates of the weather and our shared rhythms of sleep, play, rest and hunger. We spent hours together preparing simple but delicious meals on our wee camp cookers, eating together as though every meal was an event to be celebrated, which it is, and then enjoying the ritual of working together as we cleaned up.

For all those days I didn't write. I read and I sat and I walked and I talked. I would say that I did yoga every day, but in the spirit of that playful summer space what I really did was just played with the yoga poses. Lots of freestanding handstands and headstands that ended with me toppling into the sand or surf and lots of arm balances because I've finally found my sweet spot in bakasana and I felt like celebrating that. Yoga as play. It felt good.

Now I'm back and as soon as I arrived back in this house I wanted to sit and write. But I had two house guests, both rare treats from far away. So I chose to enjoy them and to tell myself that the moment for writing would come. Some days I was chaffing at the bit, feeling impatient to get to my writing, but I knew that if I didn't spend as much time as I could with my friends while they were here I'd regret it as soon as they left.

Now here I am, alone in my house and feeling the words ready to burst out of me. I've been back at work for two weeks and in those two weeks I've been working a lot on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Even if I hadn't lived in Gaza for two years I think I would be deeply moved by the situation, but as it is I think about my friends in Gaza every day. I wonder how it can possibly be that I get to live this life - of beach holidays and yoga and surfing and gardens, while they live with bombs and tanks and over flowing sewage and hospitals run out of basic supplies. I wonder if they are even alive and try to wait patiently for an email. I watch people here get into angry political, ideological debates about the Middle East conflict and my stomach twists and churns.

This morning I added a contemplation to my meditation practice, it's something I sometimes do when I'm really struggling with emotion when I sit. A friend recently gave me a special copy of a Dhammapada that her family had published in memory of her grandmother, so I've been making my way through the pairs of contemplations.

Every time I've opened it so far the contemplation has been absolutely spot on for the challenge I have been working with. My friend says her grandmother was always very good at that - the elbow nudged in your side to remind you of the obvious. Here is how she nudged me this morning:

Never by hatred is hatred conquered,
but by readiness to love alone.
This is eternal law.

Those who are contentious
have forgotten that we all die;
for the wise, who reflect on this fact,
there are no quarrels.

Yesterday I spent three hours talking about the role of the New Zealand military in Afghanistan. This after having first read a report about the increasing risks posed to humanitarian workers by the blurring of the line between military and civilian actors due to increased participation of the military in humanitarian and development activities. I also learned a few days ago that a past colleague of mine in UNAMA has died from the severe burn wounds she suffered when she was attacked while working as a civilian researcher embedded with the US military. Her story illustrates all too well the exact risk that many of us have been trying to communicate to the military for years.

When I sat here in Wellington with a man who had led a patrol of New Zealand soldiers in Bamiyan and we talked about what the military was doing in Afghanistan I had to repeatedly and consciously step away from the heat of my emotion about Paula's death and find a space where I could see his own compassion and concern. Never by hatred is hatred conquered. But by readiness to love alone.

With that thought I'm off to continue my writing. Namaste.