Spark the Heart
Love has no borders. The heart has no enemies.
Dear Readers,
My heart-mind continues to ache with sadness and disbelief as I write this post. It’s been so difficult to sit still in meditation or even at my desk with so much agitated energy swirling inside me. When I close my eyes as I fall asleep or prepare to meditate, images of the school children and their teachers who were recently murdered in Uvalde creep into my consciousness. This horrific tragedy happened only 10 days after the slaughter of ten Black people in Buffalo.
It could have easily been my youngest niece’s photo that I included in this post. In 2019, my sister and her 8-year-old daughter spent an hour locked in an elementary school while a 16-year-old boy in nearby Saugus High School shot five of his schoolmates, killing two of them before he shot himself. In 2021, my spouse and I were living in Boulder two miles from the King Sooper’s supermarket where a 21-year-old man murdered 10 people. One of the people killed was a friend of the woman we were living with. These two incidents are the closest—logistically and emotionally— I’ve come to witnessing this horrific hallmark of life in the United States.
Since the beginning of 2022, there have been 22 school shootings where people have been killed or injured. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more than 200 mass shootings (four or more people shot or killed) since January. You don’t need me to tell you these statistics. You can just Google them, like I did, and there’s even an interactive map of the United States with red dots indicating the “relative number of people shot” in each incident.
I wish that those red dots were red hearts indicating the relative number of people performing random acts of kindness: running errands for a home-bound neighbor, comforting someone on a crisis hotline, adopting a child, forgiving someone that’s harmed them, returning a lost wallet, teachers buying supplies using their own money, planting trees, assisting the many refugees with finding shelter, etc.
I know that around the country and world there are millions of people who are doing good and causing no harm. I wish that we could track these acts of generosity to instill us with hope and faith in humanity’s basic goodness. It could be a new kind of Global Positioning System (GPS) that we could call the Global Positivity System or the Generous People System.
“Hatred does not cease by hatred, only love; this is the eternal rule.” — The Dhammapadda (“The Way of Truth”)
The boys and men, as the shooters are mostly male, who killed and injured all of these people—mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons—come from different states, religious traditions, socio-economic backgrounds, educational levels, political ideologies, etc., etc. Although none of us can fathom all the karmic causes and conditions that propelled these shooters to commit these atrocities, at the core of their being there must have been a deep-seated sense of alienation and anguish.
Here’s what my Dharma friend Ayya Dhammadīpā says in a talk posted on Vimeo about how Buddhist practice can help us be more present with our own internal demons and more compassionate toward those who hurt us and others.
“Hurt people, hurt people'“ is a phrase that I’ve heard numerous times. For some of us, we’re able to not act out in such a violent manner when afflictive emotions arise inside of our heart-minds. With the help of our meditation practice, faith tradition, therapy, family and friends, and a host of other factors that support and nurture us, we find some relief from suffering. For whatever the unfathomable reasons, these shooters found no alleviation of their self-hatred, their disconnection from their basic goodness, and their afflictive demons.
While we grieve the death of all of these innocent people, can we also hold a small place in our hearts for the shooters? If I can not extend compassion to these deluded, traumatized human beings, then I too am part of perpetuating the energy of aversion and ill will. For me, this practice is a universal prayer that must include all the cries of the world, like Kannon Bodhisattva with her thousand arms and eyes.
Love has no borders. The heart has no enemies. That’s all I know.