forget about the tomatoes

It's one of those portals in conversation that comes now and then. When, with just a sentence, the door to the world bangs open. Leaves you spinning as all Life blows in. Knocks all your carefully arranged papers and things off the shelves and the tables. One moment, a single aside, can easily do this. You've seen it, right?

We're talking, he and I, for the first time in a while, about nothing more than our everydays. How his entrepreneurial effort, surprisingly, continues to go well despite the economic worries of so many. How happy I've been, lately, to find again that living simply, even doing without, is so very possible. How I wish more people could see the liberation -- the elation, even -- in getting outside comforts so taken for granted. In seeing what abundance we still have, at any moment when we have less.

"And of course," he continues, "I've been in places where it was so much poorer than anything people can imagine here..." I know this, but then he says something in passing about back when Mexico devalued the peso, and I realize all of a sudden: he was THERE for that. Somehow I never thought of it before. "I cannot imagine how people dealt with such a thing", I reply, knowing what a hopeless understatement is any comment I can make. How in reality I will probably never begin to imagine. "Oh, you know" he replies, in his almost dangerously offhand way, "You just eat more beans...forget about the tomatoes and all that sort of thing." I wish he would say more, but that's all he says on the subject.

And what can we know about it here? All over this world are millions who have lived for years with 'downturns'. Or whose turns have never gone upward in the first place. On so many parts of this planet are people for whom crisis, violence, disaster, has never been front-page news; it's only life as they know it. The only moment in this so-very-privileged land when we can ever say we are alone in our experience is when we find ourselves, by intent or by circumstance, outside the struggle.

Two other moments coincided, this week, with the preceding words. At the library, I came across The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey Sachs. My lifetime awareness of global history and economics has been sadly limited, but this is a fascinating and very accessible book. As far as I've gotten into its 450 pages. It's only a small effort, motivated partly by that conversation about the tomatoes, to keep the door open. And also to make some much-needed improvements to vocabulary, where the language of justice is concerned.

A couple days before that, my sister announced that she was giving up Facebook for Lent. "I'm not Catholic" she wrote, "but I like to observe Lent because it's conscious...." Her choice startled me, and in a good way, with the reminder again: how varied our range of choices, and how easy our liberation. Arriving together on my doorstep, as they did, these three voices brought much-appreciated reminders. Why don't we who live in abundance try giving up the tomatoes a lot more often? Not to mention the virtual reality? Not because we have to -- before we have to. Or even out of sheer gratitude that we don't have to. It'd be a practice. Practice-makes-perfect becomes fire-drill-preparedness becomes spiritual practice. Traditions such as Lent -- which I'm actually kind of pleasantly surprised to hear of anyone, religious and otherwise, still practicing in this country -- yes, could still have their place, in that kind of awareness. Really, if we lived more consciously, it seems we might practice giving up something different every week, right? This could get interesting.

I can't label as inherently 'wrong' or 'bad' (like some of my activist acquaintances) the beautiful things that comprise so many of our privileges. That's missing the point, to me. Partly since the point to giving anything up, intentionally, would be to regain the gratitude and the very beauty that excess desensitizes us to. Never to add more shame or negativity to the world. Neither am I suggesting that going without sufficient food and going without facebook are in the same category of experience. Only that I think our intention counts, and our alignment in whatever way possible with the world's realities. And this is by no means a complete anything: just a few thoughts on beginnings, since we in this country sit at the beginning of so many of these lessons. But beginning counts. And compassion always counts. My sister wrote today of "remembering the other mind" in her newfound offline spaciousness, a phrase that just sings to me. After reading her post, I decided to go vegetarian for the same 40 days. It seems one of the very simplest ways that I can find just to remember all the choices that so much of humanity goes without, every day.

And my larger intention, growing for some time now, is to keep that door open. Whatever that means (and it means many things). Even if the stuff inside won't stay where I put it because of those currents swirling in.