You Don't Have to Be Good
Trusting the power of our ordinary lives
Dear Friend,
We went on a road trip to Ontario a couple of weekends ago, the day of the summer solstice, so that I could attend a weekend meditation course with one of my teachers. The course was lovely. Also, it was refreshing to be in a country that has not completely lost its goddamn mind.
The highway into Canada was immediately tidier and better maintained with a noticeable absence of billboards capitalizing on people’s pain and desperation: no threatening warnings from the Bible, no 1-800 numbers to call for trouble with lust, no attorneys for work-related injuries.
We had a moment of hesitation about crossing a border because my husband is a dual U.S./Colombian citizen but citizenship only gets you so far these days when you’re Latinx. He wondered if he’d get less likely to get kidnapped by ICE if he wore a tie while driving. The Canadian border patrol official took his U.S. passport, and for a few seconds, couldn’t locate my husband’s name and info in the database. We held our breaths. She found his name. We passed through.
Everything was fine for us and still not fine for others. We drove along.
I found myself wondering how long our present lives can continue to coast on the momentum of all the social engines that existed before, and which are now rapidly crumbling. I don’t know what will happen, but I have faith in the ordinary people who are meeting the needs of their communities and bringing goodness into the world.
I used to feel a mistrust in our sensitive web of interconnection. This happened especially during the first Trump administration. I often worried that I wasn’t not having enough of a positive impact. How could I, when my life was so small and ordinary? Whenever I feel this mistrust now, I know it is ego talking, a false-self conditioned to believe that only people who hold seats of visible power and influence have any lasting effect on the world.
This doubt in the power of our interconnection contradicts any kind of democratic notion that ordinary people like myself are important, or the fact that regular people are standing up for their neighbors throughout my country. There’s an internalized elitism and classism, I think, embedded in this mistrust, a grandiose suspicion that a simple life led with integrity lacks the valence necessary to relieve suffering, cruelty, and injustice.
It is not despair so much as a feeling of angst. Of never-enoughness.
Whenever I feel this creep of angsty never-enoughness, I try to stop thinking so much. I put away my phone. I place myself back into the living world. I take this never-enoughness to my meditation practice and work on writing fiction and poetry because writing helps me pay attention to life. During our trip, my kids and I walked around a small town in Ontario, smelling the roses and milkweed that grew in the gardens of the neighborhood where we were staying. I was reminded by my teacher that our positive skillful actions, our gewa, changes the tone of the world. No matter how small, gewa is powerful.
We returned home to Northern Illinois that Sunday at around ten pm. My partner and I stumbled out of the car with the type of exhausted relief that every parent knows after driving a long time with two young children, our hands filled with discarded snack wrappers and single socks and tote bags.
Our front yard was dark. The air blinked with fireflies.
They hovered over the patches of clover we’d left for them, wild and unmowed sanctuaries. They signaled their yellow beacons to each other. Some of them crawled inside the grass to find a mate. I managed to catch a few to show my kids. They lit up my cupped hands with a brightness that felt impossible. Their light is their mating signal, their sign that they are in the world, their will that the world should have more of them.
When we looked up into the darkness of our streets we saw the fireflies avoiding other yards in our neighborhood. There were no fireflies in the lawns that only had one species of grass, or that used pesticides and fertilizers. Our yard had become a grassy, island refuge for these small beings—all because we don’t spray chemicals on our lawn and because we leave large, rectangular patches of clover unmowed. Through not-doing, through a kind of decisive inaction, we helped support life.
I never grew up in the suburbs or lived in one before I moved to this house. Until living here, I had never really considered that the suburban lawn is actually a crop, one that is cultivated through perpetual fertilization, fungicides, and pesticide treatments.
My childhood home was situated off a highway, an old yellow brick farmhouse on an acre lot and next door to a men’s halfway house, where formerly incarcerated men would return to the outside world after prison. I grew up in a part of town where no one cared much about how their yard looked. We never did anything to our lawn other than mow the grass every weekend during the summer. There was no singular grass species in our lawn which we tried to cultivate in preference to others.
My mother, a biologist, showed me as a child all that was growing in our yard that was edible—crunchy wild onions that I’d wash off in the garden hose, wild strawberries that barely exploded with a tangy burst of watery juice, heart-shaped sorrel with a bittersweet taste, syrupy early spring violets. I wanted a rich, biodiverse lawn like this for my family and for non-human beings, even though the lawns around me are uniform, green swatches of fine fescue grass.
We made a compromise with our non-human kin, leaving tall patches of clover for bees and other insects. We do this because they bring us joy, filling our yard with a steady euphoric hum, and because we know these small beings are responsible for keeping us alive, pollinating the crops on farms that become our food.
Every summer, I feel a moment of self-consciousness at how unruly our yard is, and yet every summer, I’m amazed at how much life is nurtured simply because we don’t insist that our lawn grow a certain way.
My neighbors can think what they want of me. I care more about conserving a steeply declining bee population than conforming to aesthetic lawn standards that originate from English aristocrats.
When I look at our yard blinking with fireflies, I don’t doubt that our small choice—which required less labor, not more—is helping other beings, including beings I don’t know, including beings I will never meet. I find myself regaining natural confidence in the web of interconnection, and in knowing the choices I make to support and care for others have power. I stop feeling that frantic sense of never-enoughness.
I think this is how practices like Dzogchen—which involve resting into being, or even a kind of experiential faith (to use a word that is practically taboo in western Buddhism). You familiarize yourself with a trust in the innate, positive qualities of awakened awareness, and allow these qualities to work through you.
I feel a sense of Dzogchen when I read Mary Oliver’s first line to “Wild Geese”—a poem which admittedly, has been celebrated down to a whittled stub. Even so, I can still access the simple, profound truth in its first two lines: “You do not have to be good/You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”
We can let go stiff ideas about virtue and rest into an open awareness that is already good, and from there, a limitless sense of goodness and joy are experienced. As Longchenpa writes, “How joyful is one immersed in genuine being!”1
When I stop struggling and stop trying to be good, when I relax into a vast, genuine being, I always find that positive qualities like generosity, acceptance, creativity, and goodwill arise in me more naturally and are enacted more skillfully, without the angst of perfectionism and control—without the shadow of my own inner authoritarian and ideologue. I can have my opinions about how I want to keep my yard without insisting that others do the same, and that lack of insistence can welcome others to support pollinators without a sense of coercion. And I can focus on the life-giving choices I make without being pulled into anger or judgment at my neighbors who use pesticides.
We all change the world through our existence in it. Our smallest choices have tremendous power. Ordinary people who trust basic goodness, who don’t often mirror our own religious or political beliefs, and who, like all of us, are a mess of contradictions, are the ones who keep communities from imploding in times like these. They know their own dignity and that helps others find dignity in themselves. We all know people like them. They trust so deeply in a transpersonal sense of goodness that they allow it to work through themselves and whatever their conditions are. When they die, their goodness continues to generate in the world, even when their names are lost to time. You do not have to be good, and I do not have to be good, because we belong to a goodness that is greater than any “you” or “I.”
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Updates:
and I are postponing the mini-salon on “Resetting and Reenergizing Your Writing” until September. Stay tuned for the exact date.
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Creative Exercises: Rewild Your Creative Practice
Art is a microcosm where we can experiment with some of our most turbulent, messy feelings. I think of Lama Rod Owens saying how he tells his students to practice grief on trivial things, like the grocery store being out of your favorite lettuce, as a way to support yourself with the grief we experience from the gigantic losses of life. In a similar vein, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche writes that certain types of art are like a rushen—a purification practice—that allows us to rest in our natural state through enacting and emoting various mental states.
Here are five exercises to rewild your writing and creative practice: