I woke up this morning, twitching from the steroids I’m taking to alleviate a persistent cough, the lyrics from James Taylor’s Mexico drifting through my mind… “Americano got the sleepy eye but his body’s still shaking like a live wire.” So, I got up and had some Green Tea with Lemon to flush the system, read my usual news sources, BBC, NPR, Washington Post, New York Times, etc. Switched to coffee to jump-start the system. Yoga was next. I found a really good meditation playlist on Apple iTunes and fired it up, easing into the asanas of the flow, letting the music be a background to emptying my thoughts. I considered sitting zazen, but my stomach was grouchy, so I had some yoghurt and granola to get me through to the real bacon and eggs breakfast at mid-morning.
At this point, you might be asking yourself why you are reading a description of a liberal’s morning. If so, you are missing the point. The key word in the title of the post is “appropriated.” In 1956, Horace Mitchell Miner wrote an article published in the American Anthropologist called “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” It was a clever article that used anthropological language to describe Americans. If you didn’t know it going in, it seemed he was describing a strange people. When decontextualized in this fashion, the strangeness reserved for the other becomes focused on ourselves and we get a bit uncomfortable.
However, this decontextualized view provides distance that can allow us to see our similarities to the other, and that is the source of the discomfort. We are Americans, and in 1956, the prevailing belief was in our inherent superiority, a belief that slightly diminished but is making a resurgence. The irony of the belief is that, for all our accomplishments as a nation, all that we are most proud of was appropriated from someone else. Our political system is an adaptation of the Ancient Greeks, our ideas of human freedom come from the Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, our coffee from Central and South America, the Christian religion was appropriated from the Hebrews, Egyptians, the Mithraic cult from Persia, and the beliefs of the Celts, who appropriated, it seems, their beliefs from the Irish. The High Mass of the Catholic Church was modeled on the High Mass for Jupiter. Suffice it to say that originality is lost in the mists of time.
Everything we create, is derivative in some fashion. Our originality lies in the creative reimagining of the world as we experience it. Our greatest strength is to be able to see personal value in the creations of others. But we have to be honest about it. The problem with cultural appropriation is when it is assumed the appropriator has a superior perspective over the appropriated. I get a bit queasy when I see Americans studying Zen and taking Japanese names as if Bill can’t be enlightened, but Jiko can. I understand the ritual of renaming and being reborn into a new identity, a process not exclusive to Christianity, but my understanding of Buddhism, Zen in particular, is that doesn’t matter. So, I guess my discomfort comes from my understanding of Zen Buddhism, not profound by any stretch, and my personal sense of what is appropriate. It is one thing to appropriate a religious belief for personal development, but something completely different to take someone’s name. I know, it’s my judgement and the personal experience of the person is different in perspective.
So, I began my day, full of appropriation. James Taylor, Chinese green tea, tropical lemon, Sumatran coffee, Indian Yoga, news from around the world on a device designed in California and manufactured in China, a playlist of music someone else wrote and some other person assembled, Indian yoghurt; granola, I’m attributing to a very creative hunter-gather on the savannas of East Africa ca. 10,000 BCE. That is life in the modern, first world, at least. All that we have comes from elsewhere, whether beliefs, food, drink, clothing, trinkets or ideas. In the wealth of experience, it is easy for us to forget the poverty of existence upon which that wealth is based. That is the shame of our time, that so many must suffer oppression, whether political, economic, social, or religious, so that so few can have so much. So when we take the little they have without gratitude, as if it is our due, we have sinned against our humanity and theirs.
I was born into the Judeo-Christian milieu of Western Texas in the 1960’s. Nothing in my growing up and development would have predicted I would practice yoga, sit zazen and believe in a way more inline with holy women and men of 1500 years ago on the other side of the world than people next door. What I take into my life, I do so with gratitude, and try to honor the originators of the ideas that I incorporate into my world view. But I also take the long view, I hope. My gratitude isn’t just for what I have, but also for others who have followed their truth. I’m not a Christian, but I’m grateful for the fact that Jesus lived his truth as he saw it and ultimately died for it. It is a level of courage I’m not sure I possess. I’m grateful for Siddhartha Gautama’s willingness to sit beneath the bodhi tree for eight years seeking enlightenment in the middle way between excess and asceticism. But mostly, I’m grateful to the Taoist monk, who lived centuries ago in the forests of China, who followed The Way beneath sun and moon, through rain and snow, and no one but the wind knows her name.
Namasté.