Hi everyone -

Happy Interdependence Day!

People become people through other people. No man is an island. We are who happens to us and what we make of the happening. One world is enough for all of us. (And it better be, because that's all we have, by the way!)

405 days ago, George Floyd was murdered. Darnella Frazier stood there, took note, shook the world, and remains shaking herself, to this day, traumatized by what she saw. At the very least, she is far from alone in her awareness of brutality and injustice. I'm sending her and the family of George Floyd, and all the victims of police brutality, love and peace today. Let's keep all those who suffer in our thoughts.

We are not done yet. We have a long way to go to make this a safe world for Black Lives, Black men, women and Black people of all genders. I was passed through Black communities and Black hands on my journey through America. I have walked, overwhelmed and magnified, in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in a year when all seemed lost to my wounded heart. It was hard to even take in everything, but I vowed to let the Museum see me, and spin my voyage as it chose.

We are timeless, connected to the cares and struggles of all who have gone before. We are in an American Reckoning, in which we are taking stock of ourselves and our collective journeys. Many of us are aiming to do better, to listen to those who know the troubled waters, and help them right this ship before it sinks. Some have said to me "well, everyone's on their own journeys." Yes and no, yes and no. Our journeys reverberate and rebound on each other. We have been controlled, subordinated and even demonized and scapegoated by those who wish to claim power. But there is a deeper power stirring, a force older than human history, but which we call love. 

Love can mean many things, but I write of it as selfless love, altruistic love, care for the well-being of another with little or no concern for oneself. This flows readily most often when we feel safe. When we don't feel safe, we close up, become less generous. 

Sometimes, we sense the lack of safety, and give more of ourselves, trying to make others feel more safe with our presence. But those who have not been granted safety by the tragic circumstances of life often enact their feelings of lack of safety on those around them. It's so hard to be vulnerable. I think a lot of things have made people in the Bay Area feel more vulnerable over the last decade or more. Carlos Bulosan's Saturday Evening Post essay from 1943, Freedom From Want, still tragically holds up. "We are marching!" he wrote, and we are still marching. 

Every day I get up and meditate. At the end, I recite the Lovingkindness Sutra from memory. You can also memorize this sutra and recite it as part of your meditation practice, and also notice where your mind snags. This is a good indicator of what still needs attention in you, what still feels untouched by love, where it still feels unsafe to be loving.

But the rubber meets the road not on the meditation cushion, but in real life. The 'master' can be enlightened in the cave, but what happens when he/she/they goes back to the town and the marketplace? "There is no attainment, there is no non-attainment" -  there is only process. Our enlightened bits travel with our unenlightened bits, with our human emotions and our experiences. Our identities are the ache of the world trying to have a new experience.

I hope you have a new experience of interdependence and freedom from want and suffering, this July 4th.

And if you'd like an hourlong dose of me, Truong Tran and QiRe Ching, check out our film at the Cannes Independent Film Festival. There's a streaming window from July 6-17, and tickets are available now :) I will be releasing the film on Vimeo this fall.

The Bandaged Place: From AIDS to COVID and Racial Justice

Grief, rage, identity and meaning are explored in the stories of three Asian American men: psychiatrist/poet Ravi Chandra, poet/artist Truong Tran, and Jungian psychoanalyst/artist QiRe Ching. From shamanistic poetry channeling the dead to deeply riven accounts of our psychological truths, these three come to insights and reflection that aim to inform a changing world.

Tickets here: https://watch.eventive.org/cannes-indie/play/60dfee8084a3780030f52026

Finally, here are some words from Rumi:

"A candle as it diminishes explains
Gathering more and more is not the way.
Burn, become light and heat. Melt."

Warmly and with affection,

Ravi