A Song of Myself Should Be a Song for All
Do You Hear the Immunocompromised?
I contain multitudes. And so do you. In Buddhist philosophy we acknowledge a lack of a self-existent self. We don’t exist as individual units the way we think we do. And the way I read Whitman, he acknowledged that, too. We are more like a process—a process that involves you, me, our parents and all the generations before, trees, plants, animals, birds, fishes, insects, bacteria, and viruses. We are all alive and trying to stay that way. We are evolving. Changing. Thriving. Declining and dying.
Whitman wrote in his Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you….
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
And in the Shōbōgenzō, Dōgen writes:
….every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.
My teacher, the late Rev. Koyo Kubose, taught the most important Buddhist concepts in a simple way. That is why those of us who have had the good fortune to learn from him, his father, and the teachers that went before, are conditioned to look for the Dharma right where we are standing.
Rev. Kubose taught the concept of person, place, and time as an everyday way of saying life is interdependent, impermanent, and constantly changing. We are constantly interacting with life through different people—including our self as we change—different places, and at different times. But we rarely see life that way, even if we deep-down know that’s how it is. We want—and most times expect—things to continue to be the way they are now, especially if the way things are now are relatively comfortable. If they’re not relatively comfortable, we grasp at what isn’t, denying what is.
That’s why the Covid-19 pandemic was and is a life-altering experience for everyone, even if they weren’t dramatically affected by death in the family, major illness, or job loss. What we lost in the pandemic was the bliss created by ignorance. Yet, many people couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. They didn’t want to look at how the pandemic came with deep lessons about uncertainty, impermanence, and interconnectedness. They dove deeper into a reality their minds and emotions created to make themselves feel better.
Lives were altered across the globe, not just across the street like in a storm, but many continued to live in an alternate reality that things should, would remain the same. Some people eventually realized that this life-altering experience was not something to escape but something to learn from and they looked straight into life as it is, finding new ways to be in the reality they found themselves in.
The alternate realities people created were based on each person’s conditioning. That’s the “person” and the “place” parts. The “time” part is the circumstance of the pandemic. So, each person’s life was a completely different mix of these three things. Different realities based on the way their minds and emotions processed the change in the “times.” And the more tightly people grasped to their alternate realities, based on fear of the unknown, the more real their realities became.
What each person saw in their lives as real were real. To them. And that is always the way all the time, not just in the pandemic. Everyone’s real is real for them. The real of others is not any less real than our own. My real, my truth, doesn’t necessarily apply to your life. Heck, it doesn't even apply to mine all the time.
Looking at this from the perspective of what the Buddha awakened to and taught, we see the karmic workings of ignorance and what arises from ignorance. Each person’s brand of ignorance is unique, essentially creating their own unique reailties.
And if you believe in past lives, in the way the Buddhist texts explain what the Buddha saw about his past lives, then trying to identify specific reasons why you see reality the way you do—or why someone else sees their reality the way they do—IS impossible, because we do not have omniscience. If you don’t believe in past lives, it’s still impossible to know the contributing causes to each person’s creation of their reality. Each person’s life is made up of “past lives” within the context of their one lifetime.
This is helpful in our framing of things, to create a more open and forgiving perspective on why people behave the way they do. There are so many realities. So many selves. So many songs and stories.
In the Lankavatara Sutra it says:
As all things are unreal, there is neither defilement nor purity; things are not as they are seem, nor are they otherwise.
Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise is the best way to put this slippery reality we call life.
When it comes to living in the reality of a global pandemic, many people look the other way, through either a resigned wishing it wasn’t so or an active participation in spiritual bypassing. Others deny and fight it, a more aggressive behavior but also driven by the need to look away. They charge headlong with a pugilistic behavior, fighting whatever or whomever they think is to blame, like countries and authorities. Still others can’t look away (like me) and cling to doom scrolling while trying to catch every new scientific observation.
I’ll try to explain my reality through the past three years, knowing that I really can’t explain it as it was and is, because as soon as I try to grasp it, it will slip away in the person, place, and time of “time being.” I saw the pandemic as an existential threat and acted accordingly. I still do. As a little time went by, in the early stages of the pandemic, and there was some scientific and medical consensus about who in the population was classified as the most at-risk, it became clear that I was right in the middle of that demographic.
In 2020, at 67 years old with Systemic Lupus (SLE), an autoimmune condition, I began to feel I joined a population of “others”, as the medical community and the media skewed the presentation of information toward a younger, healthier majority. They still do, as of this writing in 2023. This caused me to believe that I needed to be continuously aware and dig deeper to find the most up-to-date information about the virus and the scientific/medical recommendations about safety and precautions, to save my life. I became steeped in all things Covid-19.
When it finally became clear that masking and social distancing were important, I viewed both as obvious behaviors everyone would willingly subscribe to. As we all now know, that was not the case, then nor now.
My immersion in everything Covid created a relatively unhealthy environment for a peaceful mind and body. Starting three years ago and continuing to this day, the need to be alert to the potential dangers that others represent to my health is a form of hypervigilance. Unfortunately, though, it’s not imagined hypervigilance caused by trauma, but it is the reality of life for me and my partner.
What was, at first, a cultural awareness of the potential dangers of Covid, has seemingly become a willing cultural ignorance, as the risk seemed to lessen. Again, more cultural ignorance. The risk has only seemed to lessen, as the evidence that a large percentage of people who get Covid end up with long Covid becomes more obvious. Yet, off went the masks, and a return to restaurants, bars, gyms, concerts, and flying away to vacation spots. For most, it seems a harmless behavior. There doesn’t seem much risk involved for many. A couple of weeks of feeling crappy, like a bad cold or the flu.
So, people continue on, because as the pandemic rolled on these past three years, the virus, like all of us and all viruses, changed over time. From Alpha through Beta, Gamma, Delta, and now the rapidly changing variants of Omicron.
Thinking the threat is over or subdued—most seem to not care anymore because they never got Covid or, if they did, it was only a bad cold.
Life is now normal for most people. No awareness of the alternate realities
of the immunocompromised, the frail, or the elderly seem to enter their peripheral vision. The song of Walt Whitman, “for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you…” doesn’t seem part of their realities.
Out of sight. Out of mind.
Protect the vulnerable was a mantra once. It’s still mouthed as some sort of goal. And, at one time, there were people on their balconies applauding and cheering healthcare workers in a show of unity. Unity and concern for the welfare of others has all since disappeared.
Throughout the course of the last three years of the pandemic, the threat was and is very real to me. And the more obvious it became in my life, the more I viewed those that didn’t “believe in” the virus, or didn’t mask or social distance anymore, were as if saying my life wasn’t important. If those others are close to me, like friends and family, my reaction is hurt and disbelief, and eventually anger.
In my reality, this behavior appears malicious. Yet it is ignorant. And clinging so tightly to my own fears and protection of self is also ignorant. To this day, I still can’t view the behaviors of some people without reacting on some level. Obviously, though, as we remember the constantly changing nature of person, place, and time, the people in my pandemic reality have changed—including me—as has the places and times. Yet, when we feel (or actually are) threatened, attacked, betrayed, or abandoned, the feelings embed themselves in our bodies, in our cells, even if our minds bury or compartmentalize. This is trauma.
In my case, I have had multiple traumatic incidences throughout my life that centered around betrayal. I was adept at compartmentalizing and putting them in containers where I acknowledged them as parts of my life that I rationalized, understood, and accepted. It’s a long story that I’ve shared before on my and others’ podcasts, but it serves as a good example of how each person’s reality is comprised of many (unknown to us) elements and demonstrates that no matter how real reality seems, it isn’t as real as we think.
But our lack of awareness of our own and other’s ignorance is bigger than something that happens only in a pandemic. The pandemic spotlighted behavior that has always been in our culture. The relocation of the elderly to separate living facilities, keeps old age and death out of sight. And protecting the vulnerable during the pandemic turned into an attitude of it’s up to the vulnerable to protect themselves. Stay home and out of harm’s way. And stay segregated from life. Keep the sick and disabled out of sight.
This behavior I’m talking about is the behavior of not acknowledging or ignoring the non-abled and the disenfranchised. It has always been in the American culture. In America we cling to individual sovereignty.
Individual over community. A song only for oneself.
This has highlighted the need for me is to be more aware and more vocal in raising awareness of those that can’t participate in the productive hum of our culture. Throughout my life I have had the blessing of being a part of shunned, disenfranchised, and non-abled communities: Acknowledging my own gayness at a young age during a time where being gay was considered abhorrent and illegal. Betrayed by family, friends, and authorities I thought were there to always love me—or at least support me—instilled a lesson about human ignorance. But it also instilled trauma.
I have been working hard to heal that trauma since the pandemic ripped off the thick scab used to protect myself for seven decades. And the work is made even harder because the wounding continues. It continues because the Covid virus isn’t gone. And the potential threat to me isn’t gone. Now that masking is rare and testing is private or non-existent, people come and go without a thought.
Except I must think about them. My partner must think about them, to protect me. I must protect myself against—yes, against—them. I can’t count on them to think twice about walking into the house without a mask, even though they may have been at a restaurant or a concert the night before, or they just stepped off a plane. They aren’t doing it on purpose. They’re just living their lives. For that, I don’t blame them.
And yet. And yet. We have had many instances in our home where ground rules were set and the fact that I am immunocompromised was communicated repeatedly, and, still, a mass forgetting or not being totally honest, or honest non-compliance because of a focus on their now-normal lives.
I read an article from Self that said that nearly 42% of 1733 people polled misrepresented being compliant with Covid health guidelines. It said:
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that many people are, well, a bit selfish. Most of us know a friend of a friend who decided to end their COVID isolation early to go to, say, a wedding or a concert. Or perhaps they refused to test themselves over the fear of actually being positive and needing to chill at home for a bit.
Now, a new survey suggests that people do, in fact, straight-up lie about their COVID status or about following public health guidelines. The survey results, which were published in JAMA Network Open, found that 721 of the 1,733 people polled—nearly 42%—said they have “misrepresented” their adherence to COVID public health measures. (Just so we’re clear, in our book, that means they lied!) For the survey, that “misrepresentation” included ignoring quarantine guidelines, telling people they were about to visit that they were more cautious than they actually were, and failing to mention at the doctor’s office that they might or did have COVID. *
*(https://www.self.com/story/taking-covid-safety-seriously-survey)
This has happened to us and continues to make us more cautious (read: hypervigilant) and suspicious of others. The numerous incidents of this behavior caused us to make our house once again off-limits, even though we had been loosening up a bit.
Why am I writing this?
First, it’s part of a book I’m writing about Right View, the first of the Eightfold Path.
Second, and most importantly, it’s part of my practice to remember that just because we’re all ignorant doesn’t mean anyone is really my enemy. They’re just doing what we bumbling humans do. Yet, in all honesty, I admit I don’t always remember this. The sense of betrayal and being forgotten stabs at deeply set trauma wounds and opens them again and again. Anger flares. And the need to roll up in a ball and self-soothe is a more frequent behavior than I would like to admit.
Third, I hope what I write will make a difference. I hope it will cause someone to pause before they stretch or willingly not tell the truth or avoid the question about their adherence to pandemic guidelines. And I hope it might make more people realize that Covid isn’t over. Not for me and the roughly seven million people in the United States (as of 2022) that are immunocompromised.
Above all, I hope, as you sing your songs celebrating yourself in your time being, you will remember that I and seven million others are trying to sing, too. Are voices are muffled behind our KN95 masks and distant because we are standing away from the aerosolization of your song. But we want to join the chorus and sing a song for all. The chorus that sings, “for every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.”
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Very thoughtful piece of writing, thank you. Appreciate you sharing it.
Thanks for this Wendy - it DID make me think. I value your presence in the world. And hurray for your writing your new book! Bowing.