We are all connected. Two of my friends, both photographers, were visiting Paris during the November 13, 2015, ISIS attacks. One of them, Steve McCurry, a photographer for Magnum, emailed me: “I was at the football match believe it or not, where the bombs went off … Was crazy. There was a stampede, thought I was going to be trampled to death. Am flying [home] … now.”
His news was strangely fitting. As a photographer, Steve has chosen a life of danger and adventure. His travels reveal a kaleidescope of human portraits, each showing unique individuals, their eyes meeting ours and revealing the depth of our sameness. He has had many brushes with death, and I was not surprised to learn he was at that scene in Paris.
My other friend, Noriko Nasu-Tidball, a Vancouver-based photographer, stayed on in Paris for over a week. She sent me photos she took of a makeshift memorial that was set up near the restaurants where 19 were killed and others injured (top photo).
After the attacks happened, Noriko had been wandering Paris, and was having trouble finding the apartment where she was staying. “It felt very strange — I ended up back at the same spot,” she wrote me. “Then, suddenly, people were shouting and running everywhere. I asked what was happening and someone told me there was a suicide bomber nearby. We all ran into a small restaurant and rushed upstairs until it was confirmed safe to go out.”
Here in North America, I wasn’t yet ready to read the reports on the news. But Noriko and I continued to correspond.
“People in Paris are living in fear,” she wrote. That same afternoon, there was another scare. A generous Parisian woman invited my friend to hide with her in her apartment.
As a young adult, I studied under a woman who claimed to be a spiritual teacher. I’ll call her Lucy. In hindsight, I see that there was much value in her teaching, but there was also a lot of distortion. That distortion, a dark side — whether we call it ignorance, stupidity, hatred, evil or impudence — is in all of us.
Ultimately, love connects us. And it’s often in loosening the knots of distortion that we discover our deepest connections. Lucy taught me some basic practices that I have combined with others I learned later, all of which help me in the struggle to be a compassionate human in a conflicted world.
The most important exercise Lucy taught me was to journal. I learned to look at my part in any misunderstanding. As soon as I found myself laying blame, it was a signal to look within until I could see my part, no matter how small. Only then could I open a dialogue with the other.
I grew up learning to question everything, and was rewarded for being open minded, curious and daring. But my family’s style was competitive and overly focused on the intellect. An aggressive attitude tinged my approach to life. Grappling with the paradox of making friends with my inner demons, I learned to listen to the repressed parts that only show up when the unconscious mind has a chance to speak.
The trick is learning to focus where it’s most uncomfortable, without blame or self–recrimination. With a dream journal, I learned to track inner conflicts and psychic stumbling blocks through symbolic language.
Dreams are universal — we all have them, whether we choose to work at remembering them or not. Symbols from the unconscious bubble up in our dreams, guiding us naturally to ever deepening understanding of ourselves and our lives.
For about 10 years, I practiced Aikido, a Japanese martial art dedicated to world peace. My sensei taught us that were leaving the mundane world behind when we stepped on the mat and bowed. The mat was a special zone, a world onto itself, where we practiced in safety, responding to each other’s attacks.
Aikido includes care for our practice partners, even when they are attacking us in ways that feel real. I learned through repetition to stay present as someone came at me with a punch or a strike, and how to respond in the flow to put my partner to the ground, yet without adding any aggression of my own.
Simple practices of sincere self-reflection lead to the possibility of deepening our awareness and freeing us to be both more compassionate and more courageous. I see many posts online encouraging us to look within and to become better human beings. Yet most governments fail at it miserably. How can we bridge the gap?
Since September 2014, there have been over 50 vicious attacks around the world for which ISIS claims responsibility.
In February 2015, a Canadian Muslim man wanted to make a statement of human solidarity. Mustafa Mawla stood outside in downtown Toronto with a blindfold covering his eyes. Signs at his feet proclaimed he was Muslim, not a terrorist. Open to trust, with arms spread wide, he offered hugs and was met in turn with a warm, hug-filled response.
Another Muslim man stood blindfolded with arms stretched wide in the Place de la Republique, near where many of the Paris attacks happened. His signs proclaimed in French: “I’m a Muslim, but I’m told I’m a terrorist. I trust you, do you trust me? If yes, HUG me.” And they did.
A Persian Conversation
Arian Zand is a first-year UBC student from Iran. I was preparing to give a short talk on the positive implications of the Iran nuclear deal as part of my ongoing Neutron Trail dialogue project when Arian volunteered to talk with me about Iran and the climate there.
Arian told me that, in learning English, he’s been grappling with the cultural divide between us.
It’s more than vocabulary. In his culture, it is normal, even in formal writing, to be non-linear and to include, for example, poetic references and circuitous lines of thought. Arian came to our first conversation assuming it would be linear, Western-style.
Arian’s first question to me was, “What do you know of Iran besides the nuclear deal?” I shared my love of Rumi, the Persian poet, and said that I see Persian culture as part of the wellspring of human civilization.
It was a test question, and apparently I passed. We talked, much of the time walking, for two and a half hours, about his culture and the situation in Iran.
I asked him about his dream job, and his aims with his studies. From there, we were off on an engaging tangent about Iranian culture.
It was only at the end of our time that Arian told me how surprised he was that his preparations for our meeting were so off base. Beforehand, he read the entire Iran deal and summarized key sections to discuss with me, only to discover that my interest was multi–disciplinary and multi–faceted. And that was when Arian told me we’d had a Persian conversation.
Writing this post has helped me cope with my confusion and sorrow over these attacks. What are they telling us? What do we need to do? Connecting with myself and with others, like Arian, Noriko and Steve, helps me make sense of our relationship to what’s happening with and behind the attacks. It’s not a linear process, it’s more like a Persian conversation.
Arian’s dream is to become a peace negotiator in the Middle East. Five days after the Paris attacks, I was on the SkyTrain talking with him by phone about a traditional teaching story he’d told me during a second Persian conversation we’d shared a few weeks earlier.
In Persia, and what is now Afghanistan and Iran, teaching stories was, and is, a way to highlight the gap between our unconscious, often harmful actions, and a broader, deeper wisdom. Often, the stories are set up with one or more people who are confused or spreading harm, with a Sufi (wise man) providing some insight.
The stories don’t typically have tidy endings. They are purposely left with a bit of mystery — open to interpretation on many levels, personal, social and universal.
Each time a story is told, it is moulded to the current situation. These stories are so embedded in local Persian culture that even a one-sentence reference is meaningful to the listener. The stories serve as a bridge, just like a dream story, from the events we need to make sense of in the outer world to our gut feelings, our heart’s desire to make sense of, in this case, random acts of violence.
Deep in the middle of our conversation, I was walking out of the Lougheed Skytrain station and walking to the bus loop. Arian exclaimed, “You’re at Lougheed? So am I!”
In the next moment, he saw me and we spoke face to face for a few minutes, before my bus arrived, about the ISIS attacks, about the hidden cultural references in the story and about the story itself. Here's one story:
A villager in an ancient time is sitting on a traditional red clay wall throwing chunks of it at passersby. It’s hard to tell if the man perched on the wall is purposefully trying to hit people in the square, which he sometimes does, or if he is more engaged in his wild display, simply throwing clods in every direction to attract attention.
People do what is normal to them. A few momentarily stop to angrily raise a fist and throw insults back at him. Most ignore him and walk quickly by, pretending he is not there.
But there is someone else, watching from the haven of some trees a short distance away. He is a Sufi teacher, as anyone walking by the lunatic throwing clumps of adobe could tell you at a glance. People go to him as to a priest or rabbi with their problems. Sometimes he volunteers his advice.
Eventually, as a crowd begins to gather in frustration around the offender, the Sufi approaches the scene. He says to the man, “But what are you telling us? You are throwing away the wall that supports you!”
I ask myself whether the story refers to the ISIS attackers destroying their foundation or to the Western nations, including France, that sell arms to the Middle East. Or to both? There are lots of other ways to look at it.
To me, as a Westerner, a wall creates separation and structure — keeping people in or out. Arian tells me that in Persian culture, walls are associated with serenity. He says, “The presence of my family in Canada is like a wall to me. I can rely on my parents. I know that if anything happens to me, if I become sick or injured, there is a wall that I can lean on. That wall gives me peace.”
A week after the Paris attacks, I asked Noriko, “How is it there now?”
She wrote back:
“I know people are scared inside, but they have to live their everyday life.” She said the mood in Paris, even with the heightened police presence, is more composed now.
“I feel people realize ordinary life is quite precious,” she wrote.