Shattered

On the inevitability of disruption and undeserved devastation

Welcome to The Practice of Life — a place to slow down, befriend yourself, and connect with the world from kindness and awareness. If you’re just arriving for the first time, you may appreciate this introduction.

Everything here is freely offered without paywalls. If you appreciate what you find, please consider a free or paid subscription, or a one-time donation. Your financial support creates possibilities for me to spend more time on writing, including a memoir-in-progress. It also really helps if you give this post a ‘like’ (click the heart at the end) and share it. Thank you!

Two Friday mornings ago, I woke up to a call from my neighbor.

“Are you okay, Maia?”

I had no idea why she was so concerned about me. It was only 7:30 and I was barely waking up. The only reason I answered the phone was because I thought she might need help. Her question turned my brain upside down and I mumbled something about being fine and asked why she was asking.

“Someone threw a rock through your windshield!”

Ah shit….

I live in a town that’s rather notorious for its crime rate but in the five years I’ve lived here, nothing bad has ever happened around my house and I’ve felt relatively safe. Nadine’s words jolted me into the reality I had always hoped to avoid.

She told me she’d meet me out in front of my house, I told her I’d be there in about five minutes after I put some clothes on.

A huge rock was sitting on the edge of the windshield, which was completely smashed. We peeked inside and there was another large rock sitting on the passenger seat, the glove compartment was open. (Does anyone actually keep gloves there anymore?)

Nadine called the cops as I tried to take in what I was seeing. Having lived in San Francisco for many years, car break-ins were not new to me, but they always involved broken side windows. It seemed odd that someone would go through the trouble of smashing an entire front windshield.

When the police came, we looked inside the driver’s side and realized that the ignition button and steering column had been ripped out. The button and other parts were laying on the floor. Someone had tried to steal my Mazda. More bizarreness – why would you break the entire front windshield to steal a car that you then couldn’t really drive?

Nothing was missing from the inside of the car. None of it made sense.

I spent the day sorting out this mess and thanks to the kindness of neighbors and local business people, by the end of the day I was able to start the car and my windshield was replaced. I also learned I wasn’t the only one who had been hit. Other neighbors had their cars broken into and vandalized.

Friday night, my main goal was to soothe my frazzled nerves. I took a warm bath, got to bed early, and was in the midst of a blissful deep sleep. Around 1 in the morning on Saturday, I woke up with a vague sense that there had been a sound. I rustled myself out of bed, waited a moment, and listened. No other sounds. But something felt odd. I walked out to the front door and looked at my car, fearing it had been hit again. The windshield looked okay.

I started to walk back to my bedroom and felt a cool breeze, which was weird. I looked over at the living room and noticed a tear in the shade that covered the living room picture window. Looking more closely, I realized there was a massive hole in the window. I turned on the light and saw glass shimmering everywhere – on the floor, on the couch, sprayed out into the adjoining rooms. And a large rock sitting on the floor at the foot of a bookcase.

The cops showed up again and I filed another report. By the time they left around 2:30, I tried to go back to sleep but it was impossible knowing there was a gaping hole in my front window. So I stayed up, cleaned up glass, and once again tried to digest what had happened. The car incident felt digestible, the house incident completely pierced any sense of safety and security I had been hanging onto.

This past week has been all about repairing the damage on all fronts. About considering what other steps I need to take to protect my house and myself – not a way of thinking that comes naturally to me.

In the dark and sleepless hours after the rock through the living room window, I kept thinking of people who have endured far worse, who have lost homes and families and children to unspeakable violence from bombs, fires, famine. My experience was barely a blip on that spectrum and I am blessed with resources of all kinds to cope with this and recover. But on some basic level it gave me a visceral experience of chaos and loss, an empathetic link to people around the world who have experienced violence.

At any moment, the wheels of fate and karma will move in ways that churn up confounding, devastating events. Intruders will break into our supposedly safe spaces and steal what is of value to us. Beloveds will be diagnosed with cancer and other diseases that will take them away from us. Bombs will be dropped on innocent children. Deeply disturbed young men will take all-too-easy-to-get automatic rifles and steal the lives of teachers and classmates.

These things will happen out of the blue, like a lightning bolt in an otherwise clear summer sky. None of it will make sense. We will lose what we love, and we never saw it coming. Trauma will try to take root in our bodies. Life as we know it will be shattered, never to return in the same way ever again.

The best of us will be taken far too soon. The worst of us will be spared for reasons we can’t understand.

Those who are most proximate to our suffering will receive the brunt of our outrage, they will be the target of our desire for vengeance. And yet… the endless web of interconnection tells a deeper story, where one person or one thing does not exist in a vacuum but is the outcome of causes and conditions we may never be privy to.

Yes, people should be held responsible for their actions. I hope that those who broke my windshield, who shattered the peace in my home, and who vandalized others in my neighborhood are called into account for what they did. Yet I do not want to waste my life energy in heated and hated pursuit of them, I don’t sense that punishment is the way. I wish there were more opportunities in our communities to learn about and practice Restorative Justice.

In the most basic teachings on karma, the Buddha reminded us:

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.

- From the Dhammapada, translated from the Pali by Acharya Buddharakkhita ¹

This past week after this shattering, I have knit myself back together by hewing close to this teaching, by focusing on what needs to be mended back together in my physical and material life, by not getting diverted into vengeance that adds to the karma of harm. As a dear friend reminded me, this incident was “such a mirror of the larger world destruction… And your cleaning up and all the energy expenditure is serving the highest good… maybe keep dedicating the merit of your practice here.”

I’m no saint, by any means. This is a very practical choice. The Buddha’s teachings almost always are more pragmatic than esoteric, when you practice them deeply.

And so life goes on. This week I’m firming up plans for the living room window replacement. I’m gathering estimates for building a fence and gate at the front of my home. I’m learning about security cameras. But mostly I am trying to keep my heart open, to “stay human” as Michael Franti used to encourage us. That’s a big enough piece of work, a life time’s worth of work.

An Invitation

This month I’m doing a Spring fundraising drive for my Substack. I’ll just come right out and say it: I would be very very VERY happy if you’d considering signing up for a paid subscription to The Practice of Life, or alternately making a one-time donation as a way to say “thank you” for the time and effort I put into these pieces (you can find an archive of my writing here). This is also a material way to support my livelihood as a writer.

This Substack has no paywalls, so the reason you’d do this is not to access articles that others can’t. You’d do it out of pure generosity — and that can feel really good. Also, for every five paid subscribers, I “pay it forward” by paying for a subscription of Substack writers that I appreciate.

Right now there are more than 3,000 subscribers here – which is amazing! The vast majority of you are free subscribers, and I appreciate every one of you. Fifty of you are paid subscribers, and I am deeply grateful for your support. Fifty out of 3,000 is a pretty small percentage, and I would love to see that number at least double this year so that I make the 100 mark.

While I will always keep The Practice of Life free for everyone to read, I do plan to create a special thank-you offering for paid subscribers in the near future. I’ll be turning that Mandala of Socially Engaged Buddhism (also known as The Four Ways of Engagement) into an online course/journey for paid subscribers to access and benefit from. Also, I currently offer one complimentary Guidance and Encouragement session a year to founding members.

Please consider entering into this circle of giving and receiving with either a paid subscription, if that is doable, or a one-time donation. Thank you so much!

In kindness,

Maia

1. https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.01.budd.html#dhp-5