I had the pleasure of hosting this week’s Awakin Call with Phyllis Cole-Dai, masterfully moderated by Pavi Mehta! Phyllis is a writer and social artist. She is also a mother, wife, daughter, and extraordinarily warm human. Even online through zoom where I got to see and meet her for the first time, I could feel her compassionate nature.

Before the call started, I thanked her for writing and sharing her poem, For the Sake of One We Love and are Losing. I had listened to her recording multiple times and had shared it with a friend whose grandmother was transitioning. It brought such comfort! There was no ego as Phyllis thanked me for letting her know.

There was the sense that the poem was not hers, that she was simply the messenger – the words came through her, she had no choice. What a gift for all of us who may be saying good-bye to a loved one.

Phyllis knows first hand what this means, as her father passed recently. It was powerful to hear how she is moving through this time. What struck me specifically about Phyllis is that she doesn’t ignore pain or darkness but rather chooses to stay with and lead with light; she radiates peace. She spoke at one point of a necklace she wears…a labyrinth that leads to a peace dove; they are connected. The labyrinth is surrounded by the dark but the path is light. Seemed quite fitting for Phyllis!

At the beginning of the conversation, Pavi asked about Phyllis’s current home – a “130-year-old house that started small but has become grown over time, cobbled together.” Still, it is not about a structure. “Home is where I am,” said Phyllis. Some places have been easier than others, she acknowledged, but Phyllis simply “blooms where I am planted as the saying goes.”

Phyllis spoke to various spiritual inquiries and experiences - it was never a selfish endeavor – “it wasn’t all about me” she said. She could not help but care about how her work and way impacted others.

One question she spoke to that stood out for me – How do we reconcile radical belonging in a world that does not honor inclusivity?; how to engage with others where there are obstacles to connection? It is a life long practice and journey. Later, Phyllis would speak to approaching others of different ways or backgrounds with humility; enter quietly, listen; let go of the need to do or fix; wait and watch.

She spoke about loving “neighbors” as oneself; Loving God with all your being. And, what/who is God? Everything. The challenge is how to love the parts that I don’t want to have anything to do with? From her Buddhist practice came the question- “how do I cultivate the capacity to love?” It is ongoing learning and “wisdom comes from every direction” so the next question becomes “how to integrate the wisdom?”

From a young age, Phyllis was aware of the suffering of others and resonated with the question of “how to bear witness.” She was especially aware of the suffering around her, noticing the homelessness, for instance, in the area she lived at the time. A voice came to her that would not be silenced, “Be present with those suffering.” And, Phyllis didn’t just listen, she followed through with action. This led to 47 days between Lent and Holy week, living homeless, with friend James, in 1999. Afterward, it was difficult to put into words what had happened so she didn’t force them and when the words were ready to come out, they did. It was a pivotal experience in her life and one that continues to live within haunts her in fact. She speaks of trauma moving to teaching.

Phyllis shared a story about their first day walking the 14 miles into the city when a truck passed by with those inside pointing and laughing at her and James; this was day one of their homeless experience! She “realized how fragilely constructed our identities are….we were stripped down to our essentials.” In the city, homeless and without a wallet, everywhere she went to rest, security would tell her to move. She had “no place to go…no place where I had a legitimate role.” “What is the value of my life?” she wondered. Not relying on someone else, she grappled with “how to feel at home with self.”

Some of the “golden threads” of learning during that time, where ultimately she and James ended up living at the Riverbank with the homeless community, related to how we serve each other; how others want to serve others. What is the driving force? Who is it for? Rarely those who offered donations for instance asked what was needed. They gave what they wanted to give, what they assumed the people needed. “Stuff was often foisted upon us,” she said. And, in the end, when it was time to leave, she needed a truck to carry out things that were given but not needed. The lesson wasn’t don’t give, of course, but do ask what is needed.

Moving on to present day and where Phyllis lives in Brookings, SD… also the traditional homeland of the “Seven Council Fires” of the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota Peoples. She shared a bit of being called to write her novel, Beneath the Same Stars which is a historical novel set during the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. She spoke to being welcomed by many of the Native peoples in her area.

Phyllis’s stories of being an outsider who is welcomed in whether that be at the riverbank in Columbus, Ohio, or among the Native people as a Non-Native led to the question, How did this happen, how does one enter? Phyllis spoke to “bringing everything you have into the relationship. And then, we sit. And, we listen. I think my people, Euro-American people, are not good listeners generally. We like to talk a lot…and don’t realize when we are speaking from ignorance. We need to be more willing to sit in silence….and not feel a need to act …We will be invited in when it is time….Native people are really good at teaching me the long view.”

So many gems! For the long, and fuller, view -- please enjoy the full video recording. More wisdom to be had beyond the nuggets that struck me :)

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!

Nuggets from the Transcript:

"How do you reconcile a radical belonging and hospitality and so on with the sense that we don't live in a world that always honors those things? And what do we do, how do we engage with that which destroys community or is an obstacle to the community, instead of hiding from it or being embittered by it--to embrace the challenge of that?"

On her multi-faith experiences and inclinations, especially Christianity and Buddhism:

• "I think my rural upbringing, and that kind of conservative Christian starting place, gave me really firm ground for what my life journey has continued to be. And I also found the ethic of loving the neighbor as the self in that upbringing and loving God with all your being. I tend to think of God--I try not to name that, but if I have to use a word like “God,” it's everything. So how do I love everything with all my being, even the hard parts, even the parts that I don't want to have anything to do with? So those questions then dovetailed with Buddhist practice eventually: How do we love? How do we cultivate the capacity to love? What are our tools? What are the exercises that can train us up in that? And Buddhism and Buddhist practices have really informed my life on how to do that. Not that I am good at it necessarily. I am always a beginner but these things have been instructive."
• "I feel that I don't like to box myself into any particular religious or spiritual viewpoint because wisdom comes from every direction if we are attentive. And so the question is how to integrate the wisdom, whatever the source, into this miracle that is our life. And that's the journey I am always going to be on."
• "I had gone to seminary to become a United Methodist minister, knowing that I was a heretic. But I thought that serving in the church was the best place where I could try to touch those tender spots that we have and try to build awareness and compassion and empathy. But I knew that I was not a doctrinaire Christian. I knew it was going to be a challenge. So at the same time as I was going to seminary, I became the little student minister, student pastor of a United Methodist church out in the country not far from where I had grown up, ironically. I was trying to navigate this--again, this belonging and not belonging at the same time. And it was all happening inside of myself. That little church was a tremendously loving place. And if I was ever going to make it in institutionalized Christianity, it would have been in that spot. But then I took a world religions class and I encountered Buddhism in-depth for the very first time, and it was like coming home. It was a language that I intuitively had been speaking, that I felt inside of myself the whole time that I had been alive. And there were these practices that answered that question: How do we learn to love and to be compassionate, and not just say that we’re following the great commandments or something? We actually have to work at this."
• "When I got into Buddhist practice and this notion of being present and to try to hold open a space for presence and transformation in the midst of radical suffering or places where the energy of past suffering is so profound, such as Auschwitz and if you walk across the land here in the Dakotas, where there have been terrible things done to Indigenous people, how can you bear witness to that? What is your responsibility in those places?"

On her experiment living among the homeless:

• "I began to notice, around 1998 or so, that there was a growing number of homeless people living on the streets of Columbus. We did not seem to be talking about it as a city. In fact, we were tearing down homeless shelters to make room for skating rinks and things. I just felt this growing sense that I needed to do something, but I did not know what, so I started asking the question, what can I do? What can I do? It took eight or nine months, and one morning as I was sitting in my basement office waiting for a meeting with James Murray on something else, and I call it 'the thing with a capital T' came down and said, 'You need to go out on the streets and live a season of your life and practice being present among people who are suffering on the streets.'"
• "One thing that became immediately clear is just how fragile our constructed identities are. I would say that within the first 24 hours, who James and I understood ourselves to be was completely ravaged on the streets."
• "I had always assumed my life meant something to everybody I met, but I couldn’t count on that anymore. So how do you be present to yourself then? Because that brings you home in a new way. When I say, “Home is where I am,” to own that gives you the power, at least spiritually, to survive anything. Because you are not relying on somebody else to give you your home, to make you feel comfortable where you are. I think we all have that capacity in us, but we have to nurture that. It doesn't mean that we're all going to survive physically. Unfortunately, even some of the homeless people whom I knew I'm sure did not escape the streets. But they were all struggling with how to feel at home with themselves. So it's an ongoing thing."
• Learnings from the experience: "we urge people to be vigilant about their motives for wanting to help somebody else. Usually they're mixed and that's normal. But what is the driving motive? Is it to feel better about yourself, or is it to actually meet the person whom you're hoping to companion through some suffering and hear what they need? We were rarely asked what we needed. There were a lot of deliveries to our camp from people assuming they knew what we needed. ... So being vigilant, inquiring into why we're wanting to do something for somebody, is important. At the same time, I think if we do give carefully to others, if we companion them carefully, we've got to let go of the outcome of our attempts to help because we don't have control over that part. This is something that is true, I think, in many areas of our life. Letting go of the outcome--just do what feels true and let it go. Don't have expectations about what's supposed to happen."
• On letting go of expectations for gratitude:  "It’s a long story, but I realized that I was really angry at her because she did not reward me with any gratitude at all. And I thought, at bare minimum, I'm going to get gratitude for how I have suffered to help her through her suffering. Well, no, there was no gratitude. That's on me, for expecting it. But we can become bitter in our lives if we have those kinds of expectations and they are disappointed and we cling to the disappointment. So letting go of the outcome is letting go of the expectations too."

About her book on the U.S.-Dakota War: "If you Google “Dakota 38 film,” you can get there and you can watch it for free. I watched it first with a Euro-American audience and then with a largely Dakota audience. And it was just so apparent from the discussions of this film that the conditions that created the war, that led to the war, in 1862 are still with us today--much suffering related to the same things. We've not moved, in a lot of ways, on this. And to me, the white supremacy and the Christian imperialism that helped to create the conditions for the war are still very much alive and well, unfortunately, in this area. So I felt right away that I needed to respond. Something was laid on my heart, and it wanted to be done in fiction. And I was like, really? I've never written a novel in my life. How am I going to do this? Especially when it's about a culture that I know nothing about, the Dakota culture, and it has to do with a war. How am I going to imagine myself into a war that happened 150 years ago? But again, you don't ask the questions as a way of saying, I'm not going to do this. It's more like, how? And so then you just slowly find your way through."

"I think one of the things that was hard is that certain people who are celebrated as heroes of white culture, we have to see them as complicated people who have a mixed legacy. And we don't often want to look at the darker parts of what they have left behind, things that are still alive today."

On her relationship with her Dad:  "we came to a peace between us--not understanding necessarily, but peace, because we didn't abandon each other in the middle of what was hard. So that place where belonging and not belonging come together can be home too. That is a place, if we learn how to inhabit it without anger, without resentment, without the disappointment of expectations."

On true service, especially to non-white people:  "If we just sit in the presence of other people and be there, with them, and with what's going on in our own heart-mind, and not feel a need to act until what needs to be done appears, we will be invited in when it's time. I think we have an urgency that we feel, if we have discerning hearts and compassionate hearts. We want to help fix things right now because we know that the stakes are high, especially for people of color or people who are impoverished, or whatever. But we are not in charge of this. We have to be the allies, and that requires humility and a willingness to do what we are asked to do rather than deciding what we think needs to be done because we know best."

On life as an integrated practice:  "I try to make all of my life my practice. And so I like certain things like mindfulness practice and tonglen, but I have less set-apart time for those than I used to. And maybe I'm letting myself off the hook here, but I feel like when I am really tuned in to what I'm creating, it is meditation. So it feels redundant to then, you know, go practice mindfulness meditation. So there's a constant kind of negotiation that I'm doing with myself between formal practice and what is my life practice. But if you can cultivate--and that's what I try to do, is cultivate in myself a mind that no matter who I'm with or what the moment is, it's still practice. It's another opportunity to be present and to exercise compassion and attention. And so just trying to integrate it, I think, more fully."