A Map Grows No Trees
On political discourse as warfare, a JANE HIRSHFIELD poem and stopping the practice of making enemies
“A map grows no trees.”
—Alberto Blanco1
By Jane Hirshfield 2
Yet a thought is a forest.
Birds knock their heads against living tree trunks,
Looking for living beetles.
This continual concussion
Must be why sureties so often confuse.
Mosses on the north side, leaves going up,
Roots going down,
And still for a lifetime I’ve kept getting lost.
“At no time were policy makers unaware of the hazards, obstacles, and negative developments. American intelligence was adequate, informed observation flowed steadily from the field to the capital, special investigative missions were repeatedly sent out, independent reportage to balance professional optimism – when that prevailed – was never lacking. The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.
The question raised is why did policy-makers close their minds to the evidence and its implications? This is the classic symptom of folly: refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence, addiction to the counter productive.” ~ Barbara Tuchman3
“To some, the Vietnam War was a crime – an attempt by the United States to suppress a heroic Vietnamese national liberation movement that had driven French colonialism out of its country. To others, the Vietnam War was a forfeit, a just war needlessly lost by timid policymakers and a biased media. For many who study foreign affairs, the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake brought about by U.S. leaders who exaggerated the influence of communism and underestimated the power of nationalism.” ~ Michael Lind4
There are different ways of understanding historical events like the Vietnam War. Barbara’s view, that the war was an example of the human penchant for folly is an important one. Michael Lind says another way of understanding the Vietnam War was as a proxy for the Cold War. This merely extends the question. Was the Cold War itself folly? History will always be contested.
I think war and contested interpretations of war are important topics right now because we are entering an election season where warlike politics will again be on display. The ugliness is already on the rise. The season has already included an act of violence. Undoubtedly, we will see more. So, how we think about war, the extent to which we glamourize it, has an influence on how we think and do politics.
Krista Tippet recently completed a retreat at Plum Village, the place of peace founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. She wrote recently that one morning a monk giving the dharma talk had them experiment with the difference between trying to force open a clenched fist and simply holding the clenched fist softly with an open hand. “A sea of clenched fists is a metaphor for our world right now,” Krista wrote.5 Krista is concerned with the healing that will be necessary after the election. Whoever wins America will be a fractured nation.
The mudslinging will only get worse. I just engaged in a skirmish with a family member who posted a fake video of Kamala Harris, an attempt to make her look drunk in a public speech. Misogyny and racism are sure to be in full display. As Carrie Newcomer wrote in her most recent essay, “I fully expect that our newsfeeds will be filled in the next few months with subtle and flat out brazenly sexist and racist opinions and language. I resolve not to be pulled into the spectacle of click-bating of these tactics.”6 That won’t be easy, but I think she is right.
At the beginning of the Iraq/Afghanistan War nearly 80 percent of Americans believed it was the right thing to do. Twenty years later, a year after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan more than half of Americans thought it had been a tragic and costly mistake. Note that a not insignificant percentage of Americans were suspicious of this from the beginning. Largely forgotten are the protests of the war that began 12 September 2002.7
Thich Nhat Hanh was asked once about karma and whether the Vietnamese people had brought the war on themselves. What did they do, the person asked, to bring this on themselves. The U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam, Loas and Cambodia than any other nation on earth, more than the entire bombs dropped in World War II. Hanh said, “it didn’t happen to the Vietnamese people, it happened to us.” It wasn’t just their karma. It was our karma. In war there are no victors. We Americans have a tendency to mythologize our war history. We sometimes sustain “dangerously sentimental” attitudes toward American exceptionalism and our military might.8
Betty Basye Hutchinson, a nurse in Pasadena wrote about how shocked the local citizens were to discover wounded soldiers in their midst when they were billeted in a local hotel after the closure of a nearby hospital. The locals would stop and just stare. “It’s like the war hadn’t come to Pasadena until we came there.” Residents wrote letters to the local paper demanding the patients be kept out of sight of the population. “It’s only the glamour of war that appeals to people. They don’t know real war.”9
It can be easy to get caught up in wars as if they were video games. Consider the popularity of heroic stories of Ukrainians fighting against the Russians. Early in that war there were stories of Russian soldiers abandoning their posts because they were not prepared for what they had been asked to do. From afar, we easily forget the humanity and the cost to ordinary people. I heard Jack Kornfield tell the story of a Palestinian woman who attended a gathering that brought both sides together. “Oh, I forgot they had mothers,” she said of the Israeli’s, “I’ve only seen Israeli soldiers for the last 25 years.”10
“A map grows no trees,” Jane Hirsfield quotes the Mexican poet Alberto Blanco. Like woodpeckers we bang our heads against the hard surface of our preferred maps. No wonder we are confused.11 It is somehow easy to forget that “the map is not the territory,” as mathematician Alfred Korzybski once said. And yet maps are more simple and controllable and so humans often cling to them as well as bang their heads against them. D. H. Lawrence said “the map appears to us more real than the land.” One of the great dangers in human existence is to choose fictions over reality.
“Promise me, even as they strike you down … humans are not our enemy. The only thing worthy of you is compassion, invincible, limitless, unconditioned. Hatred will never let you face the beast in humans. One day, when you face the beast of war alone with your courage intact, your eyes kind, untroubled, out of your smile will bloom a flower.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh12
The enemy, Hanh taught, is intolerance, fanaticism, authoritarianism, hatred, greed, fear, the toxins that rest in the human heart.13
Benjamin Rush in 1793 proposed a Department of Peace as a balancing arm to the Department of War. It never found support.
When I taught JROTC in a high school I asked the cadets to wonder about why West Point teaches poetry. Former commandant Lt. Gen. William Lennox wrote an essay about this necessary question.14 Lennox said, among other things, we want military leaders to be able to think, to struggle with hard moral dilemmas, to discern and make difficult decisions. As long as Armies are necessary and we keep sending people to war we want them to conduct themselves as morally as possible. The more we equip them to think morally, the more we can expect them to behave morally and the less morally devastated they will be by the experience of war. It will be bad enough without adding layers of their own moral thoughtlessness.
But, why not a department of peace? If that sounds fanciful and unrealistic, it has come up again. In 1943 a Senator proposed that American might become the first nation to have a secretary of peace. It came up again most recently in 2001, 2005 and 2013. So far, it has not been taken seriously except for presidential candidate Marianne Williamson who has it as a major platform item.15 Why not a department of peace? Especially in light of the epidemic of violence we have domestically as well as that around the globe.
NPR’s Throughline recently aired a story about our culture’s deficit of dreaming and suggested that this might help account for the anger and intolerance so prominent among us.16 The hatred espoused on social media is rampant. Is this unrelated to our long addiction to violence and to the myth of redemptive violence and our faith in punishment as a remedy for wrongs?
We have to look at ourselves. In a world burning with hatred and fear how should we respond?
Rob Bell commenting on how warlike we American are says we keep getting stuck in cycles of violence because we lack the imagination to see that the world could be otherwise.17 And, by the say, I was a soldier for thirty years, so I know it’s possible to be.a solider and not be warlike. Most of the soldiers I served with over those years were people who cared deeply about justice and valued peace as much as if not more than most civilians. Perhaps mandatory service would help more Americans understand the cost of war in a more personal way. Ironically we might become less warlike if we all had to serve in some capacity.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s instruction was to stop – stop making enemies. Hanh’s best selling book is called Being Peace. If we are to become peace, we have to learn to stop making enemies. The maps that we are addicted to are not capable of growing trees.
In one of the most recent editions of Being Peace, Jane Goodall writes the forward.18 And she says while she never got to meet and learn directly from Hahn, his words touched her deeply because while he was teaching the world about interbeing and about the importance of practicing not making enemies anywhere, she could see the truth of what he was saying in the natural world among the gorillas and in the wild.
How important for people like Goodall and Hahn to discover these things from diverse perspectives in a time like ours.
Remember the words of David Whyte who said, “the great mistake is thinking we are alone.”
“The great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone…
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation.”
Jack Kornfield said he was present with Thich Nhat Hanh once at UCLA and they were doing a mass walking meditation in protest of the Gulf War. And Jack suggested they give out black arm bands to everyone and Ty said no, when we walk, we just walk. Because he was concerned not to send a message that they were taking sides or were for or against anything but that they embody the peace that the world needs.
He would describe his meditation as sitting with and taking tea with Mara. In the Buddhist tradition, Mara is an equivalent temper figure to the Bible’s devil who tempted Jesus.19 Part of what both Jesus and Buddha were tempted with was to set themselves above others, in other words, to separate. Separation is where the making of enemies begins.
No more making enemies.
Frank MacEowen is a teacher of Celtic spirituality, the indigenous wisdom tradition of Scotland and Ireland.20 The Celts were nonviolent and non-imperial, so they are a good alternative to the warlike inclinations that are killing us today. So I will conclude with his poem.
Return
By Frank MacEowen
My wish for you
is a homecoming in this life.
A coming in out of the cold;
a drying off the icy rain’s touch.
In the holy reliquary
of childhood memory
may you find there the unshakable truth
of your preciousness.
May you remember the cool and padded graces
of your wet feet against stone.
In the middle of a long night,
a single burning light
serving as your peace,
may you fold back the pocket
holding your slights,
your jilted times,
your feelings of betrayal,
and discover small diamonds there,
created from the crushed coal
of your hates and rage.
May you taste resurrection
without the need of dying for it.
Mexican poet and visual artist and jazz musician, grounded in Zen. He studied chemistry, philosophy and Asian studies, all of which influenced his poetry.
Jane Hirshfield, “A Map Grows No Trees,” The Nation, 18/25 September 2023.
Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 234.
Michael Lind, “Why we went to war in Vietnam,” American Legion, 20 December 2012.
Krista Tippett, “Softening the Clenched Fist: reflections from Plum Village,” Substack, 20 July 2024.
Carrie Newcomer, “Hope is … Hope is not,” Substack, 24 July 2024.
See the History channel’s “Millions protest the impending invasion of Iraq,” https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/millions-protest-iraq-war-february-15
See Elizabeth Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
Ibid., 72.
“A Change of Heart: an interview with Jack Kornfield,” Tricycle, Fall 2012.
There is scientific research explaining why woodpeckers do not give themselves chronic concussions. This was not understood until a couple of years ago. See “Why woodpeckers don’t get concussions,” Physics Today 77 (1) (2024): 54-55. The poet plays with the appearance that such birds must give themselves massive head injuries. Alas, it seems human are the creatures prone to this.
Thich Nhat Hanh, “Recommendation,” 1965.
From a letter Thich Nhat Hanh wrote to Martin Luther King Jr., 1 June 1965. Both the poem Recommendation and the excerpt from the letter can be found at https://www.openingheartmindfulness.org/weeklytopic/2020/11/6/man-is-not-our-enemy
Lt General (Ret.) William James Lennox, Jr., “Romance and Reality,” in Who Reads Poetry, (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 57-59.
https://marianne2024.com/issues/us-dept-of-peace/
“The Way We Dream,” NPR, Throughline, 20 January 2022. We are going to sleep later even when we have to get up early. This has seriously robbed us of deep sleep. Added to this, culturally, we devalue dreams and thus many people pay them very little attention.
Rob Bell, Everything is Spiritual, (St Martin’s Press, 2020), 132-144.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace, (Parallax Press, 2024).
See Stephen Batchelor, Living with the Devil: a Meditation on Good and Evil, (Penguin, 2005).
Author of The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, and Seekers, (New World Library, 2002).