The investigation of my personal cynicism peaked in the Watch Commander’s Office of a small police department here on the north coast of California.

I was on staff there and running various delinquency prevention programs and family services. On that day, I was working on a local School Violence Threat Assessment protocol based on FBI research. My head was spinning with strategies and tactics for sorting out and responding to school violence without making the situation worse. An Officer came in my office and asked me to meet him in the Watch Commander’s Office to evaluate a series of calls about high school girls being harassed by a new street person in town.

Four of us sat in the Sergeant’s office reviewing the circumstances, having added in a Detective known to be skilled in profiling sex offenders. After gathering together what little we knew, checking other local jurisdictions and finding no contacts, we sat for awhile drinking coffee and waiting for the State and Federal rap (report) sheets to arrive, quietly contemplating our suspicions. Finally, the dispatcher handed in the findings, saying there was nothing there, the guy had never been arrested. To a one, the Officer, the Sergeant, the Detective, and myself, all blurted out: Yet!. We all laughed.

As I walked down the hall to my office, I had that disquieting feeling that my heart/mind had closed a little bit more. Whether or not that street person was caught for sexual harassment, or worse sometime in the future, really didn’t matter; I had registered an interior constriction that somehow I felt was unnecessary and unhelpful.

Granted, I was working in an environment where the ‘c’ word was avoided. To care seemed to reveal a weakness and was best left to social workers and the like. In fact, many of the more hard-boiled personalities Officers dealt with would take advantage of a kindness, sometimes in a dangerous way. And yet I knew that staff well, I knew they came into police work because they wanted to be helpful (and, yes, for the excitement when they were young) and cared.

However, I couldn’t let myself off the hook. Simply put the practice of zazen and the Buddhist precepts, over time, just did not allow me to put up with adding constrictions of heart/mind. I was looking for true freedom, not safer defenses.

What to do? Well, actually nothing. I couldn’t come up with a strategy to defend myself from the cynicism around me, nor my own. Cynicism had become a mental habit that slowly accumulated like a light, yet continuous, snowfall. Worse, perhaps, was realizing that it also reinforced a severe sense of separation.

It took years for me to see that my mistake wasn’t really the cynicism, but in trying to come up with a strategy to defeat it. The more I sat with the cynicism, with the sense and fear of separation, with the notion that there isn’t anything that needs protecting, the more it melted. It was like dropping a clear jewel down an infinitely deep well of clear water. The movement of the jewel was enough to catch my attention and allow a loosening of the fear based body/mind habits.

Oh, the cynicism-habit is still there, though weaker. I just don’t invite it in for tea (much) anymore. And the jewel, well, it just seems to fall in every direction.

Here is a letter to Jim published with his agreement. It serves as an introduction to Scratch a Cynic, Jim’s most recent post and it signals the teaching relationship that exists between us. Such relationships stretch both parties and I’m not sorry about that.

Scratch a Cynic takes Jim out of the garden, and off the beach, to reflect on the raw realities he lived within, day in day out in an American Police Station – for years. I can just about join him with the harshness, although it scares me, and I can understand more deeply why the conscious appreciation of garden and beach have been so significant to him. (Ones senses must be rubbed red raw in the law enforcement world he describes, breathing in the sound of ocean waves a balm.) Soon after his retirement we talked about the intensity of his War Zone work life and I remarked that, you are as one who has returned from the battle field, and your boots are still smoking! Gladly his boots are cool enough to reflect on now.

Dear Jim,
It’s finally came to me to re-read your Scratch a Cynic piece and I’ve decided to publish it. But before I do that I want to thank you for your patience in sticking with me; for listening to my difficulties with the piece, my teaching/remarks about it and still keeping on going. You might have quit and I’m so grateful that you haven’t.

Thinking about you in particular, and the other two as well, I can see how in different ways you have come out of the War Zone of your lives, and thankfully reasonably unscathed. But in a war zone you have been, undoubtedly. Over the past few years I’ve know you, and the others, the residue of excitement, buzz (and disappointments and dented self esteem) have settled and bodies and minds have renewed, and recovered! This achieved largely by going about your daily rounds in garden, farm, beach and textile heaven – dwelling at the shady end of the garden of life as I have put it in a yet-to-be-published article.

Yes, there has been more than garden and beach of course however your (Jim’s) beating of the drum has been a little slower (not much though by all accounts) and what you do now has been less war zone like. Perhaps the emergency nature of events that come up now can be related to more as a movie you visited. Rather than as being trapped in a movie theater, you only dimly knew you were trapped in.

Your article shows that however locked in you, or anybody in similar circumstances have become there is a capacity to reflect on ones actions/thoughts/feelings and to do things differently. Perhaps that’s all part of the gift that comes with the human being package. I don’t know. Anyway thanks once again for your reflections, and your willingness to stick with me as I reflect on myself. Yes, sometimes I’m difficult.
Mugo