By Michele Li

(1) Work

I work at a coffee shop and we also make food for the grab and go fridge including wraps, salads, fruit and yogurt bowls. Recently I started to work in the kitchen preparing these foods and I noticed we throw away a lot of food that cannot be eaten but is full of nutrient. Many of these foods can be used for composting and creating nutrient rich soil to grow and give new life. This reminded of a line in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)

In a perfect world, all the food that can be reused for compost that is thrown away daily in kitchens and restaurants would be collected and treated properly to decompose and to be reused again, to complete “circle of life”.

(2) School

At Baruch college and most other colleges there is an academic advisement center to help students complete the correct path in school, take the right classes and get the right degree. However at Baruch College, there are only 12 academic advisors to meet with all the students in Undergraduate. Although students are helped everyday, not everyone is helped and this ends up causing more problems overall. By the time the deadline comes for enrolling in courses, students may be enrolled in the wrong classes, thus taking up space from a student that needs the class. Students then need to spend more time and money on school to take classes needed for their degree. The academic advisement center is a paradox.

(3) Home

In class we discussed the line where Whitman tells his reader to “Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,” how there is a surplus supply of air for everyone. Air is free, but food is not. In New York City, there is a disturbing surplus of food but there is also a large percentage of the population that goes to bed hungry. I live in the East Village where anything I need is in arm’s reach. At work, we have to throw out most of the pastries that do not get sold. At first, I was really upset  that we had to throw away so many croissants a day, but then I realized that we were just one store and just a coffee shop. Imagine the amount of food that a restaurant might throw in a day, then multiply that by the amount of restaurants there are in New York City today. That’s a lot of food! However according to the NYC Coalition Against Hunger, one in six New Yorkers are food insecure. How is this possible if there is so much food available in the city?

If we are being totally honest, The Heart Sutra was definitely a little confusing to grasp at introduction, but over time, when you stop trying so hard to digest it, it comes to you. The Heart Sutra discusses the concept of knowledge and emptiness, how one’s knowledge of emptiness is actually supposed to be extremely comforting. Excuse me if I’m wrong but I’m not exactly sure how understanding the emptiness of something is supposed to reassure me.

To me, the emptiness is almost comparative to a materialistic emptiness, that the Buddhist tradition is proving that by living in our materialist reality, we have become empty of ourselves. But who knows if that’s even right for I feel like there is a greater lesson to this Sutra that is beyond my knowledge, as if I am supposed to be empty but still full and understanding all at the same time. How paradoxical.

As for the Whitman piece, as well I was completely taken in a different direction than I assumed was intended just by the first few lines. It appeared as a love poem when he quotes that his atoms belong to him just as they belong to you, the you I assumed was his love interest. How wrong I was.

Once I read it a few times, I started to realize that this was indeed a poem about Whitman, who had decided to celebrate himself and stare at some grass while doing so. Romantic, no? He describes himself as different people, almost as if he’s reliving his maturation process. Then out of nowhere this child comes and questions the grass Whitman is clearly having a love affair with and suddenly his whole world has exploded because he has to describe everything simplistically.

Clearly both pieces were too winding and evasive to actually pinpoint their true meanings but one can guess. Yet, what really got to me is what is the point of reference between them? I’m sure there are plenty of other poems we could have placed side by side and dissected like a creature in a laboratory so why these two? Whitman clearly loves the world and is high on blades of grass we cannot begin to reach. The Heart Sutra just wants to teach everybody that they are just empty beings and once you accept that you have bitten into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and liberated yourself.

I’m starting to believe that the only thing these two pieces have in common is that they both discuss this notion of oneself and discovering the truth behind it. I’m assuming that Whitman’s love for the world is similar to what The Heart Sutra was trying to explain but took a more twisted route in explanation. Whitman went all candlelight dinners and butterflies while The Heart Sutra embodied Poe by channeling negative energy to teach us about a lovely thing. So which is it really? Should we be celebrating ourselves or should we just agree that we are empty containers and that is the truth of all that matters?

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