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<\/a>\nSeeley believes she is sufficiently educated to have outgrown the provinciality (and blind-faith Christianity) of those who remained in backward Kansas. Here she explores the self-congratulatory smugness we all fall into when we think we know more than the person next to us.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn China Garden in Goodland, I felt like an inside outside, someone who knew the words, the world view, the winning tricks\u2014but someone who chose not to play. Someone who knew, but also knew better. I felt smugly advanced in my thinking. Besides, I knew how to use chopsticks. The woman humming \u2018Amazing Grace\u2019 had nothing on me\u2026<\/p>\n
I hadn\u2019t figured it out yet, but that night in China Garden, my chopstick-wielding\u00a0smugness had met its match. When those small-town, cattle-ranching, wheat-groaning Kansans didn\u2019t marvel over a Chinese restaurant on the High Plains, they were refusing to be herded into my today corrals. Why shouldn\u2019t Kansans eat Chinese food just as I did in San Fransisco? Just because I thought they were supposed to be provincial carnivores?\u2026<\/p>\n
In the days ahead, Kansas became a rich, complex place that challenged my assumptions and stereotypes about the state I\u2019d left at seventeen. Of the many people I met, not one was anything but authentically curious, generous, and kind\u2026 Everyone one of them listened to my tales of wandering with openness and sympathy, more tolerant of my otherness than I had been of theirs. They seemed to<\/p>\n feel sorry for me, gone so long, and welcomed me home.<\/p>\n Back there in China Garden, I should have been humming \u201ca wretch like me,\u201d right along with the woman in the next booth. Lord knows, I could have used some amazing grace to make me more open-minded and less provincial. Less stuck-up about my passport from Oz.\u201d<\/p>\n My\u00a0dream is that every one\u00a0of us on both sides of the power struggle\u00a0will come to recognize our own self-congratulatory sense that I-am-so-right-and-you-are-so-wrong<\/em>. We must know that we are like everyone else–limited humans. And we must resist stereotyping the people\u00a0we assume\u00a0are unlike us. came up as the top search return. Reading her obituary I felt the same loss I experienced when I received\u00a0news of the death of the long lost classmate who had once been my friend. I, a committed Christian, am grateful to Tracy Seeley\u00a0for her memoir. She illumines the truth that Christians and Buddhists, Jews and Muslims, atheists and pagans–all of us all together–can<\/em> get along. She\u00a0also opens\u00a0a window into how<\/i> to get along despite our differences.<\/p>\n By letting go of our damnable, ignorant pride. \u201cRecovering my fluency in Kansas things, I talked recipes, quilts, and weather with some people, books and poetry with others. I met populists and democrats, poets and farmers, Lutherans and agnostics, and a lot of people who not only loved where they lived but had chosen it.\u201d Tracy Seeley How to be at home \u201cHow …<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/tracy-seeley.jpg?w=116\")
Choosing to love where we live<\/h2>\n
\nIt\u2019s encouraging\u2014how close we are, really, to accepting each other in love. The conservatives\u2019 hero Chesterton and the liberal Buddhist Seeley will always remain\u00a0in philosophical disagreement about the place authority ought to play in our lives and what our response to authority\u00a0should be. But they know\u00a0exactly the same thing about how to live wisely and sanely. They agree that the only way to be at home in our place and in our own skins, is to make ourselves smaller.
\nHow do we\u00a0make ourselves smaller? We deeply listen to each other. We believing we could possibly\u00a0learn something from one another. But this can only happen if all of us reject the false (and highly seductive) premise that we are inherently superior to the person whose ideas and convictions baffle us.
\nReaders of Seeley\u2019s My Ruby Slippers<\/i> will glean insights into the common bond uniting us even when we don\u2019t perceive our unity. Tracy Seeley\u00a0shows through her own experience that the people we think are\u00a0ignorant, and the people we believe are the cause of our suffering, are very often seeking the same authentic goodness and decency in life that we so passionately desire. They probably are\u00a0also\u00a0suffering the same sorrows we endure.
\nIn all religions, the common wisdom underpinning all the doctrines is that we are most deeply at home (in the place that makes our lives meaningful) when we manage to be kind to people we don\u2019t understand, who don\u2019t understand us, and who are different from us, whether those people are family, friends, or strangers.
\nUpon finishing this memoir, which I stumbled upon at the library and knew nothing about, I felt such kinship with Tracy Seeley (although I am not Buddhist) that I googled her. I wanted to write her a thank you note. But…<\/p>\nTracy Seeley obituary<\/i><\/a><\/h2>\n
How can we all get along?<\/h2>\n
\nComplement Seeley\u2019s Buddhist perspective on a meaningful life with Radical Hospitality<\/a>: [Saint] Benedict\u2019s Way of Love<\/i> by Lonni Collins Pratt and Father Daniel Homan, Compassion for Humanity in the Jewish Tradition<\/i><\/a> by David Sears, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman\u2019s Journey to Love and Islam<\/i> by G. Willow Wilson, and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm\u2019s 1956 Masterpiece The Art of Being.\u00a0<\/i><\/a><\/p>\nLove is a choice. How will you make it yours? <\/b><\/h3>\n
And if you\u2019ve already committed to love, how might you make your love\u00a0bolder?<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nPhoto credit: Mr B’s Photography<\/a> via Visual Hunt<\/a> \/ CC BY<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"