“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
I joined many in quoting the above words by Stephen Miller from his interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper several days ago, and I thanked Miller for helping my mind clear a little bit. It’s been hazy this winter, mostly because of ill health, and Miller helped melt some of that mental gauze.
You might say: I see, he defined what you’re against, right? Without subterfuge or double-speak, he stated clearly his side of things, the bad side, the cruel side, which helps you define what you’re for, right?
Wrong. Nothing like that.
An interesting thing happened about a week ago. Coughing hard, I finally caught up on the superb series, Adolescence, that had been shown last spring on Netflix to great acclaim. It deserves every ounce of that praise; it’s one of the finest television programs I‘ve seen.
By now, I’m probably not giving anything away when I say that it’s about 13-year-old Jamie Miller, who kills a fellow classmate, all of which is shown in the first episode. But it was the fourth episode that really took my breath away. That last episode shows what the boy’s family is dealing with in the aftermath of the killing: silent, watchful neighbors, verbal abuse in school towards the older sister, and harassment and vandalism. It gets so bad that they consider leaving the neighborhood and moving away.
But late in that episode, they decide not to leave but to stay put. “After all,” says the older sister, referring to Jamie, her brother who did the killing, “he’s ours,” she says. “Pete’s ours.”
When I heard those words, the following words instantly flashed in my mind: “Abba’s mine,” I thought to myself, “Abba’s mine.”
Abba refers to my father, who is how we referred to him throughout his life, the man who, at a younger age, abused me badly. He changed a great deal later on, and we truly loved each other in the last 30 of his 90 years of life. But things get triggered, or as a well-known trauma therapist said, “The body remembers.” So just before that, over a bad night, those early years appeared in stark black-and-white in my darkened bedroom while I was unable to sleep, the yelling, the curses and names, the beatings. Those memories don’t govern my conscious life at all, but they like to sneak in now and then, especially when I’m tired or feeling weak.
One day later, watching that last episode of Adolescence, I found myself saying: “Abba’s mine. He’s mine.”
It doesn’t matter that he’s been dead over 10 years; it doesn’t matter that he was my father, not my son or younger brother, as in the television program. Time and generations had nothing to do with it. I was his, and he was mine. Whatever he said and did, harmful and compassionate, painful and loving—they were all mine, even if my life started 25 years after his, even if I was a powerless child when he acted as he did.
It’s all mine, across time, across distance. That includes Stephen Miller and the terrible things he initiated and gleefully defended. It doesn’t just include the immigrant family I gave $986 for rent and electric bill from your donations, it also includes the ICE agents they are afraid of, Jimena and Byron Pareja who do so much on their behalf, it includes students and teachers, it includes the behavior of people like Vladimir Putin, like Donald Trump and Maduro, which I think is criminal. It includes everything.
It has nothing to do with what and who came first, what caused what, it’s all here and now. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his masterful Midnight’s Children: “If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance.”
Of all our inheritance.
And where is here and now? Believe it or not, on board a Southwest Airlines flight to Orlando, Florida. Several days ago, I decided I needed some days with sun to get healthier and stronger. I emailed a friend, he sent back a very gracious invitation, and I plan to be in Orlando for some 6 days.
Don’t do anything special for me, I wrote him. All I want to do is sleep and sit under the sun because sometimes I just need a rest. I need to remember the blessings of my life and the mocking laughter of a sun that has no patience for commiseration and certainly not for self-pity. As usual, other people stepped up to help. Lori is feeding Aussie, and friends will walk her most days.
Will I blog? I don’t know. Yesterday I sent a draft of a first act of a play I wrote to a theater friend of mine, asking for feedback. I got inspired to write it after the last No Kings rally, and it concerns the mood of this country as I experience it. Will I start plotting out the second act? Will I worry that it’s no good? Or will I just sit under the sun, swim in a pool, and get my strength back? I have no idea.
There’s a curiosity about the future, about what we’re up for as individuals, as humans, as spiritual practitioners. We’re infinitesimally tiny—and we have roles to play and work to do. I want to gear up for it by experiencing all the love that comes my way and by expressing appreciation and love back. Because it’s all mine, every bit of it.
Eve Marko is a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and head teacher at the Green River Zen Center in Massachusetts. She received Dharma Transmission and inka from Bernie Glassman. She is also a writer and editor of fiction and nonfiction.
Eve has trained spiritually-based social activists and peacemakers in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has been a Spirit-Holder at retreats bearing witness to genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rwanda, and the Black Hills in South Dakota. Before that, she worked at the Greyston Mandala, which provides housing, child care, jobs, and AIDS-related medical services in Yonkers, New York.
Eve’s articles on social activists have appeared in the magazines Tricycle, Shambhala Sun, and Tikkun. Her collection of Zen koans for modern Zen practitioners in collaboration with Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up In the Land of Attachments, came out in February 2020.
Hunt for the Lynx, the first in her fantasy trilogy, The Dogs of the Kiskadee Hills, was published in 2016.
“When I was a young girl my dream was to be a hermit, live alone, and write serious literature. That’s not how things turned out. I got involved with people. I got involved in the world. Two things matter to me right now: the creative spark and the aliveness of personal connection. In some way, they both come down to the same thing.”



Eve Marko is the founding teacher at Green River Zen, which is a couple hours west of me. I had the privilege of meeting her at a sesshin there in December. Zen Peacemakers, which is referenced in her bio, is an international organization with many affiliates and a lot of online activity. During these especially challenging times, the organization is a great resource for those who want to engage with the injustices and pain of the world within the context of spiritual practice.
The shift from seeing abuse as something that happened to you versus something that belongs to you is profound. That ownership framework bypasses the usual victim/perpetrator binary and opens up space for actual healing. Reminds me of how indigenous cultures talk about responsibility extending across generations, not jus forward to descendants but backward to ancestors. The Miller quote at the start works perfectly as a foil becuz it represents the opposite, the idea that power is external and must be seized rather than something we're all already embedded in. Found myself thinkin about this for a while after reading.