I found a really fascinating and powerful story about the nonviolent path of transforming enemies into friends, in Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be.

On a Sunday morning in June 1991, Cantor Michael Weisser and his wife, June, were unpacking boxes in their new home, when the phone rang. “You will be sorry you ever moved into 5810 Randolph St., Jew boy,” the voice said, and hung up. Two days later, the Weissers received a manila packet in the mail. “The KKK is watching you, scum,” read the note. Inside were pictures of Adolf Hitler, caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, blacks with gorilla heads, and graphic depictions of dead blacks and Jews. “The Holohoax was nothing compared to what’s going to happen to you,” read one note.

The Weissers called the police, who said it looked like the work of Larry Trapp, the state leader, or “grand dragon,” of the Ku Klux Klan. A Nazi sympathizer, he led a cadre of skinheads and klansmen responsible for terrorizing black, Asian, and Jewish families in Nebraska and nearby Iowa. “He’s dangerous,” the police warned. “We know he makes explosives.” Although confined to a wheelchair because of late-stage diabetes, Trapp, forty-four, was a suspect in firebombings of several African Americans’ homes around Lincoln and was responsible for what he called “Operation Gooks,” the March 1991 bombing of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Center in Omaha. (He later admitted to these crimes.) And Trapp was planning to blow up the synagogue where Weisser was the spiritual leader.

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One of the most amazing stories to come out of World War II concerns a church leader in Bulgaria named Metropolitan Kyril. When the Nazis rounded up the Jews in his city and herded them into a barbed wire enclosure, he decided to act.

The train that was supposed to take the Jews to Auschwitz pulled up at the station. The S.S. guards were just about ready to load the Jews into the box cars that would take them to the gas chambers, when suddenly, out of the darkness, Metropolitan Kyril appeared. He was a tall man to start with, but as an Orthodox priest, he wore a miter on his head, which must have made him appear like a giant as he emerged out of the darkness. He was wearing his black robes and his white beard hung over them. Marching behind him were many of the townspeople.

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When I was eighteen, I left my Kansas hometown and fled to college in California with no plans of returning except to visit family. And when my family moved to California I had no reason to return.

And even now, when I think about what it would mean to live in the middle-American town I grew up in, I experience great distaste.

But recently I discovered some photos of various random locations around my old town, and I was struck with strong waves of nostalgia. No; it was something more than nostalgia.

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I just found this on craigslist. Painful, and moving, and touches me in so many ways.

I graduated from college in May, and this summer seemed like a good time to go through the box of papers and assignments I had been saving since the start, both to reminisce and to do a little cleanup.

Tucked in a folder of an old notebook at the very bottom of the box was the essay that follows. Written in longhand, it was the first assignment from the first class in my first semester.

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I play lip service to the idea that all things are meaningful, that “everything happens for a reason.” But I’ve realized lately that my behavior and my actions reflect a deep underlying belief that the world is, essentially, a random, chaotic violent mess where anything and everything could happen. And the only way to defend against randomness, chaos, and violence is to expect them, to build them into my psyche, so that at least I won’t be caught by surprise.

And this is a dead end, because I find myself trapped in a corner, victim to the very chaos and violence I fear, unable to escape because I have at some level embraced them in order to maintain a sensation of safety. Keeping an eye on “the enemy” traps me as well as my enemy.

It’s interesting reading some of my old posts, when I use the metaphor of dancing with the hurricane to describe my process of growth. The process involved becoming free enough to move freely and even gracefully amidst tremendous pressures. But what I am beginning to realize is that many of those pressures have their roots in a very deep and very old set of beliefs about reality, so invisible that they masquerade for reality itself.

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When I was in my sophomore year at Stanford, I lived in a dorm called Terra. Technically, I guess it wasn’t a dorm; it was an on-campus co-op. I chose it because I wanted to have my own room, and their two-room doubles (you had a roommate, but each of you occupied your own room) were the closest I could get.

Terra is Latin for Earth, and it fit who I was at the time that I joined what was basically a hippie house. Everybody pitched in on the workload: cooking, cleaning, etc. Every week I helped wash dishes Thursday nights; that was my job.

One of the interesting things about these hippie co-ops was their liberal policies about gender mixing. Primarily: The bathrooms were unisex. And it was funny, because the urinal was right by the door, so quite frequently I would be standing there taking a piss and a girl would walk in and start brushing her teeth or something. We all took it in as a matter of course.

Another interesting thing about Stanford, or any of those Ivy League level colleges, is that some famous people go there. Tiger Woods dropped out of Stanford. Fred Savage graduated from there, as did John Elway. (Off the top of my head.) I remember seeing then-Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug (the one who injured her leg) sitting a few rows in front of me in a class. (She was very short.)

My closest encounter, though, was with a political pseudo-celebrity.

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My first instinct was fear.

I had just returned a couple of rented movies to the store and was sitting in my car with the door open, when I heard someone nearby say, “Excuse me.”

I looked over to see a guy who looked like a panhandler. He was maybe in his late 30’s or 40’s. Weathered skin tinged with yellow and grey and a little red. Bloodshot eyes. Worn clothes. Like a longtime smoker, drinker, “white trash.”

He explained that he was from Alabama and was stranded and could he get a ride to the highway (a twenty-minute drive).

Multiple scenarios flashed through my head in that moment, many of them involving me being attacked with some sort of sharp weapon. So I said no, I was going in the opposite direction. He thanked me and left me alone.

After that, I was so torn. I couldn’t decide whether to change my mind and help him out or not. I watched him for a minute, and it didn’t look like he was asking anyone else for help. Quite unlike your usual panhandler. But still, my fears gripped me. Finally I just started the car and left. But two minutes away I could not stop thinking about him, so I pulled onto a side road and stopped the car.

The worst case scenario was that he was some sort of psycho and I would put myself in grave danger by helping him.

But another worst case scenario was that he really, genuinely needed assistance — he was far from home, and no one else would lift a finger to help him … and I was going to just dump him there.

I didn’t know what to do. My paranoia warred with my compassion, and mixed in there was guilt about class and wealth, as well as my own physical fatigue and the ever-present concerns about generosity versus self-preservation that everyone in a helping profession must struggle with.

Then, I swept all of that aside and asked myself: What do I feel, in my gut? And as I tuned into my body-feeling about him, I remembered the look in his eyes, and I knew then that he was real. And since he was real, I had to help him.

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A guy comes in for treatment the other day. He’s down on the table and I start putting needles in him, when he starts complaining that his headache, which had been vague today, was getting worse and worse, like it was really stabbing him like a knife in the head. I asked him where it was and he pointed at the top of his head, just a little to the left of midline.

So this is what’s remarkable. First, I had to know that the acupuncture meridian that crossed through that point was the Bladder meridian. Then I had to know that the Bladder meridian was associated, in an esoteric Chinese theoretical way, with the Small Intestine meridian. Then I had to know that the Small Intestine meridian ran along the ulnar edge of the arm. Then I had to know that the hand correlates to the head, and therefore the point that might best be associated with his headache was Small Intestine 3.

Most of these are things many an acupuncture student will know, but it just blows my mind how what once seemed esoteric has become practical.

So anyway, I stuck a needle into SI-3 and stimulated it strongly.

And the headache died down dramatically.

A quick cure with just one needle.

That’s so cool.

Treating patients in the acupuncture clinic, I’ve had some definite successes, some moderate successes or ongoing projects, and a few failures. Of course the obvious successes feel great, and the ongoing projects feel, well, like ongoing projects. The failures feel like a blow to my ego.

I define a failure in this context as the inability to get a good result, resulting in the patient deciding not to continue treatment.

Of course every doctor, even a good one, will encounter cases that he or she is unable to treat. Sometimes the diagnosis is incorrect, or the treatment techniques are applied poorly or inaccurately. Sometimes it’s just that the modality one practices is unsuited to the patient. But sometimes you just don’t know why it didn’t work.

A lot of this process is detective work: figuring out exactly what’s going on, collecting clues, sifting through evidence, coming up with a hypothesis or a story. A lot of it is technical: choosing the right points, inserting needles to the right depth, stimulating them the right amount; or, choosing the right herbs, calculating an appropriate dosage.

But so far, the outright failures that I’ve seen actually seem to have nothing to do with these things.

Recently a patient came in with pain in her shoulder. She was jittery and sensitive, and very anxious to be rid of her pain so she could get on with her life. I didn’t blame her — constant pain is difficult to ignore. And yet, something strange happened to me when I encountered that anxious energy she brought with her: I absorbed some of it. I found myself making her concerns my concerns.

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A fascinating experience with Japanese acupuncture:

On Friday I ate a pear that a fellow student offered me. I don’t know why I thought it was okay, as I usually avoid anything that has starches or sugar, even natural sugars, due to my hypoglycemia. Quite soon afterward, I started feeling woozy and fatigued. Since I knew I still had a whole afternoon of classes to get through, not to mention a very busy weekend, I became very concerned. I didn’t know what I would do, I just knew I felt like shit.

Just on a whim, I decided to try this non-insertion acupuncture stuff. Toyohari focuses much more on sensitivity to qi, which is right up my alley; but a hard-science part of me is still skeptical of it. But in a pinch, I thought, why not give a shot? So I got out a 40-gauge silver needle and did a tonification technique on my right foot, at Spleen 3.

I felt qi rising up to my head, giving me a sense of “filling” it with energy. Immediately I felt lighter, my head cleared up, and even though I was still tired, I felt much more stable. I was stunned, and just sat there in amazement at the efficacy of one needle that didn’t even pierce the skin.

Good stuff.

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