Picked up a little book by Thich Nhat Hanh while I’m in the middle of all the wars in A Clash of Kings. As much as the highly descriptive battle scenes fly in, out, around, and over my head, I come across this “war scene” from The Miracle of Mindfulness:    

“If you care so much about your people, Mr. Hanh, why are you here? If you care so much for the people who are wounded, why don’t you spend your time with them?” At this point my recollection of his words is replaced by the memory of the intese anger which overwhelmed me.

When he finished, I looked toward Nhat Hanh in bewilderment. What could he - or anyone - say? The spirit of the war itself had suddenly filled the room, and it seemed hard to breathe.

There was silence. Then Nhat Hahn began to speak - quietly, with deep calm, indeed with a sense of personal caring for the man who had just damned him. The words seemed like rain falling on fire. “If you want the tree to grow,” he said, “it won’t help to water the leaves. You have to water the roots. Many of the roots of the war are here, in your country. To help the people who are to be bombed, to try to protect them from this suffering, I have to come here.”

The atmosphere in the room was transformed. In the man’s fury we had experienced our own furies; we had seen the world as through a bomb bay. In Nhat Hahn’s response we had experienced an alternate possibility: the possibility (here brought to Christians by a Buddhist and to Americans by an “enemy”) of overcoming hatred with love, of breaking the seemingly endless chain reaction of violence throughout human history.

But after his response, Nhat Hahn whispered something to the chairman and walked quickly from the room. Sensing something was wrong, I followed him out. It was a cool, clear night. Nhat Hahn stood on the sidewalk beside the church parking lot. He was struggling for air - like someone who had been deeply underwater and who had barely managed to swim to the surface before I dared ask him how he was or what had happened.

Nhat Hahn explained that comments had been terribly upsetting. He had wanted to respond to him with anger. So he made himself breathe deeply and very slowly in order to find a way to respond with calm and understanding. But the breathing had been too slow and too deep.

“Why not be angry with him,” I asked. “Even pacifists have a right to be angry.”

“If it were just myself, yes. But I am here to speak for Vietnamese peasants. I have to show them what we can be at our best.”

The moment was an important one in my life, one pondered again and again since then. For one thing, it was the first time I had realized there was a connection between the way one breathes and the way one responds to the world around.