My Love Affair with Dick Cheney
By Ewen Arnold

For those of you who don't know who Dick Cheney is, he was one of the architects, as President Bush's Vice President, of the Iraq war. He personally profited greatly financially from the war.

Some time ago, I had the idea (I have no idea where it came from, although I'm sure it had something to do with the metta, loving kindness, practices that I had been doing.), to try to send love to someone who I thought it would be impossible to send love to. So I chose Dick Cheney.

I went online and started looking at images of Dick Cheney. I wanted one in which he looked particularly scornful or contemptuous. There were quite a few to choose from.

The one I chose was one of him looking slightly to the left, wearing glasses with a thin black frames. To me, his eyes appeared cold and hard, rather like those of a predator. The left side of his mouth was curled in a wonderfully contemptuous look. I believe a similar picture starred in the TV series "Lie To Me" as an example of contempt.

When I printed it out some ink ran onto the top left of the piece of paper in the form of something like a raven pecking at carrion. It seemed apt. I still have this image now.

I sat in meditation with the image. At first, I had my eyes open, but then, each time I started, after a few minutes I was able to close my eyes and see the picture. At first, it was really difficult to find anything to love. What was in the way? My thoughts and my stories about who this person was. In my mind, I had already arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced him, but there was something in the eyes, even early on in my meditation.

I did some research to try and find something to like about the man. The one thing I found which seemed really important at the time was his support for his daughter Mary who was gay. He even financed his daughter's same sex marriage, although he didn't attend the wedding ceremony. He actually made himself very unpopular with some circles in America by not opposing gay marriage.

There was something in the eyes. I kept coming back to the eyes. If you spend long enough looking into someone's eyes, even in a photograph, things begin to change. Gradually I began to see someone who was suffering.

Gradually, the stories I had began to seem less important. Also, over time, the contemptuous look began to appear more and more like pain. It began to look like an outward expression of something horrible, something diseased inside--something dis-eased. There was still a me here feeling sorry for a him there. The feeling was akin to pity, which is a me-other thing, but things were changing.

I began to realize more and more how my own feelings, my own stories about him, were the barrier that divided us. Also, a bit more subtly, my own feelings of scorn, of superiority, of separation into good and bad, and of right and wrong, began to arise. This is what keeps us small, constricted, and separate from one another. This is caused not by the feelings themselves, but by our denial of them, our unwillingness to acknowledge that we, human beings that we are, have such feelings. And this acknowledgment, this noticing, was what finally allowed me to connect with Uncle Dick. I used the word love rather provocatively in the title. I don't know whether it was love, but the mingling of his pain with my pain was something very similar to love.

When we stop holding our opinions, or, at least, stop holding them so tightly, when we really connect with another person, we are taking a risk. It is the risk that we will change, and without our opinions, we won't know who we are. Our me knows it. Who am I when I'm not in opposition to Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, etc.? This doesn't mean we don't try to change the world. What I think it means is that we try to change the world without being in opposition to the way it is, leaving our judge and jury behind. I'm not sure how this works.