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8
CONVERGENCE

IN 1989, while I was thinking about what to do next, I took the private elevator to a spacious suite on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Astoria, where I was greeted by several members of the family of the late Nathan Cummings, the Sara Lee cheesecake king. The hosts were Cummings’s elegantly dressed, silver-haired son and several of his adult grandchildren. His daughter, Buddy Mayer, who was not physically in the room, participated actively in the conversation from her hospital bed in Chicago via the conference telephone that sat on the coffee table beside the silver tea service. We sat informally on the overstuffed sofas, spreading marmalade on flaky, fragrant croissants as we talked. They welcomed me with unaffected cordiality into their circle.

A few weeks earlier, I had run into a friend on upper Broadway who told me about a new foundation, endowed in his will by Nathan Cummings with more than $300 million in assets. So far, his descendants had chosen four areas for grant making—arts, health, environment, and Jewish life—but they didn’t have a clear idea about what they wanted to do and were looking for a president to help them figure it out. The foundation would give away about $15 million each year. She asked if I would like to be considered.

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It sounded interesting. When I was looking for money to launch CLASP, I had believed that most people who worked in foundations were passive in their work style, arrogant in their interactions, and cautious in their responses. While there are some foundation people who fit that description, I have had enough experience in raising foundation money to know that a foundation officer with courage and imagination can do enormous good, supporting new ideas, convening meetings to explore solutions to pressing problems, helping grantees assemble the resources they need to be effective. I liked the idea of opening to a broader world where beauty, spirit, and intuition were not inherently suspect, of spending time with a mix of artists and rabbis, environmental activists and health advocates. The prospect of working as a foundation president sounded like it might be a welcome respite from the adversarial, argumentative lawyer’s world—and it might be an opportunity to explore the practice of wisdom.

I asked her to put my name forward. “But I’m not hopeful,” I said. “I’ve never even worked for a foundation before.”

“True,” she said, “but you’ve raised a lot of foundation money, so you obviously know how to play the game. And they’ll like your start-up experience.”

A few weeks after preliminary conversations and reference checks, I was invited to meet with the family. When I received their invitation, I reflected on the fact that I never would have been invited to the preliminary interview if I had stayed at Arnold & Porter. My decision to leave had opened more doors than it had closed, although I had no way to know that at the time.

After some small talk with the Cummings family, I raised the issue that was uppermost in my mind. “I know that there are few foundations that are willing to take controversial positions and to commit to a social justice agenda. Those are the foundations that 211have supported my work in the past, and that is the kind of foundation that I would be interested in building.”

Ruth Cummings Sorensen, a granddaughter who was actively engaged in the downtown arts world, replied, “We want to create that unusual kind of foundation—cutting-edge grants and social justice, rather than grants to well-established art museums and research universities. Enough buildings have already been named in honor of our grandfather, from the Stanford campus to Mt. Sinai Hospital on Central Park.”

Her cousin, Rob Mayer, the family member with an M.B.A. and experience working with his grandfather at Sara Lee, seemed less comfortable with my orientation and unconventional résumé. He was good-humored about it, but he obviously valued order and businesslike administration, and was troubled by my lack of financial and managerial experience. “Cutting edge is fine,” he said, “but I want to be certain that the foundation takes only prudent risks and carefully measures the success of its grantees against objective benchmarks.”

“You can see we have some strong opinions and disparate views,” said the elegant Herb Cummings, the founder’s son. “This is not going to be an easy start-up.”

“Every family has its dynamics,” I replied. I could see that the corporate, managerial faction of the family, with Rob as its spokesman, would be aligned against the more risk-taking, venturesome branch that Ruth had spoken for. But, when I remembered the intensity and anger of the arguments at CUNY over race, class, and gender, this fault line and the family’s other disagreements— splits among family branches, intergenerational tensions, and shadows of ancient grievances—seemed manageable.

After I finished my café au lait and was in the oak-paneled elevator going down into the streets of Manhattan again, I had a sense that I could be comfortable with this family. They had much in 212common with my own family of origin, Eastern European Jews arriving in a foreign land at the turn of the twentieth century, with no money but great ambition, who in one generation moved out of poverty. Their connections to Judaism were all over the map, from pious observance to militant secularism, and some of them had explored other spiritual paths; still, they retained a traditional Jewish commitment to social justice. I liked their unpretentiousness, their willingness to acknowledge what they did not know, their openness about their search to find meaning in their own lives. Buddy Mayer, the voice over the speakerphone, told us that marching in Mississippi in the civil rights movement had been one of the most meaningful events of her life. I thought back to my own brief stint in Louisiana and was impressed by the impact that her civil rights work had on her sense of herself. The others in the room had obviously heard her story before; I respected her for underscoring the responsibilities of wealth: “the duty to give back,” she called it.

There was much about this foundation that sounded attractive to me. It was large enough so that its grants could make a real difference, yet not so large—like the Ford or Rockefeller Foundations— that its grants were on the scale of a small country’s annual budget, which made them more visible, cautious, and vulnerable.

On the other hand, I was concerned about becoming a retainer to a rich family, the person who doled out their money to the nonprofit world. I disliked that part of the philanthropic enterprise, which was at its root an exchange relationship—philanthropists negotiating over the size of the sign that recognized their generosity, making large contributions to their children’s prep schools and to the hospitals at which they anticipated being treated.

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I discussed my concerns with some people I knew from my years of foundation fund-raising. Waldemar Nielsen, whose books on foundations had become standard texts, told me: “If you take this job you will have had your last bad meal, and your last honest compliment.” Still, he advised me to take the position. I thought of the New Yorker cartoon showing a man shoveling money out a window; his disapproving supervisor runs up behind him and says, “Just a minute, young man! That’s not the way we do things at the Ford Foundation!”

I reflected on Nielsen’s light remark. There was a real question about how I could take a job like this and not be seduced by the power and money. I would move from our law school in a converted junior high school on Main Street in Queens to the thirty-second floor of a Philip Johnson building on the Upper East Side; from lunches at the kosher pizzeria across from the Law School to the latest Thai/French fusion restaurant off the lobby of our building. The paradox of working for the poor in this setting would become a tension in my new life. The large sums of money we were dispensing would pose challenges to my balance and humility. Everyone was a potential grantee and everyone would want to be my best friend.

At the same time, this foundation definitely presented an opportunity to direct substantial new resources into the solution of important issues. I liked their four program areas: environment, health, arts, and Jewish life. Among them, Jewish life was probably the only one that I would not have chosen myself. As a secular Jew who had not received much nourishment from the rationalistic, desiccated Reform Judaism in which I had been raised, I had never thought deeply about the Jewish spiritual tradition, but I was open to learning more.

The foundation would also present an opportunity for me to learn about artistic creativity, deep ecology, a more just and effective health system—things that interested me but that I had not 214fully explored. I knew that I had changed greatly in my past career moves, and I anticipated that this would move me further along. When the family invited me to become the first president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, I accepted, thinking that this foundation would be an ideal place to work to bring social transformation and the practice of wisdom together.

The announcement of my selection in the New York Times landed on the desks of hundreds of fund-raising professionals.¹ As soon as I moved into the NCF office on Third Avenue, I began to receive requests for meetings from prominent people—university presidents, museum directors, symphony conductors, hospital directors. One of my first visitors was Teddy Kolleck, then the mayor of Jerusalem, who had known Nathan Cummings and was always looking for American Jewish investors for his projects. Until we were able to develop and publish grant guidelines, any fundraiser with imagination could frame an argument for why his or her program fell within one or more of our four program areas. I moved quickly to hire a staff to manage the foundation’s assets and four directors to work with me and the foundation’s board of trustees to develop each of the program areas.

As the foundation president, I became accustomed to the flattering attention of people who thought that all my ideas were good and all my jokes were funny. Especially in the beginning the contrast with CUNY, where every word I spoke was subject to a criticism that could be harsh and unforgiving, was stark. I had to remind myself that the response at Cummings was conditional on my being so close to a large amount of money. I was not entirely successful in resisting the temptation to take it personally.

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In developing NCF’s programs, I drew on my experience in law and advocacy and the Cummings family’s willingness to take on controversial issues. In the arts, for example, the foundation had opportunities to exercise leadership on the issue of arts censorship.

Shortly after we began, I learned that the director of the Cincinnati Museum of Contemporary Art had been arrested and was being criminally prosecuted under pornography laws for an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Although we had not yet established our grant guidelines or hired the program director, it seemed to me that the use of the criminal justice process to censor artistic expression should be a matter of fundamental concern to a foundation with an arts program. I flew to Cincinnati, saw the exhibit, and met with the director and his board chair. Although the story of the criminal prosecution had received national attention, they had not received support from any foundations, museums, or arts organizations, and they felt entirely isolated in facing criminal charges and taking on the conservative establishment in an important skirmish in the culture wars.

As I sat down to lunch with these people who were on the firing line, I realized how grateful they were that I had come to look into their situation and offer support. The director said, “I am actually facing criminal charges because of an exhibit I installed in the museum. I can’t believe that I have not heard from any other museum director or any of the established foundations that have supported the arts.” It seemed clear to me that Mapplethorpe’s exhibit fell within the protection of the First Amendment and that the prosecution was unjustifiable.

My first grant recommendation to the board was to establish a legal defense fund for the museum and its director. The board 216approved the grant, additional supporters came forward, and the defendants were acquitted after a trial.²

We made a number of grants to resist art censorship and promote public support for accessible and public art. When the Brooklyn Museum was under attack from Mayor Giuliani for displaying paintings that the mayor considered impious and indecent, we organized a small group of foundations in the arts area to support the museum, financially and through our defense of their right to display controversial art.³ I was surprised that many foundations and museums failed to come to the aid of the Brooklyn Museum. I attributed it, in part, to their unwillingness—and the unwillingness of their trustees—to stick their necks out and risk the wrath of a famously vindictive mayor with whom they had multiple, complicated relationships. This was a reminder for me of the extent of the interconnections between the world of politics and business, on the one hand, and foundations and art patronage, on the other.

I also drew on my experience in advocacy when I began to explore the creation of a new think tank that would develop a public policy agenda for the new century grounded in social justice, sustainabil-ity, and community values. After a long gestation period, we located foundation partners and established Demos: A Network for Ideas & Action.⁴ Now in its sixth year, with offices in four cities, it has become a leading center for research and advocacy for democratic renewal, effective government programs, and economic equality.

Robert Redford, a serious environmentalist as well as an actor and arts entrepreneur, came to the foundation to discuss his planned conference on global warming, which was at that point a still-controversial hypothesis, bringing scientists and policymakers from around the world to his conference center at Sundance. Arriving 217at our office in a cream-colored suit and a lime green silk T-shirt, he created a considerable stir.

I agreed to participate in the conference, the first meeting I ever attended where my presence was justified by the money I had access to rather than my knowledge, insight, or experience. There were times when people genuinely wanted my advice, my input, my partnership on a project; I had, after all, some relevant experience and a capacity to develop creative responses to hard problems. But for as long as I remained at the foundation, I was always valued, at least in part, for the checks that I could sign. And some people could never look at me without seeing a flashing dollar sign on my forehead.

Redford’s Sundance conference was a wonderful opportunity for me to be educated on global warming by some of the most knowledgeable scientists and policymakers in the world. I became an early convert to the view that global climate disruption, a more accurate term, is a serious problem that poses a great threat to planetary well-being. I returned to my office from the conference to face a dilemma of how a foundation could use a relatively modest amount of grants—perhaps $500,000 per year—to deal with a problem of such enormous dimensions.

With the leadership of our environmental program director, we decided to focus on transportation, a sector where the greenhouse gases that cause global warming are generated in large quantities. It also was an area where innovations in technology and public policy could dramatically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions. It was a large problem but small enough that we could have an impact. The transportation issue was a good one because it required us and our grantees to see an environmental issue not in isolation but embedded in a complex political, economic, and cultural matrix. We funded transportation specialists in environmental advocacy organizations and technological innovation to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

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We drew together a coalition of other funders and created the Surface Transportation Policy Project, with an office in Washington, D.C., to coordinate the work of the environmentalists and provide a steady, well-informed capital presence on transportation issues, from highway construction to mass transit.⁵I was pleased by the connection between this project and the environmental advocacy we had done at CLASP. The public interest law pioneers had developed the skills to influence key environmental issues— through the courts, the administrative agencies, the media, and Congress. Their accumulated knowledge and experience meant that there were committed and sophisticated advocates to work on transportation policy and other aspects of global climate disruption.

The environmentalists’ alliance to develop a more energy-efficient transportation policy won some major victories. But it could not catalyze the major shift in American life, especially alternatives to the gas-guzzling automobile, that will be necessary to reduce our generation of greenhouse gases. There has not been any fundamental move toward a green transportation policy, and few Americans have changed their lifestyle to reduce significantly the amount of greenhouse gases they generate.

Our Jewish Life program officer, Rachel Cowan, was a rabbi, a convert to Judaism, and a veteran of the civil rights movement. Like the members of the Cummings family, she had an unusual background for a leader in Jewish philanthropy, and our grants reflected their unconventional perspectives. A few years before she joined the foundation staff, her husband Paul, an influential writer, had died of cancer. She had been disappointed by how little the Jewish community had to offer to support their spiritual needs during his illness and as his death grew near. She brought to the foundation an interest 219in building the field of Jewish healing, developing and promoting a distinctively Jewish way to provide support for the nonphysical suffering that is a dimension of serious illness both for the sick person and for those who are close to the sick person. With the enthusiastic support of the NCF board of trustees, she and I worked together to create the Jewish Healing Center, which has catalyzed a Jewish healing movement in communities across the country.⁶

Our work led us to think more generally about supporting the movement for deepening Jewish spirituality. With the inspiring leadership of Rabbi Zalman Schachter, Jewish Renewal communities were springing up around the country. Rabbi Michael Lerner and Tikkun Magazine were energizing spiritual activism. Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man was leading a revival of Jewish meditation.⁷ Jews who had found the religion spiritually arid were returning to their faith. As yet, the highly structured and traditional Jewish philanthropies had not acknowledged this shift and were not supporting it. We felt there was an important opportunity for the Cum-mings Foundation to have a significant impact.

I found myself in rewarding dialogues with rabbis and other spiritually engaged Jews. The foundation made grants to support their efforts to bring Jewish insights to modern problems, from environmental protection to feminism and the role of women. NCF grants supported the spiritual growth of rabbis and congregations. After the foundation’s trustees visited Russia, meeting with Russian Jews who were just learning what Judaism was, we began programs to support Jews who intended to stay in Russia, at a time when the organized Jewish community was insisting that emigration was the only viable policy.

The foundation was able to support this renaissance in Jewish spiritual life and to develop new institutions to encourage Jews to pursue their commitments to ecological wholeness and social justice in a Jewish context. Rachel was an inspiring guide, and many 220of the Cummings family members found their own ways to reconnect with their Judaism, finding personal growth in their engagement with the foundation’s work. I also found myself going more deeply into my Jewish connection. My exploration of other spiritual paths enriched my participation in the Jewish work.

When I received a letter soliciting foundation support to bring a group of rabbis together with the Dalai Lama for a conference about points of intersection in their traditions, I was immediately intrigued. Unprecedented in the long history of the two religions, the dialogue held promise of being a significant exchange. We made a small grant to support the meeting.

I went to Dharamsala with the rabbis and observed the rich conversation and the ways in which a deep mutual respect for the spiritual traditions emerged from their interaction. I was absorbed by the relationships with the rabbis and intrigued by their dialogues among themselves, across denominations. Most of them seemed to open to the wisdom of the Dalai Lama’s perspective without feeling that they had to constrain their engagement because of the chosen people rubric or a special Jewish relationship with God. I had never felt so connected to my Jewish roots. I was also impressed by the Dalai Lama—his wisdom and presence, and the compassionate way that he held the suffering of his people and the Jewish people.

I persuaded Rodger Kamenetz, a poet who attended the gathering, to write The Jew in the Lotus, a book that chronicled the interchange and reached a large audience, continuing to enrich the understanding of both Judaism and Buddhism.⁸ He described the American Jews who had found spiritual enrichment in Buddhist practice. I felt that I was part of that community, and that my exposure to meditation and Buddhist ideas had opened the Jewish world to me.

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The Cummings Foundation developed a unique blend of grants, integrating support for forceful, cutting-edge advocacy with support for meditation and other inner work. This grant-making perspective came, in part, from my experience in Dharamsala and my evolving understanding of inner work as a way to support and deepen good work in the world, as I drew together the poles of my previous work.

It became increasingly clear that Jewish Life was more than just one out of four grant-making areas. Since the foundation had declared that the Jewish heritage was central to its mission, it opened up the sphere of spiritual inquiry in all the areas of our program. In most secular environments such inquiry is, by tacit understanding, foreclosed. Secular institutions leave little space for spiritual dialogue; the language of secularism is a barrier to introducing the language of the heart and the spirit. Because we had a religious identification, we were freed from that rigidity. Once we were liberated from the secular limitation, we were not bound to exclusive reliance on the Jewish perspective. We could range more broadly. We had the advantage of the rich Jewish tradition—but we were unlike many other insular Jewish foundations by virtue of the secular dimensions of our mission. We had an unusual opportunity to deal with issues of life and death, illness and health, human responsibility for the ecosphere—in all their dimensions, secular and spiritual.

Since the foundation had a Jewish commitment and a rabbi on our staff, we were an unusually receptive place for the dialogue between spirit and social justice. Because several of the trustees and most of the staff were not Jewish, we had an incentive to speak about spiritual matters in an ecumenical manner, to find a language that allowed us to find the wisdom that lies at the heart of Judaism, many 222other religions, and secular humanism. It was this institutional culture that led the foundation to make the initial grant for the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. At that point, there was no systematic effort to encourage religions to bring the weight and depth of their traditions to bear on issues of environmental protection. Cummings saw the importance and potential power of such an initiative, and we stipulated it must reach out to the more conservative religious groups as well as the liberal denominations. Many of the trustees welcomed this direction in the foundation’s work. Rob Mayer, with his more managerial orientation and analytic clarity, would often raise probing, skeptical questions about some of our grants to promote inner exploration and spirituality. I became accustomed to his challenges on these matters—and I tried hard to think about outcome measures, even for grants where outcomes were likely to be uncertain, subtle, and unpredictable. But I insisted that our grants could not be limited to projects that would yield measurable outcomes over a short period of time. Other members of the board were open to my view, and Rob was always willing to support the board’s decision. His tenacious probing created a dynamic tension on the board that made our program more rigorous and effective, while it made our process more stressful.

As we were thinking through our health program, I invited Daniel Goleman to the office for a conversation. He was a New York Times reporter on psychology and health, and later became the author of the global best-seller Emotional Intelligence.⁹ He had written his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard on meditation and Buddhist psychology, after doing research in an Indian ashram.

The entrepreneurial Goleman was delighted to be drawn into the NCF conversation about our health program. “The relationship 223between the mind and body is an area of growing therapeutic importance,” he said. “Scientists are investigating the many ways that mind states affect physical health. High stress causes heart attacks. Pain can be reduced by meditation practice. Suffering at the end of life can be managed by treating dying people with a compassion that is grounded in meditation.”

His comments intrigued me, and I thought about the connection between my own experience with meditation and the emerging therapeutic applications he described. I began to see the way that my work in the foundation could draw on and reinforce my meditation practice. Through Dan, I came to meet some of the pioneers who had studied with Buddhist masters, in Asia and the United States, and began teaching meditation in the West. Among them were Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg, who spent years in southern India, Thailand, and Burma, then established the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts; Joan Halifax, a Zen priest and anthropologist in New Mexico; Paul Gorman, a senior vice president at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, who collaborated with Ram Dass on their classic book, How Can I Help?; and Mirabai Bush, another collaborator with Ram Dass, on the book Compassion in Action.¹⁰

I met Ram Dass himself. He was living in a cottage in Marin County, where we sat together in his hot tub while he reviewed his incredible journey from a brilliant academic career at Harvard through a complete spiritual reorientation. As Richard Alpert, he had been the youngest tenured professor in the Harvard Psychology Department; then he began his experiments with LSD, left Harvard, and traveled to India, where he met the guru who put him on the spiritual path. “He told me that my life should be given to helping others, to relieving suffering. There are different spiritual paths. Mine is the path of service.” Consistent with his understanding of that mission, he was happy to help me think through the ways 224in which we might bring the wisdom of inner work to the world of social action.

I began to meet with these wisdom teachers and others, an informal and shifting group, with people coming and going, as I worked with staff and trustees to shape the foundation’s program. Sometimes we called ourselves the Compassionate Action Working Group, sometimes the Spirit and Action Working Group, sometimes, whimsically, the Wisdom Party. As we met through the early years of the nineties, we talked about our desire to be of service in these unsettled times. We asked ourselves hard questions. How could we have the courage to confront the underlying structures that led to deep injustice in our country and in the world? What fear of failure or isolation held us back from making the sacrifices necessary to address the deepest challenges? We acknowledged our attraction to the world of power, and our reluctance to give up our connections to people in power. Longtime meditators and respected teachers, their modesty and commitment to service gave me a new model for a way to be in the world—committed to serving others, cultivating wisdom, being open to changing themselves, and exposing their own vulnerability.

I found that our conversations helped me resist the temptations of power inherent in my work, and also helped me bring the spiritual dimension forward among my foundation colleagues, where there was a strong tendency to be secular, pragmatic, and cautious. I sometimes discussed Cummings Foundation programs in the Working Group, but more important than addressing specific projects, these sessions helped me stay devoted to seeking the deepest wisdom available to me and bringing it into the work of the foundation.

I had stumbled into an extraordinary circle of wise and dedicated people. The Buddhist term sangha refers to the community of people who support each other in their meditation, study, and effort to bring wisdom to their service in the world. We all need such support. 225Some of the Cummings Foundation’s most creative initiatives were nourished indirectly by the Working Group’s free-floating conversations.

Goleman urged the foundation to consider a health program that supported mind-body approaches, involving meditation and Eastern psychology; they had significant therapeutic potential but were unlikely to receive the support they deserved in the world of mainstream medicine. Since few foundations had moved into this area and the science had begun to look promising, it seemed a natural area for our support. This was especially important because research efforts and treatment resources were increasingly moving in the opposite direction—toward biological explanations of illness, and treatment of the patient as a collection of symptoms, not as a whole person with emotional and spiritual needs.

The NCF investigation confirmed Goleman’s enthusiastic assessment. In addition to making grants to the explorers who were developing this work, we drew together a small group that met at the NCF office to share information and think about ways to develop the field. One critical issue was that the mind-body interventions had not received the recognition and legitimacy that was due. There was too little public understanding, and the medical establishment was skeptical.

The Fetzer Institute, a foundation in Kalamazoo, Michigan, headed by Rob Lehman, shared our interest in mind-body healing.¹¹ NCF and Fetzer became decade-long partners in the work, developing ways to bring the subject to a larger public. Rob and I brought the project to Bill Moyers, who had a unique place in American television journalism and a skill at getting below the surface of current events, finding the story that hadn’t yet broken, often exploring the 226connections of spirit and public policy. Lehman, Moyers, and I met for sandwiches around Moyers’s conference table. He had a lot of questions: Was there really enough to report on? Was it solidly grounded? Were there articulate, compelling people working in the field? We made a small grant to his nonprofit production company to permit him to investigate these questions. He decided to go forward, and prepared a proposal for a five-hour series for public television, Healing and the Mind.¹²

Cummings and Fetzer jointly funded the series, highlighting the work of some of the leaders in the mind-body field, people who were treating illness and health disorders as a complicated challenge to the mind-body organism, not simply a biological matter. Cancer, pain management, and heart disease were all illnesses being effectively dealt with. Moyers’s sensitive treatment of these matters was a turning point, leading to a popular television series and a best-selling book; in large part because of his presentation, most doctors today are exposed to mind-body thinking as a part of their medical education.

The most important outgrowth of the Working Group meeting was the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Mirabai Bush, a senior meditation teacher who had been a charter member of our Working Group, agreed to take the leadership in developing the Center, a new organization to bring the contemplative dimension to mainstream institutions in order to build a wiser and more compassionate world. A number of meditation centers had been created around the country, teaching meditation in a particular tradition, most often Buddhism, but they did not focus on the general benefits of meditation if the practice were more widely diffused in mainstream institutions. The Center would build on their work and present 227meditation in a secular form, permitting people who were not interested in a new religious commitment to explore the benefit of meditation in their lives. This was a natural extension of my inner work. I had discovered in my own experience the benefit of meditation in making my work more effective, and helping me cultivate clarity of vision, compassion, and a sense of balance.

Over the past ten years, the Center has conducted meditation programs for lawyers, social activists, corporate executives, and journalists. Together with the American Council of Learned Societies, it has awarded more than a hundred fellowships to permit professors to introduce contemplative practice into their teaching in a variety of disciplines—from architecture to literature, from law to philosophy. During this period, meditation has become more widely accepted and understood, and significant scientific findings have indicated that it can have important health benefits and a dramatic impact on brain function. As chairman of the Center’s board of trustees I have been actively involved in its programs, which in turn has deepened my commitment to my own meditation practice.¹³

Global warming and other major environmental challenges will respond only to a shift in the deep structure of values, a fundamental shift in consciousness—toward the recognition of interdependence among people and with all living beings—leading to changes in the way we live in the industrialized countries. The leaders of the environmental movement and others will have to reach a new level of consciousness if they are to be able to imagine and inaugurate the dramatic changes that will be necessary to respond effectively to the massive challenges ahead.

I thought that meditation was a technique that might open environmentalists to a new consciousness, to looking into the connec- 228

tions between human beings and the natural world—more deeply than at the level of intellectual theory or legal doctrine. Contemplative, slow inquiry could drop down to a level at which interconnections could be felt more in the body than understood by the mind. I went to see Joan Halifax, an environmentalist, a Zen priest, and a member of our Working Group. I proposed to Joan that we work together to offer a meditation retreat for environmental activists.

At the retreat I had attended with Thich Nhat Hanh while I was dean of the CUNY Law School, I had been moved by his vision of a world held together in a network of mutual dependence that he referred to as interbeing. He highlighted the reciprocal relationships of all elements of the natural world—the connections that unite the dying flower, decaying to nourish the soil, to newly sprouting flowers. I heard his teachings framed in a meditative silence that permitted me to take them in at a deep level. Many hours of focused silence had heightened my receptivity to new concepts and points of interconnection.

I thought that a meditation retreat led by Thay could have a deep influence on many people in the environmental movement. Joan agreed to take the lead in the venture. She developed the plan, and we funded it. More than three hundred people attended the five-day retreat, led by Thay, Joan, and Peter Mathiessen, the writer and Zen priest. It was an inspiring event.

The teachings invited contemplative attention to interbeing— our reliance for life and health on clean air and water, the inevitable passage from birth to death, the joy we can take from the natural beauty of the world around us, the need for respect and stewardship, the literal understanding that the human body is the aggregate of water and small amounts of other natural substances.

The participants were people who lived in the world of words, committed to advocacy efforts to protect the environment. Here 229they were together, with their primary commitment to looking inward in reflective silence. Only after they had spent days in this inward process did they begin to build bridges back to their ordinary lives, between their meditative insights and their advocacy.

I met Grove Burnett at the environmental retreat. An environmental lawyer in New Mexico, Grove returned home encouraged to start a meditation retreat for activists on a ranch in the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. He wanted to bring environmentalists together to retreat in silence, to restore their energy and deepen their connection to the natural world. It was just the kind of thing that I had hoped to see emerge, and the foundation supported it financially.

When Grove was ready to hold his first retreat for environmentalists, I decided to make the pilgrimage despite the daunting trip to get there. The Vallecitos Mountain Refuge was northwest of Santa Fe, and the last fifteen miles were over unpaved mountain roads.¹⁴ There was no electricity or telephone. I was particularly drawn to meditation in the wilderness. It connected for me with my experiences of nature in the lakes of Ontario, the valleys of West Virginia, and the Adirondack Mountains. Here was an opportunity to deepen my connection to the natural world without distraction. It was a place where the human imprint was hardly visible and the magnitude and grandeur of the land would fill my consciousness completely—the rocky cliffs, high grass meadows, ponderosa pine, and the wild, unpredictable weather.

We slept in tents and met in the old log ranch house. Joseph Goldstein, the lead teacher on the retreat, was a tall, loose-jointed man who had grown up in his parents’ bungalow colony in the Catskills. I found his talks about the Buddhist teachings, incongruously punctuated 230with Borscht Belt humor, accessible and engaging. It was interesting to receive teachings from a contemporary, someone from my own culture. I was struck by his presence and his wisdom.

The retreat was a profound experience. I had never been so long in so wild a place, maintaining a mindful awareness that made the silence and beauty more tangible. I was alive in my senses, seeing the sun rise and set day after day, feeling the afternoon heat and the frosty cold of the high-altitude nights.

Joseph’s teaching focused attention on the present moment. At first, I was slow to give up familiar thought patterns—letting my mind wander, planning for the anticipated future and reliving past memories, but after a time, past and future fell away. When thoughts entered my mind, I let them come and go, without attachment or evaluation. I had heard these instructions before, but I was able to respond more fully as each day passed in this remote and overpowering place. The uninterrupted passage of time and the grand, unfamiliar surroundings made it easier to leave my traditional modes of thought and behavior.

Each evening Joseph gave a talk, introducing some of the wisdom teachings of the Buddhist tradition. We gathered in the log house that was the center of the ranch and watched the light of the setting sun slowly fade from the deep green meadows and the rocky cliffs in the distance as he spoke. A skillful teacher, he left aside the exotic elements tied to the specific Asian cultures in which these teachings had first appeared, cutting directly to the more universal core. The teaching about impermanence was reinforced by my own experience of the thoughts that passed through my mind and then disappeared, and by the never-ending changes in the high-mountain sky. The teaching of the interconnectedness of all beings was easier to understand when I was so deeply embedded in a wild place, far from the noise and hurry of my hyperurban life in Manhattan. My life was close to the essentials.

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Joseph advised us to settle into the practice and observe what came up next, to refrain from making judgments of the experience that would interfere with the direct experience itself. I found that the stillness of the place was generating an inner stillness in me that made me more receptive to his gentle suggestions. I was able to suspend my critical faculty for much of the time, and simply be present in the experience, observing what was happening without judgment.

After a week in the stillness of the retreat, I took an early morning walk among the immense ponderosa pines as the sky was just beginning to glow in the East. I walked beside the Vallecitos River, at first a little stream that meandered through the meadow. After a half-mile of walking upstream, I was at the point where the river turns to frothing rapids as it comes roaring out of a narrow canyon, between two rocky cliffs. I sat down in a grassy spot beside a deep pool, savored the solitude, closed my eyes, and connected with my breath.

The roar of the flowing water blocked out all other sounds. I found myself in a place of deep inner peace, fully present in the moment. I felt myself a part of this place, not as a tourist or observer but rather as integral a part of the moment as the river or the fallen trees, the boulders or the grasses. It was a wordless space, and I felt myself taking it in more through my body than through my mind. It was a genuinely new experience—total presence, clarity of awareness, an uncritical sense of being at home, nothing to be done. Time fell away, and I sat without any sense of its passage.

Sitting there, I was exactly where I belonged; all my decisions had been right, though some had seemed doubtful at the time—to begin my meditation practice, to stick to it even when it seemed pointless, to accept the job at the foundation, to come on this retreat in a remote corner of the world, to get up this morning in the predawn chill and find my way to this isolated spot. It all seemed 232perfect. And I had the sense that I could trust my inner knowing to guide me in the future, that I had access to a wisdom that was a powerful and reliable ally to the finely tuned intellect that has been so potent a guide and asset in the past.

On the last day of the retreat, I took my notebook up to a high meadow and let myself reengage my analytic mind while I was still vibrating from my early morning experience by the river. I began to write down some thoughts about the role of meditation practice in cultivating wisdom, about the way that meditative silence can clear a space for wisdom to arise, and about the core of wisdom that Joseph’s teachings had exposed—impermanence, interconnection, and compassion. These did not feel like lessons that came from the outside; rather it seemed that he had helped me connect with things that I already knew but had somehow forgotten. I realized I had a need to embrace the solitude that allowed wisdom to emerge. Our foundation could be the right place to work on this project. I felt confirmed in the thought that I now had begun to walk a wisdom path, and that the cultivation of wisdom would become central to my life and work.

When the foundation moved its office to a nineteenth-century industrial building facing Lincoln Center, we had an opportunity to renovate a large empty space. It is significant that we placed a meditation room close to the heart of the offices. It was a room for silent reflection and renewal, where some staff members would come together midafternoon for a period of silent meditation. Spatially and temporally, we were opening a space in which wisdom could arise. In renovating the building we also made a decision to leave the immense concrete support columns open and visible, a reminder of the reality that supported our lives and of the beauty in 233simple things. The treatment of space was sufficiently startling and open so that people coming into the place were challenged to think outside of their usual patterns. When our grantees or applicants were in the office at meditation time, we invited them to join us. It was a novel experience for many of them. Both staff and grantees received a creative jolt from the space where we met and the fact that we made a significant commitment to silence and meditation.

The members of the Cummings family entered into the creation of the foundation with a willingness to go deeply into the process, to embrace the possibility that they would be changed by their participation in its activities and in their interaction with grantees. They were not simply analyzing social problems and allocating grants to support solutions. They were prepared to let their experience in NCF affect the shape of their own lives. I was not surprised that many of them underwent profound spiritual shifts: one entered rabbinical school, a second emigrated to Israel, a third undertook a deep meditation practice, a fourth enrolled in a series of in-depth programs designed to develop his full human potential. Even Buddy Mayer, the secular doyenne of the board, was willing to sit gamely and patiently in the studio of a senior Jewish meditation teacher and push her own capacities to look inward and find a place of inner peace.

Unlike the eminent and successful members of many foundation boards, they did not enter the process with the confident assumption that they knew the answers, that their knowledge and experience were adequate to shape and guide an effective grants program. Some of the family, individuals who would not have been selected to join a nonfamily foundation board because of their relative lack of worldly recognition, were extremely effective board members precisely because they were open to new learning. Some had emerged from their own life crises with a deep interest in spiritual matters. Others had gone through the changes of the sixties with an openness that led to spiritual exploration. They were pleased to 234be in a foundation setting where this experience could be honored and expressed.

The foundation’s early success in its grant programs integrating the inner and outer dimensions had created something distinctive and important in the foundation world, with few precedents. And it was exciting for me personally to see the different pieces of my life come together; my early explorations—yoga at CLASP, winter camping in the Adirondacks—formerly tangential to my real work, were now being seamlessly woven into the most creative part of my work life.

Our work in meditation and contemplative awareness was not greeted with uniform enthusiasm by all trustees. Some objected that our support for inner work was ungrounded and unconnected to the other program objectives. Their objections were also tied to the rising enthusiasm in the philanthropic world for clearly articulated corporate-type decision processes and evaluation standards. A frequent claim made in the philanthropic world was that foundations would be more effective if they made themselves more like corporations. Corporations had an easy way of judging their effectiveness, by their bottom line, by their profitability, by their financial return to shareholders. Philanthropy obviously had no such bottom line. But if a philanthropy had clear and quantifiable goals—the number of poor children going through a specific program, or a certain number of exhibits by new artists to be shown at a particular museum, for example—there could be a relatively simple process for evaluating success.

NCF was in a less concrete area, trying to change people’s consciousness about the environment, bringing a deeper meditative reflectiveness into the professions, or alerting young physicians to the complex interrelationship between mind and body. We could 235establish evaluation criteria, but they inevitably would be diffuse, long-term, and unpersuasive to doubters.

The philanthropic sector, I felt, was fundamentally different from the corporate sector. Foundations should be home to wisdom, compassion, and interdependence. The norms of aggressive, competitive, and materialistic behavior that dominate the corporate sector could easily overtake foundations, but it would be a great loss. In a world that is becoming increasingly dominated by free market ideology, it is important to have a sector in which a different set of norms holds sway.

I remembered a conversation I had had with Ralph Siu during a visit to Washington, D.C. I told him about our transportation program at NCF. I was frustrated that our grantees weren’t having more success. They were on the defensive, trying to protect air quality standards from dilution. We set benchmarks in our grant agreements, and our grantees weren’t meeting them.

“Well, these are hard times,” he said. “You can’t be too attached to specific outcome measures, and you don’t want your grantees to be. They should be flexible and responsive to subtle shifts in their relationships. They should be supple and able to flow with the currents. This is a long-term effort. You can’t be too attached to outcomes that are measurable in the short term.”

At that time, when some foundations were calling themselves “venture capitalists of the nonprofit sector” and asking nonprofit organizations to prepare “business plans,” I was under that kind of pressure from some of my trustees. I was happy to have different advice from someone who had managed billion-dollar research budgets.

This debate frequently surfaced in our board meetings, explicitly and implicitly, with Rob Mayer taking the lead. There was never a conclusion to the discussion. We all agreed that we would evaluate our grants as effectively as possible while resisting the temptation 236to limit our grant making to those areas where hard-edged evaluation would be possible. The general thrust of the board was to continue our probes into the spiritual dimension of life and to draw together the connections between those explorations and the vigorous commitment to social justice and sustainability that characterized the foundation’s grants.

I brought to these debates the fruits of my inner work, a growing capacity to listen receptively to people with whom I disagreed, a willingness to question and let go of my own dearly held beliefs. I thought back to my days at CLASP, how easy it had been for me to demonize the people who disagreed with me, to identify fully with my current causes, to grow impatient with delays. I had come a long way, and I felt that my meditation and other inner work had helped me respond to difficulties and challenges with equanimity and grace. I still had a long way to go—practicing wisdom is an unending voyage, not a destination.

I discovered that an advantage of being in a family foundation is that the crises of ordinary life—death, illness, and divorce—were never far from our experience, and these crises were dealt with and discussed. One turning point was the diagnosis of Herb Cummings, one of the senior members of our board, with a serious cancer. As the family struggled to cope with his illness and rapid decline, it deeply affected the way we thought about our grants programs. The health program, for example, undertook to look at the way death and dying are treated in America and made grants to support efforts to handle them more humanely. It made grants to address the extraordinary burdens that serious illness imposes on family caregivers.

Midway through my decade of leadership at the foundation, I was called one day to join Susan at her doctor’s office. A lump had 237appeared in her left groin. The doctor tried to be reassuring and positive. Two weeks later we went early one morning to Lennox Hospital for a surgical biopsy, and the doctor told us that Susan had Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Suddenly, we were ourselves at the center of a health crisis—the grants we had been making in the health area were close to home. We were living in the middle of the emotionally fraught world of cancer.

Susan’s cancer was a slow-growing type that did not constitute an immediate threat to her life, but it was resistant to cure. During the next years, we went through alternating periods of radiation and chemotherapy, bracketed by long periods when she was symptom-free and we had only to deal with our anxiety. Altogether, her illness created a fundamental change in our lives.

I thought about the poignant Woody Allen story, “The Shallowest Man.”¹⁵ Lenny Mendel, the protagonist, was so frightened by his friend’s cancer that he could not even visit him in the hospital. I was afraid that I would be unable to engage Susan’s disease and become a full partner in dealing with it. I had never been much of a caregiver, and I was going to have to develop a new set of emotional skills.

But I found that Susan and I were able to draw on our shared experiences of contemplative practice, and we became closer as we joined in the management of the disease—in its physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. We went together to doctors’ appointments and slogged across town in the midwinter slush for daily radiation treatments. Later, I sat with her during the long hours while chemicals were dripped into her arm, lived through the nausea and exhaustion that followed the chemotherapy. And we developed strategies to celebrate and rejoice during those periods when she was feeling herself, strong and energetic. When it was time to buy a wig, we went to the wig store with our grown children, and we all tried on wigs, clowning and improvising comic 238sketches. And when it turned out that Susan preferred to be bald most of the time rather than wear the wig, she looked beautiful with no hair, and we felt a kinship with the men and women who were bald by choice, a fairly common fashion statement in Manhattan.

Susan, who had been meditating since our retreat with Thay, found that meditation practice helped her face her new reality, the periods of uncertainty and the debilitating treatment, with less despair and anxiety—and so did I. Meditation practice starts from a recognition that suffering is an inevitable component of the human condition, and we had been reflecting on that reality for years. Our pain and anxiety were reduced by staying fully present with what was happening and not exacerbating the situation by clinging to a particular way that we wanted things to be. I was inspired by the thought of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, confronting the suffering of the Tibetan refugees with compassion and good cheer. Susan was part of a supportive community, people who had the capacity to deal with her crisis with love, clarity, and generosity. I was able to reach out, acknowledge my need, and accept their support, without any pretense of autonomy or strength. We were both able to rejoice in her periods of vitality and strength, when the disease was dormant.

Susan’s cancer became a central part of my reality during my last five years at the foundation. It made my inner work more essential—morning meditation practice and annual ten-day retreats at Vallecitos. It made the work at the foundation more precious. The Nathan Cummings Foundation was an important leader in drawing together the elements of wisdom and compassion in a foundation’s grants and work, and I was fortunate to be there to promote it and to benefit from it.