Ngamo Palep, and That Time I was Arrested

Check out the awesome ngamo palep I made last weekend. After browsing our bookcases for something to re-read, I chose our two large Tibetan cookbooks. Over the years, we’ve been thinning our herd of books, but these two will never go. Yes, practically everything in these books can be found online, but I prefer the touch and tenability of a book over a computer or phone screen any day.

I chose to make this delicious Tibetan sweet bread, which I’ve made many times over the years. I love the guilelessness of a simple, warm, homemade bread for breakfast. American breakfasts can get complicated. A big bowl of steaming chai and some fresh bread from the oven or griddle makes me feel warm, satisfied, and happy.

I was arrested several years ago during a heated animal rights protest. The charge was slight; a bush-league misdemeanor. To this day, I wear this arrest as a badge of honor. We were doing important work - alerting the public to a case of utterly cruel animal exploitation.

The court ordered me to perform community service. Given a choice of penalties, I elected to bake bread for and work at a local community center for a total of 30 hours. I was required to log my time baking and serving bread to the people who came to the center for free meals. All of these people had been disenfranchised by our society in one way or another - the elderly, infirm, disabled, struggling single mothers and their children, the mentally challenged, and not surprisingly, people of color.

I’ll be forever grateful for the day I found myself handcuffed and carried off, because the consequences of it brought me to that community center. I honed my bread-baking skills and had the privilege to serve it to these people. And beyond that, I received a life-changing lesson in how to let go of fear.

I was raised in a First World home with First World problems, which, when you do the math, are not really problems. I attended competitive private New York schools, summered in the country, rode horses, got my ears pierced, and had plenty to eat. I didn’t know homelessness. I didn’t know people of color intimately. My health and happiness was looked after, and when I grew into a teenage girl with a taste for pretty, useless things, my parents indulged me on that too.

Face-time with mentally ill, disabled, elderly, and brown- and black-skinned people was nil. Naturally, my lack of understanding rendered itself into fear. It wasn’t until I was in college that I experienced diversity and confronted my own demons and the faults of my upbringing. And it wasn’t until the arrest that I found out what I had been missing all that time.

My punishment turned out to be a blessing too big to quantify. As I talked with and became close to many of the people who ate the bread I’d made, I evolved in a way I never had before. I learned to let go of fear and embrace curiosity. I had conversations and made connections with different people – people who didn’t see the world as I did, people who came from a different neck of the woods.

These are the things I learned through bread-baking and service: human beings all want the same thing. The key to our inner worlds and our inner strength is not found in some complex algorithm or deep psychoanalysis or a self-help retreat; it’s found in letting go of fear and embracing diversity. The moment we release any racist or class identity and latch onto humanity instead, the fear goes away and all the possibilities become endless.

Nature doesn’t care about race or class. That’s all man-made. Nature is into diversity, with the goal of strengthening the species by combining the best of our assorted DNA for our species’ long-term survival. And my precious ethnic features are expendable to that end.

This doesn’t mean that I live without fear. I know what it is to fear. I have more than enough reasons to lay awake at night. But there’s one thing I don’t fear – the differences between you and me.

I also don’t fear any unbeatable monster. Everything out there has an Achilles heel. So I don’t worry too much about our current political and social climate. I know that there’s a way to navigate through this. Threats of war, mass shootings, violence against women, grotesque acts of racism, child and animal abuse, exploitation of the Earth – all of it – will be settled in its time.

My suggestion is that we get into diversity, because if we’re not, we’re going to lose the fight. We each have a universe without, and a universe within – we don’t have much control over the universe without, but we have all the control over the universe within, and therein lies the power. The secret is releasing our fears, and embracing connection.

It’s time to grow, people. It’s time to evolve. It’s time to embrace fearlessness and diversity as tools of prosperity. Compassion and connection are mighty forces, so join the revolution. Between you and me, I suspect it’s going to happen with or without everyone’s cooperation. So I suggest we all participate.

About that ngamo palep. It was amazing. I made a big bowl of chai, and all the bread was hogged. I thought about my community service, the people I met, and the things I learned. That bread fed me deeply, and I’m grateful for it. I’m eternally grateful.

Barbie xo