NOTE: This interview with Saij Miller-Wildsmith [SMW] was conducted by The Only Love Project’s Bill Murphy [BM] on April 20, 2015. Original artwork from Saij. Enjoy the interview!

BM: Briefly tell us your background. What would you like us to know about you?

SMW: What I would most like people to know about me is that I am a mother, and I say that because I try to think of my legacy a lot with my children and how I want them to view me when I am gone, what they will sit around when they are older with their children and talk about “mom” and how they will refer to me and the memories that they talk about. So a lot of my decisions and a lot of the things that I do and the way I move forward in my life is based on my two boys and how they view me and how they look at me and how they look up to me and me being their role model. So that is the biggest part of my identity that I would want people to know about me.

Other than that I am a lot of different things. My background is – I think about me – currently my faith, my Buddhist faith. I am a vegan. I am a partner. I have been in a long-term relationship for almost nine years. I am an artist. I am a writer, and a big part of my background has to do with my evolution through my spirituality and my views of the world, just the growing up of Saij and the way I have changed as an adult from a Catholic girl growing up in Nebraska to a Zen Buddhist priest in East Tennessee who is gay and vegan. That is not something you see a lot of in East Tennessee. [Both laugh.]

BM: That’s quite a jump from a Catholic girl in Nebraska to a Zen Buddhist priest in Tennessee. That’s a huge transition.

SMW: That’s a huge transition. It absolutely is. It’s quite a story. It’s quite a story.

BM: Well, it’s a good story. I like that. Anything else you would like to add to that?

SMW: Well, I guess my background being a girl from Nebraska — I have a sister. We grew up in a very strict Catholic home, and I think that a lot of the basis for how I view life and how I changed so much was based a lot in that little Catholic church I grew up in and the dogma and things that were – and the ritual attached to Catholicism and the strictness of my home life I think formed in me anyway this need to break free. I think I have spent the majority of my adult life leaving home at 18 seeking for what that looks like, leading to where I am now. The evolution from that to going to every different kind of church known to man trying to find where I fit led me on a direction that has spanned some 30 years, and it’s evolved from Catholicism to herbalism, Reiki, martial arts, yoga, atheism, just a gamut of different belief structures and systems that eventually found its way to Zen Buddhism. About 17, 18 years ago that’s where my heart landed and even within the structure of Buddhism I have evolved in many, many different ways. But finding that heart place for me in Buddhism is what really has made my life more complete.

BM: Here is a question, and I don’t know if anyone has ever asked you this or if you have ever thought of this, but what were you looking for? Why spend all those years, a couple decades looking for stuff? What were you looking for, trying all those different –

SMW: I was looking for love, acceptance and peace of mind. What I found in my little neck of the woods, and let me just…let me put this caveat out there that I do not now believe that the way I was raised in that particular Catholic church is the way or formula for every Catholic church in the world. Mine was a little different, and I think that it skewed my views. I found out as an adult that that is not how – the way we were taught was not necessarily how the Catholic church in general teaches, but because of where I grew up and it’s very small – and when I say very small, I mean, 180 people. I mean, there were seven people in my graduating class, two of which were exchange students, so I was “Little House on the Prairie” for real, so it’s –

BM: Let me just say it’s very kind of you to put that caveat out there because I know some people who could misinterpret that “Oh, the Catholic church sucks according to Saij and you have got to run from it.”

SMW: Right, not at all.

BM: This just happened to be your particular church.

SMW: Right, exactly because in all the studying I have done since then, that is not how all Catholics believe and that was an eye-opener to me because that’s not – you know, the way we were taught with that one little priest in that one church building that held about 20 people was a very different Catholic church than what I found out in the real world which is full of more open-mindedness than what I knew existed. So when I went on that search, on that journey there was an ache inside of me because I had a calling of wanting to be a nun. I wanted to be a nun, but I didn’t want to be a Catholic nun and they scared me. I wanted to be –

[Both laugh.]

SMW: I mean, I heard all the stories of old Catholic nuns hitting you on the knuckles with rulers and that didn’t fit with my idea of a nun, and, you know, when I started searching for all the different religions I literally went to all different kinds of religions trying to find one that seemed to fit my heart, because I knew if I found faith of some sort that fit with me that maybe I could heal whatever I felt was broken in my heart and find some peace of mind because I didn’t have peace of mind, and I had millions and millions of questions. I would ask my priest growing up, I would ask him questions, you know, what about this, what about that, and the only answer I ever got was the answer is faith. You have to have faith. That just didn’t do it for me. I wanted more. I wanted details. I wanted to know why. I wanted it proven, and it just wasn’t happening. So when you ask me what was I looking for, I was looking for answers. I found bits and pieces of answers along the way, but I didn’t really find the things I needed to start the process of becoming whole until I personally found Buddhism and then things seemed to fall into place.

BM: The next question is – possibly you have answered this – Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

SMW: I think maybe now I am a little spiritual. I mean, maybe some people think if you are a priest you are spiritual and I think you have to feel like you are at least somewhat spiritual to be a priest and to study religion like I do, but I think spirituality is much bigger than just religion. I think that for me spirituality is much different than religion. Religion is to me – it can be many different things, but spirituality to me is more personal and I think it’s different for every human being on the planet, however spirituality touches any given person anywhere in the world, you know, it may look very different from one person to the next. And there have been times when I have felt very spiritual and other times where I did not feel spiritual. I would say that probably this evolution that I referred to in the last question you asked me, I think my whole life has been spiritual but I haven’t necessarily felt spiritual throughout my whole life if that makes any sense.

BM: Sure.

SMW: I think one of the biggest things that I relate to has just been a recent epiphany with me, and that has been finding the movie that a very close person in my life told me about which was the movie Ragamuffin. It’s the story of Rich Mullins and his life as a Christian singer, songwriter and his struggles in life and his journey of finding his, you know, his true purpose to just be himself and just accept himself with all his flaws and all his things that he didn’t feel were good enough or his fear to speak his mind or say what he wanted to say because it wasn’t said the way everybody else thought he should say it. Watching that movie I feel has been a pivotal point in my life that really has allowed my spirituality to come forth in a way that has never come forth before because I identified with his rawness, his ability to be in front of a crowd of people and say the most profound things but to say it with no flowery anecdotes, you know, just say it like it is, and that’s the kind of person I am. I tend to say things like they are. I tend to be blunt, and I related to him that way. He said things that were very meaningful and full of love that I think touched people in a way that was very special, and it really moved me. I have changed because of that movie and because of his life, and it’s so sad that he died when he was like 41 years old.

BM: Yeah, very, very sad.

SMW: Yeah.

BM: Well, that was an excellent answer. Next question: Most religious traditions speak of the power and value of love. For example, the Dhammapada tells us, only love dispels hate. The Bible tells us, a new commandment I give to you that you love one another just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. What, if anything, do those words mean to you?

SMW: Well, now, they mean so much, and I got to be honest and say that up until the last year and a half, two years, I didn’t think about love in the same way that I think about love now because love was a word that was tossed around. Love was something I felt for my children or my family. Love was something I saw demonstrated occasionally by people, but I didn’t give it like intense thought and I didn’t study the word until I joined seminary and really started examining what love means. Also, you know, me – the person that I am coming from the upbringing I had going through a period of atheism just because I was confused and angry and didn’t know what I needed or wanted out of life, I didn’t know the framework of love and what all that meant, and I still don’t. I mean, I don’t think anybody fully understands love, but I think now having had the opportunity to be exposed to different thoughts about love from the Bible, from the Koran, from the Buddhist books. I mean, I read all different kinds of books. The History of God is a book that is sitting on my stand right next to me now, The Pilgrimage of Buddhism, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, all of those things that I study talk about love but they all get it in a different way. The people that those books touch, they can get that from different messages that those books give, and all of it has a common – there is a common thing there whether it’s spiritual or whether its love, whatever it is, it all seems to be connected, and I never really thought about that as much as I have been lately. I think that looking at how demonstrating love is really powerful. I can talk about that in my own life.

Back in the days of being atheist and being angry and an activist who was against everything and always had a – you know, something we are going to fight for and all those kinds of things that I used to find really important I would never open the door to someone who knocked on my door that wanted to talk to me about the Bible. That just wasn’t a part of the way I lived, and today if somebody knocks on my door and wants to talk about the Bible, I want to talk to them. I want to listen to them. I want to love them unconditionally. I want to hear and let them know that what they have to say is important to me, because I can learn from them no matter what faith they come from as much as they could learn from me. That to me has a lot to do with love just being able to listen to other people and not judge what they are doing or why they are doing it, but knowing that they are coming at love with the same amount of intensity, the same amount of conviction or the same amount of, you know, opinion that I may be coming at it. It’s important for me just to be able to not open my mouth and listen. That is a very powerful demonstration of love, and I can do that today and I do do that today if someone wants to knock on my door and talk about the Bible. That to me is love. And it’s a special thing, and it’s changed me because I would have never given those people another thought. I wanted to shut them out because my heart wasn’t open and so those words to me have a lot of different meanings today than they used to 20 years ago.

BM: Wow! Thank you so much. What role can love play in the world today?

SMW: Well, I think that love is pretty much the answer [laughs]. I think it’s the answer to just about everything. I think that in order for this world to change the people in it have to change, and they have to change one at a time. I used to think people had to change all at once. There has to be peaceful engagement and dialog, the listening, the opening of the heart, the – not hanging onto my opinions about everything because my opinions sometimes are wrong. Opinions are perceptions. I need to be open to someone else’s opinion and if I can open my heart instead of my mouth and just be open to the idea that I may not be right, then I think that goes a long way to peaceful resolution, and, again, demonstrating love I think is paramount. The way I conduct myself from the tiniest little thing that nobody sees to big things where, you know, it needs to be seen, demonstrating love so that other people can see what demonstrating love is about from helping someone get groceries off the top shelf at the grocery store to giving money when I can. That is nice, but I also need to do things like listening, not reacting to things that I typically used to react to. That’s a big one really; not reacting.

I think that – my personal opinion is that if we all didn’t react, knee-jerk reactions to things and just sat back with our mouth shut and listened, we probably wouldn’t have as much pain in the world because we could step back from the situation and be open to the ideas of others. So I think that love is the absolute answer because love if it starts with me and flowers out from my family to my city to my county, state, nation, world in that order, I think really would do a lot to change the world, but I think it has to happen one person at a time. That for me has been a huge total circle, you know, from the picketing activist, angry at everything person to trying to be a loving person who can keep my opinions to myself and just try to be peaceful and not react. Do I do that all the time? Not by any stretch, but that’s a huge difference, and it’s made a big difference in my life when I can apply it.

BM: Well, all this sounds great. But what stops people from becoming more loving and compassionate?

SMW: Well, I think there are several things. I think that maybe there are three main things. I think some of it might have to do with our greed, anger and desire, but one of the biggest things, in my opinion (and I could be wrong) is our ego. I can speak about myself because I have a huge ego, and a lot of the time I think I am right, and that is usually the downfall when I think I am right. Because once I get it in my mind that I am right and you are wrong, then there is a problem. There is an opposite. There is a definite you and me instead of an us. There is a line. There is a back and forth. There is a stance. There is opposition, and I think that for me the greed, anger and desire include a lot of different things. Greed doesn’t necessarily mean money. It could be materialism. It could be I want more food or I want more clothes or I want more whatever, but greed in the sense of I want more time for myself – you know, it can be a lot of different things. Anger, desire – desire is not – that is a huge word. It can include a lot of things and so can anger. I think those three things are some of the biggest problems, but ego when I think I am right, I think that stops me from being very loving and compassionate because I have a stance. I have a fight. I have a thing I have to prove if I am thinking I am right which comes from my ego, and that has caused me a lot of pain in my life.

Before, when I was an activist and I thought whatever I am standing for, then I must be right. If I am right, then that means you are wrong, and I am going to prove you wrong and I am going to demonstrate how you are wrong and I am going draw up signs to show how you are wrong and then I am going to yell stuff because I think I am right and you are wrong, and in the end I don’t solve a damn thing. The only thing I do is alienate, and that’s what I did for a lot of years because I was so stuck in my own belief system, my own opinions, my own ego, and if I can put that down. If I can just say, you know, here is an issue and here is how I feel about it – feeling and acting are totally different. I can feel a certain way about something, but to act upon it is a different matter altogether. If I am feeling love and compassion for all sentient beings, then there is really not a lot of room for ego and there is not a lot of room for greed, anger and desire if I am thinking about others. There is nothing to prove. There is no point to make, and if we could all think that way, we wouldn’t even, you know, need to worry about all the big stuff because we would just be thinking about others in a loving compassionate way. That’s what I aspire to try and do.

BM: Let’s say people reading this right now are digging it. They want to know do you have recommendations regarding how someone might cultivate a spirit of love over the long term but also put love into action right now and how he or she could make a positive difference right away?

SMW: Yeah, I do. I think that – well, first of all, I think everybody has to find within themselves what love means to them. I think they need to know what love means before they can start acting upon it. And I think over the long term creating some sort of practice whether that’s praying, whether that’s bowing, whether that’s meditating, burning incense, doing yoga, going on a hike, you know, making a garden, whatever it is that is a practice of love for yourself, that is important over the long term and short term.

Education. Whatever passion you have about your love or spirituality that you feel could build upon that as your foundation educating yourself is vital. If you are Christian, then feed your spirituality with books and prayer and music and art and all the things that make you feel rich in your own love and spirituality, and I think that would blossom out to the people around you. Same if you are Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or anything else, you know, feed that and then also educating yourself about other religions as well, other dialogs, other ways of belief and structure and educating yourself on the fact that just because I am Buddhist doesn’t mean that Buddhism is the only answer. Just because I am Christian doesn’t mean Christianity is the only answer. Just because I am Muslim doesn’t mean Islam is the only answer. Educating myself about everyone else and the way they think and feel about their love and compassion is just as important as the way I am feeling about my beliefs. If I can be open to all of that, to everybody else’s structure, the interfaith dialog to where – I mean, it seems to me that at the top of the pyramid it’s all the same damn thing. It’s love. However that filters down to each one of us is – I mean, people who live in the rain forest who don’t even know about other religions or what our definition of love means, they demonstrate their own love and religion every single day. Theirs is just as strong and just as serious and just as compassionate and just as rich as any priest or monk or rabbi or anything. It’s just as rich. [I know there are differences, but] it seems to me that it’s all the same thing. So I think educating ourselves about all those different things and putting those things into practice and creating a practice for yourself, that is where it’s at. I think that is long term and short term really, but then short term: start doing good stuff now, like right now. I mean, what’s stopping us from going outside and picking up the trash across the street in our neighbor’s yard or what’s stopping people from, you know, putting an extra quarter in a buggy at the grocery store and paying it forward, letting people cut in front of you. You know, you can do good things all the time. It doesn’t take massive protests. It doesn’t take Congress to change stuff. It doesn’t take wars and all this crap going on in the world. It can happen right here right now at this very moment and it’s free! You know, it doesn’t cost anything to be kind, and it’s also the stuff that you do without anybody knowing about it, you know, being kind just because and doing it without recognition and without being attached to the outcome. You know, I don’t want to be kind to people so that I can get their reaction of approval …”Oh, thank you for being kind to me.” You know, I want to be kind just because I want to be kind. I want to be loving. I want to be compassionate. I don’t need someone to thank me for it. I just want to be that way because I want to be that way, and that doesn’t take any special effort, and that doesn’t take any education, and it doesn’t take laws and Congress and wars and guns and all this other crap that is going on in the world. I can do that and everybody can do that, so that is short term. That is long term. Both of those things that I said. All those things that I said are long term and short term.

BM: Who do you look up to most when you think of the power of love?

SMW: Bar none my two sons! There is nothing more powerful in this world to me than the power of the love of my two boys. There is nothing stronger. There is nothing more poignant. There is nothing more compassionate. There is nothing more loving, and there is nothing more on the planet that I adore more than my two children. They are the most loving, precious gifts I have ever been given, and without a doubt they are the two that I look to the most because they have taught me the most about who I am and what I am, what I can be, the strength that I have as a woman, as a mother, as a person who gave life. I am honored and humbled to be their mother. Without a doubt they have taught me so much about how I am, and they are a constant reminder of how hard I need to work at being a better person for them, for my grandchildren when I have grandchildren, because I want my grandchildren way down the line when I am dead and gone, when I am dust in the air, whatever the hell I end up being, I want my grand kids to go, you know, Saij was a pretty cool chick. I wish I could have met her, you know. She was kind, loving and compassionate. She was a vegan, an artist, she spoke from the heart, she stood for something good. Oh, my gosh, she was a Buddhist priest (laughs), what the hell, you know. I want them – that’s what I live for, so, yeah, I would say that my two sons.

Other than my two sons I think His Holiness the Dalai Lama has demonstrated the power of love that is pretty unequaled. [Photo from Wikipedia. Photo by Christopher Michel.]

Also, I think that [Vietnamese Zen Master] Thich Nhat Hanh is a very strong power of love that I look up to a lot. [Photo from Wikipedia. Photo by pixiduc at http://flickr.com/photos/24633196@N00/277064154.]

Both of them have influenced me a great deal in my life and given me strength and courage when I have felt like my life is rough right now. I can look to them and go, my life is pretty easy compared to what they have been through, and they still love people anyway, so yeah that’s how I would do it and in that order.

BM: Do you have anything you would like to add that I haven’t asked?

SMW: I think that it’s important – I think it’s really important that people know there is a choice. There is always a choice when it comes to anything really. I mean, I am getting ready to write about the gap. The gap to me is, you know, a stimuli and then there is a response. There is a circumstance and then there is a reaction.

There is a state in between those two where people can choose. They can either choose to do A or B or C. They can choose to do a loving thing or not the loving thing, and I think that one of the biggest things I have learned in life is that I need to be humble, and I need to think before I react, and I need to think about that gap between what is happening right now in front of me and how I need to think about how I am going to react before I react. That gap, that space in time that is precious in how I am going to move forward in my life is something I think is really important. I have been thinking a lot about it. In my meditation I think about the gaps between my thoughts and I think about all the times where I have been faced with a circumstance in my life and then reacted without taking any time to think about my reaction and how many people I have hurt in that process.

Today I still react that way sometimes, and I don’t take that time to step back. I don’t, you know, breathe. I don’t pray about it, meditate about it, or think about it first sometimes, and that’s – nine times out of ten causes me suffering or it causes someone else to suffer. The part that I really want to focus on now is that gap and taking time with it and really analyzing things before I react to them and that is something I am – I really want to grow in. I want to learn more about. I mean, I feel like I have just touched the tip of the iceberg in my life. I am 50 years old and I feel like I am just now taking my first steps. I have learned so much since I have entered into seminary, but I have just barely scratched the surface. I have so much left to learn and I just feel like, you know, becoming a priest and studying my faith and being a good mom and being kind to people, that’s what I want to be remembered for. I want to continue to learn, and I want to continue to learn about how I can bridge the gaps between people instead of creating walls. That’s a life-long journey and that’s something I am going to probably be doing until the day I die, but I want to help people. I want to teach people. I want to keep learning because I have so much left to learn. I want to learn to love people more and be more loving and be more open and I want to have that for my children and my family and I want to be the example of love. That is what I aspire to be, and I fail at it miserably a lot, but today I am like aware of it, and so that’s what I aspire to be. I aspire to be an example of what love looks like, so that’s what I would add.

BM: Thank you so much for your time, Saij. I appreciate it.

SMW: You’re welcome.

NOTE: Thank you to Saij for transcribing our interview.