Real-eyes

Cold. Our idea of cold here in Ohio, that is, 6 degrees. The matte green ivy is curled tightly upon itself on one tree. On the next tree, where the sun hits, the ivy has relaxed. I am seeing this through a window from a house so warm my bare feet enjoy the wood floor. Snow still lies gracefully on branches, but less of it. A strange snow here. I woke up yesterday to see white comforters thrown on the lawns while the driveways and street were clear, shiny black. No drifts, due to the particular heavy nature of this snow, and to no wind, and that made it look like snow as envisioned by a child doing an exercise for art class, creating a model village.

I was eager to read some dharma this morning, having dreamed again about my brother, as he was, and feeling cluttered. I have Zen Miracles in the bathroom right now, so I picked that out. I find myself stuck where I left off, on the chapter about getting unstuck.

"Find your own pilgrimage," Shoshanna writes. "Where is it you need to go?" I can't do much physical going in the state of health and finance I'm in. I've been thinking about the fall retreat at Grailville, thinking I've been well for long enough that I start to have confidence in my wellness. I am afraid to do things that might tire me or stress me. Hmm. That retreat. I could just go for the weekend. Wonder if the food's gotten any better. If I could sleep in another bed. At my level of health, that's important.

I know there is some going alone I need to do. I have become a dependent person, as is my tendency, with all this illness. This weekend Tom got sick, a fever and deep fatigue. We talked about whether it might be pneumonia, and his particular vulnerability with restrictive lung disease, when to call the doctor. I was alone while he slept all weekend. I stayed home from church, taking his temperature, which was lower, thank God, getting him to drink some water, covering him up now and then. It is blessed to be together at these times, whether you are the sick one or the caregiver.

What is the pilgrimage I need to take? I am already taking a personal pilgrimage in the direction of confronting the extreme poverty in the world and my responsibility toward it. Realizing the truth - in my journal I often call it "real-eyes." It seems like denying that truth was taking a lot of energy.

Last night the news said that China invested $1 million for every gold medal it won in the last Olympics. I thought of what I read in Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save. The surgery to correct a common form of blindness in Africa costs $50. Twenty thousand people could have been given sight for that investment. That surgery makes a permanent improvement in their lives that enables them to work, to live, to have families. What are these gold medals about? Nationalism, for one thing. Comparison. We are better than you. For every winner there are ten losers, no, hundreds.

Singer's claim is that the world's wealthy can easily give the money to lift the whole world out of the extreme poverty that kills 27,000 children a day, and never even miss it. Me, on my pensions, I shouldn't expect too much of myself. I was relieved to read his impeccably reasoned conclusion. And as I contemplate how much to give, what organization to give it to, I feel more like a tree trunk, less like the fragile, beautiful African violet that is blooming in our den against the backdrop of snow.

Asparagus for brunch

Snow still falling on the crumpled blanket in the back yard, where snow clumps dropped in the night. Branches are gracefully piled with snow, so are even little twigs. I am afraid of a power outage. This is a heavily treed neighborhood, and in weather events, trees fall on the power lines. One year we were out eight days. It was summer, though. In winter, we could stay warm with our gas fireplace and layered clothing for a while, but Tom needs to sleep on his ventilator or goes downhill rapidly (CO2 builds up in his blood). So we have to find alternative housing if the power's out for very long. Of course, we have options. Bla bla, our life style.

How can you not feel a lift of beauty and awe when this kind of weather happens? It is a great change. It isn't like this half the year here in the Ohio Valley; in fact, this is going to be a record storm. Another huge weather event, courtesy of climate change. From the kitchen window, snug over coffee and two newspapers, I saw the woman all in black walking, the black dog prancing in front of her. A living haiku.

The front page of the NYTimes has an odd conjunction of articles below the fold. In the center, one about a servant maid in Pakistan, a child, who seems to have died of abuse. The article talked about how hungry the poor are there, how they will do anything for work, and then don't earn enough to live on. Right next to this was an article on portion size in American food, how for instance, a soup bowl that is destined to be one serving is labeled to be 1 2/3 servings, something like that. I am quite familiar with it because I do read labels and even measure portions, fruit of a long life narcissistically concerned about my "weight". I know 1/2 cup of ice cream is a serving, and I know how small that is.

How ironic is that? these subjects side by side, front page. People starving somewhere way far from here. Americans too fat, so much so that our government itself is trying to slow down our eating through legislation. Think about it. I would not have thought about it before I got captcha'd by Peter Singer's book. So far he is promising me that my fair share to end extreme poverty will be on a sliding scale, does not have to cost me my pleasures, like the asparagus I bought yesterday and plan to cook for brunch in a little while, with scrambled eggs.

It was only $2.99 a pound ($3, that is), and I bought only half a pound. None will go to waste. Asparagus is good for me. Asparagus in February, shipped in from I don't know where, maybe all the way from California, in a big truck fueled by oil formed in the carboniferous era, a truck that laid rubber particles on big highways that we as a people have paid to have put down and maintained. To see a whole world in this asparagus is not just a mystical trip. The asparagus must have been picked, cut, by hand, I think, it is so delicate. That would be migrant workers perhaps, illegal immigrants who sometimes die trying to get into the land of plenty.

Volunteers with their own guns like to patrol our borders, I understand, as if there wasn't more than enough food here. They think that rigidly controlling immigration is not about food. And what they think it's about is not really what it is about, in my opinion. I think about the timeless application of the parable of The Good Samaritan, who would not let a stranger die in a ditch.

This asparagus was not labeled "organic," or it would have cost twice as much, and I wouldn't have bought it. It can't be local, isn't in season, so it violates the rules some people set for themselves when it comes to their food purchases. They are rules that make a lot of sense, and like Peter Singer's ideas, they keep knocking on my skull, asking for my attention.

It used to be that in spring I watched and waited for asparagus to hit the markets. It was like Easter, a sign of the resurrection of plant life, one of the first edibles to come through the ground locally. I have never had an asparagus bed, but I understand it comes up so fast it is magical. You can still buy that kind of wonderful real asparagus at the local co-op, which just keeps going along somehow, decade after decade, kept alive by people who care. Real asparagus, from local organic farms. You can still buy that. As the poet Hopkins said, "For all this, Nature is never spent."

p.s. It didn't taste much like asparagus.

Peter Singer is still battering my heart (see yesterday's post) to such an extent that I wanted to look up John Donne's sonnet of that title. Yet, I cannot stop reading, am eager to finish the book so that I know how much money he thinks I should be able to give away. I am nervous about this. We live on pensions, most of which is taken up with living expenses. But it is feeling imperative to keep reading this and thinking about how I live, eating beef as I please, driving a second car.

Singer is one of those natural teachers, cutting through to clarity about a situation with a Zen-like blade. He describes many people who work to end extreme poverty. Just now I am reading about a doctor, Paul Farmer, cofounder of Partners in Health, who has devoted his life to serving the poor in Haiti for many years before the earthquake.

And just yesterday I also got the first letter of this year's pledge campaign from my church. They want a stunning 5% of my gross income. I will pledge, but I am thinking about how my church enhances lives in many ways, including my life, but does not do much to save them. In fact, I think my specific church has not contributed to the national church and its social justice programs for a several years.

Here is where I stopped reading to look up Partners in Health and write this post:

Flying from the peasant huts and their malnourished babies in Haiti to Miami, just 700 miles away, with its well-dressed people talking about their efforts to lose weight, Farmer gets angry over the contrast between developing countries and the developed world.

He seems to have taken the bodhissatva vow to heart.

On Becoming Engaged

[image - Peter Singer with a friend]
Spiritual practice has been creeping up on me and making me think about how I act. This is not really a Zen thing, or a Buddhist thing. Ethics can creep up on anyone. Right now my consciousness is being impacted by Peter Singer, a young guy (younger than me) who teaches Bioethics at Princeton and writes books about our relationship to the world. He is a philosopher, but aspires to be the kind whose thinking and scholarship reaches out to the real world outside academic circles. Years ago I read his manifesto Animal Liberation, and it led me to avoid meat for quite a while, until the kidney diet led me to put "high-biological-quality protein" in my diet. I was relieved to go back to something more like the diet of my childhood (though with numerous restrictions), an easier way for me to cook, and I have avoided Peter Singer ever since. I know you understand.

But this has been creeping up on me - this realization that though there are many ways I don't live lavishly, I am an American, and I do live well. It's been Haiti, of course, night after night on the news, in-your-face the realization that this country 500 miles from our border lived in abject poverty as it was. Then came the latest issue of Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, which had a little piece about the need for a national Buddhist relief effort to address poverty. It mentioned a group called Buddhist Global Relief. I looked them up. I noticed that one of their advisors is David Loy, who teaches in a nearby city, and whose interest is "engaged Buddhism." An interesting term. Tom got to looking up Loy and found a video of him talking that we both want to watch.

Then I stopped in at the library yesterday and as usual scanned the new books shelves with keen interest. We have "the best public library in America," one of the 83 things I am often grateful for. There on the shelf sat an unpretentious book with a red cover: The Live You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. By Peter Singer. I picked it up, looked it over, sighed, and put it in my bag.

Undertaking a meditation practice seems simple at first. You want to de-stress. Or to heal. Some personal desire. But if that becomes a Zen practice, the goal begins to shift. You learn about this something called "enlightenment." Teachers talk about happiness, joy, peace of mind. "This very place is the Lotus Land," we chant together. Nirvana is out there if we keep practicing.

I think if the Buddha came back and gave a little talk, he might look out over the crowd and begin, "Nirvana is not La-la Land." No, becoming more aware means aware of everything. One of those things is the vast tragic inequality of wealth on this planet, and the extent of poverty. As I sat in an expensive, comfortable bed last night and read the first chapter of Singer's book, the facts began to sink into me. That's one thing. But where this book is headed is a direct confrontation with my lifestyle, and the luxuries I enjoy.

Already the book had me thinking. I thought, This is an important book. I want to own it. It is very easy to buy on Amazon with one click. I can get it used Like New for $10 plus $3.99 shipping. That's $14. Well, I thought, I do have this library copy.

I read on. Suddenly I thought how I was planning to go to the church auction this year, a fundraiser, $12 at the door, but you get a great dinner. I was planning to buy my friend Bob's Turkish Coffee breakfast there for $14 - but the money goes to the church. I already give money to the church, as I give to NPR, things that support my lifestyle. I don't have to do the auction. That $26 right there.

I read on, as Singer established with footnotes to my satisfaction that children die for want of a measles vaccine or medical care when they get measles. I had the two-week measles as a child. (As my mother once remarked thoughtfully, "Maybe that's what happened to you.") My daughter had the vaccine. I thought about how we'd feel if her son, my grandson died. One child. In the poorest nations one in five children dies before the age of five. One in five.

Although this was striking home, I kept reading. That led me to think about how Sheba is due this month for her shots, feline leukemia and rabies. She doesn't go out, no animals come in, contacting these diseases is very unlikely. The shots cost $60.

There is this figure Singer keeps referring to: $1.25 a day. That's what an individual needs to buy food, shelter, water, clothing, medical care, and education enough to lift them out of extreme poverty. That's very different from our idea of poverty here in the US, where

97 percent of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV. Three quarters of them own a car. Three quarters of them have air-conditioning. Three quarters of them have a VCR or DVD player.

Extreme poverty is better defined by cases. It is where you die for lack of a mosquito net.

I don't know how to round this off. Talk about strict Zen, as some of us have been doing. I don't think Singer is a Zen master, but he seems to dealing me the hardest instructions I've had yet. Give up my DSL? I don't think so.

On getting a mammogram

I awoke this morning with a sense of being light as thistledown, my trunk made of air. I had dreamed I was part of a large festival of choirs, and in my dream I sang "Marching to Pretoria" very well, on tune and able to shape the notes without that quavering of old age. It is still running in my mind. I am used to my tinnitus. Because I have it, I think I might welcome the silence of death. As for the song, we used to sing it in church camp. We didn't know what it was about, but didn't care. It has a rousing rhythm.

In the kitchen I pointed out to Tom the paperwhites, soft green blades that shot straight up from a large bulb in a nice little vessel, gift from a friend who does this every single Christmas. I said to Tom, "All that was stored in that bulb. All it needed was water."

He is a scientist, and he said, "It is water."

I said, "And a code." It fascinates me that a living thing is an association of patterns held together by a code. But that's my way of seeing. Something holds it together. A consciousness? Just the karma, it is made of so many bits and pieces, and they will wear the way they do, like parts in a car. Carma.

I have had so much illness that I have no future. I realize that when I sit with friends who talk of major life changes. To people with their health, there are infinite possibilities, and so often I see my friends sitting on those possibilities, procrastinating, in the belief that they are in control of their future, and that it is definitely going to be there, like some storage room full of gold that cannot rot or be stolen. They can do it next year, or the year after that. I don't know how next year will be for us - probably worse. I am very comfortable in the knowledge that this is all I have: my home under my feet right now, the wood floor vibrating as the furnace runs. The sound of Tom in the kitchen, turning a page in the newspaper.

You have probably noticed that there are many things to remind me of my mortality. Yesterday it was the annual mammogram. When I called to make the appointment they got me right in just a few days later, because I had breast cancer once, many years ago. That's the policy, to get us in for those mammograms.

I don't really think of myself as a cancer survivor now, but as a kidney patient. As for cancer, I like to consider myself not in remission but cured. I liked to think that five years out, when I got off tamoxifen, I was done with cancer. But deep within I now know that it can strike any time, anywhere. You don't have to have symptoms. And my first cancer was found on a mammogram. So I don't want to have a mammogram, and somehow the appointment gets procrastinated.

Of course a mammogram hurts, and worse in the breast that had surgery, even though the people at JamesCare are both skilled and kind. But what hurts worse is sitting afterwards waiting while the radiologist looks at the films. The waiting room is thoughtfully arranged, with coffee and tea and snack bars, and cheery bright magazines. But you wait. This time it was about half an hour. The door opens, people come out, but they are not for you. I felt raw. I leafed through the pages of a Metropolitan Home without interest in decorating anything in my home. It's where I live.

Finally the door opened and the nurse called my name. I gathered my parka, bag of clothes, and essential comfort scarf, and went through the door with her. They don't tell you anything until you're through the door into the hall. Then they say it right away with a smile:

Everything looks fine. You're free to go.

Everything went out of me with a whoosh. It was as if I had been holding my breath all this time. Then I clumsily found my way through the halls to the exit. I have been doing this for 13 years, but I get it wrong, and someone helps me.

In the car I ate part of a snack bar, willing the sugar to help me concentrate and drive home safely. There I told Tom that next year I will ask him to drive me. Sure, he said. That's what it's about.

A thought about this little ordeal. In early years I believed that if I meditated enough I would be calm in the face of anything. I guess that's how I saw enlightenment, as a state that was beyond being human, as detachment from everything. But it seems to me that now these medical events rock me more than they once did. That that's being alive. I'll take it.

A note on one-pronged practice

This morning I woke up at 5:00, as I do once in a while. Getting my annual mammogram today. Thirteen years since I had breast cancer. They have been difficult years but I'm so glad I had them.

Meanwhile, the year's brightest moon is dropping through the bare branches of the oaks. I have never seen it move so fast - you can almost see it moving. But I am not a good moon watcher unless I'm on retreat, where there is so little stimulation that the sky becomes enough, becomes fascinating when you get a break and get to see it.

Yesterday after church my older friend Nancy and I shared a hug, as we do, and talked a little about what's going on in our lives. I reminded her how we used to enjoy meditating together years ago in a little group, nothing special. She told me she doesn't meditate now, meaning sit, but tries to be totally aware as she does her t'ai chi in the morning. I remarked that that's a form of meditation, and I said, an afterthought, "Anyway, what really matters is what you do when you're not meditating."

She was struck by that, and so was I, the statement coming out in that good space you can be in after church. It laid it out for me in plain talk, what the bodhissatva vow is all about, what we mean by being on the Buddha way. We don't vow to meditate all day - meditation is only one of the steps on the eightfold path. I recalled an incident in one of Bernie Glassman's books, where the sangha goes to meditate in an abandoned schoolyard, then gets to work cutting down weeds. He says something like "Meditation is a luxury, I could do it all day. But there's work to be done."

Here and there I've written about how I came to Buddhism privately, through books and tapes. Later, I found group practice on retreats with a sangha that emphasized form in imitation of the Japanese tradition. Ritual, severity, discipline seemed to be everything. I was challenged and fascinated by the wierdness, frankly, and learned how to do things right, but I also rebelled against the militarism, heirarchy, and violence. This teacher's use of the stick ultimately drove me away.

I tried hard but couldn't reconcile it with the ideal of kindness I believe is fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, the religions I have practiced in my life. I couldn't reconcile it with the feminist ideals of cooperation and respect. And, like many women who were abused as girls, I could not be comfortable with the ideal of obedience expressed in full prostrations to the teacher as I entered and left dokusan, and more generally, with the many stories in this tradition of rudeness and violence as a teaching method. I am far from alone in this. I know there are wonderful women offering retreats in gentler styles.

This is a big subject, and a fundamental question for each individual: How do we practice the Buddha Way? Is it "just sitting"?

I hope that just sitting naturally improves people, which is the theory behind a one-pronged practice. I hope sitting builds awareness "off the cushion," and that helps us to be kind as we cut through our dualism, but I have seen it to not come true. Being A Student of Zen can so easily be used to feel superior to all those non-meditators out there that I have started making a point of not making a point of it, if you know what I mean. The far enemy of regular practice is arrogance, the near enemy smugness. Something like that.

It is so easy to fall off the path! For years I have yearned for a Teacher to locate here in central Ohio, and begin to build a sangha in which we could work together on some meaningful service. The events in Haiti unfolding in the news night after night make me yearn for involvement in a Buddhist organization with open hands, with a mission beyond . . . just beyond.

Sheba and the Great Matter

You might say Sheba is just a cat. Go a little further and say she's a tiger cat. Look closer and she's a calico overlaid with black stripes, and a very detailed face with, for instance, black kohl around her eyes, then white eyeliner, and that's just the eyes. But - you know where this is going - she is much more than just beautiful. She is magic.

Time and again I look at her and think, She looks like a stuffed animal that has miraculously come to life. I really do see that. Eyes that see, that focus and blink. A delicate paw that spreads and retracts, treading a little whenever she feels loved, or whatever that is that she feels when she is petted. She does feel. She is responsive, real and alive, more satisfying than any stuffed animal can be.

My sense of Sheba's aliveness was perhaps sharpened by experiencing the mystery of Sherlock's death. One moment he was alive, lying on the leather couch beside me, and the next minute he was dead. Nothing had happened to mark the moment when the paralytic medicine stopped everything. Not a convulsion or a sound or a relaxing. He was no longer breathing, that's all. I was alarmed. I asked the Vet, "Is that it?"

"Yes," he assured me. "He's dead." How could that difference be so small?

So now I know that what keeps Sheba from being just a stuffed animal is her breath. She breathes in and out, like I do. I don't know why she breathes or when her breathing will stop. This breathing is a mystery; it is life itself. We take in air and other nourishment, but air is the one you need every moment. We use what we can and exhale the rest. In sitting Zen we are sometimes told to focus on exhaling completely. Suzuki says that thus we die every moment.

Sheba is a lady of a certain age, as the British say, meaning on the upper edge of middle age. We know her kidney functions are very bad, and we know intimately what that means, because that is what killed Sherlock. Right now Sheba eats well and drinks water and continues to process it all. She is alive.

I expect to outlive her (in which I may be quite wrong). If so, I may someday be there when she has stopped breathing, and just like that, Sheba will be no longer alive. Like Sherlock, she is here temporarily. So it is natural to cherish her. And I believe it is natural for that appreciation to fan out to my loved ones, my friends, the squirrel in the Zen garden and the chickadee in the back yard, to every living creature and thing, every breath, every breath I myself get to take.