Just a (female) practitioner

It stuck in my craw, as my grandmother would have put it, something written a while back by a Zen Teacher who blogs. Distinguishing between authenticated Teachers and the rest of us, he points out that most in the buddha-blogosphere are "just practitioners" who don't make any claims to be otherwise. It is an innocent statement, a generalization based on observation, and I can't disagree with it. But my craw was taking this little modifier, "just" and it wouldn't go down, the way sometimes your throat is dry and a pill gets stuck there.

Well then, I'm a woman. Just a woman, it's been said. I know about this thing of being automatically pigeonholed. I am extraordinarily sensitive to it, as if my whole body had been sanded by sexism.

Because I was an aging woman with health issues when I came to Buddhism 12 years ago, and caregiver to a husband with health issues, and not wealthy, I've had relatively few opportunities to study with teachers. But at last I was able to form a formal relationship with one after years of attending his nearby retreats and doing koan work with him. The same year, this master's sizable international sangha split apart on his refusal to affirm a female student whom his dharma heir had affirmed, who had passed an extensive body of koan work and had originally worked with the Master. My mail told me it had been a dramatic mess.

What is enlightenment for, I wondered, if a man cannot negotiate a peaceful resolution of differences with his heir? But I didn't resign as a student over that. I resigned a year later after he sent me a mean, impatient e-mail. God, I'm too sick. I have no space for that in my life. And I wondered, what the hell is enlightenment about if our authenticated masters are not examples of compassion and harmony in their own lives?

There are relatively few female Zen Masters (the very term is an oxymoron, for "master" was originally a male noun). There is no way to ensure anything like fairness as women work with male Teachers, or female Teachers for that matter. Our sexism - all of us - is so underground it is even harder to detect in ourselves than our racism. We are aware of horrific violence done to women in other countries - most recently in Honduras - but not aware of what is one to us when we are seen as "just" women. Or worse, "just girls."

Another (male) Teacher told me it is considered a bad sign in Zen to want to be a Teacher. Really? Okay. It is something one is supposed to simply rise to, one pops up without any desire to attain. There is no entry exam, that's for sure, no way to formally undertake a known curriculum and pass through hoops and ultimately earn the designation. I do see what a slippery business that could be, I can imagine that diligent merciless people could make it to the finish line the same way they make it through PhD programs.

But the current situation is also quite slippery. It leaves all of us - but especially women - liable to the fits and prejudices of an authenticated Teacher. I have observed that very few women even see sexism when it walks all over us. It is utterly built into our culture - that's why we call it "a patriarchy," and it is built into the masculine heirarchys and traditions of Zen. And so once again, as I have year after year, I find myself reconsidering where I belong, who I can practice with.

Your own pillars

Thanksgiving passed Sheba by. We were gone a couple of hours during the day, but that's not unusual and didn't upset her. She spent that time on my chair, which she has recently adopted. It does not have a towel on it, but does have a memory-foam cushion covered in imitation sheepskin. Apparently just the thing for a cat.

When Sheba came into this house she was too scared to get up on my chair. If she had, she would have jumped down and run away, meowing, when I went to sit beside her. Now she sits there in the middle of the cushion as I carefully edge in, encouraging her to move aside a little and make room for me. She is not aggressive about it, but has come into her natural feline dominance. I was here first. What I thought of as "my chair" is one of her pillars now.

Some 40 people were at the church dinner this year. I thought, "all the lonely people," people without any pillars of family to sit on. Then I realized that we are now the generation on top. For an increasing number of us, there is nobody up there, no parents to go home to. Nevertheless, when we came home Tom and I did not have that sense of empty house - we had Sheba, jumping down off The Chair Formerly Known as Mine and squalling to remind me that when I've been gone a long time and come back, treats are due. She was happy with her usual treats, and for her Thanksgiving dinner had Purina liver and bacon supper. She is always happy when things are just the way they have been before, which in her mind is the way they are supposed to be. Predictable. Secure.

Meditation on a cat's life

Sheba likes our morning time together. Tom is not up yet; I come in my study and sit down in my chair, and she jumps up on her chair. It is one of her dedicated pillars, with a folded towel on it, and Buffy, a soft stuffed cocker spaniel, lying beside her. And this hour is dedicated to us being here quietly. I tap on the keys. Sometimes she steps over onto the computer table and taps of the keys herself. Then, finding no interesting outcome, she goes back to her pillar, where now she is curled up in that enso cats make to sleep deeply in. I can watch her sigh and then see her breathing change to low. When I am meditating I try not to control my breath. Sheba never has to make an effort at that. She is an animal: few choices, little indecision. She was in hell in Cat Welfare, constantly afraid of the other cats, and just like a child in an orphanage, couldn't do anything about it except look longingly at the visitor who came in the door. She had written me off by the time I made up my mind to bring her home and weave her into our family life.
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Loving people before they die

I want to keep this short. Tom is baking zucchini bread for the church potluck Thanksgiving tomorrow, and I want to sit in the kitchen and knit and listen to NPR with him.

Sunday, a lay leader at our church - Unitarian - came up to me during coffee hour to tell me a certain woman was in intensive care, and had been asking for me. I'll call her oh, Mary. A common name in the generation above me. Mary is a sturdy 83 years old and has been causing me trouble intermittently during about thirty of those years. I'll spare you (and myself) the details, but on one occasion her gossip caused me what I saw then as grievous harm. Over the years, however, I came to think she was a ship without a pilot, and we no longer felt like enemies.

Dependency syndrome" hardly begins to describe her affliction. It was dangerous to let her into your life the least little bit. She would then call you time after time. Invite you repeatedly to lunch. Get you to come over for dinner and then try to give you anything she owned, everything in her freezer, all the food in the house, cast-off clothes. A compulsive shopper, she had a huge ever-growing wardrobe. I talked once to a woman who was in a church discussion group with Mary, who told me Mary had inveigled the entire group into helping her move, and it was an endless nightmare.

For years Mary came running in late to church on Sunday morning, because she had been changing clothes, she told me once. She always ran all the way down the center aisle to the very first row, where she could hear. She came running in late to my meditation groups, too, where she insisted on making people move so she could sit right next to me and cup her hand over her ears. During discussion she wanted compulsively to hear every word, every word, so she would cry out, "What? What did he say?"

She was a hypochondriac and a lapel hanger-on, a person whose loneliness was so excessive that she interrogated you with staccato questions, one after the other, interrupting your answers, to keep the conversation going, so you couldn't get away. So of course, everyone learned to avoid her, to avoid eye contact with her. Including me. That made it sad to think I was someone she asked about when she ended up in the ICU, kidneys failing, heart having stopped and started again, everything failing. Why me? It took me a while to remember.

She had called me last summer, worried about her kidneys. She had many anxious questions. And I decided to sit down and stop tapping my toe and give her whatever time she needed. We talked for quite a while. I assured her that I felt her kidney doctor was doing the right things. Toward the end I remember calling her, "Hon." That was unlike me, but she so clearly needed some affection. Her life strategy had been such that it denied her what she wanted most. After that phone call, I hoped being nice to her wouldn't lead to problems, and indeed, she called not long after to invite us to a potluck at her retirement community. We turned her down politely. That was the end of it.

Now she was asking about me. So I did what anyone who read this far would do, I suppose, stopped by the hospital Sunday afternoon, setting aside my rigid policy of avoiding places that might give me antibiotic-resistant TB (for new readers, I have very low immune function).

Intensive Care is always sobering, even if you're used to medical stuff. It takes all the Zen you can conjure up to accept death in such a cold, impersonal place.

She was sleeping when I got there, propped up in bed with an IV in her jugular vein, and neither her glasses nor her hearing aids. She did most of the talking in a low, hoarse voice I could hardly hear. She told us her daughter had gone back to Chicago. She told us nobody had been to visit her but Eric, the minister. She said she just isn't hungry, she said they told her she doesn't qualify for the kidney transplant list, all she likes is Sierra Club to drink. Sierra Mist, she meant And pudding. She likes that. She was bored but hadn't turned on the TV. She couldn't see it anyway. She said she did things wrong, she should have managed her diabetes better. Blame, I thought. Is that how she's coping with this? I hovered close over the bed and shouted that everybody cheats on the diet a little, and I thought she did pretty good, that making it to 83 was a long life. "Really?" she asked, with a kind of childlike gratitude.

I don't really expect to go back - we used up every bit of conversation we had. I suppose her daughter will be back in town over Thanksgiving, and maybe stay. I keep thinking about how when someone is dying, all your dramas with them, all your little preferences, fall away, and you see the simple, resounding truth of life and death, the same for all of us.

Adolescence

Finishing up a knitting piece (!) and listening to the Everly Brothers sing "All I have to do is dream." Thinking, wondering if mine was the first generation to have its own music in adolescence.
~~~
Well, that took two hours, longer than I thought, and turned out worse than I expected. I dread meeting up with the experienced knitters I know, who will see at a glance that I lost a stitch near the beginning, and then one near the end, too. They are the hard parts, a little different than the knitting endlessly along the middle. I could always hide if I saw a knitter.

Furthermore, it goes with nothing in my wardrobe. Nearest, with my new old blue flannel plaid shirt. It's about on that level of undress, anyway. Kind of scruffy looking. Just plain knitting. I thought that would be easy. Well, I almost got it right, look at it that way.

And I realized as I worked on the thing - a scarf, your first project - that it is one of my high school colors. We were maroon and gold, two colors I hate for their own selves, and for the memory of high school, too. I grew to hate the color. What was I thinking when I bought it? My eye was drawn to the yarn, Bamboucle it was called. It just captured me. I didn't think how bad I look in yellow or what I was going to wear it with. It was about some dream, a dream of thread made from bamboo and linen. I love bamboo, the plant, and didn't realize how a four-ply yarn would split on me, how the slight nubbiness would add to my difficulty knowing what I was doing, without giving it any nubbiness at all. I bought bamboo needles, too, and they are very nice. I kept on enjoying them, anyway.

Thus I have wasted my Monday morning to end up a little grouchier than when I woke up. I am supposed to be saying Yes to everything. Yes, this is a damnable yarn. Yes, it's a gloomy day. Yes, at least I am done with it. I am done with it. I don't have to wear it. I certainly don't have to go buy clothes to go with it. As an artist I have lots of things that didn't turn out. Hey, here they sit in my file drawers, in my drawing portfolio. That's something it's hard to take, the unease when the finished project is not what you wanted it to be. Not great. Or maybe it is, if you just look at what it is, not what you wanted it to be. There, I knew I'd arrive at Zen eventually.

Scraps found going through old files

[above: The Lotus Shrine]

Notes made during a meeting with a financial advisor:
Be careful when you start doing nothing, because it's hard to quit.
terminal velocity - the fastest you can dance
re keeping my little Civic, our second car:
car = you = freedom power adulthood (we kept it)

thrown out: a 2000 article about planting Alpine Strawberries from seed. We just don't have the sun. No sunny garden this year. Maybe next.

kept: an article about a book, "Meetings with Remarkable Trees." From 2002, when Tom was still working and we had more money and felt we could still travel

2002
obituary of Swami Satchindananda, the Woodstock Guru (that's his temple above)
an article about a luxury vacation in Bali. I was dreaming hard that August, just before our personal crash into illnesses

2001
articles about artists who dedicated themselves totally to their art

a note for a comic novel:
Bonnie the Dog in the funeral procession: at the beginning, not the end

on an index card: What would Buddha wear if she could afford anything?

Okay, I hear Tom getting up just as I hit another folder of inspirations. Those are slow going, and fun. Have a nice weekend.

On War and the Failure of Feminism

You can point to great strides made for women in America. But in many ways time has failed to bring about the changes some of us wanted most. By "us" I mean those women who were involved in the feminist movement, in consciousness-raising groups, in NOW, embracing not just a bigger paycheck, but radical ideas. Radical. The word is derived from radix, meaning "root." A radical idea is one that upsets society by digging at its roots, or tries. An idea like equality or non-violence.

I thought about this last night as I watched a segment of the evening news about Alexis Hutchinson, a young Army soldier and mother who refused to be deployed to Afghanistan because she doesn't have anyone who can watch her baby. The Army, in a brilliant display of bureaucracy, imprisoned her. Hutchinson was slated to be a cook.

I believe that if war is ever ended, it will be by women, so I am sad whenever women have anything to do with war. It is a men's game; many of them love it fiercely. It is fueled by testoserone and ideas of winning that are not exclusive to our maniacally competitive culture. One of the attractions of Buddhism to me that it stands for acting in such a way that we increase peace and harmony in the world, which is to say, it stands for peace. And this has almost always been true throughout its long history.

I do understand that the military is for so many young people the only way out of a bleak environment. It was so for my father, who joined the Army at the end of the Great Depression and ended up in the trenches for the whole of World War II; and didn't want his son going to Vietnam. For a lot of kids like Ms. Hutchinson, who is African-American, it's a job with a paycheck, a life with saving structure.

Back in the early seventies, we feminists wanted women to have the freedom to choose work that suited them, and you can see that some of that has come to pass. NBC news, for instance, uses Dr. Nancy Snyderman to talk about health issues - wow, a woman doctor. There are more and more of them around. This woman is an expert on the national news, and not showing cleavage, either.

I have known women who chose the military. One high school girlfriend went into the Air Force. I never detected in her the slightest interest in killing people. She loved the uniform, the neatness of regulation, and pilots. Another woman, of another generation, found herself crouched down under the rockets in the Gulf War. Nothing can prepare you for that.

Back in the day we wanted women to have the right to work, and to choose all sorts of work beyond nursing, teaching, and serving as a secretary. Opening up career choice made total sense as a fundamental building block of the freedom to give your best gift to the world. But Ms. Hutchinson is just one obvious case of being forced to choose between family and career. She was not going to abandon her ten-month-old son to foster care. Because her job is in the military, the choice made the national news. Other women give up careers more quietly.

If feminism failed to see something, it was the same thing we always fail to see, can't see, in fact, and that is the outcome of what we do today. There are too many factors coming together to make the future. For this reason it seems good to be careful. I am reminded of a Basuot proverb, which came to me worded in traditional masculine gender by way of author Robert Ruark:

If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them.

The Army is backing and filling as fast as it can to figure out why nobody heard Ms. Hutchinson's plea to be kept stateside, and to relieve itself of blame. For my part, I bow to her. She has struck a blow for that wonderful thing, mother love. My own mother love extends to her, and to a deep wish that no other boy - or girl - will be lost to the insanity of war as our young friend Nicky Kim, was not long ago.

I don't have any grand ideas about what to do about war. I think about how to help my ten-year-old grandson see that it is not really exciting and triumphant at all. He's in fourth grade. He would have to become different than the other boys. I know that the ferment of the sixties and fifties has led to many different organizations working for peace. Just now I am going to settle for writing President Obama again about the war in Afghanistan, reminding him that we really don't have to keep letting our sons and daughters die in these insanely cruel ways; that he was elected to bring about change.