A Discourse with Self, or Why I Don't Meditate

The thought in my mind this morning, planted there by reading Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, is that following our impulses is not real freedom. In fact, we can become slaves to them.  Now, in my case I will point to a really homely little thing, not hanging up my clothes.  It is related to changing outfits under the press of time and throwing things on the bed.  Or deciding I'm too tired at night and draping them over the brass rail thing beside the bed.  And that's what it's for.  So as I write it is occurring to me to take that incitement to disorder out of there. 

Anyway, this standing mess has led me to declare that my New Habit of the Week is hanging up my clothes or putting them in the hamper.  You see how this is not a matter of discipline vs. freedom? More discipline leading to freedom, the freedom of being able to find clean clothes without cursing your way through a heap.

And then there is meditating every day.  You'd be surprised the explanations I came up with yesterday just meandering, talking with my PT guy while he pulled my arm, breaking up lesions in the frozen shoulder.  It is good to talk while he does that, it takes my mind off the pain.  

But I am aware that talking about the reasons I don't do what I actually want to do is not very helpful. There's lots of Why.  In some quarters, explaining why you can't is called excuses, excuses.  I can imagine a dialogue with my higher self:

me: Ummmm

self:  Go ahead.

me:  Well, I was going to explain how it came to pass that I got out of the discipline of sitting every day.

self:  You were going to do that instead of meditate.

me:  Ummm.........  Anyway, they're not excuses.  They're, like, reasons. Cause and effect. Karma. Like how I'm on narcotics, and sick all the time. And the moodswings from the steroids. And this irregular schedule. I could go on all day.  It makes sense.  Really.  I have a lot of reasons.

self:  Uh-huh

me:  So anyway.  Guess I'll go meditate and get a little more friendly with you, this self that seems a little wiser than me. (Though I would like to explain how when the creative impulse hits, you have to go with it.  An artist's life is very messy.  Well, the unsuccessful artists, at least.   And all these medical appointments........

self: So you have lots of good reasons why you don't do what you really want to do.

me:  [struck silent]  

p.s. I did take the brass rail thing (a quilt rack) downstairs. I did meditate.

Against Fibromyalgia (a poem)

A crocus in my back yard, which some one I never knew may have planted, though the squirrels do that too. This is the only one like it there.











Against Fibromyalgia

Rain coming in. My hands start to ache.
Shoulder muscles hurt, neck, some strain
in my jaws. And the sky
beyond the clerestory windows
is gray. The spring buds have gone from green
to a quiet statement, withdrawn,
as it were to an old lady grey
(which I wish to spell the British way).
It is early yet. Nests can still be seen
easily, as last night in the park
we heard an unknown bird,
stood and listened, looked up
until the silhouette flew away.

    from Poems Written on 3x5 Cards (unpublished)

[In church on Sunday morning, I often feel a poem come on. I carry 3x5 index cards, so that's what I write on, and that does affect the form of the poem, though this one carried over to a second card. Writing by hand also seems qualitatively different than writing with a keyboard. These are not "difficult" enough for the literary journals, so I never send them out.  Today thought I would begin sharing, especially as this one moves from pain to remembered beauty. The title of the chapbook in which I would publish them is sheerly optimistic.]

Touched by compassion

Daffodils outside McConnell Heart Health Center yesterday

The way things happen, this pain in my abdomen (near the old scar from a hernia repair six years ago) had slowly, slowly been emerging.  Then this week, it began quickly quickly getting worse.

But I went in for my physical therapy yesterday (for the frozen shoulder, result of a fall and broken arm last September - and oh my, how healing drags on).  This PT is very important to me; unless I keep at it, I will never have the strength and range of motion in this arm to play guitar again.  I had recently grasped the unpleasant truth that a frozen shoulder is loosened up only by enduring pain regularly.  Every day at home, too. That's it. I take a pain pill before I go, and it still hurts to the max.

PT is very intimate, someone working with your body and caring about it.  I get to liking these people a lot.  Back when I was first getting lymphedema massage (post-breast cancer in 1997), I used to talk talk to the therapist and then cry, though that kind of PT didn't hurt much. It was like crying in shavasana, after yoga; you relax, it's a safe situation, the tears and healing chemicals just leak out.

Afterward I went over to make an appointment with my doctor. When I told Katie what the problem was, she talked to someone, and said they'd take me right in.  I started to remember how awful it was when the last hernia burst through - this is really extraordinary pain, and demanded flight to the ER and emergency surgery. 

It was a new doctor - my usual Saint, Jason Dapore - was off.  This John Diehl was every bit as sharp and focused.  He poked my abdomen while I stood, then had me lie down, then had me tense the muscles.  Ouch! marked the exact spot, I can feel the little protrusion there now.  Just like last time. Then they wrapped me in nice wide elastic, gave me two extra elastics, and set up a CT scan for Monday morning. (I always get sick on Friday.)

But here's what made me want to write about this.  In the course of questioning me, the new doctor learned that I am still being treated for shingles, and the shoulder, and that we are exploring the question of surgery to remove my old kidneys, which may be harboring infection.  He said quietly, "You really have a lot going on."  Writing that, tears came to my eyes again.

That's what I wanted to write about.  It seems I'd been being brave and matter-of-fact about all this because that's how I was conditioned in my alcoholic family:  never show weakness. After the doctor left the room, to my surprise, I started to cry.  Yes, I really do have a lot going on, and my left ankle's been aching again, too. I felt my insides - my heart - soften, my whole being softened toward myself.  I thought, That's the power of compassion.  Someone noticing. Listening. Affirming your reality.  It felt like an important spiritual experience to soften where I didn't know I was hard. And to feel physically how much even a light touch of compassion can mean.

Your one wild and precious day

[The title of this post is taken from Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day."  Oliver is a nature-mystic and the favorite poet of many people I know.  The image is my valiant African violet, which has survived Tashi's teeth, and my neglect, to bloom when it thinks it is spring. It's spring for me right now, too.]

When I am depressed, I have no motivation, no desires except to not be in that emotional pain - and, oddly, the flatlands are as painful as what Holly Golightly called "the screaming reds," that irritable, hypersensitive depression that hits me in August, season of decaying fire.

Just a week ago, on Saturday night, watching a rerun of House and playing Words on my iPad, I felt the barely perceptible lifting of the big February depression-with-shingles-and-UTI that meant I didn't post much.  "Lifting" is the word, as if some invisible bricks have been on you, weighing you down, and they are lifted off one by one.  The next morning I felt somewhat better.  Got all dressed, went to church, and there found I was so cold, cold to the bone. Cold.  Different than chills.  It's making me feel cold to try to describe it.

Left the worship center, wrapped up in my parka, sat around Fellowship Hall drinking decaf and being uncomfortably cold. Couldn't go out for lunch, had to go home and dive under my electric blanket set to 5.  So it was a dumb, very flat day.  Not exactly painful.  More, nothing.  And the next morning I woke up and my first sensation/thought was one of relief.  The damn thing was gone. I felt good.

If you are not bipolar, you may never have experienced this - your depressions or miseries may be situational, and relieved by things that happen to you or things you do, like exercise.  But I am describing this because you have a relative or spouse or friend, or you will, who has this illness.  I wanted to write "suffers from," so I will, despite thes Buddhist truism "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."  This is bull, when it comes to these times of serious chemical imbalance, though I completely understand the truth it expresses, that we cause our own suffering by our thoughts and actions, by sticking to stuff and desires. I could write a book about how we cause our own suffering, based solely on my own experience.

Day after day this week I have felt good.  Not the swirling manic-high terrific, God forbid. But fine.  Loving, peaceful, calm, enjoying everything I do.  It is the perfect mood.  For my Buddhist friends, it's that mood you can have after a retreat, or even at the end of that first long day of meditation.  A day in this mood has that "wild and precious" sense to it - the silence of the house after the dishwasher has run is as pleasing as music or flowing water.  The laundry basket half-full of socks (depression leads to sock calamities - no motivation, you know) is amusing.  A good friend's invitation to an art-and-coffee day is delightful.  So is Tashi when she climbs up on my shoulder, descending to curl on my heart and purr, which I answer with imagining the identical vibration of Mu.

I've known a lot of bipolars, so I know that this mood is not entirely a chemical blessing, for we can tangle ourselves up thoroughly in our neurotic ideas and impulses and never enjoy a damn thing.  This mood is also the blessing of years of practice - meditation, prayer, writing poetry, paying attention to others, letting go of one fantasy after another.  Suzuki said we meditate so we can enjoy our old age.  It's true.  It's like a retirement saving's account that is going to be your salvation when the time comes.

I hope you have a wild and precious day, too.

Good shoes

[imagine you see a beautiful picture here]

This morning, wasting the first hour up, not fighting my resistance to my Artist's Way assignment (write morning pages first thing), and to meditating. I love to connect with friends on the internet over coffee. Always wanted to be able to do that. And roam around, having found again last night Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, and the whole poem.  I read it to Tom in bed, the Norton footnotes too, how Yeats developed this belief in what we could call a Pure Land, which he thought was made of art and fine craftsmanship.  In this, it seems to me, he did not have the acceptance of this fine organic mess we try to cultivate, trying harder the messier it gets.  It was this poem, BTW, that begins with the line "This is no country for old men." And has several other immortal phrases, too.
~~~~
Went to six-month appointment with kidney doc this afternoon. It looks very much like we can't go on with these UTIs developing ever-more resistant bacteria, so we are proceeding to talk to a surgeon again about getting the useless old bad old stupid calcified shrunken cystic kidneys taken out, on the assumption that they are harboring infection.  There is a type of cystoscopy that could give more information, maybe, so we are trying to get that going.  I feel optimistic about this, since it might mean I could feel more well and healthy down the road. I don't know how many surgeries I've had now, and I'm pretty blase about them.

For the appointment I decided to dress up by wearing "real shoes" instead of my Avias.  This is it, folks, as dressy as it gets when you've had several stress fractures in your feet and must wear good (as opposed to pretty) shoes to protect them.  The adorable Mary Janes below are leather, not mesh and rubber and a lot of engineering. The autumn leaf socks were a special touch due to by poor sock laundry management.  I really need some Easter socks.

p.s. My ankles are not that fat - it's the perspective.