To miss New Orleans

If you want to renew your appreciation of life, of your fortunate life, watch and listen to this treatment of the song, sung by Louis Armstrong.

Born to Mosey

I see there's a book very popular among runners (people who choose to run when there's nothing chasing them) called, what else, Born to Run. A great title, and it suggested to me the title for my own autobiography, which I intend to write when nothing is chasing me. "Born to Mosey."

Mosey is an archaic word, but I will stick with it because it's the first word that came to my mind, and sticking with it is much easier than getting down Roget's Thesaurus, which I actually own in book form. That right there should tell you that mosey is an apt word for someone of my age. It is an interesting word that connotes my humble heritage. But I don't want to deviate into looking up the word's etymology and hopelessly lose track of my inspiration, I want to explain myself. Not as an apology, just - clarification.

This is a world, this world I was born into way last century, that does not mosey. Americans run, they strive, they stretch, they reach, they gain, they multitask, they dream impossible dreams. They believe in dreaming impossible dreams, which has given rise to multiple huge industries that help people either dream that way or recover from dreaming that way: personal trainers, life coaches, therapists of every description, gurus, expensive running shoes . . . as you see, the list is endless. Nevertheless, some of us, many of us actually, just aren't suited for that.

If you look at the animal kingdom, it is very hard to justify this running thing. What mature predator gallops about at full speed when there is no prey? None, unless they hear the can-opener in the kitchen, and after all, catfood is a sort of prey that's been pre-conditioned to make life easier.

TV has given us a false impression of the animal kingdom. The fact is, in the state of Nature, lions lay around in the sun until they get hungry, and they would never get up if someone else would serve them. Elephants just stand there occasionally whisking their pathetic little tails, unless someone gives them some paints. Monkeys spend a great deal of time picking fleas off one another, an activity I suppose is akin to going to the beauty parlor or going on the Jerry Springer show. But they don't run.

It was very difficult for a pale, artistic type to grow up in this culture, which was like this even before feminism told women that we could compete (a form of running) in the "real" world with men, both in sports and at work. Still, I got along okay until seventh grade, when we were put without our consent into gym class, complete with starched white one-piece uniforms like truncated sleeveless jump suits. There we were expected to perform hard things that involved a lot of hasty moving about and sweating. This was great for a handful of naturally athletic girls who went on to become cheerleaders or high divers, but some of us just liked to read, and you couldn't get excused for that. I thought then and still do that getting out of breath isn't right, somehow.

The sport that naturally appealed to me in adulthood was yoga. I liked best the prone poses, the ones you do on the floor, especially shavasana, or corpse pose, which I do not say in order to be screamingly funny. It's the truth. I was willing to go through the rest to get to those last long, slow minutes when somebody told me to Relax.

Another thing I tried during my Middle Years was Tai Chi. This was a reach for me, because you were supposed to keep moving through a series of poses that were not posted on a blackboard (okay, white board) for us readers. It should not surprise anyone that my favorite thing about Tai Chi was the pose my teacher called Wu Wei, I think it was, which involved just standing doing nothing at all. Not even intending to move. My teacher claimed that all action had to proceed for this complete non-action. But I was always just getting into it when he started us moving.

Today, I watch more active people from my comfortable seat at a kitchen window that looks out on the street. Runners, power walkers, just plain walkers briskly walking, feeling their pulse, consulting their watch, talking on their cellphones, accomplishing something. None of them seem to be enjoying themselves the way their dogs do. Dogs, now, laugh when they're out for a run. It's fun they would say, and dogs like to have fun all the time, which is why they are dogs and we are the Master Race.

Case 1: "What's the use?"

[Case 1 in Grandmother's Koans]

The Case
One afternoon, Grandmother and a friend sat on the patio under a shade tree having a cool, refreshing drink and discussing the recalcitrant idiosyncrasies of their husbands. They calculated that between the two of them they had been married some seventy years, though not always to the same men.

Contemplating their vast lifetime store of experience, the friend said, "You can't do a thing with them."

"What's the use?" Grandmother said.

The friend sighed and remained silent. Both women nodded.

Grandmother's Poem
All things change they say.
But some things are just more of the same.
So why bother?

Commentary
A historical note: The "patio" mentioned in the Case is a predecessor of the modern deck. Usually made of brick, stone, or concrete, it provided an outdoor haven when built near a large tree, whose cooling shade was welcome in the days before air-conditioning. Obviously, Grandmother and her unnamed friend are Women Of a Certain Age, given their many years of married life - the only life available to women in ancient times. Another key to their advanced age and wisdom is the fact that they are sitting down in the middle of the day instead of working their asses off. Perhaps they are "housewives," or are retired, or are working women enjoying the classic Friday "long lunch."

The Poem. It has been noted that the Poem does not rhyme or scan, follows no classical form, and has no imagery. Why, therefore, is it called a poem? What is a poem? Thinking deeply on that is an entirely useless past-time, and thus highly to be commended.

A curious fact about the central statement, "What's the use?" is that it takes the grammatical form of a question - but is never answered. It would be a great mistake to answer it in any meeting of Tea Ladies, and would be considered a breach of etiquette. Why is it never answered? No use asking.

The statement can be defined as a rhetorical question, but should not be set aside as trivial for that reason. Work this non-question with all your might, day and night. At every turn ask yourself, "What's the use?" When prompted to speak, stop and ask; when about to take action, stop and ask. When the alarm clock goes off, silence it and, turning over, ask, "What's the use?" Do this until you have become a mass of stopping and doing nothing, until everywhere you turn, you see that there's no use. People don't change, we never get anywhere, you will put every pound back on. By the time you fix anything, two other things will have gone wrong.

Then you will shout to the universe, "Why bother!" and the very heavens will crack open for you, and you will enter a fresh, new life. All delusions fallen away, you will understand the pleasures of a use-less life, and may now enjoy refreshing beverages with your friends, and may enter into advanced contemplation of buying a chaise lounge. But where would you put it?

It seems to me that most of you have probably had enough teaching . . .
Ajahn Chah, Meeting the Dharma Alone

How to relax

[image: Sheba not working at relaxing]

Getting it back together - whatever "it" is . . .

• read "The Heaven of Animals"
• breathe in deeply and exhale, mouth open, saying Ahhhh. Hold the bottom of the exhale - don't rush to breathe back in. Or don't vocalize Ahhhh. Or just imagine you are saying it.
  
• listen to "Will the Circle be Unbroken" by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on YouTube
• take a brief, easy walk around the neighborhood (before the hours of fire begin at 10:00 a.m.) walking meditatively - slow, heel, ball of foot, or call it toe; heel, toe. Mind in soles of feet.
• collect a yellow leaf from a rough black asphalt surface
• put your palm against a great old sycamore, and feel its chi
• throw away some publications you should read but don't want to
• laugh when Sheba walks across the keys
• drink some lavender tea
• lie down on the rug and stretch any old way
  

In love with made things

[image: In Love with Made Things, Jeanne Desy]
This quote, attributed to the Buddha, came to me yesterday via the Tricycle Daily Dharma:

You should train yourself: Even though I may be sick in body, my mind will be free of sickness. That's how you should train yourself.... And how is one sick in body but not sick in mind? There is the case where an instructed noble disciple ... does not assume the body to be the self, or the self as possessing the body, or the body as in the self, or the self as in the body. He is not obsessed with the idea that "I am the body" or "The body is mine." As he is not obsessed with these ideas, his body changes and alters, but he does not fall into sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, or despair over its change and alteration. (Similarly with feeling, perception, mental processes, and consciousness.) This is how one is sick in body but not sick in mind.

Well, I wonder about the implicit dualism, body separate from mind, self separate from parts. In extreme forms we call this disassociation. I myself desire to be a whole person, and I thought this was the goal of Zen practice. I sit in meditation and observe my thoughts, my aches and impulses, my fears. Me in my body. It is true that I also build the strength of the Witness who can say to my body/mind, "It's just a brief pain" when someone comes into the hospital room to stick my finger with a glucose monitor yet again. Part of me is saying, "I hate that, my fingers are very sensitive, it hurts," but the Witness overrules the impulse to jerk my hand away and refuse.

Glucose is one of the many parts we are made of. When mine dropped perilously low in the hospital last Friday, and I was on the verge of passing out, it all went - mind, body, ability to speak coherently, ability to do anything. At best, the body conspires to keep glucose flowing at a rate that does not threaten your whole being that way. (If I had been alone, driving a car . . .?) You are your blood sugar. All of you.

You also are your red blood cells, while I'm at it. Last winter I learned that, when my anemia wouldn't respond to the shots. The red blood cells carry oxygen which is pumped by the heart through an array of blood vessels. Every mechanism in your body and mind has to have this oxygen. I noticed the lack in my fatigue, in my pervasive depression, my shortness of breath.

You are your heart, which will valiantly work faster and harder to bring you oxygen when the supply is running short; that's why you get short of breath running. When you have a heart event like I did, an arrythmia, the heart taking off on its own, losing rhythm, getting faster and faster, you realize you are your heart, and nothing without it. If it doesn't work, and you don't get immediate medical care, you're done.

I used to think you are your breath. After all, in the end we exhale and don't inhale. But that depends on all the rest, on so many other parts not failing. And breath is one thing medicine can provide, via respirators, when a person is "brain dead," that is, the part that governs breathing has died. But of course you are what you breathe in, and the whole world gets what you breathe out.

Who is that one? Who are you? This was the first koan my root teacher gave me. I have come to understand that this one is composed of parts. Each part is attached to and works with the other parts. It doesn't take much to kill you.

When I had the big arrythmia, my heart pounding around in my chest, my neck throbbing with high blood pressure, unable to breathe, I knew I could die right there, just like that. It went on ten minutes, fifteen, while I recorded it on the little ECG I'd been wearing and transmitted it, and it kept getting worse. I had no time at all for regrets or thank you's or goodbyes, only to gasp, I don't feel well, I don't know what to do. I was entirely caught up in my heart's wierd panic. As quick as that, the whole thing that is you can blink out.

Two days later I had another "event" as doctors like to say. My blood sugar dipped very low (46). I happened to be on a guerney in the hall of the hospital, my doctor talking to me. I don't feel well, I kept saying. Sorry, I can't understand. A black blink kept occurring as my entire body went into a sort of physical panic. I had no reason to suspect that I am hypoglycemic, so no way to know how to act. You just want to fall back and go to sleep. If I had been home alone when that happened, I think I would have just laid down. I don't know what happens then.

So there was this reading, attributed to the Buddha (though we think nothing he said was written down for 200 years). I do not feel detached from this unpredictable body. Not at all. My fear of sudden death has me feeling tentative. Maybe a Teacher would call this "a promising situation." Maybe they could yank me into facing it, revising my will, writing those letters you think about to my loved ones, now that I am mended. But actually, I just want to go do the laundry that sat in the washer while I was gone, draw something, or shop on the internet for a laptop, so I don't get stuck in the hospital yet again wide awake at 3:00 a.m. alone with the fragility and unpredictability of this body, which it seems to me is what I am.

About being grateful . . .

[video - a song I'm grateful for.]
My latest reading is a slim book by Pema Chodron, Practicing Peace in Times of War. It is nothing about large political action, and all about working on yourself to develop non-aggressive habits of mind. It has led me to watch myself as I skip away from some feeling toward some action, desiring to Do Something.

Just now I saw myself do that as I read a friend's note on difficult change. He wrote, "I need to live in the moment, to appreciate and be grateful for what IS," and my hackles went up. You can count on that - I hate it when people tell me how to feel. In the same mail I received a letter from a woman whose husband is slowly dying. She wrote that she wanted to throw a visitor, Ms. Sunshine, bodily out the door. Yes, some things are just pain, and we don't want anyone telling us to cheer up. We just want our experience to be acknowledged.

Ann has it a lot worse than me. I am actually grateful to remember that, since I am not very grateful right now. I just got out of the hospital (again) yesterday, after three days evaluating the atrial fibrillation that manifested hugely on Wednesday. I am on two new meds and expected to do fine. Atrial is the kind of fibrillation you want, if you get to choose. I am actually grateful for that, too, as I was afraid it might require a pacemaker. I waited all one day for the doctor who had said he would read the tests and be back. Abstractly speaking, I'm glad I got through the long night somehow, and in the morning the news was good.

Feelings can arise when the body does some thing pretty independent of what's going on, neurotransmitters remarking the phase of the moon, hormones marking it their own way. But most of the time I can trace my own feelings to thoughts. Like, "I didn't sign up for this!"

I am not so against feeling grateful as I once was, since I read about research on the subject. Oh, these busy people, many of them closet Buddhists, who study happiness. Here is a researcher's overview of the science. I'll just quote one finding:

In a sample of adults with neuromuscular disease, a 21-day gratitude intervention resulted in greater amounts of high energy positive moods, a greater sense of feeling connected to others, more optimistic ratings of one’s life, and better sleep duration and sleep quality, relative to a control group.

It seems that one way gratitude accomplishes this is by increasing our sense of personal control over our own life. That would certainly be good for me, as all this that keeps happening medically has given me to think a lot about the bad karma in my father's family, with all those deaths from "heart," all that alcoholism and bipolar. And generally bad attitudes, now that I think about it.

One way to intervene with your negativity is to keep a gratitude journal, to write down (or express in art, say collage) what you are grateful for. What if you are just NOT grateful for a heart event that scared you almost to death? Well, I was grateful for a nurse who brought a glass of water, no ice. This inspired more heart-felt (sic) gratitude than the good luck of decent health insurance, which is rather abstract when you're sitting there on oxygen and IV Lopressor, panting. So often the direct physical experience trumps all our ideas. On the other hand, I was so grateful that night when a close friend surprised me with a visit that I cried.

Still, the resultant exhaustion, and the clear promise that I'd better slow down, really slow down, or else . . . all this change has left me inclined to count the things I don't like, don't want. And that's the truth. I am not grateful for the deconditioning of three days in bed, just as I was progressing slowly with physical therapy, learning to walk again. NOT grateful for "another _______ growth opportunity." Don't need more growth, I say. Give me some not-growth.

Really, I have a lot to be grateful for, abstractly speaking. It wasn't a heart attack, I have "a young heart," undamaged. They got my heart back in rhythm (though it bumps a little now and then, and that frightens me). But I find what I am really grateful for is the homemade zucchini bread Carol Wilhelm brought to church today for us. It tasted wonderful. There, that wasn't so hard. Maybe I'll begin a gratitude journal, at last.

Happy End of Day

[image: End of Day glass]
I certainly prefer birth over death, beginnings over endings. A baby is fresh and new, a delight of potential and surprise. Old age, sickness, and death are so sobering. Yet, many Buddhists work with that. I believe it was Issan, a Buddhist abbott, who started the first hospice, when the AIDs epidemic hit California, and no one knew what to do. Buddhists find hospice work fulfilling, as do many people once they have served as caregivers for a spouse or parent. Facing death, we are more sincere, we are leveled.

In my church, memorial services often glide over the hard part and emphasize the joys of the person's life, before he got so sick, that is. It is a celebration. Yet I remember one service in which people spoke about the dead woman, Lisa, her eternal youthfulness, and at last one man got up and said, "She did not remain herself to the end. That was the tragedy." I knew that, too. I had visited her in her locked dementia ward. She had been dressed well, and sat on an absorbent pad on the bed, smiling, pretending to know us. She was not herself anymore. I appreciated that man's honesty. He loved her.

As I understand it, it was encountering the realities of end-of-life that led the Buddha to leave his home and search for some consolation. It took him a while, years of traveling from one esteemed teacher to another, learning what they had to teach, meditating, doing all sorts of rigorous spiritual practices. What he came up with was - Life is hard. Very unsatisfactory, say. Because in every single birth, death is implicit. All living things mature and die. Our problem, the Buddha said, is our endless thirst. Our craving to not have life be the way it is.

You sure know about this when you end up like me, limited by a mortal illness our medical system tries hard to defeat. Beyond "lifestyle" treatments, kidney failure can be addressed only by dialysis and transplant. Both are crude, painful, elaborate and expensive treatments, but dialysis is worse, and is usually low yield in terms of restoring health. So we thirst for that magical transplant.

I had to stop there the other day and examine that. This is one reason we meditate, to go deeper with ourselves, until we face the strength of our cravings and our unrealistic delusions. Transplant is not in fact so magic as all that; the real story with Cinderella is that you might marry the Prince, but you will still have to sweep up the ashes of life, metaphorically speaking. Our lives don't stop at the beautiful waltz of the beginning.

Going deeper with myself these days I realize how I crave healing, how I want to believe there is - or will soon be - a treatment that will give me back my life - the energy of middle age. Or at least, more years with more good days. I have an alternate craving: to forget the whole thing and just accept quietly dying; that is a choice a kidney patient can make.

Lousy alternatives. Realizing this yesterday, I went about doing my laundry yelling fervently, "Don't want!" That assertion was one of the first things my grandson learned to say, and as a toddler he could say it ferociously. "Don't want!" Of course, Don't Want is as much a craving as Want.

I came back from a Memorial Service the other day with an index card on which I had written,

There is no happy ending
to an individual life.
So, what is going to console us?

Zen says the answer is to sink deep into that truth. Accept it. I guess that is the Right Understanding piece of the way of life the Buddha recommended as our consolation, what is called The Noble Eightfold Path. Ah, so, I hear my sister-in-law say. It comes down to that after all. Where is the consolation of right livelihood, of not taking what is not yours, of kind speech? This hardly seems appealing compared to a party, or a transplant.

The image I put up today is End of Day glass. If you click on that phrase, it will take you to a site that describes this accidental art, which makes beauty is made out of the leftover scraps. That seems a very nice idea to me. Consoling, in fact.

The Kind of Cat I am: The Artistic Temperament in August

I was consoled this morning to see that my most creative, artistic Facebook friends also had -- what to call it? okay, fits. They, too, had fits yesterday. You can call them mini-breakdowns. I had a tai chi teacher who told me to call them "nervous breakthroughs." How right he was - you fall apart, you find some truths in the junk at the bottom the mess, you put yourself back together a little better. Better how? Maybe less constructed. Or more organized. Or over it. Which function is more useful, Control or Delete? Depends.

The kind of cat I am is creative, and generally in need of more mess. All artists make things out of our experience (Norman Fischer is very good on this). In my case, I arrange words or sometimes blocks of color, or angles, to catch someone in a photograph . . . or flowers, one of my favorite forms of art, so impermanent, so frivolous, meant only for my appreciation, which is keenest as I make the arrangement. I make art when I think I should be making something else. See image, a bowl of raw yellow squash, cut in circles, and laid across it a scape of garlic. There it is, found beauty interrupting the task. I would never never want to work as a chef, purposeful and fast, intent on the end product.

The essence of Being an Artist, of allowing one's creativity to flourish, is to have purposeless time, empty time, uselessness. It is from that open, rambling, no-should do-nothing spot that art pops up, that we can hear the poem when it whispers. That place can be peaceful and contemplative, but to tell the truth, the poems that emerge from that later read as . . . boring. The paintings might make good hospital art. It is from the rough and ragged that interesting art comes. Why is that? I suppose because what we want from art is to arrange the rough and ragged in some way that makes us feel better about it. And so, many of my own poems are about death. A death plunged me into writing. I have since written much about other people's death. Now it's about my own. But a Poet once told me, "Every elegy is really about the poet."

This week my friend Bob gave me a refresher in a game I used to play a lot, pinochle. I told him, making a chancy bid, "I'm not a good card player. I like to take risks."

"Actually," he said, "that's what makes a good player."

"It's the same in literature," I said, sweeping in tricks like a riverboat gambler. "It's the people way out there who dare to do what they do and to hell with what you're supposed to do."

I was thinking to myself (as students so often write, as if there's another kind of thinking) how 20 years ago I compulsively wrote a collection of linked stories about people who were friends and showed up in other people's stories. No one was doing that then. I tied myself in monkey knots trying to make the thing into "a novel." Despite that, it won first place in a national contest, but I never had the courage to market the thing aggressively. Agents and publishers want to know, What kind of book is it? See, it's sort of something new, I would have said (if you discount Canterbury Tales). Oh well. They don't want new. They want proven success. Now I am reading prize-winning books of linked stories, Three Junes, for instance. The genre is coming into its own. It's too bad I didn't have the confidence, or connections, back then.

I endowed our cat Sherlock with the quality I wanted to cultivate in my art, total unquestioning self-confidence. He did things his way. Sometimes he seemed to smooth his lapels before walking slowly away, emanating as he did, Well, I guess you don't like what I did, but that's the kind of cat I am. Get used to it. Up on the table licking the roast? That's the kind of cat I am. I bit you? Oh well. That's the kind of cat I am.

Not that I, Jeanne, want to go around doing evil things with no conscience - what I mean is that in a sense, genuine art is disruptive. It breaks the boundaries of Should. To be an artist in any field, that's what you have to do to get down to the real. Everything else is just doing the conventional thing.

It is hell to be an artist, and probably worse to live with us, I don't know. In August in this hemisphere, some of us get way out of balance. I myself am a largely Air person endowed with Fire, and I get all blown about inside by relentless overripe August. It isn't just the sun, it's the time of year. Summer goes all out, ripe and poised on the edge of death. This morning what I saw helicoptering down in the sky across the street was the first maple seed. There are many many redbud seeds in the back yard, clustered like little green bananas, poised on the brink. I am tempted to go out and photograph them - just discovered the macro in my digital camera - but I'll wait until evening. The long light is better then, and I have sworn to stay inside during the heat of the day, with all the blinds closed. Dim and cool feels wonderful.

Consolations of literature

Appointment in Samara
(a very old Babylonian story, retold)

A certain merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the market to buy some provisions. A little while later, the servant returned, white in the face. In a trembling voice he said, "Just now in the market place I was jostled by a man in the crowd, and when I turned I saw it was Death. He looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Please lend me your horse. I want to go to Samara where Death will never find me."

The merchant agreed and lent the man his horse. The servant mounted and rode away as fast as the animal could gallop.

Later that day, the merchant went down to the market place and saw Death standing in the crowd. He approached him and said, "Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?"

"That was not a threatening gesture," said Mr. Death. "It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, because I have an appointment with him tonight in Samara."

[n. The above is from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Note that Death's banner is the white rose, a symbol of life, perhaps spiritual life.]

When the Resurrection Lilies Bloom

(A preliminary chronicle of yesterday): A bad awakening at 5:00 a.m. General anxiety about sickness, old age, and death, like a cloud of gnats around me. Flew out the door to talk to a good friend over an emergency breakfast. Later in the day talking to Tom and crying with frustration when my daughter called. She wanted to know if I had ever made zucchini patties, but was more than willing to talk about This Health Thing, about nuclear stress tests and transplant. Husband, friend, daughter, all are intelligent, practical people who listen and say what they think. I am very lucky to have three such people like that in my life. It added up to calming me enough to go out for Jade Scallops at Pacific Eatery. They use fresh broccoli and real scallops, and are not stingy with them. Then nine hours sleep - the most healing thing in the world. I fondly remembered Shakespeare's line -

Sleep, that knits the raveled sleeve of care.

Usually, I sleep seven hours. Nine hours gives me one more crucial sleep cycle full of resolving dreams. Then a long, slow awakening, not snapping to. It is a beautiful morning, so I thought of Hopkins' poem, "God's Grandeur" -

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

So happy to have poetry stored in my mind.

We took our coffee out to the screened porch. Then I decided to meditate on the patio, I guess you'd call it, a nice old rumpled area of brick leading into the back yard. I decided to do the kind of meditation I think of as contemplation, just being with nature. In the back yard, the resurrection lilies are in bloom.

I don't think there's a way to take a photo of them that would convey what there is. Imagine a heavily wooded yard that slopes down on one side to the next lot. Going down from the middle of the lot and curving around, the lilies.

I didn't know what resurrection lilies were until we moved into our first house. Our next-door neighbor, Kay, had lived in her house sixty years, and the yard was overgrown with classic perennials. She pointed out her lilies to me when they bloomed. They are quite unlike the daylilies that naturalize around here, and the showy hybrids people buy at Oakland Nursery, in that the leaves come up in early summer, show no bloom, and die back.

Then one morning you get up and pink lilies are cascading down your yard on tall, leafless stems. The name "Resurrection" is so apt - they are always a delightful surprise. We drive through our neighborhood, Clintonville, during the week or two that this is going on, and point them out to each other, patches of pink lily on a devil's strip or in a yard, left over from some previous landscaping.

I sat on the patio looking at them and thought with gratitude about the "old people" who once lived here and put in a great many plants. It must have been a lot of work, planting those lilies; lily bulbs have to be planted rather deep. Those who built this dwelling and lived in it must be dead now, but they left behind this amazing gift.

Often I picture karma as a long, hand-woven river of fiber, with many little strands of thread in every color entering and going through it. Here is our woods, giant oak trees that nobody cut down. Through them are threaded old flagstone walks which the neighborhood cats always use in preference to walking on dirt, and on which the groundhog sits to eat the attractive weeds that grow alongside. This time of year there is no color but green, and today white clouds and blue sky. One day of real summer, at last, a perfect day. Woven through this green and blue, the pink lilies. They display because that's what they do. Long before I knew what a Buddhist was, I had a little sign in my kitchen that said, "Bloom where you are planted." It seemed sort of sentimental, but I liked it anyway.

Surviving doctors

[image: Sheba in my study on her very own chair. Normally, she sleeps there while I write, sending me much-needed alpha waves.]

At this point in my life, I wish that many years ago I had decided to avoid Western medicine. I wasn't that eccentric, and the choices were not clear. For instance, when I was pregnant in 1961, I had never heard of midwives. The hospital was impatient with my desire to breastfeed, and no one helped me, so that I ended up with a painful infection called mastitis.

But I stayed on the track, going to doctors. This morning I found myself awake early, running over the mistakes they have made with me, remembering how last year a urologist prescribed a maintenance antibiotic that would have finished off my kidneys. Since my internist caught the error and warned me against the medication, that error didn't loom as large as other things. But it was.

Western medicine does some things well, handling infection, and fixing up traumas, wounds and broken bones. Antibiotics have saved my life at least twice. The first time was straightforward, a shot of penicillin that magically cured acute bronchitis. The second time, I had peritonitis. The antibiotics cured me, but it was Western medicine that had made me ill - the peritonitis followed on a simple D&C. That was long ago. I didn't learn from it.

I can't count the number of grave medical mistakes made on me since then. One was the unnecessary removal of my lymph nodes when I had surgery for an early breast cancer. The surgeon pointed out that by doing that, we could know whether the cancer had spread. He promised certainty, which is very appealing when you have cancer. I'm surprised, looking back, that I thought certainty was possible.

Total lymphectomy is no longer routinely done, but the change happened too late for me. This body is doomed to live with a lymphedemic arm. It could be worse. Ten years earlier, they would have routinely done a radical mastectomy on me, because that's what they did then - to be certain.

The lymph removal turned out to affect my life greatly. Like a great percentage of women - maybe 25%, maybe 50% - I developed lymphedema. The arm is so swollen my grandson calls it "your Popeye arm." It's almost impossible to find women's clothes that fit over it. I have to wear an elastic sleeve at all times, and sit with an electric pump massaging the arm every day. There is no hope of cure for this, no way to restore the chain of 17 healthy lymph nodes. They were part of the mechanism of the body.

Because they were removed, the arm gets infected easily, from the tiniest cut. I was not told until after the surgery that I must garden in long sleeves and gloves, never handle dirt, never get stung by a bee or mosquito, or pricked by a thorn. It made gardening miserable. That is the kind of quality of life issue very few doctors care about. And clearly, the many infections I've had in that arm are more life-threatening. The last one seemed to be caused by a tiny paper cut, which I did clean with an alcohol swab, but not quickly and thoroughly enough, apparently. The resulting cellulitis put me in the hospital yet again.

Here I am, going way back, maybe because today is the 12th anniversary of that surgery. In all this it is still true that I survived breast cancer. The surgery probably lengthened my life, though there's no way to be sure, is there?

I learned something about cancer then, that Wun's body is always being invaded by cancer cells. The key to health is Wun's own immune system, defending. This knowledge terrified me into beginning healing meditation, which became a daily meditation practice and led me to an immersion in Buddhist thought. There is nothing like a good jolt of fear to get you going. It keeps me going even now, much as I hate to sit still and do nothing.

Heart events

As near as I can remember, when I was a child the only ways I could say No to what someone else wanted me to do were to whine, to cry, to disappear or disassociate, or to lag back, doing the thing slowly and badly. My little brother on the other hand, who had red hair, learned when he was still in diapers to throw himself down on the floor and scream and kick, and then hold his breath. Amazing. There is no middle way between these two poor ways of gaining some ownership of your life.

Until recently I misunderstood the Buddhist idea of the middle way. I believed it meant carefully steering the boat between two extremes, such as passivity or aggression. But there is another way to understand that. The word that is often translated as "middle" actually means "core." The Core Way is the way of our center, the way of the heart. Sometimes you see the word "heart-mind" used to indicate that it is all of us, the entire thinking, feeling creature we are.

When you try to make a big decision about your future, you are like a person in a black tunnel, reaching out, touching a wall, advancing carefully, feeling overhead, listening to drips of water, tapping a foot to see if you're coming up on a chasm. We don't come equipped with flashlights. I'm afraid I wasn't even that careful about big decisions when I was young, though choosing a major or getting married seemed to be life-and-death. You don't know life-and-death until you can see that the light at the end of that tunnel is death, that death is where you are going, and your decisions may affect the timing and manner of your death.

Several years ago I was shocked to learn that my kidney function had fallen so low while I was busy with other things that it was time for me to contemplate dialysis and transplant. My reaction to the idea of having my body invaded by either of these treatments was very emotional. I couldn't stomach the idea of cadaveric transplant, and was afraid of it. I chose to go on peritoneal dialysis, which the doctor recommended, uninformed about what it would mean in my daily life. You know, what you have to go through each day. How it will affect what you eat, when you sleep, whether you can leave the house, the way your clothes fit, how much time it will take (3 hours a day). This ended abruptly when I got an abdominal hernia at my waist band and the doctors let it rupture. I chose not to go back on dialysis after I healed. It turned out a careful person could live with the kidney function I have.

After that I got to seriously rethinking transplant. I had unwittingly accepted the cultural imperative that we must do whatever it takes to stay alive one more day. If that was true, I had only two choices, dialysis or transplant, and I was on a path of complying with major medical treatments. I ran the hurdles and got on a transplant list. In my fear of death, I had reverted to that little girl who goes along with what the grownups tell her to do. This is strange, indeed, because the kidney doctor had told me carefully that I could choose to have no treatment, and that death from kidney failure was not unpleasant. But I didn't know anything about death.

Over this year-and-a-half, many things happened to nudge my attitude and change my mind a little at a time. Those many little experiences that make us who we are. Then, three weeks ago my health "events" caused the transplant surgeon to put me on hold. One problem was that I'd had an episode of arrythmia. My internist didn't believe me, that it was caused by electrolyte imbalance, that I had been flagrantly ignoring the kidney diet (it was the Fourth of July). The cardiologist didn't believe me and told me to wear an "events monitor" for a month, maybe two. The transplant surgeon didn't believe me. I'm much more familiar with the kidney diet than any of them. More importantly, I'm familiar with my body. But they know the statistics.

I kept thinking about the stress test, even as I treated the sores left on my body by the leads to the monitor. A stress test is very unpleasant, several hours of boredom capped by a huge stress caused by chemicals that raise your blood pressure and your heart rate. You are so radioactive that for three days you will trigger an airport detector. That troubles me. The disdain of the medical profession for the elderly, sick patient is shown by the fact that you must show up at 7:30 a.m. for this test. Because. No flexibility, no explanation.
(to be continued)
[image: "Freedom is to Follow the Heart," by Sanna Wallin.]

Giving in

Article in today's NYTimes about how people head for their internet connections to the outside world first thing in the morning. Kids sleep with their phones in hand. Of course, this is deplored as taking us away from the traditional morning activities of a certain privileged demographic (us), like walking the dog or helping the kids find their homework. Yes, I think the dog should be walked. I also think there's a certain Luddite resistance to change.

If I tell you I remember when television came in, you will think I am 66 11/12 years old, and so last century. I try to think of it as accumulated wisdom, or at least experience. Television. We were all fascinated by it, stunned by the availability of entertainment. Until then I had been lucky to go to the local movies once a week, where I would patiently sit through an entire double feature, even cowboy movies. They were movies. I loved them.

I had a girlfriend whose household had the magic box, and she and I used to watch all the sitcoms we possibly could. It all pleased us, though it was aimed at adults, and I suppose we didn't understand most of what went on. We liked Topper, and My Favorite Bachelor. I knew a kid who actually sat and watched test patterns, waiting for the programming to start. Parents, surly about the whole phenomenon ("Radio was good enough for me"), became fixated on watching the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Then, hearing other grownups talk about actually indulging in TV, my own parents allowed themselves to watch Sid Caesar and the Ed Sullivan show. Thus I got to see the American debut of an English singing sensation.

I have a point here and I am wandering toward it as you can when you have no editors to please. It is this - let us stop berating email and texting and Facebook and admit it - we like this stuff. What's wrong with that? A Zen Teacher I used to work with had a way of saying things that struck home for me. In one talk he referred to simple desires, and he shocked some earnest vegetarians by saying, "If you want a Big Mac, go ahead and have one, and enjoy it. Be with it all the way." The idea was, it doesn't have to be a big thing.

Doesn't it sometimes seem like we spend our lives resisting ourselves? There are impulses well worth resisting, arson, infidelity, just one cigarette, but that doesn't mean goodness is purchased through self-denial. Sometimes I think about the string of stupid diets I've been on in my life, thinking that being slimmer or abstractly "healthier" would translate into happiness. It didn't.

I hate thinking about that self-denial. I mean, one of these diets, prescribed by an alternative MD, had me off all gluten, dairy, and sugar. You could hardly find gluten-free products at the time. When this doctor intuited that I should stop eating potatoes and drinking water, I finally said No. But I had wasted months concocting unpleasant milkshakes with all sorts of stuff in them. I regret that now that my kidneys are wearing out, because I really do have to follow a diet, no choice. The experience of the last years confirms the medical wisdom: limit potassium, phosphates, protein and, God help me, salt. I can't binge on this diet. Eating the wrong things overloads my poor kidneys, and I get a major congestion headache or an episode of arrythmia, or lie awake all night feeling the ribs I treated myself to because it was my birthday.

There actually is more to life than food, that's just one example. In fact, we Americans obviously do indulge too much in food, mindlessly, I think. The real thing is to become intimate with yourself and your cravings. Does this circle me back to the fact that I, too, get up, make coffee, and check my e-mail? Yes. Facebook, yes. Maybe someone else is online at 5:00 a.m.

I can make a logical argument for all this internet connection, but it really isn't about logic - it's about enjoying what we decide to do. This can be a challenge when it comes to eating that Big Mac, which I did not long ago. In reality, it is precooked and never warm enough. But eating it reminded me of these realities, and stopped the craving for that ideal Big Mac they advertise, at least for a while.

Courageously battling X

Scanning the obituaries in the local paper today, I soon came across the person who had died "after a long, courageous battle with leukemia." I wondered just what that meant. I decided it meant she didn't make other people uncomfortably aware of her pain and fear. She didn't cry much in front of other people, she didn't whine, she smiled, she put on a pink turban and went to parties and tried every kind of chemo, proven or not. Effort. I mean, what the hell does it mean to "courageously" "battle" the inevitable? Can you battle in a cowardly way? Or can you just battle, without any adjectives? Or can you not battle at all, and can that be a dignified choice?

Going down to the basic assumption, that battling is good, I wonder whether this is a distinctly American thing, part of the dream of conquering all frontiers through sheer force of will (i.e., doing violence to the Other)? I could, in my mind, imagine someone in a far distant culture and time - okay, maybe in that simple mountainside hut - who knows she has a terminal illness and doesn't fight it. Perhaps she watches her progress, or regress, with some interest. If she is a Buddhist nun, say, she has often meditated on the inevitability of death.

But an American will say, "There's always a chance! There's always the possibility of a miracle," which Western doctors call "remission," meaning, the cancer has become less aggressive, and we don't know why. So this courage seems to consist in part of hanging onto a dream, no matter how shredded and remote. Hanging on to hope. Continuing to work when everyone knows working doesn't work anymore.

Let me say I do not now have cancer, as far as I know. August 12 I will celebrate twelve years since my surgery for breast cancer. I do have kidney failure, and now the as-yet undiagnosed heart thing. And there's Tom, shaken and further handicapped by breaking his arm when he fell just walking across the carpet in our own house. A moment of inattention, lost balance, that's all it takes.

I feel very burdened by this idea that admirable people are those who fight, and who do so "courageously." It's hard enough to do what seems to be the right thing, go to the doctors, watch the diet, undergo the tests and the misery of hospitalizations, do the exercises, wear the event monitor and the orthotics and the tennis shoes. Do I have to do it with a cheerful attitude?

Yesterday I told my Chinese doctor that I have been put on Hold on the transplant list because I can't take steroids. He seemed genuinely shocked. We all thought he was helping me hold on until I got the call. I was working my way up the list. I had a future. It promised new problems, but also renewed energy. It is a bitter irony to me to see the sudden flurry of interest in kidney donation - the Boomers, who are five or six years behind me, are turning old, and they always change things. If they want kidneys, there will soon be a universal donor law in place. No longer will we have the spectacle of thousands of people dying every year, waiting. (As an aside, I wonder what portion of the extraordinary expense the universal health coverage will pay?)

The famous definition of courage is Hemingway's, "grace under pressure." What did he mean by that, I wonder? He had faced wild animals, bulls, guns. He defined the heroic masculine life. But after a continuous string of physical and mental illnesses, even he was finally no longer able to fight.

Who's on first?

Every morning around 3:00 a.m. Tricycle, the Buddhist Magazine, sends me a Daily Dharma. I like to imagine it is the one cool thing someone with a clerical-level job gets to do. It might not be 3:00 a.m. where they are, they could be in England or China. They don't have to speak perfect English; all they have to do is transcribe a few lines from a book or article. It's a small thing, but I enjoy getting it among the 87 ads and maybe one personal message I download every morning. This morning it is a quote from Michael Wenger, who informs me, I am in charge, just like all those Much-too-positive Thinking books I've given away. Here's the whole thing:

The perfect student is you. You have within you all the ingredients you need to practice. You are in charge, and once you realize this you will seek—and find—all the help you need.

Actually, the place I am at in life this moment is that of a fallen leaf being carried down a swollen river. To make this telegraphically short, I spent my life being told I was in charge of my destiny, believing in the power of personal will and intention, and trying to Do Things. The old Chinese way of seeing life calls this yang, a sharp, pointy approach.

That gets us to now, when I find increasingly that my body trumps all my intentions, or more precisely, that I am aging fast, and I don't get a week off just because I want it. e.g. Last week, I spent three days in the hospital with a mean infection. Slowly, with physical therapy, I am getting back my very small bit of conditioning. And yesterday morning I was sitting talking quietly with Tom when I went into tachycardia. I felt my heart start pounding in my chest. I became short of breath getting dressed. Something new.

We are not unprepared for it - I am wearing a heart event monitor to try and catch the next "episode" of arrythmia - so we had the technology to record this a couple of times and transmit it by land line to some strange place of business that might be on the moon and is open to receive these calls 24/7/365, quite unlike the actual doctor. There, we are told, a knowledgeable person will read the results and they will be transmitted, maybe, to the doctor. I imagine the vague copies of my little printout lost on the guy's desk in a flurry of faxes and pens from pharmaceutical companies. So doing my "you're in charge" part, I called the cardiologist's office this morning to let him know about this.

If you want to feel blown around like a helpless little sailboat on the raging ocean, try getting a message through to a specialist. His nurse's voicemail informs Wun that "Leaving multiple messages will not advance the priority of your call." She means, "Please don't keep calling and crying and screaming and leaving incoherent messages. We'll get to you if we think you're important." What is wrong with these people?

Actually, I know. They are trying to make some order of the endless tide of the frantically ill and dying that washes up on their doorstep. Think about it - a cardiologist never treats a healthy person. But it is exactly this bureaucratic approach that makes western medicine a nightmare, and means someone is punching an IV into your arm at 3:00 a.m. when you're going home the next morning.

When you deal with the western medical establishment, you battle endlessly to have the tiniest bit of control over your own life, to convince people that you must not, no, never, be given steroids in any form, no matter what they usually do. To get the doctor to acknowledge your husband's presence in the room, sometimes to acknowledge yours. It is a perfect recipe for the disastrous loss of hope and any sense of self.

I don't mean ssssssself, that annoying construct Zen wants to help us de-construct. I mean just being, being alive, being real, being you. I suppose it was in the spirit of insurrection that I smuggled a little packet of salt into the hospital last week. They put me on the renal diet, which they interpret ferociously to mean measured grams of unadorned food. Sometimes the menu calls the food "herbed" but those herbs have been dead a very long time. Maybe all I could do to be Me in that place was gleefully sprinkle a little salt on the hamburger that came in a white bread bun without mustard, ketchup, or god forbid, dill pickle. Sometimes you feel like committing suicide by eating a hot fudge sundae (high phosphate).

Time to go to the acupuncturist, who does his best to keep me well. So I'll cut this off. The image: Elizabeth Taylor with her dog. Once I said to Tom bitterly, "Elizabeth Taylor gets better medical care than I do." He said, "Jeanne, Elizabeth Taylor's dog gets better medical care than you do." Too true.

All those half-empty shampoo bottles

[image: a junk sculpture in Flagstaff, AZ]

There is no disaster greater than not being content.
Tao Te Ching

We have small awakenings throughout our lives, and the number of people who have large ones would surprise you, I think. Maybe it's coming back from a great vacation to the burdens of dull work and housekeeping and tired recreations. Maybe for no reason you see some corner of your life. That may lead to a sense of blessing, or it may be what we call "a rude awakening."

I was once in a Buddhist study group with a sad young woman I'll call Ann who had contracted hepatitis in the course of "doing what everyone else does," and now felt the misery of sobriety and the awareness it brings acutely. That night the group was talking about living with care for your impact on the world, and people began complaining about how difficult that is. How do you figure out "paper or plastic," and what is the most efficient way to recycle, and who has time? Suddenly this woman said, "What to do with all those half-empty shampoo bottles in the basement!"

I remembered this recently when I noticed in my overcrowded linen closet two nearly full bottles, shampoo and conditioner, of an organic product scented with lavender. Apparently I had used these products once and decided to return to a commercial product made for long hair that I was accustomed to. What to do with this stuff? Maybe someone would pay 25 cents a bottle for it at the weekly Cat Welfare garage sale. Maybe Cat Welfare doesn't even accept used cosmetic products. I'll just use it, I thought, and see if it's as bad as all that. It isn't - in fact I like the barely detectable scent it leaves, which is probably why I bought it. The simpler composition of the stuff probably makes it easier on the earth when it washes down my bathtub drain and into a river somewhere.

The event made me remember Ann, and her many such bottles. I pictured them gleaming in a pile in a dark basement, like some discarded treasure trove, which they are in a way - evidence of Ann's eternal hope that something would make her blonde hair as beautiful as she wanted it to be. She had pretty hair, and the fortunate disaster of being a pretty woman, disaster because she had just turned thirty. Each and every one of those hair care products radiated the promise, as you know if you look at the ads. The ads tell us what kind of girl to be, and promise to make us that girl.

So there's the problem that women are manipulated by salesmen and the constraints of gender role into constantly striving to be visual objects - to look like someone else, someone with "perfect" hair. But say you awaken to that, and decide to just, you know, wash your hair. You use up all that old shampoo, a project that would have taken Ann quite a while, I think. What to do with the empty bottles? Recycling takes effort. And what to use to wash your hair then? Any shampoo you buy will come in a bottle made of processed dinosaur juice. Coal was strip mined in Appalachia and brought across country on trains to power the factory that went to all the trouble to make this bottle. Human beings worked on numbingly dull assembly lines, maybe at sweatshop wages. Where was this bottle made, anyway?

Wun who lives in Columbus, Ohio, could go to the co-op where, God bless them, aging hippies make available shampoo and conditioner in bulk. You take your own container and fill it. But their shampoo leaves Wun fuzzy. Maybe you decide to stick with the lavender organic product. It is expensive, though, money you could be donating to the care of Aitken Roshi. But maybe it employs people. If you don't buy it, will a good factory go out of business? But how can you possibly support all the laudable causes and buy all the wholesome products? Is it really a wholesome manufacturer, just because it says "organic?" Maybe you should research that. Now the howl sets up, Who has time for that? It was a cry often heard during the years of frenzied high consumption, as Americans worked more and more, and shopped more and more. Nobody had time to think about consequences.

For Ann, whose life had been about fun until the roller coaster broke down, thinking this way was torturous. It was her whole life heaped in that basement, I suspect. Illness and sobriety had made her sensitive and subtle. She knew that if you let thoughts like that creep in, you may see that your closet is bursting with unworn clothes, so many that you have to buy special organizing hangers. Certainly you never need to buy another garment. But how could you possibly not? You want a jacket in the new purple. There's the dilemma.

This ethical awareness was too much for Ann, who just wanted to feel better at the time, and who could blame her? Before long she dropped out of the group. So I have no idea how she solved the problem of all those shampoos. Maybe she just moved out and left them there for the next owner. I did that once, leaving behind a ratty old bike I didn't like. I was confident someone would soon take it. I hope they fixed it up and are enjoying it. Or at least put it into one of those artistic assemblages. There is no junk that can't be put to some use, if only to confound the tourists.

A blog by the side of the road

I was pleased to hear from a new reader yesterday. That doesn't happen real often. This blog is like a little hut by the side of a road with no sign, nothing to mark it. It is surrounded by Las Vegas, flashing lights and screens, free entertainments featuring tigers and hypnotists and extravagant music and invitations to enjoy the illicit. Everywhere barkers shout, "Free! Fun!"

Hardly anyone even sees a small hut down amidst all that, hardly anyone stops to say hello. I think of the childhood storybook that fascinated me, about a little house - the city grew all around it. At last, it is moved I think to the country, where it can breathe again. It was one of those resonant metaphors; you can't really attach a meaning to it, so it continues to reverberate.

I also think of the story of a monk or Teacher in Japan who in old age just made sandals and set them by the side of the road. Perhaps he could make one pair each day. The traditional straw sandals wore out quickly. Pilgrims and wandering monks would see them there and understand that they were a timely gift, and take them. I see how this was a nice illustration of how to live a quietly useful life.

You want to know something ironic? Just now I searched for an image of a Japanese hut. What I got? Dozens of images of succulent overstuffed pizzas from Pizza Hut. The more I looked for a photo of a simple, authentic hut of the type a hermit monk would build and stay in, the more laughable it got. Huge palaces called The Hermitage. A castle in Japan's Disneyland. Hotels, so-called "mountain huts," for travelers to stay in. Everything's for sale, including our symbols.

And it's time for me to dress and leave for acupuncture, so I'll post this with no image. Maybe you can find one, a picture of the little house you would really like to live in (if it had indoor plumbing, of course).

Why Wun Meditates

In a sense, Wun doesn't meditate because they "like to," Wun meaning me, but universalizing. Do you like cleaning your teeth thoroughly before bed? Sometimes not. You're tired. And as we age, by the way, it just gets more time-consuming, involving luxury products like a Rotabrush and floss, maybe a Waterpik. I was quite impatient with all this when I had to begin doing it fifteen or twenty years ago. Meditation is like that, too. A rebellious child within Wun thinks, I shouldn't have to do this. It isn't fun.

But Wun does it. I hesitate to say, Here's what I gain from meditation, as it is fatal to do a spiritual practice in order to gain something, such as EnLightenment or the best tree pose in the class. (You could read Chogyam Trungpa's Spiritual Materialism on this subject.) But I do meditate because in the long run, I gain from it, the same way I gain something from cleaning my teeth and sweeping the kitchen. It isn't a totally bad comparison; meditation is a kind of sweeping clean.

A story. When I sit, I usually use a small elegant Pyrex timer, the kind you buy where cooking utensils are sold. It beeps twice when there are ten minutes left, and again, when there are five minutes left - very useful for calling Wun back to the task.

Today the beep surprised me. Perhaps I had missed the ten-minute beep, I wasn't sure. This thought led to an impulse to turn my head and look at the timer. It's easy to do something like that when you're practicing alone. When practicing in a group, you hesitate even to raise your eyes to look at a clock, because everyone knows we are supposed to stay quite still. Peer pressure. And then, stillness leads to better meditation. This was explained to me initially as "The stiller the body, the stiller the mind."

But today I caught myself, and didn't look. I held still, while my mind registered the thought that not following that impulse was good for me. Practice in not following every little impulse.

You never know what a specific action will lead to; this might be one reason long-time meditators are often quieter than most people, say less, maybe do less. May be slow to leap into sub-prime mortgages or new clothes.

Thinking before you act can at least save you from trying meth. It might lead you to speak out when your impulse is to protect yourself; or not to speak out, say at the family reunion, when political argument is likely to lead to a fistfight. (This actually happened in my mother's family, a vivid argument between brothers about electing a Catholic to the presidency. I missed it.)

Meditation is far from the only way to stand back a little from your impulses. At one time in my life, during the hectic eighties, I took to carrying a little notebook in which I would write down everything I wanted to buy (groceries and gas excluded), and wait three days before buying it. This worked to stifle pretty much all my consumerist desires. They just drifted away down the stream of time, to be replaced by other drifting desires.

Impulse control. You can't buy it at Wal-Mart. On the other hand, stop and think what follows from shopping at Wal-Mart.