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.
~~~~~~~

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.

Every day's a novel

[image: a promotion for a movie titled Fear2. You might still be able to get one of these coats for your cat here.]

Yesterday was a day like a Russian novel for me, full of events and dread, with recovery at the end. Here is the sketchy outline, the events, and some nods to the places I went in my mind.

Kidney doctor in the morning, Tom couldn't go with me. I was pretty sure my recent shortness of breath was caused by further kidney failure. Hoped it was that and not recurrence of my breast cancer. The night before I did some hectic research on accesses for dialysis. The doctor is satisfied with me not going back on it yet, just watching my slo-o-ow trend downward. But he could hear "some whistling" in my lungs, and I had gained four pounds in two months. That could be from fluid in the lungs, what, congestive heart failure? He wanted to order a chest x-ray. We agreed I would call my PCP about it instead.

11:00 Went out and sat in parking lot, called my primary care doctor's clinic and got in with one of the other doctors at 1:15. People take not breathing very seriously. That and no heartbeat. If you want attention in the ER, not breathing is excellent.

Called Tom. Got him just leaving his own pulmonary function tests. (More fear on that later.) We agreed to meet at home and make lunch. He offered to drive me up to PCP. I felt gratitude, and thought about the pleasures of marriage in old age. I had no idea when I was young.
Breathing raspy now. Pneumonia. Maybe bronchitis. Hoped it wasn't the antibiotic resistant kind that kills people.

1:15. Dr. very smart and attentive to detail. Ruled out heart, discussed COPD and emphysema, etc., which can start EVEN THO YOU QUIT SMOKING 20 YEARS AGO! How unfair. He walked me around the hall briskly, thot I did good. Ordered a breathing test and chest x-ray. Went home trying to adjust to the idea of chronic lung disease.

3:30 His nurse calls to say he has revued my breathing test and it is okay. It will be two days to have the radiologist look at the chest x-ray. That's my fault, I'm breathing.

5:00 Couldn't nap. Starving. Worried about my blood sugar. How could I be so hungry? I must be getting diabetic. Eat some leftovers. Something wrong with my friend G's phone. I try her cellphone, leave a message.

7:00 I am definitely either manic or depressed, hit by a crazed desire to cook a creamy pasta dish with Tom's help, substituting bacon for pancetta and so on, using some frozen peas that were used as an ice pack on my ankle back when. We play Iron Chef in the kitchen. It's really active and the food turns out good.
~~~~~~~
I am not a reader of Russian novels myself. I just know they have a reputation for being very long. I assume most of that is not actual action, but people thinking and feeling. The subjective, as in the deep exploration of the fears highlighted above. It did seem like a long day. And all those fears were real, if temporary. Even then, it was kind of funny, like, What now? Watching myself as one of those farces where people dressed in ridiculous clothes keep bobbing their heads out of doors and hiding in closets.

Oh yes, in with all of this, it was a beautiful sunny day today, one more in an improbable string of them. I hope yours was better. And now it's time for the weekly taking out of the trash. Garbage. I mean plain ordinary actual tangible garbage, which would really smell bad by next week. Kind of thing you have to do if you're alive.

In which Wun is very Zen

[the image - a kitty litter, of course]
I haven't felt very inspirational lately. But this morning as I was scraping Sheba's box, I thought, I am being very Zen. Why? Because working with shit is inherently unpleasant, but avoiding it leads to worse, to smells and maybe bad cat behavior. In scraping the box every day I am in touch with the reality of cause and effect. And I am doing a fundamental (sorry about the pun) job, just doing the work without making a big deal of my preference, which is for far different fragrances.

After that I washed my hands (more karmic thoughts) and went about putting on my minimalist eye makeup. I thought to leave off the strokes of blush I like to use, so the doctor could see my honest coloring. How Zen, I thought. I am fully present here, not running on automatic.

Then again, I know people who would think wearing any makeup was very not-Zen. They might be outside Zen, or might be meditators or lapsed meditators. They have ideas about the severity for which Zen is famous. They show up a lot in sanghas, I suspect, the same way there was a good number of Ideational Christians in Youth for Christ when I was a youthful Christian. A conversion experience, and a good one for me, in the end. I'd like to write about it some day. But for now I'll stick to the bathroom mirror.

Giving myself a last check I caught myself smiling, and thought, I like myself. Well. That should go down in the annals of psychology, as well as meditation. It was a long way there from the way I learned to see myself in childhood. Liking Wunself - some would think that's not proper Zen. They would confuse it with ego, with self-absorption.

What was it we thought Zen was, before we got deeply involved? Form, robes, silence, all that lovely bowing and chanting. Wearing a mala around your wrist. Having the neatest, cleanest damn house you ever saw. But in fact, a real meditation practice gradually slowly reveals to you that you are just like everyone else, that we are all alright.

It is the easiest thing to be attached to ideas, zillions of them, about how we and others ought to be. So many of those ideas have nothing to do with an ethical life, but are just there, just conditioned assumptions learned some time long ago. Subtle little ideas like, really religious people don't wear lipstick. Like, enlightened people always answer their e-mail or wear black or don't eat and watch television at the same time. Don't watch television at all. Ah, it sounds like a nice quiet life, but it is not my life. I have my own life. That's the essence of Zen.

A Relationship

[autumn grasses at the wildlife center]
I have been thinking hard about relationships. First, I have decided, they do not have this hard existence we sometimes give to them, especially to the painful ones. Show me that relationship I thought, in a Zen way. You can't hold it in your hand. What there is, is the moment when I am with somebody, and attention and energy flow back and forth between us. Then we say goodbye, and it does not. Thinking about it does not keep it alive, though we often believe that. (Ask any grief counselor.)

Yet, the relationship also does exist, it has been built. My mind and that friend's mind hold the memory of every meeting, every word spoken, every event shared, every laugh or tear, though we have each perceived it differently. There is this heap of relationship in our minds, I guess, even when we are not thinking about it.

What has me thinking about this was a homely event, something that happened this year: a lost friend renewed contact. A precious friend, the last one left from junior high days. Hearing from her generated a thrilling kind of warmth that seemed to be mutual. We wrote back and forth, excited to catch up on our lives, to send pictures of our pets, that kind of thing. Then it stopped. A month went by and she didn't answer my last e-mail. Two months. I wrote. You know, RU OK?

She wrote back after a while, and said carefully that I needed to understand she doesn't answer e-mail promptly, that things can sit a long time until she feels like replying. With this some things fell in place about the relationship we'd had long ago, the one that had just dwindled away and died without being buried. I recalled the less attractive parts of our past years, our differences. How hard I'd try to be available with her when she showed up in town, how she then would go home and then I wouldn't hear from her.

What about this? I have friends who would point out that Wun has the right to define boundaries in a relationship exactly as Wun chooses. This is true. But it is very important to realize that both people have that right. Uh-oh.

It's not that my way is right and hers is wrong. In fact, I think that back in the day I remember having relationships like that. Saw old friends now and then, nobody much wrote; I was never good at non-electronic letters. We were all young and crazy and doing exciting things.

When Tom and I were about to get married, we had the minister to dinner, can you imagine I'm that old? He told us he liked to ask a couple, "What will you do if one of you wants the thermostat up and one of you wants it down?" At this time I didn't know anything about negotiating, which is actually a set of skills. I thought morosely, I guess I'd put on a sweater. Oh, uh-oh again.

Negotiating levels of intimacy and commitment, which is what I'm talking about I realize, is more delicate than that. Later in my learning curve, a therapist informed me that in any relationship the person who wants the least intimacy always wins. Think about it.

Where does that take us? or me, for I have written this to clarify what it's about. I think the salvation, when a conflict is this primal, is to step back and think like a Buddha. We both want happiness. We each have our own ideas about what makes us happy, our preferences. We respond to life with our own temperaments and all our conditioning. And, oh yes, it's not all about me. That should take me somewhere.

I have finally gotten back some yang - maybe just a temporary blip in the extreme serenity I've been feeling since I began taking valproic acid a couple of weeks ago to smooth out the waves and troughs I'd been in since a different doctor gave me a different medication, a steroid, in January ("It's just a local shot. It won't hurt you"). I was wondering if I had gotten enlightened, to use the language loosely, and hadn't realized it until my chemical sine wave was calmed down. But here it is, I am back, the old me, busy mind, desire to get something done. Then frustrated. I'll tell you from experience, it can be nice, not wanting anything very much (if that is not caused by depression or suppression or oppression, as it often is in yin creatures). Yesterday I was still there.

Yesterday we went to the health club in the late morning, planning to come back home, where I intended to work on my poetry. I had a project in mind. But when we came out, Tom saw that one tire in the van was low, and wanted to take it back to the Discount Tire place, where the tires are still under warranty. It should only take twenty minutes, he said. I agreed, it was important, and I wasn't comfortable asking him to drive the opposite direction to take me home first.

Outside Discount Tire there is a huge field, part of the OSU ag complex, with a lavish display of barns and cows and horses, though they were not visible from where I sat. What was, was a section of plain old wire fence, not barb wire, just square wire intended probably to keep the cows in. One panel of this fence was sort of bent and blowsy, with dried up small vines curling up it. It was just like a fence at Grailville, where I went on retreats for so many years as if I was a drowning person. In free time on those retreats I would sometimes stand by that fence, which in late fall would always have a little late wild honeysuckle blooming on it. And it seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world, putting to shame all manmade art.

Well, I often have this feeling about Art. With poetry . . . maybe it is the most intimate art, expressive of our own selves. Speech is what we humans can do. But what to do with a poem? You come out with it in a sacred space, like giving birth. If you then want to Be Published in the only place where poetry is published, the literary journals and small presses, you put your precious little poem on a conveyor belt and off it goes. It is in a huge factory now, being treated like - a product.

I had admired a certain poet, and then looked at a journal that published him, and then got infused with the desire (there's that word) to get published there myself and then, like him, to have a perfect-bound book come out. Down the road, of course. This was all born in the left brain, which is so good at schemes and plans.

And so I was working on that (at last!) this morning when something contradictory and cowlike set in. I had thought a particular poem was something they would like, tight and emphatic. But I had several versions of it, so I called them up into my word processor and set out to compare them and select a final draft. My poetry file looks like an artist's studio must, paintings leaning against the wall in tiers, twenty things all in progress, rags and paint and stuff everywhere. This file is where I work. I don't entertain people there.

I really. Didn't. Like. This. Poem. All of a sudden. A week ago I liked it. I'd put it on the short list because thought it was the kind of thing they'd like. This week it's too angry. Instead I found myself thinking about the wire fence and a poem I wrote with honeysuckle in it. It is one that refuses to get into shape, and I don't know where the first draft is - I wrote it at Grailville in pencil. I probably have it somewhere. My filing cabinets also look like an artist's studio.

While as a professional I have discontents with this poem (and your comments are welcome), I like it. It makes me feel soft, recalls this priceless experience. It is not the sort of thing they appreciate in literary journals. So I will just paste it in here.

In the Zone of Silence
by Jeanne Desy

In the time before dawn
the morning bell clangs.
Figures walk toward the zendo,
hugging themselves. Stars. Silence,

except for the clatter of the screen door,
of shoes nudged off. In the dark,
motionless figures wait.
One candle burns on the altar

before the great window that will fill
with fog, then meadow, then cows.
For now the particular is lost.
Midnight fevers subside.

Out beyond the light, the Teacher
catches an elusive scent:
a few late honeysuckle blooms
in the tangled vine on the fence.

How does James Ford do it? blog every day. He must have it down as part of his practice.

I am very well today, acupuncture having relieved me of the irritability caused by the full moon, and I haven't got much to say. But just in case you tuned in, hoping for a little something, here is a link to Rev. Ford's blog today, where you can drink in a luscious painting of Kuan Yin.

Two pairs of shoes

Terms for Google to grab: affluence - women's shoes - Nike - choice - Zen - Red Box

This morning my right shoe felt funny. This is the same shoe I wore yesterday, the woefully overpriced Nike's the physical therapists encouraged me to get fitted for. Mostly the only shoes I wear now, except - uh-oh - last week I had used the black Avia's instead.

I do not have the kind of shoe dilemma I once had when I would be getting dressed to go to work or out to dinner, and so often didn't have quite the right shoe. Or did have the right shoe and it was boring or getting worn or scuffed. Now I have only the two pair, and it's sort of dumb luck that I even have the Avia's left over from my high-consumption days.

Right away I wondered whether I had transferred the heel lift from the Avia to today's Nike. I sat down, took the right shoe off, pryed out the custom orthotic: aha! There was no heel lift. Limp to the bedroom, me and the cat, where the Avia's sit primly against the wall. Yes, the heel lift was still in them. That's the kind of trouble you get in when you have more than one pair of shoes., I think. Then I realize that all over the world there are people who have no shoes! Then there are people who fashion sandals out of old rubber tires, and win marathons in them. Many of us here in America, where the TVs shout commercials about shoe organizers, can't imagine that life.

I don't have many shoes to organize these days, not much to choose from. This seems like a very good thing to me. When I look at the clothes in my closet, I often wish I had even less to choose from. When I am not going anywhere special I will wear the same old things day after day, well-worn yoga pants (nothing is as comfortable), a gray tee-shirt (I have several), and a flannel shirt. I am sadly leaving go of my old flannel shirt, a navy blue plaid with a pink stripe through it, because I've gone through the right elbow, just wore the fabric tissue thin. The new one, which I found at the thrift store, is breaking in nicely. Sometimes I consider becoming a Zen monk or nun in some official way that would entail shaving my head and wearing the same old robe day after day, but I feel it would make some of my friends nervous. I am already weird enough.

I am already weird. Comfort matters to me much more than how I might be evaluated by people I hardly know, people at church or in the checkout line or at the voting place I will go to later today. That's another thing people all over the world cannot count on - being able to vote without being shot, or put on a list. Having the vote count honestly. I know a woman who hates our country, and would tell you right away that we've had times and places where voting wasn't honest. Yes, okay. We're human. Maybe you can never get away from that. But it's the exception here.

I don't like the frontier land-grab aspect of this country either. All those damn shoes in a dusty organizer under the bed. Sometimes we're so selfish it's disgusting. But it's where I happen to live. I am happy to live in a time and place where I can be weird. Amazed to sit in a room that is just my room to play in, with a computer that tells me I am not spelling the word "weird" right, again; and fixes it for me.

But having All This means having choice. Too much choice - it's like too much food, another American problem, and one very few people have ever had in the course of history. In regard to choice, I find a new phenomenon called Red Box interesting. These tall red kiosks stand inside McDonald's and the grocery stores. They hold just a few DVD's of the most popular movies, 200 max. This compares to a service we use, Netflix, that has many thousands - too much choice, it becomes a problem. Part of the success of Red Box is that it offers so few choices, you can stop and push a button and shazam! you're out of there. It also costs only $1 for one night. (I don't know what the late charge is. I do know that returning DVD's on time is a chore I was not very good at, back when we used to get them from the library.)

I get up in the morning now and face very little choice in many ways, but it is consumer goods I am talking about today. Clothes. It is late fall here, and I almost certainly want to wear my new-old flannel shirt, and the only tee-shirt color it goes with is gray. Since it is sunny and not yet slushy and snowy, I will stick with the Nike's, which have a summer sort of mesh construction. Changing shoes means something goes wrong, like the heel lift, and there you are, wasting time writing a blog about it.

I often wonder what I do write about here. It seems to me all I have to offer is the truth of my life, and that is very simple. Until I hear from them, I don't know I am talking to friends in the Phillipines and Scotland and New Orleans and Portland and across town. Maybe I will hear from Helen, the teenager in South Africa who wrote me about my Princess story. Sometimes it truly seems like enough just to hear from people, to know I am read. That connecting feels very good. Feels like a spiritual matter. Some people say it's the only thing that counts.

Loving a cat

I am watching a sunset in shades of copper and tin, the dark brown trees now black, the sky almost turned from blue to gray. Peach at the horizon. It is too early for sunset here! Yesterday was the first day off daily savings time. It took us quite a while to realize that was Sheba's problem. Be glad I'm not posting an audio clip of what she does when she's insecure: [windup] Yaroweer, Yowl [repeat endlessly].

Sheba doesn't like it when things change. Routine is very comforting to animals and children - and me, I notice. You can feel Sheba sigh with relief at night when we get in bed the way we should. Then she jumps up the way she should, turns around, settles in down where my feet would be if she weren't there. After the light goes out she waits a measured amount of time, then thumps down and does what cats do at night. Patrols the perimeter, I suppose. She is always asleep on the bed when morning comes.

She yowled so long and hard yesterday afternoon that I lost my temper and yelled at her, regretting it in mid-syllable. It made her worse. She leapt up in nervousness and fled, still yowling. I realized that the answer was not anger but plenty of petting. Unfortunately, you can't pick her up and walk around going, "There, there," for she is afraid of being held, and goes into an hysteria of struggle. This cat is neurotic. She's not bad, uses her litterbox, doesn't scratch upholstery or people, doesn't even try to run out the door. Just neurotic. We are committed to her anyway. Oh, if only people were more that way about each other!

What love is - I had no idea when I was young. I won't try to define what I thought love was then, but now what I know is that love is first of all a decision to stick with some one. You are making them family, and saying, no matter what you do, we have a bond.

When you adopt a cat, because it is dependent, you are deciding to care for it. Is that love? Maybe not. But caring can generate tenderness, can flower into a wish to help them be happy for their own sake, not yours (though it is true that when the cat is unhappy we are all unhappy). It's that last part that impresses me, the wish for the well-being of another creature, and that makes love a spiritual act. It means growing away from our devotion to our own self, to having things our way and having someone else meet our standards and our needs. It means connecting empathetically. Being generous. If you do this for a cat, you are rewarded magnificently with that spontaneous, sweet sound of happiness, a purr.