Are we still having fun?

Home from the hospital, I tell you, taking a shower is great. Kids know this. They love to run through an oscillating sprinkler, stand under a waterfall, jump around through one of those computerized fountains that shoots water up erratically. They play in their bath, they splash each other in the pool and at the beach. Water is amazing.

So, why would a grownup not feel like taking a shower is a fantastic treat? Working from limited evidence, my own experience, I think it's because we think a shower is work, or a Shud, something you have to do that is keeping you from doing something else more important.

That something else might be work of many kinds, the tasks that keep accumulating in our overabundant lives. Or it might be that kind of heightened, risky play we call fun. Going to the neighborhood tavern to have fun wasting away. Or the casino, say, or the theme park, or an adventure vacation - going somewhere exciting and risky, to do an activity whose chief purpose is fun.

"To have fun" - isn't that an odd thing to say? Because fun is actually a personal, internal response. Like enlightenment, it isn't a thing you can "have." It is an activity, something you do inside yourself, where? In the mind. In the physical response when the rollercoaster starts down the 90 degree incline and you enjoy the terror of risk and helplessness.

Aren't we humans strange? There isn't a cat in the world that would willingly get on that coaster. In fact, if you once made it go through that, it would pack its bags and head out, looking for another home. A cat gets enough excitement when a hawk or eagle plummets down and tries to grab it for fast food - that seems to have happened to one of our neighborhood cats, a Mu who wore big wounds on his hindquarters for quite a while.

Years ago I was puzzled to read in a book by a Japanese Zen master that he never had fun. He seemed to be frowning as he held the word in his hands. I guessed that he found his daily life and work satisfying, enjoyable, and didn't understand the pleasure of excitement. Buddhists do get to enjoying calm.

The above video - for a break from your calm, you can chair dance to it. And darn it, it is fun. I had to laugh out loud, it is so last century. Something about the crowd gently rocking but staying in their seats, the black and white filming, not one single cellcam held high, not one Bic lighter. There's another video of this song from my own younger days, a time when cars were revered, that gives a montage of T-birds. Classic cars, another kind of Fun With Stuff.

I laughed watching this - I swear the lead singer is chewing gum. And look how conventional and un-surfer these Beach Boys look by the standards of the present, a day in which a performer (Michael Jackson) can accidentally get his hair caught on fire during a filming. There's a point - how the spirit of fun got loose around this time - in four more years Woodstock would record people using illegal drugs, having sex with strangers in the grass . . . and that risky freedom kept escalating until high-stakes gambling in the stock market was a way of life and Americans were determined to consume the world. In a way, we have, not without help from other nations.

We had some talks with the grandson on our last visit. He wants to visit a casino. I told him I did visit one in the early seventies, and made up my mind I could lose $20 and then quit. Back then that was money. I went to the blackjack table and lost that money so fast my cigarette didn't even burn down. It was depressing. All around me were people whose pockets seemed bottomless. I hadn't realized how many very rich there are in this world.

Otto knew how to play blackjack, so we three played. We taught him how to bet, how betting makes it more interesting, using colored glass dots for chips. You should have seen him work at this game, how kids do, how they work at their play like cats do. In blackjack you try to note the aces and face cards that have been played, you do math in your head all the time, counting hands, you assess the other players. It is the oddest thing, how we will do hard things for fun. If you like analytic detail work so much, why not just do stem-cell research in your leisure time? You can see this at casinos too, or at the local Bingo game, or playing bridge - people hellbent to win, concentrating as if they were deciphering Sanskrit.

Otto told us he only bets on 20 or 21, so we explained how that's a losing strategy, and told him how bluffing works. He got it, but seemed to have a hard time understanding it somehow. Nine years old. Maybe he was wondering if it isn't a form of lying. I told his mother I was afraid we turned him into a gambler, teaching him how to bluff. Cassie laughed and said, "He's a long way from having a poker face." He is. He has that bit of the Irish in him, an inner life and responsiveness that shows up in his face and body. He likes to do almost everything, it seems, as long as it isn't boring. I'm still trying to unravel that - what boring means. And what it has to do with the search for fun.

What to do when the resurrection is cancelled

We had our nine-year old grandson, Otto, over the weekend, and as always, played board games and card games. Then he suggested Jenga, which we have played together for years. In this classic game you build a tower of finely milled hardwood blocks, which you remove one at a time and stack on top, trying not to topple the tower. But it inevitably does fall with a wonderful crash, and you are never quite expecting it, so you scream. Blocks go everywhere, on the table and floor. Cats don't like it, Otto does. I like that we played it as a cooperative game, all three of us trying to beat our personal group best (32 levels).

As we played, I thought how this game is like the crash and rebuilding of the self, our ego. Something happens, our trip stops working. Today we might say, Time to Reformat. Robert Aitken comments that Zen teachers consider this an auspicious condition, though he didn't know that when it happened to him.

I happen to be noticing my crash right now - last week I talked with an OSU transplant surgeon about my bad reaction to cortisone. A shot in my hip for bursitis in late January led to moodswings that ended only recently (if they have indeed ended). Now I am "on hold" on the list - that is, they have not removed me (that will probably take a committee meeting), but I will not be matched when a kidney comes in.

I thought OSU had gone to a "steroid-free protocol." They're trying. But the first week after a transplant, it is still necessary to load every patient with steroids to prevent the rejection the body is trying so hard to bring off. Every day the dose would be fifty times the dose of that shot in the hip - which sent me into moodswings for several months. Ten percent of transplant patients end up having to stay on steroids. Anyone who goes into rejection syndrome is put on steroids. In other words, there is no avoiding them. (This story is the same at Cleveland Clinic.)

The doctor told me he has been working with kidney transplant for fifteen years, and he has seen what both of us avoided calling by its true name, "steroid psychosis." He was sincere in explaining that you don't want that to happen. No, I really, really don't. The moodswings of this winter and spring sometimes had me just sitting in a brown sludge weeping gently, thinking I'd rather be dead.

The odd thing about being taken off the list was that I did not have an emotional reaction to it, beyond mild shock. No drama, no need to stuff it down with chocolate cake. I kept wondering about that until this morning, when I realized the more complex nature of my reaction - I am no longer waiting for the call that can come any moment and lead to - maybe - a new life. Sometimes transplant works stunningly; that's why I was willing to be on the list and contemplate a life on immunosuppressants. I kept wondering hopefully, Who will I be when I have more energy? It seems to me now just a bit like a remnant of the fairy tales I loved as a child - the girl waiting for the prince to come and rescue her.

This morning I am realizing that I have responded to this event with a new sense of being right here in my life, in this body in the present moment. The bright future has been cancelled (though Tom reminds me there is all sorts of research coming down the pike, wearable kidneys, growing a new kidney from your own skin cells - anything can happen).

Maybe it was the sense of this new blank page that impelled me to ask a friend to move everything out of the big closet in my study that I call my toy closet the day after that appointment, and put in in a metal shelving unit. This study now looks like I just moved in, boxes everywhere. This room was my last priority when we moved in here, and I was worn out and careless. I stuffed in this huge closet all the stuff I didn't sort in the move, all the stuff I didn't let go of. Every single draft of old pre-computer manuscripts, for instance. Old journals and letters. All those photographs. Old books. A pristine Cabbage Patch doll (whose adoption certificate is somewhere in one of these boxes.)

My path seems clear all the way out to the horizon. I can't hold my breath waiting for the call that will change my life. I'll have to just breathe in and out, pay attention to the body I have, and start sorting.

Entering the Zone of Silence

I am reading a book titled Wabi-Sabi and thinking about hermit monks and my days. This is a rare day without a medical appointment, which feels spacious and very pleasing, since the sun is out.

The book breaks down the two Japanese words that add up to refer to a concept of natural, simple beauty.

Wabi is internal, one's way of life or path
Sabi the external, the material, the world of forms

I don't think one's Way can really be very separate from one's external world, the space you live in, the ways you spend time. Imagine waking up in a stereotypical guy's dorm room - ancient empty pizza boxes, the smell of fast food, beer cans, unrinsed, dirty socks and underwear on the floor, stale air, stale bedclothes, closets a tumble of unbalanced stuff. How spiritual could you feel? (I have to admit, what I know about this is gained from watching those cute guys make over people's homes, back when we got Bravo on cable. Hmm, maybe a memory here and there from misspent youth, the sort of thing you prefer not to access.)

The opposite of that image is a room on retreat. Not all retreats have private rooms, but the ones I've gone on at Grailville did. The rooms are small and spare, not an extra thing in them, none of that fancy hotel stuff of mints and little shampoos and huge, stiff bedspreads. Wooden floors, no rugs. You learn to bring only what you must have, almost like a camping wardrobe, comfortable clothes you can layer when it's cold.

The outside of the little campus is equally simple, devoid of signs that flash time/temperature and giant TV screens with ads for concerts. Retreat theory is no reading, writing, or TV during the week. Near some buildings are signs that say "Entering the Zone of Silence" - no idle chatter, either. So you are taken down to a life that's much simpler, almost qualifies as wabi-sabi. All told, it is as close to hermit monk as I've gotten. What a treat it is for a woman, too - because our houses are so much more than we need, and they become a burden to us. Our lives are much more than we need. Fancier, busier.

I've been thinking of the first Teacher I ever heard, a Theravadan abbot familiarly known as Bhante G. A tiny man, he sat crosslegged on a table in the coffeeshop at Borders and spoke to a small crowd what I would learn was called "the dharma," reality as Buddhism sees it. I was transfixed when he said "Most serious students find three or four hours a day for meditation and study."

Seeing my astonished expression, he laughed a little and said to me, "Really."

I am getting more interested in time for a spiritual life now that I have a life again, back on my feet, anemia resolved, not ill at the moment, enjoying decent energy and mood. I find myself awakened, of course, to all sorts of messes. Things to catch up on, learning how to get back to some routine duties like planning meals and cooking.

I know the first principle of time management: there is always time for what is truly important. Out of all the less important things in my life, what to give up?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
a postscript: When I saw Bhante G speak he was very old, much older than me. Now he looks younger than me (see image above). How to explain that?

Taking a break

Fifteen years ago fibromyalgia was my worst problem, so I got a book about it - back then that's how you researched things. I read with disbelief that "fibros," who tend to be intense (the book said), need to learn to work 50 minutes and rest 10. What? rest 10 minutes out of every hour? How would I ever get anything done? Then again, if I did relax, would I ever get my nose back to the grindstone?

This came back to me this morning I was lying peacefully on the acupuncture table thinking about how my energy is so good in the morning, and dwindles all day long. Even if I take a couple of hours in the afternoon to read and nap, I'm often lackluster (great word!) in the evening. I wondered, What could I do to make my energy last longer? and into my mind snuck the idea of taking breaks. One of them is about to happen right now.
~~~~
So I took 20 min on yoga mat, eye pad on eyes to relax them, and little sandbags on my twitchy hands, to encourage stillness (a handmade gift from a friend and yoga teacher). Toward the end of the rest I wanted to stretch, and slowly remembered the pose called cat/cow. I've had trouble with knee and ankles for six months, and had forgotten all about doing any pose that involved them, or pretty much doing any pose but corpse. Being able to do cat/cow made me realize that I am finally back on the fast track, for me. . . . Time for physical therapy.
~~~~~
It's 5:11 - curse the unnecessary accuracy of digital time - it's a little after five, and I am home, feet burning from too much footwork, none of it dancing, and from a depressing, enervating experience at Kohl's, where they have no cardigan sweaters. In fact, I think "In today's modern contemporary world" (as composition students sometimes begin a paper), cardigans are so totally like old lady that I am going to have to go to the thrift store, where they have them by the rack full. I'd much rather shop there for that reason - last year's fashions, yea, last millenium's fashions are waiting for me there, and suit me better than things with all sorts of trim so that you can't put them in the washer. But I digress.

Got home tired from multiple errands but with a single gorgeous pink gladiolia, and had a mishap trying to put it in a vase. It involved spilling a bunch of glass marbles down the garbage disposal. Fortunately, it wasn't running. Also, Tom wasn't in the room. Still, it unnerved me, and I had to sit down and have slightly sweet iced tea and a few White Cheddar Cheezits and the end of a chocolate chip biscotti, which had fallen out of my purse earlier. So there was my second good break of the day, and badly needed, too.

But mostly, the need for breaks is not about working too hard for me - it's about being too intense about my work, and even my play. This is the core of my personality, so I don't mean to malign it. But I did get to remembering with a smile how my Tai Chi teacher once told me to "Chill out." I'd been told that before in other words, but the slang surprised me, coming from a sort of spiritual person.

What, was I taking something too seriously, trying too hard? Well, I suppose. But do you want to know how much good it did to tell me not to do it? About as much good as it would have done if I had told the young mother at Kohl's, "Be kind to your children." She looked like "kind" wasn't in her vocabulary. I don't know how to fix this world, not even one young mother. So it was good to come home to a New Yorker in the mailbox, and go through back to front, the way all normal people do, looking at the cartoons.

Making a difference in this world

We can do no great things - only small things with great love.
Mother Teresa.

Thinking this morning about doing things that matter - this Rothschild guy setting out huge projects to rouse awareness of global warming and trash - clearly he wants to matter, to change the world significantly. The New Yorker profile of him details the latest project, to sail around the world on a boat made of plastic bottles.

Most nights we watch NBC news, a sort of old-way kind of thing our parents did, like sitting on the front porch. The news often ends with a segment called "Making a Difference." These little video essays spotlight some formerly ordinary person, sometimes a child, who has conceived of a generous project, and drawn other people in. That's the key. It becomes more than one person, it's big. A system.

I have groused about these enough to Tom, so I'll keep it short here. The assumption of this series (and of Rothschild's projects) is that our gestures matter only if we do something big and visible. These stories never spotlight individuals like my old friend Marie, who appeared at the door after my mother died with a bunch of sunflowers. Marie was like that, dropping off soup. I got to think of what she did as her Bodhissatva work, though I feel sure she didn't think of it that way. She was just led by her sympathy, her desire to offer.

The importance of small actions is so evident when the action is mean - look how quickly a dog or cat learns to cringe or bite or flee, and it is very difficult to untrain them from their fear and their reaction. Maybe we are all that way. I know children are. I remember the single most important thing my father ever said to me.

I was in seventh grade and not adjusting well to the new freedom of changing classes and the new idea of junior high, a pen of adolescents, grades seven through nine, instead of the traditional K-8 grade school I had grown up in, where I'd been looking forward to being one of the big kids. Seventh grade was small kids here.

And now there was homework, on top of it. I didn't like to do it, I suppose. It seemed (and was) meaningless. More of the very boring. My public school education was like that all the way through, tired old teachers stuffing irrelevant facts in your head, you obediently wrote the fact down, Battle of Hastings, 1066, as meaningless as if it were Sanskrit.

Actually, I wish it had been. Then I'd have something to show for those years. How strange that kind of education seems now that we have the internet, the great cloud of facts, any fact you want right at your fingertips, so that it is slowly becoming obvious that mental skills like analyzing the reliability of a source are most needed.

Back to junior high. I had been getting some low grades and 5's in "citizenship," which really meant disobedience, esp passing notes and talking to others, as I recall. But now I had found religion - that's another story - and changed my ways. I was pretty much behaving perfectly, as I understood it.

I waited for my father to come home and sit down at the breakfast table. I must have waited eagerly, anxiously. This was supremely important to me. I believed he would love me now. I thought the love I got was all about how "good" (?) I was, about whether or not I deserved it. I thought I could earn love. I had a Bible that said "As you sow, so will you reap." I understood that in a very simple way, expecting fairly instant results.

I put the report card in front of him, a beautiful clean grid of A's and 1's.

"Straight A's," I said proudly.

He glanced at it and made a dismissive sound like "Harumph." Then he said, "Why aren't they A pluses?" I can still hear the timbre of his voice, can feel that scene almost sixty years ago.

I fell from delighted anticipation to shocked disappointment. My father was hypersensitive to facial expressions, and must have noticed mine. Quickly he said in his rare more human voice, "Oh, I probably shouldn't have said that." Alcoholics do that, express regret. I understand they do it after they beat up their wives.

But he had said it. The moment had occurred, I had taken it in. Nothing could erase it - it was a fact.

It was a long time until I remembered that event, but it left big footprints in my life from then on. I had been trained. I believed that nothing I did would ever be enough (and my father's behavior toward me kept confirming that, the apology forgotten). I don't think I have to tell you how that played out in my life, and not just in the next report cards, not just in how I felt about trying in school. In life.

So many years, decades, later, I realize my father didn't really have volition. He just passed down the cruelty and indifference of his own father. His fire temperament, his DNA if you like, predisposed him to love alcohol, which quickly loosens the tongue. His experience in the trenches of the last great world war left him with the extreme reactivity of post-traumatic stress. What was inflicted on me was a general cruelty of the world you could say. The suffering he had experienced was funneled down to me, and to my brother and sister in different patterns. And this is always true. We are dots in a cultural context. We are the sum of all our experiences. If we don't seriously work on ourselves, we will pass on the the distorted gifts we were given.
It was a really awful moment for me, the time I heard myself hector my little girl in my father's voice, catching yourself in a passing mirror. Slowly you learn to do the only thing you can do, watch yourself and your reactivity, those conditioned things you say. Listen to what comes out of your own mouth. Hesitate. Think of the other's reality, think how you can be kind.

Grand gestures, fabulous stage shows, oh, maybe they influence the world. But when I look at my own life, the great events of my time did not matter nearly so much as that one moment when I presented my report card for my father's approval. He is long dead now, but how he lives on.

Living in Bali

In June, 2000 I did a thought exercise I read about somewhere:

The designer Milton Glaser assigned his students at the School of Visual Arts: design a perfect day for yourself five years from now.

I set myself down to do this in one nonstop session, the way I was keeping my journal in those days. The exercise caught my imagination as I wrote, and I am surprised, looking back, how it creates a whole community, an ideal civic order of cooperation and neighborliness. It was a life of no work and harmony on a sort of fantasy island, as I then thought of Bali - as a culture where the arts are sacred and pervade life. In that design, we lived in a sort of gated community where nothing evil could enter.

My fantasy began with a house with glass walls - such as I now live in. It sat in a small community of close neighbors - which I now live in. We are not on a beach, it's true, but on a woods, next best thing - our own little woods. What we "own" goes steeply down to the ravine.

We have come a long, long way since then, but it has not been an island paradise. Life has been punctuated with illness and deaths. Yet, as the poet Robert Frost said, "Earth's the right place for love." This life is what we have, complete with all that.

The photo I chose today marks one instructive event that took place two or three years ago. My grandson Otto was visiting, and Tom was gone. It was a pleasant summer day, warm and with no wind, and Otto and I were at the dining room table playing a board game, maybe "Life" (I'm not making that up) when we heard an odd sound I identified as a loud swooshing. My peripheral vision caught something happening to my right: a huge bouquet of leaves falling past the window to our right. We blinked, stood up and went to the window. The back yard was covered with green leaves springing out from a branch. A branch of the maple had broken off and fallen.

I remember that I just kept on saying, "Oh my God." Utterly astonished. It is interesting to think that it didn't seem to rattle Otto at all - maybe when you're seven years old, a whole lot of things are inexplicable and surprising. But he obediently went with me to inspect the back yard. The branch had not scraped a window or poked through a porch screen. Nothing was harmed. We circled the house, had to go across the street to see just where the branch had broken off, high in the tree.

There are moments when our conception of a safe, secure reality is torn apart, and we see the true nature of life - how a branch can tear off when there is no wind, no apparent disease in the tree. There are reasons somewhere, maybe in the unseen world, the 90% that scientists say our senses do not detect. Maybe the buddhas whose spirits are thought to be everywhere gathered to push that branch down just to break me out of my complacency and give me an amazing dharma lesson. But it is also true that organic life is complex, and birth always leads to death. And death is not necessarily announced. Again and again, it cuts through our belief that we have things in order.

Blame it on the Stuff

[image: Jizo in the little Zen garden, last fall]
I am cleaning out books, again. What can this book do for me? I ask each one. Some I will never again read, but they emanate memories. Sometimes the book is the only tangible thing I have left of someone I love, the only "stuff." I'm putting books like this together in a corner where they will emanate love, perhaps. I know that when I am gone, they will mean nothing to my daughter, and will probably end up in a huge tag sale.

My friend thinks about selling her house and buying a little travel trailer and wandering the country. I fantasize about living in a 10 x 12 room. This room would be spare, with polished hardwood floors like a Zen temple. I see it as having my computer, of course (but fewer wires), two or three books I'm reading presently, clean windows. If it has a little kitchen area with a sink and small frig, there is only what I need. Not cupboards full of stuff I never use.

But wait - does that mean I leave behind the pig cookie cutter? If I didn't run across it once in a while, I'd forget the party we threw to make Pigs Across the World, and how Don enjoyed slathering the pig cookies with pink icing. Well, it's small; I could fit it in that imaginary room, I think.

Thus we love our stuff, some of it anyway, as we love the people in our life, but we also feel these items complicate our lives. I wonder how true that is. I think we when imagine relinquishing all stuff, we are imagining the freedom of enlightenment. For my friend, the freedom of action in that spaciousness is emphasized. For me, the stillness. For both of us, the simplicity. We think if we had no stuff, we would be at peace. I'm not sure that's true, either.

Small talk

It strikes me that those of us who write about daily life don't, really. We pick one thing and write our thoughts about it, our reactions, what it seems to mean to us. So here are a few bits from my day so far.
❍
slept late, very relaxed
❍
up, dressed quickly and out for acupuncture at 10:00
❍
mind too full of fiction, thinking about this novel I've been reading
❍
on acupuncture table I imagine making a fiber hanging that would demonstrate how lives are intertwined, influenced, separated. Many thoughts about whether to take a fiber arts course (no), do we have a board I could use, would pushpins do . . . it would be a muted red fiber, between yarn and twine.
❍
I play with the idea of "my work," of being useful in this world. I think about how when people say that, they really want to matter. To be Someone. I think, the right question is, how can I relieve suffering a little? This gets me thinking about printing a nice photo I took of Tom for my mother-in-law. He had been working outside, and had a holly berry caught in the hinge of his glasses.
● ●
I get very hungry and plan to eat a peach as soon as we get home. They are ripe in the refrigerator and we have to make a plan. I plan to eat two of them today, can't eat five because of the potassium. I want to pick up local corn for dinner, there's at least two servings. I think a whole lot about getting my long hair cut really short. I love my hair, but it mostly annoys me.
❍
Acupuncturist asks how Sheba is. I tell him her blood draw showed she has kidney disease. We talk about how it is he hasn't got a cat yet. He says they saw one they liked, so they asked their daughter whether she was sure she would take care of it, the box and everything. She said no. So they didn't get a cat. He tells me, "We say, You can do it or not do it, that's okay. But if you say you will take care of it, then you must." I think that's a really good motto for child-rearing. Maybe for your life.
✚
after breakfast Tom and I talk about getting a locking medicine cabinet for all our prescription drugs. Workmen come in here, and our grandson, who is almost ten. Tom is going to unearth an old medic's tool chest he has with a red cross on it that can be padlocked, and would fit in the linen closet. Good, we agree, not spending money, not having to wrestle with installation, not bringing more stuff into the house.
❍
we talk about whether we would take extraordinary measures to prolong little Sheba's life if she goes into terminal kidney failure before we die. Syringe feeding yes, hydration no. We are not as attached to the idea of "having" her as we were Sherlock. We would hope to make her end of life more comfortable.
~~~~~~~
Enough. It's past noon. I used to have a card on my desk with the saying, "How you spend your days is how you spend your life." It's not usually big and important. On the other hand, it all is.

Reading about enlightenment

[image: Designed by Dutch firm Studiomeiboom, The Enlightenment illuminates your shelf rather your soul. Made from plexiglass and lit by an energy-saving bulb, the lamp plugs into an outlet with a standard cord.]

from Chan Master Sheng Yen, Shattering the Great Doubt -

[B]odhisattvas and lineage masters appear in the world, using countless ways to expound the doctrine, using all sorts of expedient means. What the lineage masters say is not actually Dharma, since the Dharma itself is not expressible in words; they are only expediencies to help people.

The Tao te Ching -
The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao.

W. B. Yeats -
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

I want to let my friends know about this new feature in the New York Times. (I don't think it's restricted to subscribers.) It is a compiled blog titled Happy Days, and described like this:

The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed.

Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.

This is interesting stuff - not your ordinary smiley face.
[image: Brodie, smiley-face dog]

Daily Work

some thoughts from my morning journal -

I watched the smoke of the incense this morning. This stick gave rise to two streams of smoke. I knew no other stick would burn this way.
■□◦☐
Sheba got up on the filing cabinet and looked out just the way Sherlock used to do, and I thought how a cat is a cat like every other, but we choose to care for one, to love one.
□◦☐
Whenever I check my trash and junk, I think about how spam reveals just what we desire. Free transformation
◦☐
Wouldn’t it be great if we could show other people the same tenderness we give our cats? And then, if we could show it to ourselves. The teachers say it begins with loving yourself.
☐
I keep thinking of a new room with just the books I want to read now.

What do we mean about getting organized?

Want, want, mine

[image: a coal mine in Wyoming, from Wikipedia commons]
I have always been pretty uninterested in history, except to respond to the reports of great harm. The history presented to me as a girl was clearly about men wanting power and territory for reasons that seemed abstract. It was like a sort of outdoor stage play, a world a poet said, "where ignorant armies clash by night."

But recently a friend mentioned to me the idea put forth by an economist that all history is about scarcity. The scarcity of resources. Ah. I like great unifying theories. "Oil," I said, thinking of the wars in my lifetime.

So I have been thinking more about this, and I want to take it a little further, to look behind the word "scarcity." I think it means -

there is not enough of this for all of us, and I want it, and I think I need it to survive, or to live the way I want to live, therefore I want to own it. To keep it as mine.

But how much is the battle ever really about necessities, about having a drink of clean water? About a place to put up a little shelter? (In fact, battles often creates hordes of refugees gathered in places where it is almost impossible to provide clean water and simple sanitation, let alone livelihood and food.) I put the quote above in red, the color of desire and of blood.

It fascinated me to watch my grandson learn to talk. Pre-verbal, he learned to shake his head No vigorously, so right away he wanted to say "No" and say it often. Self-definition. Soon after came the shrieked "Want!" Boy, could that kid attach to a want. And then, as every preschool teacher knows, comes "Mine!" So the teachers concentrate on teaching kids how to share, a good idea, but one that doesn't usually apply to adult life or video games. Imagine a game where you win by giving away the most? Hmmm. You'd still have to get it. Hard to imagine a game, since games tend to be about competition and winning. Winning points. Useless.

So take oil. Oil is scarce. By that I mean, we don't have enough here in America to do what we want to do. Right? For decades, liberal thinkers have suggested we learn to do with less oil, to destroy less of the world's finite resources and cultivate the endless bounty of the sun - endless until we build a cloud around this earth making even that impossible. But there is something attractive about violence, about destroyers and aircraft carriers and jets flying in formation. Dropping bombs and shooting guns is fun, I hear. Is that a different story, or is it more of the desire for excitement and personal power? Desire.

So it seems to me the Buddha was right, suffering is caused by desire. It is definitely not just personal, not just about how we make ourselves crazy longing for a certain person's love or trying to get ourselves a different-looking body or buying things we can't afford. We are part of the world. Want, want, mine, our behavior to get what we want, in fact every step we take, every breath we take extends us into the world.

Knowing this leads to some uncomfortable personal questions. What does it mean to the world that I want to be cool in summer, hate to sweat, actually, and turn on the air conditioner? Ah, the power plant runs on coal strip-mined in Appalachia and brought here on trains . . . .

Approaching Sheba

Here is Sheba sleeping trustfully on her chair beside my computer. When I noticed she liked this chair, I put down a folded hand towel for her. During her five-month stay in Cat Welfare, her territory consisted of a low sort of pillar made for a cat to stay under or on, on top of which was a piece of chenille - one of those things it was once fashionable to put on the lid of your toilet, just the right size for the pillar. So now she likes the territories around the house marked by her very own square of towel.

I have no idea what Sheba was like before she got to this sort of Ellis Island for poor homeless cats. I do know she stayed in what the volunteers call "the old ladies' room," a glass-walled room about 4 x 8 feet with a sign on the door, Staff Only! There were four or five other cats who stayed in there, each curled on its own spot - the cats who just didn't like other cats, or maybe just wanted to sleep peacefully. Sheba was premiere among them, genuinely afraid when a strange cat came in the door after me. I suspect that in all her months there she never willingly left that room to join the great central room where a hundred cats mill around, watching DVDs of birds, spatting, climbing up to sit on the cages and look out high windows. Those cats include some who will never leave this place, like the one who is erratic about his litterbox, as well as many young cats able to adapt to all this company.

Sheba had not adapted. She was only three, but the forced inactivity of the little room had plumped her out a bit - we didn't really know that until we got her home, because we had hardly been able to observe her standing or walking. The center of the room was filled by a tray with catfood and water on it. To the side, a litterbox, always kept clean. Whenever I came in the outside door and looked over, she was straining to look at me. She seemed to ask silently, Are you my woman? Are you going to take me home? When that happens, you might as well give up. You have been chosen.

Our beloved companion Sherlock died just about two months ago, having woven his way through our lives for thirteen years. I thought it would be many months, maybe years before I was "ready" for another cat. Certainly I'm not "over" losing him.

But it was just because I missed him so much that I went to Cat Welfare, initially just to pet cats, to be around them, and I found it made me feel better. I went back, Tom with me. We asked about foster cats. Well, they don't really do that, except sometimes when there are kittens that need socialized for a couple of weeks. We knew we are too unsteady on our feet to have kittens around.

We went back again. We started to consider various cats. But my attention kept being drawn to Sheba on her lonely pillar. She was a nervous cat. When I went in (closing the door behind me) she stood and strained toward me, eager to bump her head against my hand, but then frightened and withdrawing. Yet, that eagerness was there, that head bump and that silent question.

Years ago I read a children's book about death called Missing May. It tells how a parentless child is taken in by two kind elderly people who see that she is hungry in her foster home. They give her an abundance of food and love. It's a book everyone should read. It helped me understand real grief, as feeling people experience it. I had lost family members over the years, but in an alcoholic family, grief is avoided, as all pain is avoided. And the loss of difficult people is very complicated, different from the loss of an animal companion. Their love is so straightforward and authentic. And I certainly have felt real grief since Sherlock died, and still do. He was not, as I often told him, "just a cat."

We have had Sheba three weeks now, and she is settling in nicely. It's a pleasure to see her trustfully arranged on the chair beside me, sound asleep. She loves to be petted, it turns out, though she remains terrified of being picked up, and struggles so much she cannot be held.

Tom remarked the day our warranty expired, as he put it. Cat Welfare will take a cat back, and give you back your adoption fee, within a ten-day period. That fact had reassured us, uncertain as this thing seemed. Moreover, this place - and there are many, many such shelters trying to alleviate the suffering of at least a few animals - this place will take a cat back anytime, so none of the cats they have made a commitment to should ever have to end up as strays.

Our commitment to Sheba has deepened gradually. It has gone to another level now that we scheduled her for a vet visit Tuesday. She will have a baseline exam, and perhaps be told to lose a pound. She is still not used to not having food available all the time. We will discuss those front claws, which present a problem in a cat that won't hold still for trimming. She is still jumpy from an attempt a couple of days ago. It was a battle she won. Well, that's the kind of cat she is.

Life has taught me that you can't pick out a cat like you do a car. It just doesn't work to go to the animal shelter and announce, "I have to have a lap cat." Actually, that was one reason I brought Sherlock home all those years ago - the volunteers said he was a great lap cat. It turned out that once he got home and had the run of a two-story house, lots of plants to knock over and windows to guard, people to meet, he became uninterested in sitting in laps.

When you take a cat home, you don't know the back story, whether this cat flinches because someone hit her or it's just her temperament, things like that. And you certainly don't know what that cat is going to be like in this new environment and relationship. In that regard, it's a lot like getting married - be prepared to be surprised. If you look at it the right way, that's what makes life interesting.

Mu in the Magnolia,or Almost Perfectly Happy

I have made it possible to search this blog, so if you are not familiar with the two black cats, whom we call The Mu's, you can find my blog about Street Mu.

Meanwhile, above are two pictures of either Jake or Elwood high in the saucer magnolia tree in our side yard. If we'd had video with zoom, you could see that cat's side heaving, as it tried to catch its breath.

I happened to be at the kitchen sink when the drama unfolded: a black cat flying low, followed by two dogs about the size of wolves. One was a young dog from down the street, who might have been tempted by the other dog, a stray, to cross his electric fence. Or perhaps they were in the yard playing when the Mu strolled by, believing himself safe. It is an electric fence, probably visible to a cat's vision, who knows. In any case, it marks a yard from which the dog had never strayed before, to the cat's knowledge.

Cats are not marathoners. Everything about them is fitted to spring, maybe sprint a few yards. Just why this cat hadn't found another suitable tree I don't know, but he was so clearly exhausted when we went out, camera in hand, that he must have been running a while. He made it up the trunk barely ahead of the many, many teeth of two large, healthy dogs, who did their best to jump up beside him.

The magnolia was a good choice, its close, twisted branches excellently made for a cat that wants to rest comfortably for a long, long time before coming down. That's what this cat did.

What you are seeing in that tree was not exactly a happy cat, I think. Yes, he had beat death by a whisker, but his terror was slow to recede. Cats are a quick study. I think he knew something now, that his territory could deliver a huge, hungry, unpleasant surprise anytime. Yet, he seems to have recovered. We see a black cat strolling our yard with what seems like the same old savoir faire. It could be Jake or Elwood - we can't tell them apart from any distance, but we'd like to think it's whichever one made his way to safety in our tree, giving us now an example of how to go on with life in the face of uncertainty.

Getting in touch with nature, or Sheba among the orchids

It's not a great picture of either Sheba or the orchids. The big orchid is still a graceful arch of perfect bloom, larger than the picture shows. The little one has lost its blooms, so I have moved it to an auspicious place where its sad, naked stem is not prominently in view. You have to love that about potted plants - the fact that you are in charge. Compare that to the ivy in the back yard, firmly situated on seven of the oaks, and trying for number eight. Nature is like that. You can't turn your back for a minute.

Sheba would like to be a phenomenon of the Great Natural World beyond the screened porch. But that's because she doesn't know any better. She doesn't realize she is a very small domestic animal, prey to large dogs that slip their electric fences, diligent hawks, speeding cars, and the naturally scraggly coyote that now graces our ravine. There are also out door cats, and she doesn't like others of her species. Another good reason to stay on the porch.

Then too, out in the natural world Sheba would be sure to be found by fleas, which would ride in to inhabit our civilized world, to leap onto the sofa and the bed Sheba shares with us at night. We like having her there with us. We dislike fleas, which would require us to impose still more civilization in the form of flea poison for her, anti-itch creams for our own tender skins, antihistamines, fogging the bedroom, and so on. Nature leads to complications like that. In fact, it is the very point of civilization - to keep complications out of our houses so we can watch TV in peace.

No, Sheba, like me, does not belong in a world devoid of wireless internet, cellphone towers, yoga pants, and Just Pies. She is an artifact of civilization, bred to diet not on God's beautiful little rosy finches, but on Fancy Feast, which is probably made in part from God's less attractive chickens.

Even now she is on her chair next to me behaving in a thoroughly civilized way, doing a thorough grooming, though she was clean to begin with. There is, in theory, a reason cats do this, but she never studied philosophy. She just does it instinctively, the same way when I was about her age, except in human years, I examined myself closely in the mirror. All these years later that's the one civilized activity I can safely say I'd just as soon avoid.

Organizing the mind

[photo: The beloved critic John Leonard showing us what a working study looks like.]
This morning I knew I had to get back to my usual meditation. I felt scattered, full of ideas and reactivity. Specifically, I reacted when Tom suggested we move some wire shelving he built into my toy closet.

This closet is one of the luxuries of my life I take for granted. I don't take them all for granted. Not a day goes by that I don't thank whatever God may be that I do not have to work anymore - how did I ever survive it? I sweet-talk the robot vacuum cleaner, and load the dishwasher with gratitude. But closets? I'm used to them. My study, for instance, has a whole wall of closet. I like to think the doctor who built this house put this in for his wife, who I like to think had a lot of clothes. It was the fifties, after all. What we did was buy clothes.

I don't have a lot of clothes, so one half of this closet houses my toys - drums, paints, drawing pads, unfinished crewel embroidery, drawings and paintings and photographs, seeds collected at Grailville . . . you get the idea. The kind of toys we enjoy as grown-ups.

Over coffee this morning Tom brought up the fact of this shelving, which sits in the guest room awaiting my command. The idea is to put it in my toy closet and make everything much more accessible - there are boxes under boxes put there when we moved in, boxes that are a mystery to me. He had a friend coming by who could do the heavy lifting.

Immediately Don't want! sprang full-blown into my head the idea of the Right Way to Do This. It was muddled in with a sense of embarrassment - surely I couldn't let Greg see this mess! I would need to at least get in there and remove the little boxes before he came, and where would I put them? What I should do is buy a bunch of organizing stuff at The Container Store . . .

Now wait, I said to myself, what's all this about? Isn't this actually just what closets look like? I realized I don't actually know. I don't get much chance to look in other people's closets. But I bet hardly anyone has every single thing stacked and labeled like . . . ah-ha, like my parents did, compulsive workers. Then I wondered whether my reaction had something to do with always wanting A's? A in everything and, as my father once said, "Why aren't they A pluses?"

I could see that the whole thing was one of those half-thought constructions brought up by a knee-jerk No, a slight aversion, a sense of threat. And fifteen years ago it would have ended there, with my refusal, I'm too busy right now. This time I caught myself and marveled. Because moving the shelving is not about how good a person I am, or what someone thinks of me. It is about nothing but hey, moving the shelving. My kneejerk reaction was the kind of mysterious weirdness we can see in our friends and spouses, but usually not in ourselves. Unless we meditate.

I am not talking about destressing with a mantra, or doing a visualization, or the practice of lovingkindness meditation, all good things. What I'm talking about is plain old ordinary sitting meditation. It is taught in all the Buddhist traditions, this sitting still and following the breath, watching our thoughts, desires, fears rise and letting them pass like clouds in the sky. Practicing not grasping. Practicing just being here with ourselves and whatever arises in us.

I am not at all sure about the division often made between the psychological and the spiritual. I am just one person, with these things muddled in my mind and gut. I have found that meditation leads me time and again to what you would call psychological insight, as in this case. Then again, once I see the snafluffle I have built in my mind, and let it fall away, something spacious and relaxed appears. That feels spiritual. It is very nice when it happens.

Yesterday I wrote about some of the ways women nourish themselves spiritually. And certainly none of us should beat ourselves up for falling away from our practice. That's not productive. But I woke up this morning wanting to correct myself, afraid that I seemed to equate meditation with a number of other practices. That hasn't been true for me.

Wandering off the path

[photo: Sheba sleeping in my study. Note orange spot on top of head.]
Somewhere in the box of old-fashioned photos and slides in my study closet is a picture of nothing, taken when I visited San Francisco years ago. Actually, it is a picture of a path. A simple path, wide enough for one person, scuffed in the dirt and surrounded by tufts of tall grass. Often I couldn't explain why I took the stupid pictures I took, pictures that didn't even have people in them. Now I wish I could get my hands on that one. Hardly a day goes by when I don't think of getting into that box and having at least some of my pictures (that's what we used to call "pix") digitized. Seems lower priority than cleaning up some other areas, what I'd like to call "disorganized areas," or "my filing," but actually think of as messes. In fact, getting out that box would be sure to create another such . . . area.

This morning I am thinking about how I have wandered off my chosen path. That is, right now I am choosing to do this rather than study dharma and meditate. Earlier this morning I chose to sit and talk with Tom over first coffee. We have our best talks this time of day. Inbetween I petted Sheba, who asks for frequent doses of serious petting. I dressed. I sat down here and checked e-mail to see if anything important had come to me in the night.

Indeed, it had. An e-mail from a friend who has been in the hospital with her very sick daughter for many weeks now, coming home briefly now and then to shower and talk with her other kids, then back to keep vigil. Her life has been interrupted - she is thrown off her usual path. I think of another friend, who is grieving her husband of over fifty years. She has grown very thin.

As for me, I woke up depressed, feeling flank pain, which makes me think my kidneys are still infected. I'd gotten used to these infections, but now I'm scared, because we think the episode of arrythmia I had over the weekend was caused by the miracle drug I was taking. The usual drugs for these infections are fluoroquinolins like Levaquin and Cipro; but they can cause arrythmia. What if I can't take them? A kidney infection can kill you. So can irregular heart rhythm. What will the doctor say this afternoon?

Meanwhile, Sheba sleeps beside me on a chair with a hand towel on it. I have discovered that she feels secure on a towel. There are now three towels folded on various chairs in the house. She goes right to them. During her long months at Cat Welfare, she sat on a bit of chenille on a little pillar in the quiet room - that was the limit of her territory. How we envy and love animals for this simplicity. Sheba is happy now, ranging this much larger territory of this house, and having people to pet her frequently. She does not need to be told her path - she knows it. What security is, when she should be fed, when to sleep, what her instincts tell her to do (run from window to window to keep out the Mu's when they stroll our garden paths).

I am less certain of my path. How can I say that? At this moment, being here doing this is the right thing for me. So it must be some idea of my path that troubles me. Tom said an interesting thing about that this morning - as soon as we get on a path, we stop seeing all the options. We tend to keep our eyes down on that path. For me, the path was meditation. I undertook it in 1997 when I was diagnosed with cancer, believing that healing visualization was the only thing I could do for my health. I was wrong about that. There are a lot of other things you can do. Since then I have benefitted from drawing and painting, working with beads, being with friends. Writing poetry. Sitting here in the morning looking at the woods and sky.

One of my friends began keeping a gratitude journal every night when her daughter was dying. She also bought herself a photograph full of comforting blues and white, and put it up opposite her recliner. She has had a daily tai chi practice for many years. The friend who is in mourning keeps a journal listing things she can do for herself, and also sits and lies in her back yard, surrounded by trees and stars. She meditates every day, too, though she is quick to say she's "not a Buddhist" - she follows her own path. She has been writing poetry.

Another friend loves to go walking in the morning before work. When she has to choose between that and sitting in meditation, she chooses walking. She is a healthy, active person who loves to be outside. "Walking on the earth is a miracle" Thich Nhat Hanh says. She sings in a choir, too. These things nourish her spiritually.

So what is our path about? Who knows our path? I suppose that one of the things that has always attracted me to Zen is its focus on meditation, its conviction that this individual practice will lead us to the wisdom and compassion that are basic to the larger Buddhist way of life. Zen also offered me a history of eccentrics. Poets, hermits, people who journeyed around trying this and that until they found it on their own - in fact, that's the Buddha's story or myth, if you prefer. It's a story that emphasizes sitting under a tree and looking at the stars.

For most of the years since I began meditating, I was rigorous about doing it every day. Yet, I always had the policy that if my daughter called when I was meditating, which she often did at one time, on her way to work, I answered the phone. To call this "juggling priorities" is to trivialize the nature of the choices. We are talking about our spiritual nourishment, our commitments, about love. I think it is in this context that we need to contemplate our own path of this moment.

Love in action

Last night we watched a documentary titled The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, one of our Netflix finds. It is the story of a man named Mark Bittner who had begun living homeless decades before. When the film begins, he is occupying an old apartment rent-free, and has become known for his close relationship with a raucous flock of wild Amazon parrots that nests nearbye.

But the interest of the film isn't confined to parrots. It records how observing and giving care lead to love. Mark imagines the former lives of these tropical birds, what they went through as they were trapped and shipped here. He has given the parrots in the flock names like Connor, Picasso, Olive, and recognizes them, and they sit on his head and arms.

At the same time as his interest in these birds grew, and he became committed to feeding them, the vocation he's been hoping to find all his life comes clear - he is the only person studying this these birds, which are very difficult to study in their native rain forest. So there comes to be a market for his articles and photos. By the time he tells us movingly of the death of Tupelo, a sick and damaged bird he kept inside and fed through a syringe, we have come to see his spiritual depth and breadth, and we have become more and more fond of him.

I have been thinking about how love can be taught. I don't think telling ourselves - or anyone else - that we should love makes it happen. Probably the best thing is example. This quiet film (no special digital effects) about an unambitious person presents an example of caring action, and how this grows into love and transforms a life.
[photo: "We are gathered," Mark Bittner]

On Dalai Grandmothers

Last night I had a good long sleep, with many dreams, and today I find myself questioning my purpose here. Not why blog at all? but What does it mean to call yourself The Dalai Grandma? Or, what is this blog about?

It vastly amused me that my daughter made up this name for me, and I chose it for the blog on impulse one evening. But beyond the humor of it, I wonder what it means. I am chronically uncomfortable with the fact that it implies some special knowledge, some Buddhist attainment. Me, a role model?

There are many men who are lamas, meaning Teachers, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and a few women these days, but no sect headed by a highest and most precious Grandmother. No religious sect that values most highly home and home-making, the ongoing tender love for children and grandchildren, the care of the sick and dying - women's work, the ordinary feminine. In our own rapacious masculine culture all the old are undervalued, old women more so, because women are valued for their apparent sexual desirability. All this deserves many more words, and they have been written. I have no idea how to change this value system. Maybe I'm a little unusual in being chronically aware of it.

Dalai Lama means, in Tibetan, "ocean teacher," meaning one whose spiritual understanding is limitless and deep. What would Dalai Grandma mean? A grandmother is not usually seen as a teacher, but as one who loves, values, and accepts. We think of laps, aprons, homemade cookies, smiles. I've read that most "successful" members of minority groups (including women) were strongly supported by a grandmother who believed in them.

There is the phrase that appears in the Zen tradition, and perhaps elsewhere, "Grandmother's heart." This seems to me to sum up what a grandmother ideally has to offer: an oceanic heart, an encompassing love. Many women can tell you how we felt awakened by the birth of a grandchild. Even writing that sentence, I feel that altogether new Love stirring in me. And from the moment I knew my daughter was pregnant, I also loved babies and children in a new way. Wherever I was I related instantly to babies, and to women with children. I felt connection to the great web of life down through time.

From a religious standpoint I guess we should aspire to open our hearts to everyone in that way, but that does sound abstract to me. What I do see in my own life is the need, the desire to have an open, nurturing heart here, for those around me - not just my daughter and grandson and son-in-law, not just Tom's parents, but my neighbors and friends. I see that my practice has come to include thinking of the people in my life and asking, What does she need right now? or, What could I do to ease this person a bit?

There is a masculine way that is intellectual, demanding, oriented toward building towers and, unfortunately, flying planes into them. It has given us what comfort and safety we have in civilization. But a feminine way is badly needed, a way of love and respect for all others, and for the life of this planet. This way is exemplified for us in Mother Teresa, who said, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."

And for me, it is exemplified by the Jesus I was introduced to as a child, with his flowing brown hair, tenderly holding a lamb in his arms. Something a grandmother would do.

This morning I am thinking about the Protestant Work Ethic. It is a long way from the dense surround of scholarship about this way of thinking to our actual life as creatures that feel, live, and die. It calls to my mind a poem I wrote several years ago. I liked the original, but lost it in revisions, playing with meter and rhyme, which is an ironic footnote to the project.

By way of explanation, the Beineke is a library at Yale. Its walls are made of thin marble that casts a certain pale underwater light. It's hard to tell in the photo; those are stacks on the left and marble "windows" on the right.

The Beinecke displays a Gutenberg Bible, which is not that old, but is precious - why? Partly because of our thoughts - we assign a historic value to it. Partly because, like us, it is fragile. I am often aware of how fragile the word is, printed or stored as a collection of electronic impulses somewhere. I know this image is not correct, yet it seems to me there is a bitstream floating now around the earth.

The building's rare book library contains various collections of papers thought to be important, such as those of the poet H.D. When I visited, copy machines were not as widely used as they are now - to think, it was even before the internet! One sat and copied by hand from the handwritten miscellany of someone who is dead and forgotten except by a handfull of scholars. It was the very image of the quiet isolation of scholarship.

Scholarship at the Beinecke Library

Precious papers settle unseen at night
in acid-free boxes. Submerged in the light
that falls through marble here, by day
scholars chronicle poets.
You cannot write

sprung rhythm on their index cards.
You need huge white
boards covering every wall,
hasty scrawls,
dazzled eyes.

I see that in this poem, written before I got seriously absorbed in Buddhist thought and imagery, I was considering the difference between the world of thought and the reality that words do not capture, but poetry tries to.

Wish I could find a good book to live in

[Melanie and pix from the Hubble - if you want to go back to 1970 for 4 minutes, this is it.]
This morning I had the blissful morning I like to have, still in pj's until noon, drinking coffee, ignoring responsibility. I have always thought this is what a writer's life should be like. My life, anyway.

In all this I journaled, wrote a poem I don't understand, which was interesting and perhaps auspicious, and got into learning things I don't have to learn, thank God. Things I probably did learn at one time, but tossed aside as no longer useless. These ideas are probably still littering my lower brain, like the dirty sweats littering these 3 guys' dorm room I saw on Oprah. In case you're wandering, the Answer was The Container Store. Miraculous transformation. Mmm-hmm, for about as long as it took to get those cameras out of there.

Anyway, I tracked strange and interesting ideas through the internet until I landed on metanarrative. Wonderfully, the professor who included this in a course glossary began "Difficult to explain." Then, as evidence, he copied a paragraph from the Free Encyclopedia.

Actually, I confess that I was a student of narrative theory, a fairly rare specialty, you'd be surprised. It has made me very hard to please when it comes to novels. So here is my plea -

I want to read a novel that has the comic attitude, which sees life as fundamentally okay, which emphasizes farce, weddings, and feasts. I want to not be exposed to terrible dark secrets, wrenching experiences, aging and death and all - see, I get those in my life. If I wanted those, I'd stick to life and not seek out novels. In short, I get changed enough by life; I don't want works of art to scratch up my frozen soul. If you know this novel, please write.

At this remove from academia (I left it in 1995), I admit to liking what I like, and it does seem far from what I am supposed to like. I like to feel good. I like TV. The evening news, controlled by NBC. DVD's from Netflix. Chocolate. Okay, everybody likes that. And, like Melanie, "a good book to live in."

I wonder where we got what you might call the metanarrative about Art, the idea that Art should reflect suffering and moreover, make you suffer. Folk art isn't like that. A friend and I talked today about another friend who has taught himself to play wooden flute, and plays it like a shaman, sending delightful stirrings all up and down the chakras. He doesn't make us suffer. We feel better after we hear him. Hey, there's an idea.

I admit, an idea about Art isn't quite the same thing as a story; but they have something in common - they are made up by our brains. And millions of these meta-concepts govern our lives, billions litter our path, like the stars in the heaven. Things we should and shouldn't like. What decent people read. How to eat. I mean, since the truth about margarine came out why does anyone listen to the Diet Police?

Well, it is late. I have brought you a truly wonderful song today, and I actually do have a novel I am enjoying, perhaps for the second time, The Burglar who thought he was Bogart. I am a great fan of this witty series by Lawrence Block, in which corpses never really bleed, so it is time for me to get reading.

Why they call it work

Nothing is much weirder than thinking that Being a Poet is your work. Or actually, Work, with a capital W. For one thing, as I have often noted before, you don't get paid for it, unless by a sort of accident you win a grant or contest. But I am pretty sure there is no salaried job whose description of duties is --
1. write poetry.
If there were, I am afraid the job description would go on --
2. get it published.
Aye, there's the rub. That's where the work (with a small w) comes in. To get published you have to write well enough - that's years and years of studying good poetry, writing and revising, learning to throw stuff out, or at least move it to a file titled "unpublishable." And transcending rejections to submit your work time and again.

Yesterday we had an excellent visit with the kidney doctor. He pronounced himself as happy as we are with my latest labs, which actually show some improvement in kidney function, perhaps because my anemia has been fixed. I don't have to go back for two months. Released!

Furthermore, the Fourth of July is the date set by my orthopedic doctor when I can leave off my air cast and ankle support and walk around like a regular person. I am already walking more, trying to get muscles toned up after five months of being almost chairbound. My ankles do not hurt!

All that, and I passed the neurological exam of my aging mind. So you can imagine that I feel frisky. You know what that means - if you feel good, it's time to get back to work.

I have been writing during all this; writing is what I do to find myself and express myself. But I haven't made much effort to finish stuff and send it out. Even the blog seemed to take too much energy during this storm of illness. My time is still eaten up with tedious, frustrating phone calls regarding insurance and prescription delivery, and with the ordinary demands of life, like deadheading and watering the Wave petunias in the hanging basket, which have turned out to be demanding Divas. Everything takes minutes, and then the hours are gone.

But I am back to work today, and have been devoting myself to exploring contests where I can submit a certain long, narrative poem. This is work of the tedious, ordinary sort, not as pleasing as tending my potted plants. And it will be more work when I move on to the task of revision, trying to perfect the poem, line by line, word by word, does that comma need to be there? Writing a poem you are pleased with feels like a miracle in which you got to participate. But revising it takes a sharp, clear mind and a sort of ruthless detachment. It's the hardest mental work I know.

At one retreat I wrote a question for the Teacher, "How do I make myself write the book I need to write." (At the time, I thought I knew what that book was.) He read the question aloud and sort of laughed, and said, "Your work is your work," with a shrug. And went on to say that he, too, found aspects of working on his books tedious. Work is not always inspired or inspiring, and it is not always a pleasure.

My daughter, whose consulting business requires a lot of tedious travel, also shrugged when I talked to her about this. "It's not fun," she said matter-of-factly. "That's why they call it work."

Since I am, after all, a writer, these words led me to months of exploring the words work and play. I haven't got very far with it. It's cool when you love what you're doing, and it feels like play, but we all know that not every morning is like that. Some days you remember the First Noble Truth, which people translate various ways, but it goes like this: Sometimes life is hard. Unsatisfactory. Unpleasant. Or at least boring.
[image: our new cat, Sheba, questioning everything I said.]