A Birthday Wish

[image: The last song of the Weavers' reunion concert]
Eight women came to my birthday dinner last night. As people drifted in, we upset the usual birthday order of things, and I opened bags of wonderful gifts, quite unexpected. My friends are multi-creative, every one, and made art for me, gave me fantasically embellished chocolates and a tiara and miniature bottles of fruit liqueur, giving rise to a fantasy of a fruit liqueur tasting party down the road. I saw how I can pin their handmade cards and the big banner Gini designed up on my study wall, and feel surrounded every day by friendliness. I want to start a rustic weaving with the little ribbons from the gifts and rolled-up tissue, and hang it on my wall, a work in progress.

Mozart's is a small, classy neighborhood restaurant where some of us come often, and know the owner. The tiramisu I ordered for our dessert came embellished with delicate chocolate flowers and a single small candle, so “Happy Birthday” was sung for the third or fourth time, with Mark, the piano player, obliging with a flourish. The restaurant was nearly empty last night, and we felt free to do a lot more singing throughout the evening, as Mark picked up on the fact that we sang along with the old songs - pre-Beatles you could say - and show tunes.

In between songs Mark played variations on a piece I always ask him to play, "I Love Paris," and once again I thought optimistically, Maybe I will get there. With a good transplant people climb mountains. Some people even travel on dialysis, though that idea frightens me - everything has to go just right, dialysis is a life-and-death matter, and you know things never go right. You feel more secure on home turf.

Mark went on to play everything French, which he thought included "Que sera, sera." That's a fitting place for me to note that as I blew out the candle ("Make a wish!") my wish came clear to me: May I accept whatever comes. I meant kidney failure, dialysis, no transplant, failed transplant. I'm afraid my future with this disorder is coming fast. I wish to accept whatever comes, the flu, fatigue, pain. To relax into the state of restfulness we call equanimity.

There was so much song and laughter last night, so much creative flow, and something else - a sadness as we sang “Good night, Irene” and I remembered my 65th birthday two years ago. Laurie took pictures there, too. Not long after that party, Betty died of a heart attack one morning after Sunday brunch. She was in her early fifties. A few months later Jean Levinson died painfully, of brain cancer. At Jean’s memorial service, the church posted Laurie’s photo of Jean at my party, wearing the furry leopard mask Gini gave me, all smiles. You get those moments.

Last night - maybe I already had this flu, or whatever it is - in the middle of all the laughing and singing I looked around our table. To my right, Terry, who nearly died three years ago of a heart infection, whose partner has Parkinson’s Disease. Across from me Laurie, chronic back problems and now whiplash. At my left my beloved neighbor Marion, who is eighty and lost her husband this year. I wondered who among us would be gone in two years, who else might die young, who would be missing from this gathering of friends in ten years, what it might look like in twenty years. I felt a simultaneous mix of joy and sorrow. Even now, the memory gives me chills.

What I know for sure

[image: communal art by incarcerated women in the Resolana Project]
Sometimes, like every aged person facing a birthday (tomorrow) I wonder what wisdom I have to give this world. Well, here it is, a little bit of my hard-earned wisdom:

1. Always round prices up mentally. So a VZ Navigator app for your cellphone is not $9.99 a month, it's $10.00 a month. (It is widely believed that you feel 9 is a much smaller number than 10, and that $299 is much smaller than $300. That's why they do that.)

2. Never think in terms of monthly cost. Multiply every monthly price times 12. Thus, the VZ Navigator does not cost "just $10.00 a month." It costs $120 a year, while Mapquest is still free. If you like, you can multiply that times ten years and contemplate a nice vacation somewhere with palm trees.

What does this have to do with the life of spirit that I so often write about? Well, managing money well is a blessing that can lead to a pleasant old age in which you are free to live the way you wanted to when you were a child. (Which might include taking up weaving!)

Shelter cat

When we chose Sheba over 285 other cats at Cat Welfare, it was our own welfare we had in mind. Though it was true that Sheba played a part in the choice, standing up on her pillar and stretching to look at me through the glass walls of the quiet room every time I came in, just as if to ask, "Are you my woman?" I felt sorry for the little cat who was afraid of other cats, whose previous owner had abandoned her at a veterinary hospital. I wondered what had become of that woman. Maybe she was hit by a car, maybe she died, maybe her mother got sick and she flew home to be with her, and couldn't get her wits about her enough to make arrangements for the cat. Anything could have happened.

Your heart goes out to all the cats in that perennially overcrowded no-kill shelter, the ones who wind about your ankle, the ones who are too tired or discouraged or ill to even look up. There is a certain crowd that seems to enjoy the place, hang out together, run around looking for trouble, just like high school. But, just like high school, everyone else is marking time, looking for a way out.

The only record on Sheba showed that she was brought in five months previous, and had been spayed and had her shots. Someone, one of the volunteers I think, told us she was three years old, but we can't track down any records with her date of birth. We believed she was three until we'd had her at home for a week or two and took her to the vet to get her claws trimmed. (Having front claws had not been in her favor.) The vet did a blood draw and called the next day with the bad news: her kidney function is very low. This is a familiar story to cat people; many cats die of kidney failure. Our Sherlock had. We knew his age, seventeen.

Sheba was also chosen for her looks. Shallow as that may seem, a cat is a thing of beauty, an adornment in a house. Sheba was a sort of clouded black tiger, with an expressively marked face, and shadows of auburn beneath her striping. And she had personality. And furthermore, she seemed to yearn toward me, to want to be adopted by us, even though she could hardly be touched, and certainly not picked up. (We never got to pet her until she'd been home for a while.) Her figure we didn't know about, because we saw her only in the tiny quiet room, where she wove in and out of pillars, but mostly just lay there. When we got her home and she was walking about we could see that she is paunchy, with the low belly of an older cat, and carries an extra pound or two.

So we had another cat who might be close to death. I began saying that this was The Wynding Drive Cat Hospice, a joke of sorts, but there seemed to be something sweet about it, that we could give a helpless animal a good end-of-life.

Sheba began weaving into our daily lives in a very satisfactory way. She has gradually taken in more of this nice, big territory - the screened porch, the basement (carpeted steps!) and the garage. She has learned to eat her special kidney diet, though not without protest. She has learned when treats are given, three times a day, and tested a great many other possibilities. She has developed two tricks, or say, aspects of her performance piece around these treats - Running Cat and Magical Floating Cat. She has dedicated certain venues where she naps at specific times of day. At night, she lies on the bed, at my feet, where the heated mattress pad confers a lovely warmth. Would that we could all end up in a hospice that offers so many creature comforts!

It was not our first priority to generously give an orphan cat a home, though we knew we did want a shelter cat. We did it for ourselves. We wanted a cat in the house, we needed relief from the echoing emptiness after Sherlock died. We have ended up with a cat who will probably not be with us as long as he was - I think she is actually eight or nine years old.

Her happiness here is plain to see. She goes out in the garage and stretches to claw at the doormat. In my study, I am surprised to see her thread her way through the colored pencils on my art table and jump neatly up on the file cabinet to watch from the high window, just like Sherlock did. I'm in the process of clearing a place for her on a really high shelf in the closet; she has indicated that she would like to try that.

It is very hard to do any good in this world, have you noticed? You give someone a carefully chosen gift, and it falls flat. You try to help someone out and it turns out to be impossible. But with an animal there is never any question. Sheba is not as demonstrative as some, but she has an expansive purr, and a chirrup and chuckle that demands serious petfest at odd times. She feels safe enough now to try some questionable things, like jumping up on the kitchen table. Gradually her coat has gotten shinier, and she has less dandruff. She sleeps more soundly, not jumping up alarmed at the smallest sound. So, if we never accomplish anything else in this world, we have made one small animal happier. But in the end, it is impossible to say whether she benefits most or whether we do, who gives, the giver or the grateful recipient.

The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet

Long, long ago Ms. Magazine published a fairy tale I wrote called "The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet." It was a sort of map, the way myths are, of how to grow and find our way in the adult world, and has become known as a classic feminist fairy tale. I am humbled to see tonight that it gets more hits on Google than I do. I know it is published (sometimes pirated) and studied around the world. I love to think of it being read in South Africa and China by young women who really need a new myth to help them stand up to their cultures' demands. I love that a woman in the Netherlands wrote her thesis about it. Having written this story relieves me, I hope, of the duty to accomplish anything else. I am about to turn 67. I'd like to be the Princess who finally retired.


Feet seem central to my story, which has taken another turn in age. All day today I kept thinking happily, "I am on my own two feet!" The Constant Reader knows I have struggled with bone problems since January. But last week I graduated from physical therapy, saw the caring young doctor for the last time, no followup needed.

I am in my new Nike's and orthotics, and can't remember when I had to take a Tylenol for pain. I can go places, I can take a mixed media art class at the rec center because I can drive there and walk through a big building without worrying about my ankles. I can cook dinner. I am getting back in condition from a pitiably sedentary state, up to 15 minutes on the Nustep now. Yesterday I loaded the van with the bags of recycle and cardboard boxes that piled up in the garage all winter, drove it to the plaza, unloaded everything in the small rain. Doing this felt like liberation. I was totally happy.

I have at times thought how much I needed to learn the story I wrote, how hard it's been time and again to know when to stand up for myself. Today it seems like I have gone beyond that struggle. But growing up is just prelude to more growing up. You don't get to relax for long before life presents a new challenge. I feel like I need a new and different story to express what I have been through this year, what we all go through if we live to an old age. The new story would feature a girl who maybe keeps falling, who gets very discouraged, but gets back up. It reminds me of the samurai saying, "Six times down, seven times up," which means to me that all you ever have to do is get up one more time.

What you can get away with.

The list on the silver bulletin board on my refrigerator door reads

food
rest
exercise
meditate
fun in its many forms

If I had to narrow it down to what's necessary for survival, I'd put

food
rest
exercise

. . . much as I love fun, you can go a whole lifetime without it. Some people do.

(Strictly speaking, you don't have to exercise to stay alive, but if you find yourselves comatose in a hospital, someone will move your limbs around and massage them, by hand or mechanical pumps, or before very long you'd be quite unable to stand or use any muscles. As for meditation, many people never do it after infancy when it seems to come naturally in the form of rapt absorption in an object, seeing the world in one's toes, or repeating endlessly a mantra, such as "mine, mine, MINE.")

Many people recognize Eat, Pray, Love as the title of a best-selling book. I haven't read it, but I imagine the author also rested and moved about. I don't think that book's about survival. More like "finding happiness," I guess, which we Americans believe in profoundly, that happiness is an object, a treasure, that can be found somewhere. Somewhere else. Like an Easter egg hunt.

What gave rise to my little list was a decline in my happiness last night, a muzzy, bored mood, a fatigue coupled with insomnia, and a desire to eat all kinds of things at 1:00 in the morning. That could read "things I should not eat," which is most everything for someone with kidney disease. Certainly on that Don't list are cashews and all the potato chips in the house. Fortunately, there weren't too many.

Faithful readers know I have kidney failure, and am very close to needing dialysis or a transplant. Kidneys are really the center and soul of your body, in charge of your cells getting the nourishment they need. Whatever you eat, the kidneys sort out, and send the excess along the trash conveyors of your elimination system. A piece of this is keeping your electrolytes in balance. To do this, healthy kidneys discard extra salt and phosphates (as found in Dove ice cream bars) and potassium (as found in potato chips). Pathetic little kidneys like mine do their best, but can't keep up at all with the standard American diet. So my body informed me this morning when I woke up with a familiar headache and a salty taste in my mouth.

Thus we have again a new vow, yes, maybe it's deeper than that - maybe it's a realization that there's no way to get away with eating the way I've been eating lately.

I don't think any of the sweet and spiritually advanced people who read my blog would at this moment feel haughtily superior to me. We all know about problems with food. I myself once knew an eating problem intimately, when I gained a lot of weight, so much that I decided I had to "go on a diet" to even stand being around myself.

I believed, and still do, that to lose weight I have to burn more than I eat. Back then that meant eat less than I burned, because I was as far from physically active as you can get and still climb stairs. I went on that diet rigidly. That was it. No "cheating." I knew that every mouthful actually counts, including the crumbs in the Oreo package. From somewhere I had gleaned a slogan:

A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.

I set myself to eat 1200 calories a day, which meant I was always hungry. I was obsessive about measuring and writing down what I ate. I carried lunch to work - I recall peanut-butter and applesauce sandwiches. A yogurt for breakfast. I counted the tablespoon of cream I used in the coffee I drank a lot of back then. I allowed 150 calories for the one treat of the day, 1/2 cup of ice cream before bed, which I ate with a reverence I have seldom brought to prayer. I did.not.ever.cheat. Living like this (and smoking cigarettes) I lost 1 1/2 pounds a week. Taking off thirty pounds was thus very very slow. But I did it.

Wouldn't you say a person like that could manage a renal (kidney) diet? It is not even calorie limited. You can have all the organic shortbread cookies you want. All the white bread. A lot of vegetables, if you're careful to check their potassium level - no binging on guacamole, for instance, very little tomato, no potatoes. Even in chip form. Especially in chip form, dusted with salt. Did I say, no salt?

That radical dieter was the person I was some thirty years ago. Rigid systems suited me more at that time, a personal preference that has melted around the edges. Now what I have to count on to keep me on track is an understanding of cause and effect.

That about sums that up. Today I am back on the renal diet with a new ferocity, aware of another decline in kidney function on my last labs, as well as my subjective experience. Maybe meditation practice can help me stay in touch with the reality here.

In one of his recorded talks, Jack Kornfield says that a student summed up karma pretty well: "You don't get away with nothing."

When I first heard that I laughed. I thought it was a joke.

String too short to save

Sometimes I make grand vows, though recently I just make them for this day. My day is often divided in two parts by an afternoon nap or at least restorative yoga (lying in a shambles on a yoga mat in my study with a lavender-scented eyepad), so I could just make my vows for half a day. Sometimes I spontaneously make a little vow, having seen myself do something I don't like. My vows often have to do with speech: "I will count to three before I speak. No, five." Sometimes I vow "It's Sunday - I get a day off." I am pretty good at keeping that one. Other times I vow not to try so hard. I usually make that vow very energetically. Lately, beyond vows, I am devoted to keeping my stress low. This one comes right from the center, that part that wants to stay alive. Avoiding stress. That's a funny thing to vow, if you think about it; animals don't have to vow that.
~~~~~~
There is only one reason we spell thought the way we do, custom. And lots of good reason to shorten it to "thot," which I do in my journal. I have my word processor trained to automatically spell it right. I mean, the regular way. It also knows how to spell wierd and protein. Weird, I mean. Protien. Protein.
~~~~~~
Today I graduated from my physical therapy and have NO FOLLOWUP APPOINTMENT with the musculo-skeletal (sports) doc, who said he's never seen my feet and ankles looking this good. Now I have to grrraaadually and sloooowwly accustom myself to my new semi-flexible orthotics, being more careful than I was last time. They did not give me balloons. One little balloon wouldn't hurt them.
~~~~~~
This morning from my kitchen window I could see in reflected sunlight a sort of bouquet formed by my red potted geranium, doing its last valiant bloom; the new orange pansy I bought, which is supposed to "rebound" in spring (as I myself do, too); and the last delicate white blooms on a hosta. I did like that reflection of the eastern light from the kitchen window, giving the plants a lovely portrait glow.
~~~~~~
What would make a pretty picture tonight? Oh, a rag rug from Vintage Chica (see image). Because I have signed up to take weaving, in hopes of making a ragged authentic rug, or something, the kind of using-up-every-last-scrap thing I have always admired.

And what I remember someone always used to say about this time,
Good night,
sleep tight.
Don't let the bedbugs bite.
. . . thus fostering in me at an early age a love of poetry.

Guide those demons out

[image: Social Group III by Andrew Guenther, from Tricycle, Summer 2008.]

I just talked with my friend Nancy, and want to share something she mentioned. She was talking about the fabled affliction that drives so many people out of meditation practice, monkey mind. She said she has learned that when those unwanted thoughts disturb her peace, it's best to guide them out the door. (I can hear a song, to the tune of the very old folk song, Boil that cabbage down. "Guide those demons out . . . ")

"Not trying to throw them out, or say 'Get away,'" she explained. "It just seems best to sort of nod and say hello, and then gently guide them out. It seems to work better." Nancy is a lady almost a generation older than me, and has the manners of a slower, more thoughtful time. She is one to write thank-you notes, to call when you've been ill. She is also a longtime practitioner of tai chi. The Taoist emphasis on being in the flow, on listening to the universe, suits her temperament, I think. I can't imagine her being aggressive. She has political views, but you'd never know it; she doesn't argue politics. Just doesn't argue. Not even with her demons. I can imagine her saying to one, "I'm sure you have a lot to do. Don't let me detain you."

A story about finding yourself

Michael Arthur, from "Just Drawn that Way":

Overwhelmed by grief, I found myself drawing again, as I had not drawn since before grad school — notions from my head, floating hands and disembodied heads with empty spaces where the bodies were suggested but not drawn. I drew spaceships and birds, circles and flowing hair. The kind of thing one finds in the margins of lined notebooks, but dropped instead front and center in the middle of an otherwise empty page. As the losses accumulated, I found that the very act of drawing raised my spirits. I decided that if drawing made me happy when there was no reason in the universe for me to be happy, I had better pay attention to that impulse.

For a beautiful inspiration to nonviolence, check out this blog on one woman's action.

The problem with being in the now

[image: an example of a Venn Diagram]
Of all the serious stuff I read, what stuck with me lately came from a column in a magazine I picked up in a doctor's office. The writer said that what you obsess about is not really your problem - that obsessing is a screen or barricade against your real problems.

I thought about how some people I know carry around obsessions you can count on. How underneath the constant working-the-problem there are feelings like loneliness and disappointment and frustration. I could see it in layers, like the cupcakes you can buy at Kroger's, huge fluffy decorated icing on top of a plain layer of cake. I thought about how I obsess about how to help my obsessive friends. Eventually I thought about my own case. That's always good when you get there.

I recalled how, when I had a lot of contact with my family as my mother needed caregiving, I used to obsess about various family members. "I don't know why she said that. Did she know how mean that was? Maybe she didn't mean anything by it. No, that's excusing her, that's exactly what my mother trained me to do. She had to know. . . . " You get the idea.

All that could not be unraveled, not by me, and what's the use of all this history, anyway? I'm sure my obsessive efforts to "figure it out" after each family event were tedious to my husband and my therapist. They certainly were to me.

On my second retreat the constant rewind, play it again in my mind had me frantic. I just so much wanted to stop thinking, to just be there in the beautiful building as the sunlight moved across the floor, to be at peace. I wanted the retreat experience as I understood it - the illusion that had brought me there. I remember making it to my room at lunch break and bursting out in tears, whispering to Tom, "I don't want to be sick." I was breaking the vow of Noble Silence, but that turned out to be a good thing. I went back for the afternoon sit, and I vividly recall feeling wonderful by 9:00 p.m., walking back to my room under a full moon.

I had begun to find access to the feelings that lay underneath that crazy mind, the frustration that triggered the inner and outer monologue. Feeling sounds so simple, Just do it. But it isn't simple when the feelings are painful and the issue is deep.

After that retreat I made progress in therapy, but my psychic pain and exhaustion didn't come forth until I apparently ran a red light (obsessing) and ran into an enormous new vehicle. Bruised and shaken, I still maintained my composure and got out to ask the other driver if she was all right. When she picked up her license plate and threw it in fury, swearing, I started to cry and just kept crying. 24 hours. A week. The lid had come off my real problem.

Tolstoy said happy families are all alike. I have to disagree. I've seen that unhappy families, especially alcoholic families, have many things in common, especially shared delusions. However, it was all new and unique to me. I was going through it for the first time, and glib talk and slogans were not helpful.

There is a very wide No-man's-land where the spiritual and the psychological occupy the same field (like the hamburger in the Venn Diagram in the interesting image above). I think obsession is also a spiritual problem, tied in to illusion or delusion, and to desire, which the Buddha said was the root of all our trouble - the craving for life to be different, the insistence that it fulfill our dreams. Desire: I want those particular people to love me. Illusion: Of course your parents love you. The mind is involved too, simple cognition. This belief/illusion leads inevitably to faulty logic, "You're crazy if you think they don't." (So it should be a three-way Venn Diagram, but I couldn't find one this charming.)

We talk a lot about wanting to be in the present moment, being mindful. Everyone wants "The power of now." The news is that we really don't - we don't always want to be there for our own experience; it can feel very raw. But I am here as evidence that psychic pain won't kill you. If it does, please contact me from the other side. I'm always eager to learn.

Urgently Meditating

[yes, that lower picture is a web built by a spider on caffeine)

It is something a Zen retreat tries to tell us with The Evening Gatha - You could die any minute. You don’t have forever to get with your life. You can’t be waiting for It to happen. Teachers say it in their dharma talks. You begin to get it.

I got it big in the early seventies. I have written before about how a book helped me think closely about what really mattered to me. I came up with the understanding that I urgently needed "to learn to relax." Well, that's a long story of not understanding what it would take, how I needed to change my life down to the very foundations. I'd rather do a bit of memoir on the arrythmia I experienced last month. It was called "a heart event."

Don't you like the term, an "event"? It was not a heart attack, nor was my heart damaged. I didn't have a blockage - I went out of rhythm. I find that evocative, because I did have the feeling in the weeks before that that I was too speeded up. It was a fact that my heart rate was higher than usual. It was a sort of too-much-caffeine feeling, though I never drank coffee after noon. (In the hospital I got off caffeine against my will, but have stayed off.)

The event . . . my heart began thumping, like an engine that's missing, and then felt like it was bounding around in all directions, racing faster, so that I got shorter of breath. When it peaked I realized I could be dying right now right here on this couch with no warning I could die!

This was the second time in my adult life that I knew that - nothing about dying from fear or grief, it was the genuine thing, the body. (The first time was the cancer diagnosis in 1997, which caused me to begin meditating.) Facing death is much harder if you think it is the very end of you, that there is nothing beyond. And since our beloved cat Sherlock died four months ago, I have been convinced that the death of the body is the end, for in no way has he come back to give me a sign. Our bond with that animal was so deep that I believe if such a thing were possible, he would have done it.

Dying, I felt, was just going to be descending into blackness. Gone. I haven't even recorded myself singing Keep Me in Your Heart for a While (but here is a lovely version).

Well, there is so much time in the heart hospital, time when you are awakened at 3:00 a.m. by someone taking your vitals or drawing your blood, and can't get back to sleep. No laptop, nothing much to do but think. Sense how worn out you are from that "event," how it battered your heart. Think about how you had been sliding on your meditation practice. Skipping days, doing it lightly, just ten minutes maybe, or just sitting outside in a lawn chair letting the universe be with me, contemplating. But not meditating.

Meditation is hard work. Seung Sahn said Americans won't do it because it is boring, and he laughed. Maybe the truth is right there - that America is a culture of Getting Somewhere, Getting Some Thing, you know, fame, money, status, going for it, just doing it, accomplishing. It is our heredity, and it surrounds us everywhere. This is why there needs to be an American form of Zen that truly takes this psychology into account. In my opinion, such an approach to Buddhism will keep before us the issues of our yang. How, for instance, being aggressive increases testoserone, which makes an individual tend toward aggression.

I got it during that event - I could die. If it hadn't calmed down, I would have. In my three days in the lovely private room in the privileged heart hospital I began meditating again. Out of bed, sit in a chair, do the posture as well as you can.

Home I didn't have to take a vow - I just started my morning practice again, sitting upright now with the incense I get from Zen Mountain Monastery, and a tea candle in a rose quartz holder. Started inching my time up from 20 minutes in case I decide to go to the Ama Samy retreat later this month, where the sits are 25 minutes. A retreat costs a lot, takes me away from my doctors and all my comforts and protections, most of all, asks a great deal of me. Follow the schedule. Meditate all day. No distracting. Some people call it "facing the wall." I think about that, how it is a metaphor. What is the wall you face? Is death a wall?

A retreat always stimulates my practice. What else would make me stay with it? besides this motivation, this urgent feeling that I could die, which is coupled with the conviction that meditation does destress me, and gives me a space to touch down on my true self, to be myself before I die. That's a good question, so I'll end with it.

Forgotten by the World

[image from Ryokan: Forgotten by the World]
In America we don't share religious celebrations, so national holidays are about something else. The meaning of Labor Day, the reason it was founded, is almost forgotten, as are the desperate struggles of ordinary workers to have decent lives. Labor Day is now the last big weekend of summer, last chance to grab some fun before life gets serious again. Preferably outdoor fun.

Here on Wynding Drive the trees are quiet. 11:00 a.m., no fireworks, at least so far. Bird calls. I still don't know how to identify any of them, except the ones I have seen - a cardinal going chip-chip-chip from a high branch; a mockingbird doing everything but a ring tone. No language for a bird call - this is all right. I have been reading Seung Sahn this morning -

Take away your opinion - your condition, situation - then your mind is clear like space. Clear like space means clear like a mirror. A mirror reflects everything: the sky is blue, tree is green, sugar is sweet. Just be one with the truth - that’s Zen style. Only talking, talking no good. No truth.

In the true style of Zen masters, Seung Sahn used words, many of them, to say - No words will get you there. Lacking his presence, the words are like finding a scrap of fabric off his robe, at least letting me get a sense of him.

Our house has something of the air of a temple, lots of hardwood floors, a window wall on our woods, a sense of quiet. There is a cowbell (what else?) inside the front door, and we own some Zen instruments, but there is no bell or wooden percussion to call us to meditate in the morning. We're on our own. Equally, we are not joining in the weekend fun, constrained by my body. We used to go to the church's Labor Day retreat, but it turned out last year to be more fun than I could handle.

It is interesting to fit together two opposing pieces that seem to have different edges: the relaxed silence of Zen, and a talent for words - a small thing, but mine own, the saying goes. And these days, I can do very little but what I can do at the computer. ?If what you are good at is words, how do you use words to heal all beings - "Save all beings from suffering." Seung Sahn often ended his letters to students that way.

I try to write from a brain in alpha, a brain saturated in the leaves and sky framed in the big west window over my computer. The scent of the out of doors comes in through side windows cranked wide open today. Once in a while sitting here contemplating this produces a good poem. It hasn't today, so I am going to copy in a poem from Ryokan, translated by John Stevens, which came to me this morning through my subscription to the Pacific Zen e-list. I wonder how many other invalids who will never be able to fly to the west coast for a koan seminar subscribe to this little window on Zen? and to Tricycle's Daily Dharma. Enlightenment in your in-box? Seems unlikely, but if that's your window, look there.

A single path among ten thousand trees,
A misty valley hidden among a thousand peaks.
Not yet autumn but already leaves are falling;
Not much rain but still the rocks grow dark.
With my basket I hunt for mushrooms;
With my bucket I draw pure spring water.
Unless you got lost on purpose
You would never get this far.

Being Authentic

In "After the laundry" a practitioner in the Phillipines, comments, "Sometimes, we don't want authentic, especially when we just want to relax." This came together for me with today's quote from Tricycle, by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. I will copy here a fair amount of it so you don't get the wrong impression.

Wherever we are, whatever we're doing, what we need to acknowledge is something natural. Something uncontrived. The uncontrived state is actually very special. Being natural is very special. And the natural way is actually already with us, in or out of retreat, but we just don't acknowledge it. If you just acknowledge your natural way, that's enough, good enough. It's like the cow peeing in the field. It just stands there and pees. Every day, it just pees, quite naturally. That's really enough.

Ah, here we are, back to cows. I am descended from rural people in the American midwest, maybe there's something there, though I don't remember my ancestors owning cows. I like them, the way they smell, how they stand firmly and walk slowly. Sometimes even Sheba, our nervous cat, has the same walk when she is patrolling her territory. Simple purpose.

Peeing. The TV is full of it. Every night we like to watch the 6:30 news, a habit that marks us as very last century. The commercials are aimed at the old and aging: products for cholesterol and high blood pressure (cure them in one easy pill), loss of sex drive (bring romance into your life with one easy pill) and loss of bladder control. Some of the bladder commercials are aimed at men who have to leave the ball game at a crucial moment because they have to pee, again. Sometimes it's a woman clearly trying to make the restroom before she pees herself. I always hope that health consumers will make sure their doctors check them out before writing these prescriptions. These problems have many causes - sometimes the problem is caused by some other pill. The one you take to make you happy.

The above quote could have been said by the great Suzuki, who also liked homely metaphors, and said somewhere that the way to control your thoughts is the way you control your cows - give them a wide field to roam in. There, another way to be authentic - to let go of our containment and fences, our preferences and ideas about who we are or would like to be, our rigid strategies for self-protection. That takes us to "the idea of self" that Zen talks so much about. The easy way to let go of all that is to let go of our ideas about who we are.

The funniest things occur to me. Just now I am remembering the time my sister tried to get me to wear the colors that had been prescribed for her. That may sound very strange, but it was an important fad in the early eighties, following on a book titled Color Me Beautiful. You could use the book or go to a coach who would make you up a wallet of the colors and textures you should wear. My sister had gone to a coach, and felt it had changed her life. She was liberated from taupe and helped to remake herself as a prettier woman. She was firmly convinced that since we had similar coloring the prescription would work for me. That it was important that I do it. That she knew best for me. I knew she would be angry if I didn't agree to convert.

Does that sound familiar? Someone has a path that You have to try. A right way. Right for them, right for you, right for everyone.

On that occasion, as I look back, I just stood like a cow peeing in its field and refused. I don't know what I said, but I know I had no money for clothes just then. I remember feeling inarticulate, not knowing how to say that simple thing without seeming to criticize. My refusal did make my sister very angry, so I have sometimes looked back and thought, I should have just accepted the offer with thanks. But working through the karma on that, I'm afraid it would have meant being scrutinized on future occasions - was I following the path of Autumn coloring? Getting dressed for family occasions I would have worried about lipstick. Sometimes you can't win (there's a good Grandma saying).

More importantly, I liked to dress to express myself then - not to impress other people, not to be a pretty picture. My life had been about being accultured to be a visual object. I was in the rubble trying to make a different self out of myself, one that was not about being seen. If you look at that carefully, you see it is reactive. But these stances are not so different from our attempts to look like a good Buddhist or keep house like a Zen practitioner.

To be authentic is to not be very concerned with how you look. Whether you meet other people's approval. At the same time, it is not authentic to live in rebellion against other people's ideas. They are just ideas. Some people have a lot of them.

The authentic stands relaxed in the wide field of awareness and its responses come from inside, from a core that seems to me located somewhat above my bladder. Japanese Zen refers to this core as the "heart-mind," one unit. I try not to strive for it.

Cool

dim
smooth
clean
empty
quiet

slow
still
easy
pale

green
blue
white
sky

thin
fresh
moon
night