Completely full

In 2005 I wrote the first two stanzas of this poem, and sent them to Daniel Terragno, a Zen Master I was fortunate enough to work with at the time. He wrote back the few words that became the last stanza. May you sleep peacefully and awake to the new year with pleasure.

Winter blue out there.
A drip from the eaves, another.

How thin the needles of the pine
at the edge of the ravine.
No blessing anywhere, and

that no-blessing—
drip drip drip . . . pine needles . . . the ravine—
is completely full.

A heart of winter

Another gray day in mid-Ohio, our most common kind of winter day. Yesterday the dentist's assistant told me "This kind of weather gets me down." Gloomy is the word. There is a kind of winter day we like around here, fresh snow on the ground (but not too much), sun shining, blue sky, air crisp (but not too cold). Want, want.

I often think about this issue of our response to winter. Within us there is natural sunshine - this is actually a "true fact" as my English students used to say, who had not learned that a fact by nature is true. From a scientific point of view, we are made of nothing but the light from the sun. We have to get that light by eating plants that have captured it (and to some degree by sun bathing, which Gandhi firmly believed in).

Many of us believe that we have a nature that is golden and unspoiled, whether you think of it in Buddhist terms or Christian, or other religious belief structures. Ah, why can't I call forth that sunny nature on an overcast day?

Maybe I should not be trying to feel that particular lift of the heart. Maybe my intention should be to be here within winter, and not try to build a sunny mood when my neighborhood is overcast. Just be at peace with it. To see what it is like.

Noticing the day move on

[image: Snow shovel by Tom Tucker, my husband]
I didn't notice the seasons of a day very much when I was working. How could you? I got up with an alarm clock, started coffee, rushed straight into an orgy of dressing and packing Tom's lunch, maybe planning dinner, rushing out the door like some river that had been let loose. It was of course important to be there at 8:00. Exactly. There was so much to think about - did your hose get a snag or run, did your shoes need polished, purse to match outfit (I'm talking the 1980s here). Rush, rush.

Once I got there I did notice that I-I-Me settled into the morning, and that was pleasant. I did notice that I lost motivation to Accomplish Something around 3:00 p.m. It was not until the late 1990s that I got interested in Chinese medicine, which reflects the Taoist or Eastern way of understanding human beings in our place in the cosmos. (For those who want to know, according to Chinese astrology I was born in the year of the horse, and at the time of day that is horse, but on the very cusp of becoming sheep. And in the season of water. Absolutely the profile of an artist.)

TCM - Traditional Chinese Medicine - believes that the major organ systems of the body take turns governing function. I always feel 3:00 p.m. kick in. This is when governance goes to the kidneys, and I have a weird moment when my pixels are not arranged, then I am more tired. That's me, though, with major kidney problems.

I also notice the hours of fire. That's another aspect, the changes in our relationship to our sun, and the body's internal fire, which is highest between 11:00 and 1:00. I feel that. Sometimes I am writing like the dickens in that time. Starting 10:00 a.m. I often have an urge to get to work.

You get to feel these things when you retire. I didn't feel them years ago when I was out of work but full of Am-bitions. At one point over the holidays someone wished sincerely that I would have that get up and go, hit the ground running - like that. That's her idea of good health, not mine. I like to be on the ground walking, paying attention to every step, heel-toe. This morning I woke up to a couple of inches of snow, and I want to walk down to the end of the street and back, just walking. I love to do that.

To feel how you are during the day, you have to be in this moment, this body, not stretching out to catch the golden ring. But many of us are really ill at ease when we don't know what our goal is. We might call that "having nothing to do."

I had a modest goal over the holidays, preparing for our Open House, and some subgoals, gifts to make. Now I am just me, finishing the second cup of decaf, noticing the day rise in me, about to meditate. I think you can do this noticing when you work, but it must be very hard.

The Great Reality Show

Today we have been slowly eating an elephant, cleaning up after a long Open House yesterday in which nobody, thankfully, felt the need to clean up as the day went on. So wax from the candles on his antlers dripped onto the brass reindeer, plates and red napkins and silver forks were laid down anywhere, cookies spent the night on the dining room table. Just now I took a rest from straightening up to lunch with last Sunday's New York Times, and scanned the Week in Review, which is always fun this time of year, and even better at the end of a decade.

I am struck by how various columnists and cartoonists talk about the same thing - that this was a decade in which massive dreams were punctured and failed. Columnist Frank Rich poses Tiger Woods as an example of a delusion somebody should have seen through, just like the housing bubble and the teetering accumulation of consumer debt. Shared delusions that fell to ground with a thud.

What this brought to my mind was my own series of dreams. Last night, as we relaxed in the after-party, I told a friend how I entered the PhD program at Ohio State in 1990 to fulfill a dream of teaching I had held onto for 20 years. And how five years later I walked out of the program with the degree and the knowledge that I never wanted to teach college again, not like that.

Many things had gone into the formation of that dream, including some fine experiences in my first years of teaching in the early seventies. And there were many ways higher education had changed in the years since, a new cynicism in the students, careerism in the faculty. But to pare it down to the bare bones, my four years of teaching in the graduate program showed me that it was not at all what I remembered. Or dreamed of.

I don't know what a dream is made of. Parts and pieces, like everything else. How my mother was so impressed, and referred to me back then as "my daughter, the professor." How it was the first time I had a job where I was treated as an equal and allowed to create my own work, assign anything. The seventies were a time of ferment when we could play with new ways of doing the old thing, trying to teach kids to love the written word. It was a time of change, when change seemed important, and positive. "Not always so," Suzuki Roshi cautions us, but I hadn't read him back then. I graded essays listening to Hair.

This for sure: you hold on to a dream with your mind, probably both halves of it. A dream is an idea, generated by the mind, clung to by whatever that mechanism is, mostly mental I suspect, but probably some in the body as well. Americans are particularly prone to dreams. The country was founded by people who dreamed wealth would save them, and wealth could be found around the edge of the world if the dragones didn't get you.

Zen actively discourages us from paying attention to dreams and ambitions. In sitting in meditation, we do nothing but count or watch the breath. We watch ideas rise like little tendrils of smoke from incense out of the mind, and we let them go and return to the breath. We do not run from the cushion to write down our thoughts and dreams; in fact, that is actively discouraged. We are encouraged to be mindful of what life is presenting to us minute by minute, of the small things that need done, and done by us, and done with care.

Last night, after we had discussed our big, difficult dreams, we got to talking about our e-mail inboxes. Mine has ahh, 440 posts sitting in it. A number of them are tagged. Another 2200 rest in the dialysis and transplant boxes, a great collection of information, most of which I haven't yet read. Every year this time I start paring this down, especially that inbox, in the hope of getting to zero. A small dream. An activity, really, like sweeping the path as the wind blows new leaves down.

Getting Ready for Christmas

We spiritual artistic types are by nature suited to meditate, draw, write, decorate the house for Christmas, wrap gifts prettily, make gifts by hand - anything but schedule blood draws and take the cat to the Vet (you can hear her toenails when she walks across the kitchen). So at times I have to move my artist self aside and allow the executive secretary I should have been emerge to help me out.

She did good work yesterday, divided my business cards into Medical and Friends, with rubber bands around each one, and the Medical roughly arranged with current doctors on top. So just now I was able to easily find a phone number I need.

This woman can calmly and thoughtfully try to find a phone number for a doctor whose secretary left a blurred message about rescheduling. She does not indulge in frustration, which is anger at things not going your way. She does not let herself believe that a little thing like this shouldn't take 20 minutes. Her mind is not on things to do that would be more fun. What a woman!

Now she is preparing a letter to a surgeon requesting a small sort of favor, a lab order. She will be surprised if it works out smoothly, but she has done her best. The letter looks good (actual snail mail!) but she has to find an envelope and address it by hand; she does not know how to do that on the computer, and believe me, while she is a paragon of efficiency in some ways, she is not gifted technically. It would take much, much longer for her to do it than to just write the address by hand. Maybe not for you, but for her.
~~~
later: And here it is, Christmas Eve. I wonder how many of my internet friends will be checking blogs tonight or tomorrow.

We are holding an Open House tomorrow, since we don't have family we can be with on Christmas Day. So today has been given over to the kind of activities my executive assistant likes to oversee: putting away things that should have been put away before, cleaning (especially running the robot vacuum), polishing, setting up the table. We could go to late candlelight service tonight, but it feels like too much trouble to get all dressed up and go out in the cold. Just now we've been watching and listening to the Valparaiso University concert. It's reassuring to see an audience stand reverently for the Messiah.

It's mostly been a very secular Christmas for us, yet calm and happy. Perhaps tonight we will sleep in heavenly peace. I wish the same for you.

The gorgeous abundance

A polite snow is falling, and the little St. Francis in the back yard and the Jizo in the front garden both wear white caps. On the bushes outside my study window, the remaining round red berries hang at the tips of thin, flexible branches, where no bird or squirrel has been able to reach them from a perch. Some of the berries also have caps of white snow. I haven't seen any birds this morning. Here is a quote from St. Francis -

My sister birds, you owe much to God, and you must always and in everyplace give praise to Him; for He has given you freedom to wing through the sky and He has clothed you... you neither sow nor reap, and God feeds you and gives you rivers and fountains for your thirst, and mountains and valleys for shelter, and tall trees for your nests. And although you neither know how to spin or weave, God dresses you and your children, for the Creator loves you greatly and He blesses you abundantly. Therefore... always seek to praise God.

This is lovely. I try to remember often the abundance of my life and be grateful. Yesterday we were reminded of the abundance of this time and place in a very different environment, Best Buy. We were there to buy ourselves a plasma TV for Christmas to replace our 13-year-old Sony. At least a dozen people waited in line to check out, some of them holding boxed flat-screen TVs. We threaded past them, past camcorders and telephone answering machines and games, and outdoor speakers that looked somewhat like rocks and tall skinny indoor speakers, and many items I didn't understand.

I know many people deplore this aspect of our culture - yet it is part of what people abroad yearn for, the abundance, the stuff, the possibility of work, of being able to buy some of this. It's not so bad, living in a warm, dry house, feeling safe. It's almost crazy giddy to feel the abundance in Best Buy, which you could think of as a toy store. Outside the store, cars danced in and out of parking spaces.

I appreciate having all this. At the same time, I am constantly dealing with the things I own - too many things! Right now it's too many Christmas ornaments and lights, things we're not using this year and won't take to senior housing us if we ever move there. Well, I say to myself, then that will be the time to let them go. Meanwhile the issue is to organize them and label the boxes.

December morning: Ohio

first snow
so little color
the ivy darkened green
the few brown oak leaves
the few red berries
in a world outlined with snow
sleet falling, gutters driping, melt

The Fall of Tiger

You can't escape the story - even the New Yorker is writing about him, the highest-earning athlete ever, falling, falling. It made me think of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun.

I know him best from W. H. Auden's poem "Musee of Beaux Arts," which is read aloud in the YouTube selection above. The painting is "The Fall of Icarus," by Breughel, which the poet is looking at (or recalling). Icarus desired to fly to the sun, but his wings were fabricated of wax, and they melted, and he fell into the sea. (In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Satan is similarly represented as an angel who became too proud.)

Auden notes that in this painting, no one cares about Icarus. Even as his legs are disappearing into the sea (in the right foreground of the painting), the great ship (of the world) has somewhere to get to, and moves on. It will be the same way for Tiger Woods. Last year, A-Rod. Last month, Michael Vicks. Next year, who? Winning comes at enormous cost, and fame is so easily lost.

Tiger's posters are being taken down all over the world by Accenture, the company that paid him obscene amounts of money to let them use his name and image as a symbol of focus and perfect control. Just now, it must be terribly hard for him. Flicking past TV channels, you get the feeling that people fall upon the wounded great man like eager wolves. Maybe it would be better to be ignored as you fall into the sea. Meanwhile, a poet encourages us to remember our compassion, even for the rich and famous.

Getting out the ornaments

This morning I was up early, designing an invitation for an open house we are going to hold on Christmas day. After that, I found myself laying ornaments out on the dining room table.

Some time ago, I got rid of the usual round balls you hang on the tree - we don't do a tree anymore, since when? I wonder. Maybe since we moved here. In the old house I used to enjoy dragging the tree out behind the garage. You could see it from the kitchen table, how the birds used it as a nice snug habitat. But after we got Sherlock, the Bad Cat, having a tree became ever more precarious with Sherlock. He would eat tinsel and ribbon, so you had to be very careful about that. He didn't lie in the branches, though, like my sister's cat used to.

In this house, we put up a three-foot fiber-optic tree that twinkles and change colors. This cost $29 only once, so after the first year, it's gravy, and putting it up is just a matter of plugging it in. It sits at the living room window, where maybe it can be seen from across the ravine. On the kitchen table we put up the lit ceramic tree Tom had made for me one year. I get an unreasonable amount of pleasure from these things.

But I set out to write about getting into the small box that holds ornaments precious to me. Some of them are actually precious, I suppose, sterling ornaments from specific years when my mother worked in a jewelry store. Several crosses, and a sterling silver bell. Then there is a golden winged horse she gave me at a time when I liked unicorns; not a unicorn, but good enough - maybe better.

I took out two felt doilies, I guess you'd call them, that I'd embroidered on my sewing machine. It was an entirely manual machine back then in the sixties, and I'm impressed that I did the scrolls freehand, how pretty these red and green things are.

Felt ornaments patterned on Czechoslovakian style. Two that I made, one that Aunt Eileen made and gave me, a cluster of felt scraps that Cassie made, all this when Cassie was just three. The instructions for these ornaments had shown up in a women's magazine, so I formed this party of the my mother, Eileen, Cassie and me. It's been many, many years since Eileen fell down the basement steps and suffered such severe brain injury that she no longer knew any of us. I look back on that ornament party now and know some things I didn't know then. For instance, that none of us had a creative outlet in her life. That my life was sadly empty of friends, so that they were actually my best friends - and that our three-generation friendship was a good thing for all of us.

I came to the cluster of half-inch square packages wrapped in foil and gold string, and smiled. You could not have them out anywhere Sherlock could reach, or they would be batted all over the house, to end up eventually way back under the couch. Worse, he might eat them. Holding those packages in my hand, I missed him in a physical way. I remembered him with love, thirteen years of a bad cat who just got worse. And we thought everything he did was remarkable.

The ornaments come out year after year, and each year has brought fresh loss. Tonight, in fact, we are going to visiting hours for our old friend, Mary Smith. Like Eileen and my mother, Mary had a aging process, leading her further into dementia and a life empty of friends and pleasures. I happen to know quite a few people who have had bad deaths. They don't have to be slow. My father's was sudden, a cerebral hemorrhage when he was alone down in the cabin.

Who has a good death? There are stories told about Zen masters, who seem to see it coming and write a death poem, or maybe produce a poem they have ready and waiting. A good death is one in which you accept the inevitability of this process, a change of state, when all the parts that make up you fall apart and go on to make up something else. When someone is willing to give up this body, this self, I imagine they can be peaceful at death, and grateful for their life. So many people I know have gone unwillingly, sometimes angry that this should happen to them no matter how hard they tried to keep living.

But I honestly do find that in the face of death, it is consoling to affirm the good moments in the life. So we stand in a funeral home and talk about how valiant Mary was, raising her children alone, how creative she was, her little sewing room stuffed with hundreds of scraps, how happy she was to buy her own house late in life. So, in the words of J. Donald Johnson, "In the presence of death, we say yes to life."

No buts about it

[image: Pema Chondron]
Early in my practice I had no access to a Teacher, so I bought tapes and listened to them while I was ironing, working in the kitchen, driving. I remember Pema Chodron telling about how - maybe it was after her ordination as a nun - she was in hot wool robes, sweaty and exhausted, and “I’ve never been so happy in my life.”

That struck me as odd - I hated to be tired and sweaty - and I remembered it today. We’d had The Grandson, a ten-year-old spontaneous reaction, overnight, and Saturday had been a big day for us. We went to an old friend’s Memorial Service before we picked Otto up, and had no time to rest at all. The evening with him was exciting. He demolished a lot of pizza and discarded the Anime we'd rented, Spirited Away, saying, "I've found that with the Disney films, you always know how they're going to turn out." Hmm, I thought, narrative theory at age ten. It turned out what he'd rather do was play Uno with us. Tom is a card shark when it comes to this old game, which he learned at an impressionable age. I am not good at it, but tend to scream. These things make it lots of fun for Otto. He wore me out and I went to bed at 9:00, while Tom and he cut snowflakes for the front door.

I was barely up in the morning and lighting my candle and incense, being very quiet, hoping to get in some meditation before he woke up, but he came padding into my study. We arranged an amiable settlement; he got on my computer, on ESPN, where there is all sorts of information he is interested in, and I sat a foot away, back to him, having an interesting meditation. He's seen me meditate before, asked a question about Buddha, had me show him about sitting crosslegged. Cassie has taught him how to stop and take three deep breaths when he gets too wound up.

On the day went. Root beer and Cheezits for breakfast. More snowflake cutting, then I had cooking to do before Cassie and Chris arrived at noon for dinner, and a little more Christmas decorating. I noticed myself getting tired, especially my legs. I can get a kind of exhaustion now that I seldom knew before I had failing kidneys. I was in a very fine, clear place, and noticed my reaction. There. That, exactly that, noticing what you're doing, is the eventual outcome of practice. My internal reaction was fear, and then a thought that I'd got to sit down and rest or . . . or else. And then I recalled Pema saying how happy she could be when she was totally exhausted.

That fear was one of those conditioned responses, going back to the previous couple of years when I got hidden UTI's easily, and would get very sick and lose still more kidney function. But last year, after much maneuvering through the medical system I had a consult with a Famous Urologist who put me on the right preventive antibiotic. Eureka. I don't get those infections anymore. In other words, the fear was leftover from a past (nonexistent) me. I think that's a good example of a conditioned response, one that is not about present reality. That doesn't seem like much, but it's the same mechanism, isn't it, that governs more disabling mental reactions.

So I kept going. Then sat down and knit, watching Otto and Tom play Blokus, and leapping up a couple of times to do this and that. I didn't even have to be "tired but happy." I could be tired and happy, and was.

Ripeness in December

[image: House finch, Mike McDowell]
This morning I was thoroughly involved in a creative inner world when I looked out my window and saw a rosy finch on the bush with red berries. He was quite beautiful, sitting there puffed out against the cold, which was so deep the sky was blue. Soon he was joined by another, then others, and I began counting. I got up to eleven - mind you, this on a few thin, flexible branches. There were so many of them, eating one berry at a time and spitting out its skin, that a blue jay sat some ways off and just watched. Ordinarily, blue jays are pushy types that will shoulder their way in any buffet ahead of the people who were there first. But this one must have felt himself outnumbered. Rosies are rather aggressive little things.

Those small berries have been red for months now, but apparently not ripe. Occasionally, a robin would try at them and go away. Yesterday a squirrel went out on a limb, which bent under his weight, but then gave up. Today he was back, trying a new technique: he would walk out on the limb and, even as it kept bending under his weight, yank off a twig with three or four berries on it and scurry back to more secure footing. There he could hold the twig in his front paws, surely an important survival ability. There were almost no acorns this year. It's going to take a lot of berries to make up for that lack, and a lot of nerve. Fortunately, squirrels have that in good measure.

The Cat's Zen

When I am hungry, I eat; when I am tired, I sleep.
Zen saying
We applaud the cat for doing what we cannot:
seeking her own comfort, knowing what she likes,
going her own way.

In which we examine the fact that a thing is not just a thing

There. Balanced checkbook, paid Visa, all online. Nice and neat. The socks, though, are still unfolded. I lost focus this morning, putting the second load in the washer. Those white "World's Softest Socks" are supposed to be washed inside out. It sort of makes sense, and I have been proud of myself for doing such a finicky thing until now. Actually, I had forgotten to turn the black socks, too, when I did the first load.

The more you own, the more comes into your house every day, the harder it is to keep it all organized. Closet so full I'd taken the extra plastic hangers out and hung them in the guest room closet. What the closet is full of is clothes I don't like. Some mornings I can't stand a thing I own. Idly shopping last week in a travel store I saw these underpants for travel. You are supposed to take two pair and go around the world. Wear one, wash one. I suppose what makes them worth $14.95 a pair is that they dry quickly. What an appealing idea, to pare down to that. You think it would somehow neaten up your mind, too.

The drawers in my chest are full of things I don't use. Many of them have sentimental value, like oh, hey, an Obama campaign tee-shirt with his face and Springsteen's on it, that says "Born to Run." I love that kind of double meaning and remember the day I joyously bought two of these. We were eating on the patio of a Mexican restaurant on High Street when a van pulled up across the street. Some college-type kids had been waiting there a while. The driver opened the van door, and began pulling out boxes of tee-shirts. Over I went. One for me, one for Tom. He gave his to Cassie last Christmas, I think.

So there is my shirt. I don't like to wear tee-shirts with faces and words on them anymore. Just a matter of preference, but rather strong, since it's my body. Nevertheless, I am very fond of this shirt, which reminds me of the beautiful high of the last days of that campaign, of voting, of the count coming in, of the inauguration ceremony capped by Pete Seeger in a flannel shirt and wool hat leading everyone in "This Land is Your Land."

Those were glorious days around here anyway, for in our close circle there was no disagreement. Now it has just become governance, meetings, discussions, compromises. I was disheartened that we are to continue in Afghanistan, though I admit I don't understand the ins and outs of that problem. I relate to the children of soldiers waiting for Daddy to come home. I relate to Daddy coming home without a leg, with PTSD and addictions.

As for the boring business of governance, The Times columnist David Brooks wrote about this the other day, saying that one of the myths we need to get over is the idea that someone can walk in and solve a problem. The problems are of long-standing, he said, and they've been worked a lot up till now, and the clay has hardened.

But you would think a person could remember to turn the socks inside out. Yes. What a refreshingly simple task. Then again, I am a 67-year-old piece of clay.

Sunk cost

[image: calligraphy by Jakusho Kwong]

So here I am. I heard from several readers after my "Last Post" the other day. Husband Tom said the same thing to me hadv said - you can expand your idea of Dalai Grandma. And in a way I had, in posting my anger. As to knowing what I do here, I also see that Not Knowing, that's pretty Zen, after all.

Who are you today?

I don't know.

As Seung Sahn would say, "Good. Only keep that Don't Know mind."

I woke up today feeling better, ready to go to church. I'd been thinking of all the people I would miss in this community, of the fact that I've invested 25 years there. Economists call that "sunk cost." Traditional economics says your decision about future investment shouldn't have anything to do with past investment, but behavioral economics finds that it does. We are "loss averse," a term the Buddha would have smiled at, I think. There isn't much the dharma doesn't cover.

Nowhere do people act worse than in a spiritual community, I told Tom. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we monkeys are just bad in groups. A neighbor has a story about threatening to shoot out the tires on the truck of the tree guy working in the yard next door, culmination of a long, intricate feud. Meanness hurts worse in a religious setting, though, because we think that here, if anywhere, we are going to behave a little better than the chimpanzees. Okay, an ideal.

I had a rich mental life this morning. The very nice woman found me, pressed the Ziploc bag with the innocent, pretty Donate Life brochures in my hand, made such expressive hand and facial gestures that I really felt sorry for her. I knew my own face was showing some complex feelings.

She said, "I'm so sorry, there was no way . . ." No way to get past that difficult person, I thought. Someone on that committee who must hate me. I knew who that might be. But I am actually not sure who the core members are right now, or who was in that meeting.

Even as we were seated and the service began I found my eyes would light on someone and the words would leap energetically to my mind, Expletive you! My, I was aggressive. It was Expletive you for every one who was ever rude to me, maybe half a dozen people, little scenes popping up bright in memory. And expletive you, too! Funny, perhaps, in the recounting, but not fun really.

At the same time I was feeling a strong energy in the church, the good energy of hundreds of people, many of whom I've spent some time with over the years, of friends my heart leapt in gladness to see. Complex, good-hearted people, real solid people, face after face of men and women I trust and like, who would never have done this idiot thing. It was a special day, voting to affirm a new associate minister, and people were happy.

We read an affirmation by Dr. Martin Luther King about embodying peace. Music played, and I meditated a little, counting my outbreaths one through ten. Even the first breath surprised me with its depth. I lost track, started again. As we settled into the quiet time at the center of the service, I formed my hands in a mudra of intention, just the first two fingers touching the tip of the thumb, and thought, I want to be peaceful. I want to be peace. I could feel heat in my hands, and waves of peace came over me, and I simply calmed down.

Every meditator knows what it feels like to try really hard to meditate in a bad situation - I remember doing it one night, most of the night, in the ER with my mother, who'd had an anaphylactic reaction - and to have it not work the way you wish it would. This was an unusually powerful experience for me. It seemed to validate the years of investment in meditation. Mentally I thanked many teachers, who kept saying, each in their own way, "Keep sitting."

You get what you deserve even when you don't deserve it

I seem to have learned the term "perfect storm" late, and I like it, though some feel it is overused. It grows out of talking about weather, and the conditions that come together to create a major storm. From Wikipedia -

the phrase has grown to mean any event where a situation is aggravated drastically by an exceptionally rare combination of circumstances. . . .

That would be my life recently, multiple impacts, but I'm only going to write about one event right now. It was set in motion two weeks ago when I asked The Caring Committee at my church to put on the table a few brochures from the Donate Life people. These are colorful brochures with an application for deceased donor status inside, just in case there might be someone who wasn't an organ donor. Something like 8,000 people die waiting for a kidney transplant every year.

At last, ten days later a Committee member called to tell me nervously they didn't think it was appropriate to put the brochures on their table. I could put them up on the Community Bulletin Board in the back hallway, she said. The woman who called is a nice person I've known for many years. I was as polite as could be. I told her I've been on the transplant list two years now, and I haven't been able to figure out how to get my story in front of the church. Quite true. Also, I've been afraid to, afraid that no one would step forward to talk to me about live donation.

Every week I read about someone who got a kidney from a live donor. These folks are in the news, they are on the dialysis and transplant e-lists. Sometimes they're pretty smug about it, as if they deserve to have a loving sister and a best friend who are both eager to undergo major surgery for them. A couple of years ago, the first person I met in the waiting room at the dialysis unit was an elderly priest, my age or older. He had three (count them, 3!) parishioners wanting to be tested for a match. I wondered if one of them would be willing to give me a kidney.

When I got off the phone, the storm inside me broke. I had asked so little, it seemed impossible that they would turn it down. Was it personal? I wondered if I had an enemy on that committee, what I had done to deserve the malice I felt was behind this refusal. Memories of other times church members have hurt me came up. In Unitarianism, ministers love to talk about interconnection, but not about kindness. That would be asking people to examine their behavior. Interconnection, that's safe. It's just something you imagine.

As I was brushing my teeth tonight I thought about some maxims, some things I'd like to say on this blog, and thought about why I wanted to discontinue it. After that phone call something inside me really wanted to discard that sweet Grandma self who always understands. I got angry at Buddhism, too, for seeming to always reinforce accepting abuse.

A maxim: When people hurt you, it is usually not on purpose; they are just involved in getting something for themselves. I know abstractly that this is true.

What could that be in the case of this committee? The usual fear of opening the floodgates, although in our church the floodgates are always open to whatever weird thing someone feels like doing and just goes ahead and does. I imagined the conversation: If we do this for her, what will someone ask of us next? What does the dharma call that kind of fearful self-protection? Greed, I told Tom. And also ignorance, not thinking of consequences. I could think of one consequence right away. I said, I'm glad they called back before I responded to the Holiday Appeal for more funds. I thought how I never have liked the Christmas Eve service since they did away with the individual candle-lighting. (Someone was afraid the wax . . .)

Today I came across a Zen quote, one of those "When I laugh, I laugh. When I cry, I cry." But what about when I feel hurt and vindictive? Do I go with those? Is that Buddha-nature? What about profound depression?

The title of this post is from Issan, a Zen monk and student of Shunryu Suzuki who positively flaunted his faults. I try to get there. Meanwhile, I salute his advanced wisdom.

One More Time When I Didn't quit

[image: Granny Weatherwax, by Paul Kidby]
My mood is much improved - thank you again, acupuncture - and I find myself moving into new territory in my life. One thing it means is that I have a sense of being ready to leave behind this blog, its persona and its subjects. "Dalai Grandma" was, after all, not my secret name, but my daughter's nickname for me, a sort of joke to say "I don't take myself too seriously," and it feels outgrown. To me, it suggested a persona (a word we literary types use for a self fabricated by the author) that was, oh, a little bit of kind old granny. That I am not, or let me say, I think there's more to me. A model I might be ready to incorporate is Granny Weatherall in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels - a no-nonsense practical witch, a healer who knows herbs and human psychology, like most witches, and who tackles evil with the fierce determination real work sometimes calls for.

I don't know whether I'll start a new blog tomorrow, or five minutes from now, or never. I do intend to leave this blog up and open to moderated comments for now. That means a comment on a post from last year would end up posted underneath that post. I have so liked making the friends I made here, and intend to keep following you in your blogs.

p.s. 2013  Obviously, I came back.  Maybe a little witchier and more like Granny W.  I imagine the main reason this has had so many hits was that for a while there, anyone who landed on the blog landed on this.  

Smart Change and Just Change

Thinking so much about death these days, and about change, Change, which is fitting - it is the end of autumn, winter setting in. Every day in this depression seems like such a waste, one more irretrievable day gone, life so short, I am 67! One more day wasted just getting through the day. But then, you waste your whole life that way until you wake up.

Today my rather aimless tracking around the Cloud led me to a photo in a blog called Dashh. Can't get anywhere from the blog to find out if he is still writing. Tom has promised to have a look at my PC, which is often spinning its wheels lately. I wonder whether it picks up my garbled, failed energy. I know Sheba does. One day last week she was just awful, yowling, and finally made a pass at biting/scratching me. We realized she was anxious because I was so different. If you want to make a case that there is nothing in this world you can't measure with your instruments, I don't care. You can say I just didn't pet her enough, it was all behavioral. But the fact is, that kind of science is arrogant. People don't realize it is, because we are all inside of it, it is the Western mind, the mind of the conqueror. There is still a great deal we don't know. Who said he felt like a child playing with a shell on the beach while all around him an ocean roars? Some scientist. You could google it. bing it. If your computer works better than mine.

Dashh was or is being anonymous on the blog. Trying to email him just has the search engine spinning. Alive or dead? Another of the lebenty-zillion blogs sitting there in the cloud, karmic traces of people who have passed by this intersection? Too many people, too many! I don't want to know all of them! It is a crowd.

Last night Tom said Do you realize what has happened these past five years? He was thinking about this kind of thing: Facebook. Smart phones. Twitter. Snail mail, real letters, have just about passed into oblivion. I said, when I was young I guess we had health insurance through Firestone. Nobody gave it any thought. People just died at 62 of a heart attack.

And actually, for all this Smart Change the basic facts of being old are the same, never mind those who want to believe aging is a disease and if you take Spirulina every day you can live forever. I return from the graveside to tell you, it isn't so. It isn't a matter of will. We wanted to stay young and vigorous and healthy. But here we are, slowed down, cautious, wondering what truck will come out of the fog and hit us next.

Still, it was a pleasure to be led to the Pink Floyd video above, from 1994, when they still made good videos. Like life, so many wonderful things just gone, like some kind of great, fancy parade. I think Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about an elephant going down her street. I don't know if a real elephant did, or if it was, you know, just a wild rhinoceros.

Graceful gestures

The New York School has for me a certain radiance and youthful charm. I gather it was the end of the age of irony, that is, AIDS hit and a lot of things became dead serious. Frank O'Hara seemed to take himself less seriously than some other spontaneous poets like Ginsburg. He presents in this poem as a charmingly theatrical friend just chatting. The image above is by another sweet star of that era, painter Joe Brainard. A critic said of him that he showed beautiful could be interesting.

Poem (Lana Turner has Collapsed)
by Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

In withdrawal

I do not remember Neurontin withdrawal being this awful, but it is for some people. Google the phrase and you get 25,800 hits, about half as many as for heroin withdrawal, which was the gold standard for suffering when I was young and saw the film "The Man with the Golden Arm." As I recall, the star actually tried to climb the walls when he was locked in a room, in withdrawal.

It was prescribed earlier this year for the peripheral neuralgia that set in so fast, and it worked surprisingly well. This stuff seems to be the first drug of choice these days for nerve pain, but was formulated to act on epilepsy. It is so good it helps people through meth withdrawal. It smoothed me out emotionally, it helped calm down the neuralgia, it shut down my GI tract. I soon decided to cut back from 300 mg. at night to 200. Unfortunately, I didn't make many notes about it in my health log, how long it took, how bad it was, and I really can't stand the idea of cruising my journal from that time to see if I can tell.

So this fall a new medication shut down my GI tract again. I take several medications that contribute to constipation, and the others are essential. Neurontin was the only one I could ease off on.

The neuropathy seems worse, but tolerable, very cold feet and a sock of strange neural sensation halfway up my leg. I can take my attention away from that, though. I even sleep through the night sometimes. The depression is another story. It is not your everyday holiday blues, though I have had a problem with that for a long time, the way children of alcoholics do, because what is a worse time of year to be miserable and alone than when all the people in the commercials are having a great time? This is the kind of depression you may experience when your whole life falls apart, clinical depression. The kind where you wake up each day with a groan, sorry to see another day, sorry to wake up, feeling that a day is just something to get through until at last it is night and you can (you hope) fall asleep. It is real, chemical depression, something that happens to people like me with a genetic susceptibility. It goes beyond dissatisfaction with my life to dissaisfaction with the very nature of life itself.

Now, my left brain, my reasoning self, knows that it is sunny outside. I see red berries on a wild honeysuckle outside my window, the giant old sycamores in the ravine white in the sun. But I see the berries in the shade, I know the branches will be picked clean by the hungry robins before long.

My left brain, my reason, knows I will feel different some day, maybe even in one minute. Right now it is high noon, the hours of high fire according to Eastern ways of thinking about the energy of the day, and I feel more human than when I woke up. More alive. I have had over a cup of real coffee, the kind with caffeine, and I think it helped. Cried a little, it seemed to help. A brisk walk in the brisk air might help but I am just too what? tired, apathetic, unmotivated.

This is like having on my face a scuba mask (something I hate) made of the most brilliant optical glass, but subtly tinted gray, so that I see everything clearly, and everything is gray. We all die. What we do doesn't matter. None of what we did will last very long or make any difference. Our love for one another is tremendously faulty, our relationships shallow, able to wash away or held in place by creaky cultural locks.

Is all this true? Sort of. Or yes, a partial truth, my reasoning self knows. But in a fully awake state, I also see a beauty of constant birth and creation. I feel an eagerness for life while I have it. I enjoy. Not enjoying anything is one feature of profound depression; it is called anhedonia.

One thing I am glad about is that I know enough to avoid situations in which someone has made me angry. Over the years I learned that. When my mood is this bad I could say anything. Even if I don't lose control, to be around people is too demanding. I can't keep my end up. I don't want to.

I know a couple of people who have been stuck in this state, for decades. Even to me, and I should know better, they do things that look like the exact wrong thing to do. But these actions make sense from inside you. You seclude yourself, because you're just not up to social interchange, to reaction and conversation. You do know that no one wants you around if you're not in "a good mood." You stop drawing or writing, the things that usually make you feel like yourself, but that have to come from somewhere inside that self. You skip social events, skip class, skip church. What self? You don't seem to have one, you are so flat.

Doesn't it seem like a bad deal to have chemistry like this? That's in the midst of the generally bad deal that is life.

I have to wonder, how is it that people who don't have this chemistry can suffer so much, as if their lives were always tuned in to a low hum of a song in the background, a voice singing This isn't it. Right now I feel that if I could wake up feeling like I sometimes feel, just human, just awake and rested, - I'd be in a chorus line singing "New York, New York" and kicking up my heels.