Sheba and the Great Matter

You might say Sheba is just a cat. Go a little further and say she's a tiger cat. Look closer and she's a calico overlaid with black stripes, and a very detailed face with, for instance, black kohl around her eyes, then white eyeliner, and that's just the eyes. But - you know where this is going - she is much more than just beautiful. She is magic.

Time and again I look at her and think, She looks like a stuffed animal that has miraculously come to life. I really do see that. Eyes that see, that focus and blink. A delicate paw that spreads and retracts, treading a little whenever she feels loved, or whatever that is that she feels when she is petted. She does feel. She is responsive, real and alive, more satisfying than any stuffed animal can be.

My sense of Sheba's aliveness was perhaps sharpened by experiencing the mystery of Sherlock's death. One moment he was alive, lying on the leather couch beside me, and the next minute he was dead. Nothing had happened to mark the moment when the paralytic medicine stopped everything. Not a convulsion or a sound or a relaxing. He was no longer breathing, that's all. I was alarmed. I asked the Vet, "Is that it?"

"Yes," he assured me. "He's dead." How could that difference be so small?

So now I know that what keeps Sheba from being just a stuffed animal is her breath. She breathes in and out, like I do. I don't know why she breathes or when her breathing will stop. This breathing is a mystery; it is life itself. We take in air and other nourishment, but air is the one you need every moment. We use what we can and exhale the rest. In sitting Zen we are sometimes told to focus on exhaling completely. Suzuki says that thus we die every moment.

Sheba is a lady of a certain age, as the British say, meaning on the upper edge of middle age. We know her kidney functions are very bad, and we know intimately what that means, because that is what killed Sherlock. Right now Sheba eats well and drinks water and continues to process it all. She is alive.

I expect to outlive her (in which I may be quite wrong). If so, I may someday be there when she has stopped breathing, and just like that, Sheba will be no longer alive. Like Sherlock, she is here temporarily. So it is natural to cherish her. And I believe it is natural for that appreciation to fan out to my loved ones, my friends, the squirrel in the Zen garden and the chickadee in the back yard, to every living creature and thing, every breath, every breath I myself get to take.

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who do not pick and choose.

A useful question

Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn founded and directed the stress-reduction clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. His program follows the principles of the discipline of Mindfulness. Kabat-Zinn suggests that we ask of every endeavor that causes us stress, “Is it worth dying for?”

from "The Near Enemies," by Dr. Edward Frost.

Transitions

[a snow junco]
It was interesting to find myself speaking to a woman who was born fully hermaphoridite yesterday. I knew Linda, know her through my church, which is especially welcoming to folks who are GLBT - gay, lesbian, bi-, transsexual. But I didn't know Linda's story. She is in transition now from a life spent as a man, according to a doctor's determination in 1955. Better to sew up the vagina, the doctor thought, than to cut off the penis. To Linda right now, her gender identity is everything. I recall reading a female Buddhist practitioner's story of confronting her Teacher about the fact that there were no women in his lineage.

"Oh," he said. "So you are a woman." I have thought about that deeply ever since. Yes, I ama woman. But one day even that will be taken from me.

I spent Saturday morning with an 84-year-old woman who is in the hospital, alas, with a broken hip. This is so often the beginning of the end for people, who then get pneumonia. I imagine she knows this.

This woman and I have a long history, again through the Unitarian church. She often came to sit in my meditation groups, running in late, disrupting everything with a demand to sit right beside me so she could hear, then struggling to put new batteries in her hearing aids. Well, it used to get in the way of my agenda and irritate me. But some people just keep falling on your path. What, are you going to do, kick them aside?

Some weeks ago when she was in another hospitalization, she asked for me. My usual conditioned aversion fell away like a thin shell, outgrown. In the presence of death, we can touch our humanity, though I know some people don't. A chaplain told me that these things usually either bring family together or rip them apart. This woman is making the great transition, though she hardly bear to think of it now. "I don't know when this is going to end," she said to me, in a moment of vulnerability. "Or if it's going to end."

Well, this has only one end, however old you are. At times like this I feel lucky that I met Buddhism. Isn't there a story that when the Buddha saw death for the first time, he said, "Cursed be birth, if this is what it comes down to in the end"? He was not yet enlightened then.

Transitions. The big ones have to do with losing our identity. George learning to be Linda. Another Linda letting go of her whole lifetime with all its memories, trying to reconcile herself to the mistakes and accept the losses. Not able to walk anymore. Not able to make decisions for herself on how she will live. Death is the great loss of who we "are" and everything we own. Back to the Five Remembrances. Number four is the frightening one, isn't it?

Everything and everyone I hold dear will one day be taken from me.

Everything. We will end up with nothing, like refugees in Haiti, seeing even our most beloved ones recede from us as we set sail.

Last night Tom and I watched a lovely Japanese film titled Departures, which features a young man who takes up a career of preparing the dead for cremation through a very respectful traditional sort of ceremony that reminded me very much of Soto Zen practice. At one of the viewings a husband throws himself on the coffin, crying again and again, "I'm sorry." Too late now.

Just for a moment, a beautiful little snow junco appeared on a bare branch outside my study window. Charcoal gray overcoat, white shirt. How you wish you could hold him in your hand for a moment and feel his tiny twig-like feet, his miraculous little heartbeat. I usually see Juncos on the ground outside my kitchen window, not up in the air. I do know the ivy offers a warm shelter to some birds. A temporary home.

Zen and Memoir

At one time my Zen training kept showing me how I kept inventing and responding to stories thrown forth by my fertile mind. "Stories" was a word my Teacher, Daniel Terragno, seemed to favor as he tried to shake me loose from my iron grip on this passing, constructed self.

My graduate study was in narrative theory, so I theorized about this story thing. A story is a fiction; that's fundamental. It's made up. It is not what happened or what is happening right now. What does Zen say? Something like, The moment you say a word you have lost it.
It is possible to be quite lost in your story about your reality, not only dreaming during meditation but when you are up off the cushion supposedly engaged with reality. For instance, when I was 20 I had a story about what I felt entitled to: "I shouldn't have to work at a crummy clerical job." Much later I found that story was encumbered with feelings of frustration and with judgments and expectations. I felt demeaned by clerical work. I hated it. It bored me. I believed myself entitled to interesting, highly-paid work. I couldn't even stand to look at the fact that I should have stayed in college. Don't Want, in other words. Preference. Pain avoided and amplified. It's really hard to grow up.

Our stories about our past lives can get much more elaborate than that. What my mother should be like, what kind of father I deserved, how uniquely I suffered. Indeed, a lot of people have had very painful pasts, even here in the most widespread luxury any humans have ever enjoyed (and what a lesson there is in that). The American model of recovery from a painful past is often to talk about it. In 12-Step meetings, people get up and tell that story, a verbal memoir of suffering and redemption. We might also do this with our friends. I knew a woman who always got around to the thin stream of her misery. I don't see her anymore.

This is what "confessional" memoirists usually do - they invent a coherent story that uses selected pixels from the huge junkyard of their past, and knits them together into a story with a narrative arc, a beginning and an end. It will begin with their despair or dissolution and show us how they achieved redemption, or at least a peaceful wholesome life. (Won't it be interesting to see how Tiger Woods tells that story?) I understand that many psychotherapists believe that humans can't change much, that it is their job to get the patient past the crisis that brought him in, maybe give him some hope.

I benefited from therapy and was also harmed by it, so I don't speak for or against it, just to say that it's my nature not to be satisfied with small goals. I took to Zen and the idea of enlightenment with a lot of enthusiasm. I believed happiness was possible, that life could routinely include joy and satisfaction, and a sense of freedom, and security. At least, I was going to shoot for that. So I meditated. Listened to tapes, bought and read books, lots of books, studied. Went on retreats.

And I kept hearing from the Teachers that my past did not exist, my life was not a story at all. Just here, they would say. Right here. I was encouraged to notice as I sat that a story would arise from my brain like a thin twist of smoke from incense. To back off and realize it was just another story, to hold still and keep breathing, to let the story fade away.

There were years during this process when I did write memoir, telling the painful stories of family members who died unhappy during this time and left me grieving. I never published any of it. As the years go on, those people become more real and complex to me, and I realize that I didn't have "a relationship" with any one of them, but a stream of many, many encounters, some close, some frustrating. From this I learned something more true and painful than I could have ever written: they are dead. People die and then they are dead, and the opportunity to sit and listen to them is gone forever. The past is dead. Maybe memoir can be a memorial - I hadn't thought of that until now - but it won't bring them back.

Grandma's absolutely perfect lovely morning

Wake up 8:23. A good nine hours of sleep. Everyone should have that in the winter. Make coffee, happy that there is nothing on the calendar. Move thoughts away from Things To Do as they pop up. I might stay in all day, I might not do a thing. The weather on my home page has a cute little graphic for freezing rain. I start checking e-mail. Then Tom's up.

Go into kitchen, a long discussion of whether to buy an extended warranty on the new TV. Tom has researched the consumer experience with this thing. We do an informal risk/benefit analysis and decide not to. At one time we would have been reactive and contentious about it, him always wanting insurance, me always arguing risk. It's good to get old with someone and get past those things.

While we talk I am knitting - finishing a Christmas present, in fact. I reaffirm the research that says there's no such thing as multi-tasking, that you can only think about one thing at a time. In this case, it is the knitting that suffers. However, I am used to that, and the beautiful textured yarn hides mistakes. There's a metaphor for you.

Tom is doing his initial scan of the New York Times. He tells me about the history of Haiti. Founded by escaped slaves, a French colony. All the trees cut down for hardwood by the French. We comment on how the French saw Haiti as some other world, took what they wanted with no imagination that it affected the planet they lived on. Utterly dualistic thinking: Us/them. Avatar.

I read aloud a bit about grasping and clinging from my current book, Zen Miracles. Brenda Shoshanna, who is a psychologist as well as a long-time Zen practitioner, invents major exercises. She isn't kidding. Here's the one I want to do next, which is titled "What We Cling To:"

Make a list of those things in your life you are greatly attached to. Stop and look it over, see what purpose they serve for you. What would happen if you let go of one of them? Each day this week, let go of one, just for the day. See how it feels. You may be surprised.

I'm going to meditate before I start it. It is 10:45, a good time of day for me to meditate or do other mental work. Some stretching first, adapted from yoga. Just remembered - health club today. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. We're trying to set a schedule. Should put it on the kitchen calendar.

Meditate. I am learning to count each breath mentally at the bottom of the exhale. Aitken recommends counting as a way to “tidy your desk.” Don’t evaluate your meditation Daniel once told me, so I won’t.

11:32. Go through box of things to do and pull out two fun things, a coupon from Banyan Botanicals and a free subscription to Bon Appetit, which I got for being foolish enough to buy their big cookbook about easy fresh food. Easy, ha. Still, I like getting a magazine like that, and sometimes it inspires me. I pass through some thought traps, as there are other To-do’s in that box. But I remind myself I am taking the morning off.

12:03. Time to get dressed and go to health club. Do a Shud. Will have to proof and post this later.
~~~~~~
The freezing rain never developed. We are supposed to get the January thaw this weekend, temperatures up near 50, and sunshine. That always feels like a blessing.

Freedom to be weird

Our grandson visited last weekend. We sang and danced along with "Come Together" - Tom had printed out the words. A fourth-grader has no trouble at all with nonsense. We sang all the way through "Hey Jude," passing the microphone back and forth so people could sing or howl during that almost endless ending. That was in Tom's computer room downstairs, which can pass for an electronics studio. It was exhilarating. I never could dance, but I don't care anymore. Fruit of practice.

Upstairs, Otto showed us a YouTube video, an audition for American Idol in which General Larry Platt raps on the gangbanger's uniform - a great teaching for black kids, I thought. The man is a Buddha. As of today this particular video has had 2,359,493 views. I would never have heard of it if not for Otto. What tickles him so about it, that he couldn't wait to show us? I don't know. He's in fourth grade.

We played Uno, of course. I actually won a few points this time, and Otto won more, gaining on Tom, figuring out how to be a little strategic. We don't try to expose Otto to our idea of culture. But I do like that he likes to play board games and cards, old-fashioned entertainments that go back to our childhood.

In the van, on the way to take him back to his folks, Otto and I sat in the back while Tom drove. There is an intimacy in a car. Otto made a casual comment about how Sometimes kids say somebody's weird, and my ears went up.

"Some kids are uncomfortable when people aren't all alike," I said. "But what would the world be like if we were all the same?"

The diet of remastered Beatles and American Idol had loosened us up, I guess. We started shooting ideas back and forth like writers do, about writing a book, call it The Day No Kids Were Wierd. What if everyone was exactly alike? The cafeteria would go crazy because everyone wanted pizza for lunch and nobody wanted hot dogs, so they would run out of pizza. Then everyone wanted grape juice, nobody wanted orange. . . . We worked on the idea, me making notes on the index cards I carry, I just do that hoping to someday snare a golden idea.

Social animals are relentless about conditioning one another to conform. I read of a study recently which showed that every corporation has a network of unwritten rules that everyone knows, though nobody says. Kids are like that, and maybe ruder about it, meaner than adults. I didn't expound on that to Otto. I didn't try to delve into what had happened in his world. Something had. I remember that kind of teasing being terribly hurtful when I was little.

We discussed whether it should be a chapter book, or a picture book, how many pages it should have. Otto thought the main character should be a bully who makes some little kid feel bad for being weird. Then that bully will have a dream, and a ghost will visit him and take him into a world where everyone is exactly the same. In other words, the bully will get what he deserves - ah yes, this is why we read fiction, for the pleasures of living a while in a world that makes a certain kind of sense. By the end, the bully will be a former bully. Like Scrooge, he will have learned a lesson, and be happy to return to the real world. A world where everybody's different, only now that same boy will find himself sticking up for the little kids instead of tormenting them. Yes. An enlightenment story.

Morning coffee with good friends

Years ago I wrote a soul-searching fantasy of my life as I wished it could be. Much of it has come true, though I am not in Bali, but in Ohio. One thing I wanted was to be nested in a community of like-minded friends. I am now, and that community fans out to include the internet sangha. The world-wide web, which has given me this morning a talk about bare perception in meditation.

I love this connectedness. Still, I am sitting alone in my sudy with my morning coffee, not able to wander out to an outdoor cafe where people I know might stop by to say hello. I would take a sketch pad a sketchbook and charcoal if I were going out there today, not my little notebook, maybe draw some quick portraits, maybe a banana leaf. People would come by.

Hello. I am fine. How are you?

These would be intimate friends, so we might talk about our response to what's happened in Haiti, the sudden massive earthquake, all the death and suffering, and not just murmur cliches, but talk about its intimacy and immediacy. We are Buddhists, our practice leads us to respond to suffering in a certain way.

This way is with something like equanimity. I would share with my friend that I cry every night, watching the news. But I don't get carried away into despair. I come back to my normal, like one of those inflatable clowns with sand in its bottom.

This way is with something like detachment. That doesn't mean being without compassion. It means understanding the constant presence of death all over the planet, the rolling and turning over of organic life in the universe, the widespread suffering, even in our privileged little community, our inability to create perfect societies. It means accepting my place as a tiny little bodhissatva who can dispense a teaspoon of water here and there. I say I think it's Bernie Glassman who puts it that way. My friend nods Yes.

We would acknowledge that this has touched our own sense of vulnerability and disturbed our dreams. We are not friends in order to hide from the truth with small talk and partying. In this quiet morning coffee of my dreams, we are just real with one another. No need to talk a lot. It's nice to connect.

Anyway, how are you?

Morning Fog

What a beginning to the week! I awoke from a restless dream - Grandson's energy still in the house - and reached for my clock to press the light on it and see the time. But my hand brushed my water bottle, which is one of those things with a straw in it they give you in the hospital, and it fell to the floor and spilled. Water, water everywhere. Sitting up, I lit up the clock, and then it fell from my hand to way under the bed somewhere. The time, BTW, was 5:00 a.m. I usually get two more sleep cycles.

What a mess, trying to mop it up and not wake up Tom. At least I got in the linen closet for an old towel and didn't use one of the new ones. Back to bed, I lay there thinking about Things To Do, worrying about getting my computer backed up. Thinking this is the result of watching all those explosions before bed, on TV. Eating badly over the weekend. So much excitement with grandson. It had accumulated in my patchwork body/mind. Sleep was not going to come back.

Get back up, drink a cup of lightly caffeinated coffee, find that an important e-mail has bounced, yet again. Research the student, find a different address, try again. Resist getting mad at the student. It is now 6:00 a.m. Here I am. Morning fog.

Yesterday it was warm - 40 degrees - here, rainy and foggy all day long. We were on the freeway, Tom driving, me in the back of the van with Otto, and I was admiring the beauty of the city resting in layers of fog. It is a peaceful look. Then Tom said, "What an ugly day."

He meant it made driving hard, mostly, but also, that it wasn't sunny. It usually isn't - I've heard that Columbus gets as little sun as Seattle, we just don't think of it that way, and continue to be unpleasantly surprised. People complain about it as if overcast skies are an unnatural deviation from The Way Things Supposed to Be. I certainly feel this way about the ridiculous state of being I'm in. I seem to be on a roll of clumsiness - last night a glass slipped from my hand and fell a few inches to the table, and shattered. It shouldn't have broken, but it did. Last week I dropped the sugar bowl. I don't like this not-with-it state, and am inclined to fix myself. Coffee, blogging, meditate, come on, get fixed.

In my morning mail, the daily dharma from Tricycle magazine happens to be about equanimity. Gil Fronsdal is talking to me. I think about standing calmly in the middle of it all, including the awkwardness of my body, dropping things, spilling things, making messy karma everywhere.

Of course, we love morning fog when we're at Grailville for Ama Samy's fall retreat. It is usually foggy at 6:00 a.m. when we walk toward the Caravansery, the lovely arc where we sit. The fog doesn't interfere with us or make it hard to walk. We are aware we're sitting in a cloud. We trust it to burn off.

Meeting High Water

[image: Oak Creek and Cathedral Rock, by JoelDeluxe]
In Appalachia, which isn't too far from here, there is a saying people use when agreeing to do something in the future - "The good Lord willing an' the creek don't rise." Through my dharma lens, that's a bow to all the things that can happen to prevent us from meeting our goals, keeping our promises. All that reality out there that doesn't care what you want, and gives rise to a future you can't predict.

An' the creek don't rise.

We were in the Honda Civic, out west, Arizona, driving through the Superstition Mountains. There must have been a lot of snow and a lot of thaw. I was driving along enjoying the curving road and the mountain scenery until we came to a dip in the road labeled "Punkin Creek." The road there was filled with brown, rushing water, and there was a sign posted, High Water. The water didn't look that high, maybe ankle-deep, but I rolled to a stop. I thought about how hard it was going to be to turn around and go a long way back to take another route. I didn't see why I shouldn't try it.

Tom said, "Ahh, I don't think we should try to go through that." Something like that, calm and reasonable.

I protested. I have always been more of a risk-taker than him, except when it comes to buying electronics. But he told me what rushing water can do - carry you and your car downstream and into big trouble - and I reluctantly turned around. Some people are always spoiling all the fun.

To his satisfaction, we learned later that the town on the other side of that rushing water, which was also named Punkin Creek, was cut off from civilization as we know it (i.e. even 4-wheel drive vehicles) for three days. Three days! You could run out of bread.

The good Lord willin'.

I don't know about the good Lord, whether there is an overriding unembodied Consciousness, if it has a will. The question doesn't worry me. It would be interesting to find out about it after death. I think of "the good Lord" as a metaphor for all those braided forces, like the woven strands of run-off that make a creek rise. I know now that what looks like a little obstacle can have mighty force.

And where there is snow melt and fast-running water and no bridge, you can find yourself stranded downstream. The ordinary natural world, a thousand little run-offs from high up the mountain, can defeat you without even trying. You thought that getting to a certain restaurant for lunch, or passing your generals, or making a marriage "work," whatever your ambition, was something you could do if you just did the right thing. But sometimes all the determination in the world is just going to dig you deeper in the mud. It's a good idea to respect the High Water sign and consider another way around the mountain.

You're already perfect - and you should take a break

[An American midwest painting by George G. Adomeit, "Tilling the Fields."]

I'm honored to learn that minddeep included me on her end-of-year list of 15 Great Women Buddhist Bloggers. This has meant that more people visit this blog, and strange new things happen to me, like being asked for my opinions. (Moi?) I remind myself that it is a turning of the dharma wheel. It is a little more connection between us, the women who are out here on the internet forming a great mandala, and I thank minddeep - Marguerite Manteau-Rao - for that.

The Constant Reader knows that I have sometimes wondered what I do here. I don't think I do much of telling people they should practice. I have a strong "should" detector. I did used to think everyone should meditate. Well, that was beginner's enthusiasm. Now I realize that it isn't for everyone, that I don't even know the next right step for myself, let alone for my closest friend. So I try to do this step, this one, and not worry about the next step.

There are many good and faithful teachers and teachings on the internet, so I don't try to do what they do. I don't think I do too much telling the dharma, though Zen stories often leak into what I'm writing about, that's the way my mind works. I enjoy stories and metaphors; I think that's one reason I've been attracted to the Zen tradition. Over the years I've become flavored with Buddhism, you could say, like water with a drop of indigo ink in it, but I'm no longer cocooned in it.

My earliest model, I suppose, is the first blog I ever followed, James Ford's Monkeymind. I had met James, so his voice was friendly and human to me. You never know what he's going to write about. My only problem with him is that he stole the great title Monkeymind before I could get to it. He exemplifies the real fertile, interested, changeable mind that is not constricted by ideas about what you ought to be.

In the end, though, I found my name, landing with a nice solid thud on Dalai Grandma - a joking way to refer to myself. That helped bring forward my sense of humor - it runs in the family, sometimes alarmingly. And there was the grandma part, which is true, too. I tend to have the long view of life that you get by looking at it from 67 years. You view generations and people with the grandmother's mind and the special heart that opens when we see our grandchildren - all children - are perfect.

Sometimes I think about how Zen needs to angle itself differently for women, to emphasize our wonderful capacity for Grandmother's Heart. I think it was Dogen who urged his dharma heir to cultivate it more. Maybe I should write more about my thoughts on that. We really are different than the men these practices were designed for, even though we are also just the same. (There, some Zen paradox.)

Just today a friend and I were recalling that Suzuki Roshi said to students, "You're already perfect - and you need to work a little harder." True, true. But also, many of my readers are women, and what I know about women's lives is that most of us already work too hard. So I'll close by saying, "Thank you for reading me. Remember, you're already perfect - and right now, you should take a little break."

What's wrong with that cat?!

[image: Sheba on her pillar in my study]
Monday morning we were out for about two hours, getting acupuncture. It's unusual for both of us to be out in the morning, but not unheard of. When we came home, we were meant by the loud lament of The Banshee Cat. 'Sup? I wondered, using my latest street vocab, learned from my grandson. Whassup, Sheba? Why do you need ten minutes of petfest and verbal reassurance to calm down?

It came together with many observations of this little old cat we adopted last summer. Her skittishness, her fear of all Others, cat or human. I thought she had what writers call a backstory, and I knew what it was. It was titled "Separation."

Sheba was eight or ten years old when she was left at a veterinarian's by the woman who brought her there. How long was she there in a cage, waiting to be picked up and taken back to her home territory?

But before that, I thought, she had experienced abandonment. I imagined she lived with an older woman who loved the cat dearly - Sheba has a great purr, the softest fur anywhere, loves to be petted. Her dainty, well-trained habits suggest someone worked with her - no scratching on the rug, no trying to run outdoors.

What if that woman got sick and was taken out, and never came back? Maybe Sheba survived for many days until some niece or sister came to the apartment to pick up some things, and there was the little cat, wailing piteously, out of water and food and scared to death by her person's disappearance. Abandoned and likely to die of dehydration or starvation.

We can hardly know what it feels like to be a nine-pound animal that cannot open a door or get water for itself, that is totally dependent on people who don't follow the schedule. One horrible experience with abandonment can train that animal to be forever easily frightened.

It's a good thing, I thought, that we've never gone on vacation since we had her. We did that when we had Sherlock, leaving him in the care of a reliable and attentive neighbor. Nevertheless, when we pulled in the drive coming home he was on the kitchen table letting out sustained, distressed meows, telling us over and over, I missed you, I didn't know if you were ever coming home.

Thing was, Sherlock was a big strong male cat with a lot of resilience and a naturally sociable fearless nature. He got over it, no credit to him I suppose. He didn't do therapy or meditate on it, just plunged forward into the present reality. That's the kind of cat he was. Sheba is another kind of cat altogether.

What made Sheba and Sherlock such different members of the same species really doesn't matter. Why, why we humans ask. Buddhism points out that we are better served by concentrating on the reality of now. Sheba does have something in her personality you could call separation anxiety. Knowing what caused it would not much help me deal with her. Following her attentively to one of her pillars and stroking her, that helps much more. All this, of course, does not apply to our Small-r relationships ™ with humans in our lives, how we might accept them. It's just about cats.

The myriad things

[image: Snow on screens, Tom Tucker, taken with film]
Getting my EPO from the special mail-order pharmacy - not there yet, but a little step just now, the phone call verifying that I will pay the co-pay, and that the delivery date works (it comes refrigerated). The end is not here, but there's a little satisfaction with each small step. Isn't that how a pilgrimage should be?
~~~~~
Called up my friend to see how she's feeling and discuss our shared sense of being overwhelmed - the mess of carnivale (Christmas) to clean up. Much harder than it was to get it all out and decorate the house, because we want to organize it as we put it back. Ah, desire. Delusion.
~~~~~
later - Swamped by practical tasks, but got two e-mails, one related this blog, perhaps hoping for my endorsement of a book (think of that), another from a high-school girl in the Phillipines wanting some information about my story. Answering these things rose to the top of the to-do list, even as they filled my center with a soft happiness. I am a writer. I still am, as hard as it is to fit it in. Just yesterday I read something snarky by a writer about how writers hate these requests. Like people get in the way of your work. Maybe that's a guy thing.
~~~~~
If Wun would handle the mail every day as it comes in instead of, say, tossing it on the kitchen counter, Wun would never have a messy accumulation that takes 15 minutes to sort, and might result in your Rewards check being thrown away. This is one of about 10,000 good habits that it takes to keep a neat, clean life. I think it is probably too late to form all of them starting at age 67.
~~~~~
Some days nothing will satisfy the cat.

Small-R relationships

[The small print in the image above says "Sure there are plenty of other fish in the sea. But you're not anywhere near the sea. You're in the desert. Alone."]

I read that there are more single people around than there used to be - I see it around me, too. And it seems most of these yearn to have a Relationship. An 84-year-old woman who divorced three decades ago just confided this to me, how this desire persists despite her surround of caring children and friends.

Talking about the possible causes for this desire could occupy us for a long time. We could look at one of my home-made koans, Who is that one you want to relate to? But I want to make a note on something different - our failure to pay enough attention to the relationships we already have.

I remember a time in my life when I had no Relationship, I remember often feeling alone in a bad way. Yet, in my life then were my grown daughter, and the kitten she named Greylin after the feline hero of my first novel and made me take. In my dumpy apartment building I got to know an elderly neighbor, Margaret, whose recipe for a sort of quiche ratatouille I still have - she must have given me some, and I must have asked for the recipe. My parents were both still alive, and my mother wrote to me every week. ( I had no idea how precious those letters would become.) My brother was still alive and living here in town, my sister was still in this country. I belonged to a Unitarian Fellowship that had been very welcoming to me. I had two women friends who are still friends today - that's almost 30 years now. I had a small social circle that included - gasp - Tom, and went out and did rowdy things together now and then.

It was harder keeping any relationship up in those days, when a long-distance phone call cost by the minute, and you usually didn't make them except to announce a death, something like that. No answering machine. No Skype. No facebook, no e-mail such as I used yesterday to ask my sister in Australia if her back yard attracts Lorikeets. No lovely e-mail cards.

But I didn't give much thought then about keeping up those small-R relationships. You could call that taking them for granted. You could say accurately that it wasn't very mindful - back then all I knew about Buddhism was that I had a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, whose mysterious pages I stared at now and then. The only kind of meditation I knew was the visualization I had learned in yoga, and it didn't seem to get me anywhere. Well, you know about Getting Somewhere.

Years later I saw a Unitarian video about daily devotions. One of the people it featured showed us how in his morning devotion he went through a little stack of photographs of - what did he say? his family, the people he loved - and asked of each one, "What does this person need right now?" I was struck by this. I'm sure I thought devotions were done for one's own self. Now what he did looks like a practice of compassion, putting Self aside to ask about the needs of those he loved. I felt that would translate sometimes into actions.

Even when we feel isolated, we are nested in family and a broader context. We have relationships at work, we live in a neighborhood, our every step affects the planet. There is what we used to call civic duty. Doing our part.

I recall a scene from the long-ago movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which the woman goes riding a bicycle with Paul Newman to the tune of a cheery song we all got very tired of. She asks him something like this: "If it weren't for the Kid, do you think you and I would have a Relationship?"

He replies, "We do have a relationship." A little cowboy wisdom.

My anxiety

I feel so relaxed today, deep in my body, that a quick scan of the past doesn't turn up a comparison. Better than Valium, I think. Better than the phenobarbital I was given at one time for irritable bowel syndrome - that's when your gut can't stand the way you're living or, maybe, who you're living with. A relaxation as good as what I used to feel after doing yin yoga with Kit. That good.

The source of this peace and freedom from anxiety seems to be getting good lab results yesterday. Of the various things they check in my blood every month, two figures stand out: hemoglobin and eGFR. Hg is easy, red blood cells. My poor little kidneys are still producing enough of the hormone that makes them, no downward slide since the last test. Good news.

eGFR is something you probably don't know about unless your kidneys are failing - a number arrived at from plugging your creatinine into a formula. The number indicates about what percentage of kidneys you have left. Mine went up from 8 to 9 this month, not down. What a relief! (What is the new punctuation mark we're going to get that is a quiet sort of exclamation? I imagine the kids, texting, are going to invent it.) It means I don't have to get serious this month about preparing for dialysis.

Peace. It's wonderful. Wouldn't you think that 12-plus years meditating would make it possible for a person to call it forth at any time? I would have thought that, but it turns out not to be true in my case.

Americans underrate Karma, in my opinion. I mean, the reality that our personal will is not in charge, that a great many causes go into making us act the way we do. I wonder, if I had an identical twin turn up, would she be like me in myriad small ways? A person who tends to throw her clothes down instead of hanging them up, say. Or who has to try hard to be punctual. Who gets anxious about things when being anxious doesn't help a bit.

Anxiety is a lot like anger that way, I think. That is, it doesn't do any good, and in fact, probably gets in the way of a good outcome. But my experience is that anger has been easier to work with. Practice has impacted my tendency to get angry until these days I don't get mad. I may feel frustrated, but I can let that dissolve, the way you let stories dissolve when you're meditating.

My anxiety though exists on a deeper level. Maybe I need to do a Chod practice that has helped me with other things - sit down with that anxiety, personify it, name it (Ann Gzieti?), and give it what it needs. That's a serious full-bore approach.

The things I've done up till now have certainly taken it down quite a few notches. Yet, talking to myself about how dialysis is just a medical treatment, telling myself that it won't be what I imagine - nothing is - reminding myself that anxiety will not hold off reality - these intellectual strategies just involve the left brain. They have not gone to the deep layer of self or body where that kind of anxiety resides. Maybe it is something innate, a fear that is natural to us as vulnerable animals. Maybe I only notice it's still there because I meditate, and have become more sensitive to my feelings. Maybe, maybe.

There turned out to be a sure cure for my anxiety, the way there is a cure for the panic you feel when you dream you are confronted with a test in a subject you know nothing about. That is, to wake up. The anxiety was also a sort of dream running in the way-back movie theatre of my mind, and the way to stop it was to for reality to step forth and present good lab results. I couldn't make that happen, but here it is, a gift from a personal karma that has kept these faltering kidneys working for years longer than predicted. Last night I slept an amazing 11 hours. Today I feel the gratitude in my abdomen.

It is snowing here in Ohio, a persistent fall of small flakes, vertical, no wind. We are expected to get several more inches. I don't plan to go out today. My Appalachian friend might add, "the good Lord willing an' the creek don't rise." That is, we'll see what karma brings.

If you get what you always get

You know that cliche - "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always get." Or maybe the generations that followed mine don't know it. Back in the day it was a commonplace that many a therapist murmured sooner or later. For that's what we see other people do - the same old thing, butting their heads up against that wall and expecting it to give this time. I seldom catch myself at it, of course.

Actually, this is the story of a small triumph. I just finished a 15-minute phone call with my special mail-order pharmacy, a call that seems likely to result in me getting at last the doses of EPO I need to inject myself with, not to compete in bike races, just to stay upright.

My kidney doc faxed that prescription to the regular mail-order pharmacy Nov. 22. Then again December 24. Nothing continued to happen. I worried about it. At last Tom made his way through a file and came up with a certain phone number, and - voila. It turns out that EPO has to be ordered from these people, not those people. It would have been nice if those people had called or written to tell me they couldn't fill the scrip, but no. They are a bureaucracy, and once something becomes a bureaucracy, its purpose is to perpetuate itself. Furthermore, the tendency is for everyone in it to exist only to keep himself out of trouble by following the regulations.

Maybe we hit the yellow brick road at last for the EPO, for which I am truly grateful, and will be more grateful when it actually arrives. Meanwhile, what makes this sort of ordinary granny story in any way Zen? Well, it's about getting in touch with reality. And how good it feels.

Monetizing yourself

[image: a morning glory in a local garden, unrelated to the subject today, perhaps]
I like to observe "hits" on the blog, so I have Statcounter up along the side. Today around noon it topped 10,000. That's individual times people logged on, that's all, not how long they stayed. Still, it tickled me.

Every time I get on to write a new post, I am given the choice to go bigger, to "monetize" the blog. A new word? No. Merriam-Webster tells me it appeared around 1879, and can mean -
3 : to utilize (something of value) as a source of profit

There's a lot of that around, isn't there? Times being harder, many people are trying to make money doing things they used to do for fun, to sell their arts and crafts on websites like etsy. I shopped for Christmas in the gymnasium at our community rec center, and bought two hand-dyed silk shirts and a glass-bead necklace of Mittens and snowmen, which my mother-in-law loved. All were priced so that the artist probably didn't make minimum wage for her labor. It made me kind of sad. It appears again and again, the hopefulness of the talented that somehow you can make a living at art. But almost no one does. I wish I could talk to aspiring young artists and explain, first you figure out what to make a living at, something that doesn't sap your creative energy or demand overtime. Figure out how to live on very little, decide what will be enough for you. Then use your spare time to throw yourself into your art. Think of your art as your gift to the world, not your passport to wealth.

According to Sunday's NY Times, the young people entering college are figuring out, some of them anyway, that they will eventually need to make a living. They want useful majors. I used to hate that crass commercialism when I was an idealistic young teacher, willing to work for not very much to do something I loved. Now I see it as enviably realistic.

There's always a Zen story back in my mind somewhere. This one appears often, about the old Chinese Zen master Hykujo whose students try to get him to retire. You can read the short anecdote here. I have come to realize that this aphorism is not an abstraction about How We Should Live. As the Great Recession grips in, with the real unemployment rate at over 17%, according to some analysts, a lot of people are starting to understand what our simpler ancestors never doubted: "No work, no food."

L'heure bleue

Right now out my east window it is what I think of as Paris Blue - the sky is in that moment of twilight the French call "the blue hour." Between light and dark, the hour lovers steal from their boundup days, utterly romantic. And if you were in Paris right now, you'd be there for this: to sit at the window of a cafe and be right there with this moment, with a color of sky you think is found nowhere else. You would catch your breath at the sight, as if you were spotting the green flash, or the dolphins playing. But the sky is the same everywhere, isn't it? It's us, we don't pay attention.

Twilight. It is catching up over here in my study, which looks west. Two lights, between lights. They are magical moments in the day. There is a point - it is here right now where I am - where there is absolutely no wind. The birds have to have eaten by now and be tucked in already. You've noticed they don't fly at night.

It is 5:50 January 3, and I am sitting in Columbus, Ohio facing west. The sky is still not quite Paris Blue here. There is still a characteristic line of salmon along the horizon, behind the bare trees. Only a couple of small lights are visible across the ravine; otherwise, it looks formidably treed out there. I wonder whether the charming effect of "L'heure bleu" is basically cosmopolitan, to be enjoyed only when you face civilization from snug restaurants and apartments in tall buildings, among the small, warm glow of city lights.

"All you have to do is follow the schedule"

Hello and Joy Luck New Year -
I am content to wind down into winter.

We have a junco in the bush this morning, and a robin sitting very fatly, so his russet vest seems stretched over his body - turning his head pertly here and there as if looking for someone, and this is likely - they often travel in pairs or packs, I've noticed. I see a little bit of blue tint to the sky this morning. The sky colors not at all the way you mix paint. With watercolor, one drop of a sincere color like indigo will tint the whole jar of water. It is quite cold, about ten degrees.

I am at the second day of acting on my resolution. Thought I would share it - it is to have one cup of coffee when I get up, doing the miscellaneous things I like to do first thing at the computer - check e-mail, maybe answer one or two - observe wildlife activity, wind, and sky in the little landscape before me. And then meditate. And to do this as routinely as if I were in a Zen center where the bell starts ringing and it is time.

And it is time now.