Saturday morning tasks

Some days there is so much getting in my way I get frustrated, and then cry. Or perhaps I hear some music or sing, especially in church, surrounded by hundreds of other people, and my throat grows soft and heavy, and I cry. I don't understand the life of a being like Sheba that cannot cry, or relate to tears, and I know there are human beings like that, too, ordinary people who almost never cry. Crying seems essential for me to express to myself my feelings and the chemicals that somehow come out in those tears, so I end up balanced again.

Frustration: There are things I want to do and they are getting in the way of what I want to do. Right now I want to do this blog, write, journal, consider a fascinating article on tragedy lying at my left hand. Sometimes less important things have to come first. For example, right now I need to put on my socks and shoes. I have learned the sports doc and therapists are right about that. If I go around barefoot, my left ankle begins to hurt, and that leads to the tragedy of being off your feet. While I'm up I need to put a load in the washer with my two everyday pants, black sweats and jeans, and my black socks. Wait, I don't really have to do that today. I can do it tomorrow in sweet Sabbath time. I won't need those pants till Monday. And I don't care if I wear white socks with my tennis shoes. People are just going to have to get over it.

Grandson and family are coming today mid-afternoon, and that means I have to lie down for an hour or so before then, or I'll be tired and lackluster by evening. What is all this getting in the way of? Sitting here slow, thinking. I'd like to let my mind play over this week of big change, in which I wrote every morning for two hours. I thought about a poem by Yeats this morning, with the repeated line, "Like a long-legged fly on the water, her mind moves upon silence." That reminds me that somewhere in a large box of old-fashioned film photographs I have one of a waterbug, and its shadow. When will I ever get at those? (Maybe tonight while everyone else watches the Olympics?)

As for poetry, I have come to think I have not been very kind to my poems, churning them out into a file of "unpublished poems," which means "unfinished poems," too. I am getting inclined to imitate the visual artists, who often have a dozen canvases in process, propped all around the studio. I once read that the poet Elizabeth Bishop had one certain poem taped on her refrigerator door for 20 years, but unhappily, I don't know what it was. She was probably trying to get the last line right.

It is almost 11:00 now. I see that the fooling around we did with my computer last night has erased the clock. This is annoying me, though I don't need the damn thing - I have a real clock in my study. . . . [pause] Aha, I figured out the problem and got my status bar back.

I got an e-mail rejection yesterday. Offhand, I don't know what poems I sent those people. I would like to get into that slow mood in which I just do this, do that, such as get into my files and see if a note on that submission is hidden somewhere. . . . Sending stuff in by e-mail and getting rejection by e-mail is much better than the old way, where they might clip to your stuff a little 4x4 inch form letter, as if they didn't even want to spend the money for a half sheet. Come on, my heart is written in those poems. . . . Found the record of the submission. [pause] substantially reorganized files, so I can easily search this year or the archive. How do things get in such a mess? In part it's not having enough time, or do we? Is it just being in a hurry to get on to the future?

When you're older, life is confusing. I take, quick count, ten prescription meds at three times during the day, and also medication with every meal. Not every one of those is necessary to sustain life, but I sure wouldn't want to go off of the ones that merely address the burning freezing feet of neuropathy. Slowly I have been getting those up on automatic refill. That will certainly help. But now I have sitting here in my box of "practical to do" a weird thing they want the kidney doctor to fill out affirming that yes, I do need EPO at intervals. Can't blame them, it costs something like $500 a shot. Gave myself one Thursday. Had it marked on the calendar, then checked it off.

Ah, the tragedy of life. How to begin working again in earnest as a writer, which is perhaps my fundamental practice, and yet find time to meditate, time to journal, two other spiritual practices. And fix dinners, pick up house. Shower. Get together with friends. Go to all those doctors. Buy just something pretty for spring, when shopping wears me out. The tragedies I must admit of affluence.

And also of wanting. It's not that we should not want things, I think. We should accept that we are wanting animals. And I think after this, it's time for me to select February's gift for extreme world poverty (see previous posts). That is sure to yank me upright and in touch with reality.

Yesterday I began reading an article about Being a Poet that fascinated me, and I thought my friend Daron, who writes poetry and teaches meditation . . .

alert: a tufted titmouse in the ivy on the nearest oak. A chickadee. Another.

I thought he'd like the article. This morning, quickly checking e-mail before diving happily into that talk or another summarizing what has happened since 1945 in American poetry, which is like what happened the moment you were hit by a truck - I was happier to realize that talking to him about this, our lives as poets, is part of my work. My vow has given me freedom to do what I want to do. Why wasn't I doing that?

I don't know. It is inexplicably karmic, but one thing I note is that it has to do with my recent interest in dropping my self-description as "a decent person" and living like a college student. The house looks like a college student took it over. A nice, responsible grad student, no pizza boxes on the living room floor, nothing smells, but clutter everywhere. Who cares?

Thank you both LuLu and hadv for yesterday's comments. LuLu comments that true practice begins when it gets hard - now do you hold the pose? This is absolutely true, and marks the difference in the arts between the amateur and the professional. The pro works at it when it is temporarily not fun. Yet it must remain an advanced form of play.

A new practice

Vows or intentions come upon me, rise like yeast bubbles, and there they are. This one is to spend from 10:00 a.m. to 12 noon Monday thru Friday on my writing. That's writing, leaving blogging aside, because I'd become aware that writing a post was usually taking an hour and a half.

Practice, what is practice? It is an activity undertaken in a disciplined way with the end of advancing spiritually. Now, I don't like that word "advancing," so say "with the end of being with Oneself." Many people say "with the Divine." I don't think like that. In Soto Zen there is supposedly no end, just sit like a frog. Your reflections on what a practice is, and why, are welcome.

This entry isn't going to take me long because I'm not going to go down that beckoning path. But indeed, going back to making my (real) writing a top priority does represent some kind of long-worked gradual awakening for me. Doing your real work, that's a practice for a great many artists and writers, and not enough normal people.

Monkey Mind: Gary Snyder Sings of Why He Takes Care of His Mac

Here's a little gift James Ford posted for all of us who love our computers.

Majeane's Household Koan: The Papers You Did Not Attend To

If you do not say "mess" and you do not say "filing," what is the nature of the papers?

Commodifying our gifts

The internet is transforming the world in thousands of ways, tiny rivulets of communication and knowledge running everywhere. One is that it has made it easy for people to offer what they create for sale. I noticed this the other day when I was looking for a simple photograph of pines, vertical in the snow to post with my haiku. The first couple of photos I liked led me to sites offering prints for sale for, say, $150. There's a lot of that going around these days.

Causation is complicated here. It probably includes the fact that many people are out of work, and have the time, and the need, to make money by selling their hobby or dream - their wonderful cupcakes or unique knitted purses, or well-composed photographs. It goes to services to. Reading over the catalog for a local fund-raising auction I see people offering forms of massage that border on the spiritual, such as Reiki and foot reflexology, for handsome prices. Folk healing practices they are gifted at and that we once did for one another for free. These services, too, have leapt out of the realm of the spiritual and become commodities.

I haven't got very far in Lewis Hyde's formidable book, the kind we call a tome, large and scholarly. The early parts were inspiring enough, and got me to thinking with fascination of the commodification of what we call our gifts or talents. I see there is a great deal of scholarship along these lines, and if I don't stop here, I'll be reading Marx, at last (not required of a humanities major back in the day). And I want to stop. I have promised to make orzo with roasted tomatoes for a potluck tonight, and this is the moment to make it so I can still have my nap. You can't buy a dish quite like this at the gourmet market (they don't roast the grape tomatoes) though the tomatoes are not, alas, home-grown here in Ohio in February. Now that I think of it, the dish lacks the authenticity of the local and seasonal such as I am reading about in Michael Pollan's book on food. Sigh. It's so hard to be good. Or perfect. Hard to be perfect. Maybe not so hard to just be good.

It's not fair

It was not strong enough to be called a craving - my decision this morning to go to my computer and automatically renew a prescription. Should take five minutes at most. Then I wanted to finish carrying trash out of the kitchen, get dressed, meditate, blog before I left for lunch.

I will not try to trace the labyrinthine depths in which I got lost as the prescription site refused to boot up, would not tell me how to put this scrip on auto renew, refused to print an order form, and so on. It is not fair, it's not right! As I saw how the hands of the clock had crept on - I hate time - I realized my spacious morning had been lost to this idiocy. I told Tom I felt like flying a plane into my computer.

Of course Wun is preoccupied with the fantastical narrative of Andrew Stack, who did commit suicide by flying a plane into an IRS agency yesterday. It happened on two channels before my eyes in real time (real time, there's a thought) as I worked away on the Nustep in my health club, making up for the sedentary affluent life to which I am not entitled.

From what I read, Stack had a righteous grievance against an unjust tax law that has prevented many computer engineers like himself from making a living self-employed. If you read his entire 3000 word statement, this is inextricable from money, money. And from some belief that the regulations of a huge bureaucracy ought to be comprehensible, and kind, that one man ought to be able to change things.

I learned about unfairness and being kept ruthlessly under the heal of Authority when I was eight years old, and my mother gave my chocolate pudding to my brother, to stop his tantrum. I recall how frustrated both she and I felt as he lay kicking and screaming on the floor, then holding his breath and turning from red to a bluish-white? I said it, "It isn't fair!" Children have a keen sense of fairness.

I was not tempted to violence in return. I suppose I moped, a kind of kid depression called pouting, which you're not allowed to do. Is violence not what girls do by nature, having little testoserone, or is it conditioning? Both, I think.

The world I grew up in was affluent and safe from overt violence, but heavily unfair. Loaded against women. Run by the Bernie Madoffs. Once in a while the system cracks and some lava of justice pours through, and a Madoff gets put in jail. I find it tremendously amusing that one of his investors has written a book about how she now fears "being a bag lady."

Andrew Stack took money very seriously. And his ability to fan his own belief that the world should be fair, and his anger that it wasn't, were so developed that he set fire to his house before he took off. His wife had taken herself and daughter away the night before, afraid of his gathering rage. I suppose he wanted to leave her nothing. A real man, acting like men are supposed to in America.

Oh, Buddhism, speak to me. Doesn't the Buddha's story tell us with breathtaking clarity that the road to enlightenment is not entitlement, but includes giving up everything you were taught could be yours, your kingdom? In some lineages, monks still make patchwork robes of used materials - recently I read an interview in which the Dalai Lama talked about that. He said, This way we have nothing to lose.

Nothing to grasp. No desires. No well-developed dreams, fantasies of what you need in life to be happy. No hatreds, abandon even them. Imagine that.

The Purpose of Art

This video was made in the Antwerp Central Train Station at 8:00 am on the 23rd of March 2009.

With no warning to the passengers passing through the station a recording of Julie Andrews singing 'Do, Re, Mi' begins to play on the public address system.

As the bemused passengers watch . . .

Praise and blame

I have long liked this quote, which travels quite a bit around the internet. We used to say it to together to conclude the meetings of our meditation group:

Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a great tree in the midst of them all.

One day Marie asked, "Does that say 'in the midst of the mall'?" We all agreed, that worked. Rest like a great tree, in the midst of the mall. That was back before the crash, so we felt ourselves to be in the midst of the consumer society, trying not to be swept by it.

This quote is about maintaining equanimity, not being pushed off balance by our experiences. I had a funny little push recently when the blogger minddeep named me one of 15 Buddhist women's blogs she especially liked. This has led on the way karma does. Today I had an email from a University press that wants me to send me a Buddhist book by a woman. This is the second time this has happened this month, probably people in publishing checking minddeep's list. But it feels like praise. Like being special.

This heady acclamation has subtly nudged me to feel more Buddhist, to slant the blog more Buddhist, if you know what I mean. When I started this I was all over the place, not knowing my identity, though my blog name itself makes some of it clear.

I am uneasy about writing for "an in-crowd" and shutting everyone else out, but it is probably inevitable. And what a pleasure it is to talk to faithful readers who talk back, to read your blogs, to be able to speak comfortably from my framework. Talking to other Buddhists I know some of the things we all believe in, like compassion and non-harming. In the same way, I go to my church and know I can talk as a Unitarian, that is, people I know there share my liberal political and social views. In this day of a gathering storm of sheer hatred calling itself the Tea Party, it's nice to have homes like this.
~~~~~~
The photo today is Snowgirl 2010, by Susan Michael Barrett. She was made in Texas - something I wouldn't have believed last year - and began melting as soon as her garland was placed, a vivid testimony to change. She is all organic.

Toward an American Buddhism

This morning I read the NY Times with my first cup of coffee, something I don't usually do. Perhaps that made me was more sensitive to the news about America it brought to me.

- A computer-guided rocket supposed to be able to strike within a yard of its target went wrong and hit a compound crowded with Afghan civilians, killing - among others - at least five children.
- In Elkhardt, Indiana, people who can't afford to buy houses are buying them for the tax credit. Economy stimulus gone wrong, perhaps.
- A neuroscientist who was denied tenure and shot three colleagues is found to have a history of violence.
Do you want to label these events with the three poisons? Greed, hatred, ignorance, take your choice.

But the day's news got worse on the inside pages. How security guards in Seattle watched the beating of a teenage girl without intervening. In the Business Day section, news of "dark scary content" I won't even hint at is now found on CNN. And to cap it, the Arts section reviews a book titled The Death of American Virtue, about Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. We all remember that, don't we? How he sat there not quite smiling and said that what he and Monica Lewinsky did was not sex.

Was that moment really when American virtue ended? I wondered. Was there ever an America characterized by virtue? This is a country founded on colonizing its indigenous populations - oh yes, there is an obituary today of a former chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Philip Martin. He brought his people out of poverty by attracting or building industries; they include two casinos, which take people's money by giving them cheap alcohol and fostering delusions.

Reading story after story I found myself imagining America as a disk. Half of it is dark, convoluted with the struggles of violence and greed and delusion. The other half is white, representing the ideal of life lived according to Buddhism's basic five precepts for behavior.

The precepts are simple and down to earth, though they can be interpreted carefully and thoughtfully. We are to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, and intoxicants. They seem to be fundamentally about not harming - a basic manual for building safe, gentle communities. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any one of the stories above happening in a community where most people seriously aspired to follow these practices. Some monks recite them every day.

I can't figure out how to make members of Congress recite them daily. But it is interesting to think about. Here is a quote from a very nice, concise discussion of the Precepts by Thanissaro Bhikku:

The Buddha's path consisted not only of mindfulness, concentration, and insight practices, but also of virtue, beginning with the five precepts. In fact, the precepts constitute the first step in the path. There is a tendency in the West to dismiss the five precepts as Sunday-school rules bound to old cultural norms that no longer apply to our modern society, but this misses the role that the Buddha intended for them: They are part of a course of therapy for wounded minds.

In fact, it is interesting to think of our sanghas adopting this ancient practice of virtue. It is interesting to think of doing it ourselves.

Empty Hands, Soft Paws

[image: Tangerine, notice the vinyl sheaths, "Soft Paws," applied to his front claws]
Sheba does not have to wear Soft Paws; somehow she knows not to scratch on the couch or the living room carpet, but runs down to the basement or out to the garage. But this post is not about cats. They are just the furry little metaphor that keeps weaving through my life.

Soft paws. Dim lights. Slow steps. Empty hands. There is a koan -

With empty hands, I take hold of the plow.

I suppose the meaning is obvious, directly visual. You cannot steer a plow if your hands are trying to hold onto other things as well. You can't be here, now, if your mind is full of ideas and ambitions, cravings, judgments.

I think about walking and feet a lot, since I had so much trouble with my feet last year. There's a gratitude that stays with me just walking around the house. Soft feet. Be careful where you step - that little yellow flower may have been your grandmother in some life.

Recently I've been thinking Soft paws. It means to me, slow down. Don't be aggressive. Don't make a big pawprint. Let life come to you.

Yesterday my daughter Cassie and her family visited for a couple of hours. Everyone watched the Olympics on the new plasma TV and talked talked about this and that, the athletes, village politics. I am not a sports fan, but because I love my daughter and husband, I set my judgments aside. We don't need to disagree on that.

I'd had little sleep the night before, and was tired, so I sat back and knitted (very grandmotherly) and a fine mess was made on the coffee table of valentine candies, crackers and cheese. Otto and Chris, Cassie's partner, horse played. I realized a warm feeling in my center. Not spectacular, nice. It took me hours to put a name to it, talking later to Tom - I felt safe. I trust these people. We all wish each other well. I know many people must feel this with their families of origin, but I never did. Here it was, though, at last, when I wasn't looking for it at all.

The Life I Can Save

I was very relieved when I finally came to the conclusions in Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save. He is not telling me to strip from my life the occasional dark French mint or lunch at Skyline Chili (note the emphasis on food). His arrows are aimed at those much richer than me. His carefully argued conclusion is that if America's affluent give even moderately, they can change the desperate poverty that exists on this planet. He does describe the positions of some thinkers who would be more demanding than him, but he also understands human nature - that is, ask too much of us and we'll give up. He is aware that those of us living on pensions or modest salaries may be able to give very little.

Singer discusses the enormous wealth, and annual incomes, of the very rich - you did know that Larry Ellison of Oracle lives in a 50,000 square foot house? - and describes a sliding scale that asks Americans who earn at least $105,000 a year to give 5 percent of their gross. Those who are paying off college loans, or have lost their jobs may not be able to do that. It is the super-rich whom he argues should give much more than they do. Did you know there are almost 15,000 Americans who earn over $10.7 million a year? If these people gave a fair share of that income, it would generate more than twice the money needed to meet the Millenium Development Goals set by the UN. It would be enough to end extreme poverty.

When I finished this book I started to think, I want to get those super-rich to read it. So far I haven't thought of anyone I know who could remotely qualify. Anyway, no one ever reads a book you give them, do they? So I have focused on what I want to do. Looking at my half of our gross income, I feel I can give 1% of that. I can do that and still support my church, an important enhancement to my life.

Singer's discussion was presented tidily in this article from the NY Times.
Or you can go directly to the book's website -
www.TheLifeYouCanSave.com
Doing that myself, I see that only 5130 people have pledged on this site since the book came out a year ago. That's a surprise. Not so many in the American midwest, only 14 in the Columbus area.

The site is rich with possibilities. It can lead you to a list of organizations vetted by GiveWell doing work of every kind. I am interested in the Fred Hollows Foundation, which can save one person's eyesight for $25, and by the Worldwide Fistula Fund, which does equally lifesaving surgery for young women who have had to bear children before their bodies were ready for it.
Since I began this post two people have pledged to give their fair share to end extreme poverty. One of them was not me.

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

The photos above are of the same sculpture, "Quantum Man," created by Julian Voss-Andreae, the image of a walking man. Made up of over a hundred vertically oriented steel sheets, the 8’ tall sculpture provides a metaphor for the counter-intuitive world of quantum physics. Symbolizing the dual nature of matter, the sculpture seems solid when seen from the front but nearly disappears when seen from the side, as light shines through the spaces between the slabs.

Faithful Reader knows that I have felt somewhat disturbed recently, my usual comfort challenged by Peter Singer's delusion-fracturing book on ending extreme poverty. Then Brenda Shoshann's Zen Miracles asked me to "Find Your Own Pilgrimage."

A word of explanation. My best time for getting in touch with myself and the rest of creation is morning, before my ego structure gets firmly in place and I start making lists of things to do and running around. And this morning I did an idle search on hemoglobin.

That's another element of my personal story - doctor's office called yesterday to say my Hg was low again, and it is time for a Procrit shot. This has gone on for years now, a consequence of kidneys not able to do their rightful work. I learned that Hg is essential for the transport of oxygen - that's why say a competitive biker might want to use it to maximize red blood cells, and why you feel fatigued when you are anemic. But more to the point, I came to the art of the sculptor shown above, because he has done a wonderful sculpture of hemoglobin.

Science/art has insisted on coming my way lately, beginning when? Well, a couple of weeks ago we went to a presentation by a local sculptor, a woman who works in bronze and sometimes paper. What I learned was how messy sculpture can be, how it is literally down to earth, down to clay and metals and fire, and work with the hands. I have been dissatisfied lately with the flat plane of paper on which to draw or write. Writing and talking are such thin things. Words have a very odd kind of reality, intangible, and lately I have been enjoying working with my plants, a way of getting into the earth.

Next I ran into a TED presentation on a scientist/artist who puts paint cans in a pendulum and lets or helps the natural flow create a painting. What was very odd there was that Tom also ran into it and watched it on the new TV. Now there's this, coming to me from Wikipedia as I tried to find out just what a Hg count refers to. I didn't find that yet, but no matter.

My title today is the famous line from the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. (I guess not everyone in the world was an English major, or wouldn't we be in trouble when the drains clog up?) I think it is famous in part because it so neatly targets that sense of Spring, that desire to be fresh and renewed. Surely that is a big part of why we do this amazing thing, going on retreat.

For Shoshanna, a pilgrimage is when you stop clinging to something, get out of your stuckness. Mine goes to always doing small, private things so I don't get hurt, perhaps, or because of some tiny twist in my DNA. But I think of big things. I admire huge art, like an installation I saw a while back at a fiber art show. I'm sorry, but I don't recall the artist's name. She had created huge panels of barely colored silk that hung from the ceiling, one after the other, and that stirred with your passing. The room seemed to engulf you and make you tender.

Yes, there was yet another sculptor who came my way recently, who does Buddhist work in mosaic. Art that is out there shattering light in garden.

So what is my next step after writing this? I don't know. As often, I hear Seung Sahn (whom I never met) nodding and telling me, "Good. Only keep that don't-know mind."

Real-eyes

Cold. Our idea of cold here in Ohio, that is, 6 degrees. The matte green ivy is curled tightly upon itself on one tree. On the next tree, where the sun hits, the ivy has relaxed. I am seeing this through a window from a house so warm my bare feet enjoy the wood floor. Snow still lies gracefully on branches, but less of it. A strange snow here. I woke up yesterday to see white comforters thrown on the lawns while the driveways and street were clear, shiny black. No drifts, due to the particular heavy nature of this snow, and to no wind, and that made it look like snow as envisioned by a child doing an exercise for art class, creating a model village.

I was eager to read some dharma this morning, having dreamed again about my brother, as he was, and feeling cluttered. I have Zen Miracles in the bathroom right now, so I picked that out. I find myself stuck where I left off, on the chapter about getting unstuck.

"Find your own pilgrimage," Shoshanna writes. "Where is it you need to go?" I can't do much physical going in the state of health and finance I'm in. I've been thinking about the fall retreat at Grailville, thinking I've been well for long enough that I start to have confidence in my wellness. I am afraid to do things that might tire me or stress me. Hmm. That retreat. I could just go for the weekend. Wonder if the food's gotten any better. If I could sleep in another bed. At my level of health, that's important.

I know there is some going alone I need to do. I have become a dependent person, as is my tendency, with all this illness. This weekend Tom got sick, a fever and deep fatigue. We talked about whether it might be pneumonia, and his particular vulnerability with restrictive lung disease, when to call the doctor. I was alone while he slept all weekend. I stayed home from church, taking his temperature, which was lower, thank God, getting him to drink some water, covering him up now and then. It is blessed to be together at these times, whether you are the sick one or the caregiver.

What is the pilgrimage I need to take? I am already taking a personal pilgrimage in the direction of confronting the extreme poverty in the world and my responsibility toward it. Realizing the truth - in my journal I often call it "real-eyes." It seems like denying that truth was taking a lot of energy.

Last night the news said that China invested $1 million for every gold medal it won in the last Olympics. I thought of what I read in Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save. The surgery to correct a common form of blindness in Africa costs $50. Twenty thousand people could have been given sight for that investment. That surgery makes a permanent improvement in their lives that enables them to work, to live, to have families. What are these gold medals about? Nationalism, for one thing. Comparison. We are better than you. For every winner there are ten losers, no, hundreds.

Singer's claim is that the world's wealthy can easily give the money to lift the whole world out of the extreme poverty that kills 27,000 children a day, and never even miss it. Me, on my pensions, I shouldn't expect too much of myself. I was relieved to read his impeccably reasoned conclusion. And as I contemplate how much to give, what organization to give it to, I feel more like a tree trunk, less like the fragile, beautiful African violet that is blooming in our den against the backdrop of snow.

Asparagus for brunch

Snow still falling on the crumpled blanket in the back yard, where snow clumps dropped in the night. Branches are gracefully piled with snow, so are even little twigs. I am afraid of a power outage. This is a heavily treed neighborhood, and in weather events, trees fall on the power lines. One year we were out eight days. It was summer, though. In winter, we could stay warm with our gas fireplace and layered clothing for a while, but Tom needs to sleep on his ventilator or goes downhill rapidly (CO2 builds up in his blood). So we have to find alternative housing if the power's out for very long. Of course, we have options. Bla bla, our life style.

How can you not feel a lift of beauty and awe when this kind of weather happens? It is a great change. It isn't like this half the year here in the Ohio Valley; in fact, this is going to be a record storm. Another huge weather event, courtesy of climate change. From the kitchen window, snug over coffee and two newspapers, I saw the woman all in black walking, the black dog prancing in front of her. A living haiku.

The front page of the NYTimes has an odd conjunction of articles below the fold. In the center, one about a servant maid in Pakistan, a child, who seems to have died of abuse. The article talked about how hungry the poor are there, how they will do anything for work, and then don't earn enough to live on. Right next to this was an article on portion size in American food, how for instance, a soup bowl that is destined to be one serving is labeled to be 1 2/3 servings, something like that. I am quite familiar with it because I do read labels and even measure portions, fruit of a long life narcissistically concerned about my "weight". I know 1/2 cup of ice cream is a serving, and I know how small that is.

How ironic is that? these subjects side by side, front page. People starving somewhere way far from here. Americans too fat, so much so that our government itself is trying to slow down our eating through legislation. Think about it. I would not have thought about it before I got captcha'd by Peter Singer's book. So far he is promising me that my fair share to end extreme poverty will be on a sliding scale, does not have to cost me my pleasures, like the asparagus I bought yesterday and plan to cook for brunch in a little while, with scrambled eggs.

It was only $2.99 a pound ($3, that is), and I bought only half a pound. None will go to waste. Asparagus is good for me. Asparagus in February, shipped in from I don't know where, maybe all the way from California, in a big truck fueled by oil formed in the carboniferous era, a truck that laid rubber particles on big highways that we as a people have paid to have put down and maintained. To see a whole world in this asparagus is not just a mystical trip. The asparagus must have been picked, cut, by hand, I think, it is so delicate. That would be migrant workers perhaps, illegal immigrants who sometimes die trying to get into the land of plenty.

Volunteers with their own guns like to patrol our borders, I understand, as if there wasn't more than enough food here. They think that rigidly controlling immigration is not about food. And what they think it's about is not really what it is about, in my opinion. I think about the timeless application of the parable of The Good Samaritan, who would not let a stranger die in a ditch.

This asparagus was not labeled "organic," or it would have cost twice as much, and I wouldn't have bought it. It can't be local, isn't in season, so it violates the rules some people set for themselves when it comes to their food purchases. They are rules that make a lot of sense, and like Peter Singer's ideas, they keep knocking on my skull, asking for my attention.

It used to be that in spring I watched and waited for asparagus to hit the markets. It was like Easter, a sign of the resurrection of plant life, one of the first edibles to come through the ground locally. I have never had an asparagus bed, but I understand it comes up so fast it is magical. You can still buy that kind of wonderful real asparagus at the local co-op, which just keeps going along somehow, decade after decade, kept alive by people who care. Real asparagus, from local organic farms. You can still buy that. As the poet Hopkins said, "For all this, Nature is never spent."

p.s. It didn't taste much like asparagus.

Peter Singer is still battering my heart (see yesterday's post) to such an extent that I wanted to look up John Donne's sonnet of that title. Yet, I cannot stop reading, am eager to finish the book so that I know how much money he thinks I should be able to give away. I am nervous about this. We live on pensions, most of which is taken up with living expenses. But it is feeling imperative to keep reading this and thinking about how I live, eating beef as I please, driving a second car.

Singer is one of those natural teachers, cutting through to clarity about a situation with a Zen-like blade. He describes many people who work to end extreme poverty. Just now I am reading about a doctor, Paul Farmer, cofounder of Partners in Health, who has devoted his life to serving the poor in Haiti for many years before the earthquake.

And just yesterday I also got the first letter of this year's pledge campaign from my church. They want a stunning 5% of my gross income. I will pledge, but I am thinking about how my church enhances lives in many ways, including my life, but does not do much to save them. In fact, I think my specific church has not contributed to the national church and its social justice programs for a several years.

Here is where I stopped reading to look up Partners in Health and write this post:

Flying from the peasant huts and their malnourished babies in Haiti to Miami, just 700 miles away, with its well-dressed people talking about their efforts to lose weight, Farmer gets angry over the contrast between developing countries and the developed world.

He seems to have taken the bodhissatva vow to heart.

On Becoming Engaged

[image - Peter Singer with a friend]
Spiritual practice has been creeping up on me and making me think about how I act. This is not really a Zen thing, or a Buddhist thing. Ethics can creep up on anyone. Right now my consciousness is being impacted by Peter Singer, a young guy (younger than me) who teaches Bioethics at Princeton and writes books about our relationship to the world. He is a philosopher, but aspires to be the kind whose thinking and scholarship reaches out to the real world outside academic circles. Years ago I read his manifesto Animal Liberation, and it led me to avoid meat for quite a while, until the kidney diet led me to put "high-biological-quality protein" in my diet. I was relieved to go back to something more like the diet of my childhood (though with numerous restrictions), an easier way for me to cook, and I have avoided Peter Singer ever since. I know you understand.

But this has been creeping up on me - this realization that though there are many ways I don't live lavishly, I am an American, and I do live well. It's been Haiti, of course, night after night on the news, in-your-face the realization that this country 500 miles from our border lived in abject poverty as it was. Then came the latest issue of Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, which had a little piece about the need for a national Buddhist relief effort to address poverty. It mentioned a group called Buddhist Global Relief. I looked them up. I noticed that one of their advisors is David Loy, who teaches in a nearby city, and whose interest is "engaged Buddhism." An interesting term. Tom got to looking up Loy and found a video of him talking that we both want to watch.

Then I stopped in at the library yesterday and as usual scanned the new books shelves with keen interest. We have "the best public library in America," one of the 83 things I am often grateful for. There on the shelf sat an unpretentious book with a red cover: The Live You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. By Peter Singer. I picked it up, looked it over, sighed, and put it in my bag.

Undertaking a meditation practice seems simple at first. You want to de-stress. Or to heal. Some personal desire. But if that becomes a Zen practice, the goal begins to shift. You learn about this something called "enlightenment." Teachers talk about happiness, joy, peace of mind. "This very place is the Lotus Land," we chant together. Nirvana is out there if we keep practicing.

I think if the Buddha came back and gave a little talk, he might look out over the crowd and begin, "Nirvana is not La-la Land." No, becoming more aware means aware of everything. One of those things is the vast tragic inequality of wealth on this planet, and the extent of poverty. As I sat in an expensive, comfortable bed last night and read the first chapter of Singer's book, the facts began to sink into me. That's one thing. But where this book is headed is a direct confrontation with my lifestyle, and the luxuries I enjoy.

Already the book had me thinking. I thought, This is an important book. I want to own it. It is very easy to buy on Amazon with one click. I can get it used Like New for $10 plus $3.99 shipping. That's $14. Well, I thought, I do have this library copy.

I read on. Suddenly I thought how I was planning to go to the church auction this year, a fundraiser, $12 at the door, but you get a great dinner. I was planning to buy my friend Bob's Turkish Coffee breakfast there for $14 - but the money goes to the church. I already give money to the church, as I give to NPR, things that support my lifestyle. I don't have to do the auction. That $26 right there.

I read on, as Singer established with footnotes to my satisfaction that children die for want of a measles vaccine or medical care when they get measles. I had the two-week measles as a child. (As my mother once remarked thoughtfully, "Maybe that's what happened to you.") My daughter had the vaccine. I thought about how we'd feel if her son, my grandson died. One child. In the poorest nations one in five children dies before the age of five. One in five.

Although this was striking home, I kept reading. That led me to think about how Sheba is due this month for her shots, feline leukemia and rabies. She doesn't go out, no animals come in, contacting these diseases is very unlikely. The shots cost $60.

There is this figure Singer keeps referring to: $1.25 a day. That's what an individual needs to buy food, shelter, water, clothing, medical care, and education enough to lift them out of extreme poverty. That's very different from our idea of poverty here in the US, where

97 percent of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV. Three quarters of them own a car. Three quarters of them have air-conditioning. Three quarters of them have a VCR or DVD player.

Extreme poverty is better defined by cases. It is where you die for lack of a mosquito net.

I don't know how to round this off. Talk about strict Zen, as some of us have been doing. I don't think Singer is a Zen master, but he seems to dealing me the hardest instructions I've had yet. Give up my DSL? I don't think so.

On getting a mammogram

I awoke this morning with a sense of being light as thistledown, my trunk made of air. I had dreamed I was part of a large festival of choirs, and in my dream I sang "Marching to Pretoria" very well, on tune and able to shape the notes without that quavering of old age. It is still running in my mind. I am used to my tinnitus. Because I have it, I think I might welcome the silence of death. As for the song, we used to sing it in church camp. We didn't know what it was about, but didn't care. It has a rousing rhythm.

In the kitchen I pointed out to Tom the paperwhites, soft green blades that shot straight up from a large bulb in a nice little vessel, gift from a friend who does this every single Christmas. I said to Tom, "All that was stored in that bulb. All it needed was water."

He is a scientist, and he said, "It is water."

I said, "And a code." It fascinates me that a living thing is an association of patterns held together by a code. But that's my way of seeing. Something holds it together. A consciousness? Just the karma, it is made of so many bits and pieces, and they will wear the way they do, like parts in a car. Carma.

I have had so much illness that I have no future. I realize that when I sit with friends who talk of major life changes. To people with their health, there are infinite possibilities, and so often I see my friends sitting on those possibilities, procrastinating, in the belief that they are in control of their future, and that it is definitely going to be there, like some storage room full of gold that cannot rot or be stolen. They can do it next year, or the year after that. I don't know how next year will be for us - probably worse. I am very comfortable in the knowledge that this is all I have: my home under my feet right now, the wood floor vibrating as the furnace runs. The sound of Tom in the kitchen, turning a page in the newspaper.

You have probably noticed that there are many things to remind me of my mortality. Yesterday it was the annual mammogram. When I called to make the appointment they got me right in just a few days later, because I had breast cancer once, many years ago. That's the policy, to get us in for those mammograms.

I don't really think of myself as a cancer survivor now, but as a kidney patient. As for cancer, I like to consider myself not in remission but cured. I liked to think that five years out, when I got off tamoxifen, I was done with cancer. But deep within I now know that it can strike any time, anywhere. You don't have to have symptoms. And my first cancer was found on a mammogram. So I don't want to have a mammogram, and somehow the appointment gets procrastinated.

Of course a mammogram hurts, and worse in the breast that had surgery, even though the people at JamesCare are both skilled and kind. But what hurts worse is sitting afterwards waiting while the radiologist looks at the films. The waiting room is thoughtfully arranged, with coffee and tea and snack bars, and cheery bright magazines. But you wait. This time it was about half an hour. The door opens, people come out, but they are not for you. I felt raw. I leafed through the pages of a Metropolitan Home without interest in decorating anything in my home. It's where I live.

Finally the door opened and the nurse called my name. I gathered my parka, bag of clothes, and essential comfort scarf, and went through the door with her. They don't tell you anything until you're through the door into the hall. Then they say it right away with a smile:

Everything looks fine. You're free to go.

Everything went out of me with a whoosh. It was as if I had been holding my breath all this time. Then I clumsily found my way through the halls to the exit. I have been doing this for 13 years, but I get it wrong, and someone helps me.

In the car I ate part of a snack bar, willing the sugar to help me concentrate and drive home safely. There I told Tom that next year I will ask him to drive me. Sure, he said. That's what it's about.

A thought about this little ordeal. In early years I believed that if I meditated enough I would be calm in the face of anything. I guess that's how I saw enlightenment, as a state that was beyond being human, as detachment from everything. But it seems to me that now these medical events rock me more than they once did. That that's being alive. I'll take it.

A note on one-pronged practice

This morning I woke up at 5:00, as I do once in a while. Getting my annual mammogram today. Thirteen years since I had breast cancer. They have been difficult years but I'm so glad I had them.

Meanwhile, the year's brightest moon is dropping through the bare branches of the oaks. I have never seen it move so fast - you can almost see it moving. But I am not a good moon watcher unless I'm on retreat, where there is so little stimulation that the sky becomes enough, becomes fascinating when you get a break and get to see it.

Yesterday after church my older friend Nancy and I shared a hug, as we do, and talked a little about what's going on in our lives. I reminded her how we used to enjoy meditating together years ago in a little group, nothing special. She told me she doesn't meditate now, meaning sit, but tries to be totally aware as she does her t'ai chi in the morning. I remarked that that's a form of meditation, and I said, an afterthought, "Anyway, what really matters is what you do when you're not meditating."

She was struck by that, and so was I, the statement coming out in that good space you can be in after church. It laid it out for me in plain talk, what the bodhissatva vow is all about, what we mean by being on the Buddha way. We don't vow to meditate all day - meditation is only one of the steps on the eightfold path. I recalled an incident in one of Bernie Glassman's books, where the sangha goes to meditate in an abandoned schoolyard, then gets to work cutting down weeds. He says something like "Meditation is a luxury, I could do it all day. But there's work to be done."

Here and there I've written about how I came to Buddhism privately, through books and tapes. Later, I found group practice on retreats with a sangha that emphasized form in imitation of the Japanese tradition. Ritual, severity, discipline seemed to be everything. I was challenged and fascinated by the wierdness, frankly, and learned how to do things right, but I also rebelled against the militarism, heirarchy, and violence. This teacher's use of the stick ultimately drove me away.

I tried hard but couldn't reconcile it with the ideal of kindness I believe is fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, the religions I have practiced in my life. I couldn't reconcile it with the feminist ideals of cooperation and respect. And, like many women who were abused as girls, I could not be comfortable with the ideal of obedience expressed in full prostrations to the teacher as I entered and left dokusan, and more generally, with the many stories in this tradition of rudeness and violence as a teaching method. I am far from alone in this. I know there are wonderful women offering retreats in gentler styles.

This is a big subject, and a fundamental question for each individual: How do we practice the Buddha Way? Is it "just sitting"?

I hope that just sitting naturally improves people, which is the theory behind a one-pronged practice. I hope sitting builds awareness "off the cushion," and that helps us to be kind as we cut through our dualism, but I have seen it to not come true. Being A Student of Zen can so easily be used to feel superior to all those non-meditators out there that I have started making a point of not making a point of it, if you know what I mean. The far enemy of regular practice is arrogance, the near enemy smugness. Something like that.

It is so easy to fall off the path! For years I have yearned for a Teacher to locate here in central Ohio, and begin to build a sangha in which we could work together on some meaningful service. The events in Haiti unfolding in the news night after night make me yearn for involvement in a Buddhist organization with open hands, with a mission beyond . . . just beyond.