Reality checks

You have to be Zen to appreciate what I did this morning. Regular people are quick to call such things OCD (and BTW, I am so tired of the glib-pop western psych ways of seeing things). The act in question: I timed myself unloading the dishwasher.

The timer was right there; I use it to boil an egg in the morning, as I am in the grip of the latest study, in which people who ate an egg (or three) for breakfast ate less calories throughout the day, and lost more weight than people who ate a bagel for breakfast. So it's not like using the timer took effort. And it is a very nice little Pyrex timer that will obediently count up for you if you like. I use it a lot, sometimes as a reminder that I have somewhere to go. I am always working with or against time, it seems, like some long-legged bird that doesn't stand up too well in the stream.

This morning seemed crowded. My first priority was a shower complete with washing hair. Yesterday I had been too tired, don't know why. Went to sleep knowing it was first priority. I have many observations about how as you age, just taking care of your body's needs becomes harder in every respect, except that you learn not to get drunk.

But breakfast came first in my day, and a discussion with Tom, who is modeling the financial management that would enable us to move to a continuing care retirement community some day. Then we talked about my concern, how I lost impetus on my poetry projects this week. By listening, he helped me see that I had just met a couple of karmic obstacles, but really did keep working all week. (Working instead of blogging, because that's the way it goes. You can't multi-task writing.)

Unloading the dishwasher, not counting silverware, took five minutes. That's all. I kind of thought so. I knew my resistance to doing it didn't really make sense. This, then, was a successful reality check.

The problem, if there is a problem, is that the dishwasher often needs to be unloaded in the morning, and that's when I have the energy to do a thousand things, including working through my karmic obstacles to writing. I'd think I'm not that unusual. One wakes up refreshed. That was part of my problem this morning - I had slept ten hours, thus not waking up till the sun began piercing the little holes in the room-darkening shade. Thus I woke up refreshed. But there wasn't so much morning left by 9:00 a.m. However, letting the clean dishes sit in the dishwasher means the day's dirty dishes start piling up on the counter. We don't like that.

I think I have partly worked through the dishwasher-resistance problem now that I understand it only takes five minutes. You can make it through anything for five minutes. And giving thought to this little problem tells me it would be best to do said task in the evening, when I usually don't want to do anything much, anyway. Yes.

And now it has gotten to be after 5:00, what with meeting a friend for coffee, then fertilizing the azaleas and the dogwood, and the bulbs in the front of the house, since it is going to rain tomorrow. I do have just a bit more energy than I usually have, though, so I am going to actually, finally set out to learn GIMPshop. I don't think the world needs another person making sunsets more contrasty and people's faces more orange, but, oh, sometimes when I should resist, I don't.
[the image: something leafing out in the ravine]

Instructions for the Cook

Tonight we watched a documentary about Bernie Glassman that Tom got off the web. A simple film that goes through the five stages of making the meal of your life, it is titled after Glassman's book, Instructions for the Cook, one of the first Zen books that deeply engaged us.

He came to the point about looking at your ingredients. Using the metaphor of cooking an omelet, he opened the refrigerator and said, "You just look. Observe." He said we confine ourselves, we think much too small. He talked about how we think there's such a limited amount of money, but there isn't, and I recalled how he got Greyston Mandala funded. It is a huge endeavor, and seemed amazing in the book. But in the documentary it did not seem so amazing when you saw him sitting there quietly (in outrageous suspenders) explaining how he thought. We have much more to give than we think, and there is much more out there for us than we realize.

Out of nowhere I was struck with a personal realization: "I'll never get published in Poetry Magazine if I don't send them anything." (Poetry being the highest peak of that particular world.) I realized I've had a very small vision, an idea that there was a tortuously long, steep path that led to a basketball hoop way too high for little me. So, mind clarified a bit, and without even a real dokusan. [The image of Glassman Roshi above is said to be of him doing dokusan at the Yonkers zendo.]

and death i think is no parentheses

We had one red tulip in a vase on our kitchen table. I stuck in a stray hosta leaf, and liked the effect. Later, the tulip dropped its six petals one by one, leaving what you may agree looks like an ethereal being, halo slipped down a bit, raising its arms in joy.

There are many problems with this as a photograph, but it was the best I could do right now. I had a pulmonary function test today and am tired. I love the quilted effect of the leaf, and its ruffled edge . . . and where the stem enters the water.

Two days ago, in a routine followup, my doctor asked me whether I had found a live donor. No. I confessed to him that I couldn't even do the first thing to look for one for three years after a nephrologist told me I needed to do that.

He nodded. "That's because it would mean admitting how sick you are."

Sometimes they're so sharp, or you're just in a place where you're ready to hear. This remark went in and ruined the happy equilibrium I've had for quite a while. Oh, sometimes I would cry, but not for long. But this stirred up the waters. I ended up saying to Tom, "I don't want to die. I don't know what's there."

I will die, and much sooner if the only treatment I can get for my ever-lower kidney function is dialysis. It merely keeps you alive; it doesn't give you back your life. I will live longer if I get a kidney from a deceased donor - I've been waiting for that for two years. I will live much longer and be healthier if I get a kidney from a living donor. That's getting a new life.

Quite a while back I saw how uncomfortable people were when they asked me hopefully, "How are you doing? You look good," and I responded with the truth. I decided this kind of statement/inquiry is social, like "How do you do?" which isn't really a question. So I've been upbeat about this constant decline in my health, about the three hospitalizations last year, though they went into the church newsletter. About not being able to go to the church's Labor Day Retreat any more, too hard on me to have a bad night's sleep. I'm never going to get the truth out this way. I need a way to be honest and let other people deal with their own discomfort. It's a Zen thing, just be sincere.

I slept very long last night and had a complicated dream, from which I awoke thinking I'm going to start a second blog and call it "Looking for a Kidney." That seems less aggressive than "Dying for a Kidney." So I might do that, when I feel more rested. The transplant surgeon ordered the pulmonary function test because I am increasingly short of breath. It does that to you.

The tulip, if it can think or sense, may understand it is a bulb that has a good chance of blooming next year. I wish I thought I did.

Rare and wonderful sights

Last night - what excitement! My friend and I were driving around our neighborhood, enjoying the bloom, and shaking our heads at the lakes of garlic mustard - a horribly invasive plant in our ravine that you can see will overcome all the Virginia Bluebells and Dutchman's breeches. People band together to pick it. We were on Glenmont Avenue getting near to the light at High Street, when I saw something different in a well-trimmed yard to our right. I said, "Are those real?"

They were. Two deer. Then two more. Then another. All walking delicately toward the busy street. Down the hill into a parking lot. My friend and I got frantic, afraid they would go out into High Street. Then I saw a white Volvo parked around the corner with his trouble lights blinking. A man got out of it, and his wife. I pulled around behind him and turned my blinker on too, hoping to help stop traffic. Now we were looking at - count them - eight deer. In the city.

Some people were trying to photograph them, but I was too flustered. Some were trying to shoo them back away from High. The man called out, "No, they want to cross the street. They belong over there." Over there was a steep, undeveloped piece of land, heavily treed.

More people got the idea, and now there was a loosely coordinated action, traffic stopped both sides, and the deer were shooed across the street, into their deep woods. Where they wanted to go, they just didn't know how. And what were they doing up there in our pretty gardens? Probably eating tulips, we thought, and not garlic mustard.
~~~~~~~
The image above is my photo of a Dutchman's Breeches in the ravine, a plant I never expected to see in the wild. It favors rich woods. I want to memorize the lacy foliage, too, so I can identify its fruits later this summer, which Audubon describes as "oblong to linear capsule, opening to base into 2 parts when mature." I guess I need to go down there again today and see what's going on. I'll let you know.

The Great Matter

I was surprised and pleased to see this Mayflower blooming yesterday, April 20. They're called "May" apples. They are very shy, hiding under the big leaves. Described in my Audubon guide as "Solitary, nodding flower . . . The common name refers to the May blooming of its apple-blossom-like flower." Audubon is quite right - they appear around here where there is a damp, shady clearing in rich woods.

This morning Tricycle sent me an article by Stephen and Ondrea Levine. Many American Buddhists know them as a couple who have worked with dying. They say that so often when they sat with people who were on their deathbed, they heard these three themes -

I wish I had gotten divorced earlier; I wish I had taken a job for love of the work, not money; I wish I had played and enjoyed myself more.

The first one sort of surprised me until I thought that getting divorced is often more than separating from that person - it involves pulling ourselves out of a life that was given to us, and making our own choices for the first time. How hard it is to just be yourself; otherwise there would be no need for Zen.

The second one, no surprise. In my own life, what a hard time I had accepting that there was something I loved to do - write. I'll spare you the actual biography, but how sad it seems to me when I remember years in a suit and heels, shopping mindlessly on lunch hour because it was at least a little break from the boredom, instead of writing children's books.

And play. Yesterday I drove down to the ravine and walked around with my camera. I discovered the mayapples, some blue jay feathers, some little purple flowers I can't find in my Guide. Maybe they are perennial phlox that wandered down that way, or maybe something that has never been named or classified. I'm going to go down there tomorrow and see if I can find them and have a close look at the leaves. Useless activity. Play.

The Direct Apprehension of X

I've had a couple of days that didn't go the way I like my mornings to go, but that were delightful, given they were about Tom's birthday, and then about planting in the front gardens. Lovely days that interrupted my routine, and caused me to think about just how is it I like my morning to go. It's this: I like a spacious time to wander in, to be mystic.

Last week, looking up Julian of Norwich, I found myself reading and thinking about mystical practices. I didn't quite understand until then that Zen is in that category - a practice whose purpose is to help us directly apprehend X, however you name the sacred and ineffable in the universe: God, Buddha nature, reality.

For me, poetry is an expression of what I sometimes hear in that wandering state. If I write a poem, it is usually be in those quiet early hours, before Tom gets up and my day swings into another gear. In that early time - and I like to have two hours - I usually meditate and read some thing you could call inspirational. A life of a saint or a monk or teacher, a talk. I drink coffee and sort of do nothing, look out the window. This time of year I might wander in the back yard, looking to see what's come up.

Mystic experiences come in many forms. In Zen we think about kensho which is often a pretty big experience of having the ordinary structures of the conditioned mind blow apart, and apprehending the nature of the universe. Usually in Zen, your troubles now begin. For where Julian of Norwich may have wanted to stay in a constant prayerful state, in communion with the God who spoke revelations to her, Zen is designed to insist we come back into everyday reality, which we maintain is the best state. So it is said (to mystify the newcomer) that before enlightenment you haul water, chop wood. And after enlightenment you haul water, and chop wood. Of course there is a trick in there; before enlightenment you weren't really with it at all.

When you finally get to enlightenment, it is commonly said, it will not be what you thought it would. It is just - reality. Your body feels real to you. You like it. You are happy with yourself and your life, you ride along life's waves with equanimity. Let's see, what did I leave out? Well, the image above, Tom amid a flock of flamingos to celebrate a nothing-special birthday. In case you can't read the sign, it says "We flew in to make Tom's birthday classy." A little English-major irony there. That's our house to the left, with the red Japanese maple in front of it.

Finches on the sock feeder - I want to cup them in my hand, just touch their tiny heads with a forefinger. Live, in person, not six feet away, you see their miracle. Their intricacy. The pair of them, golden male and more subtly colored female, feed together. Their style is to take a seed in the beak and look up while they eat it. Looking around, I'd guess, watching or predators.

My little feeder is hung on a rather delicate branch that the Mu's (a neighbor's twin black cats) cannot climb. It hangs under other branches, so you wouldn't think a hawk could get through to grab the birds. I try to imagine life when you are so delicate, so small. In children's books, very small things have secret cities and palaces of green. I once wanted to write a book, for adults, that would present rabbits - well, bunnies as I thought of them - who lived in a bean field. How it would be to be in there when it rained. I didn't stop to think about how the beans would eventually be harvested. Maybe I could make it an abandoned farm. Farms and gardens do get abandoned. We once were in a CSA with some young women who were doing intensive organic farming. The food they gave us every week taught us what food is, how vegetables could taste. But they had to give it up - exhausting, and not enough money in it.

So these rabbits set up cautiously, once they see that this field is being let to go its own way. It's just an acre, but to them it's huge. Rabbits have been done masterfully in Watership Down, stray thought. What will happen of course . . . what would happen? There would be a kid who discovered the self-seeded carrots, the thrill of pulling them up and taking them home. A story there, that kid's story. There would be a family that moved in after a while, maybe a single mother and kid, maybe the same kid and his mother. They had to move out of where they were, she is barely earning enough money for milk, working part time at the Dairy Queen. They are squatters. What about the all-important running water and toilet? Electricity. Heat as winter comes on. Children's stories today address things like that with less sentiment than they once did.

An unbelievably beautiful day. Creative energy high, wants to go all over the place. This is my hour to let it do that.

[image: from Claire's Photostream. The sock feeder is on a window, with a suction cup, so she is right up close to the male goldfinch. I wonder if he's changing from winter color in the photo - they get more golden down the chest. See how easy it is to cling with those tiny claws on the net in the sock feeder, which has holes just big enough to let a bird pluck out a tiny seed, but not big enough for seeds to fall out on their own.]
May all beings enjoy such wonderful food.

Change

What a wonderful morning. What a wonderful moment - I am sitting at my computer facing north. I have a view of the beautiful old cedar in Carter's yard, several great oaks, other evergreens, bushes that attract birds. It's like having a new study. And all without the terrible anxiety of moving, of someone else having your prized things in their truck. In moving, you are for the moment homeless. I myself feel that keenly.

Back story: a week ago I decided I didn't want to put up anymore with the problem of facing west when I was at my computer. Most afternoons it was too bright to work, unless you pulled down an obstreperous room-darkening blind, which created an unpleasant atmosphere, and didn't want to go back up - yes, a roller blind that came with the house.

As I stood in my study doorway considering the problem, a simple answer struck me - move my project table under the west window, and my computer under the north window. I know that even now there are people chuckling at the idea that this would be simple, what with a PC and two printers, one of which is hooked up to a fax. I think we're dinosaurs in this respect - we don't use laptops. Tom doesn't like the idea of carrying a computer - you might drop it.

We go back a ways with all this. He got our first PC when they came out, around 1981 was it? He couldn't resist. He loves this stuff, and if he could fill my study with a mainframe, he just might. As it is, a regular PC seems huge compared to my friends' slim pretty laptops. Separate system unit, separate ergonomic keyboard, separate speakers and monitor, all those wires. We did streamline the mouse recently, went to wireless. I know one thing we get for this is that Tom can tear things apart, install more memory, things like that, and we never have to spend a lot on computers at any one time.

This morning our lovely friend Greg came over to help with our List: the weird miscellany of things that need done around the house, the little things that eventually drive old people to move to a retirement village if they don't have a handy child or friend like Greg. Getting ready for the move, I cleared away the detritus of my creativity - a quartz half-sphere, the Shaker boxes that hold shells and rocks, the stuffed ferret - and they sprang into action. I wisely left the room (you do learn some things with age). In no time, Tom called me: there it was, my PC was booting up.

It was hard being without it for that half hour, though, at my own most creative hour of the day. Ideas for the blog kept floating into my mind as I folded dishtowels - there's a subject, folding dishtowels. Thinking about it fanned out like a cloud to Aunt Doris, who sent her nieces and nephews each a linen calendar towel at Christmas. Even the one from 1984 is still perfectly good, though I don't know where a lot of missing years are. I also remembered Aunt Evelyn, who by example taught me how to do the most menial household task with care. When you fold dishtowels or socks, you keep scissors at hand to cut loose threads.

My angst at missing the opportunity to write about these women, who have departed, and about many other things connected to dishtowels, like how I resented it my health meant I had to stop ironing them . . . I recognized that forlorn feeling. It comes over me when I arrive at retreat empty-handed. No laptop. I might take a yellow pad and two pens, but at a Zen retreat you're not supposed to write. Doing that in free time is breaking a contract that may or may not be spoken. Now I have a little netbook, which would really be easy to sneak in, but will I?

Ah yes, this morning I missed the moment to write in depth about that. But here I am, back in my Zen tree house, hooked up again, facing that even north light. Everything just as it ought to be.

Sheba and the Way of Healing

We brought Sheba home late last summer. A very nervous little tiger cat, who had spent six months in Cat Welfare in the little glass room where unadoptable old lady cats like to stay. She sat on a low pillar there, jumping about in fright whenever the door opened. Jumping down to take a bite of food, jumping back up to safety to eat it. When we visited, we were not able to pick her up or even to pet her - she was so generally afraid.

When we brought her home, she kept her distance. She was starved, starved for touch, and allowed us to pet her a bit, but then ran away. When anyone else came into the house, she walked away and curled up in a bedroom.

Here it is, about six months later, and Sheba is sitting on an armchair in the living room watching TV with our friends. She is letting strangers come in and disturb her nap and pet her. She has gone from neurotic to just, oh, timid. Cautious. You still can't pick her up, and she won't come up on my lap, but my friend Scott assures me that just takes patient training.

In other words, Sheba has substantially healed. I remain impressed by that. What has healed her? No therapy. Just a safe, affectionate environment.

When we think about healing from our own psychological difficulties, the fears that constrain us, the unmet desires, we so often think of doing something. Often we need to do something. But the other kind of work, meditation, is about "just sitting," doing nothing. Being there without any hope of gain, letting ourselves abandon our thoughts and desires instead of working them.

Zen postulates that this is a healing activity, this plain sitting. When we do it, we are giving ourselves the luxury of time in a healing environment, for in the present moment there is nothing to harm us. It is a safe place. I have often had the sense walking into a Zen center that there is a deep, healing silence there. These bright days of riotous bloom, I sometimes feel that when I come home and into a dim room.

I have also found that as I meditated, I have become more sensitive to how I feel around certain people or in certain places. Whether someone is good for me or makes me uneasy. This enables me to keep putting myself in the environments I need. "What is good for me" becomes simple. I find myself thinking, these beautiful spring days, of Julian of Norwich's famous revelation, a reassurance that we can abandon striving and trust in the Tao or in God, who she believed spoke these words to her:
"…All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well"

[image: Sheba in zazen, sitting on a sacred text (the morning Times).]

The Princess who Went Back Home

Sometimes I think I make it too simple. I see all people struggling to ease their own suffering. Some do it in ways that just make things worse - spending, drinking, winning - and some know the ways that work: simple attentiveness. The practices of generosity and compassion and understanding, like that. As if by magic, but it isn't magic, the actions that relieve our own suffering also give a little relief to the sufferings of the world.

It's not just me - it actually is simple. That relief is found in one's own intentional actions. No one can give it to you. Learning that might fall in the category of wisdom, hard-earned in my own case. I tried everything before I finally tried sitting down to do nothing but be with myself. My life was like an epic fairy tale of a young person who goes forth looking for the precious jewel under every rock. Battling major forces, enduring great hardship. And here it was all along, inside me once I settled down. If I wrote it, I'd call it, The Princess who Went Back Home. Empty-handed. And here it was, contentment, sitting by the fire waiting for me.
[image: our magnolia against a backdrop of petals fallen to the brick patio. Perhaps fortunately, I have not yet learned to use Photoshop.]

The gateless box

Last night we invited our Zen group here to watch the PBS special on Buddha's life. Some of the people who came were new to us. All said at the door, "I don't have a television, myself." Sigh. Tom and I manifest our flaws. I was glad to see this touched upon in the special - that even Buddha himself could get angry. I liked that. Just that afternoon I'd gotten too tired and had a temper flareup. Stupid. After that I found myself sitting and trying to dispense with the sense in my ribs and throat of having had an adrenalin spurt. Then I talked to myself about just accepting how I am, adrenalized and all. I don't think this is some form of mental illness; rather it's pretty much what we humans do. It just takes years of practice to notice yourself doing it.

We enjoyed having people here, just the right amount of people, the right people, bringing the right snacks. I was amazed to see Sheba take up position in one of the little blue armchairs and watch the program. This is the cat that six months ago, even a month ago, left the room when anyone came into the house. We talked about how much cats like meditators.

Let's see - what was I going to write about? Oh, maybe how I am at a fruitful time right now; every day or two I clean up some little mess, some square foot of my territory. The other day it was my closet floor. Took out the pictures-we-don't-know-what-to-do-with-but-are-grasping. Put all my purses in the right size plastic box. Put shoes on top of said box. It was awe-inspiring. We've been here seven years; I am beginning to address the problem of what to do with the pictures. A couples project. Ah yes.

Today my spring nest-cleaning went even better. Calmed and softened, refreshed by being with meditators, I realized I could take a different approach to the archive box that has been sitting on my study floor nagging me, haunting me, insisting it had priority over more interesting things to do. Sorting these old papers was a job that was going very slow.

Wait, I thought, isn't there room in these file cabinets? I refer to two four-drawer file cabinets, the ugly old functional kind that you thought you needed at one time. Actually, they're very pretty, now that I look at them with gratitude. For these cabinets yielded two empty drawers to me, and I filled them with the stuff from the box.

You might say that wouldn't satisfy you, and I can't blame you. You might say all I have done is hide the papers from myself. But it's bigger than that, somehow. After months of hating that box, I saw my way around it - an obstacle that's not an obstacle, really. Its solidity melted as I realized that the only reason those old papers mattered was because I could see them. Now they became nothing but a bunch of old papers in two drawers, to be handled at some other time. Or not.

But before I closed the drawers and took the box downstairs to Tom, who's been wanting an archive box, I pulled out a fat file titled humor in red like that. I remembered how I went through a spell of writing short humor pieces after I got my PhD, a sort of finding my voice again.

I liked the first one, which is about my negative attitude toward pain. Reading it, I was pleased to be reminded that in 1996 I suffered keenly from fibromyalgia. A combination of years of sitting, Flexaril at night, and the slow magical unstressing of personal growth has made fibromyalgia pain no longer an issue in my life, though I left it in the piece, because it worked so well there. That was then; happily, this is now.
[image: a type of box, from this creativity website]

[image: Saucer magnolia blooming for Easter]
Here is a paragraph from John Tarrant's talk about the koan, The Moon sets at Midnight. I put this under my transparent desk blotter a year or more ago, when I had reason to feel somewhat disabled. I found a lot of richness in it. The idea of "satisfactory vices." The idea that a rich life could also be a difficult life. The very idea of dis-ability. Not being interrupted by your scenario. In my case today, a little depressed by the thought that several days of very nice spring holiday are over. But it's still April.

Athletes are trained to not get interrupted by their scenarios. Otherwise if someone insults you on the field, you lose your game, and what’s the use of that? Another example would be for a disabled person to say, "I am disabled so I can’t do anything, my life is over." Even though you may have plenty of data points to back it up, that is a scenario that won’t help you. Without that thought world you might find that you can be disabled and develop plenty of very satisfactory vices and live a rich, complicated and difficult life.

Every day's an interesting day

A day or two ago I spied a book at the bottom of a stack of recently purchased books, called Awakening to the Sacred by Lama Surya Das. I read a bit of it before bed. I am thinking of the sacred now, responding to Easter.

The next day, which was yesterday, I recalled the book's invitation to think of many ways you can contact the sacred, and set out with my camera to walk in the ravine. If there is any one thing I feel grateful for most often, it is the ability to walk, for I was off my feet for eight or nine months last year, and then spent months getting used to walking. Now walking meditation is not hard for me - walking is always conscious, a pleasure.

I found to my delight that walking down to the stream was nothing. Easy. I decided to take the left fork and walk on to the little bridge over which I once saw a Great Blue Heron fly - a breath-stopping sight. I turned and walked back, taking the above picture of backlit leaves coming forth like a flame. Spring is very eager around here now, the saucer magnolias getting ready to burst out for Easter. So I got lost, which is hard to do when there are only two roads, and I know them very well. Spring befuddlement. I was gone an hour.

All well and good. But last night I did a poetry reading, and as a result of all that, today I'm tired. Too tired to shower. My initial reaction this morning has been to feel sad, sorry that my energy is so low. Well, I have a little work to do to get beyond that and make my way to a deeper understanding. And I think that way is not only the Buddhist way, but also the way of the Tao, and the way of Christianity, the belief systems I am familiar with. I suspect it is the way of every religion, at heart - the spiritual understanding that things are as they are, that we can have faith in that. In reality, which moves on.

Sick or poor or alone or overburdened or in grief - there are many conditions you can wake up and find yourself in on any given day. I have a calligraphy Tom bought me a while back after I'd been working the koan, "Every day's a good day." A statement to ponder whenever you're displeased with your life. How can that possibly be true - every day's a good day - when ____. Fill in the blank.

I am sure this is not about talking yourself into cheerful, something I hate. It is more about just sitting and being with how you are without putting labels on it. Feeling the feeling, a therapist might say, but it is also discarding your ideas, assumptions as elementary as "High energy is better," and your desires, desires like "I want more energy." Sitting in meditation you actually feel the desire. Then, equally difficult, you let it pass away. If you sit in meditation or prayer for a few moments, you find even an obsessive thought pattern has passed and you are thinking about something else, like folding the towels in the dryer, or the chalk whiteness of the sycamores across the ravine.

To some degree we pass beyond the very words "good" and "bad." After all, evaluation is not the direct experience of reality, but a concept structure that exists only in the mind. If I do discard those words, I seem to experience life more as interesting, and absorbing. Sheba here at my left hand, getting some good petting because I am rereading what I wrote, not typing. She's got this figured out in that tiny brain about the size of a walnut. Simple. Mom sits at the computer every morning, and when I come over, walking carefully between the keyboard and the screen, she turns on the desk lamp for me. And pats me. Every day's a good day.