A Zen student must go straight

In order to be worthy as a Zen student
I must go straight on a narrow mountain road
that has ninety-nine curves.

[image:  David Link, sierracanon]

A very energetic mind this morning, after (at last) a good night's sleep.

Somehow I thought of this koan, one that my teacher Amasamy included in his booklet on koans.  It is a metaphor that sinks in as an image.  How do you go straight when the road curves?  Picture it.

Looking for the correct wording of this koan, I found a book online, The Flowing Bridge, which has a chapter about it.  It led me on what is probably a fool's path, trying to get emptiness in my gut by understanding it cognitively.  Definitions, Japanese-English dictionary (ku).  The author says you follow Essential mind, which makes me feel indeed like an unworthy Zen student, so involved these days with the phenomena of my personal body, so little time and energy to just stroll, just be, to be aimless.  I used to read Dogen, not with the guidance of any teacher or sangha, just because I wanted to.

In earlier years, on retreats with teachers, especially Amasamy, who is also a Jesuit priest, and has a history as a mystic, I sometimes got quite mystical.  This poem comes to mind, written in that state of mind. God, I miss those retreats.

Webs
by Jeanne Desy

For I have seen the ten thousand webs of the weaver,
so many wheels on the wire fence,
felt myself a wishbone to be taken and split,

fashioned small semblances on paper, in speech,
a thousand times, contrived a thousand masks,
to what purpose?   O Death, I hear your song.

Host to a multitude, I studied everything, 
retained it all, remember nothing now.
I am held in the hand and not found.

Realized the first riddle, whispered the answer,
not heard what I said, slept and forgot,

saw the holy shuffle of skeletons
around the meditation hall,
our bony rattle silenced by flesh,
soft body, soft breath. 
It is easy to die, said the Master—
all you do is breathe out.

Four yellow butterflies dance around my feet
   on a road where gravel casts shadows.

The goat turns from the herd, steps toward me,
   the duck stops splashing to look in my eyes.

I unfold and become
galaxies woven on the yew,
   prayer flags fastened to grass,
      sighing in the breeze,
         invisible web     a net of dew.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
August 2001
Amasamy retreat

Get ready

Today after church, bright-eyed with happiness, Laurie told me that she passed the Donor Day tests (EKG and chest X-ray, among others).  I just sighed.  Networks of internal tension began to relax.  I'd had a couple of bad nights, waking up and not being able to go back to sleep.

They asked her when we should schedule the surgery and she told them 4-6 weeks, and the nurse wrote that down.  Seems to mean they will go ahead and schedule, though Laurie has one more test this week - a cat scan of her kidneys, so they can determine which one to take.  It is very unlikely that they will find any problems now, after the preliminary tests of her kidneys.

She reminded me that I also have to "pass" a blood draw to examine my lipase enzyme, which will tell what kind of shape my pancreas is in.  That's scheduled for Sept. 1.  Then there's making sure the nurse has the results of my recent big tests.

My, this is so data oriented.  What do you say?  I was aware that no sooner do you pass a major hurdle - Donor Day - than two more rise before you.  Then we'll be ready for surgery.

This transplant has many possibilities, but the odds are good (95%) that it will take and work well, because it's from a living donor.  If so, it will revitalize me as the new kidney cleans my blood and tissues. Once I recover I'll have more energy.  Enough to visit the Park of Roses when the traditional rose garden is in bloom.  Enough to actually make the collage of materials that represent my summer.  Hospital bands, thank-you notes, pretty papers, petals.  In the center will be a tiny Chinese fortune I found in a pocket the other day.  It says "Get ready for a daring adventure."
[image:  a white single rose in the Park of Roses in Columbus, Ohio]

Unreasonable expectations

I usually like my mailings from Tricycle, but this morning Matthieu Ricard struck me the wrong way. He wrote -

Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure than he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them. There will be no “hard fall” when things turn bad and he is confronted with adversity. He does not sink into depression, since his happiness rests on a solid foundation.

Well, that's not me.

This came on the heels of a bad night, wide awake and depressed at 5:00 a.m.  My first thought was, Easy to say when you are a monk who lives in the mountains of Tibet. My life is more complicated.  Then I remembered that he has done a good deal of traveling in support of his books, a form of teaching, though he prefers to be at home.  I also remember an American teacher, John Tarrant, who lives as a householder and presents himself as constantly happy, undisturbed even when visiting a friend who is dying.  It is an ideal in Zen and perhaps in Buddhism in general - an undisturbed equanimity and inner sunshine. Enlightenment.

Well, that's not me.  I am emotional and responsive.  I feel intensely, given to rapture and bursts of tears.  As our old cat Sherlock used to say, "That's the kind of cat I am."  I am that, along with being naturally creative and nurturing.  This maybe is the answer to the first koan a teacher gave me, "Who is that one?" meaning, Who are you?  I am embodied and sensitive.

From what I read about the brain and gender, maybe these qualities are just being feminine.  This is about the thousandth time I've been driven to think about the masculinity of Zen, specifically, the tradition I've practiced in, Japanese Zen.  Yes, it teaches the Bodhissatva ideal, to serve all beings.  This emphasis appears much more in books than on retreats, where it is common to treat retreatants really badly in the paramilitary Japanese tradition, depriving us of sleep, hitting us with sticks, allowing no personal time.  On the one hand, this is the tradition that has come my way here in the American midwest, where there is a shortage of authentic teachers.  On the other hand, I have been attracted to Japanese Zen, fascinated in the beginning (Are they serious!?) 

So many of us pick the religious practice that serves our trip, or make it serve our trip.  This is easily seen in yoga classes where people vye to "do the pose perfectly," seeing it as accomplishment rather than a spiritual practice. My trip was trying too hard, trying to be perfect, believing I could be, believing that out there if I did practice hard enough was exactly that perfect happiness Ricard describes.  And not so incidentally, I would rise above my reaction to people using the noun "men." to mean "people", which dates from a time when only men were considered human.  A time when it was believed that one could achieve enlightenment only "in a male body."

Well, if I had much more access to a teacher, she might have helped me unlearn all that.  In fact, I am being helped right now by James Baraz book Awakening Joy.  Maybe joy is an easier thing to aim for than happiness.

But I am who I am.  Yesterday's labs showed I am still anemic, hemoglobin under 10, despite 40,000 units of EPO, enough to help you win the Tour de France. That accounts in part for the slow depression I have been in; you are not just what you think. 

I gave myself another shot yesterday; it will take a while.  Meanwhile I have to confront the dread special pharmacy that handles this very expensive drug, which requires refrigeration all along the way.  It can take weeks to unravel their Byzantine structures and get a refill. On the happiness side, I am glad to have the drug, and the double insurance (earned through working dull, meaningless jobs) that pays for it. 

Maybe more important to my happiness, this live transplant thing has been dragging along for over two months now, and still no answer as to whether the donor qualifies.  This has given me ample time to think about all the things that can go wrong, and how they can go wrong any time - before the transplant, at the moment of surgery, the next day, refusal of the kidney to take, any day in the years after.  I wouldn't do it, except that dialysis is the only option.  Hard, very hard to feel lucky that you have these options.  It's there, but today I just feel discouraged. Well, I'm almost 68, and all these years of work have changed me in some ways, but not perfected me.  My new motto, related to this, and Baraz' book, is Don't try so hard. Maybe that's a form of enlightenment, to relax.

[image:  Oak twig and shadow, Jeanne Desy]

The pain in your neck

Ten years ago the pain in my neck was a great problem to me.  Whenever I was trying to sit still, as when  sitting with a group or just conversing with someone, the pain set up within 90 seconds, and I had an irresistable desire to move my head around and ease the stiffness.  But that didn't . . .
[interrupted by a phone call - it wasn't the transplant center]
moving didn't work for long.  In another 90 seconds, the neck was stiff and painful again, and I wanted to move again.  But shrugging or circling my head around didn't work for long.

When I started taking private tai-chi lessons, Nathan asked me what my physical problems were.  I told him about my neck, how moving the neck just didn't ease it.

He replied, "That's because the pain in your neck isn't really in your neck."

"Where is it?" I asked, surprised.

"Down here." He indicated my lower back. . .
[interrupt to search for neck wrap and put a load in the wash since I'm downstairs. heat neck wrap in microwave.  aah.  it lands on shoulders just right.]

Nathan could see in tai chi class how stiffly I held my back, not moving from the core.  For our first private lessons all he did was work on pressure points to relieve my stiffness, and at the same time release my energy.  Everyone cries.  He uses a lot of pressure.

The tai chi was a good thing for me, uniting my body with its parts and with my mind.  It seemed more effective than the reiki treatments I'd had - but who was I to lie flat while half a dozen strangers almost touched me?

Today the pain in my right shoulder and neck is partly, I suppose, about waiting for that phone call - are we Yes on the transplant and head into a new life, or No - start over?  But it is also partly that two nights ago Tom wrapped my lymphedemic arm with compression bandages before bed.  When the wrap is really tight, so I can't bend my elbow, it can lead to this.  And then, my dull headache is the usual these days, uremia it's called, basic poisoning from waste the kidneys are not able to remove from the blood.

And then I do have fibromyalgia, confirmed by two doctors who know all about it.  You get these miscellaneous aches and pains.  When I was first diagnosed with that back then - complaining about the chronic pain in my lower back - I thought it was a big deal.  Now it is just unpleasant background noise. 

[image:  a neck wrap stuffed with healing herbs, so maybe better than mine, which is filled with just plain buckwheat, but also microwavable.  Mine is shaped like an enso, and is better for shoulder pain.]

Tapping desire

Today is another day, and I am waiting for a phone call from the transplant center - two days ago Laurie had her last tests.  Someone should know whether she passed or failed.  Aieee.

Appropriately, I began my day with a dharma reading about desire - how we can simply own our desire and not rush to fulfill it or to deny it.  Just being with it, you know.  Well, offhand that did not seem to help me, for I felt all my desire to have more energy, more lively creativity, and not have to go on dialysis.  (Don't believe the stories about someone living a wonderful life on dialysis for 35 years - that person is one in a million. Dialysis is dangerous and uncomfortable and time-consuming.)  My desire seemed much stronger; I had tapped it.

After breakfast and a pureeing Sheba's catfood, I called Tara and left a message.  Well, it is 12:41.  She hasn't gotten back to me.  We are supposed to go to the health club today, but I don't want to leave the house and miss a call.  Didn't leave my cellphone number.  Could call back and do that, but you have to go through this long menu and wait even to leave a "voicemail" (useless synonym for "message" designed to make the recipient sound businesslike and important.)

I set myself some time for lively creativity.  Read a short article in Writer's Chronicle about how poets should be willing to use the internet to get our poetry out there.  Went to Blogger to examine the possibility of adding a page to this blog for poetry.  Or putting it on the unused domain I own, zencat.com.  The directions were so confusing.  It bends my particular brain to think about new technology - I'm just not made for that.  I realized it was time for a music break.  Went to YouTube trying to find a Chopin etude played by someone older than 10 years old.  And somehow from there got onto Fail Blog which made me laugh, and that made my stomach feel better. (Yes, stomach reflecting anxiety.)  As for music, I found myself listening to a song by Morphine.  Didn't need Chopin after all.  Didn't need much Morphine, just a little.

I had strayed into scrolling around on a favorite blog, The Book of Joe, where Zappo's ran a tantalizing custom-made video-ad, showing every fall purse and fringed boot I had considered buying.  It brought up my previous desire, which had begun with a picture of a knee-high boot with three layers of fringe.  Very hippie seventies. I had modulated that to a slip-on mocassin type thing with one layer of fringe and what looks like some wooden beads.  But hadn't ordered anything.  Zappo's knows all about it.

So I was distracting myself as best I can.  This is another way, writing - a better way, uses more of my frontal cortex and puts the desire for a transplant to simmer on a back burner.  Seems to me part of that is the desire to know my immediate future, which will become busy if the answer is yes.  Well, back to not-knowing.  Even if you think you know the future, you never do.  It is always a surprise.  Haven't you found that to be true?

[unrelated image:  titled "Spring Advances," so what I was looking for was that tint of green on the trees reflected in the side mirror.  I am aware that most people would snort at this - the kind of picture you take accidentally.  But I know how contemporary art works - if I say it's art, it is.]

Marriage

This is Cassie, my daughter, and Chris getting married in our back yard.  I think this must be when Rev. Eric Meter is asking Chris whether he . . . I don't think it was "take this woman."  Different words, more meaningful.  I made Cassie's bouquet, but someone else did her hair.  A part of the service I liked was when Eric asked the assembled company - me, Tom, and grandson Otto - whether we would accept and support this couple, and we said "We will" in loud unison.  Many of Chris's relatives in Canada were watching via video, and if they said "We will" I couldn't hear it.

It was cool when we three surprised them with chimes and bells at the end.  But the most impressive part of the service to me was when Eric spoke about responsibility.  The service was firm about that; marriage is about assuming responsibility, not only for the other person, but for this third thing you are inviting in - the relationship.  You will be required to give it time, to tend the relationship itself.

I thought how Tom and I sit down and talk when something is troubling one of us, usually me, or have a meeting when there are major financial decisions to discuss, like getting a furnace. And we routinely just sit with coffee and breakfast and the morning paper, and casually download miscellaneous stuff, our dreams, our daily schedule. That is marriage-tending time.  Then of course there is murmuring in bed.  You can't have an intimate relationship if you are not available for this kind of ritual.

We are coming up on our 26th anniversary in October, pretty good for people with disastrous early relationships.  I wish the same for Cassie and Chris.

On backing off from our thought-worlds

Usually people believe in their thoughts, and if you do, the trick is not to talk yourself out of them, just to look at them for a bit. You might be thinking something like, Here is an awful person, or I was right after all, this is hopeless. Then if you look at the scenarios that you are running, you can find the consequences of what you believe. In other words, you begin to notice the way you live. There is compassion in that. And you can also begin to notice if your thoughts are useful to you, if they help you to act.

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.

from John Tarrant, The Moon Sets at Midnight
[image:  Red leaf]

Plots and Zen

This morning I underwent what I once would have considered a grueling ordeal - examination of my stomach and colon by inserting tiny cameras into my body.  

I was prepped, that is mostly naked except for a hospital gown (but they let me keep my socks on, and I was wearing nice socks), and wearing an IV, left hearing aid out and in a plastic bowl, glasses off, and Tom sitting beside me.  You wait like this for GI procedures, on a gurney in a little examination room with a curtain for a door and just room for a beloved to sit with you.

I was relaxed and in a good mood - yesterday was the worst of it, and I knew I would be unconscious for the procedures.  I thought how terrified I had been the first time.  I like to lay that down to having a vivid imagination (cancer?) but in fact I think it was neurosis.  General anxiety heightened by fear of letting go control of my intimate body, and fear of the results (cancer?) 

I said to Tom, "Six years of meditation," meaning that's when I had the last colonoscopy.  A day's meditation most often doesn't seem spectacular.  You may not be conscious of the ways it changes you.  But day after day, year after year seems to have mellowed me considerably. 

Lying there I got to thinking about the novel I read last night, a comical-mystery chick lit.  It had a number of important plots or troubles, which were all handled like dominoes falling in the last few pages.  This is a great problem for writers - how to make the mystery novels to do this smoothly.  The explanation of the crime is not nearly as interesting as the detective's process was.  This seemed to illuminate something about dying for me - that people who have a lot of plots in their life, things unsolved, may be agonized at death. 

Narration, story-telling, is unique among the arts in that it has plots.  A plot arises from some disturbance of the main character's equilibrium.  Think of Scarlett O'Hara and the luxurious life at Tara just before the war hits.  The interest lies in the character's efforts to regain balance.  So there is often a fiction to begin with, a life that seems to be perfect until - whatever.  A stranger comes to town. 

Here's where I transitioned to thinking Buddhist.  We readers of novels may very well not have balance in our daily lives.  We can spend our lives unsatisfied, complaining, thirsting for that something more - that illusion that would be so much better than the present moment.  To me one of the excellent points of the Buddha's story is that he did have it all - all the things people commonly think would make them happy: the  money to buy pleasures, power, dancing girls.  He had it and perceived its emptiness, how dissatisfying it was. He saw that and did not try to push the truth away. 

I am rambling.  I was told not to drive today, that I would still be under the sedation.  I do feel quite relaxed, but then, I feel that way when I have been given the rest of the day off.
[image:  Perfect Leaf, Imperfect Picture.]

Another Unintentional Fast

Live Transplant Update
Laura, my live kidney donor, passed another test last week, one she had previously "failed."  Sigh of relief.  Next Monday she goes in for the last group of the tests, including an MRI.  [They can still find some health problem at this point and stop the process until it is corrected, if it can be.]

But suppose she passes everything.  We will by then have the results of my GI tests (taking place tomorrow) and my lipase enzyme test Sept. 1 (to see whether my pancreas is healed). If all is well, we can schedule the surgery, maybe four weeks out - maybe on my birthday (September 26).  Maybe I'll get to go to the Amasamy retreat in mid-September.  Maybe, maybe, not knowing.


Griping
In prep for the colonoscopy/endoscopy I am on a clear diet today.  I do know about that.  I am hungry, but that's not the worst of it.  The worst of it begins later this afternoon with laxatives and drinking the dread fluid that empties out your colon.  Well, maybe it won't be so bad this time.  Try not knowing.

Clear diet includes, thank God, my decaf, broth, popsicles, Jello (not red, blue or purple, though).  I was on this diet for a day or two in the hospital to rest my pancreas.  After two days on Nothing By Mouth, I was in heaven when I got some chicken broth.  It was the most savory thing I ever tasted. 

Today, though, I am hungry, unappeased by broth and lots of water.  I never could do a spiritual fast, and it is generally not something Buddhism asks of you.  Still, these unspiritual versions keep coming my way.  Well, that's your path, isn't it - these odd stepping stones that appear in front of you.
[image:  The Buddha as an ascetic - British Museum]

Doing nothing

This is very important — to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything. Whether you're an actor, anything, a housewife … there has to be great pauses between highs, where you do nothing at all. You just lay on a bed and stare at the ceiling. . . .
The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you.

Advice from poet Charles Bukowski.  If it makes you sigh with longing, you might be interested in this feature story from the NY Times about several brain researchers taking a rafting trip, cut off from all their technological distractions - cellphones, laptops - to see how it affected their minds.  The word "meditation" actually does appear in their future research plans.

Reading the story in a leisurely way I thought, If you guys liked this, you should try a meditation retreat.  Or like Sheba, just lie on a chair doing nothing.