The Worldwide Web of Friends

Thank you this morning to those who sent encouraging comments last night.  Keeping this blog is an odd habit, and sometimes I think I should instead be doing other kinds of writing, looking for print publication and, yes, money.  But the comments from people I've gotten to know have connected me with a wider world, and that's become precious.

And because so many readers are Zen students, you are my sangha.  I have good friends who are not Zen students, and I like the variety of personalities and concerns in my life, but to keep the faith you need those we call dharma friends or siblings, people who use the same language and know the same stories, and for whom practice is a central concern.

I don't like to call this "the virtual sangha."  It should not be implicitly compared to sangha-in-the-flesh; it is what it is, and that is real.  The "virtual" is defined (online, of course) as existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or name.  That doesn't immediately untangle for me, but it brings up the interesting question, what is "actual fact."  I used to tell students that for me, Poland did not exist - I had never been there and didn't even know anyone who had, so it was just another rumor.  Kidding, of course, but making a point.  One of my points, by the way, was that a fact is just a fact.  It is not accurate to describe it as true or actual.  And the online sangha is a fact, even though I can't test it with the gold standard of sitting across an actual table having coffee with you, touching your hand.


There's a fad right now of worrying that this invention has changed our social lives for the worst, taken us to fewer in-body contacts with people.  Isn't there something in classical Buddhism about comparisons?  I'm thinking of the virtue of sympathetic joy for others' successes, whose far enemy is envy, which is caused by comparing ourselves to that other.  More broadly, and from a Zen point of view, comparison is an intellectual activity that should be used only when it is valuable - our question is, what is the experience?

Comparisons or "virtual" and "actual" friends are not really about our lived lives, I suspect, but about the lives we think we should have, or would like to have, small-town lives of lifelong friends who drop in to borrow a cup of sugar (a fantasy that goes back to the day when a "housewife" didn't have her own car).  The geographic mobility of our affluence changed all that long ago, as does our class mobility here in America, our lack of leisure, and so on.

Your life is your life.  Despite all the bootstrap books, it is not created entirely by your personal goals and acts of will, but by the very ornate and mostly hidden karma that may seem to be a series of accidents.  It is your life, around you right here - what you have to work with.  I mean to say, I don't want to devalue these friendships by mail by comparing them to an idea in my head.  When I consider that statement more broadly- be with where you are, relate to the world in the ways you have - I think it's a pretty good policy in general.

[image:  Late chicory at Grailville]

Pain, or One good reason to sit Zen

I did not start meditating in order to develop tolerance for pain, not physical pain.  But you will get that, as a side effect, say, in your struggle for less mental pain.

I've had some striking experiences with pain, not counting last night in bed, as the painkillers and steroids wear off and the heavy drugs (the immunosuppressants) confuse me, and the incision ("the wound") slowly heals.  Then, as now, allowing a nice deep breath felt like a blessing, and following that breath took the sharp edge off the pain.  As for the rest, I lie on my left side - the incision is on the right side - prop my abdomen carefully on some firm little pillows, so there's no stress on the incisions, and sleep in that one position all night. 

Being okay with the residual pain had everything to do with perspective.  I didn't catastrophize it ("This is aful, I can't stand it.")  I knew I could default back to Percocet, I had choice.  I watched the pain come and go, as even pain usually does, but the way I propped it and lay was pretty comfortable.  (Lying on the other side so I could face Tom and talk to him was very bad.)

On my first retreat I sat in a chair, not knowing how to sit with pelvis propped, how to balance alert and relaxed.  My whole back was soon a mass of pain, worst in my neck and shoulders and TMJs.  Tighter and tighter.  Now I know tricks from yoga that I didn't know then - for instance, move out from the pain and soften around that spot.  Or imagine breathing in and out in that spot.  Or change the color of that spot.  But then all I knew how to do was hold myself stiff.  There was a thunderstorm brewing, and the basement we sat in was stifling and smelled of mold.  I sweated, and my legs stuck to the vinyl chair. Nobody else moved.

My mind was an even worse enemy that Friday evening, as it thought frantically about whether I could get Tom to go home the next day - he never likes to leave anything.  Maybe by noon, I thought.  Then I was given 30 blows, as we say:  the senior student called out in a very loud voice, "Sink into the heat!"  The structures of body and mind collapsed like a Tinkertoy edifice.  Even now, I feel myself relaxing at the memory.  All the pain was gone.  Dogen would say, You should think deeply on that.  You should remark the fact that that can happen.   Even bad things change.  Even the heat was not so bad.

My second striking experience came years later in a long retreat, when I could sit crosslegged on a cushion on the floor, which never came naturally to me, but which I loved to do.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, a red bar of pain set up in my right thigh, the kind that makes you gasp.  It was well into the retreat, so instead of being reactive, I set my mind to be with that pain, to focus on it and watch it.  And I both saw and felt it dissolve in a red mist.

Well, this was much better than saying "This, too, shall pass,"  This, too, did pass.  I saw it pass.  That's the experience everything part of Zen.  Your mind has it wrong.  You think pain sets in and just gets worse and worse until it is intolerable.  You think it is only impacted by pills or shots.  Thinking, thinking.  But if you let it, experience will demonstrate that your ideas are wrong.

Harder for me these days is working with a painful mood - yesterday's stalled, slow drab mood, thinking this has been a huge mistake, thinking I'm going to have to go back in the hospital, what if I lose this kidney, and between thoughts, bored to death.  But I knew theoretically that this low mood was a factor of chemicals beyond my control, not exactly real, and that it, too, would pass, and here I am today, about to go have some extra caffeine with Tom.  Coffee doesn't taste great either, but it's still coffee.

[image:  In Grailville, even the grass casts a long shadow.]

Life around here

 update:  Yesterday's symptoms may be caused by withdrawing from pain medication - morphine in the early days of the surgery, then Percocet.  A friend told me she's had the same flu-like symptoms from that.  So that would be good news, meaning it isn't all side effects from the immunosuppressants.

I feel better today, clearer.  Took a shower!  Wearing shoes! 

Went for the biweekly blood draw this morning and then got in an electric cart and shopped at Kroger's!  (I'm going to run out of exclamation points.)  This was a treat after two weeks in hospital rooms and at home.  And so is the food. I bought an avocado and fresh pineapple and bananas (all too high in potassium for a kidney patient). I haven't totally got the idea yet, the freedom to eat - bought white bread, forgetting that now I can have whole-grain bread (whole grains, nuts and seeds are high in phosphorus), all I want.

I know that many Americans try to confine their diets in various ways - low salt, low fat, sugar-free - and I've been there, too.  But these diets are spacious compared to the restrictions of the diet for advanced kidney disease, which I had to observe for over ten years.

As part of the job of cleaning waste from your blood, your kidneys decide what is waste, and so they automatically remove excess potassium if you've been binging on banana and peanut butter sandwiches.  So you are careful to eat small servings of  high-potassium foods likr tomatoes and potatoes and citrus.  You also restrict salt and protein.  You don't get to cheat too much on this.  As my kidneys failed, I lay awake all one night, unable to digest 3 ounces of filet I'd had to celebrate my birthday. As for cheating on potassium, if it's high you can go into cardiac fibrillation, which I also did at one point. On this diet, you don't get away with nothing.

And so here I am, realizing I am free to eat like anyone else (except no grapefruit or pomegranate with the immunosuppressants).  I'm not used to it yet.  I hope I never take it for granted.  Imagine - I can get up and have raisin bran with a banana.  Simple pleasures.

If I had not received Laura's kidney - I would be on dialysis any time now - I was just barely avoiding it by living an increasingly sedentary life with few good hours.  The hemodialysis diet is a nightmare compared to the chronic kidney disease diet - even water is restricted.  My friend Nancy, a model of aging with grace, keeps a gratitude notebook.  I keep mine in my head, and here.

Tonight we found at our door homemade spaghetti sauce and whole-wheat pasta, gift of another friend and neighbor.  We are living in an abundant universe.

Not thinking positive

It's one of my themes - I don't like to be told to look on the bright side, though of course there's a reason I undertook this kidney transplant, to live much better, much longer, once we're through this.  But as for putting a spin on my experience, there is this experience, what it is, in total, though it's only that - experience.  Today it's been unpleasant.  Much of the day in bed trying to be warm, cold sweats, blurred vision, inability to concentrate, nose running.  Immunosuppressants are very strong.  My nurse told me to eat when I take them (3 times a day) and that cut down on stomach pain and belching.  At least I'm not nauseated.  (I know, that's thinking positive.  And at least I haven't come down sick in some other way, and there are many ways.  And I'm not "in rejection."  In other words, this is working fine. A good recovery.)

I got on OSU's classy website to enter my vitals, and it asked me to take a little survey.  The first question was How do you feel today compared to before your surgery?  Worse, I had to say.  That was a depressing truth.

But there's another side to this whole Zennish approach to what has been a fairly miserable day - it isn't awful.  Or unfair.  There's a lot of conceptualizing I'm not doing, in other words.  Not blaming other people, none of whom warned me how this would be.  Blame doesn't make a lot of sense, things are much more complicated than that.  Nothing is how you thought it would be.  That includes that I still don't have the clear, incisive mind I've been hoping to rediscover, now that my blood is clean.  I spent much of the day under a lot of soft blankets feeling the breath at the tip of my nose, in and out.  I suppose this is meditation.

Sheba just came yowling into the room.  I want to record her and post it for the world to see what we put up with.  We had no idea when we picked her out of the Old Ladies' Room at Cat Welfare - never heard her yowl.  Sherlock had almost no voice; hers is huge.  She is also the softest, silkiest animal you ever touched, and loves to be petted.  You never know what you're getting with a cat, or anything else maybe.

Recognizing Love

Feeling clear enough to have a second cup of caffeine and think about blogging.  Yesterday I went off the Percocet and just on Tylenol.  Some healing in the night - this morning I have not felt the need for the Tylenol (you have to monitor it - too much hurts your liver).  Maybe it was from Nancy van Deusen's lentil soup - she appeared on my doorstep with it yesterday morning, an angel in a gray hoodie.  She was so happy to be doing this for me, giving me the best she's got, her own homemade soup. 

I have had something else beyond price from all this - I have learned to recognize love when it comes my way.  This has followed directly on Laura's gift of her kidney - I think I wrote about that here back then - it seemed the universe opened up a golden track, that there was this benevolence, this giving, even this taking care of me, a friendly universe instead of the sad threats I experienced in childhood, like so many children of broken people.  I have begun just seeing and feeling the love that is in front of me.  I feel it as healing in the center of my body.

Tom came into my study a while back to tell me I coughed a lot in the night, and he is concerned about me breathing deeply and exercising my lungs.  I have a little machine for that, a spirometer I think it is.  But also, in the hospital I was walking 10 minutes or more at a time around the halls, and I'm not doing that here.  As I listened to him I felt the love and caring that this came from.  How astonishing - to have a husband like this.  I have to dress, put shoes on, and do some walking meditation around the house.  If the sun comes out, I might walk outside for a few minutes.

I think a lot about the oxymoron:  a Zen Blog.  The Way is beyond words - so what is it I do here?  A kind of art form, I guess, like stacking stones at a crossroads.  A kind of appreciation.  Also, I try to just present myself and say, Well, this is Zen too. It's not about preaching anything.  It is very ordinary.  I am convalescing.  That sounds like a journey from A to B, from surgery to Being Well Again.  But there is no end point to this particular journey - no assurance, we're done now.  Actually, my experience is that whenever you reach one of those, it's highly disappointing.  Remember graduation?
(image:  Rainbow sunrise at Grailville)

Everything counts

A little while ago I had a phone call from Suzanne, a new friend who is on her way to her own kidney transplant.  She is very interested in all of it, of course, and it's a pleasure to talk to someone else with the same depth of health knowledge.  I realized, hanging up, how cheered I felt from this short phone call, how it had a certain energizing effect.  Before that, there was homemade chicken noodle soup, and miniature muffins, and a visit from two neighbors who told me how they had seen the foxes play in their back yard.  I could feel health going into me with every spoonful of that perfectly seasoned soup.  I felt I wanted to say this more strongly than I know how - every kind act matters.  How to say that strongly enough?  Over and over, a card comes in the mail, a plate of Halloween cookies at the door, every drop of water matters. 

We can think we aren't important, or we can't do much, but that's wrong.  Everywhere you go you build the universe, you heal other people.

Generosity

In a few minutes I get dressed and drive to the Chinese doctor for a pre-surgical acupuncture treatment.  Then we pick up Laura and check in at the hospital at noon.

Our church does cards for people experiencing important life transitions.  These "joys and sorrows" are announced in the service.  This was the first time the entire church knew of Laura's kidney donation to me.  The several hundred people there burst into applause! After the service, so many people came to me with hugs and good wishes that I felt filled with the energy of love.  People are rightly stunned to think that someone would undergo surgery and give a kidney to someone who is not a beloved relative, but (until now) a virtual stranger. So am I, over and over.

Statistics suggest that if instead I had to begin dialysis, I would live less than four more years.  With a good, healthy donor kidney, I can live 20 more years.  Laura is handing me years of life.  Please pray or sit for both of us, that we have good recoveries.

The abundant plate

Yesterday at First Watch I looked at my plate, contemplating the grace I learned at my first retreat:
    I am thankful for this food,
    the work of many hands
    and the sharing of other forms of life.
The English muffin.  I pictured a field of wheat rippling in the wind - nothing is prettier.  It had to be plowed, killing some little field mice, I suppose, and worms, who knows what other life.  I am not eating meat at this meal, but my eating interrupts the life cycle of other forms of life, plant and animal.

Then wheat is planted, how?  probably by big machines.  The sprouts grow in the sun and rain.  They are harvested by another machine; these machines are made of metals mined from the earth, someone sits in them doing this tedious necessary job hour after hour. 

Here are the harvested sheaves.  I don’t know what is done now, vague notions of wheat and chaff.  A truck takes it to a factory whose existence changes a town.  And so on.  My mind didn’t stay that long on the complexities of the muffin.  Images flowed through my mind, the muffins trucked here, the tires leaving their fine deposit of rubber on the roads.

On to the eggs.  Whoops, I pictured the chickens crowded into their cages.  An uncomfortable thought.  Move on from that.  The mushrooms - I was having mushroom caps with cheese (from the milk of captive cows) - I asked Tom, what does a mushroom farm look like?  He has seen one, in the basement of the old Barber mansion in his home town.  It smells earthy, moldy.

Too much to think about sitting there looking at this plate, which also contained potatoes someone had to dig up, though surely not one worker with a spade but again a machine.  Then, coffee.  The whole world had come together for this breakfast, in which I was eating and disturbing all sorts of life forms (pass the strawberry jelly).  Aware of my tremendous luxury, I could only be hugely grateful.  I tucked in.  We didn’t talk much as we ate.  I felt more like a millworker, which my grandfathers were, in my pleasure in this food than like a lady.
 
This luxury is all over in my life, the privileged life of a westerner with a secure income and good medical coverage.  Many hands and backs make this life.  We can even afford medical care for the little cat, Sheba, who went to emergency yesterday morning with an upper respiratory infection, and had her little lungs x-rayed, and got an antibiotic. 

Somewhere within all this gratitude is also a sense of humility, if not shame.  I consume so much, waste so much.  Small example:  I let half my home fries go yesterday, too full, and they went back to the kitchen to be thrown away, good food that I could have taken home.  But it goes much further - the gas used to drive there, for example.  Don’t think about the clothes you're wearing, and how they were made in China.

I am not recommending guilt.  It is useless.  You can, however, regret an action, and vow that next time you will bring the potatoes home and use them, or even that you will cook at home, where you can use eggs from cage-free hens . . . Zen does not ask us to be perfect.  What it asks of us is primarily to have the rich, full experience of the moment, of the abundant plate before us.  To be aware.  Life complete with its joys and somber ramifications.  Tactile, present life, not so much about words or thinking, either, but words (and the occasional picture) are what I  have to work with here.
[image:  Abundant autumn:  the stream in Overbrook ravine.]

I love the idea of this hour to myself before tom gets up and the day gets going.  It's my time to read dharma, journal, and meditate, sometimes (like now) to take my journaling into my blog.  It is a time of being quiet with myself, not to train my mind as we do in meditation, but to stay with my bare morning thoughts and sometimes dreams and go to their deep place.  Maybe this activity is also a spiritual practice or a form of meditation.  I have done it so long I can't imagine life without this quiet moment to be with myself and the rising morning.

I heard from OSU pre-transplant at 5:30 yestdrday, at last, when I had given up hope of hearing because they close at 4:00.  We are on for the surgery.  The small problem with antibodies in my blood is seen as a false positive.

Though I knew I was scurrying around anxiously and not getting things done, I was amazed at the tension that let go in me.  I could feel my heart soften and expand.  It felt like every cell in my body was contracted and afraid.  The fear was that the surgery be cancelled and Laura not qualify as a donor for me, and that knocked down my idea of the future like a pleasantly lit corridor, the future we’ve been preparing for.  I would have been back to no donor, and needing to find one, and feeling sick and tired.  That was not okay with me.

It was hard for me to feel it was okay to be so anxious.  What a vision I have of myself as unflappable, like some older women I have known and admired - and maybe some people really are that calm and still inside, perhaps by nature.  Daniel Terragno once said to me with a sigh, "Everyone wants to be someone."  Calm and clear, accepting uncertainty and unwanted change.  Does the koan apply here? - The real Buddha is not made of wood, metal, or clay to fit an ideal, but is found in the inner precincts of the house - this glorious mess.
[image:  a bit of my home altar.  I am fascinated by shadows.]

A stumble

Yesterday was the "final" crossmatch, a last blood draw for both me and Laura.  There was no reason it should be bad, but it was - a small piece of it showed I seem to have antibodies to her blood.  This should only happen if you had a transfusion, but there it is - maybe from my flu shot.. . . They are continuing to run various tests on the blood.  We should know tomorrow whether the transplant will go on Tuesday as scheduled.

I have said all along that I won't believe this is happening until I wake up in the recovery room and the doctor is standing there and says happily, your new kidney started working the minute we hooked it up.  However, that doesn't mean I feel blase about this.  I reminded Tom that being Zen is not being calm and accepting all the time.  No, it is being authentic. 

They have taken four (4)! months to get Laura through this process, God knows why, when they can get you ready for a deceased donor kidney in a matter of hours.  Now this.

Slowly, slowly coming home

Grailville Zendo (the Caravansary)

A sad moment yesterday when I realized that last week's retreat at Grailville, which was bathed day after day in hot sunshine, so in memory is a golden square, is gone.  And will never exist again.  It has passed

At the same time I realized that we are in countdown to the surgery.  In two days, the final cross-match.  At noon on Monday the 11th laura and I enter the hospital, probably for a flurry of final tests.  Sitting in church I began my mental list of things to do before then.  Small example - make sure Tom has a list of people to call when the surgeon tells him everything went well, and their phone numbers on his cellphone.  Charge up my Rotadent.  Like that.

How fitting that Tricycle offered me today a new online retreat with Larry Rosenberg, on the subject of living out in the world.  As I listened I made some notes.  He says he came to realize as a younger student -

we were fixated on retreats and the sitting posture - but that was not our lives.  just trying to make money to get to the next retreat.  feeling retreat was real life.
a dialogue between the contemplative life and action - wanted that dichotomy to disappear.  can it all be of one piece?

Home from retreat, you feel the peace fading.  The spaciousness is replaced by the new schedule, the thousand obligations of daily life, like making warm catfood slurry morning and evening for the poor cat, who has a sore throat. Making your own oatmeal in the morning.  Someone has to wash the pan.  Like that.

It's such a busy world.  I find myself aware of the effect of the novel I'm reading on my dreams and my waking mind.  I wake up thinking about the drab existential sadness of the Masterpiece Theater we watched last night, and understand why a lot of Zen students don't watch TV at all.

Sometimes I think that when I'm healthy again (an amazing thought) I might want to go for a residency at a Zen Center somewhere.  A month, three months.  I have a friend who hopes to do that when his daughter goes off to college.  Then I think about the lines of one of our chants, Hakuin Zenji's Song of Zazen -

Nirvana is right here before our eyes - 
This very place is the Lotus Land. 

I'm tempted to be facile about it and say something like, "Oh yeah, I forgot again."  Well, you do forget, that's why periodic retreat, where we meet each other on the very ground of our existence, and experience the free flow of love.  So you can remember yourself and experience love back here, as when a stranger - I mean, a new friend - comes up the walk with zinnias..

A gift of zinnias