On Not Being a Brand

I am reading a terrific book right now titled Different:  Escaping the Competitive Herd by a classy teacher at Harvard Business School, Youngme Moon.  I was drawn to this on the library's new book rack, though I have never really been in business, just on the outskirts.  The intriguing further subtitle of the book is "Succeeding in a world where conformity reigns but exceptions rule."  It made me think of this blog, a continuation of my lifelong difficulty in figuring out my brand - maybe a problem everyone with bipolar disorder, or any type of unusual mind, has.

A blogger expresses his or her brand through format, color choice, name of the blog, profile, self-description. These things have given me varying amounts of trouble through the years of writing this blog, though I stick with the title, which is my daughter Cassie's nickname for me, because  I am deeply and fundamentally Buddhist.  Beyond that, I have at times described myself (my brand) as recipient of a live-donor kidney, cat-lover, feminist, poet, writer, Zen student, lover of the visual arts, PhD in narrative theory, retired teacher, former editor, amateur artist and photographer, old, chronically ill - did I leave out Grandmother?  blah blah blah.  It's partly this slipperiness of identity - because really, I am not any one or two of those things - are you? - it's this changing hodge-podge that finally drove me to drop the description under the title.

I never get too far from the first koan my Zen Teacher gave to me:  Who are you?  At first it made me think over roles like the above, which became like trying to shuffle a deck of cards.  I was frustrated that I couldn't settle on one.  But as I remember my life, I am reminded that when I did see myself as a couple of nouns (wife, mother) I felt stuck in a small space.  And  those nouns were slippery, too.

So I have quit trying.  I never know from day to day what I will be interested in or want to write about, and as a retired person with a parade of physical problems, I don't need to have a goal for my life.  Thus time and chance have let me slip like spirit through the fence and escape the competitive herd.  Just lucky, I guess.

As for a deeper understanding of the koan, it's right there in front of us. 

Think in this way of
all this fleeting world:
As a star at dawn,
a bubble in a stream,
A dewdrop, a flash
of lightning
in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp,
a phantom,
and a dream.
         The Diamond Sutra 

[image:  Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Flawless, the 1999 film.]

What is your place in karma?

I went through some years when I was fascinated by koans. I worked through Aitken's The Gateless Gate twice, consulting versions by two other authors as well.  I liked the koans my Teacher Ama Samy brought to us from the Sanbo Kyodan tradition.  People sometimes call koans "riddles" I see them as metaphors whose truth is realized only when you experience them in real life.  Some teachers, like John Tarrant, tell us just to carry the koan around, not thinking about it.  But I did think about them, often wrote my thoughts down. Then one day the koan would rise up and be apparent.

One of Ama Samy's koans was "What is your place in karma?"  This is a thinking-type koan.  I got it conceptually.  Then, today I saw it, a visual representation rising in my mind.  Karma, shaped like an elongated hourglass lying on its side.  Where it pinches in the middle, small as a pixel, that's me. A thousand megapixels flow into me, making me what I am:  DNA, moments in my culture, everything I ever saw and heard, every single experience with people, the natural world, changes in it - one cannot be exhaustive.  Moment by moment the little pixel I am, things flow into me, and I change, because the river changes but is still one river bearing me along.

Out of me flows that great river, now changed by every breath I exhale, every word I say and every action, maybe even changed by my solitary thoughts, angry or kind.

The work of art one might create to represent this would show the countless other myriad beings, flowing in the same great river, affecting me and being affected by me.  The big, bright blue jay who lands on the feeder, startling me and bringing a smile to my face, changing me.  Me changing him by keeping that feeder there.

What the little cat knows

Contemplation

The Little Cat loves routine. Three times a day my cellphone alarm goes off, I come to the kitchen and take my immunosuppressants, I feed her.  While I take the pills she rubs daintily around my ankles.  After she tastes the food she jumps up on my kitchen chair and holds her front legs up to me, an invitation to let her climb on my shoulder and settle down on my chest, purring.  The world is running the same old way, and she feels safe. Food, safe shelter, predictability, these make her actively happy.

It makes sense for an animal to be anxious about change; predictability spells out food and shelter to them.  So I suppose that we, in our animal body, are the same - comforted by routine.  But we are capable of understanding that things always change.  I mean always, every minute.  That's what organic life does.  Here in Ohio, you can count on the blue sky being gone in an hour, the temperature dropped 20 degrees.  People complain about it all the time, wanting the more equable skies of California, perhaps, without the mudslides and early freezes, of course.

Suzuki Roshi once said that the central teaching of Buddhism is "Things change."  When I first read that years ago, it didn't seem real inspiring.  Now that I am 68 many experiences have taught me that it's true.  Some 70 tornadoes went through the American midwest yesterday.  A high wind is the ultimate in chaos.  No telling where that tornado will touch down, whose house will be leveled.  Me personally, last summer I had the shock of being offered a kidney by a friend.  This promised to give me many more years of life, to take me from what had become very old age and physical degeneration back to being an active 68-year-old.

Since then I've had either 8 or 9 UTI's and two or three hospitalizations, lost count.  Inbetween all that, I've had glimpses of feeling alive all over again.

So far the UTI's are unpredictable and we've been unable to prevent them.  The good luck is that - so far - the bacteria involved have been responsive to antibiotics.  So far.  The spread of resistant bacteria is scaring everyone in the medical field.

Like all other living things, from strawberries to Bengal Tigers, our safety is never guaranteed.  We ourselves and all forms of life constantly change, and age.  Felt great Wednesday, Thursday woke up with urge incontinence, a fever, and urine full of white cells.  So we had to postpone the bladder scope that we hope will tell us why I have all these infections, and thus how to stop them. Had to cancel three appointments on Friday.  I reminded myself of The Five Remembrances (you can find them at the bottom of this page), which many Buddhists recite every day .  I focused on  "I am of the nature to grow ill; I cannot escape illness."  That is, don't count on anything.  And don't get too caught up in your desires; that way you won't be too disappointed.

Years ago I knew a woman who was convinced that if she did the right things and had a strong will and stayed hopeful ("a positive attitude") she would survive metastasized cancer and live to be 94, the number she felt entitled to after taking a test in a women's magazine.  She died at 72, pissed off, still sure that if you only did all the right things, all of them, you could live, well, forever.  Still not accepting reality, I'm sorry to say, which is, Do what you can, and let your craving for a certain outcome diminish.  Life is as unpredictable as a high wind.  Take refuge.

A good habit

I have spent much of my life breaking bad habits - smoking comes to mind. 

I suppose other people have bad habits too, things they wish they wouldn't keep doing.  But we have good habits too.  Say getting to work on time - some people never do.  Or working itself, though that is often a bad habit, too.

I found myself thinking this morning that it is time to make a firm decision - resolve - intention to meditate every morning.  I can pin it to taking my 8:00 a.m. meds, which also means feeding Tashi, and she knows that - cats love nothing so much as routine.  Everything going regular.  We can learn from them.

A couple of years ago Tom and I decided to just go to church every Sunday, to stop getting up and sitting around with the paper undecidedly, maybe feeling like going, maybe not.  How good this has been I can't even tell you.  I got my new kidney from a woman I knew from that church.  And much more.  Even if it bores me or I am restless, overall, church is a good habit.  My church anyway.  I like the people there, I have stopped wandering. Very settling to make these decisions and have it done with.

Meditating is another very good thing for me to do, just do, every day before the day gets rolling faster.  I have found that forming a good habit is easier than dissolving a bad habit.  It's a thought.

Now to do it.

Some words on private retreat

Here are some more apropos words from Dogen posted in the San Francisco Zen Center's Ino's blog:

"Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor. It is not introspection...
Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the dharma gate of great ease and joy. It is undivided practice-realization".

Thank you and a bow to Melanie G. of the Austin Zen Center for sending this in as a comment on my recent post about taking a sort of private retreat from writing.  It is going well..  I love this phrase - "let the myriad things rest." 

Music in the woods

Thanks to my friend Gini for the above amazing musical video.

found in my archives

typing a letter to a sad friend
the goose-neck lamp on the desk
vibrates in sympathy

Private retreat

They say there are two basic plots - the hero goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.  But this is such Western thinking; a journey usually means a goal - even a pilgrimage has a purpose - and a stranger coming to town, change, upsetting the accepted way things are.  The trouble with that one is that things never are any one way, and something is upsetting us every day.

My recent hospital stay threw me into profound change, as did the illness (undiagnosed, maybe a particular virus that immune-suppressed people can come down with).  You go into the hospital like you do on retreat, carrying just the few things you think you will need, and some of those turn out to be extra.  It is not much like a vacation, it is not about being distracted or having fun.  I was by the windows (which I love) in a double room that housed two diabetics with serious kidney impairment, first a blind woman, then a woman who was in danger of losing a leg to a skin infection.  There were many things for me to learn there, believe me, about how painful and difficult the end of life can be. It made me resolve to eat in a way that's good for me, and to devote myself to my PT and the exercise program that lies beyond it.  Gail and Becky were more motivating to me than any dharma talk has ever been.

I came home to a relatively silent mind, still slowed down physically as well.  I love having that calm, quiet mind, thought trails dwindling away by themselves, no big deal about "getting things done."  Even my tinnitus was quiet.  If you go on retreats, you'll probably recognize that sensation.  Days or a week or longer with low stimulation.  A hospital is never quiet, and you are interrupted interrupted, no matter if you're sleeping or on the john with the door open because you couldn't figure out how to get the IV stand in there.  Still, you have left home.  I've always thought that Buddhism is very strong on that - it's called renunciation.  It's not just about fewer things, but fewer goals or none at all.  Breathe in, exhale, rest there.

In my highly verbal way I am saying I find myself wanting to talk less, write less, keep erasing those goals and desires that will all drop away when I die.  Like the many names on my Rolodex, meaningless to anyone else.

So I observed Sunday like I do, doing nothing I don't want to do, no obligations, no shoulds.  Then I thought it was a good idea to do Monday like that, and it was.  Today is looking pretty good, too.

I love to write this blog, and hear from people, close friends, people in parts of the world I've never visited, which is most of it.  But it is one thing that clutters my mind, which tries to turn every experience into meaning.  That is really the opposite of what I want my practice to do for me.  At the same time, this has been a practice.  But all my life I was pointed in this direction, to write, talk, perform, make art out of my experience, and I wonder what I will do if I have less to do, what I might want to do now.  I have no idea, and I'd like to keep it that way.  There's a lot more to this than that, but you get the idea.

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