Battling the Big Guy

Lace

 

I had a rest-less (good word) night due to extraordinary pain that had me on Vicodin all day - sometimes I can go without even Tylenol except at night.  Pain in left shoulder and that damn left hip, which I hurt last Saturday at the health club by doing one small new back exercise with care. Let your pain be your guide, the sport-spine doctor's mantra, ran through my thick head, and I was careful, and thought yes, the little leg lift was a little painful, not bad.  But it turned out it was bad.  Now I think the SI joint on that side is inflamed.  I woke up with these two areas hurting, a bad sign, as being prone for some hours is usually very helpful.

But my mantra is, It won't kill you.  Also, Being in pain doesn't mean you have to be unhappy.  Also, Having limitations doesn't mean you need to be unhappy. I used to have ideas in my head that these things did necessitate unhappiness. No, unless you cling to your desires to do things you used to be able to do.  Things have changed, that's what happens to carbon-based life forms.  If you don't want to change, you should have been born a hunk of granite.  Then you wouldn't change very fast. (Wondering now whether granite is based on carbon.)

Often I read about someone's determination to find a cure for cancer. There's a big uproar now about women wanting the FDA to keep Avastin listed as appropriate for metastasized breast cancer, though there is no reputable scientific study that shows any benefit.  One warrior said she wanted every possible weapon in her arsenal against this dread fiend.  I thought, yes, but this is a gun that never hits the target and can backfire and kill you.  The problem seems to be that if the FDA does remove its temporary sanction, insurance companies can refuse to pay the $88,000 a year it costs to take the drug. The women want anecdotal evidence to reign; in other words, if one person taking it felt better, they want it.  You know I have many reservations about Western science and medicine, but it does have its uses.

Here's where I want to go on this:  The good old Five Remembrances (see sidebar on this blog).  I guess I should have them tattooed on my forehead.  Barring accident, we are all going to have pain, we are going to get sick and die of something.  If not cancer, something else. Doing your best to be alive - really alive - I heartily recommend, but accept reality, you'll be glad you did. As for pain, I am trying to befriend it, if you know what I mean. "Oh, there's my rheumatiz again" type of thing.

When things change, there might be a benefit in there somewhere.  The bad shoulder (Bad shoulder, Bad!) and back mean I no longer have to do the weeding.  So my dear friend and Grand Master of the Gardens, Karen, is coming this afternoon to pull many more oak seedlings and generally set things right in the front gardens. She earns money doing what she does so well and loves.  I feel relieved.  The neighbors are relieved.  I get to sit here and play with my photographs.

Limitation is okay once you accept it and stop yearning to never grow old, certainly to never die, to always be able to do what you feel like doing.  I posted a John Tarrant quote on that a while back, so I won't add it here. Grandmas do tend to repeat ourselves, maybe because nobody heard us the first time.  (Insert smile here.)

Assignment: see color

Green

Green autofixed

Green J's fix

After several weeks of thinking about it, I bought myself Contemplative Photography. Why was I reluctant? I don't know. I have been leafing around in it (sorry, pun) and caught the first assignment - Color. It's like any kind of awareness until you are a Buddha, perhaps, and have no lapses - now wait, I think that's wrong - I am told we lapsed beings are Buddhas, though we are cautioned to try a little harder, nevertheless.

My life: I have only 10 more minutes here, and was just interrupted by a much desired phone call from my transplant nurse-coordinator, Joanie. The dr. wants to raise my Norvasc - I had sent her another fax with a week's blood pressure readings that showed it is still too high for someone whose parents both died from stroke. This concern got moved recently from cardiologist to tx kidney doc, for the kidney plays a part in controlling your BP.  The new one doesn't seem to have caught on.

Back to the more spiritual. Creating art.  Catching photos with the 5-pixel camera on my phone, which turn out pretty nice, especially in outdoor light  The top photo above was my spontaneous catch this morning - I was amazed to see the backs of the leaves were really that light, and stuck with that amazement long enough to take one picture.

Below that, the auto-fix available on Pikasa's editing program.  As soon as I saw it I knew why most photos on the internet look somehow alike.  The program has been tapped to make them conform to a formula.

Below that, the result after I played with it awhile. The more I did, the less I liked it, and I don't like it now.  I tried cropping it different ways - nothing pleased me.  I still prefer the original, the point-and-shoot.  I told Tom I am going to invent The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Visuals.  See it, stay with that- don't mess it up with conceptualizing-, and click.  One take.  The book calls it three stages: the flash of perception, visual discernment, forming the equivalent (or taking the picture). It's just like washing lettuce or talking to a friend - be aware, stay aware, stay aware again.  It's what we practice doing when we meditate. That's why we call it practice.

Smoke

 

I took a number of shots of my altar just now before I realized what it was I wanted to photograph. Maybe I should video it - the smoke is the only thing visibly dancing on the empty altar. And it will change all day long as the light changes.

Seeds sprout

Yesterday a reader asked me how I arrived at faith.  I think he is referring to faith in the path of Buddhist practice, faith that it would help me.  I believe I learned that respect from the example of one woman, a neighbor named Gini Whiting, who is no longer alive in that form, but is in my mind.

She was a meditator, and this was in the 1950's, when Buddhism was just coming alive in America, and that on the coasts, not in the midwest. So it was remarkable. I imagine she could have learned meditation when she had tuberculosis; before antibiotics you took a long, quiet rest to get over it.

She was a soft-voiced woman with a quiet presence, a stillness, and she was very good to me, and was markedly different than any other adult I ever saw.

But in the course of my life I've known other people who seemed contented, happy, who enjoyed life in a quiet way.  One couple was Christian, and had been missionaries. Another man, George, brought yoga to Lancaster, Ohio in the early 1970's, and led us through meditation at the end of each class. It was wonderful. Sometimes I still hear him say softly, "It feels good to relax."  He was living entirely a yogic life, and took me to a vegetarian restaurant here in Columbus, Seva, now sadly long gone, to show me how delicious meat-free food could be. And since then, of course, I've met and worked with realized Zen teachers.  One meeting with some of these people and you think, They've got something I want.

So I experientially gained faith that spiritual practice could cut my suffering, even give me peace. In fact, I tried to establish a meditation practice, as I knew it, two or three times in my life, but had no spiritual friend to help me know what to do and keep at it. Those efforts discouraged me until I was found to have breast cancer. Then I must have remembered Gini and George and Bill and Ruth, and thought, maybe what they do could help. It was the only thing I could think of.

As for faith in a belief system . . . I entered this as someone who had long ago been disappointed by the Christian God. Everything I believe about life and the workings of the universe I have affirmed with my own experience.  It just happens to coincide with the dharma. 

[image: our front lawn with tiny new oak trees, result of last fall's huge acorn crop.]

Empty

Death and Dying

If I say "carbon-based life forms" you might picture a lump of coal or, to my surprise, a musical group.  Not only that, though. If you are a scientist, you know that all life forms on this earth are based on the carbon atom. That category, "All life," includes us.  And all life has certain characteristics; the one of interest to me right now is mortality.

Consumable products have a "shelf life," more obvious when it comes to a bag of lettuce, but true also of hard cheese.  Even things "die."  Engineered structures are calculated to have an MTTB, or "mean time to breakdown," or an MTBF, "mean time before failures."  We humans have one too - we call it life expectancy.

If you've been around this blog a while you know that one of my key labels is death.  In this, I am not weird, just speaking as a Buddhist.  It surprised me when I got interested in Buddhism, how much it talks about death, and some people find it gloomy and depressing. But Buddhism is just trying to hold us up to the fact of life.  This is about learning to encounter your own death and those of your loved ones with some equanimity, about deeply understanding reality.  Living things are born, grow, age, in a pattern that inevitably leads to death. Somewhere I have read that when he first saw a dead person, Prince Siddhartha said, "If this be death, then cursed be birth." He was not enlightened yet.

It's a funny thing to think about, how frantic we get (see yesterday's blog) when we get (ominous music here) A Diagnosis.  I am still reactive when I hear a friend has cancer, that powerful stealth invader, and at age 68½ I hear that often.  I see dying people who won't take care of this future by making out their wills or installing accessible showers, who keep falling because they won't use a cane.  I see people who are pissed off all the time that this is happening to them.  Multiple causes feed into this denial, and I believe one of them is the deep American belief that personal will and personal actions can conquer anything.  Not so. Not death.



[image: Spirea blossoms]

Craving Enlightenment

Back when I practiced as though my hair were on fire it was because I was desperate.  First, I was afraid to die. I wanted to heal, not die from breast cancer. During that time I learned that the body is always fighting new invaders, that there are always cancer cells coming in. So I formed a visual meditation that had to do with T-cells, big spiky things, like those medieval weapons. I believed what I'd been taught, that my individual will could do anything, and if I failed to meet a goal, I was "a failure," and needed to try harder.  Obviously, I thought I was a noun. Like an object.

It's unpleasant to remember being so frightened and alone, grasping with all my might at control over the future, which I did not know is subject to many, many influences beyond me. I wrestled with it like Jacob with the Angel, thinking, reading, writing, meditating up in my second-floor study in the house on Aldrich Road, which I called "my ivory tower." I was sort of joking, but it was true; up there I was secluded from my daily life, studying and writing poetry.


But I'm taking the long way around to my point - as I learned about Buddhism, I began to think the answer to all this pain was enlightenment. I conceived this as a sea change into an unwavering state that was like being in a room filled with morning light.  I thought enlightened people had calm, loving, clear, untroubled minds, an unruffled certainty that everything was alright. I thought enlightened people were perfect, and I had always wanted that, actually.  Now the mess of me - a body that had developed cancer in secrecy - was a sort of stinky garbage dump.

I was a long way from understanding the way life is, the interconnection, the change, the calm of just doing what you are doing in reality and not doing a lot of other stuff in your mind.  I had seldom expeienced a bare, clear moment; my moments were incredibly messy, my mind busy with obligations and desires and standards and hurry.  The core that run up my spine was red hot with fear and desire.  Or take another metaphor: I felt like a cartoon character running madly, trailing flags of Things-to-do.  Or another metaphor:  as I stood at the kitchen sink washing lettuce, these things whirled round me.  I was always a couple of steps into the next moments, the day, the week.

So I was perhaps your basic neurotic. I'd gotten along with myself and my ordinary unhappiness until that diagnosis.  Teachers call the state I was in "a promising situation."  God knows I was motivated to practice.

Well, this is exhausting me to even write this. It was 1997, a long way back, and 1997 doesn't exist now, nor does that version of me.  These memories are merely mental emissions, pathways through my neurons, and have no real existence.  Neither do any of the numerous Big Problems I anxiously worked back then. I have new situations, but now I know that it's me that labels them My Problems. Me that prefers not to have problems.

Intrusion of reality - Tashi broke skin on my wrist a moment ago trying to convince me that it was 8:00 a.m. and time for my Neoral and, more importantly, her breakfast.  So I have to go wash with soap and hot water, rub with alcohol, put on antibiotic cream and a bandage.  There, that's the reality of being immune-suppressed.

I don't know.  I may have more to say on this.

T profile

From my phone to Picasa to you -a technological breakthrough.  I think I can send straight from my phone.  One step at a time.

This is Natasha, Tashi for short, showing her regal profile. Notice the chin of a lioness, and the natural blue tint to her fur.

A Moment of Beauty

Below this post you will find another with a video with the song of a goldfinch and lovely pictures.  Yeats' golden bird upon a golden bough made me think of the brilliant yellow finch I saw a day or two ago as we drove out of the ravine into a dreary gray moment.  The van stopped at a light and there he was just a few feet from me. I could see his throat pulsing, so I rolled down the window, and there was his golden song. This poem came to me.  This is how poetry once was written.


Sailing to Byzantium
                       by William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the
---Those dying generations---at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Carduelis Chloris Florinte

On lovely spiritual practices

Green Woman Taking a Photograph

When I most don't want to practice, I need it most. I am not where an older woman I knew was - seeing meditation as a lovely time of the day.  Wow, I thought.  Really? But then she told me what she did in meditation: imagined that out of the top of her head there flowed a lovely golden fountain.  Hmmm.  I guess if that's what I did - used meditation specifically to float in a warm bath of bliss - I might find it real pretty too.

A lot of things go under the general title of "meditation."  I came to know that this woman's long-time  meditation had not given her insight into her envy and the meanness disguised as good intentions. What you might call Golden Fountain meditation is not for insight or befriending yourself - it's for relaxing, floating, having a lovely time. Sort of gentle mental massage, which, like massage of the body feels good but does nothing to help you learn kindness and discipline and wisdom, to untangle the stress of your life. How different is it from having a nice glass of wine to forget your cares?

As I get it, Buddhist meditation is in part about becoming close friends with yourself.  You can call it insight. Sitting with yourself, not sitting to get away from yourself.  Whole self: pain, anger, unwelcome desires, getting with your various shadows - I mean in the Jungian sense - that within you that you try hard not to look at.

Here's a poem I remember from the only book I owned as a child. When I was five or six years old I found it fascinating; it dealt with something intimate and mysterious in my own life. Now I understand the shadow cast by my own body in the prosaic terms of modern science.  Too bad.

My Shadow
by Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow--
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes goes so little that there's none of him at all.

He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close behind me, he's a coward you can see;
I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the Sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

Thinking inside the box

My schedule begins now, when my (expensive, ridiculous, new) Droid sounds an alarm at 8:00 a.m. Time to stop everything and take my Neoral. A while ago I decided to anchor my day to this in this fashion:

get up, medical stuff, take synthroid
coffee with e-friends
8:00  take Neoral
bodywork, meditate
9:00 breakfast, rest of pills

If this doesn't sound difficult to you, you are not a *Creative!* person.  To be such is to now be considering how I could import an image of the word *Creative!* in joker font and many colors.

Mine is not the smooth, disciplined creativity of many writers who do this one thing, the novel they're working on, and that is the thing they do. Mine is the creativity of someone who goes to a Greek restaurant and is inspired to learn to make avgolemon soup, in fact, to learn Greek cooking, and paint a mural on her bathroom wall, but first wants to figure out how to download photos from her Droid.  Right now the schedule says this person is going to turn the monitor off, pull down the shades, close the door (to the cat), settle down and do nothing else but follow the schedule.   There is a little slack built in, but I try very hard not to let that slack eat into practice time.

This does relate to the fact that lately I have been considering what my Buddhist name would be - Crazy Cloud?  Wild Mind? Wonder what Amasamy would say if I ask him about it. He doesn't do things traditionally.  Speculating on my name makes me sort of chuckle and smile.  Fortunately, I am alone. You don't want to walk down the street laughing at your own mind.  Other people get alarmed; they can't see your mind.  The Zen story about that suggests that you should therefore understand that your mind is not real.

I understand the wisdom of that, but still, my mind is like a fad toy I saw years go on the boardwalk in Atlantic City:  a leash and dog collar that wobbles alongside the walker, so seems to be an invisible dog.  Just electronics, and I guess, so is my mind.  Mental emissions. Yet it strains at the leash at times.  Right now it is saying, I bet there's a video of that on YouTube.  Down boy, down. This should explain why I really do need to meditate.

I always had to suppress a smile when I heard Daniel explain retreat in a public talk or before a retreat, with the words, "All you have to do is follow the schedule."  That's all? I would think ironically (yes, this is possible.)  For some of us that's the hardest thing in the world.  And I know that for some people, it's the easiest.  Relax, let all your desires float past like distant clouds, just sit here motionless in this upright posture till the bell rings.  And don't be late. 

Wild mind that I am I often think about following the schedule - doing the things I have to do.  Yesterday I was making my back hurt doing my weekly pills in the special box with 28 compartments.  This has to be done right, or you'll be sorry.  They include a pill that prevents my atrial fibrillation, another to replace the thyroid gland that had to be removed surgically, others to lower my blood pressure so I don't go out with a stroke like both my parents did, others to prevent a really bad stomach ache brought on by others that suppress my immune system.  Others to help me get to sleep because other pills that suppress my immune response give me Very Active Mind at bedtime.  In other words, these are not frivolous pills, and doing them right is hard for me.  But I must do it once a week.  if I hadn't done it yesterday, I would have awakened today to the necessity of counting out the fourteen pills I take with breakfast.

So, illness has been a stern teacher for me, forcing discipline on someone who wants to walk barefoot through the world, stop to smell the roses, and so on. Discipline is one of the three somethings we learn through meditation, as I recall. But I am not going to stop now to look it up.  Maybe later.

A Householder's Practice

This morning I am on Poop Patrol, again.  Tashi has finished her doses of deworming and her antibiotic, and I need to take in another sample for fecal float, to make sure she is well.  That means I have a timer beside me to remind me to check her box every 30 minutes.  If a visual check shows disturbance of the neatly raked surface (my little Zen garden), then I have to put on mask and gloves, as I am immune-suppressed since my kidney transplant.

Zen teachers say a lot about shit (the word they use), at least compared to ministers I have known.  It is a vehicle for getting germs out of the body, so we should be cautious around it; but it is essential to life.  Believe me, I know, for as my kidney function declined over the years, constipation became a constant problem.  If your body can't get rid of waste, you are done for.  So.

It's not that I am repulsed by what the Vet calls feces, but I find it distasteful, despite all these years of tending cats.  Practice, as I get it, means we recognize that distaste, not grasp it and make a big deal, but not try to suppress it, either. This certainly is not practice as in sitting sesshin on a retreat all day.  But even in a monastery, someone has to clean the toilets. Personally, I think it should be the Abbot.  In a business, the CEO.

Okay.  Thirteen minutes to do my body practice before the next litterbox check.  I am thinking "real practice" is exactly this.
~~~~~~~~~
Later.
I ended up with only half an hour to do my bodywork and meditation, because the Poop Patrol was successful.  So it was stop everything for both me and Tom, pack that up, get dressed, put the poor cat in her carrier - her paws needed trimmed, too - and off to the Vet.  (It turned out the fecal float and stain were negative.  So we will start adjusting her diet - bland food - to see if that helps.)

Something about writing on this subject this morning made my whole day nothing but practice.  Not the easy kind, either.  If I were to write about it and explain all the occasions when I had to step back, breathe, divert the energy or anger, or step quite away from a problem, or discipline myself strongly to get my weekly pills  done, honestly, it would make a book, and I am not Virginia Woolf.  Just what Buddhists call a householder, as opposed to a monk.  I am grateful to John Tarrant for writing about practice in the lay life.  And here it is.   And here is a paragraph of it:

I think of the old story of the warrior who did zazen with such energy that all the mice in the house grew still until he had finished. His wife remarked on this and he said, "Well, this won't do, I'll have to try harder." His zazen deepened and soon, as he sat, the mice came out and played all over him, completely unafraid.

[Zen Cat image from Northern Sun]

Trying something

From Chogyam Trungpa's The Path is the Goal -instructions for beginning meditation:

So you keep just on the verge of your technique, with just 25 percent of your attention.  Another 25 percent is relaxing, a further 25 percent relates to making friends with oneself, and the last 25 percent connects with expectation - your mind is open to the possibility of something happening during this practice session.  The whole thing is synchronized completely.

Earlier he has said that we just "put 25% of our attention on the breathing or walking. The rest of our mental activities should be let loose, left open."  Reminds me of Suzuki talking about letting your cows have a wide field to roam. 

One of the important things I learned from Daniel Terragno was to just try things.  You don't have to make a big lifetime decision, even if you are, if you know what I mean.  Experiment.  See what works. I note that this attitude gives a certain release from craving to make it work, whatever it is  You don't have to make something work if it doesn't work. You can try something else.

As for this, I've practiced in the Japanese Zen tradition for many years, and it works for me, and has not stopped being good.  Now I feel like the Tibetan has something to offer.  We shall see.
[image: the endless knot, a Tibetan symbol]

Joko Beck is in hospice

The above clip came my way on Monkey Mind, the blog of James Ford, Zen Teacher and Unitarian minister. It is a pleasant little quiet time to watch it.  Joko seems so - ordinary, and that is the name of the sangha she founded independent of the (largely masculine) Zen traditions. It is called Ordinary Mind Zen School.  If you don't know of her, even if you don't care a bit about Zen, check out the link, and you'll understand why I have liked her.  A strong-minded independent woman.  Her books are simple and lucid.

Is it this that had me thinking this morning about how much more life I myself can expect?  More likely I'm still thinking about Friday's news about my very bad back.  In my fooling-around time with my morning cup of real coffee (after that I have to go to decaf, or I'll be able to thread a moving sewing machine) I looked up my life expectancy.  It read 17.55 more years. If I were that non-existent average 68-year-old woman I’d have 6405 more days.  That would be optimistic, with the array of health problems I have, but I like to be optimistic.

Not that I feel entitled to those days, or even this one. It has been very ordinary so far. I hope it continues to be.  No unpleasant surprises.  But if they come, I'd love to take dying with as much equanimity as Joko reportedly has. Here is a post that includes a message from her daughter about Joko's attitude toward dying. And an hour or so writing this - that's how I used part of my possible allotted 6405 days.

Things are always going to hell

"In human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don’t try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary. This also applies to the practice of meditation, for instance. A person should learn to meditate on the spot, in the given moment, rather than thinking, “...When I reach pension age, I’m going to retire and receive a pension, and I’m going to build my house in Hawaii or the middle of India, or maybe the Gobi Desert, and THEN I’m going to enjoy myself. I’ll live a life of solitude and then I’ll really meditate.” Things never happen that way."

The above quote by Chogyam Trungpa made its way to my inbox this morning, a salvation from an aggravating payment mixup on Ebay (don't you wish something would go right once in a while?).  It was titled Accept Where You Are and Work From There. It's the first two sentences I'm interested in because I just got a lot to accept. I wish they didn't keep me so busy accepting.

The title of this post is an unofficial but right-on definition of entropy I once read. It is true of all made items, or forms, and super-true of the human body.  It is running down all the time, and often you just don't know it yet.

I had the lumbar MRI a couple of weeks ago. Last Friday I talked with Chad, my physical therapist, about it, but not in detail.  I did have that underground feeling while we talked that he felt compassion for me. Yesterday, though, I met with the doctor and we talked about it, and I got a copy of the report.  Reading it over I got the message - severe degeneration of all the vertebrae down there. A mess.

For this, the doctor didn't even talk about surgery.  We did talk about why I'm not electing surgery on the rotator cuff, a decision he agrees with.  He did warn me clearly that the pain may take a long time to fall away.  (But that is also true if you get the surgery.) He is quite okay with my use of Vicodin at night, more or less said, "You can do that forever, it's fine."  I already found out I can't not do it, or I am wakened often by the pain. Yesterday evening I took one early.  The back can hurt in several places at once.  Maybe I had done too much driving (though using the left arm very little, and being cautious about how I wore the seat-belt), or maybe I was somewhat depressed by this news, and that mysteriously makes pain worse.

What is there to say?  Suzuki Roshi has summarized Zen like this:  "Things change."  When you first hear that it seems meaningless.  Yes, trees lose their leaves, nations rise and fall.  But as you go on experiencing your own life and becoming more aware, you see that it's the profound truth.  You change all the time, accidents happen, people suddenly die or leave you, most things are beyond your anxious control. If you can stay right there with what is you can work on adjusting to it - accommodating to the actual body you have.  Being aware that your good luck (being alive) can change any moment.

Hitting a wall like this one is a good example, I think, of why it is important to practice being with reality.  I've done a varied lot of spiritual practices in my time, and all have benefited me, but meditation has done the most.  And it is time to go do it now.  But I want to mention that at the bottom of this blog you will find an ancient chant called The Five Remembrances. I don't recite it in cemeteries at night, as some Buddhist monks do. But I have said it enough to learn it by heart, and it pops up at times to remind me that I knew this, I'm just experiencing it more deeply now.

What is it with people anyway? or On Winning

The largest recorded dish of tabbouleh was created on October 24, 2009 in Beirut, Lebanon. It weighed 3557 kilograms and earned a Guinness World Record. The record was previously held "by the citizens of Majdal Shams, Israel on March 21, 2008" when it made a bowl of tabbouleh weighing 2170 kg.

Intending to look up a recipe for tabouli this morning, I cam across the above on Wikipedia.  I must be working inside myself on the perennially arising desire to Achieve Something, because I keep noticing the ubiquity of efforts to Win!  Winning is big and red like that, it is yang, and yang is in the air this time of year.  I often think the bigger-better-winning neurosis is deeply in the American character, but here it is overseas.

Are we born this way?  I can't quite see winning as a survival skill, except winning a wrestling match with a bear for a salmon so you can stay alive.  Winning, achieving . . . I think lately about David Foster Wallace, the writer who had already written what many people call a masterpiece.  Now he wanted to write something more important, to surpass himself.  This is common with writers and athletes, who want to beat their "personal best."  Now Wallace is dead by his own hand. It seems he couldn't stand the pressure he was putting on himself.

Winning.  There are many high-flyers in this world who are proud of their aggressive collecting of money, real estate, women, stuff, power.  I've known of women in this category, but not many.  It's yang, masculine, testoserone-fueled.  If you asked them, "What is it that will be enough, that will satisfy you?"  I think these high-flyers would immediately say, "Nothing.  I'll never stop aiming higher" or some nonsense like that.  So here's my motto today:  Why not aim low?  Hey, maybe you'll meet your goal that way, if you insist on having one.

Imagine my surprise

I didn't think I had posted this morning's long bad mood.  Went to acupuncture at 11:00, and my Chinese doctor simply reversed it.  He agreed with my observation that pain is worse when you're depressed.  Anyway, to cheer us up, here are some kitties in paper cups, a photo that came my way this morning on a little gadget I have on my home page.

It's the little foxes that spoil the vine

Last night I had a stress break.  Hit Friday with two big things, no, three - the appt. with the transplant surgeon to assess whether and when my native kidneys have to come out, that appt. pushed back three weeks.  I don't see how I can have that surgery and get to the retreat in late September.  The one time a year when my Teacher, Ama Samy, comes to the US. But how can I not have that surgery ASAP, and risk a fatal infection?  Long story, many infections since the transplant, I've blogged before about all that.

This schedule change, more delay, I learned about late in the afternoon after talking to Joanie, my transplant nurse, who was leaving on vacation for a week.  She is my lifeline, she is the only person on top of my medical problems, which include frightening blood pressure right now.

My shoulder hurts.

But worse, Tom and I had a long talk with sister Diane, who lives far away and visited the folks recently.  Lots and lots of scary things there - they are very old and no longer able to take care of themselves, but will not leave their crumbling cluttered mansion.  House. This is a very bad situation, and it worries me, saddens me that my mother-in-law, whom I care deeply about, is trudging through hell with her very sick and mentally incompetent husband, and the kids don't do anything to help.  The whole situation is profoundly karmic. I know you can't undo someone else's twisted karma. I work on turning my over-responsibility into simple kindness, not trying to fix things.  But it blossoms up now and then.

Other little things - T and I had a playdate Sat. a.m. at one of those nice huge stores called Market District where you can buy cool things. But very soon his wheelchair ran low on energy and he had to go back to the van while I continued the shopping alone. Shouldn't have. This is a new chronic problem, him letting the wheelchair run down. I don't want to be responsible for that.  My shoulder hurts.  Tashi has diarrhea from the worming, though, thank God, she always uses her litterbox.

Yesterday morning after church got to talking to an old acquaintance, listening, rather. She detests her mother, always has.  Mother is in a home in the next state, has dementia.  My friend calls her every night and hates that her mother doesn't seem to know who she is, has nothing to say (I said, has dementia). Friend has a real rigid sense of the obligations a Perfect Daughter will meet.  I used to call the two of us Eldest Daughters. It is a song, the term repeated over and over in a simple bass line.  A mantra. Being an oldest daughter is a syndrome you don't want.  It involves a sense of responsibility that can make you end up totalling your car. i.e. being unable to do anything. That's where I am this morning. Totaled.

My shoulder hurts.

So I had bought a pork roast, been wanting to do that since I read that the USDA has lowered the standard for doneness of pork to 145 degrees, so you don't have to cook it to death anymore.  So felt that last night I had to go thru with the plan to cook it, tho I didn't feel real well - confused depression.  It turned out to be laborious to figure out how to do it, it's been so many years that I was too sick to really cook. Hot in the kitchen, though we have central air. I could have just stuck the damn thing in the freezer, but had this Plan.  It didn't turn out very good, and was cold by the time I had a stress break yelled at the poor cat for getting on the table, got mad at T who was supposed to watch her so that didn't happen, because I could die from an infection borne by cats, long story, I've probably written a lot about the various dangers of being immunosuppressed. Being aware of these very real dangers and careful and accepting that I could die any moment, well my enlightenment doesn't quite cover that yet. And my shoulder hurts. I'd really like to buy some colorful annuals to complete the front garden, but I can't plant them (bad back, dirt is dangerous) would have to call Karen, just don't feel up to it.  My shoulder hurts.

All the mother stuff tugged at my now ancient memories of the nightmare of dealing with my alcoholic mother and alcoholic siblings as she slid into dementia.  Her basic conversation was about Your Brother, whom she always adored to the exclusion of my sister and me, and how she loved this young bartender who she kissed on the mouth when we all went out to dinner at his restaurant.  The tragedy and ugliness of all this is mostly laid to rest right now, but sometimes when the moon is full the ghost rises from the grave.  Don't anyone dare tell me to get therapy on it - I did years of it.  Years of practice, too. It's memory, I remind myself - it's in my brain and cells, but not real anymore.  A torn rotator cuff is real.  My shoulder hurts.  I must have slept too hard on it.

So, a stress break.  I used to call this kind of thing A Nervous Breakthrough, but this morning it doesn't seem funny. Somehow the cat getting on the table (she walks in the litterbox with those paws), table I had cleaned with Clorox, Tom not watching her, all the hard work of trying to make a decent meal which didn't turn out very good - frustration overload.  I have to ease up, stop cooking, stop shouldering (note shoulder metaphor) responsibilities. There is so much to do taking care of myself, I don't have much space for anything else.

Last night 108 Zen Books posted about Joko Beck being in hospice.  Here is a sane, sober person, which is how you hope to be with enough practice and hard work, here is someone who accepts sickness and dying as natural, who is having a good death and not stressing out her kids with craziness.  It is like another planet from what I have had to deal with in my own parents and Tom's. It made me sad.

So what's a little stress, what's a big stress, WTF is stress?  

Anyway. By the time you read this I'll feel different. Things change.

About the little foxes:  the meaning of the verse from the Christian Bible is this: mature foxes eat the grapes.  That's an annoyance, a problem.  But the little foxes can't reach the grapes.  They nibble on the vines instead.  That can kill the vines.

Don't get carried away

I am so enjoying my e-mails from 108 Zen books, the sense of human contact with someone whose voice is pleasing and whose practice is serious. It makes me think again about what I can do with this blog.

- I like to report what's happening with me, how practice is helping me, because I think that might motivate someone else; but it feels like bragging.

- I could talk about exactly what is my practice now, as Genju does.

[Right now I could and will go take today's first dose of immunosuppressants. A little break.  Then I will meditate, because this morning routine is my current focus in the ongoing project of Forming Good Habits.  A discipline, you could say.  It is one place my foolishly expensive Droid is doing its job, sending me an alarm every five minutes until I turn it off.  Bought it on impulse, but it helps to control mine.]

Back, just for a moment - the electricians haven't called yet.  Today we are having a major upgrade done to bring the house up to code, and the obvious result of that is near-panic on both our parts, for we love our computers.  So I'll try to get in a word about the current practice.

Long-time readers know I had lost my practice, you might say, when I was so ill last year.  It hasn't been easy to get back in the habit, which is simple:  10-15 minutes of body work, 20 minutes of meditation. Part of my problem is my enthusiasm/creativity/impulses - all these are on a spectrum, I guess, of mental/emotional energy.  This energy has come back since the transplant, taking me to a place I had almost forgotten.  What was happening to me in the morning was I'd make that first cup of coffee, sit down at the computer, get "carried away," as my Teacher puts it, as in "Experience everything, but don't get carried away."  That sounds simple, but it's a koan I carry, and has surprising depth.

I decided that to get my practice back I would vow to make that first cup of coffee, do whatever I wished while I drank it, no more than half an hour, then sit . . . Whoops, the electricians are here.  More later.