The Missig Lik

The Missig Lik

Rufus woke up one day in a world in which the letter N had disappeared, both upper and lower case.  At first this didn't seem like a problem until he remembered that his last name, Thornton, had included n's.  He had liked that name, thought it poetic.  When he was a kid he played with it.  Thorn Town.  Thorny Tongue (eeuooo).  Without the letters, his last name was now Thorto.  There it was on his checks, on his incoming mail.  On his driver's licese.  He did't thik he liked that at all, people comin roud chagig thigs whe he had bee asleep.
    He wet out, restless, drove aroud.  A great may thigs were still uchaged.  The Pharmacy.  Barber Shop---though it had impacted the Beauty Salo.  Marketplace was still there, but ow it was Giat Eagle.  Fuy, you had o idea how importat one small miscellaeous letter could be.  His car had seamlessly become a Hoda, it was right there o the hood i stailess steel or chrome, whatever that metal was.  It did't seem right.  He ever got to vote o this.  He wodered---
    Wha will hey hik of ex?  oyig wih your brai?

Bragging Rights

Actually, bragging wrongs.

It used to be - I mean way back in the middle of the last century - that we understood bragging was wrong.  I think as kids we corrected each other snidely if we did it.  Maybe kids still do, until they get on social networks and/or get smart phones.  I blame all that, the internet, camera phones, digital cameras, and of course, the general breakdown of civilization.

Used to be, if you had some triumph, you ran home and told your mother about it.  If she did something special, like grow an heirloom tomato, such as above - which I bought at the store - she might take it over to a neighbor to see, but not if that neighbor's tomatoes weren't bearing.  It might make her feel bad.  See what I mean?

Similarly, the incredible fellowship you won, your new fur coat, the gourmet meals you cook every day, which I admit are beautiful, your many vacations - Wun used to not brag about accomplishments and privileges to the whole wide world.  After all.  Some people you know can't travel because they're old or sick or have no money, or all of those.  Back when, you didn't ask people in those categories to come and watch your slides, or even look through a little album you might take to work, though I never knew anyone who did that, actually.  No. People used their discretion.  Perhaps Wun pinned a postcard of Paris inside her pod.  That's all.

Do I really have to go on with this, or do you want to go to your Facebook and see who's sending photos from Rome before they go on to Greece?  See pictures of a fabulous meal at a four-star restaurant you could never afford?  Okay, I'll concede this - it gives us all a chance to work on our natural envy.  As if we needed more such opportunities.

What is needed, probably, is that everyone go to that new Google attempt at a social network, which I understand allows you to separate your friends into various circles.  Put me in the one that says Can't Travel, Can't Afford Fine Restaurants.  Yes.  Put your mother and daughter in the other one that says Always Happy for my Good Fortune.  Maybe your sister too, maybe not.  I leave that to you.

Meanwhile, you can always "hide" an offender on Facebook, click on the x top right of one of their posts.  They won't even know it.  You can unhide them, too.  I managed to do that, though I couldn't tell you how.  And if one of those hidden world travelers asks if you saw his pictures of Italy, you can say wonderingly, "No - I don't always check my facebook like I should."  Which is probably true. 

Actually, Winning isn't Everything

Competition.  Many things speak to me these days about this culture of Me First, Me Win . . . so I assume it is an area of my perception I am opening to, uncovering the competitiveness of my own conditioned mind, which was largely unconscious for most of my life.  Women compete in shoes, their kids' accomplishments, their baking, on and on.  I've heard that men just can't stand to have an older car than their brother-in-law, but men are upfront about being competitive.

How it applies to Mimi Me just now?  I am in gear to apply for a local arts grant.  This grant is, of course, competitive, not just a lightning streak from the sky like every artist would like.  But you don't know how to pour effort into it.  You have no idea who the judges will be, and they've had some people whose judgement I personally did not respect after listening to them at the panel hearing.  It's always been three of them, say a slam poet with a high school education, a creative writing teacher/published poet, an academic teacher and critic.  (I need to remember to put in a certain poem I have that is spoken in a dub rhythm; a slam poet might like it.)  

Half my friends want to win this, since, I am happy to say, I hang around with a bad crowd.  We hate it. We sweat our entry and walk it in at the last minute.  Months later we crowd into the panel hearings and hear our work judged 1-1-1, "not competitive."  Ow!  It ruins your day.  At least one day.

And competition goes against my own appreciation of a life that is non-famous, humble, not striving, you know.  Wun slowly gets better this way with age and practice, not cleaning for company so much.  Because what you get to see as you gain awareness is that nothing external will make you happy.  One year I won one of these, got a letter, and I remember clearly that the joy lasted about an hour.  You can't go around in ecstasy.  Actually, that relates to the subject of my last post, enlightenment. 

Anyway, deadline coming, so I will sign off, and might post less until September.  (Did I say the grant involves a handsome amount of money?  That's another story.)  You can subscribe by e-mail over on the right if you want to know when I come out of it.

What Enlightenment is Not

There's a catchy title. And I should add some qualifier like, "In My Humble Opinion."  We used to use that a lot in the early days of the web, abbreviated IMHO.  Today, there is far too little humility on the web, wouldn't you say?  I digress.  It is one of the privileges of not being paid to do this.

When I first caught hold of Buddhism, which was more like being swallowed by a wondrous huge blue Buddha-cloud, I got very interested in "enlightenment," which I saw in my fertile mind's eye as a light-filled place, as a constant state of bliss and imperturbable calm.  This, I thought, was what the end of suffering would be like.  In my mind it would be something like eternal union with God.  God was someOne I had a fine relationship too as a young person for a while, until stern Christian definitions made that God untenable.  Still, I had my own idea, formed on early spiritual experiences, and that was where I wanted to reside, perhaps with mystics like Hildegarde.

My evolved idea of enlightenment is just now calling me to do my morning practice.  It is less like "practice" these days, and more like just being with myself for a while, not gaining, as the word "practice" suggests (see Practice makes perfect).  So more later.  Meanwhile, hey, I'll post this, because I may not get back to it for a while.  A cliffhanger.

When Giving Works

Gift-wrapped cat

Something I read this morning set me thinking about social welfare programs - a comment that they so often do no good, sometimes seem to positively harm. Does that mean we shouldn't try?  I don't know.

The fact that humans exist messes with all life on this planet. Our big brains and tool-making capacity gives us a power a sweet little fox, say, may not have. A simple example, we can make more food than we need. We can store food, transport it. We can have compassion, we can even foster compassion in ourselves by deliberate spiritual practices, and maybe in others via teaching, maybe in our children.  


As I think about this I think about recent programs in which dentists with time to spare have set up free dentistry days, and been mobbed.  This happened here in Columbus, and more recently in another city where a whole lot of dentists banded together to give people the basic care needed so they would not be in pain - fillings, extractions, even root canals.  That so many people come to these events and were willing to wait all day for help is evidence of the desperate poverty that exists right here among us.


This is private giving.  I think it works better than systems like, say, first tax me, then use the money to create a bureaucracy to provide free dental care (but only to those who qualify), and so on.  That is, spontaneous giving can be less wasteful, more direct, more skillful, because the recipients want the care. 


But even private giving goes awry if we are not skillful.  Maybe you can think of examples that have happened to you.


So here I want to recount one of the generous, touching gifts that happened to me during my long recovery from my transplant.  I'm not going to, because there were a number of them, each a lovely surprise and exactly what I needed.  One was a book dropped off by a friend.  Others were gifts of homemade food, pretty elementary.  Each of these came from a woman who knew what someone needs in recovery, and knew how to give it in a way that didn't burden me or upset my rest.  Partly, that's learned cultural behavior, I suppose, manners.  Some gifts were from people I'd never expect that from, surprises. 

The only place I'm going with this is to contemplate how very nice individual caring and giving can be, how hard it is to devise a social system that works.  No line of argument here, just some thinking aloud.

Crazy like a fox

I got interested today in an article in a National Geographic about domesticating animals, especially the part about breeding foxes to produce tame, loving foxlets.  It works.  Some people have them as pets.  But here was the interesting thing to me: in one experiment, a cub's mother for some reason couldn't raise him, so he was raised by a tame fox.  But he didn't learn any of the tameness - he just stayed a wild fox, true to his DNA. 

You hear about wild foxes in Zen, and if you are interested, there is a long, erudite article on Wikipedia about a famous koan, Pai-chang's Fox.  This is beside the point, but it is clear that it being a fox is not considered a desirable reincarnation.  There is reference to "the deeply embedded Asian folklore stereotype that 'there is something occultly nasty about an oriental fox,' as Robert Aitken notes."

But that's not my concern, except to marvel quietly at all the textual exegesis Zen has gotten itself into over the years since its patriarchs burned the scriptures and the wooden buddhas and said, Just this. I don't mind at all if people want to involve themselves in this instead of molecular cooking and visiting all 48 states, I mean 50 states (they changed it when I was little); I don't mind except when some ardent student of Zen corrects my understanding.  That riles me, I can't help it. It seems to be in my DNA.  Here is my general understanding of all religion and good manners:  It's not nice to make other people feel stupid. 

My concern is about the fox breeding experiment, and the practical application of its findings into my own small life, and yours, and the lives of all the friends I have seen quit meditating and go on trying to be tame.  In particular, I care about my life, which has been devoted for a long time to not suffering so much.  To some degree, I have learned to accept the suffering that is not optional but built into the bipolar temperament, the depression that is about nothing, caused by nothing, just karmic, but still heavy, sometimes brutal.

And after all these years of practice, and the years of preliminary practices, from literary studies to yoga to tarot to dream study to therapy, am I a tame fox?  Not at all.  In fact, I detect within myself today that 11-year-old, in a sense, pre-conscious, an idle dreamy child with no ambition and the sense that most work - such as dusting the rungs of the dining room chairs - didn't make sense.  Warped undoubtedly by an insane father, yet unsure that his insanity was entirely caused by The War (the big one), because all his siblings were awful, too, and they weren't soldiers. So maybe it goes back and back in the DNA, back in karma, the drunken Irish Poet temperament, call it, the poetic suffering replicated generation after generation in the DNA.

It's been a long journey back to that little wild fox.  But I live in a nicer house now, and I have a steady boyfriend, okay, husband, some nice friends, a good cat, rather more equanimity about it all.  Still all my own teeth.  And I think life is not about being good and tame, not even about being the best little wild fox you possibly can.  No no no.  It's just, okay, be yourself.  An aimless little wild fox. 

How to lose

"How to Lose" - there's a winning title.

Looking today at a blog about being willing to experiment in a church and fail.

I think we - or I, at least - are often blind to the fact that every action is an experiment without any idea of what its outcome will be.  With group actions, like a church, you can have bigger, more dramatic unexpected outcomes.  If you use the word failure at all, it means you know the outcome you desire.  Isn't fail the opposite of succeed? as lose is the opposite of win.
 
To be able to act outside rigid guidelines and habits you have to have a certain degree of Don't know, don't care, an acceptance of any outcome.  What we do try to control is to be sure our motivation is kind, and not all ego.  I am now wondering what my motivation is in writing this here . . . just conversation, I think. Winning and losing has been on my mind.

I got saturated in the culture of winning this summer when our grandson stayed with us for a week.  He was going to a high-powered basketball camp here in town.  These middle-schoolers were divided into six teams that played against one another.  At the end of the week there was one winner, and five losers.  Times the number of boys on each team.  One team felt good.  The rest were losers.

While he was here, he was exhausted in the evening, and we let him watch what he liked on streaming  Netflix.  This turned out to be a show that pitted some archtypal warrior against another, like Genghis Khan vs. a Ninja, which involved a lot of young men standing around a laboratory admiring weapons, and using them to cut the heads off mannequins.  The mannequins did not then release rainbow sparkles, being all unenlightened, I guess, but gushed red liquid.  Jesus.  To me, it was very like sports, a winner, a loser.  War is the ultimate aggressive winner-take-all game.

But what if we experimented with some version of "Thy will be done" in our lives?  Here is a story I copied this morning -

Ryokan lived a frugal life at the foot of a mountain. One night while he was away, a thief broke into his hut only to discover there was nothing there to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught the burglar. “You have put yourself to much trouble to visit me,” he said. “You must not go away empty handed. Please take my blanket and clothes as a gift.”

The bewildered thief ran off with the gift. Ryokan sat naked at the door of his hut, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he said, “I wish I could give him this moon.”

I love the poet Ryokan, and didn't know, or had forgotten, that he was connected with this story.  I have wondered what would happen if groups of people and nations took this story to heart and said, "If you need our land, it's yours."  There would be no war.  War requires two aggressors. We do all know (I hope) that this is the recommended approach if you meet up with a drug-and-violence crazed mugger - "Hey, here's my money."

What happened when a huge aggressor, China, decided it wanted the Buddhist country, Tibet? You can look it up.  People didn't want to leave.  Laymen and monks alike felt they owned the land and buildings.  They also believed  they had rights. The odds against them were astronomical, laughable, and millions of people lost their lives, almost every sacred historical building was destroyed.  Instead of an orderly exodus, which perhaps could have happened, many many people died sneaking over the mountains.  The culture of Tibet has been methodically suppressed, and lives on only in exile. 


I am really interested in larger cultural questions, how a culture of winning is intrinsically a culture of war.  That aggressive model is replicated in the US in our political system, which just displayed itself as two armies of dunces, deeply committed to fighting it out.  And which have now begun battling each other for places on the ladder to power.

[image: a nicely Zen shirt, don't you think?  What if one day we all showed up in one?

Needs service

Rest in natural great peace

When you are very tired of the news - of heat, riots, wars, the decline of nations, suffering in general - these words are soothing.  Here "neurotic thoughts" is not used so much in a psychological sense, but as a description of what goes on in the usual busy conditioned mind. 

Rest in natural great peace this exhausted mind,

Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts

Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves

In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

— Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche

What I learned from this illness

cat demonstrating yin yoga twist

So it was last Thursday night, just a week ago, that this UTI set in rather ferociously.  Why? after an interlude of four wonderful infection-free months.  First of all, you never know, as I think it says in the subtitle to this blog.  Still, you can usually find a couple of things you did wrong, which is a kind of comfort, as in, I won't do that again, so that won't happen again.  Well . . .

But my transplant nurse actually said to me, in a non-Western-medical moment, "And don't skip your meditation anymore."  Aha.  I had told her I knew a couple of reasons I became susceptible to this lousy e-coli (which is always lurking in waiting, that's the bad news) - it could be summarized as overactive, overstressed by visiting a very sick friend - and too busy to meditate.  For two days straight.  I don't know what made me such a blithe spirit, but it won't happen again.

It happened that the same day Harvard Health News (a nice website) sent me a list of stress relievers.  Here they are -

• Get enough sleep. Lack of sound sleep can affect your mood, mental alertness, energy level, and physical health.
• Exercise. Physical activity alleviates stress and reduces your risk of becoming depressed — and it is good for your all-around health.
• Learn relaxation techniques. Meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, guided imagery, deep breathing exercises, and yoga are mainstays of stress relief. Your local hospital or community center may offer meditation or yoga classes, or you can learn about these techniques from books or videos.
• Learn time-management skills. These skills can help you juggle work and family demands.
• Confront stressful situations head-on. Don’t let stressful situations fester. Hold family problem-solving sessions and use negotiation skills at work.
• Nurture yourself. Treat yourself to a massage. Truly savor an experience: eat slowly, focusing on each bite of that orange, or soak up the warm rays of the sun or the scent of blooming flowers during a walk outdoors. Take a nap. Enjoy the sounds of music you find calming.

It's kind of wonderful that the scientific minds have become convinced of the value of spiritual practices; and almost amusing that they describe them as "relaxation techniques."  And almost discouraging.  You don't see prayer included in that list - it would obviously seem to demean that practice.  On the other hand, it was by emphasizing secular, physical benefits of meditation that Jon Kabat-Zinn has taught the medical profession to see it as something other than snake oil.  Sleep well.

On the edge

This morning, desperate for some spiritual grounding, I turned to Barry Magid's website. He is a psychiatrist and Zen Teacher in Joko Beck's lineage whose short talks speak to me.  One called "Don't Meditate" caught me, since I have avoided formally sitting for three or four days now, though I got in some good sky-gazing cloud-watching Friday afternoon as I waited in the van for Tom to do some post-doctor shopping.

The piece talks about how we sit on the edge of the things we don't want to think about.  "Well, bingo," I said out loud. Right away I knew what is upsetting me now.  Two of the people in my small circle of good friends have been taken away from me.  One is slowly recovering from a massive heart attack over three weeks ago, still can't talk, has a trach in.  It will be at least another three weeks before she can come home. And we don't know who we'll have then, whether she was so oxygen-deprived that it may have changed her.  The other friend is out of town indefinitely, as a close relative is slowly dying.

And of course, I am experiencing both these as personal losses right now.  Getting together with each of these folks for an hour or two is a meaningful part of my usual week, a sort of going-to-church for friendship.  So in psychological jargon, these friends help me destress. 

The second thing is more deeply unsettling:  these events vigorously remind me of my own fragility.  God only knows what my next big health event will be.  Had an unsettling little one on Friday; had to go to the doctor with sudden fierce symptoms of another UTI.  It had been four months since the last one, and I had been exulting in feeling healthy and capable, had hoped this meant I wouldn't have to undergo another major surgery to take the native kidneys out.  Little by little I've been building my body up so my back doesn't hurt so much, coping well with a torn rotator cuff, even driving.  And suddenly, working on a fiction, loving to feel that creativity come back.  Then, pow, you know, the kind of pow! that has jagged edges around it in a comic book.

Along with this - and perhaps related - I figured out that my blood pressure was high because last week I left one of the BP pills out of my pills when I did them for the week.  And I was doing my positive best to do them right.  It means distributing 20 medications into the four boxes for each day of the week, a total of 28 boxes.  I've had to realize that I just can't do that alone.  I don't have the brain power.  Did I ever?  I don't know, because when I was young and healthy I didn't have to do anything that precise, that important.  So I had to tell Tom, that's it, you have to be with me when I do the pills, and concentrating on it, too.  He has a more exact mind for data.

So that's a worry, too.  Is this mental incapacity another limitation of aging?  Were these two strange episodes of incontinence related to small strokes?  I will turn 69 in September, and that has me thinking, I'm almost seventy.  Seventy! People younger than me die every day.

Loss, sickness, aging, death - boy, what's not covered?  It's The Five Remembrances in action (you can see them on the right side of the blog if you scroll on down.)  Do you want to sit still and be with all that kind of reality?  I guess I don't.  And that's been a bad move.

But overall, what I get from Magid's talk is that I can also sit with compassion for my poor, vulnerable self's avoidance of its vulnerability and life's basic uncertainty.  Or with the humor of the famous calligraphy above by Sengai, which says "If by practicing zazen one becomes a Buddha . . . " The logical conclusion is meant to be, then a frog must be a Buddha.

How to search for work

Update:  Not feeling well this morning, after a busy week, maybe too stressed - I think I am getting another UTI, waiting for callback from nurse.  You know. Otherwise, physical stamina improving, pain under control, trouble getting to sleep at night, generally happy.  Not much energy to write.
~~~~~~~~~~
But this very good advice came my way this morning because I subscribe to Ocean of Dharma (a site about Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's work).  I know many people are looking for work.  For the fortunate rest of us, I suppose it would also apply to other things we undertake.  There is a way that it is about not being guided solely by ambition or concepts. One of my Zen teachers, Daniel Terragno, often said to me, in response to my koan work, "Too conceptual."  Often enough that it stuck.  Have a nice weekend, everyone.

You can plan everything, if you plan in accordance with your present state. You don’t plan something in terms of what you would like to be. No one can do that. You can only plan based on what you are now. Now you need a job, therefore you are working on finding one. The real way of being without aim or object is dealing with the present situation, the completely present situation. The more you are realistic about the present situation—how much money you need, what kind of job you are capable of doing, what state of health you are in—the better your chances when you look for a job. If a person is off the track of relating with the present moment, consumed with what might be, then quite likely her job search would be disastrous.  [from Work, Sex, Money by Chogyam Trungpa.]

How to Sell Yourself (Not)

Shelley tries so hard to - what? to be important, to be right, to be accepted, I think, and down underneath that, to be loved.  Down under that, to feel the relaxed security of "I'm okay."  I am inferring this from her strategy, which is to buttonhole a person, and tell her story, or push her opinions, which are more like resentments.  She asserts her Self. Part of her story is that her mother doesn't accept her sexual preference.  She is 50.  Her mother is 75. Her mother hasn't accepted her for two decades now.

You can tell from my description that standing on the table screaming "I'm important, I'm right, I'm okay, love me dammit" doesn't get her what she wants. In fact, I have to wonder at her mother's patience.

I suppose Shelley is blind to what she's doing.  There, an opening to talk about spiritual practice.  Awakening means opening your eyes to reality, that's all.  Sometimes great mystical experiences, some times small ones, some bliss, but the basic thing is becoming more and more aware, here.  That means conscious of your own actions. When you are awake, you know it when you are boring someone with your story and irritating them with your demands.  You see them, not just yourself.

Sounds simple, doesn't it?  And all you have to do to get there is just sit like a frog.  Sit still every day and let reality catch up with you.  In Shelley's case the reality seems to be that she feels terribly wrong, inadequate.  She has been fleeing that painful feeling for a long, long time, so I can imagine that once it knocked on the door she'd never meditate again.  That's what most people do.

Trying so hard to Be Someone, someone important, lovable, accepted, all right.  When Wun does that, she is acting, presenting, putting forth a false self - in Shelley's case, an inordinate amount of grooming, clothes, every item from earrings to shoes screaming for attention.  Somehow to my mind comes a picture of the musician, Amy Winehouse, a manufactured figure whose misery led to drugs and recently, death by overdose.  This kind of thing is downright common in the world of celebrity artists and performers who make a living selling themselves.  It turns out that all the adulation in the world is never enough, because what comes from outside can be taken away in a flash.

And I'm not saying you can learn to love yourself that directly, despite society's message that pampering yourself with a day at the spa will turn your life around.  In my experience, the great thing, the freedom, is in letting go of your self's yearning for a security that can never come from out there.  Turn your focus out away from how you feel, what you want.  Give something small to someone else. Think about what someone else needs.  Shut up and listen.  Sit like a frog and stop that infernal croaking.

I know what it is to feel like Shelley, so my heart goes out to her. I wish she would ask me how to get her mother to accept her.  I would say, "The question is, how can you learn to accept your mother?  How can you be kind to her?"  There's something a person can work on.