Wherever you are

is the entry point.

Kabir

And soon, back to normal

Beautiful Ohio skies

God Hates the Mayan Calendar

I stole the title from a satiric news item issued by a UU friend, Bob Parks, who is a pleasure to be on Facebook with.  Now, I could have said "with whom it is a pleasure . . ." but I have never used the word whom knowingly in my life.  I was an English major, so there is some weight and knowledge behind this preference of mine.  Long ago I learned there are roughly two kinds of grammar - prescriptive and descriptive.  Prescriptive is what grownups told you, like "Don't say ain't."  It is often a way to distinguish class. Descriptive grammar - it's obvious what it means - it tells us how we actually talk.  It is not about should, a mean jaggy acid-green word, but rather about is, a pleasant little earth-brown word.

Where was I?  At first I thought Bob was reprinting an actual news item titled "Christian Objects to Mayan Calendar."  Then the satire got obvious.  Point being, it is very difficult to satirize some things because they are already bending reality quite a bit.  I would be surprised if you could not find somewhere a fundamentalist who is denouncing the belief in the Mayan Calendar as unGodly.  And yeah, it is.  Here's news:  most of the people in the world do not hold to your particular belief system.

As someone who is always on the outskirts of things, practicing the steps my own way, I am fascinated by the amount of in-group stuff I see.  In the fundamentalist Buddhist community, furious discussion about whether we can prove the Buddha existed, some of it from people who clearly have no interest in working on Right Speech (well, if there's no Buddha, there are not precepts - maybe that's the point).  From fundamental Christian friends, Boycott Target because the store is using Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas.  So as I get it, when you are spending hundreds of dollars on toys for the kids to umm, celebrate the sacred birth, you want it to be from a retailer who does not hesitate to offend Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim etc. customers by focusing on Christians.

What is this?  Can't you people just enjoy your cookies without making the point that you are superior to the rest of the world?  Isn't the larger point of all these celebrations this time of year that the sun also rises, that the days will be longer now, that there is a miraculous birth over and over?  That we can feast?

Well, maybe it's their version of the holiday blues.  Some people fight depression with anger.  I know how it is.  You're not lonely, you're special.  Like that.  Myself, I like festivities that do not center around gorging yourself or drinking and making loud noises or drinking and marching through city streets and dying the river green.  This is it - a time of year when we think about giving and being connected, as in fact, we are.

Cat Portraits

 To the left is the picture I got when I tried to catch Tashi beautifully posed on a kitchen chair. Once in a while I think of something I would buy if we had oh, plenty of money, and one thing is a good camera with less digital lag. 

And one that is better in low light.  On the other hand, limitations of the camera have led me to -  Monster Xmas Cat, below.  Her eyes burn like white-hot coals.  Right?

A Love Story

I've been more aware of the power of love since I read that being in love creates oxytoxcin in the brain - that is the feel-good chemical that makes the sad and unsuspecting pay a lot for oxycodone on the streets.  That got me thinking about the Buddhist practice of metta, which involves Lovingkindness Meditation, a method or prayer or chant taught especially in America by Sharon Salzberg, though I know Pema Chodron teaches it in the Tibetan tradition, too.  Loving is a good way to do no harm.

American Street Cat was founded by a woman whose heart went out to the feral cats in her local colony in Brooklyn - her story is at the above link.  I don't live in New York City, you probably don't either, but it's a nice love story, an example of how our lives can form around some one we love.  Like me and many of my friends, she loves cats and didn't want to see them suffer.  She didn't invent Trap-Neuter-Release; Olwen Firestone, a lovely woman at my church who lives a life of service, went to a lot of trouble and expense to do it for the feral cats she fed on her back porch. They would not be touched, but used to follow her every morning when she walked.

The video above goes on to show pictures of many feral cats someone decided to love, and gave a name to, reminding me of The Little Prince.  (If you haven't read that classic, you can give yourself a copy for Christmas.)

If the people are buying dreams . . .

This morning, on the heels of writing about Oprah last night, I am remembering a song I loved, by Melanie. This kind of protest music was what was so good about the seventies.  Note the line "If the people are buying dreams, I'll be rich someday." 

We do buy dreams.  God knows I like the controlled dreams we call fictions; I like them on the page and all my screens - Kindle, TV, Droid.  I like to play the dreams like Spirit in which you try to beat back those forces of death - very realistic, because you can never win. But you get your adrenalin up trying. And it diverts you from your pain.

I don't like the dreams that are sold to us constantly on these screens.  Just watch commercial TV for an hour, or make note of the ads that come to you in an hour online, in your inbox, on Facebook, on YouTube, almost everywhere you go except here and Wikipedia (that's why I contribute to it).  For men, poor guys, the dream of a car or truck that is so masculine it can do anything, speed, drag out stumps.  For women, the feminine dream of youth, beauty, desirability.  For kids, the dream of winning.  Gender-free, the dream of Something for Nothing.  Damn.

You can't stop this sludgy flow like a river through your life unless you live off the grid in Montana.  Even there I suppose a blimp could fly over, or a plane towing a banner.  What you have to do is distinguish dream from your reality.  The news is telling me a lot of people are doing that right now, returning Christmas gifts they bought in the fever of Black Friday, and apparently got home and realized they'd been out of their minds, and couldn't afford these things they bought on credit, and are now returning them.  (That's why paying actual cash dollars is so helpful - you know when you run out of cash.)

So, this Christmas, also be careful of the dreams of perfect family, of drastically re-forming yourself with resolutions, of gaining eternal life through exercise or herbs, of giving or receiving the perfect gift.  Just take it as it comes, good old reality.  In a way, it never lets you down.

Control or Undo?

Decisions, decisions

This evening, after a lovely day with Tom's family, I find myself a hot smoking gun in writing comments and e-mails.  So I will reproduce two items below that I don't feel like developing any further.  As far as criticizing Oprah, it takes a brave or hopeless writer.  I believe I am both.
 ~~~~~~~~~~
Why I feel Oprah is a seriously bad influence on women:
1. She is airbrushed on the cover. To say nothing of professional hair, makeup, and all that Spanx.  Nobody actually looks like that, ever.
2. She tells us we can do Anything if we only fabricate outlandish goals and continually pump up our craving to achieve them. This is bullshit. It makes women cheer when they are in the studio audience, but the next day it can only make you very very depressed. Because you can't.  Do Anything.  Everyone is limited in many ways by many factors.  I mean, come on, I can hardly do anything, let alone Anything.  And I've tried.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi ----- to all who are contemplating kidney transplant -
In the 14 months since my transplant (live donor) I have had 15 bladder infections, and no. 16 showed up today the way they do, with major urge incontinence.  So charming.  They bring depression and apathy with them, and the antibiotics upset my digestive system, so I have to force-feed yogurt and acidopholus pills and carry various stomach medications.  I am having serious pain problems with degeneration in my spine, perhaps avascular necrosis caused by the huge doses of steroids at the time of the surgery.  I am limping, that's a hip, and recovering very slowly from a broken arm. The steroids caused me to start having exaggerated moodswings that require medication, and it took six months or more of trial and error to solve the insomnia they brought on.  Everyone tells me I look great (for 69).  Wow, reborn.  I have not had any rejection problems.  There are people in my family who are glad I'm still around, I guess.  :)  Otherwise, I have not earned the transplant or paid the universe back.  The main thing I have gained is that I am no longer afraid of dying.

I don't know whether I would do it again if I had foreseen all this, but I think that's not a very good question.  We don't get to undo our decisions.  Or control the outcome. Don't even think it.

You can't get there from here

A spontaneous thought this morning - aging is not an obstacle unless you're trying to get somewhere.  Shared this with Tom and he said, "You can think of it as sightseeing."  We have been married so long this made sense to me.  And we both remembered the one thing we remembered from one trip to Canada.

We don't remember where we were going, but we pulled off at a small town, walked into a bakery, and saw something we'd never seen before, butter tarts.  They melted in the mouth in a lovely confusion of pastry and buttery custard. They were heavenly.

So now I said, "We could make them for the holidays." I have many good ideas.  I have now printed out two recipes.  The one with more butter, more egg, more vanilla, and no corn syrup is more promising, though my shoulders are not up to rolling out pate brisee, and it will have to be refrigerated pie crust.

Well, just pausing along the road as I think about the news that came the slow way over the last couple of days.  And it is that the trouble in my spine is advancing.  Pain overriding the oxy, making it hard to sit at the table and enjoy a game.  The "severely damaged" vertebrae described by the lumbar MRI in June are now pinching nerves; I'm limping, and more often slightly dragging the right leg.  Headache.  This is called spinal stenosis, and when it's the result of osteoarthritis the treatments are exercise, build supporting muscles, and pain control.  There are a couple of antidepressants that help pain and sleep in some people.

I stopped here earlier today, but I still haven't thought of any way to wrap this up. Yesterday I felt better after crying a couple of times and deciding to go exercise.  To get serious about it.  And we did, and I did my back exercises as well as 17 1/2 minutes on the Nustep, stopping this side of exercise-caused pain.  I'm a believer in crying, having read that tears wash out certain chemicals, and having learned that my parents' ideas about what was strength were woefully misguided.

I'm thinking often about how wisdom is one thing, it is a sort of deep knowledge, cognitive, and emotions are another thing.  Surely you have a certain amount of grief as you lose strength and function.

And another thing - I don't have forever to wait for both rotator cuffs to heal so I can play guitar again. Began looking at digital technology for something I could play in much the same posture I use to type.  Maybe a Q-Chord.

Well, and thus.  You can't fix everything.  Just keep going - you'll come to -

You'll know it when you see it.
(There really are a number of these exits around the world.)
~~~~~
Here is an article about how emotional crying releases stress toxins, and more assurance that women are superior to men - at least, we have larger tear ducts.

Have some joy, for God's sake

This video is flying around the net, and it deserves to. So charming.
So tomorrow I promise to write more about the umm, edifying spiritual challenges of old age.  (See what a good mood this video put me in?)

Where You Shop the Wide World Knows

When I was little, we chanted a rhyme picked up from radio and TV's Amateur Hour, which we accompanied with twirling like Dervishes and falling limp to the ground:

Round and round and round she goes.
Where she stops, nobody knows.

That has nothing to do with my subject today, which is actually Christmas shopping.  I want to say, Where you shop, somebody knows, and to comment further that changing habits is hard.

I have been a major user of Amazon these last couple of years, especially since I got my Kindle and my transplant, and was often too ill to go to the library, but could buy e-books, and did.  Then recently I saw a headline in The Economist - Amazon:  The Walmart of the Web. You don't have to read it to get the idea, do you?

It struck a chord in me, for I am a person who decided a long time ago never to step foot in a Walmart. I was attuned to how the appearance of one of these big-box stores means the death of a small-town pharmacy, hardware, and grocery store.  I resonate to the idea of neighborhoods, small towns, mom-and-pop businesses.  If you think about it, that's the American Dream, not that anyone can become a dot-com millionaire overnight, but that anyone can set out to make a living as an entrepreneur. 

Stepping foot in a Walmart has not been hard to avoid.  But Amazon?  That's another story.  They lure you with their service, the guarantee, one-click purchasing, consistent shipping.  With some trepidation I went looking today for someone else to sell me the book I wanted to get for Tom for Christmas (which is, of course, a book I am dying to read myself).  Ebay led me to Powell's Books.  And there I actually got a better deal, free shipping.  Done.

I am in a sensitive, open place today, having watched last night (Netflix streaming) a beautiful documentary-concert on Leonard Cohen titled I'm Your Man.  Woke up humming Hallelujah.  So I noticed the feeling in my stomach as I left the security of Amazon for a new seller.  Not really rational, Powell's is long-established, nothing to fear.  Just change.  A different path.

Now there you have the fruit of years of Zen, that little sensitivity to a feeling in your stomach, to what's happening inside you, as well as outside.  If you don't have that sensitivity, the small sensation translates to anxiety, which can lead to an instant thought-trail that justifies buying on Amazon, and Walmart, because, after all . . .

So that's a little commercial, not for Powell's particularly, but for keeping up practice, and also for shopping with an eye to karma.  And by the way, Cohen long ago became a student of Zen and a monk.  I don't know whether he wrote "Hallelujah" before that time - I don't think so.  I hope you enjoy it.  A nice break from "The Hallelujah Chorus" this time of year.

Who's to blame for this mess?

Blaming doesn't even make sense.

I'm inspired to think this by a long article that hit my inbox this morning about who's responsible for the Euromess.  Googled "who's to blame" and got almost 6 million hits.  Six million.  Let's see, what failures are being examined?  The euro, the supercommittee, the great Gulf Oil spill, Nickelodeon's loss of ratings . . . everything but Who put jam on the cat?

The idea that some Wun Giant is to blame for giant things like this doesn't make sense in the light of our interdependence.  A great many actions culminated in that oil spill, including, I am afraid, my own reckless use of fossil fuel flying places in airplanes just for fun, drying clothes in a dryer, flicking on light switches.  I was a smaller contributor perhaps than a manager who decided some problem on the oil platform could be ignored, but I added to it.  Then there is the large diffuse problem of human nature and behavior.

The denotation of blame is to assign responsibility.  But it nests with words that assign judgement, like culpability, guilt, reproach, fault.   And what happens when you point a finger?  You have a war.  You have sides, someone saying "I didn't do it, Sammy did!  He did it!  You always blame me.  It isn't fair."  This is a pretty good translation of American political talk today.

I am sensitive to this issue because it takes place on the small scale of our lives.  I was the scapegoat in my family, courtesy of my father. There is an odd mechanism there, in which all the pain and distrust of an alcoholic family is laid at the doorstep of The Wun.  This is similar to sacrificing a goat to God to wash away our sins, a tradition found in some societies. 

What is the problem? The karma created by our actions is not washed away.  To restate: You don't get away with nothing.  It's easy to see how harmful the blame game is in a family - if the whole problem is Billy, nobody looks at their own behavior.  And if nations or politicians put their energy into blaming the other, we have gridlock.  The only way to move ahead is to ask, What are the causes? * To assume a nonblaming attitude.

This tempts me to go to the many finite causes of unemployment, such as doctors buying expensive software to answer and make phone calls, so they can fire the people who used to do that.  Or to climate change - public places cooling the air in summer down to 68 (the guys in suits are comfortable that way).  These things are matters of individual choice.  It gets subtle.  Fixing it is not about blame or exculpation, but about looking at reality.  Reality.  And that means looking fairly at our own part in this mess.
~~~~~~~

* Though you can never really untangle the causes.  Maybe the way to move forward is to ask, What needs to be done here?  or What can I do?

Balance is not for everyone

[I like this little video in which the cat on the ledge refuses to make a fool of himself.]

Just some thoughts today, on their way to being developed in a file on Zen and bipolar. The question applies to any mental disorder, though.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thinking about how many Buddhist teachers promise that we can practice our way to equanimity and peace - and can this possibly apply to bipolars?  Depression (which can manifest as other disturbed mental conditions than sadness, e.g. irritability) is a kind of dukkha, and is in our own mind/body.  It is us, neurochemistry, brainwaves.  The dullness and apathy it brings are a survival disadvantage; of course you don't like it.  You are not at peace with it.
     Practice, and lots of it, brings a certain amount of detachment from depression, just as you can get detached from your pain.
     You can also distract yourself with external things that "take your mind off" it.  For me, fiction, both written and filmed, can work.  The more depressed I am, the more I crave exciting, active films.
     Being engaged in talking with someone else can work, though sometimes I still feel uneasy, not quite there, even with a close friend.
     So you can distract from depression.  But when you notice yourself again, so to speak, there it is, like a browned-out or jagged-red aura all around you, a dis-comfort, un-ease, in your very brain pathways.  Researchers talk about brain levels of various chemicals, norephremine, serotonin, dopamine.  And you can control your actions if mania is coming on, but still have that hyper, jittery feeling - and it will keep you awake.  And various medications won't help.  And you will eat many potato chips at night, and buy books for your Kindle, and only vaguely remember it when you see the crumbs on the table.  Sorry, got carried away. 

My arm is healed! But wait, there's more

Leaf showing its bones

I just feel like shouting it to the world.  Today the sports doc had it x-rayed, and I got to see the picture side-by-side with the picture he took in October ago - and the bone is completely healed. Seamlessly.  I fell and broke it in early September (the first x-rays were taken out of town), so it's been a long haul.  It's my right arm, and I have refrained from posting here a very long list of all the things you do with your dominant hand, including use your mouse, and participate in touch typing.  Feed yourself.  Slice bread.  Like that.

So you're probably wondering why, then, does this beautifully mended right arm still hurt so much?  Because, he said (after expertly moving the arm this way and that), he thinks I tore the rotator cuff when I fell.  That would be the other rotator cuff.  The left arm already had a torn rotator cuff when I fell.  It was very painful.  And that's the arm I've had to use all this time.

The odd and interesting thing is that the left one hurts much less now than the right one.  And I don't care.  This is partly because it hasn't caught up with me yet.  And partly because he gives me oxycodone, since I can't take most painkillers due to the kidney (transplant), and because I am a sweet harmless old lady in tennis shoes and obviously not a risk for addiction (and he controls the quantity, it's not a bottomless prescription).  And partly I am not upset by this news because the left one has been healing, despite being subject to doing all the things a left arm normally doesn't have to worry about.  So they do heal.

I felt so empowered by this news that I chopped up some zucchini for dinner, using my right arm.  It's very hard to chop vegetables with your non-dominant hand, and just plain impossible to use scissors.  The zucchini was very good, sliced about 1/3" thick, steamed not too much, glazed with a little butter and dusted with lemon pepper.

So you're an atheist, yawn

This morning I got an e-mail, a new post from a blog I subscribe to.  In it the author claims there is absolutely no historical evidence for the story of the Buddha. He and some of the commenters get all worked up and use insulting language regarding those who believe this "puerile" legend is true.  Boring, yet aggravating.  Full of Monday energy, I wrote a short comment, as follows---

I just don’t get it, why some of you are so riled up about this. It’s a myth, an extended metaphor. It’s one step more symbolic than language itself.

A similar heated discussion exists in the perennial modern anti-Christian-theology movement called atheism. Why? So you don’t believe what someone else believes. Fine. We get it. Why so angry?

A rhetorical question, I guess.  I am sure people get fixated on this kind of thing for reasons deeply rooted in their own childhood and their neurosis, using that term as Chogyam Trungpa did to describe the general kind of messy human brain we have if we don't make a real point of engaging with reality (as the Buddha said, nudge).  As an English major trudging through degrees I met a great deal of elaborate thinking along the way, and many who subscribed to atheism, which seemed to be seen as The Thinking Man's Religion.  I observed that they were often anti-authoritarian, sometimes anarchists, disliked the idea of codes of ethics, loved transgression, and lived in these elaborate dreams of argument - and believed it mattered.

There is no good reason for me to engage in something like this.  I just think it's not nice to make a big point of trying to bring down other people's beliefs.  And, of course, name-calling is a low tactic, a rhetorical trick categorized as a logical fallacy.  There.

But at least they have a sense of humor (see image above).  And here, courtesy of an evil website, is an atheist joke:
Catholics are against abortions.
Catholics are against homosexuals.
But, I can't think of anyone who has fewer abortions than homosexuals! -- George Carlin

A generous artist

Here is the story of the phantom paper sculptor - look closely at the photo.  I wish I could think of something so charming as a project to give anonymously to the world.

Have a sabbath.