A Note on Serious Practice

Red reflected at the OSU Field House

I have been fully employed since Monday afternoon with (da-dum) The Grandson.  He's here in Columbus staying with us for his second year at OSU Basketball Camp.  This has been a great experience, eating out (on his mom's dollar), doing origami together, playing Wizard, showing each other favorite YouTube videos.  Baked store-bought cookie dough that was lurking around in the frig.  Rode to and fro to OSU with Tom driving the van and me and Otto in the back seat, chatting, sometimes him messing with my phone - a nice Samsung with big screen for playing the latest update on Angry Birds Seasons. 

We celebrated his half-birthday (June 25 - it's terrible to have your birthday on Christmas) with an iTunes gift card and two tee-shirts on sale at the OSU store. He and I figured out how to make Heywire (free text service) work.  It is so good to be a grandparent.  He is polite and respectful to us, no need to battle with us about anything.  We don't have to push nutrition - they harangue the kids about that at the camp. (Lunch on Day One is always, horrors, salad day.)  I don't care if he doesn't hang his towels up for a few days; but if he lived with us, we'd have to deal with things like that. 

This morning Tom and I sat for half an hour in the stadium and watched the assemblage as the teams (eight of them, I think, grades 6-9) gathered and were instructed in the art of paying attention to the coach, or *Coach* himself, who gives brief, hard-hitting talks.  Thad Matta's story of working with a really bad back is actually very inspiring.  Serious sports is a discipline as stringent as Zen.  Coach talks to the kids twice a day, and you don't see him limp.

He would suddenly say "Two claps," and everyone better clap sharp and right on time; and louder.  The lesser coaches did it too, sometimes going up and down, one clap, three claps, no claps.  I told Tom we should do this on Zen retreats; it's fun.  What they have done on retreats we've been part of as the week wears on is chant Kanzeon, in Japanese.  This is short and rhythmic and is repeated seven times, getting louder and faster - with the wooden drum, as I recall.  It dissipates stuck energy, and energizes.  Tom and I especially like the part when you shout enthusiastically, "Go butsu!"  Maybe someday we'll get our act together and record ourselves or our Zen group doing it.

I could have spent the rest of this short day on YouTube looking at chant videos.  I found one of Japanese baseball fans chanting, but not many of Zen chanting.  Zen does favor silence, or the long, slow meandering talks by the Teacher. 
I learned a lot this week about how good sports can be for kids: discipline, paying attention, and most of all, submitting to failure over and over again; and practice. You shoot how many baskets to get one? I don't know, but as a poet, it is inspired me to go get more rejections. And it makes my short daily meditation look pathetically easy.

Yelping people, or not

[image: laundry on a line, posted on the blog Heart of Light.  Maybe this appealed to me because I was thinking this morning how bed linens dried in the sun are the loveliest thing, and so cool to run among them when you were a child.  It is also the least-harm way to dry laundry.]

Last night I read on in Pema Chodron's forthcoming book, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, which is a nice change from books on how to stand life, get through stuff, de-stress.  She has a way of going slowly and carefully through Buddhist ideas that has me highlighting many sentences, even though the e-galley I am reading will expire, and my notes with it.  There is a pace and rhythm to her writing that slows me down.

Last night I read about taking a vow to do no harm.

Well, sure.  Everyone knows that.  Doctors are taught, "First, do no harm."  Here is a nice explication of that from Wikipedia -

. . . given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good.

(I understand that it's a struggle these days for doctors to suggest doing nothing; apparently, we Americans always want to be fixed right away.  Never mind that back surgery probably isn't the answer, you want to at least feel like you're doing something, anything.  I know of a woman who was determined that her brother, who was quickly dying of cancer, have surgery to fix a not-so-bad cataract.)

When Pema talks about the vow of non-harming, she uses the word refrain.  She talks about a meaning deeper than the obvious meanings of the five precepts, the basic Buddhist ethical code.  She talks about refraining from the habitual (thoughtless) acts that let us escape reality.  Just in passing, she mentions that one way we exit uncomfortable feelings is chatter.  Sometimes it seems everyone has an aunt like that.

This was very fresh with me this morning, I noticed.  I found myself thinking about my impulses during and after church.  There was the impulse to invite S to meet for coffee; thinking about it, I know social encounters are often hard for her.  She can always call or write me.  Did I really want to yelp her?

Pause to explain.  It is very easy to leap forward to help someone who is less able-bodied than you.  I've seen people do positively embarrassing things to Tom, who was visibly changed by having polio as a child, the year before the Salk vaccine. One woman tried to take his plate during a church potluck when he'd just begun to eat.  We've grown to call that Yelping You whenever I do it, as in the blurred "maiyelpyou?" of some waiters.

All morning I refrained from yelping people.  The result of this seemed to be that I didn't say much, listened more; didn't initiate things, like time to leave, but looked around to notice that other people were having a good time. 

Now, sitting back comes naturally to some people, I know, maybe to all of us in certain situations.  It can do harm, too.  Not getting around to calling a sick friend.  Not buying a graduation gift because you don't know what to buy.  Not saying anything about an injustice because . . . oh maybe, because . . . it just slips your mind.  I'm willing to bet we can all remember doing that. It can become tragic.  A number of people felt like not speaking up in a very unpleasant situation, which let Jerry Sandusky abuse a long line of children all his life. 

(Now, there's the anger in my stomach, when Pema says will pass in 90 seconds if I don't work the story in my mind.  That's another issue. . . .p.s. It worked.  Except editing this brought it back.)

 

Just this

Heat

 

What makes someone difficult?

Reaching for the wind bell

It's been some years since I bought a book by Sharon Salzberg that taught me how to do lovingkindness meditation, and took that on as a daily practice.  I have often done it since, sometimes realizing almost astonishing results, in terms of a feeling of love for someone I had included in that meditation.  It is something you can do when you're stuck somewhere bored.  I know, that doesn't sound very spiritual, but it's a step up from texting.

There is a slot in that meditation for a "difficult" person, which Pema Chodron calls the enemy with a twinkle in her eye.  I've never had a shortage of difficult people to choose from.  If you do run out, there are always people in the public eye you can wish well for.  It's not so easy to pray for someone you see doing great harm.  It's not a refuge, it's a practice - I suppose you practice being like you want to be.  Love feels better than hate, and it does far less harm in the world.

But just this morning it occurred to me, as if it were simple, "Difficult" means "difficult inside me."  In other words, it's not that the individual is difficult or bad per se; it's that I respond to them with feelings I don't like.  So I guess that over the years my mind has, with glacial slowness, moved from blaming other people to locating the problem within myself.  I can think immediately of one relationship in my life that has been salvaged by gritting my teeth and doing this practice for her.  It is no longer difficult to be around her at all.

Not saying I have it conquered.  Just wanted to share the thought.  I know some of you must do this practice to, and would be interested in your experiences.

You are not who you think

This morning things are conspiring to make me realize more deeply the amazing luxury we live in here in the middle class in midwestern America just this moment.  Those conspiring things are the forthcoming book by Pema Chodron, which I have the really great good fortune to receive in galleys because I blog about these things; and the front page of the New York Times.  Specifically, an article about the problematic fact that now people in India and China want air conditioning, too. They want it more than they want TV.  I told Tom, "And not just in the bedroom - in the whole house, like us."

But don't kid yourself - in most of the world there are not that many "middle class" people.  There are mostly the handful of very very rich and the very poor who slave away in the mines and fields to bring us luxuries. I realize that those who can sit and read this blog are probably among the fortunate, like me.  You don't even want to know how many computers we own here.  We are middle-class Americans who grew up in a time when there was a larger, stronger middle-class.

Before you turn away from this post, thinking it is about, yawn, politics or economics, it is about to get intimate.  Actually, all those big-thinking things are intimate, in a sense.  Your air conditioning affects the whole world.  That's the problem discussed in the Times today.

But it is my personal life that's been nudging me to wake me up to reality these days.  Faithful Readers know about the majormajor problems of Tom's parents aging and not admitting to that fact.  Reading Pema last night, I felt like she had Tom's mother perfectly described.  To say, at 90, "I'm not old - I can drive - I'm perfectly capable of living in my house" is to insist on your delusion of invulnerability.  I'd guess this is connected to having spent your whole life refusing to acknowledge that you will not only age, you will die.

I have been rummaging around in Buddhist teachings for quite a few years now, and am familiar with the concept of ego.  This is not quite what we mean when we say someone is egotistic or has a big ego.  That refers to someone who thinks very highly of himself.  I say "himself" because most women seem to suffer from the opposite problem, low self-esteem.  How could we not when even Oprah, who ought to know better, has her nice plump zaftig body airbrushed into a size 12 on the cover of O?  (Here, I will restrain myself from posting a candid shot of her.)  In a competitive patriarchal society, most people feel inadequate, I'd guess. There isn't much room at the top.

So you see in the grocery store a big woman with huge (painful, beautiful) tattoos on her arms.  It is as if she is saying defiantly, "Hey, I might be stuck in a crap job, but I'm someone."

Well, you are someone.  But not who you think you are.  Who you think you are, that I-dentity you've worked up, that's a fixed idea, an ego.  Because we are really this cloud of constantly changing active systems.  A human being grows, matures, and then starts to age.  You could think of it as the decay of the carbon atoms we are composed of.  I like that word, composed.  Made.  Then de-composed.  I wish I could say that to my mother-in-law.  You're old, and getting older as we speak, I'd say with a smile, like I say it to myself after I try to take a flattering self-portrait.  Get used to it, I'd think - it's never going to go the other direction. But I won't tell her that - everyone's been telling her that - it doesn't work.

Does Connection Matter?

Grailville 2011, through a screen

from a Tricycle interview with Gil Fronsdal - 

..........the American Vipassana movement emphasizes interconnectedness when teaching anatta, or “not-self.” This is emphasized so much that a person might get the idea that realizing interconnectedness is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. It’s not; this is a very American emphasis. I think interconnectedness is inspiring to us as an antidote to American individualism and the pain of alienation it can cause. 

This interests me from a couple of points of view. One, I am a devoted member of a Unitarian Universalist church, which emphasizes interconnection as one of its seven core principles.  Two, I have seen this emphasis on aspiring to deeply realize our connectedness in American Zen, and a mystic's life is not for me.  I think it's important to emphasize the entire 8-Fold Path, which makes clear that our behavior is important.  If you set out to follow the precepts there, it will keep you busy.

On the other hand, as the scapegoat in an alcoholic family I grew up without a sense of having a family or connection, except insofar as I could connect with some poets through their poetry - sobering even to remember that intense loneliness.  So for me, personally, realizing my connectedness to what family I have, my friends, my church, has been healing; it's what kept me alive during my years of profound clinical depression. Therefore I stopped writing just now and called Nancy, a dear friend from years of meditating together.  And now, to connect with Tom over breakfast.
~~~~~~~
Oh man, such a long long too-much-to-do list today.  This is the result of addressing it sporadically, and a lot of change going on in our lives.  And sporadic is my buddhanature.  Meanwhile in back of mind, what is more important?  going to Zen tonight, see special friends there, or doing collage assn. while perhaps listening to a dharma talk?  Hmmmm........What is the most important thing?  I used to think it was my private spiritual practice, as in meditating.  Now it expands out to it being important to be there, sitting with the group, making the group.  The collage group tomorrow morning is a sort of practice, too, and certainly connection with other women in my age group.  But they really don't care if I do the assn, do they?  They shouldn't.......But my health and well-being is surely the most important thing. 

Breathe in, exhale. Cool down.  Abandon idea of going out in the noonday sun for major grocery shopping.  Decide to go to Zen tonight.  A bunch of Zenners meditating is about as cool as you can get. And staying cool physically and mentally is becoming a priority as summer barrels at us here, going up to 95 degrees today.  Already, even the little cat is irritable.

Getting Through a Really Bad Day

“Jasmine/Never Sorry (for Ai Weiwei)” a light graffiti work by Vicki DaSilva

The above photo was published today in the NY Times.  This light graffiti will appear tonight 23 stories high on the side of a building in Times Square, a charming use of electricity, if you ask me.  It becomes more resonant if you know something about Ai Weiwei, (who is said to have 40 cats).

But I was going to write about getting through a horrible day.  Two of them, actually, yesterday and now today.  I'd expected to wake up much better, but I woke up dreaming about talking to a kindly spiritual advisor about how the class just wasn't working, and I wished he would visit more.  That got me remembering Dr. Paul Kerschner, minister of my youth, and that made me sad.  It was so long ago that he must be dead.  He appears nowhere on the internet, and he was a wonderful person.

Yesterday we went to church, hoping it would not be about Father's Day, and it wasn't.  The program was presented by a number of women connected to the School for Young Children at our church, and about play.  Letting them play.  Not judging kids, not pushing them, respecting them.

The more I heard stories of kids blooming under this treatment, the more I remembered my very lonely, strained childhood, the abuse I got constantly from my father and intermittently from my mother.  Later that afternoon we had a long talk with Tom's sister, who is just very down about their father's slow demise.  Today my father's ghost has been visiting, still tormenting me after 15 years despite lots of therapy and various mental tricks.  And poems.

Saturday I visited my friend Tina, who was just moved into hospice care.  We meditated together for years.  It was a good visit, short. She has terminal COPD and had to gasp to say two words.  She liked the hydrangea blooms I took her, pink and blue; she likes pink.  Had breast cancer years ago, and I noticed she was still wearing her pink elastic bracelet, though otherwise not adorned.

I am just not there Buddha-wise.  Tina is 76 and wearing out, and it's time for her to go, but it makes me sad. And it is always sad when people are not relaxed and happy about dying.  I think about John Tarrant's description of visiting a dying dharma buddy who accepted what was happening.  He calls it "just two men having lunch."  No sadness.  Well, okay, if you say so.  Maybe I'm resisting being a person like that. Though I'm still aiming for a relaxed death.  (Just not right now.)

Last night before bedtime the sky was illustriously beautiful, the air magic.  I wrote about it all this morning, for myself.  I looked up Allen Ginsberg's poem about Walt Whitman at the Supermarket, and read it to Tom.  We went and exercised.  Meeting my daughter for dinner soon.  Slowly the day has become less difficult. 

Patience, Please

David Hockney iPhone Drawing

So the headline could have been "Stupid Old Lady Holds up Line at Kohl's."  At least, that seemed to be how the clerk saw it.  The special clerk, that is, who was called over to straighten out my attempt to use a return receipt for credit.  Eventually she showed me the kind of wallet card I should have been given, and I thought, Wonder if I've been stupid and checked my wallet, and voila - there it was.  I was relieved.  At that point, a nice person would have smiled and been happy for me.  Not this young woman.

It's not like there were a hundred people in line behind me and it was Christmas Eve.  I was just confused.  I'd forgotten about that card, and thought I could use the return receipt.  This stuff happens when you are almost 69 3/4 years old.  You stop retaining memories of everything.  Then you process problems more slowly.  As I have pointed out before, if you live long enough, you get old, like it or not.

I'd been thinking about blogging on bad systems, why they're bad, what we can do about them.  So I thought, I could write to management about this experience.  I'd write directly to the president, snail mail, that's what I do if I want to be heard, and I've had it work amazingly.  But I honestly wouldn't want a young woman to lose her job, or get a reprimand on her file.  She's not working at Kohl's for fun.  Do they give the staff benefits, or are they like Walmart, which refuses to give staff full-time work so they won't have to give them health insurance?

This was not the first time I've had perfunctory (at best) reception at Kohl's, where they'll accept anything as a return, but not with a smile.  I compared them mentally to Zappo's, the fabulous internet store specializing in shoes that fit me and free delivery both ways.  They have become famous for their success and its relationship to an emphasis on perfect service for every single customer, no matter how annoying we may be. The founder wrote a book about it.

What to do? 

Fortunately, I am not as pathetic as I might have looked during this ten-minute transaction.  I am not depressed by it, I do not feel worthless, because I accept my aging self.  I have had a certain grounding in reality through Buddhist practice, and through life, which can be a ruthless teacher.

Many elderly people are more vulnerable than I am to being treated with veiled contempt.  And it served to remind me how really important it is to be patient.  I could feel this woman's impatience, and it made me worry that maybe someone behind me in line was also disgusted with me; but there was another cashier, nobody had to stand there and wait.

It was all quite unpleasant.  Now that I think about it, maybe I won't shop at Kohl's anymore. You can buy all that stuff online.  Marketing folks, pay attention.  We don't have to put up with bad service anymore.  One more way the internet has given more power to the people.

The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Health

Common snapdragon

And I just did it - I acted as my own doctor.

I don't mean the kinds of odd things we come up with that stand outside Western medicine, which is, generally speaking, based on science, on studies and lab results and radiology and chemistry.  I do plenty of things for my health outside that province, like oil of rosemary to perk up and eucalyptus to sleep, yogurt, apple cider vinegar and garlic and d-Mannose, and lately, wearing cotton on the advice of yoga teachers.  Four liters of water a day and various spiritual practices, including a church. And more that Western science is just catching on to, like singing, laughing, getting enough sleep, and making art.  And I have several doctors and take many prescribed pills on schedule and get blood draws.......you know.  Almost 70 here, basically you work on staying alive.

But what I'm rejoicing today about is a triumph of Western medicine.  Basically, getting established with a doctor I  can get in to see, and who will listen to me and, sometimes, go along with what I want.  Yes!

What I wanted from my kidney doctor was that he reassess the immunosuppressants I take to keep my body from rejecting the kidney Laura Brown gave me 20 months ago.  Why?  Because I can't spend five minutes outside without my allergies getting even worse than they are when I stay home in filtered air.  I figured that having my whole immune system suppressed might be behind this, though it's true that here in midwestern America we have had so much in bloom all the time this year that everyone's allergies are worse.  (What, you don't believe in climate change?)

I actually have two kidney docs, one at the research hospital that did the transplant and a private doctor.  They usually alternate, each one seeing me once a year.  But I thought the right one to talk to was my private-practice doctor, Dr. D.  He is that unusual thing, an extrovert who enjoys talking to patients and telling us what he knows.  He's just about the only guy left who does the hospital - there is a vogue now for something called a hospitalier who works there and never saw you before in his life.  So I waited a month to get in with Dr. D, and saw him this morning.

I do my best to look respectable when I visit a doctor, and to seem reasonable, though I do have orange shoelaces. And Tom goes with me.  Whether you like reality or not, they respect men a little bit more.  Tom testifies to my truth and helps me remember things.  I gave my pitch, and Dr. D quizzed me about other symptoms.  I hadn't complained about the GERD which has been constant since the transplant.  He knew about the multiple UTIs.  And I reminded him I am almost 70.  Said that before, didn't I?  "I'm an old lady," I said, without even blushing.  Because I know that, generally, it is good to lower doses as you age. 

He looked over his printouts on my labs, and talked a while about how there are some newer drugs than Rapamune, which a lot of people don't tolerate; and how stable I've been since the transplant.  He thought maybe my dose could be lowered.  He takes pains to work closely with the research docs, worked there once himself.  So he called that doctor and then called me.  Yes, the doctor called me himself, they can dial the phone it turns out, rather than having the message filter through a nurse or two.

I actually couldn't have implemented the changes they are prescribing without a new prescription.  And I wouldn't have done it on my own - kidney rejection could kill me.  They want a new blood draw after a week, and I would have wanted that if I'd thought to ask. The fact is, I need professional help to be my own doctor sometimes.  But this wouldn't have happened at all if I didn't pay attention to my body and act on its behalf; that's what being your own doctor means.
 
It turned out that Research Dr. agreed.  Lower the Rapamune and lower the Neoral a little, too.  He told Dr. D, "I didn't realize how old she was."  Of course I am way too cool to be grinning as I write that. 

The Whole World is Medicine

Our house in spring, star magnolia in bloom

I'll start with the story.  I was in the Internet Cafe (TV room) at Manor Care, where Tom's father is now resident, fixing myself a cup of coffee.  The little refrigerator was empty, but there were packets of that creamer mysteriously made from corn syrup.  Well, it was still sort of cream, and would soften the gastric hit of the coffee.  As I tore open the package, looking at it for collage possibilities, I thought of Yunmen's koan, which I learned as, "The whole world is medicine. What is the illness?"  (There is a different version by John Tarrant here.)

Students of Zen just finished that thought, I imagine.  It is a famous statement that is considered a koan.  The one everybody knows is "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  (I know the answer to that one. :)  [by the way, smileys are addictive, especially useful in texting, which is economical]) 

later -
This morning's NY Times has an article on the discovery of the microbe that gave us streptomyacin, how a lowly lab assistant was finally given credit.  I loved this quote, though, from his journals: the microbes were found in "leaf compost, straw compost and stable manure" on a farm near their lab. I said, "The whole world is medicine."  Tom told me then that his BP medicine is based on snake venom, which kills you by reducing your BP to zero.

But that's not the deepest point of the koan, which goes like this:
Unmen said, "The whole world is medicine.  What is the illness?"
My response is, the illness is not perceiving the world. The illness is living in and grasping at your delusions.

And here's my example.  Tom and I are respectivily 63 and 69 years old, but sort of older, really; he has  post-polio syndrome, and I am, you all know, a sort of musculo-skeletal wreck, and on meds for kidney transplant, BP, arrythmia.....the usual.  Body wearing out, sooner than some people's.

His parents are 90 and 93.  His father is in nursing care, went there two months ago septic with untreated infections and long ago mentally disabled by stroke.  His mother is now living with brother Dave and his wife, but constantly trying to go back to her house.  She is bent with arthritis and can barely walk with a cane, but wants to drive.  Tom and his siblings and grandson are trying to straighten out a really horrible mess of their estate, much of which has disappeared into the hands of scam artists while they clung to their idea of staying in their own "home," the house they bought fifty years ago and have not maintained.

What is the illness?  Clinging to the delusion of never growing "old."  Clinging to the delusion that she can be independent all her life, it's only a matter of refusing to see reality.  In there was her own susceptibility to flattery, which she would never admit to, which has led her to meet strangers who call her on the phone and ask her to meet them in a parking lot and give them money.  And by the way, your home is not that house you live in; it's the world.  And your body, and you don't get to keep that.

As for us - we don't want to ever put my daughter in this position.  We spent this morning talking with a Realtor about what we can expect to realize on this house.  We are not going to move into a condo either; it's straight to retirement home for us, because realistically, we love our house, but we want to relax and enjoy whatever time we have left.  Realistically, that might be a year or ten years or a day. 

The Realtor wore flip-flops.  You have to love that.

Nothing is Ever Simple

Thinking about collage

So says my coffee mug, with a charming Boynton cartoon of a cow draped sadly over a crescent moon.  Today I looked at it and thought, "Yes, everything is complicated.  But that doesn't mean it has to be hard."  That is, you just follow one thread patiently.  Then another. 

Yes, there are a lot of threads, and boy, are there a lot of errors and problems along the way.  I am so grateful that Zen Teacher Dogen said, "My life has been a series of mistakes."  Of course it has; you're always doing something for the first time.  Even if you've done it before, be prepared to be surprised.

Then there are the bigger problems we run into with our neurosis.  I'm using that word in the way the Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, used it, to refer to this kind of mixed-up conditioned self we are; psychiatry aside, we're all neurotic until we awaken fully. As I understand it, you are still you, and your neurosis will rear up at times, but if you're fully conscious and present you can invite it to go sit down in the other room while you make some tea.

When something is awfully difficult, that's your neurosis kicking up.  Or mine.  They are fond of saying that's exactly where your practice begins.  I hate that.  I'm glad I'm not a Teacher and I don't have to be nice and positive about that...............though I do believe in trying to be nice.  Last Saturday night after a funeral I was introduced to a man in a beautiful Indonesian shirt was as "The Dalai Grandma," (a first for me), which led him to quote his favorite saying of the Dalai Lama:  "Try to be nice."
Time for a breather.
~~~~~~
next day -
The great news from my musculo-skeletal doc is that Friday's MRI shows no compression fractures in the spine.  The unspoken news is also no tumors or cancer.  He is confident I irritated a nerve, and it will heal over time, and I won't be as limited and in pain as I am right now.  But what I have to do - are you ready? - is pamper myself.  Yes.

And next time I start to hurt while driving, stop driving.  I know exactly when the injury happened a couple of weeks ago.  I was driving the van on a highway, running late, spine hurting like crazy but I didn't want to get off and change drivers; and Tom didn't feel great anyway, and had asked me to drive.  Well, I am not yet too old to learn.  Meanwhile, no PT just now and stay as active as I can. While pampering myself.  So I'm off to do that now.

How to Do a Hospital Visit

I do have a post in progress on attachment, a concept at the heart of Buddhism - or to be exact, detachment (from our desires and delusions) is what we vow to awaken to.  But today I had a post from faithful reader Karen that I am going to respond to instead.  Here are pieces of it:

Jeanne, I'm sorry I'm out of the loop, and don't know what's "up" with your back.......I hope you do write a post on how to do a hospital visit. I cringe away from them too often I think......Have you read "On Vit, On Parle" by Victor Hugo? I think of that poem so often as it brilliantly sums up all the big and little things we do everyday and ends with "Puis, le vast et profond silence de la mort."

I am glad to say I do know today that my thoracic spine (mid-back) does not have a compression fracture or tumor; nothing to worry about, then.  I see that doctor Wednesday to explore options for decreasing the pain.  His usual options are physical therapy, exercise.  Meanwhile I'm reading about how rats are cured with vibration therapy to the spine, things like that that my insurance probably won't pay for.  As for now, my relief is incredible. I am very attached to this body, in fact, that's what I was going to write about.

Last week I did not pay a hospital visit to my friend Tina, who had let the hospital know she did not want visitors, and had not called me when she went in. I imagine she is too tired and sick (COPD, heart) to want to entertain anyone.  So I put together a basket of foolish things, including a pretty little book of haiku with paintings that even a very sick person could lift.  And a rather fun card that didn't say "Get well" or any sentimentalism.  Tina is not a sentimental person.

I have had the unwelcome privilege of countless hospitalizations these last years.  I probably could count them if I sat down with Tom and tried, but who cares.  Here's what I learned from a patient's point of view.

1.  Please don't expect me to entertain you.  Don't sit down in silence in my room looking tired and bored. I can't rest while people are doing that.
2.  Don't come empty-handed.  A good thing to bring is something light to read, a tabloid, a Reader's Digest, I don't care.  Maybe I don't have the daily newspaper.  It doesn't matter if you bring the right thing; it's the thought that counts.
3.  Don't worry about my diet.  The hospital is already imposing grim dietary regulations on me.  Bring me chocolate.  Fritos would be acceptable too.
4.  Or bring a flower, best if it's from your garden, in a little throwaway vase. Or a little cucumber facial cream.
5.  Stand by the bed where I can see you without effort and entertain me with light anecdotes about the news, what the kids did, whatever you and I talk about, thrift-store sales, whatever.
6.  Ten to fifteen minutes of this is probably enough.  But maybe I'm animated and want to talk a lot, or have you walk me in the halls, be willing to do that.  It is rather insulting to be visited briskly by someone who has an appointment for cocktails at six and is just crossing you off their list.
7.  Feel free to lightly hold my feet or massage them.  I mean, if I know you that well.  If I know you that well you could bring a little fleece throw or something for a gift.  Hospitals are always cold.
8.  If I am conscious, talk to me, not my spouse, friend, whoever else is there.  At least in part.

So, the idea is, just pay attention to the fact that I'm sick and probably tired and scared. It is wonderful that you visited at all.  All you have to do is the three things that characterize Zen:
Attention
Attention
Attention

And while you're paying attention, notice if I say the TV remote doesn't work, or the nurses never answer the call (does it work?) or I can't get another pillow.  Maybe there's a little something you could do.

You will, of course, feel obliged to ask me how I am doing.  I may very well not have much of an answer besides, "I'm bored, they won't let me sleep, I hope to go home."  Or I might want to ramble on about my MRI.  In general, it really is the thought that counts.  When people visit, it makes us feel like we still have a place in the world, like maybe when we die it will matter.  And as to your own anxiety making a visit like this, well, there must be people who are so used to it (ministers, maybe) that they don't get a little chill when something reminds them of mortality.  As the guys say, suck it up.

And that takes me back to the Victor Hugo poem Karen mentioned. Here is a link to it in French, with English translation between the lines.  It is a very beautiful summation of this crazy life, and the final peace of death. Which may not necessarily be the dark.