Enlightenment

Stella Doro lily doesn't know it's too late to bloom.  Note the sheltered ladybug.

Salvation, if we can talk about it at all, is the end of ambition, which is when you become completely one with your experience. Knowledge becomes one with wisdom, which is called buddhahood or the awakened state of mind. You realize that you never needed to make the journey at all . . .
Chogyam Trungpa, “The Human Realm,” in Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos, page 258.

My main practice is Zen, but with an interest in other streams.  A year or so ago I bought "The Practice of Contemplative Photography," which includes some photographs by Trungpa Rinpoche, and that stimulated my interest in his work.  Like Shunryu Suzuki, he is more difficult to understand than his American followers, but worth the effort.

What these words remind me of is that I am perfectly what I am, what I was made to be by long and wide streams of karma, national, genetic, historical, environmental, and so on.  In Zen we talk about "the self," or "the conditioned self."  At one time I believed my task was to get rid of it.  I did, I believed that, because it was becoming clear to me that my histrionic hypersensitive over-responsible and bipolar self was the source of my suffering.  I remember Daniel Terragno asking me reasonably, "How could you do that?"  I thought we weren't communicating very well.

You cannot not be who you are. Your brain and your butt are the shape they are.  And you are okay.  But (as many teachers have added), you still need to work a little harder.  You may be OCD, but you can learn how to throw away a cereal box. You may be hypersensitive to criticism, but you can learn whose criticism to avoid or how to deflect it. It's bit by bit, inch by inch. There's always work to do

When I started a regular meditation practice, it was in a frenzy of fear that the cancer in my breast would kill me.  This was irrational; it had been discovered on a mammogram at stage one.  Nevertheless, I began doing a white light healing meditation you can find taught all over the world.  From there I somehow moved into just sitting following my breath, then a lot of other practices.  At this point in my life, I was also in torment with my alcoholic family, and they weren't the only people in my life driving me crazy.  That was how I saw life then: they drove me crazy.

There was some truth to that.  Some people are hard to take, and you should have a really good reason to spend time with them.  Over the next couple of years I was going to leave behind several people who just weren't good for me.  It was hard every single time.  Now I am amazed that I ever tolerated them.  But I didn't see the reality then.  My reality was governed by an idea that I should like everyone, tolerate rudeness, cultivate patience, and enjoy pool parties.  I mean, of course. 

You know what?  I like a genuine beach and a nice big body of water, as well as a creek and a waterfall.  I hate swimming pools, chlorine, cold water. It's a matter of personal preferences.  But I had to take swimming lessons and push push push myself to try and try harder - in the face of fibromyalgia pain - because, well, everyone said swimming was good for you.  And I thought I should learn to like it.  And certainly I had to go to my brother's pool parties because, well, he invited me.  Though another thing I really don't like is being around people who are devoting themselves to drinking all day.

One of the things Zen says is that when you are enlightened, you will taste a cup of tea and know for yourself whether the water is hot or cold.  It's a metaphor.  You learn you don't like Carol, and you're cold when you're cold, and hungry when you're hungry.  Other children of alcoholics may recognize the denial of ordinary needs that was enforced in my childhood.

I thought practice would teach me how to handle all the problems in my life back then. It has, including that some things can't be solved.  Also, I often see more clearly now where the problem lies, and how it can be handled.  This is hard for me to say, but there's actually nothing wrong with Carol, and I bet some people like her.  She is what she is.  I just - sorry, I just didn't like her.  And don't miss her.

In short, what I am gradually approaching with practice is not universal joy but being aware.  That includes, though it is not limited to, what you like and don't like, moment by moment.  It applies to many mundane things that can add up to STRESS.  It's very interesting how the little raft takes you far, but not where you thought it was going. 

[In looking up the hot and cold thing, I was led to a dharma talk I think must be by Shinge Roshi, for those who want to think more about this.]

A Buddhist Looks at the Olympics

I am thinking tonight about the Olympics.  Earlier, I was going to title this "Why I hate the Olympics," but that was the hyperbole of high summer fire.  Actually, under that anger I am sad; what I hate is to be in a room where sports is on TV, including the poor young gymnasts who try so hard and often land so badly.  Last night we saw teenage boys cry on camera while the coach glared at them. 

I was hanging out in the living room and Tom had the Olympics on the TV.  So I saw an exhaustive exploration of how badly Michael Phelps, formerly known as the Greatest Olympian ever, had failed.  And right there is what I don't like about sports:
Somebody wins.  A lot of people lose.

Ryan Lochte Grillz

Poor Phelps.  Four years ago he won eight gold medals and was King of the Mountain. He was way too young for such adulation.  He went through a depression and decline, finally got back in training, but lost badly.  To the left is the guy who won, whose humility is evidenced by the diamond mouth jewelry he put in for the cameras.

Phelps is better off than the Chinese gymnast Wang Yan who landed on her head in a fall in 2006.  You can find a video of it if you have the stomach for it.  A report from June 20 of this year says she has not walked again.  Somehow it reminds me of Michael Jackson's death; poor kid, trying to be as good as ever.  No, better.  He bought that story.  He couldn't sleep nights for the terror of not surpassing himself.

It is the nature of contests that a winner soon starts to sweat the future - can she do it again?  All novelists face this.  One good novel is not enough; the next one has to be better (and seldom is).  I myself have won a couple of awards and honors for my writing, and it felt good, though the elation got briefer each time.  I remember being high for over half an hour when I won a grant for my poetry. 

But my win meant a hundred people didn't win.  I know how that feels, too.  The wins empowered me, but not as much as the encouraging words of one professors, one poet, one listener who were moved by my poetry.  We do not need contests to encourage people to pursue what excellence in what they love.  In fact, I'm sure they dis-courage a great many people at the expense of a lucky few. 

The Olympics pit nations against each other.  Team sports - like college football, say - pit smaller tribes against one another, and people gather and scream, identifying with their warriors.  One school wins - maybe Penn State, where a winning football program was much more valuable than protecting children from a predatory coach. 

Joe Paterno's statue being removed

Just forget about the problems of brain damage we now realize are caused by concussions, and think about this me/you, My Team stuff in terms of human development.  I think I understand the psychology of it.  People who may be a big disappointment to themselves, men who don't earn as much money as Steve Jobs, women who were never thin or beautiful, these people pay to watch surrogates beat a fictional enemy.  It is, someone told me, a form of ritualized warfare.

Is warfare necessary?  Maybe sometimes it is.  But is this necessary?  I don't think so.  I don't think it is helpful to our growth as human beings, and as civilizations, to indulge in fantasies of winning by proxy.  I think human beings can do better than this. I would like to see our children be taught to say no to harming themselves in the pursuit of winning.

All this made me recall the poem by A.E. Housman that beautifully paints the real situation of the young athlete who's on top of the world for that one instant, that gold medal.  I'll paste it in below.  And I'd like to comment that, speaking as a poet and artist, and as a Buddhist, I wish I lived in a civilization of nonharming, in which poets were valued more than quarterbacks and nurses admired more than entrepreneurs.

The first verse of this poem imagines the young man being carried through town on people's shoulders.  The second verse pictures his coffin carried on the shoulders of pallbearers.  The last lines draw a connection between early fame and youthful beauty.  The rhyming couplets make it is an easy poem to memorize.

To an Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race   
We chaired you through the market-place;   
Man and boy stood cheering by,   
And home we brought you shoulder-high.   
   
To-day, the road all runners come,     
Shoulder-high we bring you home,   
And set you at your threshold down,   
Townsman of a stiller town.   
   
Smart lad, to slip betimes away   
From fields where glory does not stay,  
And early though the laurel grows   
It withers quicker than the rose.   
   
Eyes the shady night has shut   
Cannot see the record cut,   
And silence sounds no worse than cheers  
After earth has stopped the ears:   
   
Now you will not swell the rout   
Of lads that wore their honours out,   
Runners whom renown outran   
And the name died before the man.  
   
So set, before its echoes fade,   
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,   
And hold to the low lintel up   
The still-defended challenge-cup.   
   
And round that early-laurelled head 
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,   
And find unwithered on its curls   
The garland briefer than a girl's.

Wandering in the Weeds

Late winter woods

I have modified this comment from an e-list I follow, but kept the flowing syntax.  This should give you the flavor of it:

John, none of us care about your gripe with Mary.  We're supposed to be supporting one another on this list, so please take your argument private, you are only going to cause people to leave the group. So grow up....

Don't you love that last friendly last admonition?  How nice is that, as we say flatly.  How helpful, for two people who are both acutely ill right now.  Then another person popped in to refer to it as "high-school drama."  As for me, reading it enhanced my high-summer problem of heat.  Aggression rises easily in my poor stomach, which finds some of my required meds, and some human meanness, hard to digest.

I had an impulse to reply to Perennially Irritable, but took a deep breath and thought I really don't know how to help.  I looked back over the threads on this subject and found others who were  upset by John or Mary's quarrel, and handled their pain by aggressively telling them not to be aggressive.

So what's a Buddhist to do?  In confusing times I go back to the basic commitment Pema Chodron writes about in her forthcoming book, How to Live Beautifully:

I vow to do no harm.

(I highlighted that in the hope that I will get it.)  The first reaction I always have when I have to bring this to mind is, Whoa.  Slow.  Down.  Chill out. Don't say it.  And especially, Don't write it on the internet.
~~~~~
I'd written the above yesterday.  Last night, I myself got annoyed by a supercilious (judgement word) comment about me made by a Facebook acquaintance.  (Yeah, friend, I don't remember how that happened.)  I wrote an answer, deleted it.  Wrote another, delete.  One more, trying to explain that I am not the idiot she seems to think I am.  Delete.  Went to her page, clicked the Friend button, clicked again, fixed it so nothing she writes will come through anymore.  I will not miss her.

Kind of thing I've learned in almost 15 years of practice (!!!!!) is that this hodge-podge self I am, made insane by my childhood, is hypersensitive to criticism.  And meanness, even when it's not directed at me.  All the King's horses and all the King's men, in the form of a succession of therapists and self-help books and practice and journaling and retreats, you name it, I've done it - these things have not changed this part of me.

What getting to know myself has done, though, is that I know how I feel.  I can control my impulses.  And then, I guess a form of wisdom, I accept that I am who I am.  Hypersensitive.You are not a thing to be perfected by meticulous work.

Got to reading Shunryu Suzuki last night before bed, and God bless him, he was talking about how it is exactly when we are working with the weeds in our life that we are enlightened.  This is our practice, to work with our weeds, not to sit on a cushion in bliss.  Though he does advocate nonthinking.

So I'm okay this morning, and didn't set the internet ablaze last night.

Rest

[These photos are among those Tom found yesterday on the retired digital camera.]

postscript next day:  One long-term group member, who was valuable and a frequent commenter, has resigned from the list over that quarrel.

The Zen of Not Sleeping Well

I can nap anywhere

Living without a conception of yourself - as it relates to your health and ability -

and also without ideas of how things ought to be, what you are entitled to

and not holding your plans and desires too tightly

and relinquishing your belief that you can, or could, control what happens to you (such as a good night's sleep)

but getting to notice that your stomach can't put away a certain family problem, and is reacting.  Strongly.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
More thoughts this evening - I saw the same thing at the end of my mother's life - she clung more desperately to her delusions. About her husband, their history, herself, her kids, the bartender.  It's sad how much pain she caused, and how she suffered.

That's another thing to let go of, your anger when you see someone's stubborn delusions ripple out from them to cause pain to everyone caught in their wake.

So here is the thing - the search for enlightenment as bliss is the wrong emphasis.  We should be working and praying to get over our delusions.  To live in the world as it is.

(And in that world, sometimes you just don't sleep well, and that's a fact.) 

Boredom Ointment

Self-portrait in orange shoelaces

The Vermont Country Catalog came today, and I was leafing through, looking at the supplements they offer us old people - this company is all about nostalgia, and easing old age.  There is a supplement for vertigo, for instance, that you smell to relax your anxiety and help you focus.  It contains lavender and some other essential oils; I approve.  It's fun to think of really old people (older than me) learning to use these hippy-dippy things that came out of the seventies.

I like aromatherapy, which is a science built on the oral tradition. I have a collection of scents I can use to bring me down a little or cheer me up or just relax me.

On the same page in the catalog I came across what I thought was Boredom Ointment.  What?  No, it's Boreoleum Ointment.  Which looks a lot like Vicks Vaporub for your nose.  But I already have a classy Ayurvedic nasal oil from Banyan Botanicals.  Ayurveda is basically another folk-wisdom tradition.

But, Boredom ointment!  If only there were a cream you could dab on and immediately feel interested in yourself and your surroundings.  I googled images for Bored student and got well over 2 million hits.  This seems like a lot, and accurately reflects what my own public schooling was like, but it's only 1% of the number of  hits for Britney.  Why Britney?  I don't know.  I didn't even know  she was the Queen of Pop until I looked her up. 

Anyway, this morning something led me to see that her Facebook page has over 2 million "likes".    Why is that number taunting me?  Because mine has 1,999,62 less, unless it's taken a huge growth spurt since this morning.  I asked why on my personal Facebook page, and haven't had any helpful answers, except that maybe I have too much time on my hands.  I think this difference is a comment on human nature, in fact. I'm a fun person (see photo above), but not as much fun as Britney, I guess.

Actually, these subjects - boredom and Britney- have found themselves side-by-side in my sprawling brain, and pulling weird, anomalous things together is what we artists do.  Britney is not an artist and Buddhist blogger, but an entertainer.  Entertainment is excitement, and seems to fill that big space of being bored or discontented with life or downright unhappy.  It pays much better than art.

Is discontentment the same as boredom?  I think it is, in a way.  There are some writings on boredom in the massive body of work left behind by Chogyam Trungpa, whose page is surprisingly small, with some 21,000 hits, though he was quite entertaining in his lifetime. 

To my surprise, there is no page for Ocean of Dharma, which sends me quotes like the one below from him.  Britney may be the Queen of Pop, but his honorific is Rinpoche, a Tibetan term for a Buddhist teacher which means "precious jewel". 

“Boredom is part of the discipline of meditation practice. This type of boredom is cool boredom, refreshing boredom. Boredom is necessary and you have to work with it. It is constantly very sane and solid, and very boring at the same time. But it’s refreshing boredom. The discipline then becomes part of one’s daily expression of life. Such boredom seems to be absolutely necessary. Cool boredom.” Chogyam Trungpa

Why The Dark Knight Shooting Happened

I feel compelled to comment on the Dark Knight massacre that took place last night, because I read a column by someone asking, How do things like this happen?  He was saying, in part, that he just couldn't understand a mind like that.  That's true.  Psychosis is a different country.  I know.  I dropped into that place with my second manic episode.   This took place over two years after a really bad psychiatrist named Roslyn Pariser misdiagnosed the first mania, and the suicidal depression that followed.  I'm pretty sure she's not practicing anymore, and may have died.  Not by my hand.  I don't own a gun.

But I could if I wanted to.  I imagine any records of me as a mental patient all those years ago are lost in time, and predate the universal medical databases now being started.  I could walk into any gun store and buy whatever I wanted, just like that poor, sick kid, or get a friend to do it for me.  There's no national database to kick out a name when someone buys 6000 rounds of ammunition.  The NRA doesn't want that.  So here's reason #1 why that massacre happened:

In America, anyone can get a gun.

It is well-known that most Americans favor stricter gun control than we have, and that it is the "lobbying" of the NRA that makes politicians shy away from the issue.  I want to define that word.  Lobbying = money.  The wealthy give politicians money through one device or another, and they have access to politicians.  And it takes a lot of money to win an election.  That's what it means.  Otherwise, the voices of ordinary citizens like me who don't want our grandchildren killed in driveby shootings would result in change.  And that's why I give what I can, which isn't much, to support candidates I believe in; the little people have to pool our voices to be heard over the loud voice of money.

And here's reason #2:

Too many Americans admire vigilantism.

If you don't think so, watch the trailer for "Dirty Harry" above. Check the box office for such films as "Dirty Harry."  Count the explosions in "The Dark Knight" (I won't be seeing it).  And think about the Trayvon Martin case, how the vigilante who killed him would have gotten away scot-free if his parents had not had the internet and the ability to publicize the scandal.  And think about what this has to do with your neighbor's admiration of those who get wealthy, even if they did it by outsourcing his job to cruel sweatshops in China, because he agrees with the American Myth that anyone can do it if they try.

This problem is not just about vigilantism and greed, though.  Here's reason #3:

A significant number of Americans don't want to pay taxes.

What does that have to do with it?  It is our pooled money, gathered in taxes, that pays for our mental health agencies.  And when the budget gets tight, they are among the first things to get cut.  If anyone had noticed this guy's behavior, the resources it would take for someone to visit him, even the systems to do that don't exist.  They cost money.  It is money - taxes - that builds our roads and sewers and the systems of law and order, and mental hospitals and agencies.  Building a decent, safe society costs money.  We gather that money through taxes.

Moving from the political to the personal and spiritual, here's reason #4:

Nobody was paying attention to that guy.

Last count, according to ABC news, James Holmes had bought four guns, one of them an assault rifle, and 6000 rounds of ammunition - what, nobody adds this up?  A brilliant student, he'd dropped out in June.  Why?  Did anyone talk to him?  Did anyone in his program care about him?

I was a grad student myselfl in fact, I was admitted to OSU on a Presidential Fellowship, which is fairly prestigious. Yet nobody ever took me aside, talked to me, mentored me, or gave a damn when I said, at graduation, that I didn't want to teach anymore.  Even my director didn't ask me why.   And I foundered around for a couple of years, but was lucky enough to find my way.

That kid didn't.  His dropping out was a sign something was wrong; some teacher should have called him, talked to him, showed that they cared, tried to find out what was going on, whether he needed help.  I hope we come to learn that someone tried.  His own mother is quoted as saying "You have the right guy."  I'm sure other people could see what she apparently saw in her son.

James Holmes had been psychotic for a long enough time to stockpile weapons and protective gear, and elaborately booby-trap his apartment.  Now neighbors are saying he was strange, he was reclusive.  But did anyone take a coffeecake to his door?  I haven't heard of it yet.  Did anyone smile at him on the stairs and  say hello in the parking lot, or did people turn away because maybe he seemed a little unfriendly?

This tragedy is just awful.  And it's one of a long string of these things.  All I can do about it, other than support political candidates who might change things, is ask myself who I know that might enjoy a little kindness, at least a friendly smile and a greeting.  Is there anyone I shy away from or avoid because they're different?  I really hope not.  I'm going to be watching.  I hope we all are.

Zen and Bipolar: What to do When You're Going High, Part 1

This morning I'm having fun with a three-month-old list I made titled 100 Cool and Stupid Things to Do.  It is gratifying to see that though I closed that file and forgot about it, I got a lot of those things done.  (And am reminded to do others.)

One thing on that list was the suggestion to write this post, as part of a larger project about Zen for Bipolars.  I'm neither low nor high today, just in that nice balanced space between waves, so I'll take advantage of that and begin.

Starting up on a manic moodswing is similar to being pleasantly excited for a normie (I don't like that word, we're not abnormal, but what else can I call people-who-don't-have-moodswings?  Maybe "ordinary people"?)  But it includes the allure of a mental shapness and confidence.  And it will not naturally subside.  That's my experience, and I was just ordinary until I was 33, so I know the difference.  This difference highlights the crucial fact that bipolar is a neurochemical dis-order.  That's why chemicals are often useful in the treatment.

Science is telling us these days about brain plasticity, that is, how we can change our brains even into old age.  There's a lot of further research on the specific effects of meditation on the brain. My own experience is that nothing will calm you down better when you're too excited than meditation, which has been briefly described like this: 

Sit down.
Shut up.
Breathe.

Teachers of young children call this a time-out.  It works.  Even little ones can follow those directions for a few minutes.  For kids with temper or panic attacks, a one-minute meditation of three deep breaths, exhaling all the way, can work magic.

But the little ones have an advantage over us; someone is making them do it.  (Most elementary school is a formidable training in doing what an authority tells you to do.)  As a grown-up, you have to exert this control over yourself, unless a manic episode gets so bad that you are hospitalized.  Then you will be medicated.  If  you are really bothering people, you will sometimes be shut in a 'quiet room" for a time.  Interestingly, a quiet room is rather like a Zen meditation hall:  empty, clean, quiet.  No screens, no one to talk to, no stimulation, nothing but a mattress on the floor. But we can actually arrange our own quiet times.

They can have the same calming effect as contemplating nature.  That doesn't mean hiking, climbing, caving, making a big effort to accomplish something.  Contemplation is simply walking or wandering alone in a park or woods, just for the sake of experiencing nature.  I love doing that on retreat.  (Caution: it is  stimulating to be exposed to sun, heat, and light.)

To the left is a photo I took at Grailville in 2010, a month before my scheduled transplant, when I was very sick and very frightened.  It was a good retreat for me, given that. Perhaps you can see how calming it was.

I like the subtle colors and shadows in the photo, which is of the hedge that separates Grailville from a meadow; if you look, you might be able to make out the wire fence in the late-morning shadows.  I took photos that year for the first time; it became a contemplative activity for me, and neither the teacher nor anyone else chastised me.  Ama Samy's retreats are relaxed and kind in the way I understand retreats are at Springwater Center, founded by Toni Packer.

[If you know someone who is bipolar, or close to a bipolar, feel free to share this post on Facebook or elsewhere.  You can use the little icons below.]

Ten Tips for Living With Pain

Mountains Walking

I am thinking about pain tonight for a couple of reasons.  One is that I just cut short my meditation because my shoulder and back hurt too much, so I got up and took a pain pill.  It's started working.  Last night I skipped the pain pill, and my heating-pad time (it helps my back, too) and awoke this morning with aches and pains.  Later Tom told me that I was restless and talked a lot in my sleep.  Fortunately, he wasn't really listening.  (No comment.)

There is no bonus for pain (or for that matter, for not having pain when ordinary people would).  However, all pain medications have side effects; it seems that the better they work, the worse the job they do on your GI tract.  So it's a matter of balance.  That takes me to my first tip.

1. Use pain medication when you should (and not when you shouldn't). We can be ridiculous about that.  A friend told me her mother wouldn't take pain medicine when she was in hospice care, because she worried about addiction.  Her refusal increased the suffering of her children and husband, too.  The doctor who diagnosed your condition can prescribe for you.  If it doesn't work for some reason, keep going back till they get it right. If you haven't got a diagnosis yet, keep trying. 
2. Put your attention elsewhere. You can think of this as seeking distraction.  It can be that, a movie on Netflix, a novel.  Or you can get into something that captivates you.  I love to write, make collages, take photographs, though I sometimes generate more pain in forgetting altogether about my back, and I am not alone in this. As I said, seeking balance is an everyday task.
3. Whine with discretion, or people will tune you out. 
4. But do level with friends and family, especially if they ask.  Otherwise, they won't know; pain is invisible. This sometimes lead someone to try to fix you or buck you up; you have to learn who you can talk to about it, and who you just shouldn't.
5. Find fellow sufferers.  Things are much easier now that we have the internet and e-lists.  And there are support groups for many conditions. 
6. Start a gratitude journal; research shows it increases our feeling of personal control over our lives.  If you just can't muster a feeling of gratitude, count your blessings, or good luck.  If you can read this, you do have a couple of blessings to count right there.
7. Work on your perspective by looking around you and listening.  Everybody's dealing with something hard.  They may not have chronic pain (yet), and may be able-bodied (for now) but there are other  problems in life that are emotionally very painful.  Remember being 15?
8. Try various ways to work with pain.  I've benefited from acupuncture, yoga, ayurveda oil massage, chi gong, physical therapy, and exercise, and that's just a start.  Doing something for yourself diminishes that feeling of helplessness and depression which, in my experience, makes pain worse.
9. Find the way you can continue to give, to be useful.  Generosity is its own reward.
10. There must be a tenth tip here somewhere.  I know.  Go to this link and read Toni Bernhard's tips on how to ask for help. There are more good people around you than you may realize, and their support can be so comforting.  Give them a chance to give.

And good luck.

The Truest Thing I Know

I know lots of important things, like Do the most important thing first  and There's always time for what's really important.  But the most important thing I've learned this last decade or so can be phrased in a piece of common folk wisdom:

It's always something.

Therefore, I make a point of enjoying the gaps between those somethings.

Buddhists may be noting already that this is a rephrase of what is called The First Noble Truth that Shakyamuni Buddha realized as he sat under the evening star:  Life is hard.  The word is dukkha, and I've most often seen it translated as suffering, anxiety, stress.  There are good reasons human life is hard.  All good things pass.  We pass, and we know we will.  We lose loved ones, friends, beloved pets, our health and vitality, our able-bodiedness, even our ability to think and recognize our world - and we know we might.  I know I probably haven't touched on the problems you and I have seen in our lives, and that you may be experiencing right now.

When I'm in a balanced mood I accept all that with the sort of equanimity with which we grandmothers sometimes say,  It's always something. (sigh)  If you can't accept this fact of life's difficulty emotionally, you can work on understanding that it is true.  Whether you like it or not.  And yet, this moment is safe.

Here I'd like to mention that these thoughts are growing out of me having a very good day.  A nice, quiet day following a lot of work yesterday, and some real visible progress on the major clean-this-house project, working right along with Tom, no conflicts.  I have seen enough suffering in life to realize the abiding pleasure of an agreeable relationship.  Today it is hot outside and the air quality bad, but we have electricity back, and our air-conditioner and Hepa filter are doing a good job in here.  My back doesn't hurt too much, and in a minute I'm going to prop up on a heating pad that works wonders for me.

I do live in an emotional hurricane zone, as Readers know.  I have a bipolar-ordered mind.  Right now I am neither depressed nor anxious-angry-manic, just right in that lovely middle.  Creative but not driven.  Not sick; maybe I've found the key steps to avoiding UTIs, maybe I can keep avoiding them. My history tells me those unlovely mood states will return and everything turn sludgy and gray, though I don't want to believe it.  I know it is my nature to get sick this way, that way; illness cannot be avoided (I know The Five Remembrances. which are at the bottom of this blog, by heart).

But today I can look around and run the mental gratitude journal.  And am not even arguing with the koan I have found most difficult of all:  Every day's a good day.  There it is, on the right, in calligraphy.  I am working on accepting that, preparing to see the shades of gray on those not-so-easy days.

Listening to the Atheists

A tabula rasa

Normally, I don't think about what people believe about the metaphysical - that which is beyond the reach of science.  The American Zen I practice has nothing to say about gods or a god, nor does my church, Unitarian Universalism.  But my church goes to lay-led services for much of the summer, though the ministers are usually around.  And up came one to be led by the Agnostic/Atheist/Skeptic group.

You're familiar with the idea of a knee-jerk reaction - actually a very picturesque cliche, if you've ever had your reflexes tested with a little rubber hammer.  When I saw this service on the schedule, I had one of those, a mind jerk.  It went, "I don't want to go to that."

I am committed to attending church every Sunday, both for my own sake and for the sake of the church itself.  Every body forms that larger congregation.  So I had to think about this.  It took me no time to relate it to my former husband.  I sigh even as I write that.  It is so hard to retrain yourself

Pete (who is beyond caring now) identified himself as An Atheist, bold and loud.  It was one of the first things anyone would learn about him, accompanied with a scorching indictment of the Catholic church in which he was raised, and that was before the sexual abuse scandals.  Interestingly, UU seems to attract quite a few ex-Catholics; it is a place that welcomes people who want and need a church, but don't want to be told what to think, and especially don't want to be called sinners.  That word sets teeth on edge, believe me.  It had scarred Pete, too, to the point where he wanted an anarchic world with no such thing as ethics.  I know, scary.

He firmly believed that atheism was the only intellectually respectable position, and talked me into that on our second or third date.  Why did I say I was an agnostic? he asked. How could you possibly think there might be a god of any kind?  There was no evidence for it.  And so on.  He was older than me and a professor, and quite at ease with this argument, which he also made in the English classroom every chance he got.  He and his friends agreed on this to a man, and somehow social conversations often came around to how stupid Christianity was, how venile the Pope, there was no sin, people should be able to do anything they wanted to, and so on.

Hey, I was raised to be a girl.  In the fifties.  I was silenced by this for quite a long time.  Interestingly, while I was still married to him, when I felt a need stirring in me for a church, the only place I dared go was the local Unitarian fellowship.  There you are.  Even he couldn't argue with its firm lack of creed, its openness to humanism and scientific thought.  And it turned out to be the right place for me.  I suppose it's ironic that that's how I met Tom. Alright, disclosure over. 

I saw right away that my residual resentment of Pete - it was so long ago, but those were hard years - was influencing my attitude toward the coming service.  So I simmered down and decided to go. By Sunday morning I wasn't even worried that I might get really upset and have to walk out.  And you know the rest.  It's like every story - once the conflict is resolved, the story is over.

It was a fine service.  I sat next to a dear friend, Terry.  People testified in the pulpit to their own spiritual histories, and what the church has meant to them.  It concluded with a marvelous video about the stars which illumined for me a certain Zen koan.

After the service I talked to a number of people and we got to planning a meeting to discuss the church's plan for the next disaster - how it can help members who don't have power, things like that.  That disaster is looming at our western edge even tonight:  another hot hot spell, scattered thunderstorms, which bring scattered lightening strikes, which bring down big old trees in neighborhoods like Clintonville, and blow out transformers.  And suddenly we're one community of sufferers, united in helping one another, all divisions of religion or creed quite forgotten.

It is hard for me to sit idle.  Below, notes I made on the cover of the order of service.

How to Simplify Your . . .

this version?

or this version?

In order to be worthy as a Zen student 

I must go straight on a narrow mountain road

That has ninety-nine curves.

[koan in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition]

Google "How to simplify" and you get almost 4 million hits.  It is charming. My goodness, how many of us in the modern world feel our lives are overly complicated. 

There are, it turns out, mathematical technique for simplifying equations.  But most of the hits are about how to simplify your life, your house, your clutter, your day.  I liked the simplified approach to simplifying on wikiHow, which is a commons how-to-do-anything manual I'd never explored:

1.  identify what is most important to you
2.  eliminate everything else

This is the approach I'm taking to the move in our future.  Easy.  Take the kitchen, for example.  I'll just pack the items we actually use and leave the rest in the house for the tag sale. That's going to mean that dream items (maybe someday I'll make another baba au rhum and need that bundt cake pan) has to go.  I can handle it. It will be harder for Tom, who loves each and every book he ever bought.  And actually, I have to go through all those good clothes I haven't worn for years . . .

If you think stuff is a problem, try simplifying your whole life.  I've been working at that for years, decades, and have realized my fundamental survival instinct:  The most important thing is to stay alive.  If it weren't, I'd never have done dialysis or undergone a transplant.  And even surviving can be complicated.  Would you rush back into a burning house for your child or cat or manuscript?  Would you endanger your own life for others?  For people you don't even know?  (Firemen do it all the time.)  Would you stop eating potato chips to lower your blood pressure?  Surviving can get complicated.

As a student of Zen I naturally turn to the more difficult problem of simplifying my busy mind in the face of the choices available in a life of luxury (by luxury I mean that I have a fairly secure home and food, and don't need to work for them anymore).  Right now I should be eating breakfast or actually, meditating - meditation goes best for me in the morning, and I'm running behind on my personal schedule. Or really, this is the best time to work with poetry.

But I want to finish this post, which is my work now, and am very interested in exploring the how-to-Zen articles on wikiHow (How to create a Zen bedroom!).  And I see Jeff responded to my e-mail last night . . . and I wish my photos of  Tashi would upload to Picasa so I can pick one for this post . . .

Maybe these are the ninety-nine curves of that narrow road each of us walks on.  No big deal, each and every moment.  But it is.  

Why I Don't Believe in Evolution

First, let me say that I know the theory of evolution applies to understanding the microscopic life that likes to inhabit my body, specifically my bladder.  The e-coli there have kept changing - evolving, we say - in order to survive.  That means the infections kept getting harder to treat once I was on immunosuppressants, until only an IV antibiotic would do last time.  I respect those smart bacteria, and work hard to make my bladder an inhospitable environment.

I said "the theory of evolution applies," though - not "I believe in evolution."  Science is not something you believe, as in have faith in.  I do have faith in constant change, because that's what I've seen happen in my life; that's different.  Change is not evolution.  Consider the climate change we're experiencing now [see image above].

I swim in the same water with many religious liberals; in fact, I have been a pledge-paying churchgoing Unitarian Universalist for three decades.  And what I hear there and elsewhere is that many religious liberals have pitched battle against the creationists who have fought to have their creation story taught side by side with evolution.

Now, I do think this:  the science classroom is for science.  Not religion.  Not creation stories or myths.

I taught in universities for years.  There I observed that even religious colleges tended to be highly secular in orientation.  So do our public schools.  I'm all for that.  Now, much more than when I grew up in the fifties, we are a diverse population with many faiths and lack-of-faiths.  That can be dealt with in specific classes at higher levels; the first time I encountered education that dealt with critical thinking around religion was in college, where it popped up in several required courses.  Personally, I'd like to see critical thinking taught much more at earlier levels.  But let's leave matters of faith out of it.

There's where I believe many religious liberals fall into a trap; they engage with creationists as if the opposite of creationism is evolution.  It's not.  Creationism is a matter of religious faith.  Evolution is a scientific theory that explains a lot of data in a way we find deeply satisfying right now.  I, for example, take those evolving bacteria in my bladder very seriously.  The data supports the idea that they have evolved.  But history tells us that the most glowing scientific theory eventually gives way to something better - more useful.

When people want their creation stories taught in the public schools, we should leap to adjust curricula to add courses that teach a variety of creation stories.  From what I've seen, we don't do that.  Instead, we try to convince people of that faith that they are thinking wrongly, that it's evolution that makes sense. So you have a battle.

You know I have to say something Buddhist, and here it is:  "Hatred is never solved by hatred, but by love alone."  We need to be listening compassionately to people who feel threatened by what is taught in the science classroom.  We need to respect them and give them their say.  Why not begin making comparative religious studies available in high schools as electives? If somebody doesn't want their kid in that, let them fight with their kid, not the school board.

I realize that creationists - as in the Texas textbook problems - have sometimes been political and aggressive.  That doesn't mean that a disrespectful or aggressive response is useful.  In general I'm against battles.  I've lived through one war after another, and I've seen that the characteristic of wars is that everyone loses. 

As for the Darwin wars, and bumper stickers that draw battle lines, the image with this post is meant to remind us that we have bigger fish to fry - and, sadly, that more fish are frying on the beaches in the new climate that is affecting us all, regardless of religious affiliation.

Sitting in the Lap of Luxury

Ahhh . . . we are back in what we think of as civilization. On our tenth day without power, it came back. We had prepared for this by emptying, turning off, and cleaning the frig, and throwing the circuit breaker that has the AC on it. We'd had power for a few minutes on day two; then the transformer across the street caught fire, and we all went out again, and stayed out. My theory is that a dozen or a hundred houses in our neighborhood suddenly started grabbing power all at once, for air conditioning especially (it's been 100 degrees here for several days - in the shade). It was awful not to have fans to cool the house down at night.  Even if you had, there were nights when the temperature stayed above 80.  That's different for us.

Many of us who fancy ourselves educated people, spiritual people with better things to do, confessed to severe TV withdrawal by the time it was done. Basically, I wanted to see the NBC evening news, as always, and hear them talk about our dire, desperate straits here in mid-America. I saw that tonight.  It has been the warmest year in recorded history here in America.  The drought has farmers despairing. This is not just our problem; those of us enjoying the luxuries of the modern age have changed the climate for the entire planet.  No one can think now that it's a theoretical question.

Saturday night I watched the news, then something called "The Closer" that features a histrionic petite blonde Southern Belle as a chief of police. Not feminism's finest representative; though she does have moxie. Personally, I think you can't be a cute, emotional blonde and be taken seriously.  It's fantasy, after all.

 Then I watched a House rerun that I had never seen. It was gorgeous in high-def on our flat-screen TV. I liked it so much I watched another one.  I went to bed replete.  Gorged on 3 1/2 hours of TV, less than the average American kid watches on a typical day.

This whole thing has been a wake-up for me, what Buddhists call a dharma gate, meaning an opportunity to realize the truth about reality. The truth of my reality was that I used electricity just as much as I wanted. I dry my clothes with it instead of hanging them out.  I wash dishes with it.  Before this I liked to keep the house at 76 during the day in summer, and cooled to 73 at night so I could sleep the way I like to, windows closed (horrible allergies, it's true). But once the near-hurricane winds went through, I didn't even have a single yard light, nothing, nothing. Most people also lost their cable TV, internet, and land line.  The amount of food that had to be thrown away was sickening.

Where does my electricity come from? Men mining coal. I know that.  I was one mile underground in a coal mine once, researching a book. It is dangerous. The miners were much cleaner than Richard Avedon's series of miners "In the American West."  If you click on the link to look at those portraits, be aware that they are huge, maybe 3x5 feet, and were all taken on white backgrounds that Avedon and his assistants went to a lot of trouble to hang on the sides of barns.  The impact of whole galleries hung with them is amazing.

The coal trains pass just two blocks from our house on their way up to the power plant.  We love the sound of the whistles in the night, one long, two short, one long I think it is.  The sound a train makes on the rails, clackety-clack. There's a whole sort of romance about trains in American music.  The open cars are heaped with coal, you can see it, sitting in a long line of cars idling, waiting for the train to pass. 

Elsewhere in Ohio, and many other places, coal is strip mined.  This photo is of such land being "reclaimed" as required by laws that the mine owners consider rapacious - note the absence of anything like a mature tree.  An ecosystem is not restored  overnight.

This is not an abstract issue - where electricity comes from.  It comes from the work of people who do not earn nearly as much as college presidents and politicians and other people who have their suits custom-made, and smile and shake hands for a living. 

An hour of electric luxury takes hours of hard labor.  Mining is unionized, I understand, but much of the labor in this country is not, and is done for $8.25 an hour by someone who doesn't even get health insurance or pension, certainly not if they work for Apple or Walmart.  That's why Steve Jobs died worth at least 6 BILLION DOLLARS.  He had a genius for design, but a lot of people do; his fortune was built on the work of other hands, many of them outscourced to Foxconn.(Follow that link to refresh your memory on the suicides at that Chinese sweatshop.)  And yes, I love my iPad, and my Dell computer, too.

Thinking about climate change, about what enables the American way of life, about what my luxury takes from the earth; being aware of the cost to other beings and the earth when I switch a light on or run up the electric garage door - is this spirituality?

I'm afraid so.

The Zen of the Lion King

Here I am again, on the iPad at church, which has not only electricity but Internet. Phone charged, ready for bed. By tomorrow midnight 90% of us in Franklin County are supposed to have power back. This is day 8. I have a feeling that if we don't get it tomorrow at midnight I will start to scream. And a lot of other people, too. Waiting is a lot different than living. And it's all in your mind. Waiting, I mean.

Let's see if I have these line breaks figured out. Constantly learning my gadgets.

After potluck tonight we watched Lion King here in room 8, four of us, all over 60. I kept seeing how great it must have been on Broadway, alas. Liked how it was that Simba had to realize who he was, his true self. Sometimes I see what we call the dharma everywhere' that is, the truth about life as Buddhism teaches it.

Movies love the idea that the evil self-destruct, that integrity and goodness are directly rewarded. I think the concept of karma is that it can be much more subtle than that. And there is such a thing as luck, good and bad, that you did nothing to earn.

Justice is not inevitable, is it? Look how much squealing it's taking to get any justice in the killing of Trayvon Marton. Ten years ago the media did not exist that are enabling people to express themselves and bring certain truths to light. Roughly, there are two kinds of fiction: the kind that paints the world as we wish it were, and the kind that rakes you open with the truths of uncertainty, pain, injustice. The first kind makes a lot of money; the second aspires to be art.

Just writing to write here - not being able to has been like a steady case of oxygen deprivation. And haven't figured out how to get an image from here. Maybe tomorrow I'll be back at my own beloved computer. Maybe, maybe not.

Examining my "unexamined privilege"

The phrase in quotes above is from my UU minister, Mark Bellitini. It stuck with me and has been speaking to me for seven days now, during which we have had no electricity or Internet at home, and there's been a heat advisory every day. We can light our gas stove with a match and cook, but it's too hot to cook, and the frig is out (and dead empty and clean). We have a gas water heater, so can shower. A screened porch, where we would sleep if our life was always going to be without power. Can sit there in the morning with coffee. At six a.m. it's pleasant. The house is shaded and open at night, closed in the day, so it stays under 85 degrees and I can sleep there. Tom can't; he needs to sleep on a V-pap. He has found another place to stay. The V-pap is part of our privilege. So is the house on a wooded lot. So is, normally, good central air. A king-size bed. A guest bedroom, where a dear friend stayed one night. So is this iPad, gift of my daughter, who had the privilege of coming of age during the feminist movement, and has an advanced degree and earns good money, and flies all over the world to work (though that feels more like a burden to her than a privilege). So is The Grand Day Cafe, where I am sitting now and so was my fabulous breakfast, which included a blueberry pancake and grilled vegetables fit for a queen. So is our van and its wheelchair lift, and the power chair that lets Tom have a life, and the classy health club we are going to next, where I will charge my new 4G phone. We are the luckiest people on earth; now I know it. I have added a couple of things to my nightly gratitude meditation. When the power comes back on (maybe by Sunday) believe me, I will add a couple more. I intend never to forget my good fortune again.