Letter from an American Hospital

It is 3:08 am and I am sitting in bed in a luxury hospital thinking about writing an open letter to the doctor who woke me three hours ago to express contempt for my conviction that I cannot take steroids or contrast dye, though he had accepted that to the extent of cancelling the scheduled scan.

Dr. Doctor:
Okay, you're short.  I wouldn't have noticed except that you were so aggressive, so angry at the possibility that I thought I know something about my body that you don't.  So had to be on top. Contemptuous.  What?  You're short, animals recognize power in size, it is not fair.  And you know what?  Nobody cares if you are king of your little mountain of being right. Get over it.  We're grown us now, we don't care who's tallest.

So you were so pissed off when the nurse told you at 10 p.m. that I refused steroids and cannot have a test with contrast dye, that you came bustling into the room two hours later to wake up a deaf 70 year old lady who has apparently had a heart attack for only one reason: to do your power thing.  You and the fiery nurse who had already talked to me like I was an idiot, "Do you have any idea what you're risking?"

Yes, I do.  If I let you do the test you so imperiously wanted, it could damage my kidney - the only working kidney I have or ever will get.  That would be a sentence to death. You didn't know that, and it really pisses you off that a woman, an old woman yet, would think she knew something you don't.   Okay, you won.  You woke me up.  I can't get back to sleep. Good for my health.

You're playing doctor here as if it were a war game.  Interested only in towering over me, not in discussing the other ways we could examine the issue, or in calling my transplant doc. Did not want his name.

That nurse earlier informed me she would be giving me a heparin shot.  I know all about that, Christ I was in and out of hospitals for ten years.  It's a blood thinner.  I said, "I just had four aspirins two hours ago.". Oh. (And why didn't urgent care give me an aspirin at noon when they saw symptoms of heart?  Why didn't the ER they sent me to?  Don't you people watch TV?  Everyone knows you take an aspirin.  I knew it, but didn't know vertigo was a symptom, but you knew that.). No heparin shot.

No use trying to go to sleep now. Someone will wake me to do another blood draw because that's protocol no matter that I only have one arm you can stick.  Then someone will wake me to do vitals.  Then someone will come in shouting at me to rate my pain. This is Western medicine.  It has a great kill rate.

The Roots of Suffering

You probably sorted out the kittens from the stuffed animals in this charming photo in a blink, without even trying, based on what you know.  Live animals are not blue.  Kittens have heads with a pattern, noses and ears and eyes shaped like that.  But a baby would not know how to sort this out if nothing moved. If you held her over this bed she would reach her hands out for whatever appealed to her, and be astonished if it moved.

This small example goes to something much larger, and that is that we also sort people out as "real" (like me) and "other" (not me, not my brother).  That is a distinction that allows us to kill other human beings.  All of us, including Adam Lanza.  I believe that to Adam those he killed were not real in the way we commonly understand reality.  His mother had become a monster in his eyes, a threat to his freedom.  It looks like he had come to see the children as his enemies; perhaps his mother gushed over them, but didn't seem to love him.  But let's take this more generally to the issue of gun violence, and to our own spiritual work

My example is a story going around this season.  Since you can pause and read it here on Snopes, I won't bother to retell it.  As you see, Snopes can find no evidence that this is a true story.  But that's not the point.  The point is, it's a myth some people love and are circulating, not just men, but women, too.

The woman who posted this on Facebook has an adult son who is an alcoholic with a long history of problems, a guy who might, in a drunken moment, snatch a purse like the guy in the story - who is gunned down by a woman with six shots in his back.  The woman's daughter added her comment that she would commit that execution in a flash.  Maybe the waitress needed every penny that purse was carrying, she said.

This young woman is married to a soldier, and the story had come from an unsavory web site I won't give any publicity to here, which mixes hatred and pornography and violence with the conviction that Americans should have the freedom to own weapons.  Unfortunately, those things do seem to mix well.  I can tell you that page has some 70,000 "likes" while the Dalai Grandma Facebook page, which advocates spiritual practice and compassion, is just struggling toward 100.  Well, okay, there is work to be done.

A number of rights are guaranteed by the American constitution and its amendments that are all essential to freedom, including freedom of the press, of speech, and of religion.  If any of these is most important, maybe it is the right to justice, that is, to be tried for any crime you are fairly accused of, as opposed to being murdered by someone defending her purse or home as you are running away.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck shows off one of two rocket-launchers turned in during the Dec. 26 gun buyback program. (Jay L. Clendenin, Los Angeles Times / December 27, 2012)

The above photo and accompanying story were in the Los Angeles Times and many other news sources.  But it is instructive to go to the I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists page and read some of the comments.  There you can see the complexities of this issue, which I think actually is in part class warfare.  We have to keep asking as citizens of free countries what makes other citizens so distrustful of their government?  What makes them believe it won't protect them, that they need to be heavily armed?  Is it, in fact, the same paranoia and simmering rage that motivated Adam Lantz?  What is the rage about - having to work for a minimum wage too low to live on, and no health benefits?  This is not just their problem - it is ours. 

Another Christmas Eve Poem

I've loved this poem since I was young, maybe because I was young when I first read it, and it wasn't so archaic fifty years ago.  But you can make your way through the language.  The Jesus story I was introduced to as a child emphasized Jesus as a shepherd.  On the wall of the Baptist Church Sunday School was a large poster of him carrying a lamb.  I gather that the folk story Hardy is referring to said that the animals all kneeled at midnight on Christmas Eve.  Hardy expresses a sort of sadness and doubt; but he hopes.  He wishes.  It is surely relevant that his country, Great Britain had entered World War I in August of 1914.

           The Oxen
                by Thomas Hardy (1915)

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen.
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few believe
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve
“Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder comb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I found the photo below on this site with the explanation that it was an outdoor nativity scene, and one morning a dog was found sleeping comfortably in the manger. (It does seem to have kept "the baby" awake.)

 

A Christmas Eve Poem

Christmas Eve by Matisse

    Christmas Thaw
                        Jeanne Desy

December, gassing up for the trip,
coat open, no gloves,
surrounded by gray sky.

The past is entirely present
in the smell of gas,
the spot of rain on your glasses.
No rushing, only standing
in this tranquil windless day.

You have told this rosary
years without end.  Countless beads
slip through the hand,
memories melted
in December’s warmest days,
in a scatter of drops
from a nothing-special sky,
the high stars invisible
in the even morning light.
      ~

Having No Choice

Artwork by Lorraine Art Schneider

 I find myself thinking about my parents, of course, this time of year.  Both have been dead for over ten Christmases now, but their karma really bit me.  The violence in my family seems allied to the violence at Sandy Hook; the violent response of the NRA reminds me of my father, who wanted above all to keep his gun.

My mother never felt she had a choice in life.  I don't think her mother, Leona, did either, though it is bittersweet to know that Leona did have an affair with "the motorman."  I imagine there was passion and pleasure there, but it is not clear whether that had anything to do with her death in her early forties; my mother thought it might have been hemorrhaging from an abortion.  All abortion was illegal in 1943.  That's not my subject, but it is relevant.

What I was thinking about was dinnertime in the house I grew up in.  My mother would put on the table something she had made from scratch, of course, back then.  It might be her famous spaghetti and meatballs, the sauce made from tomatoes she canned.  There would be this tension while we watched my father covertly taste it.  Most likely he would sniff, which was a way he had of sneering, and say, refusing to look at her, "No napkins."

Because my mother always "forgot" to put the napkins on.  Then we would eat in silence.  I suffered chronically from irritable bladder and bouts of diarrhea.  It made me what I am today. 

If I were dealing with someone like him today, first of all, we would have talked about it.  If that didn't stop his game, I would not have cooked dinner the next night, that simple.  I imagine he would have said, "What's this?  No dinner?"

I would say, cooly, "Why should I?  You don't appreciate the effort, and the kids can eat peanut butter."

It's a nice fantasy to think that we might have talked, but I don't know.  My mother seemed unable to negotiate with him.  She  probably tried various passive-aggressive tactics; I know she made up her mind to refuse him sex after one St. Patrick's Day party when he embarrassed her in front of friends by refusing to dance with her, but danced with the rest of the women there.

In a patriarchal system, many women are frozen with fear of overstepping the unspoken boundaries set up by the belief that men are better than women, that women are stupid, that we are here to serve men.  We can be conditioned to these beliefs without ever hearing them spoken that way.  We are so conditioned that we don't know we are afraid.  We don't even think of options. I believe my mother thought,  "Of course you cook for Your Man.  You have to."  That wasn't a matter of choice.

I think I'll stop the domestic story here to remark that my father stole the gun, a Luger, from a dead German (he called this "liberating" it) in World War II.  He had joined the Army during the Great Depression, a poor boy who couldn't find a job, but ended up serving six years once the United States finally entered that mess, after hideous damage had been done to other countries and peoples.  He was in the Battle of the Bulge.  He only talked about that once.  That's about all I know. 

Except that he had post-traumatic stress, and would sometimes have nightmares and wake up calling for my mother.  And now I have it, because he abused me, sexually, verbally, emotionally, every way he could. After death, I learned he'd been making moves to cut me out of the estate.

There's a whole lot of bad karma around power.  Hatreds and illness are born in any system that sets someone up as is intrinsically better than someone else by virtue of gender, race, religion, sexual preference, skin color, intelligence, money, or any other superficial difference you can think of.  Such ideas of superiority were directly behind the Holocaust Hitler was creating until America finally decided it was our war, too.

It's complex.  But peace is not. 

How to Have Happy Holidays in Spite of it All

With empty hands, I take hold of the plow

The last couple of days have been hard for me, with a major weather system blowing me away yesterday, as it can fibromyalgics.  Three days ago, Wednesday, I came home from collage to find Tom at the kitchen table looking stressed, with a bloody gauze pad on his forehead.  He had fallen and hit his head on a corner of the hutch.  He may have been saved from being blinded in that eye by the fact that his glasses initially took the blow.  We are so close that I "lose it" when I am frightened for him.  Lose my equanimity and become all a-tremble.

I was already shaken.  My beloved women friends and I had been sharing the general pain of the Sandy Hook shootings here in America - 20 schoolchildren, six teachers, and two mentally ill people all died.  The mentally ill people were Nancy Lantz and her son, Adam.  Nancy owned at least five weapons, including the semi-automatics that can kill a lot of kindergartners in a minute, whether you can aim or not.  But Adam knew how to aim -she'd taken him target shooting.  And he knew where to get his hands on guns.  Nancy was a brand of everyday walking-around paranoia, a survivalist, who'd stocked up on food and water and guns. 

A lot has already been accomplished.  I read this morning that various of the United States, including my own Ohio, have passed funding for the treatment of autism. So many of us have petitioned the White House that President Obama has replied via a video.  People are turning in guns in Connecticut, where they understand now that people with guns kill people.  But the work is far from done.

It is our work as people of good will, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, all citizens, to stay with this work, but not to let it destroy us.  I awoke this morning realizing that I need to bring myself back emotionally from too much empathy and emotion.  It is a very good motivator, but the work of change needs a clear head.  So there's a Zen koan, "With empty hands I take hold of the plow."  I can actually visualize this, hands relaxed on the plow.  (The painting above is one of several van Gogh made of ploughmen.) 

The empty hands mean we work from our understanding of the universal, of all the dynamic and potential of life.  So we need to be refreshed by spiritual practice and by celebration, by love and friendship and our understanding of the constant miracle of birth.

Botticelli, The Birth of Christ (attended by the animals)

Bearing Witness

Now comes the hard part.  The funerals for the children and teachers who died at Sandy Hook are not getting as much press.  Who wants to keep thinking about our unbearable vulnerability? You'd never go to the movies again if you let Aurora get to you.  Remember Aurora?  That shooting took place at the hugely hyped premiere of a violent movie.  These people were shot there:

The little girl had been taken by her father to the midnight premiere as a special treat.  That gunman showed up dressed in combat gear.  Here is a quote from one of the survivors, Stephen Barton, who was shot in the face and neck.  He was interviewed by CBS:

"I thought we were going to get somewhere after what happened in Aurora and frankly, all we got was silence."

Sunday morning a stalwart advocate for peace at my church had a table with some bumper stickers and buttons for sale.  I picked up one lone sticker that said "Don't buy War Toys," but then got distracted signing a petition and put it down.  I had already wondered if I should put that on my car, or if it would just lead to some violent response such as keying my poor old Civic or, worse, puncturing tires.  After all, the opposition believes in violent action, and you've heard how they're talking online.  Women, too. 

I have just experienced today's 15 minutes of frustration looking online for that sticker, to put it up on this post, but didn't find it in a jpg, which is all I know how to use.  There is this article, though - you might want to read it.  I got the above photo off that site. 

I have vowed to continue bearing witness to these tragedies.  This is the essence of the awareness Buddhism teaches, that we take in the whole thing, all the suffering in the world, and not close our eyes to it.  Compassion and working for peace and social justice are all one thing.  I came up with a couple of ideas for activism today.  One is writing to the President or CEO of Barnes and Noble to remind them that their shelves are stocked with stuff like this.  WalMart knows better than that just now.  I imagine no one at Barnes and Noble has thought about it.  These are books I happened across looking for a Zen calender for next year.  You can buy a 365 day calender on guns, but not one on Zen.  Irony is not dead.

 Not thinking about it is what the pro-gun forces want us to do.  So stay with your sadness and anger, and suck it up.  This is a political process.  It takes work of a different kind than arguing with the violent people who show up on your Facebook somehow. Trading insults with them isn't going to get us anywhere except a little sick in our stomachs.  It takes money and publicity and encouraging the President to use his power and sticking with it.  Mother Jones had it right when she said, "Pray for the dead and work like hell for the living."

And, you could share this post.  Thanks.

There is Work to be Done

Children being led past their dead friends, told to keep their eyes closed

 I woke up this morning with the Sandy Hook massacre on my mind, and ideas about how I can help push sensible gun laws through our political system. Opening my e-mail is a little more annoying than usual these days, with marketers in a frenzy to sell me cigars and mail-order cookies. But my stern mood was modified when my inbox led me to Smiling Mind, and I sat with the 5-minute body scan.

I have been impatient with the advice coming from ministers and Buddhist teachers that we all sit deeply with this grief, because I'm not hearing people say, "Now get to work."  To my mind came something I once read said by Zen Teacher Bernie Glassman.  He and his students were meditating every morning in the overgrown schoolyard of an abandoned school.  He said, as I recall, Meditation is a luxury; I could do it all day.  But there is work to be done.  So they just meditated for 20 or 30 minutes.  Then he and his students began cutting back the weeds that were shielding dealers selling drugs to children. 

This is the moment when something can happen in America that can prevent these tragedies.  Here is a link to an article with the headline "Gun Backlash Begins."  As well it might.  It is our job to remember, to insist that the backlash goes on.

I went to Michael's craft store today and bought black grosgrain ribbon and tiny safety pins.  I am making a black ribbon to wear until - I am not sure.  I am not putting it aside to celebrate.  I intend to wear it on my red-and-green plaid Christmas shirt at least until the turn of the year.  Then I'll think about it.  I'm very awkward with hand sewing, so I don't know how many more I'll make, but I'd like to have some to give away if somebody wants one. 

The poet William Blake - another madman, by the way - wrote this phrase:  "Joy and woe are woven fine."  One of Roshi Glassman's main teachings is Bearing Witness to the suffering in life. This is why he leads retreats at Auschwitz.  We need to keep remembering those 20 children and six adults who were murdered by an unhappy young man with his mother's guns, guns she had taught him to use.  We need to think about how far and wide the tragedy of these deaths spreads, how many lives are irrevocably stained by it.

I would be interested in hearing from some of you who don't live in America, how you see this, whether you see America as a violent nation.  May we be free from danger.

The Unhappiness Disease

Henri the Existentialist Cat speaks for many

 I've been thinking about happiness and depression.  I know that a certain amount of our unhappiness is the result of what we tell ourselves, what we believe, our delusions.  Not everything we don't like has to make us unhappy.  To quite a degree, a resilient person can accomodate to life events.  There's a lot written about this.  But it doesn't apply to depression.

I am speaking of the kind of depression brought on by malfunctioning neurochemistry.  It is logically contradictory to think you can be happy while depressed.  Depression causes unhappiness.  Professionals call it anhedonia, the inability to enjoy anything.  Not even spaghetti and meatballs and homemade cherry pie. And it's not "all in your mind."  It's all in your brain.  In neural pathways and erratic switches that are not understood.  It features imbalances of of the feel-good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin. Nobody understands it well enough to cure it.  You try this, you try that.

It can really get bad is this time of year, for the Christmas season is the Great Spiritual Hedonic Holiday here in America.  We are supposed to be happy in a mellow quasi-spiritual way, surrounded by our loving family, generous, tra la la. When I say "supposed to be" I mean it:  that's what the culture is telling you with every song on the radio, every end display in Target, every commercial about getting all your Festive Crap needs in one store. How can you help but think, I should be enjoying this. It's The Hallelujah Chorus for god's sake.

Maybe when UPS delivers your Light Therapy box, you'll perk up. (Yes, I have one on order.)  Meanwhile, you aren't having any fun.  If you are inclined to, you can pray that nobody criticizes you for not smiling and  wearing jingle bell earrings.  Then you'll really have to work on right speech, again.

Real Practice

I am seriously having great doubt about the Zen path for about the hundredth time.

The other night I went to a local sangha I sit with occasionally. The room that serves as the zendo was set up as usual with 10-15 cushion sets, for people to sit on the floor, and four chairs for us sick, elderly, or just incompetent. I don't remember now whether every chair was occupied.  But the setup makes it clear that sitting on cushions is a sign of belonging.  A young man came in near the bell and sat down on the cushions beside me. It is not done to talk once you're in the zendo, shoes off, and I have no idea whether he talked to anyone before he entered, or had been there before.

But it was easy to see that he was acutely uncomfortable, trying to find some position he could sustain.  If you do not grow up sitting on floors, it can be quite difficult to learn how to.  In my own life, I got help from a kind yoga teacher with my posture and my pain issues.  I've always liked to get A's, and I persisted, and I did sit on a cushion for maybe ten years, until I had an ankle problem that ruled it out (and might have been brought on by all those years of half-lotus position, now that I think about it).

After about ten minutes, the guy next to me got up and quietly left. I did not get up and follow him. I hate this. It's not me.  But I was quite depressed that evening, not thinking well at all.

You do not have to sit in lotus position to gain wisdom or "attain enlightenment."  Fortunately for me, I began meditating on my own, sitting comfortably in my brown leather recliner, recovering from surgery. Sitting in that same chair two years later, after my second retreat, I had a great awakening experience. My spine was not erect at the time and I was not sitting motionless. I tell this only to point out that you can have realizations without tormenting your body. 

I empathize with that guy.  I, too, went to the only Zen group in town when I was first practicing, and felt the need for other people to support me.  I, too, tried to sit on the damn floor, since no chairs were provided there, and, using considerable willpower, adjusted my posture only a couple of times during that first excruciatingly long sit. After that, while others walked kinhin, the leader drew me aside and talked to me about how I was disturbing others by moving, and went and found a chair in another room and put me in it, all by myself like the dunce of the class. I am still embarrassed at the memory. But it happens that I'm stubborn about not letting the bastards get me down, and I persisted in my practice.

People don't come to Zen - or yoga, or church - on a whim. We are looking for something; we are in need.  But the way imitation-Japanese Zen valorizes sitting on the floor and enduring pain (and sleep deprivation) , if you can't do it, you don't belong.  Nothing could make that any clearer than all those cushions and no chairs. And no welcoming.

I had a similar experience with yoga, once. There were just six of us in that class, arrayed in a single line in the long room before the teacher.  Three of us could do almost nothing that teacher did, though this was billed as a Beginner's class. She never offered one hint of what you could do if you were not able to balance on one hand and one foot for minutes on end.  It's the same delusion:  that It is attained by physical forms.  I didn't go back, if you're wondering.

This. Is. Elitism. It is reinforced by the idea that a Zendo is a sort of tabernacle you enter barefoot and silent.  It is there in the persistent grave problem of sexual scandals in Zen, which has caused some hurt feelings online recently.  Teachers are glorified by the aura of holiness around dharma transmission, students are attracted to the power (just as they are to politicians), the teachers have sex with confused students.  Often, it turns out, with many of them. 

Special-endurance Zen is a masculinist tradition whose paramilitary rituals play to testoserone.  It is fed in this culture by the failures of the nuclear family, by the American craving to succeed, to be special. It is supported by teachers who write and talk about how important it is for you to have a special understanding born of mystical insight.  They don't talk nearly as much about simple everyday kindness.  They chant hymns to Kanzeon (Kuan Yin), but are not trained in compassion. Koan study throws fuel on the flame of striving. Robes, hitting with sticks, still worse.

I don't know whether the man who sat next to me so briefly the other night had ever attended that group before, or ever will again, or where he went when he left.  I hope it wasn't to a bar.  In the discussion of generosity afterward, no one talked about the generosity of heart that should mean you set up plenty of chairs so that every visitor can find a comfortable seat.  The compassion that should mean you welcome every person who comes in the door.

In that other Zen group, whose karma lingers on, I overheard one of the regulars tell another about his visit to one of the big East Coast Zen Centers.  I've visited there.  There were a lot of Lexuses and BMWs in the parking lot.  This guy, who was married with children, said, "Wouldn't it be wonderful to go there for a three-month retreat and "really practice?" I kept walking, thinking They don't get it. 

Samsara (not the Movie)

The Wheel of Life

"Working only to improve our samsaric life is the misstep of ignorance." 
~ Farmer Monk

 A blogging friend wrote that line in a comment today, and I thought, That cuts like a diamond. That's where all the self-help get-your-life-together books go so wrong. That is it. It doesn't matter what's goals you meet, what's right in your life, if you are not spiritually grounded.  Centered, wise.

I'm going to back up here and explain, because it's sort of heavy-duty Buddhism.  Samsara is. . .
~~~~~~~
. . . and there I stopped writing a month or so ago.  Now I know why, for I just looked up samsara on Wikipedia.  Many Buddhists and others have contributed their own understanding of this term.  Right away I can see that any definition I give might occasion corrections from those people who are missing out on their life's work, to be fact-checkers.  So you can look up samsara if you like, or be contented with the general idea that samsara is partying, success, money, winning, worldly gain - the hedonic treadmill.  And it's a fact many people don't learn until they're dying, that happiness is not found out there. 
~~~~~~~~
I had to stop writing there again, when I realized the irony of my own vivid hope today that Western psychiatry could swoop in and help me out of this depression, which has reached the disability stage, limiting what I can do.  And indeed, my shrink just returned my phone call, and is recommending a change of medications and a light box.  So two actions, and both might help me. From out there.  From in here, there's always the placebo effect.  It is very good for me when someone I respect says, "I know how to fix it."

In here, my own job is not to ruin my life when I feel like this. Like yell at someone who will never forget it. Put things out into the blogosphere that I am going to have to (try to) delete. Given the generally bleak prognosis for a rapid-cycling bipolar, just not cutting yourself, that's doing pretty good, I guess.

What to Do With the Mean Reds

I wrote the post below last Thursday.  Then Friday my mood was low.  Back up on Saturday, a pleasant mood that let me spend a very nice day with Cassie et al., celebrating both her birthday and my grandson's; he was born Christmas Day, so we try to give him a birthday party some other day of the year.  Otherwise, it just isn't fair.

Recently these visits have been so nice and stress-free that I've realized this is what childhood must feel like in a family of origin that is not hysterically alcoholic and abusive, a home you can feel safe in.  I am grateful I got to experience this at last.  Even today, in a bad mood, I'm grateful, and it's not just for a peaceable friendly meal, but also for the confidence I have that Cassie and Chris are responsible, kind people.  I'm glad I don't have to worry about them.  I don't think it's a good thing when people worry about their grown kids. Sometimes you do, but it shouldn't be a habit.

I used to feel a momentary blip of anger when my mother would excuse my father's rudeness, his black silent moods interrupted by an occasional sniff that conveyed his contempt for me.  She would adopt a voice she may have thought of as kind and compassionate:  "He's worried about you."  Well, that's a co-alcoholic doing her job well, saving her compassion for the alcoholic.  Covering the reality of the children's pain, excusing the poor sod who "doesn't mean anything."  This was a feature of his abuse of me, intended to diminish me in every possible way all my life.  His will dealt me a last huge blow after he died, the coward.  "Worrying" about me was not helpful. It was a form of criticism.  And these are the kind of thoughts that pop up when I'm in the mean reds.

I had to explain the term to Tom a little bit ago.  Here is what I had posted on my regular Facebook (though not on my Page, which I try to make more uniformly pleasant than my Self):

There are blue Mondays and then there are mean red Mondays. You are experiencing the latter when you are tempted to write to a spammer, "If I ever get anything from you in my inbox again, I will hunt you down and kill you."

And no kidding, I had just restrained myself from posting exactly that.

This is my brain on bipolar.  Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany's, got the mood once in a while, as anyone might occasionally, but for reasons.  (Here is a link to the quote.)  The bipolar brain floats and dives on its own schedule and under its own power.  I've compared it before to living in a hurricane zone.  Hurricanes just happen, and you can't stop them; about the best you can do is hunker down.  What I was  maddest about today is that I had gone back into a rhythm of good day, bad day.  You can work with that.  You can get things done on a good day.  But today's the second bad day.  

I had a plan for today.  I'd been waiting to continue reading an old fiction I pulled out last Thursday, and read with pleasure and some admiration of the youthful energy that produced it.  I'd had to stop reading in the middle and go into my bedtime routine, or find myself awake half the night.  Now that I think about it, I don't like that, either.  I'm glad I realize that I have to control myself, though.  Mania feeds on itself.  The worst thing is to start  writing the Great American Novel all through the night, and the next day, and the next.  

On Friday I knew better than to go back to the story, because when I'm depressed I think everything I ever wrote is just not worth it.  There's the internalized Nasty Father, still criticizing harshly. Best not to give it the chance.  That's reality.

I could claim that years of practice have given me insights into karma like that, as well as the discipline to turn off the screen at night when I don't want to.  But that's about it.  It has not led me to constant joy or a reliable contentment.  The blues are bad.  The mean reds are worse - agitated depression, quick to anger at, for example, a photo posted by a friend at the end of a retreat, everyone in their black Zen robes with big happy smiles.  I can't do retreats anymore for multiple reasons of aging and chronic illness extending beyond the bipolar depressions into fibromyalgia and lymphedema torn rotator cuffs and sleep disorder. I wish I could, but I can't.

I can't think of any reason people shouldn't share their joy at a retreat of advanced students meditating their ass off and filling the air with good energy.  I remember how good it felt.  All I can do about my current reaction is refrain from commenting and go do something else.  Sounds like right speech again.  And again.

As for the mood, sometimes even a Danish and window-shopping at Tiffany's doesn't do the trick.  I just have to live with it.  Accept it.  That sounds like Zen to me.

Just Like Me

Five of Pentacles from the Rider-Waite Tarot

I have the great good fortune to be taking chi gong with a local teacher I'd heard good things about for years.  It turns out they were right.

It is a small class at the local Rec Center.  It was not labeled "for geezers" but our youngest person looks to be over 50 and the rest of us over 60.  One guy, Mike, is learning to operate a new knee, and his friend Butch just stood there in the circle leaning on a cane for the first couple of meetings; he'd had a stroke that affected one side of his body, and his balance. When we did the tai chi walk, which is very slow and painstakingly balanced, he just walked along with small, slow steps, relying on his cane. 

We were halfway through tonight when I looked across the small circle and realized Butch was not using his cane at all.  He had made remarkable progress.  I smiled.  "Just like me," I thought.  Everyone working to stay even under the onslaught of old age.

Before the class we had been talking about cars, the cars they bought their daughters, how good Oldsmobiles used to be, who couldn't drive a standard shift, like that. These guys are not the professor-or-artist types I happen to spend most of my time with.  I was once told anyone could tell I was a professor (taught at a university, that is) just by looking at me.  I favored those big clunky sandals at the time, with socks, and a long ponytail. But long hair got to be just too much work.  It happens. Anyway, that tickled me at the time.

Across the circle there was Butch, whose goal is to get back enough use of his left arm to play golf again.  I found golf stupendously boring when I tried it, and anyway, I never could hit a ball.  My goal is to find equanimity in the middle of my moodswings, to stay healthy.  Whatever our goals, age is a great leveler.  We are all in the same condition in that room, the lame leading the blind, the blind supporting the lame.  Distinctions of class, gender, education, all that just doesn't apply.

If you haven't tried the "Just like me" meditation I posted on my Facebook Page on November 27, here is the link to it.  It is a two-minute practice in compassion.  I found that doing it even once affected my outlook.  I intend to gear into it the next time my mood is such that I'm finding someone (else) Difficult.

To Study the Self

Sycamore in fall

After a ragged week or two I am back to alternating up and down days or, as I prefer to call them now, high-energy, low-energy.  The best thing about this is that the moods are more moderate than they were this fall, which makes the high-energy days especially good, since I can be creative without angst, without my mind tending to flare off in every direction.

The reason I am noting this here instead of in my private journal is that I realize I never felt this good before.  Before the bipolar broke out, and broke me out of my attempts to live according to conventional standards.  Before I got off the 20 years of over-medication wished upon me by one psychiatrist after another. Before my kidney transplant, when I was just too low-energy to do anything but survive.  Before I got back on minimal and judicious psychotropics.  But especially, before I had cancer, which was when I set out on a dead-serious meditation practice and years of retreats and study of the Buddha way.  That made the difference. 

If I summed that up, I'd say now I'm able to just be here, doing what I'm doing without a lot of conflicting desires and ideas messing me up.  I've developed some equanimity and contentment.  I feel centered.

I didn't get here through psychotherapy, though it was necessary.  Getting to know yourself takes more than an hour a week of someone listening to you.  The idea of zazen (the Zen style of meditation) is that we spend many hours watching our own minds and selves in action, and opening ourselves to the bigger mind.  My Buddhist readers know I am about to quote famous lines from Dogen's Genjokoan:

To study the Way is to study the self. 
To study the self is to forget the self. 
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. 

"To forget the self" means to me that I am no longer in the grip of my impulses and conditioning.  I do this blog because I hope to inspire readers a little, or just give them a bright spot in the day.  I can't make anyone happy.  You have to do the work, a lot of it.  I'm just here on the path beckoning, saying, You really ought to try this for six months or a year.

If you are a beginner at meditation or keep losing your way, here is a post I found recently on how to form the habit of meditation that makes sense to me.
[p.s. And please take in the comment below. - he knows what he's talking about.] 

Changing Other People's Minds: My Shortest Post

You can't.
(the end)
~~~~~~~~~~

p.s.  Really, that is the distillation of the efforts of an entire lifetime trying to get alcoholics (and other unpleasant people) to not drink so much or be so mean to me, to be more open to intimacy or see it my way, or keep up a meditation practice or pick up their clothes.  People do change but slowly and in our own time, and many psychotherapists and Teachers have wished they could help that change; sometimes they do, but it is in our own hands, and the mechanism that makes us deliberately walk out of our old ways is mysterious. 
~
Since that is still a very short post, I thought I'd kick in something else, a brief book review.  I've been given a number of review copies of Buddhist-themed books, and I've reviewed only a few because I am picky.  But I want to mention a book I am enjoying called Journeys on the Silk Road.  This is not an erotic memoir,  though it would be a good title, but a history subtitled "A desert explorer, Buddha's secret library, and the unearthing of the world's oldest book."

Aurel Stein expedition; that's Dash front and center

I read things like this slowly, and stop reading anything that bores me.  This book is not boring, though; the authors use the techniques of fiction well to create the landscape and sentient beings involved.  I was won over by page 11 when I read that the preparations for this high-risk mountain-and-desert expedition in 1906 included a custom-made fur coat for the explorer's dog, Dash.  Dash was one in a string of seven terriers, all given the same name, that accompanied the explorer and slept in his tent.  That's the kind of detail I enjoy in history or fiction.  The "oldest book" in question is the Diamond Sutra.  So if you know a Buddhist or an open-minded nonBuddhist who enjoys reading history, especially art history, this could be a good gift.

Other than that, I have few ideas about Christmas, except that it doesn't make sense for a celebration, especially if it's religious, to be stressful.  It's not for me anymore, now that my family of origin is out of the picture.  How I suffered trying to please them! always thinking maybe this will do it. That seems to circle back around to my title, trying to get people to love you that don't.  There you are.