The Dalai Grandma

Not dead yet

2012-01-28T15:11:00.001-05:00

Update on personal body and soul -

Yesterday went to my PCP (primary care provider, as we now call family doctors) because a sharp recurring pain in my stomach was frightening me. This doctor actually knows me, (despite every effort of the medical and insurance professions to make medicine impersonal), so he ordered a urine sample before he even talked to me. And there it was again, a hidden bladder/kidney infection. This one was not signalling itself with incontinence. So I started on Macrobid again last night, and this morning on omeprazel for the stomach. The shingles are acting like they should, crusting over, and they itch something terrible now, and if I sweat it makes them sting. We discussed my pain medication. I haven't been taking enough.

As for my soul, I immediately felt relieved - the deep depression of this last week is not necessarily bipolar rising up again. And in fact, the terrible depression in early September was simultaneous with a UTI. Regular people who don't have mood disorders get depressed with these hidden infections, but a lot of them think they're just old and ready to die; and younger people can keep bulling their way through what they think they have to do, ignoring or drowning their bleakness or blaming it on their spouse. But if you need any proof that we are one unit, and there is not one part of us separate from the others (like mind separate from bladder, say), this is it, living proof.

I've been so tired this week that I had to miss things that brighten my life - going to choir, coffee with a friend, having Otto over for the afternoon. So tired that twice I forgot to take off the elastic sleeve I wear for lymphedema, and slept in it - dangerous for the skin. In my usual I'll Conquer This attitude, I wrote a checklist and posted it in my bathroom, so I remember to do the things I have to do at bedtime. That's how tired I was, and waking up still tired. But this morning I woke up to find I'd slept 11 hours, and my first real thought/sensation was that I didn't feel as bad, and my second was gratitude.

You know, you are not even in charge of your own will to live. Today the sun is out here in southern Ohio, and every time I look out the window at the blue sky and take a breath, it feels healing. I had a cupcake for breakfast and played Words with my grandson, whom I love more than my own life by far. Now that I'm pulling out of that depression I can feel love again. Even love is a matter of your health and the mix and flow of chemicals in your brain.

Now, that's all for now. As for what I do in this blog, I just try to share my life, the reality. As for the image above, is God behind the clouds? In the clouds? Is God the sun and clouds, and the photographer?

Do atheists exist?

2012-01-26T18:52:00.001-05:00

The TED talks are as good a place to begin your study of humankind as any - all these highly motivated people! Motivated to do what? Anything from cure blindness in Africa to swim a specific body of water at age 60. The first you can certainly understand as a purpose in life, though it's going to run you into grave problems of overpopulation and famine. The second, well, maybe you can see the point, but I can't. I just never got into Amazing Feats of the Body. Yet I've seen a world enthralled by a similarly ridiculous contest of minds, chess between a snotty kid named Bobby Fischer and the world champion, Boris Spassky. This was decades before the personal computer could beat us all at anything. You wouldn't believe how interested we all were in this, because it had something symbolic to do with the Cold War. That doesn't exist now, either. You could say it never did, just an idea. Poor Bobby - his Wikipedia entry includes a section called "Sudden Obscurity." No kidding.

Inflicted as I am with shingles (painful) and depression (worse) - and who knows whether they're related or just different neurons colliding in the mix - I found myself watching a TED talk by someone on whether I exist. I won't name him or post it, because I've found it a bad policy in life for a little tiny bug to make an implacable enemy of a powerful person. But really . . . it was a tasteless porridge of Buddhism for Toddlers and modern science.
But this guy got himself a PhD in philosophy and went on to make a career out of talking about this kind of thing and writing books about the rock-bottom-dumb questions of (Western) philosophy, which must surely be as dead as chess by (snail-) mail.

In that, a nerd sent another nerd a move on a postcard. A penny postcard. Nerd2 thought about it and made his move and sent a postcard. Try to imagine a world that slow. That was a world in which long distance calls cost a lot of money, and were only made in the event of a death. But you knew you existed and so did everything else, and it never changed. Every Sunday night Dinah Shore came out in what seemed to be the same prom dress and sang "See the USA in your Chevrolet . . . " and blew a kiss. She does not exist anymore, but are you telling me she didn't? I saw her.

You, however. No, according to this TED talk, you don't exist. I mean, what made you think you did? The fact that every night of your life you confront the same stubborn stupid oily skin? Your exact cowlick? The food trap between the molars on your lower left?

No, you're just a bunch of relationships, the way water is just a couple of hydrogen atoms mingling with an oxygen. So if you thought there was Evian and Yellowstone and the Baltic Sea, there was rain and ice cubes, think again.

There are opposing theories about existence, such as the belief that we are all ideas in the mind of God. I rather like that, but if I were an atheist, it would make me nervous.

Joe Paterno's Legacy

2012-01-23T21:15:00.002-05:00

Let's be clear about this: Joe Paterno allowed Jerry Sandusky to keep on molesting children. How many boys did Sandusky sodomize in the locker rooms, or force and cajole into performing fellatio on him? How many times? We don't know. The number of reports keeps growing. Every one of those children was profoundly scarred by this. Maybe they don't even know how much.

The most horrifying thing about this is not that Paterno was not appalled - it is that thousands of Penn State students were not appalled. The President of Penn State was not appalled.

Football is a just a game, not sacred. It is the opposite of sacred, a ritualized combat in which we know young men get permanent brain damage being sent back into the game with concussions. Why do women keep buying into this stuff? This is the violence inherent in testoserone. Women need to be the tempering force of love that says, You will not do this to my children,

The Best Therapy for Depression

2012-01-22T19:59:00.000-05:00

<p>&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>Music and laughter - both good therapies, legal, free, and without those unintended consequences we call "side effects."

I see it's been a week since I posted. I was right, the rash is shingles. So it hasn't been a great week. Even doctors agree that shingles is very painful. You'd think plenty of legal oxycodone sounds great, but opiates have disadvantages; notably, they shut down your GI tract. So not just stomach pain, anorexia and and indigestion, but the kind of constipation that can turn into an impacted bowel if you don't bring a whole arsenal of treatments to bear on it.

And then there's the demotivation of opiates and of illness. Yesterday I tackled the heap by my bed - everything I'd worn all last week, on top of everything I'd worn the four days before the rash presented, a stage called the prodrome, in which I felt sick and weird. And household laundry undone.

When this hit I was optimistically planning a life. I was (am) doing PT for the broken arm, and had just driven two short drives, getting ready to be independent again. Getting back strength and range of motion in the arm has been slow and very painful, and isn't over.

And yes, Christmas day I got a cold. I wasn't over that really when the shingles hit - no one ever seems to get clear of this cold this year - but I took a leap and joined the church choir. Singing in harmony with others felt challenging and terrific. Then the shingles hit.

So I lost ground in my general fitness program and in PT. All sorts of things around the house are a mess; haven't taken Christmas down. Who cares?

This is not so special. This is old age. I'm not the luckiest 69-year-old around, but I do live in middle-class America with decent financial stability and good insurance, so maybe this is old age at its best, unless you're the Queen of England's doggie. I had a transplant last year (and had just begun to feel recovered from that), which means I take immune-suppressives, so it is likely this will take months to pass.

This is that present moment we talk about. Reality. Growing old means your parts wear down, regardless of how sunny your disposition. Every one of them. I find I keep thinking of another song that goes -

Dance if you want to dance, sing if you want to sing.
Nobody ever knows what tomorrow may bring . . .

Can't find it on YouTube or Googles, but I remember it, don't I?

Meaningful Work

2012-01-16T14:55:00.003-05:00

Full moon over Westbrook's

I've known many people who were unhappy because their work was not meaningful - maybe that was more common in the 1960's and 70's. But I've noticed that most of the work in this world is very indirectly related to reality, like doing the quality control on bearings or heck, underwear elastic. I myself had jobs I thought were unimportant and meaningless. One was being secretary to a group of engineers who kept the calenders running at Firestone. So, Firestone made tires, they are made with calenders, who cared? Now I see it better - if you can be involved in the making of a good product that's needed, if you can bring a pleasant attitude to that, it's not meaningless just because your own work is very indirect (typing letters).


Full moon, impressionistic rendering

Many people in the low-wage jobs in the fast-food industry resent their jobs and show it. But at the White Castle we like to frequent, there is a woman at the drive-through window who is convincingly cheerful and glad to help you. We look forward to seeing her.

This morning I called my doctor's office to get an appointment about this painful rash. When I told the receptionist I thought I had shingles, she said "Oh, you poor dear." And you know, I felt a little warmer: somebody knew what it's like. I believe there are few jobs in which you don't have the opportunity to be kind, helpful, even compassionate. A friendly face, a smile - these things are meaningful in this suffering world, and probably more important than you think.

A quick personal update

2012-01-15T09:07:00.000-05:00

I was awakened by pain this morning that turns out to be from a big patch of blisters on my left side in the back, and some in the front. I had chickenpox severely as a child, that's the virus, and it often strikes as shingles in the immune-suppressed, so I was aware shingles was a possibility. It sure looks and feels like that.

It is Sunday, of course, but that's better than if it were Friday night, when I usually get sick. I'll see my GP tomorrow and also call the transplant nurse. They have anti-virals . . .

More painkillers is about the only good news I can see in this.

In the words of the song, Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down, oh yes Lord.

The Joy of Healing

2012-01-12T12:17:00.001-05:00

Remember that - amplify that memory, driving the Civic down through the ravine and around and home.

Immediately had it back, the skill. Then the pleasure of being able to stop and roll the window down and take the picture I wanted to get of the orange construction fencing down there. I love the colors orange and bright gold in this weather.

And all this mixed with the realization of pain and dis-ability in that right arm. Pain behind R shoulder blade, which PT has me exercising now with “pinches”. Pain up neck - other muscles trying to take the load from the arm. Still, pain in the biceps and simple limitation.

However, able to reach forward with right hand and turn on the key. Able to make turns, mostly using the left arm. So, able to drive. The trick now is to do it in moderation day by day, not upping the pain level too much or tearing something else. It is obviously going to be a real exercise, physical therapy.

The backstory: In early September I fell walking across a room and broke my right (good) arm up near the shoulder. Six weeks in sling, four more before I felt up to physical therapy, now doing that. I haven't tried to drive in all that time. Meanwhile, the shoulder essentially got "frozen," which means PT is about stretching it to gradually break through the lesions that formed. You do this by taking a pain pill before you go. The cool thing is that I run into friends at the PT-rehab place (McConnell) - we are all in this together.

One more thing. Yesterday was a very hard day for me, and this morning I was deeply tired. But stepping out into the cold (43' Farenheit) was refreshing. I love the energy of open skies. And I felt really fond of the little 2000 Civic, bought new, 34,000 miles, it will run forever.

A morning with pain and love

2012-01-07T09:08:00.000-05:00

Awakened by pain this morning - overdid it with the right shoulder last night. It's okay now, and that got me thinking what "living in the moment" really is. It means, at least in part, that we don't get gripped by our concepts. For instance, Oh crap, woke up early hurting, this is going to be a lousy day. Add to that preferences: Don't want to hurt! Reality is that you can only do so much about the body you have right now. Another reality: pain is always moving and changing if you let it. I put my heating-pad cape on, it helped. Moving around loosened things up, too.

And here's another thing loosened this morning. Got notified by my phone that my grandson had played on Words With Friends, from 50 miles away. It was 8 a.m. and my idea of this morning was to get in the shower about now. Then stretch and meditate, and so on. But I love this new additional contact with him. First thing he did was post me on chat, Tom played a 74 point word last night!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know, I wrote, pure evil. Tom can't help being smart sometimes.

In case I momentarily forget, love is what matters, connection matters. Not goals and schedules. It's singing in the choir, it's tea with a comfortable friend, it's letting the cat lie on your shoulder for a while if she needs to.

An interesting thing about playing Words with Otto is that it's just fun to play, and I don't care if I win - and in fact, he just won one of our games by a hair (he always wants to play at least two at once). Now, the other people I play with don't hesitate to beat me by multiple hundreds of points. That tends to make a person nervous. No, it doesn't. My mind, it's my own reaction. Maybe I should turn it around and say, Let's see if I can get Laurie to beat me by 500 points. That's what I like, a goal I can reasonably meet.

Post-holiday Blues and Good Camera Karma

2012-01-05T17:16:00.000-05:00

All right, let's go here. Christmas is over. The holiday season is over, the new year came in, your life is no better, in fact, your credit card debt is larger. And most of us have that cold that never quite goes away. And winter has dug in. So why would you not be b l u e . . . ?

What I mean is this: We have a season, sometimes a month long, of generosity and love, connections and good food. We abandon our everyday concerns, we cook special things that remind us of our ancestors, we play madly with our new toys (iPads and Kindles this year, I read). And now . . . we are tired. Ordinary life is a letdown. It's natural. Maybe it's inevitable, though I haven't asked the enlightened people I know (either one of them).

That's what I think. So instead of thinking you should buck up or something, just enjoy being fully in touch with the reality that life can't always be fun.
~~~~~~~~~
Meanwhile, yesterday I was photographing the linear pattern of jet trails in the sky over Columbus. I haven't figured out how to transfer these as a slide show, so your eyes will have to do the sliding. I like the accidental effects in the last two pictures.

I Am Not a Brand

2012-01-03T10:45:00.004-05:00

I do not have to be New! and Improved!!!
I do not have to have new and improved.
I do not have to be in style.
I do not have to display, preach, or defend my religion.
(And I can hide Facebook posts from people who do.)
I do not have to be important.
I do not have to accomplish anything and, actually, I cannot change the world.
I've been eating this way all my life, and I'm still here.
There is no bonus for doing things the hard way.
There is no penalty for having fun.
Nothing is gained by impressing people.
Life is not that much better if you hang up your clothes.
Work may be a necessity, but it is not a virtue.

Well, you can see I'm in withdrawal. Yesterday I got in my head to go without the internet until noon. This wasn't so bad until I found myself in the car waiting while Tom had a brief doctor's appointment. Phone at hand. Could have taken photos, as long as I didn't send them, using the internet, but it was cold outside. Found myself editing my contact list. If you think about it, that's pathetic. That's like only eating 13 potato chips and enjoying every one. And then bragging about it on Facebook (I mean, if you were online).

Anyway, everyone's doing the same resolution this year - not to enjoy our devices so much. To cut ourselves off from the internet and accomplish something. To perfect ourselves. Ah, much better to incline yourself to the deep spiritual understanding that we all are what we are, a whole bunch of pixels made by our genetics and the past and advertising, and folks, we are all right. Alright. Either way you spell it.

[And I decided I liked this picture best without photo-shopping. Look at the car windows. Thus all our dreams and ambitions goes passing by.]

On New Year's Resolutions, Including Mine

2012-01-01T16:40:00.001-05:00

I have not been posting much because I've been having fun - maybe too much fun, playing Words With Friends on my new iPad with 4 or 5 people at a time, including my grandson, who likes to play two games at a time. I tell you, grandmas who don't do the new technology (and I know people who won't even have e-mail) are missing out. It's made being old and less active much more fun.

But I thought I should post something today, so here is a child's view to think about as you make your resolutions -

(If you friend me on Facebook, I pass along good things like this once in a while, but not too often.)

I called my dear friend Teena today when she didn't show up in church. We were in meditation groups together all those years ago, about ten years now, I guess, and you form a bond there with people that is warm and lasting. In fact, this morning two other women came up to me who were in those groups, and who I hadn't seen for years. There is something terrific about sitting in silence with other people.

Teena says her resolution is "Be open-minded and don't get too attached to anything." Very Buddhist, I told her. She didn't mind. She likes to read Buddhist books.

I told her my resolution, arrived at spontaneously a few days ago, is "I'm not going to let this shit get me down." Can't help it, that was the language of the soul. And what I meant was this sickness and aging stuff. It just keeps coming at you, throwing curve balls. I am already much better with it all than I was, say, 10 years ago, when I practically had a nervous breakdown before my thyroid surgery. (It is possible to have your vocal cords damaged by the surgery, though unlikely.) Might as well get used to it, I think now, because aging is inevitable, and this is what it means - things breaking down. I maintain my current commitment to exercising and doing my various PT exercises, too, for my back, neck, and now right arm.

I hope you don't overwhelm yourself with a whole bunch of self-improvement ideas going into the new year, although we can all vow to be kinder and more generous. If you must form a healthy new habit, I recommend daily meditation. It's been good for me in many ways, the best being to have it in place to help you when you're lying awake in a hospital bed.

And of course, no hitting or biting. Not even doctors, tempting as it might be.

2011-12-26T10:55:00.000-05:00

Wherever you are

is the entry point.

Kabir

And soon, back to normal

2011-12-25T18:27:00.001-05:00

Beautiful Ohio skies

God Hates the Mayan Calendar

2011-12-22T10:18:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

Cat Portraits

2011-12-21T08:48:00.002-05:00

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

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

A Love Story

2011-12-18T10:02:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

If the people are buying dreams . . .

2011-12-17T11:17:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

Control or Undo?

2011-12-16T21:27:00.000-05:00

Decisions, decisions

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

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

You can't get there from here

2011-12-13T09:51:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have some joy, for God's sake

2011-12-12T20:32:00.000-05:00

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

Where You Shop the Wide World Knows

2011-12-10T10:42:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's to blame for this mess?

2011-12-09T08:53:00.001-05:00

Blaming doesn't even make sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balance is not for everyone

2011-12-08T15:54:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

2011-12-06T21:10:00.001-05:00

Leaf showing its bones

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

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

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

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

So you're an atheist, yawn

2011-12-05T09:16:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

A generous artist

2011-12-04T10:05:00.001-05:00

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

Have a sabbath.

Age is a question of matter over mind

2011-11-29T11:11:00.001-05:00

I do like the fact that my not being able to drive means Tom chauffeurs me around. This is an excellent time to natter at him. Yesterday I found myself talking about how old age creeps up on us slowly, slowly, then, yow, fast. Specifically, I recounted his father's story. Jim was around 80 when he discovered he could not lift the 40-foot extension ladder to get up and clean the gutters. (Italics his.) This fact impressed him so much that he told me the story at least twice, on different visits. He had grown old when he wasn't looking. He couldn't get over it.

I was just a kid of, let's see, age 57, and believe me, I knew more than I know now, 12 years later. I was prone to including in my practice The Five Remembrances (which you can find at the very bottom of this blog), for the purpose of being in touch with grim realities. So my unspoken reaction to Jim's astonishment was, Jim, you're 80. Of course you're old. Get it over it.

But now I know that somehow age does creep up on you. Watching yourself change is rather like watching a sunset, as I have often done, speculating on just how I would make that color with watercolors. But "that color" is already gone, no longer apricot, now in the soft coral range, and so on. And I didn't see it change. I just see that it changed when I glanced away.

As I have gone around doing little quality-of-life things today, I have had the thought that the word "old" or even "age" is a concept, a label that tends to be encumbered by judgements firmly implanted by our culture. It amused me to look up a quote from Satchel Paige, whose autobiography is titled Maybe I'll Pitch Forever---

Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don't mind, age don't matter.

Satchel Paige in younger days

I couldn't help thinking, Yes, but it does matter. Aging is like a puppy who's got hold of a book (or a couch) and is thoroughly demolishing it. The book gets in shreds whether you ignore it or watch. Eventually, those who don't get hit by a flaming arrow of misfortune die of old age. In Paige's case, it was a long season of heart trouble and emphysema that ended when he was, perhaps, 75 years old - he liked to be mysterious about his age. He had not been pitching those last uncomfortable years.

I'm just carrying on here because yesterday I woke up slowly from a long, good sleep, to realize my middle back was hurting, right there in the spine where there are severely deteriorated bones. After a sleep like that I usually (or used to) wake up relaxed and pain-free.

It would all be so much easier if Wun felt that getting older meant automatically advancing to a position of respect, if Wun became An Elder Who Had Seen Many Things. The baby Boomers, who are a few years behind me, have famously changed the culture at every age they went through. But they've got the wrong idea about age: they think you can prevent it. Like Ponce de Leon, looking for the Fountain of Youth, and he really was, I gather.

What I'd like to see happen is for the Boomers to realize old age is (usually) inevitable, and that our best shot is to make it gleam. I know they can do it if they try.

And here's an irresistable bonus (from Wikipedia)

Paige's Guide to Longevity
To a world thatmarveled at his stamina as a 59-year-old pitcher, Satchel Paige often offered these ''master's maxims''as his guide to longevity:
1. Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood.
2. If your stomach disputesyou, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as youmove.
4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social rumble ain't restful.
5.Avoid running at all times.
6. Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.

~~~~~
[The puppy photo is from a blog by a very much younger woman.]

Why I erased my public blog roll

2011-11-28T10:43:00.001-05:00

The fad among Buddhist bloggers of listing their favorite bloggers reminds me that whenever someone "wins" someone loses.

How this goes, the blogger is asked to single out her most helpful post, most beautiful, and so on, seven categories, and then to recommend five other bloggers to do the same. At the moment this is working out to include bloggers who frame themselves as distinctly Zen. And I am more electic, and - if you didn't know - the very idea of "Dalai" is Tibetan Buddhism. Like Christians, like everyone, Buddhists tend to subdivide into tight little cliques.

Still, wouldn't you like to be liked even if you are a little weird? Wouldn't you like to be picked?

It brings to my mind a workshop I attended at Earlham College several years ago, in fact, just before our lives blew up in our face, and Tom had to retire on disability and I went downhill with kidney failure. In 2003 I was still able to travel and to drive several hours, still trying to build my courage to seek publication. The writing conference was early fall, beautiful weather. I was very pleased to be there, to have done this on my own.

I don't know whether the teacher in my workshop meant to exclude me; but she didn't include me. A young woman, she was on the faculty there and knew everyone else in the workshop by name, local women, apparently, who had taken workshops with her before. She had us go around the room and introduce ourselves with one sentence. She made a presentation. Then we wrote a little on the theme, which was daily bread. Then she selected one woman, and asked her to read what she wrote, and then to name who she would like to read next.

So each woman in turn selected someone she knew. In this fashion, it zigzagged around the room until every one of the ten women there had read, except me. I was excited about what I'd written, and anticipating my moment. There were a few minutes left. But the teacher visibly did not turn to me, sitting at her right. She did some other talking, and dismissed the class. One of the other women came up to me later and tacitly apologized. I went home early, and confused.

Could this teacher have been angry because I came in a few seconds after the bell (I had gone out to fill my water bottle), and she had begun talking? That would seem to be a ridiculous response. Whatever impelled her, it must have been intentional. And the energy felt hostile. I still feel somehow shamed as I remember it. Excluded, for no reason that I knew.

My larger point is not this workshop, but to remind people that whenever you form an invitational group, you close doors. The sandlot baseball we used to play in fifth and sixth grade, before puberty separated us by gender, that too depended on the team captains (the top players) picking people one at a time. But there was a certain justice in it, in that it was based on winning the game. The most skilled players were always chosen first. I was always last, but as I say, that was fair - I couldn't catch or throw, and I couldn't hit the ball, so the fact that I couldn't run didn't come into it, really. All I had going for me was enthusiasm and the desire to be part of the game.

Once though, a girl named Diane was captain, and she chose me first. How kind that was! If I could remember her last name and find her, I'd send her a little card of gratitude all these years later. I hope her life turned out well. I wouldn't be surprised that it did.

The War Against Christmas

2011-11-26T10:15:00.001-05:00

Here was my bad attitude this morning, just waiting for me to somnolently turn to Facebook with my coffee. There it was again - a post by a self-proclaimed Christian urging others of like belief to eschew the term Happy Holidays and righteously say "Merry Christmas." And boycott Target or someone. And share the post, of course.

I don't mind if people want to indicate connection by a shared vocabulary. But I am not sure sometimes that everyone understands: America is not a Christian nation. This is true despite the fact that since our founding there have always been the religious that are not content with being religious, as Jesus suggested, praying in secret, but have to pray openly. Now it's on the Facebook highway. Their crusade is long-standing enough that Wikipedia notes ---

some Christian and non-Christians have claimed that an affront to Christmas (dubbed a "war on Christmas" by some) is ongoing.

I know, if it bothers me I could be more selective in my "friending." Too late now, and also, you never know, do you? And yes, I know I can "hide" people who get to being annoying. And I do. Then at some point I think of them and bring them back out of hiding. In this case, that will probably be after the holidays.

Don't think I don't have problems with the secularization of Christmas. I love the centering on the miracle of birth amidst poverty, the idea of the divine in our midst. I end up in tears singing "Silent Night" in the candlelight service. I was fit to be tied one year when the reins got loose at my church, and the Christmas Eve service featured "Jingle Bells" and the Christmas choir concert featured "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." I don't go to church for this, and I don't think the children particularly benefit from it - they can see this on TV and at the mall.

But I do accept that Christmas has been secularized for quite a number of years now. I grew up with it, with the ads for a fat Santa having a Coke at the fireside. When I was five, I thought Christmas was about getting presents. This is life in any society that has abundance and freedom of retail. But read Wikipedia - the very date of Christmas is thought to have origins in pagan winter festivals. Look at it that way, you could say that the Christians degraded the pagan impulse. Yet I don't see my pagan friends agitating to boycott everyone who sells artificial Christmas trees and yule logs.

And if you really think those of us who wish our Buddhist, Muslim, Unitarian, Jewish, etc. friends "Happy Holidays" are involved in a war against Christmas, I invite you to look at history and the wars against religions. Take the current Chinese oppression of the Falun Gong - go ahead, read about it. And think about what freedom of religion really means, and let the rest of us have it. Then put some cookies out for Santa. Or a Coke, for all I care.

Deep encompassing gratitude

2011-11-24T10:11:00.001-05:00

Today's post by James Ford is a deep encouragement to giving thanks. It includes a shocking five-minute movie; some thoughts that remind me that the whole mess is much bigger than my mess, and it is what it is; and a song you can't hear too often. I hope you have time for it. And I wish everyone a good day punctuated frequently by gratitude.

There's more reality out there than you bargained for

2011-11-21T14:39:00.001-05:00

I made a trivial mistake a while back of subscribing to a cooking magazine meant for another generation, for women who have fresh rosemary and currant jelly in their pantry, and who don't mind cooking and eating baby animals. (I just can't.) Like every other magazine these days, it has an article about how meditation will help you continue to live an insanely ambitious, stressful life. Sigh.

So I turned to the Sunday paper and read there an advice column. The girl - okay, young woman - wanted to know if she should keep trying with her sincerely repentant boyfriend, The Cheater. If she would ever learn to trust him. The answer agreed with my understanding of reality: If you stick with him, understand that he will always have that trait. Ask yourself whether it's worth it anyway.

The article mentioned that if you sit still and shut up and stop planning to make currant-glazed lamb chops with pistachio couscous for dinner, you will gain insight into your own mental patterns, and that will help you be less enslaved to them. This is true, and it seems to be much emphasized in American Zen, as part of the search for happiness the Boomers ushered in. Which has led me recently to study a book titled Ending the Search for Happiness by Zen psychiatrist Barry Magid. What a relief!

Less talked about is that you will also begin to see the reality outside your mind. To see other people as they are, not through your filters and illusions. That's awareness. The wisdom part is accepting that not only is the other person what he or she is, but that change, if it comes at all, will come slowly. The very charm Confused Girl loves about the guy, that's something a lot of other girls respond to, too. I am not being facetious when I say that the only times I've seen important personality change in other people has been when they had a stroke, or a similarly dire stroke of reality.

I did adopt a new habit in one fell swoop, or swooping fall in early September, in which I broke my right arm, as I have complained about here, but not enough. I began doing walking meditation every time I walk. I don't mean just when I go for a walk or walk the track; I mean when I walk down the hall at home. No dark hallways for me. An example of how occasionally Life teaches you to watch your step.

How to do Good

2011-11-18T08:19:00.001-05:00

When I follow a blog it's because I find there a real person living their life. A young mother with sick kids, a middle-aged cancer survivor with a sense of humor, a Zen student thinking about big life changes -- they have to do with lives I've lived. From here, their lives are full of energy and interesting.

There isn't much action in my life -- I'm sick again, depressed again. I balance enduring pain with taking pain medication, my stomach is upset by the antibiotic, I can't drive, I'm lonely, I'm afraid I'm going to have to have that major surgery after all - I hear you clicking on to another blog as I write. No one wants to listen to the internal struggles of that old person, or the same old frustration, the small triumphs of patience with the medical system, the envy of younger people who have goals and plans. It's a bitch. But for me, struggling to come up with some positive spin, some way to cheer you up so I don't depress you, has become too hard. So has enduring the positive thinking of people who still believe you can do anything with enough determination. They don't know what neurochemical depression is, period.

Last week we stopped by the church to see if my pink rain-jacket was there. It was the most useful and best coat I ever had - bright warm pink with a multicolored flower lining to the hood - I always got comments on how cheerful it was. And the arms were cut big, so it would go on over the fleece jackets I have to wear right now, since I can't get things on and off over my head because of the broken right arm. Worse, it had in a pocket my elastic gauntlet, a half-glove I wore on the right hand to minimize swelling - that's the arm with lymphedema. That coat is somewhere, but we've looked everywhere we go and can't find it.

I ran into Rev. Mark in the hall, and he asked me, "How are you doing?" like he meant it. Maybe this is what makes a person a minister. That ministering to the people who have dropped out of life and become invisible. I told him, how it's hard, and we had a five or ten minute talk. Mark is a trained professional. Like other ministers in our church he doesn't dispense wisdom, he engages with you, shares and listens. I was so down - sick as hell again with a UTI, discouraged - I could feel the bolt of healing it gave, like a shot of warm light. That and a homemade dinner from an understanding friend got me through the week.

If I could give one lesson from old age to those who have not yet been dropped down on this foreign plain, it would be, be open to seeing and hearing your old mom, your grandma, the 90-year-old lady next door. To do that you need to be open to your own discomfort with the realities of aging and sickness, your realization that you too could be suddenly disabled, confused, too tired to shower. Just listen. Don't do that reactive thing of rushing on or saying some imperious thing that will fix it. (What you need to do is . . . ) Maybe that half-deaf old lady has done everything possible for her loss of hearing and there isn't a good fix.

If you want this in spiritual terms, it is love, or it is paying attention. Maybe they are both the same thing.
~~~~~~
p.s. Then there's persistence. Tom insisted we stop by the Spine and Sport clinic, who said on the phone they didn't have the coat. And there it was, hanging on a hanger on the coat rack. No gauntlet in the pocket. So.

What to do about your suffering

2011-11-13T12:06:00.001-05:00

"not to struggle against the pain in our life"

These were the turning words in the above talk I read recently on a British friend's blog.

I had been having various kinds of suffering or discomfort or pain---
disappointment in a Teacher . . . a widening distance from Zen . . . the pain from the slowly healing broken arm, the real handicaps of not driving, not painting, not cooking much (you try it with your nondominant hand) . . . the side effect of the pain medication in demotivating me. . . the anxiety of the bladder infections coming back, whether surgery is going to be necessary after all. And a second-hand criticism.

It went a lot of places for me. It went to how sensitive I am to criticism, to rejection, how thin-skinned. How that affects my willingness to send my poetry out. Then back to how I became thin-skinned, my father's relentless criticism of me, my mother's lack of caring. It just went all over the place, though I sure didn't want it to. I've had a hard year, the increasing loneliness of age and disability. And I was in the grip of a depressing infection at that time.

So I struggled around fighting all this mental and emotional crap. How could I alleviate my pain? And I didn't have any answers. I wasn't talking myself out of my upset.

So for some reason - the moon was full - I was ready to hear what Pema said in the talk above. Yes, we do have suffering. Inevitably. Sometimes people hurt and betray us. We age. We die. People and animals we love die. We are in pain from physical conditions, mental conditions, and maybe we're always going to be. The point is, relax into it. There it is. There is no fixing a great many things, no cure. You don't have to like your suffering, your pain. But you don't get anywhere struggling against it. There.
[p.s. Yes, I have another (or the same) bladder infection. Started antibiotic today.]

My Rick Perry Moments

2011-11-11T08:31:00.001-05:00

All right, it's not nice to make fun of people, but humor very often depends on not being very nice - what we English majors call "transgression." On the other hand, I am here to defend poor Rick Perry, who blanked out the other night in a debate. The three agencies he was going to close the minute he took office. There was A, there was B . . . and what the hell was C? He couldn't remember.


the candidate

Anyway, it is better to call this kind of thing a Rick Perry moment than to call it a senior moment. I am sick and tired of that. Too many of my friends are Boomers, so of an age to have mental processing slow down and sometimes stall for a bit. Inevitably, they say, "haha, senior moment." Now wait. I'm a senior here, three years older than the oldest Boomer. Slower processing is usual, common, and for all I know, inevitable as you age. And it really isn't nice to make fun of your grandma.

You talking about me?

I've had two forgetful moments this morning, and I've only been up a few hours. The first was The Fated Laundry Load. I had to kick-slide laundry basket to the chute (carrying it would kill my shoulder), feed the stuff down the chute, fill the basket again. My arms were particularly bad this morning, due I think to an excess of indulging Tashi yesterday, letting her climb up on my shoulder (the one with the torn rotator cuff) and then holding her so she could lie on my heart. You will admit, that is the sweetest thing. It fills life with love. But the arm holding her up was said left arm. It is sick and tired of being overworked while the right arm, formerly known as the dominant arm, heals from the fracture incurred two months ago. Not healed yet.

So down I went and now sorted the laundry into two baskets, you know the drill. Kick-slid those across the laundry room. Went through spraying stains, blabla, putting in right amount of detergent, putting in Downy fragrance-free. Stood watching to see that I had the right amount of clothes in the right amount of water. And . . . realized I'd put the wrong freaking detergent in. The stuff from the big box I bought accidentally a while ago that has Spring Burst or some such fragrance. I can't stand it on my clothes. I mean, I seriously can't stand it.

Now, that was moment number one. So after a nourishing breakfast of hummus, Wheat Thins and sunflower seeds I went down and ran the damn load all over again, this time with a little Biz to hopefully take the smell out, more Downy. Sigh.

I said I had two of these this morning, but offhand I don't remember the other one. Enough said.

You don't want to read this post

2011-11-09T19:19:00.001-05:00

This is what a sex offender looks like

But not as badly as I don't want to write it. But I have to, having read the disgusting details of the charges against Sandusky in today's Maureen Dowd column. I sort of wish I hadn't read it - you never get over this stuff. Having been an abused child is like having a war wound that aches from time to time.

I am talking about the huge sexual-abuse scandals topping the news today. You know who they are, the football coaches, the political candidate who is trying to get you to believe eight women are conspiring against him. Two different kinds of abuse, but both about men in positions of power forcing themselves upon the younger and weaker - the child in the locker room, the female job candidate. Men above them in the heirarchy protecting them, dropping the ball, letting it slide. Catholic church. Penn State. Politics.

As long as we valorize high testoserone, this is going to happen. As long as we let men build masculine forts in which they all protect one another, this is going to happen.

Okay, but I'm not here to write the theory but just to say one thing I wish each reader would listen to: there are probably children in your life. Your own, your grandkids, your nieces and nephews. Your younger brothers and sisters. Protect them. They are powerless to protect themselves.

How? When you see a child change, a behavior change that doesn't quite make sense, get interested. A child should not suddenly develop insomnia or night terrors, should not suddenly get dark circles under her eyes or become listless or misbehave at school or take up drugs. Don't see these things as "discipline problems" and lower the boom. Talk to that kid. The closer you are to them, the more important that you listen to them deeply. If you just don't know what's happening, set that kid up with a counselor they might feel free to talk to.

I'll tell you just one little story and then I can't stand this. When I was 11, I stood with my mother in their bedroom and said to her softly, with great embarassment, "Daddy has bad breath."

Believe me, my mother could not possibly go where that should have gone. It could have gone to Why honey? When did you notice that? Not a chance. She could not imagine a father violating his daughter. Dependent on her husband as she was, caught in romantic illusions, she couldn't have any distance from him, couldn't see him as he was. She lived in a sort of dream. And we do.

So she said, "I don't understand that. If his breath gets bad, I say to him, 'Ed, I think your pyorrhea is acting up again." (This was called trenchmouth in the war.) And it was never mentioned again.

My father was a scoutmaster, in fact rose to be a regional director in Boy Scouts of America. He was a white-collar worker, a defense engineer. We went to a high-class Congregational Church, where they contributed to the building campaign. My parents kept a nice house, he painted it, mowed the lawn. He wore nice suits and good shoes. Him? Abuse his daughter? Never.

Your own husband can do it to his own children. So can the kids' stepfather or your boyfriend. The kid's grandfather or grandmother, sad to say, the coach, the priest, the teacher, the guy at the candy store or pizza shop. A neighbor. Take care of your children and the children you know, be watchful. They can't protect themselves. You don't want to think you live in a world like that. Neither do I. But we do.

It is upsetting me to even have this guy's face on my blog. But I think it's important to look at him, look hard. Believe it.

Frills, Thrills, the Essence of Life

2011-11-08T09:08:00.001-05:00


You can make this apron for yourself. See below

I want to do some deeper thinking about the subject of yesterday's post---leading the no-frills life---which has inspired some people to say, Hey, please, I need some frills.

In my thinking - and as far as I know, I have invented philosophizing on this subject - "frills" are those things or experiences that are superfluous, additions to our lives above our basic needs. In my thinking, basic needs stand above mere survival needs. To know what those are, consider the homeless Vet holding a sign: Will work for food. To stay alive we need food, water, shelter. To stay alive longer we need other people - we are a social animal. In a very real way, we must have the protection of society so we can relax and sleep, be helped when we are not able to help ourselves. Society lends a stability to our lives. Our non-magical Western science has demonstrated repeatedly that people with friends and social-spiritual groups (such as churches) live longer.

What I see people wanting is a break, small or large. There is so much marketing of short breaks these days, as the number of single mothers increases, as so many women both work and run a home. Can't afford to travel, but you can afford a day at the spa. A pedicure. A massage. Wine and whine. New shoes, hey, more new clothes. Breaks, a little sense of being nourished. Groupon is one of the most successful new businesses now, and these are the things it offers day after day, pounding in that incentive to believe they will heal you somehow. Or refresh you so you can slog on.

Then there are the way bigger, more expensive toys and breaks people feel will make them happy. You know what I mean - a new house, redecorating the one you have, a boat, a remodeled kitchen, a Mediterranean cruise. And wait, wait, a new person, undying romantic love. I could go on forever. [I almost left out A Great New Car that will make a real man of you, or alternatively, be sleek and pretty and you'll feel carefree and it will provide some moments of pleasure every day. Right? ] These are the things Americans bought on credit these last years and can't pay for now. Are they any happier for having them? Not that I can see. Because the dream vacation ends, and all you have left now is memory and a whole lot of pictures of you obscuring the view of some monument.

I'm not against these things (though I can't stand even the idea of someone working on my toenails, so I hope I never get too old to clip them myself.) Enjoy yourself. But - they are only breaks. They do not change your life. And if you are desperate for this kind of luxury, your life is too stressful and there's no buying your way out of that Changing that means actually changing your day, what you do, and yourself, how you do it. Changing your habits of action and thought.

So what is the essence, what is basic to happiness, what makes life satisfying and rich? Here's one inroad to finding our own answer: take, oh, an hour to get started write and expand on a list of ten things you've done in your life that you really enjoyed doing. Think about this not from the standpoint of ecstasy or our-of-body experiences or super fun, think more about what skills or faculty you were using.

I'm sorry, I have degenerated into advice. Forgive me, I'm a grandma. That's what we do.

[Instructions for the apron are free at this delightful website.]

The no-frills life

2011-11-06T21:44:00.001-05:00


The cat's feeling blue

Reading Len Penzo Dot Com, an intriguing post about living "a no-frills lifestyle." Well, we do that, though with a lot more medical expense than he has, despite pretty decent insurance. So it got me thinking about frills and no-frills. A frill - charming word, say it - say it slowly, draw out those lll's - okay, a frill is an ornament, an extra, superfluous. Aha. In our life that would be travel; new clothes (instead of thrift store); eating at good restaurants; going out to movies, plays, concerts; consuming recreational substances; re-decorating when those chairs are perfectly good. . . .

We are thrilled (another fun word to say, roll the r) to be getting a lot of small electrical updating done in a couple of days, due to a coupon in Angie's List, which is not, strictly speaking, essential to sustain life, so maybe subscribing to it is a sort of frrrilllllllll. But you can't just let a house fall down around you.

Where was I? Of all these things, it is travel that hurts me. It's my fault I read the NY Times and yearn to go to art exhibitions of all kinds. And have a number of facebook friends who just travel their ass off and post the pictures from their smart phones. Sigh. But I do have a Droid now, and worth every penny to me. You can actually live without even the most basic cellphone - I just talked to a woman the other day who doesn't have one. No kidding. I said, "You go out in your car at night without a phone?" She nodded happily.

Here's the thing that it seems Tom and I picked up from our parents, who were Great Depression kids: there is a difference between what you need and what you want. I remain astounded at the number of people who don't understand that. I knew a woman, single, working a modest white-collar job like me, whose washer broke or something, and she HAD TO have a brand new washer.

I said, "You could use a laundromat." Did she shudder, maybe? or just look at me like I was crazy?

"My laundry is important to me," she said. And indeed, her clothes were too, and kept her perpetually worrying her debt. Buy new clothes to take your mind off your debt, wash them in your very own brand new washer. I am serious - that woman believed she had to have that brand-new (not rebuilt like we bought) washer. Had to.

I have been encouraged to write about how in olden days (the sixties) I washed on a wringer washer - it was nice, electrified - and hung clothes out in the summer, or in the furnace room in winter. The house was previously owned by an old Italian lady, so the furnace room had these wooden things you could lace clothesline on, ready to go.

Yes, it is possible to live that way. Though I was young and hey, I live here too, and I saw the commercials, so in time I, too, had an automatic washer and dryer, and still do. And fancy? The damn thing can tell when the clothes are dry. Then it keeps tumbling them on air and calls for me. It annoys me. I have to stop playing Angry Birds and go fold the clothes. And put them away, sometimes. Why doesn't it do that for me?

I do sulk about that. It's been a marvel to me how progress has not yet given me a life of uninterrupted leisure. But as my mother would say, you'll get to rest soon enough.

[image: That is the color of Tashi's fur in the original photo. And BTW, she is a decidedly expensive frill.]

Especially for Janelle, but you can read it too

2011-11-05T19:51:00.002-04:00

Read the right way, this poem is not negative. It makes horse droppings golden. You've been warned. You can read more about it at The Wondering Minstrel,a great site where you can get a random poem anytime you like.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright

 Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
 Asleep on the black trunk,
 Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
 Down the ravine behind the empty house,
 The cowbells follow one another
 Into the distances of the afternoon.
 To my right,
 In a field of sunlight between two pines,
 The droppings of last year's horses
 Blaze up into golden stones.
 I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
 A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
 I have wasted my life.

Leaving Zen Mountain

2011-11-04T13:16:00.001-04:00

I was just looking over a recent post about goals and time management--- I titled it "A useless post" with some irony, because it basically discouraged endeavor---though that is a very useful counterpoint to The American Way of Striving. But I do try, as I come out of the hardest year of my life and awaken to the 10,000 things that need done around here.

First, a progress report. Some scarves handled, though there is more to be done, and you can't see the dresser top yet. Got the kitchen cleaned, though it must have made me uncomfortable, because I immediately strewed things all over the counters again. (A happy marriage is one in which you basically agree on the level of housekeeping.) We became greener by mixing our own general cleaning spray from white vinegar and a few drops of dish detergent - saved a lot of money, reused the spray bottle, which would probably last seventy millenia in the Pacific Garbage Patch. And I am using my right hand more all the time. Today I was able to put a compression sleeve on, and thank God I didn't get cellulitis in this whole thing. Bladder infection conquered, though I will spare you the descriptive details. Even had a couple of good nights' sleep.

Voted yesterday---we have "early" voting in Ohio; like absentee voting, but in person. I tell you, I feel good when I vote. It's a mess, our government, but it's our mess. Don't think I didn't think about the Arab Spring, and all the people in this world who will lay down their lives for a chance to have a say in their government.

Seems my mind is available now for higher things. And we went to the Unitarian church we belong to last night for a presentation by a Sufi teacher and scholar, Neil Douglas-Klotz. This was my introduction to this mystical element in Islam, unless you count the movie Meetings with Remarkable Men, a great documentary which you can watch free here. (This is a slow-moving film, but toward the end there is a section of Gurdjieff Dancers that is breath-taking.) I also know one of his senior students, Elizabeth Reed, a well-known psychotherapist and spiritual leader here in Columbus.

Neil's approach is that of a scholar, a linguist, opening out the meaning of Jesus' words as they would have been spoken in Aramaic. Awesome. He is also a teacher and practitioner, and led us in two Aramaic chants; they call these "body prayers." I was just seeing the end of my longtime Zen path, a sense that it had become dry for me - and more disappointment in practitioners and teachers. I was aware of the empty space this was leaving, but I know that when something leaves your life, something else will come in out of the darkness, and I was waiting. Here it was.

For years now the machismo of the Japanese tradition has bothered me. Example: recently we watched a film on Dogen, an important Zen mystic and teacher. It showed the monks meditating as Dogen died. When he did die, seated upright among them, one wailed "Master!" and the leader shouted "Continue!" meaning shut up, swallow that grief, meditate. Can't go there, folks. Do not see grief as an illusion or grasping. Can't stand it when people are hit by the teacher's big stick. Can't go with meditating 14 hours a day, welcoming pain, keeping my eyes on the ground when the cherry trees are in bloom. I think it's wrong.

It's taken me a while to catch up to myself on this. It's been a couple of years, 4, 5? since my last poetry chapbook was published, Leaving Zen Mountain. The title poem had been inspired by a visit to a very formal (as in form-is-all) Zen center and monastery, where I was taken aback by the levels of heirarchy expressed in robes, and the cold and unwelcoming approach to visitors. So as usual, I'm the last one to read my own story.

Every Day is a Good Day

2011-10-29T08:55:00.000-04:00

This talk by Rev. Nonin Chowaney is such a good explanation of how in the Buddha Way we work on accepting reality that I wanted to share it. The calligraphy is also by him; a similar one was a gift from Tom to me. More of his talks can be found here.

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

A couple of years ago, it snowed in Omaha on April 29th. I had wanted to work in the garden that day and when I looked out the window, my heart sank.

Later, I walked downstairs and mentioned that it was snowing to Albert, one of our group. "Yes," he responded, "there's something quite beautiful about these late Spring snowstorms."

Indeed there is, if you can approach them with an open mind; if you approach them with complaint because there'll be no gardening, they can be a real pain.

Lama Govinda writes that, "All suffering arises from attitude. The world is neither good nor bad. It is solely our relationship to it which makes it either one or the other." Snow on April 29th, or any weather condition on any other day, for that matter, is neither good nor bad. Good and bad is a question of mental attitude.

Moment-by-moment, we create the world in the mind. We can look out and create a gloomy, depressing world on any day by the condition of mind we bring to it. A depressed mind can make a bright, sunshiny day black and dreary, and a contented mind can create heaven out of rain and storm.

I am reminded of the old Zen saying, "Every day is a good day." What determines this? The mind that dwells nowhere; the mind that accepts everything. This is nirvana.

Nirvana may be understood as the absence of greed, anger (or aversion), and delusion. In other words, it's a state of mind. If we can approach whatever life brings us with the mind free from greed, aversion, and delusion, or accept things as they are without grasping for more or turning away from what's there, we cultivate the mental state known as nirvana, quiescence, or, heart-mind at peace with what is.

This does not mean passivity. It does not mean that we lay back and not move. What it means is that we start from zero, from acceptance of our lives as they are, and move from there. In that way we are not kept from or hindered in our living by complaining, grousing, or blaming others for the conditions of our lives. Every moment, then, affords us the opportunity to practice awakening, nirvana, enlightenment. When we sit zazen, we cultivate this practice.

The instruction for zazen is to cultivate the mind that abides nowhere, the mind of non-attachment. We are to allow thoughts to come and go, to arise without denial or suppression and to pass away without clinging. Angry thoughts about the boss? Let them come and let them go. Contentment with a lover? Let it come and let it go. I can't garden because it's snowing? Let it come and let it go. This practice does not aim for any particular state of mind; it is in and of itself the awakened state; sometimes it is called "cultivating the natural condition of mind."

Buddha, the awakened one, taught the Way to end human dissatisfaction, and nothing more. He taught that the end to suffering is non-attachment, non-clinging. This is the practice of zazen. Gradually, we are able to also cultivate this practice when standing, walking, or lying down; our life itself is enlightenment.

A mind that can abide anywhere is always content, even when suffering greatly. This is liberation; suffering is gone through. We accept what comes, live it, and move on. In the words of Zen Master Bodhidharma: "When those who search for the Path encounter adversity, they should think to themselves, `In countless ages gone by, I've turned from the essential to the trivial and wandered through all manner of existence, often angry without cause and guilty of numberless transgressions. Now, though I do no wrong, I'm punished by my past. No one can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. I accept it with an open heart and without complaint of injustice.'" The sutras say, `When you meet with adversity don't be upset, because it makes sense.' With such understanding you're in harmony with reason. And by suffering injustice you enter the Path.

When I was practicing at Tassajara monastery, I got sick with a sinus problem that kept reoccurring. Once during the training period that I was head monk, it came back and lingered for almost two weeks. I had a lot of responsibilities, but all I could do was lay in bed, and I'm afraid I didn't do a very good job of being sick; it was very hard.

One afternoon, I made myself a cup of tea and sat outside in the garden behind my cabin feeling sorry for myself, sneezing and blowing my nose, being miserable. I looked over toward the zendo where the late afternoon sun was glowing on the rocks. The flowers and shrubs were gleaming. In a moment, everything turned. It was incredibly beautiful. The world was a lovely place, no longer grim, dark, and heavy. Everything was all right, even though my nose was still clogged! Instead of a living hell, the world was the Lotus Land of beauty and purity.

This was an important experience for me. One moment, pain and suffering; the next, joy and relief. This all occurs in the mind; we create the world we live in. We sometimes cannot change the circumstances we live in, but we can always change our attitude. If we can learn to let go, it will change by itself.

As Lama Govinda said, "All suffering arises from attitude. The world is neither good nor bad. It is solely our relationship to it which makes it either one or the other." So, even if it's a bad day, "every day is a good day."

A useless post about practically nothing

2011-10-27T19:42:00.001-04:00

I subscribe to a (free) blog by one Peter Bregman, who writes often about time/self management. Mostly, I like his personality. Of course, time management is a scoff in my life now. When you are old, well, aging is a breakdown of systems, parts wearing out, though the shock absorbers do get better with practice. Your muscles actually lose a percentage every year, so you exercise to just stay even. And your brain slows down too, being busy with not falling.

The thing is, most time management is about Getting Things Done. I myself, in fact, have a book by that title sitting right here at my relatively useless right hand. I came across a reference to it recently, probably in Bregman's blog, and thought, I have that book somewhere. Yep. With post-its on it, too. I can't tell what year I bought it, but I was obviously ambitious.

The book asks us to sit down for a few hours or longer and write down every single damn thing we want to get done. Everything. All the things that have piled up around you for years, if you're a regular human being living the good life in America. For instance, that box of old photos and slides from the film era, which I have mentioned before: it cries out to be gone through, throw out the many bad pictures, convert the rest to digital - you know. At least do the pictures of Sherlock, beloved cat of many years. At least that. And I bet you have a box like that too - though maybe some of my readers are so young they have always been digital. An amazing thought.

Well, I thought of writing that down - just that one undone project - and I quailed. [to shrink back in fear, cower - and the synonyms are great] To even think of seriously setting out to do that project, buying one of those converter things, creating a[nother] big mess . . . no, I thought, I'd do better to do something small, like figure out where to keep my headscarves. Somehow they have all ended up on top of my dresser in a heap.

You know I must have a larger point, and it is this: when you are old enough you get to stop Getting Things Done. You don't need to accomplish stuff anymore. You are done accomplishing. You can have the great pleasure of . . . doing not much. And knowing that it doesn't matter.

On Emptiness

2011-10-26T11:12:00.000-04:00

We had a day planned here on the winding drive. The water was going to be out as they finally fix the line, so we had spare buckets and pitchers lined up. Tom was going to make bean soup with ham hocks, which is something of an endeavor the way we do it. Greg was coming over to help Tom mount the new house numbers, a project that has taken weeks or years to come to fruit, the way things usually are around here.

Then Tom discovered that they did indeed shut off the water at exactly 8:30, just as the announcement said. And he hadn't put aside water for the bean soup endeavor, thinking they wouldn't be punctual this one time. Then Greg called with a fever, not coming today. Suddenly before us was a day with no big plans. It interested me, how empty it felt. It was as if the day we'd imagined had a certain reality, occupied space in our minds.

It made me think of how I labored to finish my PhD program - the hard part, the dissertation and defense - though I now knew I did not want a career in academia, just shoot me instead. There was a certain reason to it -to be ABD is to announce yourself as a failure - better not to even start the program, I thought. But there was another reason, I think now; I could see the span of time before me filled with a certain something, even if it was only a form of acute suffering. If I had quit, never mind what my father would have said about quitters, (oh, don't go there) I would be faced with - this empty space.

Empty of what? My thoughts about it, the mental structure I carried around. Tell me those mental emissions are not "real," I know that. I also know they are. They are like the four tote boxes in our front closet full of various clothes I wasn't wearing at the time we moved, but valued, and might fit back into some day, and didn't want to get rid of. Those boxes don't exactly exist behind the closed sliding doors; but they do. And in fact, they exist in my mind, too, cluttering me up, alongside ideas about 10,000 things I ought to do, how one ought to live, etcetera ad nauseum.

Well, I thought it was interesting, that's all - the space these cancellations left in our collective mind around here. It made me think, too, about how I would live if I knew I didn't have that apparently endless stream of years in front of me until, maybe, I die. That A Year to Live idea. If I'd known I would die a year later, I certainly would not have bent myself to that dissertation. During those stressful years the cancer began growing that was discovered two years after my graduation.

There is the melancholy joy of this time of year, too. Ohio is at its most beautiful in the fall, many kinds of maple turning many colors, the gingkos along High Street yellow fans, the brown oak leaves piling in drifts in the gutters. The sun in and out, which makes each moment of sunlight precious.

Each day you know this is the last day of its kind. Tomorrow, fewer leaves, less color. In two weeks we'll be into the drab, cold days of November, which are garlanded in the cheap Mardi Gras beads of the consumer holiday frenzy of eating, drinking, spending. However, of course, that does not exist right now, except in my fertile mind.

Unintended consequences

2011-10-25T11:08:00.000-04:00

I have only tried this exercise from a mystical yoga teacher once, and it did not awaken that deep well of joy some Buddhist teachers purport to experience, nor a sense of bliss, but it did relax me, seems promising, and I feel I should be offering something now and then on this blog. I am disappointed in a couple of other bloggers I follow by email, who have stopped posting regularly, leaving me with an inbox that is stultifyingly boring - [what? now spellcheck is telling me stultifyingly isn't a word - nor is spellcheck. Nor is bloggers. I HATE this. (The computer capitalized hate by itself, don't blame me.)]

Here is the whole world at my command, yet I am bored. Or say, unimpressed. Ah, there is the sun, a lot of golden leaves outside my window, a pale blue wash of a sky, water with just a drop of indigo . . . Speaking of painting, I may be ready to pick up a paint brush in a week or so. Suddenly yesterday I found myself basically not using the sling. Well, the day before I hadn't used it much, either. Found myself loosening it whenever I was sitting, just resting the arm in my lap. Ah-ha. Healing.

The arm is tending to hurt now in the rotator cuff area. Another ah-ha recently: maybe these problems with torn muscles (torn rotator cuff in left shoulder, remember?) have been caused by the *&%(# steroids at surgery (one whole gram). That, or the misprescribed Cipro. Or the years of levaquin. Well, an ordinary life. Even if all this crap hadn't happened to me, I would still be getting old. Or, already old.

And I think that's what I've come to as I digest the fact that it is now one year since my kidney transplant, and the kidney is very unlikely to reject. I am possibly not going to die of kidney failure, but of something else. It first came to me almost like a revelation, the mundane words you keep reading as you wait and pray: A transplant is not a cure, but a treatment. Like I said, mundane.

But under that lay something else - I had been led to believe it would mean a whole new life. Being restored to health and vigor. Maybe that is the curative fantasy one of my favorite Zen teachers, Barry Magid (who is a psychiatrist) talks about.
~~~~~~~~~~
creativus interruptus - a phone call from my favorite best nurse, Joanie at the transplant center. Yes, the urine culture taken last week does show an infection. They are going to prescribe an antibiotic taken four (4!) times a day for ten (10!) days. Well, thank God, I said, in italics, because I thought I should feel better than this. These damn infections sap your strength and depress you. And why am I having them? Seems related to the transplant, since this is the fifteenth one in about a year (15!) Ah, yes, I am immune-suppressed. Sigh. And always will be (as far as we know now). That leads us to the title of this post. Wikipedia on the subject is excellent:

More recently, the law of unintended consequences has comes to be used as an adage or idiomatic warning that an intervention in a complex system tends to create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.Akin to Murphy's Law, it is commonly used as a wry or humorous warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them.

Sounds Buddhist, but then Buddhism is so loose and accomodating, a lot of things do. I bet anything that if you look at your own life, you will see that you - a complex system - have experienced such consequences too. Like the way sex leads to babies, and babies become teenagers. If they were born teenage, nobody would ever get pregnant, at least not twice.

My Credo

2011-10-21T19:30:00.001-04:00

There's a lot of money to be made in sharing our wisdom before we die, so I thought I'd start work on mine while I can still enjoy the benefits. It would be a shame to pass on without sharing the wisdom born of the considerable aggravations I personally do not think I deserved. Here then, for starters, is what
I believe . . .

Pecan Sandies are good, healthy food, and regulate mood.
Pumpkin pie is a vegetable, and whipped cream is a gift from our friend, the benevolent cow. Also butter.
People who eat right die anyway.
The bad things that happen to you have no purpose.
The chief benefit of long illness is that you learn you don't have to clean house.
Alcohol is a central-nervous-system depressant. Look it up if you don't believe me.
Fun is overrated.
So is winning.
The force of your will does not affect the outcome, so lighten up.
The pleasure of buying things has a short life, but debt has a long one.
On a related matter, there can be no debt without credit. Think about it.
You are almost certainly under-appreciated.
You are supposed to pay attention to your pain.
Sometimes you should let things get you down. People who are always up are annoying.
No matter how hard you deny reality, there it is.
There is only one way to never grow old.
You did not earn what you have, and don't deserve it. So cultivate humility and gratitude.
There is seldom anything gained by spending time with people who bore you.
It is impossible to get paid for doing something you would do if they didn't pay you.
Like your mother said, nobody wants to hear your excuses.

How to Discourage Creativity

2011-10-16T14:43:00.000-04:00

There is . . . a dark side to creativity, in that it represents a "quest for a radical autonomy apart from the constraints of social responsibility".In other words, by encouraging creativity we are encouraging a departure from society's existing norms and values. Expectation of conformity runs contrary to the spirit of creativity. Sir Ken Robinson argues that the current education system is "educating people out of their creativity".
from Wikipedia on the subject

I've seen Sir Ken on TED talks - he quite convinced me, since I could easily make a case that I had the most creativity-discouraging childhood well, probably not ever, probably not in America . . . and probably almost everyone born in 1942 had much that kind of schooling and home. Still, it was harsh. Sad.

But let's not go there. The fun thing is to think about how being creative is radical, is a form of manning the barricades. Odd example came to me just now. I couldn't possibly find the pictures, which are on film in a big box with many other slides and photos, sigh . . . but I had just gotten a new little car, and must have also been in the throes of discovering photography. For when I left work I got intrigued by the way the snow was piled on the door handle, and began taking pictures of it. Later my boss and coworker told me they were watching me from the second-story window and laughing. They couldn't even imagine. So seeing this somewhat creative act (it wasn't a photo of the family reunion) they saw definite nonconformity. Their approach was not untypical - they called it crazy and laughed at it. Not real threatening crazy, but threatening enough to make a point of laughing at it and demeaning me, which would be called "putting you down" as if it is just words, just jokes, and doesn't hurt.

Do you like to be laughed at?

You know what, though? I think there is not one single person who reads this blog or ever would stumble on this post who does things like that.

You'll be glad to know that not long after that I walked out on that job, though over something worse. Yes, sexual harassment is worse. But in the same ballpark.

And here's a recent creative photo. There was more to the sign about no fishing or wading, but this view caught my fancy.

Small talk, and being small

2011-10-15T08:51:00.001-04:00

Seems demeaning when you do it to a dog

I've been intrigued by this subject for a long time, since Leslie offered, "I hate small talk!" Why? I wondered. I thought small talk was as defined in the dictionaries---
-casual or trivial conversation.
-light conversation for social occasions
-unimportant subjects of conversation, as opposed to serious or weighty ones.
or in Tolstoy---
"Do tell me something amusing but not spiteful," said the ambassador's wife, a great proficient in the art of that elegant conversation called by the English, small talk." But I also find synonyms, like babble, prattle that have a negative cast.

Personally, I love the small talk I have with people most Sundays after the service. Maybe it's because we have been quiet and turned toward the spiritual and are not drinking (it's been a while since I was at a cocktail party, but I remember the talk as deadly dull, as it usually seems to be at any event when I'm not drinking and other people are.) It's as if, after church, we touch down for a few moments and talk about what's important instead of circling it with that "babble" It's my favorite social time.

Maybe what Leslie hated was that other kind of small talk, the prattle instilled in girls, thus in women. Because it has turned out that she wanted to be someone other than the role defined for her by her mother's life, and she has done some brave things. Maybe she resented her lifelong roles as wife and mother and very good housekeeper.

Yesterday I wrote about good housekeeping, and how the preoccupation with it does not seem congruent with being an artist. No, because it implies a lot of attention given to something other than art, thought, creativity. Being a girl excludes more than that---it calls for fluffy indecisiveness; lack of interest in world events or, indeed, in ideas; lack of personal ambition. For girls, life resides in relationships or the lack of them, usually meaning relationship with a man. So it is about being cute, lovable.

Why do I bother to write? You can go to Wikipedia on cuteness in Japanese culture and there is so much there, or check out the other nearly four million entries on this subject. Cuteness is about women, sometimes men, being docile, about looking like children, including maintaining the slender body of a barely pubescent teen, if it kills you. And it is well-known that it does; anorexia has become one of our standing social problems.

I seem to have known where to begin with this, but not where it would take me. I just read a report on patriarchy and female subordination that lays out clearly what some of us started talking about in the late sixties. It's from a study done in Zimbabwe, but it strikes very close to home. A good place for anyone to start who doesn't feel like dressing up as a Princess for Halloween.

On staying disorganized

2011-10-14T08:16:00.002-04:00

Contemplating space - not photoshopped

My friend Suzanne keeps Facebook alive these days by posting a question of the day. Yesterday's was---If you could wake up tomorrow morning having gained any one ability or quality, what would it be?
First thought, best thought I believe . . .

. . . and tracking down that phrase led me to a review in the NY Times of a book by that title, selections from Allen Ginsberg's interviews over the years. Wonderful where wasting time can take you. Just this description of how Ginsberg worked in-spires me, fills me with the breath of creativity.

I suppose I was influenced by Ginsberg in my own method of writing poetry, as well as by an English major's immersion in the great modern poets and, like him, by Buddhist theory and practice. It is a sort of mysticism. The reviewer says--

Indeed, Buddhism taught him to eschew rationality in favor of ''ordinary'' or ''spontaneous'' mind, the vast sea of consciousness upon which our concepts and categories, anxieties and prohibitions, float like so much junk. Hence Ginsberg's compositional method, the moment-by-moment transcription of thoughts and images as they passed across his mind.

You can work like this in the visual arts, too. Recently I marked some words by my current favorite artist, Joe Brainard, on how to make a collage. He too was actively exploring the visual arts in the sixties, and developed on his own, with almost no academic training, a spontaneous way of working. His studio was a mess.

Back to Suzanne. My first thought on seeing her question was, I'd like to be much more organized. To have everything in its place. That would be in the material world - I am reconciled to a mind that is "a vast sea of consciousness" as long as it doesn't get to extremes. And I realized as I wrote my reply to her that to be organized is fundamentally the opposite of being a spontaneous artist. (I am choosing that term, carefully - you do not "make spontaneous art," you live spontaneously, your discipline is being with, you are an artist.) [Should that be parenthetical?]

I have sometimes thought of writing studies of the women I've known who were exemplary housekeepers, who kept their domiciles (they didn't feel like "homes") like new. Not that one can argue from a few examples, just illustrate. As far as I could ever discover in knowing them (relatives by marriage, alas), their minds were neat and sterile, too. Interesting how men seldom or never concern themselves with the problem of housekeeping, isn't it? Insert feminism here. Have a day.

Setting goals in the middle of a hurricane

2011-10-13T08:22:00.000-04:00

Having a bipolar body/mind (chemistry?) means a life fundamentally different from the usual mind - which I did have until my early thirties. (And in a sense did have while heavily medicated for twenty years.) Usual mind gets up much the same every day. Feels predictably, not excessively, perceives much the same, can be "in a rut." I am talking about unawakened mind.

There are things about me that stay the same, that "characterize" me. Say, an interest in Joe Brainard's work, a tendency toward analytic thought, love of color, need for solitude. But each day I am in a different state as if this particular outcropping of DNA and experience were dropped into a vat of liquid that is hot or cold, dim or murky or crystal-clear. Or as if I got out of bed, opened the window and looked onto a different landscape. Of course, we always do that, as things change. But I mean radically different. One day dishwater sameness of tired houses and neighbors, a dull world. Another day the view from a rest area somewhere between Phoenix and Flagstaff overlooking a pine forest. Another day the charming, simple hut of a haiku poet. Do you see what I mean?

This is a new thing as I stroll into the second year since my transplant - dealing with this very changeable outlook/perspective/energy/attitude. For many years as my kidneys failed I was pretty predictably dull and quiet. Looking back, I see a long subdued depression. Two years ago I took up knitting. My favorite thing that year was going to a yarn store, all the colors. I washed one of the scarves I made the other day and felt tender toward myself, working so hard to create something, to do something.

Now this. I am thinking how to set some goals for myself, structure some work time, now that it seems possible to have some time not dedicated to just staying alive. This is daunting in a life that changes so radically, not just the mind, but the aging body (four weeks ago today I fell and broke my arm). In my files in the cloud I found this quote from an article in Harvard Business Review:

In work, your goal should be to spend most of your time at the intersection of three spheres: what you like to do, what you do best, and what adds value to the [world].

As you see, I changed his word "organization" to my word, "world." I guess when you are retired, that is your organization. I am imagining the above in a diagram of three interlocking spheres, picturing things being something I like to do. Stay open.

What Else Steve Jobs Knew

2011-10-11T10:43:00.001-04:00

Apple's Fifth Ave. Store

I've been thinking about a way to present some facts that startled me in the wake of our national mourning for Steve Jobs - who was the embodiment of the American dream of personal enterprise leading to great wealth. In the light of Occupy Wall Street and the growing national awareness that Houston, we have a problem, I think we can consider the whole truth about his wealth and Apple's obscene profitability. For instance -

Apple made $208 on every $499 iPad (Computer World)
This year Apple's gross profit margin topped 40% (Bloomberg)
After resuming control of Apple in 1997, Jobs eliminated all corporate philanthropy programs; they were never reinstated.(Wikipedia)
He was widely (but quietly) known for not giving any of his $7-8 billion in wealth to philanthropy, ignoring the model of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. (New York Times)
There have been numerous allegations of life-threatening sweatshop abuse in Foxconn, the factory in Taiwan that makes many Apple products. (note: this is the outsourcing that has cost so many American jobs.) I encourage you to scan this recent article in Time.

To bring these figures home, what percent of your net income do you give to charity each year? He didn't. Your Mom-and-Pop pizza store, is it making 40% profit on every pizza sold? No way. Does the company you work for match your charitable donations? Apple doesn't.

What Jobs knew was that we - not just Americans, but people everywhere - really like shiny new toys. That we can be scammed. That a pitchman extraordinaire could get people to buy, buy. That many of us would buy cool things on credit, that is, with money we didn't have (think about what that has contributed to the crisis of personal debt). That we don't like to be inhibited by ethical considerations of products. And, it seems, neither did he.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

2011-10-07T09:44:00.000-04:00

Below is the complete text of Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. It could be taken apart and discussed as Buddhist wisdom. Like everyone else, I have italicized a few statements that hit me the hardest. Take the 10 minutes to read it and you won't be sorry.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated fromcollege. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

What are you sticking to?

2011-10-06T12:11:00.000-04:00

So this morning The Onion tweets me a link on an article titled Terrible Idea Committed to Paper. It is amusing, how we can be so in love with our ideas and inspirations. I was struck yesterday with a personal realization about that as I walked, fully enjoying practicing contemplative photography, just seeing without conceptions.

There is a lot you can't do without the use of your dominant hand, and furthermore, a torn rotator cuff in the other shoulder - I don't feel like trying to paint, forget drawing, I can't even sign my name, much typing is out - this already hurts. I can't even use the camera conventionally, using only one hand to hold it, focus, and click, and I can only use it vertically. But what a pleasure it was to do that.

And into my idle mind came Suzuki Roshi's admonition that Zen is about "not sticking to anything." You know what I've been sticking to? The idea that I Am a Poet.

I slowly formed this idea in 1997, when I began to write a kind and quality of poetry new to me. My father's sudden death and my own cancer had broken me open into the need to express creatively my very difficult feelings. At that time, my skills were only verbal. My first serious poem was an elegy for the best friend who died when we were eleven. Fortunately, Ellin Carter, the friendly professor I called and asked to have a look at it, was kind and supportive. Yes, she said, this is poetry. Very nice, she murmured, reading it. For many years after that I worked hard at poetry, loving the sustained act of being in the flow that comes when you're just right.

Right now - maybe I've mentioned this - I am on a higher dose of a psychoactive drug called Seroquel that seems to me to cut down right-brain activity. Even the lower dose cut my production of poetry way down when I started on it several months ago - I felt it happen and could expect the higher dose to do more of that. I was willing to lose that kind of creativity for a while to avoid the kind of awful depression that hit me last month. So the decision demanded a loosening up of my ideas about what I need to do to be happy.

It hit me yesterday as I stood by the pond, listening to the fountains, watching the water ripple and the hanging branches of the willow sway, as I walked, selecting big fallen leaves to crunch underfoot, that taking photographs of this was deeply satisfying and natural, while attempting to make poetry of it was a different sort of effort that took me further away from the reality. It struck me that I've been sticking to the idea that I am a poet. Like a noun, a fixed identity. So this feels more free and easy, and it is another beautiful day. October is delivering.

Three tips for instant happiness.

2011-10-04T13:28:00.003-04:00

Gerenuk

First, that this elegant beautiful creature exists - that makes me happy. (My daughter saw some sort of striking long-necked animal along an Ohio roadway - maybe it was these?) It is endangered.

I'm sorry, I don't have your three things. It's my warped sense of humor - I am a sucker for lists of tips, reading them is like eating something sweet and salty with no calories. I don't really think there are three activities or strokes of luck that would suffice to make anyone happy. Less neurotic and less miserable, yes, generally satisfied with life, yes, able to be happy, yes. But those are things that take dedicated effort over a long time---for instance, a daily spiritual practice and getting enough exercise and saving for retirement---and do not bring instant gratification. There, that's three - but nobody is interested in tips like that. Tips are about Instant! Free! Easy!!

Here's a suggestion, though. Start a list of things that make you feel better. Here are two I experienced this morning:

1. Getting a handle on tonight's dinner first thing in the morning. I actually got chili going in the slow-cooker, no small feat working with single non-dominant hand. It smells good, I feel proud, I'm looking forward to dinner. If you are your own or your family's main cook, what to have for dinner will be lurking on your mind all day long unless you decide in the morning what to have. Truth is, I learned this from a site called The Fly Lady. If you need someone to nag you to do what has to be done around your house, go there.

2. Getting three! comments on this blog, and from new people. This is the obverse side of my personal problem, which is that I hate my writing to be rejected. On the other hand, I love for someone to tell me it matters to them. New readers make me happy, too.

Your list will be different. Be careful about putting on it things that society has told you ought to make you feel better, I don't know, massage for example is torture to me. Stretching, however, is great. I loved yoga (with a great teacher, whose name is Kit Spahr if you live in the Columbus area) back when I could do it. Hate running. Love Ghiradelli chocolate with sea salt and almonds - it actually lifts my mood. Love soft socks, supportive shoes. Hate getting a manicure, but enjoy wearing the right nail polish. See, this is very personal.

The list of things that make me feel better is actually a sort of spiritual/psychological exercise that I made up for myself a long time ago. It is a way of paying attention to yourself.

Now I have to go take my noontime immunosuppressants. I have to do this every day of my life now, and I don't mind it, it keeps me alive, but it doesn't make me feel better. No pushing the list by putting on things you ought to be grateful for - that's a different exercise.

Living with Uncertainty

2011-10-03T08:59:00.001-04:00


Few things are black and white

from a revue of a new success book, Uncertainty, in the good blog, The Simple Dollar

The first step in this process is to figure out your “certainty anchors.” In other words, what things are you absolutely certain about? What experiences are ones that you can rely on? What things can you rely on, no matter what? Simply put, once you figure these things out, you can always rely on these things and experiences as examples of your own success. For example, I know I can succeed with paying down my debt, so this experience of success shows me I can handle other things that require willpower.

Seems Uncertainty is not Buddhist-founded, but is an exploration of being willing to take creative steps without certainty. The above is good practical advice, but I think it's valuable to bear in mind that, at the same time, nothing is certain. Many many factors enter into every moment. We work with probabilities.

I sigh when I remember The Little Engine that Could, from my own youth and my daughter's. Its vivid story is, Just keep saying "I think I can" until you reach "I know I can" and you will be able to climb the mountain that you are not constitutionally fit to climb.

I often think these days how nobody else knows what I need right now, taking that in the spiritual sense. Maybe I don't know, but I do know myself more intimately than anyone else does. I alone have had my experiences. I do know I have a lifetime endowment of pushing, trying hard, forging ahead fearlessly. I have a lifetime endowment of running through pain, as I posted while on that retreat.This was not useful on the retreat where it finally led to falling down and breaking my arm. I was tired, deeply depressed and, it turned out, suffering from a bladder infection, diagnosed last Friday. In retrospect, I would have been well-advised to go home when the weekend retreat ended on Sunday, and not stay for the week.

But it is very easy to not want to be at a retreat, when it is scraping at your denials and pain. I've seen someone leave on a whim. (Though how do I know what his pain really was?) It is not something I do lightly. So, uncertainty.

Your certainty anchor? Things will change. You will die. Every carbon life form will die, including the cats and people you dearly love. You will lose your favorite earrings, your figure, your vital chi, and your best friend. You will mess up all the time, though it usually doesn't much matter. BUT - your life will be old and stale if you won't take a step until you (think you) know the outcome. So, creative courage in the face of uncertainty - generally, I think, a good idea. Don't expect too much.

The Fifth Noble Truth

2011-10-01T12:32:00.001-04:00

Moon, by Joe Brainard

Now, I prefer to think of the Buddha's founding insights as The Four Realities, but most places they are known as The Four Noble Truths, and you can look them up. Over the years I have revisited them often, testing whether they make sense. Now I have come to believe that something important is left out. The Fourth Noble Truth lays out what is called The Eightfold Path. It is a formidable prescription for effort in every area of your life, involving wisdom, ethics, meditation and mindfulness. What is missing is how you begin.

I have seen hundreds of people begin meditation because they wanted stress relief, people who did not want to take it any further, to look at how they lived and what concepts they carried around in their minds. Some of them last, in a way, going to a meditation group once a week or filling seven bowls with fresh (city) water every morning, but most don't.

You will not stick with it, you will not really do it - not even with that one little part, daily meditation - unless you begin with a fervent vow to get yourself out of your misery. That's going to emanate from really seeing and feeling your misery.

I remember - feeling my way out of the dark room of cancer, a room cluttered with black boxes in which there was a door with just a crack of light around it to indicate it was there. I'd known a few happy people. I thought maybe happiness was possible. That door out of my misery - it was clear to me that I had to get to it myself. Medical science was adding to my misery, I won't go into that here. My family had, as usual, failed me utterly, abandoning me after all showing up pro forma in my hospital room. In my journal I noted it had been 17 days since my surgery, and my mother had not called me. Ditto what I thought of as friendships - they didn't go to this level. They turned out to be social distractions.

The church brought me dinner every night for a week, but each of those women refused to come in and visit when I asked them to, and each time my heart dropped, I was so terribly lonely. The therapist I had been trying to work with before the diagnosis was one more nice girl who wanted to explain me to understand my poor mother couldn't face my cancer. Jesus, it was my cancer. My minister wanted to show me how wise he was, told me she didn't choose to become an addict. Everywhere I turned, no one heard me. On top of this, what I had been trying to work with before the diagnosis was the appearance of memories of sexual abuse after my father's death. Well, I'm feeling bad just touching down on all this. That's about all the memoir I can stand.

I could sit on the bottom of that for only so long before I decided somewhere in my gut, Dammit, I've got to do something. Some of us are like this. We will goddamnit do something! This sort of will - even courage - is a gift, a lucky accident of dna and karma, and a certain persistence was something I had cultivated in my life. Lucky there. And all I could think of to do was a healing visualization I'd heard three different unrelated times in my life. More luck.

I knew enough about forming new habits to decide I would have to work at this, do it every single day. I further decided I couldn't stand to spend ten minutes at it, but five was not enough, so I made it seven minutes (with the kitchen timer). I tied it to a reward. If I did it, I let myself watch the 11 a.m. rerun of Law and Order, which distracted me from my nightmare. I did it sitting in my recliner. Things unfolded from there.

I believe that realization of our suffering, and that vow, are essential. You will not make that vow until you understand that no one else can help you. Happiness will not fall from the sky. It will not "happen." It's not in that "relationship" you hope will "come your way." You have to get to work. Only then will you begin to practice as though your hair is on fire. That's the Fifth Noble Truth, or maybe it's the preliminary practice.

I'm a poor Artist, you're a Jerk

2011-09-30T19:14:00.002-04:00

Actually, what Eric Berne wrote long ago was that the world is divided into jerks - heavy parental types - and sulks - childish types. I dislike half of that. I am a creative person. Though this means I have retained access to my inner child, it does not mean I'm undeveloped and highly unsuccessful at life - if you think so, hey, you're a jerk. But actually, I have no reason to think one single jerk reads my blog. They're busy cleaning, earning, bragging.

Francis Bacon's Studio

Part of being an Artist, a real one, is a certain disorder - in fact, famously, many creative studios feature a dozen projects underway, abandoned, past deadline. Jerkdom can be defined as orderly. Now, it could be Apollinian, and often thinks it is - rational, clear. I have known a couple of those in my life, and liked them. I don't like the amateur or failed jerks who basically make themselves feel good by judging their mothers to be ditzy, their fathers to be stupid failures, and me - all of the above.

I will know I'm enlightened when one of them can offer me free fixing and I don't mind, not then, not later, not even when I'm in the grip of a depression. I used to have a "friend" who obviously believed my realism was pessimism, cynicism, and that she should and could fix me. She went so far as to urge me to subscribe to a nauseating positive good happiness news feed. What? I get my news from professional media, I'm not stupid. Finally, after many many insults of this kind, I blew up at her. Wish I'd done it years sooner. You have to blow up at some people to get them to let go of you, because they so enjoy feeling superior, even though they suspect maybe you've got something going here with your irresponsible creativity (unfinished projects!) and happiness and scepticism.

That's it - a jerk is someone who wants to think that everyone whose life is not as structured and conventional, predictable and dull, as theirs is inferior to them. And can't help but let you know. They may ask at Thanksgiving, "So have you sold any paintings lately?" and the whole table falls silent, leaning into it, enjoying the proof of your uselessness, your total lack of real success.

Should such a question come your way, I advise you tell them you have. But be too modest to go into it. Later you can let one nosy person know it sold for $82,000 but you were wrong to let it go for that. What was it about, they'll ask. An abstract, you say. That will stop them for a while. But be aware that they will go home and google you. And how lies demand more lies. No, don't say anything. Just shrug and look mysterious. Let me know how it goes.

Another unattractive day

2011-09-29T19:18:00.000-04:00

Okay, I just try to be authentic.

Just interrupted by 2 people at the door. Did not know them. What did he want? He kept saying meaningless things like did I know so and so down the street. Finally something comes thru about inspecting foundations. No, I said. What? No, and closed the door. I'm sorry if I made his day worse. I try to protect the world from me when I'm like this. At times my anger comes up at old things, like the shrink who kept me on lithium even as it destroyed my kidneys, and I want to write a really angry letter. When I feel better, I don't care, it's not what I want to be doing with a good hour. The anger is not "real." This is a chemical mess, or chaos in my neurochemistry. Point is, you just get through this.

Saw pdoc today, this deep depression is news to both of us. He does not want to put me on a new medication, obviously, I take 20 different things. One is Seroquel at night, cools the mind, I can usually get to sleep. We're going to try doubling the low dose. The downside of this drug is that it has taken away most of my creativity. But creativity is worthless if you're depressed, like sequined red shoes gathering dust on the closet floor. It's a mood stabilizer too, he says.Call him in two weeks. Gave me his direct line phone no. I refrained from telling him my sports doc gave me his cell no. There, a bit of humor.

Tomorrow, another dr. Seem to have a new bladder infection. That itself causes depression. Stopped to fill scrip, killed my left shoulder, the other one, the one with a torn rotator cuff, lifting a half gallon of milk, which weighs 4 lbs. Both sides hurt, I'm sure it's good news that I have oxycontin for it. I am so depressed it does not make me happy.

A very depressing birthday visit from one of those people in my life. It doesn't matter what I say, how light-hearted, any small talk, she can always incisively suggest what I should have done, The Answer. I realize this is a virtually psychotic adaptation to life, people who honestly think there's always an answer, things can be fixed. As if I couldn't think of going to the hairdresser to get my hair washed, since it is so painful for me to do with the rotator cuff injury in the arm I can use. As if I don't have a reason (a very painful neck) for not going to the hairdresser. So let it go, she's like that. But this is depression - it does not have perspective. It can be obsessive. It is your worst Monday morning.

Read something from a big wisdom blog on aging and snorted. It is absolutely inevitable on these that people write in comments bragging about how f- happy they are. And they're not old inside! And they love life. And you can tell they think they deserve this, they think they earned it.

Okay, good news. Tashi has recovered enough from our absence to come and ask for a cuddle twice, that's when she climbs up on my shoulder and lays across my heart, purring. She likes it when I breathe on her head. Above, an awfully good picture of her.

Oh, the phone. I am not answering.

Birthday Thoughts

2011-09-26T09:46:00.000-04:00

So here is my private journal this morning, lightly censored.

damn - the pleasure of a new page
nice to sit here and people are wishing me happy birthday on facebook
woke up from my nap ystrda w this quiet groundedness - sanity

ystrda after church was into expressing my outrage at the whole damn thing, the year, the years before, what i have been through in the belief that a transplant would give me a life. It was a good thing Wossname didn’t say “It’s all good” like she likes to mindlessly in her pursuit of a spiritual attitude or of being good or forcing happiness.

last night my feet and legs swollen awfully - need to find my compression sox see if we can get them on. take it easy on salt today.

so this morning, there’s the mindless optimism online. it is a salve people put on. why shd it anger me? here you are in a f------ garbage heap. maybe the sun is out, sun on your head and back is the greatest blessing. maybe there’s some shiny thing you can pick. but that’s not how they want to see it - they want to transform the world into a storybook cottage w picket fence and pink roses and white curtains and the sun coming thru and a decorous cat on the windowsill, and everything’s all right. And pain, loss, illness, death are just oh, a nuisance you don’t have to pay attention to.

No, life is hard. The point is, get with the reality, but do not stick to your suffering either. Handle the reality as well as you can. But you don’t handle it if you refuse to see it.

i had a lot of outrage to express ystrda and i did. found myself after church surrounded by the women I like most in the world, Liz, Gini, Terry, Pat, Laurie, we called ourselves the Crazy Artists - we are the ones who don’t go to meetings of artists. they weren’t flinching from my bad language and anger about my f------ year. Maybe they like someone saying how it is.

In sum, this has been a very hard year, if you want to know, go back and read this blog. and the years before, trying dialysis, trying to get on the f------ transplant list, jumping thru flaming hoops to do it, then waiting, trying so hard to hold on to the little k function i had, why? why did I want so goddamn bad to stay alive? i don't know. maybe it is a conditioned desire. it's a stupid one after a point, and i'm over it. I'm old, 69 today. I am going to die. I am no longer going to do excessive treatments or focus my life around not dying. Not aging? that's a crock.

Coffee good this morning. Might have t take me to Kohl's buy some comfortable underpants and maybe a treat, a wide-neck shirt i can get in and out of with this broken arm. Have a good day, Reader, if you can, or some good moments.

[image: accidental calligraphy on a curb - if you know what it says, let me know]

The First Noble Truth, Again

2011-09-24T12:23:00.002-04:00

My life

Day by day the depression has retreated, like a dark smog going out to sea. I am not so bad this morning, but left with the realities of illness in both mind and body. This mind has resumed an active ability to be depressed that I haven't had in many years, just the way my body has revealed weaknesses now that I have the energy to use it more. (Back story: kidney transplant 11 months ago; age 68). When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, it is to a mess.

This morning an image came to my mind, of life as a hooded Torturer who says to me, "This is the way it's going to be from now on - always some new disability or loss, some new pain. Maybe several things at a time. You will never know what it's going to be or when, sometimes it will be very hard. And the only way out of here is death."

I say, "But I didn't do anything to deserve this."

He shrugs. "You were born."

"I didn't ask to be born." The adolescent cry, meaning, I wouldn't have bought a ticket if I thought the ride was going to be like this. (Manic-depression has something in common with adolescence, heightened emotions connected with internal, maybe hormonal, changes. Also, an adolescent is being born out of childhood into a different less-fun world, new ways of seeing.)

So the question becomes, How do you live in prison for life under these lousy circumstances, knowing the torturer can visit anytime?

First, get with the reality; cultivate awareness of the reality, the kind of food you can expect here. This was the Buddha's First Noble Truth - Life sucks. If you don't like this reality, you'll have no trouble finding people who want to feed you sugary pap. That's their approach.

One example of my bad attitude

2011-09-22T17:28:00.000-04:00

A very bad stupid day yesterday, which maybe meant I hit bottom and turned the corner from the depression. This morning coming in here w my coffee I noticed some faint negative thoughts, I mean the pissy thoughts about people whose crap makes my life even harder, but I noticed the thoughts, so there was a witness looking at my poor overloaded mind. I wrote a poem this morning. I meditated for the first time since we got back, briefly, knowing I had to do these things before the pain got bad and I took the first oxycontin, because on opiates you just don't care.

(I guess that's partly how they ruin lives. That, and the fact that they're illegal unless prescribed; and I suppose it is illegal to prescribe them just because someone likes the way they make you float and appreciate beauty. It is a stupid law that has resulted in our prisons being crammed with mostly black young men who did nothing violent, just sold drugs.)

This has all involved how hard I worked these last years to stay alive, how vigilant I was, had to be. Then what, you're walking toward the bathroom to fill your water pitcher because you have to drink 3 liters of water a day, you trip over nothing and down you go, flat, and a broken arm that is going to make every minute of your life a hassle for six weeks. One second of inattention.

It was a second during which I was thinking how unresponsive and useless dokusan had been that morning, how I wasn't going to do another one, how I just had one *&%$# day to get through, then we could go home, thinking I probably would never come back on this retreat. Yes, I had things on my mind. But I don't care what you do, you can not guarantee you won't fall. Could have struck my temple on the doorframe and been a functional vegetable the rest of my life.

It hurt, and it shocked me the way a fall can, and let loose all the misery and anxiety of these last years trying not to die. And now what? Almost a year after transplant and it's been a lousy, difficult year, not worth living. I will never have another transplant, or go on dialysis again. Done with extraordinary measures.

In all this depression there was something I decided about letting go my anxious vigilance. I don't mind dying, people - in fact, at this point I'd welcome it. God, gets me out of here. I will do what I know I have to do to (maybe) keep living, take the damn drugs 7 times a day, get labs done, drink the *&%$# water. But I'm done dragging myself through things that supposedly will protect me. I enjoy food. I will eat what I like. I find exercise boring, so today while Tom did his I walked around McConnell with my camera. Watching every *&%$# step, believe it. Enjoyed it. Well, there you are. An update. Where I'm calling from.
~~~~~~~~~~
p.s. It's been 12 weeks now, and the arm is still a problem, not even ready for PT to get range of motion back (Wun hopes).

priorities

2011-09-20T13:22:00.000-04:00

Recently thought my priorities are -

Stay alive
Do what I enjoy.

Much is subsumed under staying alive, such as having love, friendships, community, laughing, relaxing, and I suppose meditating. Along with all the usual crap about exercise, eat fiber . . .survival, resilience.

Doing what I enjoy has to deal with learning to enjoy or accept or laugh at what I have to do that I don't do for pleasure. Like do pills every week - making it least obnoxious, most efficient. Also scrutinizing things I think I have to do - do I really? Also learning what I enjoy, not doing stuff the culture thinks I should or should not enjoy (like watching football).

Bad luck

2011-09-19T21:05:00.000-04:00

Thurs morning I fell - a split second of inattention inside - flat on my front, the right shoulder taking it. The head of the arm bone is fractured, in a sling. Had to come home from retreat, see Dr. here. It has been 4 very tiring days learning how to do everything.

What you do with your dominant hand, or both hands: eat, brush & floss, drive, touch type, write, dial a phone, lock a door, make coffee, dice celery, tie your shoes - everything. I can only sleep in a supported posture on my left side. It is tricky and painful to change t-shirts. Have yet to figure out how to support the arm with straps so I can shower.

As for pain, the torn rotator cuff in the left shoulder is child's play compared to bone pain, and also the pain from the splint around my neck. We have ordered a high-design splint that may help. Sometimes you roll on your back in sleep, and the pain wakes you up. Well, I have no wrap up on this. Dumb with pain pills. Time for bedtime pills.

What practice is about

2011-09-14T10:25:00.001-04:00

It is about awakening to the reality of your life, and the courage needed to live it, to really live it and not stand around procrastinating a million easy things and waiting for a poem to hit you.

It is about running through pain. I wrote this poem so many years ago I can't remember, and it just came back to me.

Running through Pain
My therapist dreams about shopping for tuna.
She wants me to take up running, to learn
to run from no one to nowhere, then
to run back home again.

Working with Depression

2011-09-13T13:59:00.000-04:00

As for yesterday's gloom - this morning, again the pain in the SI joint when I walk or sit still for long. That, plus being almost late, or was I late? for the first sit because when you're old, everything takes so long. I hated this * old age thing, and all those who say "You're only as old as you feel." Bull - you feel as old as you are. I'd like to see them spend a day in this body, then see how old they feel.

So I was wordlessly grieved out in dokusan, and AMA Samy said, "Okay, it's okay."
"Not okay," I growled, leaving. It wasn't funny then; extreme emotion is like that. I thought how wise my grandson was. When he was born he came out really pissed off - Who are all these people? bright lights! I'm cold! Later, his first words were "Don't want!" That's how I felt - DON'T WANT!!!

Then somehow I got with it - the sun was just coming up orange, the color of joy. I kept standing outside the zendo leaning on the railing, which was easy on my back - and then breakfast. Walking hurts, is not good for the SI joint, ouch, so I found a folding chair and sat outside with my back to the sun, a blessing, and after a while read a little Trungpa on the Kindle on my phone, which is always with me because it is my camera. He cuts like a diamond. Took a Vicodin at last, time to sit (meditate), so came in and did lying-on-heating-pad meditating, being choiceless, letting mind flow - it even went into some hypnagogic images.

Now, in all this I was not "working with" the depression, and I think that's a key point. What I was doing was paying close attention to my physical needs, and the environment, which is beautiful and peaceful. Sometimes it is called "not clinging" or "not sticking to anything." Especially not to any idea of yourself or of evaluating your life. Not getting hung up in Want! Don't Want! One of our chant begins -

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who do not pick and choose.

How you learn not to pick and choose all the time, you meditate for ten or fifteen years - it's a start, anyway.

On crying as a practice

2011-09-12T14:17:00.000-04:00

By now, I know more about the process of bipolar disorder than any psychiatrist. That's 35 years of studying and experiencing, not counting the outbreak when I was 16, that got shoved back down until I was 32. Then I had three years incorrectly diagnosed - and there was no excuse for missing it -and twenty more on lots of drugs, then twelve on few or no drugs, years given to working with the progressive kidney disease lithium caused.

One thing I learned: if you feel like you want to cry but can't, you're in big trouble. Mental health screening tests see that as a sign of major depression.

In 1999, when a new shrink yanked me off lithium and three other psychotropics (yes, that was very stupid), I began crying again, a lot. I remember crying six times during one church service. I know now that suppressing tears is a big mistake. Womens' tears release certain chemicals, and that changes the chemical balance in your brain.

Why I cried just now? so damn much pain I could neither sit or walk kinhin in the zendo. The SI joint is inflamed again, the torn rotator cuff hurt no matter how I positioned my arm. I had to leave, come to my room and meditate lying on my big heating pad, and think hard about taking a Vicodin, and then do crying practice, out of both frustration and pain. This is at least the tenth time I've cried since we got here four days ago. And the depression I came here with it much better. (Though it is not so easy to change the body.)

Our practice here is being, on the cushion and off. Acknowlede everything, let it float on. Be brave, but don't be stupid - take your pain pills.

Sunrise at Grailville

2011-09-11T21:02:00.000-04:00

Dark Cloud

2011-09-10T22:51:00.000-04:00

Appropriately, this photo is a negative effect shot of a stunning cumulus cloud. A horrible day. Couldn't get internet in my room until now, ashamed to be visible outside with it. So I felt horribly lonely. This is not like garden-variety "I walk the streets of town alone" realization. I hope maybe some relatives of bipolars read this - I am trying to express how it feels. Or look at Van Gogh's self-portrait.

I did sit mid-morning, but obsessed madly on a problematic relationship - it was like my first retreat, not much better mental control. Cried about the death of Sherlock two years ago (not the first time). It was worse than not sitting. Not talking added to it - you express energy talking. That's why anxious people babble. I'm sure I need a shower. My novels didn't even engage me. Hugging Tom helped - he is a pillar of flesh. Petting the two roving kittens helped terrifically. And taking a few photos. Why are bipolars so creative? There you are - it helps. And kind notes from two facebook friends, women from church, as well as a note from a beloved Teacher that told me he knew how I feel. I can't tell you how much connection means. Very few people don't turn away from acute suffering. People have to be realized and grounded.

There is only one Buddhist thought that helps - this, too, shall pass. Other beautiful minds know how long every minute is in a bad depression. But it has passed other times. Being able to write this has absorbed me, too.

DNR Me

2011-09-09T21:31:00.002-04:00

Far fields

We got here yesterday to set up the sound, but retreat is just starting now, and silence, thank god. I got overstressed by the week, the packing, the change of everything, and went into a really bad mood last night. I assure you undiagnosed people - what Tom calls Temporarily Able-Bodied - you do not know what depression is. I write about this because I know there are bipolars and borderlines who read this, and who do know. It has been a day to just get through. I took to hiding in my room so I would not run into some chirpy smiley Hey how are you girl and snarl at her. It's not their fault but fact is, their suffering inflicts me.

The outlook in depression is also real, though not balanced. Mine has led me to see something I think is going to feel like a big relief after I get a night's sleep. Because you think about death, and how you're just so tired of all this. Most of all I am tired of knowing tomorrow this kidney could fail. This is less likely the further I get from transplant - 11 months now - but shit, I have a torn rotator cuff and will probably never play guitar again, an inflamed SI joint, crumbling vertebrae, a worsening hip, a bad knee, an incurable toenail fungus, what might be gout on the other big toe, a tendency to blood sugar problems, can't drink ... people, getting old sucks as much as being young (except you can get good drugs legally). Add to that having my very dear friend almost snatched away by a heart attack, and no telling how she'll be after lots of rehab. You learn a major Buddhist truth - you can read The Five Remembrances on the side of this blog - anything can be taken from you in a flash.

And I thought, if this kidney fails, I'm done. I'm not going to die slowly on dialysis. I've had it.

Would I take another transplant if some miraculous kidney was offered again? Don't know. What an ordeal this year has been with 11 infections, steroid flashbacks, and all the usual crap of normal life. I am not likely to get to make that decision, so forget it. I am about to turn 69, and that's part of my depression. I lost the last five years to severely low kidney function. The five years before that were a hell of mother dying, brother dying, Tom becoming too disabled to work. Jesus, when did I have a good year? Maybe next year?

So that's where I'm at after 14 years of pretty dedicated, not to say intense, spiritual practice. Right there in reality. Which sucks sometimes. If anybody tells me to look on the bright side, I will hunt her down and kill her. But quickly - I do have some compassion and, I guess, still a sense of humor.

Taking an experimental approach

2011-09-07T20:44:00.002-04:00

Spring - remember?

Often I inspire myself in my own morning post to a good friend. Today I wrote to her . . . "I guess our big huge stupid brains can't see the simple straightforward, that's the problem. In fact, that is the problem." We build huge castles around our simple problems. Interesting.

I think a certain amount of that is because we want to do it perfectly. Get that answer, get it right the first time, have it all turn out the way we want it.

Another way to go is to try something. Explore it. Expect to often change your mind or your tactics. My favorite of all quotes is from an ancient Zen mystic named Dogen, who said, "My life has been a series of mistakes." Now, how could it be anything else? It's all new, every day full of stuff you never did before. My ideal would be to be like a happy baby - fall down, laugh, get up and start lurching across the room again.

Who do you hate?

2011-09-06T13:07:00.001-04:00

You all know that I am against hatred, meanness, violence. As far as I can see, we haven't gone very far in terms of eradicating that big boy's game of war with real weapons. Dogfighting is illegal but boxing, football, hockey, and other sports that we know often lead to brain damage are not. This is a patriarchal culture, and was founded as a violent overtaking of other humans, with the nice excuse that they weren't really human like us. It is still patriarchal, meaning it values and rewards the aggressions of high-testoserone males in business, academia, the economy, god, they even rule the kitchens now, taking a job traditionally done by women in the service of nourishing and community and turning it into a screaming competitive hell.

Okay. So it has started on facebook already, the vicious posting about that act of terrorism by a handful of deranged young men almost 10 years ago. And I was in an unpleasant mood yesterday to start with. So I got into it with someone who was deploring the very idea of "building a mosque at Ground Zero". He had his facts all wrong - here's an article about the proposed construction at Park51 that explains what the building will house - but the issue for me was the vindictive hatred I was seeing in the comments on this post. Self-righteous, and backed up by their idea of Christianity. I had good experiences in my Christian youth, and that ticked me off too - Jesus did not tell us to hate one another. So I got into it.

I restrained myself, that wasn't the issue. But my anger surprised me somewhat - maybe it was just a high-fire day. I often sat and listened to racism and bigotry and idiotic parroting of talk radio hatemongers from our fathers, not rising to the bait to argue or even get mad. Maybe my long patience was just worn out.

But if I hate the bigot and assign him/her to the category of subhuman (sub me that is), am I not as bad as him? And go further - don't you know liberals who self-righteously hate the sitting ducks of the right - it used to be George W. Now it's Sarah Palin. In the privacy of my own livingroom I am not a model of compassion and kindness about a number of people, definitely including that Dominique Strauss-Kahn person.

If you want a spiritual exercise, think about putting some person whose politics you abhor into your lovingkindness meditation, in the spot of "enemy" or "difficult person." If even thinking about it increases your stomach acid, well here's an opportunity, I guess. Meanwhile, none of us should be too hard on ourselves - it doesn't help. Lovingkindness starts with us. Well, maybe the cat first, then us.

The shadow of things unseen

2011-09-04T08:43:00.000-04:00

It comes on the wings of the morning
Through the mists of an azure screen,

To tint with prophetic linings
The shadow of things unseen.

Charles J. North
The Hymn Immortal

Image: detail, altar, August 28, 2011, Rev. Mark Belletini

Where in the world are you coming from?

2011-09-03T15:18:00.000-04:00

As Readers know, I was born in another world (1942, that is) that was much more insular. Some people had a pen pal in England or France (in other words, in Europe), but my schools weren't that advanced. As for the rest of the world, I bet the term "Pacific Rim" was unknown.

I am still not very well traveled, so I like it when I look at this blog and see that someone is reading it in - Edinburgh! India! - out on the Coast (West US, that is), which I may never get to visit again. So, being quite determinedly idle today, I have begun a list (see right margin), but I'm not on most of the time to see who's here. If you like, drop a comment to this post telling me where you're located, so I can add it to the list.

The Commitments You Don't Keep

2011-09-03T12:36:00.000-04:00

You probably think the commitments to others are the really important ones: making the dentist appointment on time, going to someone's birthday dinner, going to work every day, being faithful to the Wun you said you'd be faithful to (trying to be modern here and not just say "your spouse"). I'm not saying they aren't. But I'm not sure how much they need to be talked about, because we all tend to take them seriously.

The Wun we don't take seriously is ourself. Oh, you know where I'm going with this. But before I go on, really, I need to slow down this flow of word and thought and . . . you know where I'm going with this . . . do my practice.

Part of my practice these days is easy photography, catching texture or color or light, or Tashi in her infinite beautiful poses. My new Droid has been a great help with this - a basic point-and-shoot that I always have with me. I bought the book Contemplative Photography to encourage me to do this, and it has worked. I haven't read it all the way through or done the exercises, exactly - but it helped me along with this.

So, not too strict, not too loose, that's right effort. And if you just won't do something, like meditate every day, maybe you need to sit down and really think about it. Maybe it's not the practice for you. Maybe the commitment came from the mother in your head, and maybe the child in you is doing a healthy rebellion. And there are a dozen or a thousand other reasons we don't take time for ourself, none of them good reasons. Not one.

Why I Wish You'd Meditate

2011-09-02T19:57:00.000-04:00

This today via AMA Samy, from Mysticism in Religion - Three Ways to View the Sunset by Fr. Richard Rohr -

Consciously or not, far too much organized religion has a vested interest in keeping you . . . where all can be put into proper language and deemed certain. This keeps you coming back to church, and it keeps us clergy in business. This is not usually the result of ill will on anybody's part; it's just that you can lead people only as far as you yourself have gone. Transformed people transform people.

It got me thinking about the many bad "therapists" I've touched down on, and the world's worst psychiatrists, all of whom I've surely seen, the really bad doctors, and ministers, yes. It is exactly true that people whose level of enlightenment or transformation is low will deal with you from their own interests.

These days meditation is often sold and sought for personal gain of the most superficial and immediate sort: I feel so peaceful afterward. But what we mean to do in Zen is much more than you can get from a good massage - loosen the bonds of our conditioned self, be less driven by its egocentric project. Awakening means knowing what we're doing, and thus being able to avoid doing harm.

Tired tonight, often I don't post things like this that feel abstract, but I think I will.

My goal

2011-09-01T12:47:00.000-04:00

A poet is a man who stands outside in thunderstorms hoping to be struck by lightning, and if he is lucky he may be struck three or four times in a lifetime.
Randall Jarrell

Of course I am drawn to interesting people - in the blogosphere and in life - and maybe it follows that they are younger and healthier than me. Almost everyone is. Is that true? I went to US Census data, which is quite a strain on the left brain, and I did find there that over 40 million people in the US are over 65. Now, consider that I am 68, almost 69, which is almost 70. The aged population dwindles with every year of life, so the graph looks like an upside-down top. Therefore my statement is true, at least the part that most people are younger than me. And it's reasonable to deduce that most younger people are healthier, more vigorous than me (or my close friends, in fact).

Bear with me, because I am tired today and having trouble following myself. These younger people often have goals in life, short-term, long-term, and maybe what is now called a Bucket List but used to be a Life List back when I made one, when I didn't know what life is all about. I thought it was about great experiences, that seemed to involve sensual pleasure, novelty, travel, fun. I guess. But I think most of my desires were symbolic - you know, to fly, to float, to whirl.

Beyond that, I was really into accomplishing things, like learning to relax (and wouldn't be here if I hadn't) and learning to play the guitar. And finding love, which I really misunderstood. I'd been too humbled as a girl to have career goals, except when I was around 50 and decided that I'd always yearned to go back and teach college, and so entered a PhD program in umm, literary theory, a decision I still don't understand. I did accomplish that, by the way, I have to mention it since the stress caused me to develop cancer. In fulfilling the dream of that degree, I did learn that I didn't want any part of the academic rat race and the faux teaching - sometimes you just have to do that to get over your romantic delusions.

Now, naturally my overriding goal right now is that of all sentient beings, to stay alive, and as the Constant Reader knows, I spend a lot of time on that. It goes with another desire, to be happy, which the Dalai Lama says we all share, and of course we don't mean sappy-happy. Toward that I spend time on spiritual practice, thoughtful living, being with those I love, and so on - stuff we Buddhists are in danger of writing about too much.

On the career side, I just finished a big piece of work, a submission for an arts grant in poetry, and so I have found within myself a humble goal, or desire. It is not really anything you can bring about, like passing the French test or going to the health club three times a week. It is to be struck by lightning, not just a few times in my life, but several times a year, to be frank, and write - or be the vehicle for - good poetry. This means shaping my life around "being a poet," and is more complicated than just leaving empty time, spacious time to write. I'm thinking about it today (too tired to do much beyond think and oh, a tiresome followup dr. visit later today, and grocery shopping . . . ). How to encourage my creativity.

Right now the sun is shining, sky blue, all the green and gold outside my window moving in the breezes. There it is, right there. I hope it is shining for you.

The Missig Lik

2011-08-31T19:57:00.000-04:00

The Missig Lik

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

Bragging Rights

2011-08-27T17:34:00.003-04:00

Actually, bragging wrongs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, Winning isn't Everything

2011-08-23T19:45:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

What Enlightenment is Not

2011-08-22T10:32:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

When Giving Works

2011-08-17T11:16:00.000-04:00

Gift-wrapped cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crazy like a fox

2011-08-16T17:01:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to lose

2011-08-13T15:31:00.000-04:00

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

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

I think we - or I, at least - are often blind to the fact that every action is an experiment without any idea of what its outcome will be. With group actions, like a church, you can have bigger, more dramatic unexpected outcomes. If you use the word failure at all, it means you know the outcome you desire. Isn't fail the opposite of succeed? as lose is the opposite of win.

To be able to act outside rigid guidelines and habits you have to have a certain degree of Don't know, don't care, an acceptance of any outcome. What we do try to control is to be sure our motivation is kind, and not all ego. I am now wondering what my motivation is in writing this here . . . just conversation, I think. Winning and losing has been on my mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Needs service

2011-08-12T20:33:00.000-04:00

Rest in natural great peace

2011-08-12T09:05:00.000-04:00

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

Rest in natural great peace this exhausted mind,

Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts

Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves

In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

— Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche

What I learned from this illness

2011-08-11T20:40:00.000-04:00

cat demonstrating yin yoga twist

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

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

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

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

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

On the edge

2011-08-07T11:52:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to search for work

2011-08-05T12:30:00.000-04:00

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

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

How to Sell Yourself (Not)

2011-08-01T08:53:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living well, living good

2011-07-31T22:38:00.000-04:00

"Living well" usually means, I think, having a life rich in excellent material things and sensory delights - great restaurants, very good clothes, a villa on a hillside in the Mediterranean, faithful servants. It used to make me think of luscious bouquets of cut flowers until I read about how cut flowers come our way now by jumbo jet from sweat-shop greenhouses. Maybe that flower thing is a good example of the difference between living well and living consciously. Living well is done on the backs of the poor. And without regard for the cost to the earth. Somebody mines those diamonds.

But my example today is so much smaller, and takes place in a pretty humble Mexican restaurant, where one waitress struggled to serve our long table of friends gathered for after-church brunch. I happened to sit near Rick, whose vegetarianism grows out of his compassion for animals. We talked about his list of vegan restaurants here in town, which is a surprise to me; Columbus is often called Cowtown (see photo above), a hit on not being too hip. He gave me a piece he copied recently about the cost to the environment of the American addiction to lawns. I thought for the hundredth time about how we could dispense with our stupid lawn. At least we hire an organic service, a guy who cares about the earth, and whom we really like.

Then comes time to package up what we didn't eat of our meals, which are always too large here in America - you know about that, I bet, how obesity has become a national problem. Think about that. Reminds you of the degenerate Romans and their vomitoriums. The waitress brought me a little styrofoam box; what was left of my lunch will be my lunch tomorrow. And for about the hundredth time I thought about bringing my own plastic containers to restaurants. I told Rick, "Styrofoam is a blight on the environment." He nodded, wrapping a piece of quesadilla in a bit of tinfoil.

Now, why wouldn't I carry a few Glad boxes in the van? We eat out - at modest places - at least once a week, and I usually bring food home. And I usually shake my head at the expense of styrofoam, which is made of dino juice, I believe, and involves a lot of manufacturing and is slow to degrade.

Why don't I do that? Because I would feel self-conscious doing it. It's bad enough to not drink in America, which our movies tell us was founded on alcohol and greed, and still seems to live up to that model at times. . . .

But I digress. So I'm going to stop here and go put a few containers in the van, and then sit down to watch the evening news, which will show me much worse problems than my own small fascinating problems with principled nonconformity. . . . Meanwhile, I'm wondering if our zoning will let us have a herd of sheep in the front yard.

Notes on ego display

2011-07-31T09:01:00.000-04:00

If I had a dog, I'd name her Karma, so I could enjoy scolding, "Bad Karma, bad." (I have a weakness for bad puns, bad.)

Just thinking about that this morning as I scan my facebook, a way of having coffee with friends. Here was a posting about someone who hurt my feelings recently, not on purpose, just doing his conditioned ego display. In his case it's correcting people, showing how much he knows.

Look at me!

His post this morning is about a minor health problem, a discomfort, and since it is morning and calm and my brain is not as busy yet as it will be, I heard myself think. My self thought, Good. This is not nice, and I wouldn't admit it to most people, because most people don't realize that they think things like that. But I will so I can make some points about the whole thing.

First point: it is not desirable to be glad someone hurts. I must suppose I always knew that, but until I got going with spiritual practice and began to clear out my head, I didn't hear myself. If I had, I might have thought it was good to enjoy someone else's pain; my (alcoholic) father did, out loud and at length.

My friend. When he hurt me - however much he didn't mean to - he created bad karma: my anger toward him. Anger is in that balliwick we call "hatred," as in "Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly; I vow to abandon them." This is one line of a central Buddhist chant, The Bodhissatva Vow. And it says these three poisonous things rise in us endlessly; and we make a point of noticing them and leaving that neighborhood.

Of course, like my friend, you can make someone angry and not realize it. Maybe you're fooling around playing Angry Birds on your cellphone in the grocery line and don't notice you should move forward and put your groceries on the conveyor belt. Someone behind you who is in a big hurry and jealous of your cellphone is steaming. Maybe rams her cart into your butt and glares.

Hopefully the karma won't be so bad that she follows you and rams your car, but things like that do happen, at least in mystery novels. Point being, walk slowly and lightly, be aware, be kind, be careful, don't get too caught up in your own fun - it's easy to do harm.

Another point here: Wun is a human being made of all sorts of pixels of experience. We can continually surprise ourselves. A real person is not predictable, though a highly conditioned person can be.

My friend couldn't have predicted my reaction if he tried, and is not responsible for my reaction. Unless you deliberately inflict pain, something direct like that, you are not causing someone else's reaction. You happen to cause it. I think this is a point psychologists make sometimes; you are not responsible for how someone else feels when they have what seems like an overblown emotional reaction.

At the same time, we can't utterly disown our impact on other people. Or the earth. Right? That's why there are precepts about how we act in relationship, right speech, right action. We are responsible for our intentions, for our actions. We are supposed to intend no harm. You can relate this easily to The Golden Rule in its many forms found in religions all over the world. My way of thinking about it is: Be Kind.

So. Sunday, and here's a sermon. Now I'm going to church and not listen to another one.

[click here to go to the website that sells a poster of the image]

Slow down, you move too fast

2011-07-29T21:50:00.000-04:00

Recover from Your Speed

2011-07-29T08:03:00.003-04:00

I am dumb this morning - this state began yesterday after or during nap. Or dull, the opposite of sharp, high, inspired, en-lightened. This is a matter of the senses, of feeling nothing. Anyway, reading Trungpa this morning on Practice and Intellect, here is something I highlighted (learning how to use my phone):

. . . by providing some sense of space and openness, meditation is good preparation for reading. If you allow yourself some gap or space to rest by sitting down and doing absolutely nothing, you recover from your speed.

Don't you like that? Recover from your speed. Why are we - why is Wun - so boneheaded stubborn reluctant to sit down and give up speeding around? I have given this a lot of thought over the years, usually projecting my own reluctance on someone else, but it always comes down to this: understanding all your motivation and causation and history won't really help you act. You have to act. Sit down. Breathe. Relax.

Law and disorder

2011-07-28T16:41:00.000-04:00

There was a time in my life when my unhappiness was not at all about impulse. Self was constructed of the cement of rules and role, and I didn't seem to have any Real Me in there at all, not even impulses. NoWun. I was just what I had been told I should be. What satisfied my parents. What was permissible in their narrow thoughts. It's a small cage. But it has a door that isn't locked.

It sort of amazes me how many lives I have had. That buttoned-up tight time was in my twenties. At that time, nice little house, no mess, because my husband wouldn't have liked mess, because my parents were fiends for neatness, my mother always picking up after all of us, always cleaning. Very little creativity in any of our lives. For a while mine found its out in sewing useful things. I remember very fondly a pink terry-cloth bathrobe with a hood that I made for Cassie when she was still a toddler. She was so beautiful in it. I used a pattern, never learned how to sew without one. Now I know people who make gorgeous fabric collages stitched with gold thread, who work with happenstance in their quilting. Back then all I ever saw was quilts according to patterns - even patchwork was done to a grid. Sometimes the question is about finding your impulses.

Reading Chogyam Trungpa this morning on Auspicious Coincidence. He gets into questions about choice. And making choices is very much about being right in the center, right here, right with yourself and all of it, doing the central, sane thing. He talks a bit about using divination when we feel stuck, and it made me think of my tarot cards. At another time in my life when I felt very browned-out and stuck, I learned to read tarot with the classic Rider deck. And it was great for me, it helped move me along. It is a way to put the Self and all its thoughts and rules aside and enter the situation wide open, put your energy into the cards as you shuffle and cut, so you are putting yourself out there a little. Listen to the universe, be opened by the symbols on the cards, so that the answer becomes clear. Well, sometimes it doesn't. But you approached the question.

Always looking for big answers. But I often think the question is, What are you going to do with the thing in your hand? That's both tangible and a metaphor.