Grandma's absolutely perfect lovely morning

Wake up 8:23. A good nine hours of sleep. Everyone should have that in the winter. Make coffee, happy that there is nothing on the calendar. Move thoughts away from Things To Do as they pop up. I might stay in all day, I might not do a thing. The weather on my home page has a cute little graphic for freezing rain. I start checking e-mail. Then Tom's up.

Go into kitchen, a long discussion of whether to buy an extended warranty on the new TV. Tom has researched the consumer experience with this thing. We do an informal risk/benefit analysis and decide not to. At one time we would have been reactive and contentious about it, him always wanting insurance, me always arguing risk. It's good to get old with someone and get past those things.

While we talk I am knitting - finishing a Christmas present, in fact. I reaffirm the research that says there's no such thing as multi-tasking, that you can only think about one thing at a time. In this case, it is the knitting that suffers. However, I am used to that, and the beautiful textured yarn hides mistakes. There's a metaphor for you.

Tom is doing his initial scan of the New York Times. He tells me about the history of Haiti. Founded by escaped slaves, a French colony. All the trees cut down for hardwood by the French. We comment on how the French saw Haiti as some other world, took what they wanted with no imagination that it affected the planet they lived on. Utterly dualistic thinking: Us/them. Avatar.

I read aloud a bit about grasping and clinging from my current book, Zen Miracles. Brenda Shoshanna, who is a psychologist as well as a long-time Zen practitioner, invents major exercises. She isn't kidding. Here's the one I want to do next, which is titled "What We Cling To:"

Make a list of those things in your life you are greatly attached to. Stop and look it over, see what purpose they serve for you. What would happen if you let go of one of them? Each day this week, let go of one, just for the day. See how it feels. You may be surprised.

I'm going to meditate before I start it. It is 10:45, a good time of day for me to meditate or do other mental work. Some stretching first, adapted from yoga. Just remembered - health club today. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. We're trying to set a schedule. Should put it on the kitchen calendar.

Meditate. I am learning to count each breath mentally at the bottom of the exhale. Aitken recommends counting as a way to “tidy your desk.” Don’t evaluate your meditation Daniel once told me, so I won’t.

11:32. Go through box of things to do and pull out two fun things, a coupon from Banyan Botanicals and a free subscription to Bon Appetit, which I got for being foolish enough to buy their big cookbook about easy fresh food. Easy, ha. Still, I like getting a magazine like that, and sometimes it inspires me. I pass through some thought traps, as there are other To-do’s in that box. But I remind myself I am taking the morning off.

12:03. Time to get dressed and go to health club. Do a Shud. Will have to proof and post this later.
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The freezing rain never developed. We are supposed to get the January thaw this weekend, temperatures up near 50, and sunshine. That always feels like a blessing.

Good habits, and breaking them

[image: the stream at the bottom of Walhalla ravine, in autumn]
Forming a new habit - this is such an ordinary, undramatic thing that it hasn't occurred to me to write about it until now. Yet, nothing counts but what you do.

I'm not sure that is true, because I've had experiences of receiving energy, both love and hate, and of connecting through thoughts. But thinking about it, our thoughts and our emotions are actions, too. Thoughts can seem involuntary. I have a friend who surely has been exposed to therapeutic thinking, for once I was worrying about finishing some work, and he said, "Nobody but you is forcing you to do that." It was like having cold water dashed in your face. You blink. The fact is, even privately obsessing is a mental habit. It's yours.

My morning practices. One that I enjoy is splashing my face with cold water while the coffee drips, a Zen habit I read about somewhere in Aitken's work. What makes it Zen is that it is a paradigm for the willingness to wake up, leave dreams behind and be splashed with reality.

The moon is now in the top of an oak on the other side of the ravine, which seems very close, but if you had to walk down that steep incline, or skid and tumble down, and then climb back up, believe me, it would seem very far. Very far when there is no bridge. The October moon is so bright, yet you can look right at it with no fear.

I am muddling here. I don't have to, but I enjoy leaving a form (the essay) behind. My pauses and distractions are part of my truth. I love to watch morning arrive. Morning alive.

When to let a habit drop away? On Friday a blogger named Laura described the joy of sitting the way you want to sit when the zendo is very dark, enjoying dropping the prescribed posture of Zen meditation. That pleasure is keen just because one sits for hours motionless in the prescribed posture, one becomes very aware of the body. And, because you have been following the schedule, like it or not, time to yourself to sit freely and engage with the moon or the dark becomes precious.

My morning service, the string of behaviors I want to become a habit, goes like this. Get up, get robe and slipper socks, shut bedroom door so I don't wake up Tom, walk to kitchen, start coffee (decaf, new habit), take thyroid - don' t forget. Go to bathroom, splash face with cold water (see above), get elastic sleeve which has been drying overnight, follow Sheba's prompts and go through her morning treat sequence (two Magical Floating Cats, one Running Cat, a habit string she never forgets), sit down, put on sleeve and slipper socks and robe. Coffee is done, pour giant mug, come to study. Get computer going. Open journal page, note significant thoughts and dreams. Check incoming mail, read the Tricycle dharma of the day, maybe go to the web site and read a whole dharma talk, check Facebook. Open home page. Back to journal. When I've finished that cup of coffee, it is time to meditate. After that, breakfast (important new habit with my blood sugar playing tricks).

Now this boils down to the bones, the actions not to be skipped:

take thyroid
journal with first cup of coffee
meditate
breakfast

Ah. How refreshing simplicity is. It is true, all the other little actions are important too, and have to be done, but this is the bare form of my morning, the time alone that I have to have. That sets me in place. When I skip it I feel like I never quite catch up with myself.

It sounds easy, this little practice, but it gets into complications because I am a creative person, and writing is both my work and an important part of my spiritual practice. So, when something creative gets going in this morning space - a poem, a fiction, an interesting train of thoughts, writing a post like this - I contemplate the time frame. Today I woke up early and have no morning appointments. It's a spacious morning. So today I am finishing this post, with that always-tempting second cup of coffee. Then I'll meditate.

I know people with well-organized minds, for whom a little sequence like this might seem natural and easy. I imagine they don't read this blog. If they did they would perhaps wonder, what's so hard about it? In the morning you have a cup of coffee, meditate, have breakfast. And remember to take your thyroid first thing.

Of course they're right. (And scrape the litter box, too.) But life is different when you live in the right brain, or even in some space that includes the right brain, which is not linear and organized. I don't have to include a link to information about that; you can look it up. Add to that a long life of bad habits, like skipping breakfast or skipping time with yourself, and you have to work with it. Maybe it isn't inspiring. It's mundane, a word that refers to the world, the everyday. Some people think that's boring, but what else is there?

What to do when the resurrection is cancelled

We had our nine-year old grandson, Otto, over the weekend, and as always, played board games and card games. Then he suggested Jenga, which we have played together for years. In this classic game you build a tower of finely milled hardwood blocks, which you remove one at a time and stack on top, trying not to topple the tower. But it inevitably does fall with a wonderful crash, and you are never quite expecting it, so you scream. Blocks go everywhere, on the table and floor. Cats don't like it, Otto does. I like that we played it as a cooperative game, all three of us trying to beat our personal group best (32 levels).

As we played, I thought how this game is like the crash and rebuilding of the self, our ego. Something happens, our trip stops working. Today we might say, Time to Reformat. Robert Aitken comments that Zen teachers consider this an auspicious condition, though he didn't know that when it happened to him.

I happen to be noticing my crash right now - last week I talked with an OSU transplant surgeon about my bad reaction to cortisone. A shot in my hip for bursitis in late January led to moodswings that ended only recently (if they have indeed ended). Now I am "on hold" on the list - that is, they have not removed me (that will probably take a committee meeting), but I will not be matched when a kidney comes in.

I thought OSU had gone to a "steroid-free protocol." They're trying. But the first week after a transplant, it is still necessary to load every patient with steroids to prevent the rejection the body is trying so hard to bring off. Every day the dose would be fifty times the dose of that shot in the hip - which sent me into moodswings for several months. Ten percent of transplant patients end up having to stay on steroids. Anyone who goes into rejection syndrome is put on steroids. In other words, there is no avoiding them. (This story is the same at Cleveland Clinic.)

The doctor told me he has been working with kidney transplant for fifteen years, and he has seen what both of us avoided calling by its true name, "steroid psychosis." He was sincere in explaining that you don't want that to happen. No, I really, really don't. The moodswings of this winter and spring sometimes had me just sitting in a brown sludge weeping gently, thinking I'd rather be dead.

The odd thing about being taken off the list was that I did not have an emotional reaction to it, beyond mild shock. No drama, no need to stuff it down with chocolate cake. I kept wondering about that until this morning, when I realized the more complex nature of my reaction - I am no longer waiting for the call that can come any moment and lead to - maybe - a new life. Sometimes transplant works stunningly; that's why I was willing to be on the list and contemplate a life on immunosuppressants. I kept wondering hopefully, Who will I be when I have more energy? It seems to me now just a bit like a remnant of the fairy tales I loved as a child - the girl waiting for the prince to come and rescue her.

This morning I am realizing that I have responded to this event with a new sense of being right here in my life, in this body in the present moment. The bright future has been cancelled (though Tom reminds me there is all sorts of research coming down the pike, wearable kidneys, growing a new kidney from your own skin cells - anything can happen).

Maybe it was the sense of this new blank page that impelled me to ask a friend to move everything out of the big closet in my study that I call my toy closet the day after that appointment, and put in in a metal shelving unit. This study now looks like I just moved in, boxes everywhere. This room was my last priority when we moved in here, and I was worn out and careless. I stuffed in this huge closet all the stuff I didn't sort in the move, all the stuff I didn't let go of. Every single draft of old pre-computer manuscripts, for instance. Old journals and letters. All those photographs. Old books. A pristine Cabbage Patch doll (whose adoption certificate is somewhere in one of these boxes.)

My path seems clear all the way out to the horizon. I can't hold my breath waiting for the call that will change my life. I'll have to just breathe in and out, pay attention to the body I have, and start sorting.