No heat or cold?

I just found my way once again to a fine discussion of a classic koan by Barry Magid.  That's him to the left.  Doesn't he look nice?

The koan is called "Tozan's No Heat or Cold."  How I know I've read this before is that my browser shows I've been here.  I still don't get it.  I mean, I still find myself thinking at times, Let me out of here!  I haven't mastered umm....what have I not mastered?  Well, sometimes I can't find my center.  Sometimes I'm stuck with bad loud music or  paranoid people or weird convoluted bureaucracies and I begin to make me feel overwhelmed.  I don't like it.  I want out of this too-bright mental state.

I won't use a specific example drawn from my long day today, on the off chance that someone who made me feel like that would read this and recognize themselves.

And now it's time for me to head into my bedtime routine and let this sit overnight.
~~~~~~~~~
It's morning, and I reread the case, and I got it again.  Here's a quote from it that I put in my journal:

Where is this Oneness that everybody's always talking about, anyway? And Tozan tells him it right here, right in the midst of the heat and the cold - not somewhere else, not in some "higher" state he's got to reach. To be completely, unself-consciously cold, cold without any thought of escape or how well I'm handling being cold or anything, just [shivering] COLD - right there is no separation, no self. 

It always seems to be the same answer, just be here. Today I am in a much cooler place.  A day to do laundry.  To throw myself 100% into doing the laundry.  I can do that.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Now you can find the phrase "engulfed in flames" in headlines about truck accidents, but it's a strange locution.  Engulfed is a water word, with synonyms like flood, overflow, deluge.  Wikipedia explains where David Sedaris got the title of the book above, which features an early van Gogh study for a cover.  Van Gogh's life was not all sunflowers.

Sedaris was a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on Comedy Central June 3, 2008. During the interview he recommended moving to Japan for three months to stop smoking. This smoking cessation method, which cost the author $23,000, is the subject of the last essay of his book. He also described the genesis for the name of his book. It was the name of a chapter in a book he found in a hotel room in Hiroshima, Japan. 

There is something gruesome about that, and he knew it. Maybe, like me, he was once assigned to read descriptions of the holocaust at Hiroshima.  You don't forget that. Or, I don't. And we shouldn't.  It's too easy to engulf this planet in flames.
~~~~~~~~~~
So it's, what do you do when you personally feel engulfed in flames?  Overwhelmed?  Life can be like a tsunami, big problems tumbling in on the shore even as the waters rise.  That's how I felt last night when I started this post and ended up diverting myself by rereading David Sedaris.  Not a bad strategy, but not enough to get me to sleep.

My biggest anxiety now, the one that put my stress over the top, is this infarction in my eye caused by a  landslide of household stress a couple of weeks ago.  It hurts, and it may or may not heal itself.  I got to a good doctor and have a followup with him in three weeks.  I'm talking with my psychiatrist about this sense of overwhelm.  Meanwhile, how to deal with the feeling?  I turned to a talk by one of my favorite Zen teachers, psychiatrist Barry Magid, on Practicing With Sickness.   Here's a bit of that talk, formatted to clarify the points for myself.

If we're going to practice intelligently with illness or with pain, what we most need to do is cultivate a psychological awareness and honesty about how we handle ourselves in the face of it. Do we -
1.  try to always tough it out, and never admit anything is too much for us?
Or do we
2.  easily feel overwhelmed and always think things are too much for us to handle? Real practice should equally expose and challenge both of these positions.  Our practice should always be about watching our selves as honestly as possible - and keeping that honesty intact and functioning is the real goal.

There.  Isn't he wonderful?

So to end with, another van Gogh.  He found nature healing, and I find his paintings healing.

Wheat Field with Cypress, Vincent van Gogh

What is that Original Face?

What I am thinking about this morning:

We act as if our true self was something unique to us, what makes us "special," whether by virtue of our special talents or sensibilities, or on account of the particular traumas we've suffered, or group we belong to. But our Original face is neither special or ordinary, happy or sad, white or black, male or female. What pairs do each of you put in place of Hui-neng's good or evil when dividing up the world?

The whole talk by Zen psychiatrist Barry Magid sets this in context.

Of course, we make great effort to maintain that face we put on the world; no accident that Facebook is called Facebook, though it could be called TheSelfIPresenttotheWorld.  But we are also at pains to define ourselves by all these terms.  Surely no one is more likely to think in polar opposites than someone like me who has bipolar disorder:  I am up or down, high or depressed, high-energy or lazy, creative or . . . you get the idea.

But I think undiagnosed people think the same way, though the terms may be different.  To some degree it's about what you want, whether you feel like you prefer to.  I have fibromyalgia, too, so I think sick or healthy, pain or happy . . . And there is weather:  good weather (see picture above from last week) or bad weather (what I don't enjoy).  But what is this that stands in the middle of all these words?  How can I make this clear space wider?

Vaughan Bites the Lime

Henri Matisse, Still Life With Oranges (and maybe a lime)

The false self is the self of duality, the self of self-consciousness and limitation. Our true self is as wide open and unstructured as this very moment. Sesshin challenges us to experience this moment without limitation, without thinking good or evil, without thought of "how we are doing" or what we are accomplishing or failing to accomplish by our sitting. 
Barry Magid 

It's me, still working on that koan I discussed last time, which is working on me as I piece around in James Ford's The Book of Mu.  What I'm getting is that the point is just to be here experiencing reality.  You can get very fancy with koan work, but the point is almost laughably simple.  Just be open to reality.  A baby can do it. 

I wish I had managed to videotape our godson Vaughan one Sunday at brunch when he vigorously communicated his desire for a lime wedge on his Dad's plate.  He was under one year old, a dynamic, curious child.  His Dad gave it to him, he turned the lime around, quite a feat in little fingers, looking at it, squeezing it to see what it would do.  He touched his tongue to the skin.  Made the decision and bit down on that lime.  The expressions that played over his face were priceless, starting with shock and awe.  I can't describe that visible flow of direct experience.  Maybe you could try it yourself in front of a mirror.  I can't, I laugh just imagining it.

We get so fancy about life, how to live, and oh, how to fix ourselves.  People get very fancy about the Zen retreats mentioned in the quote, which are called "sesshin," and there can be a complex "etiquette" and rituals to follow.  The idea is that following all this encourages you to pay attention to your movements every moment, though it does seem easy to fall in love with all the theater of it and forget the point.

The goal is actually so simple:  just be here.  This moment.  Then keep doing that.  Being wide open.  Biting that lime.

Unintended consequences

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.

On the edge

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.

On Being A Self-Improvement Project

The point I was wandering around yesterday came at me this morning from Tricycle, from an article by psychiatrist/Zen Master Barry Magid. Here's what I copied into my journal -

When we sit, we realize how unwilling we are to leave anything about ourselves alone. We turn our lives into one endless self-improvement project. . . . Just sitting means just that. That “just” endlessly goes against the grain of our need to fix, transform, and improve ourselves. The paradox of our practice is that the most effective way of transformation is to leave ourselves alone. The more we let everything be just what it is, the more we relax . . .

Are we all like that? I thought it was me, that endless subterranean stretching to be different. To improve this design. There is an often-quoted Buddhist story to the effect that you can't turn a clay tile into a mirror, no matter how much you polish it. Mirrors. Mine tells me I am back to looking like myself this morning. Let me explain.

Yesterday I got a good haircut, the first one I'd had in about a year of being too sick to care. This Ken was a guy I hadn't been to before, and I like what he does to my friend's hair, so I was very relaxed about my needs: "Too much hair!" I told him. We agreed he should cut it to shoulder-length. I didn't even bother explaining that I didn't want my head to look like it belonged on someone else's body, that this is the way I dress, this is me, and I want to look like me. I've been telling hairdressers that for decades, and they don't listen. They imagine a more stylish me. They want to fix me. That's their job.

So I got stylish hair. When Ken handed me the drop-down mirror and turned me to look at myself, "What do you think?" I asked, "Umm, how do I keep it out of my eyes?" I had not forgotten my keen adherence to Grandma's Practical Rule of Dress, which covers the homely needs of the body, like being able to see.

"Like this," he said, and tossed his own head a little, so his bangs fell right. "You do this."

I tried it and it fell right for a second, then slid back. I must have looked dubious.

"Okay," he said. "What I can do is trim it a little."

He did, and it was somewhat better, thank goodness, or how would I have driven home? There I immediately found a barrette and stuck it in to hold back the beautiful wide sweep of wave created by enormous brush rollers. I tried to retain a whiff of the style. But you can't. The style is hair that falls in the eyes. Is that an anti-feminist thing, I wondered idly? A way of impairing women? Perhaps, like wearing high heels, it signals, I may act intelligent, but I'm not, really.

Men don't know from self-improvement, I mean, on average, though I think we might see more Self-Improvement Men in American Buddhist circles, and in the Unitarian church. But in general, a man who wants to Be Someone is more likely to devote himself to power, or to his work. (Being devoted to power, and being Someone through your work, these are also very bad ideas, but not my topic right now.)

But the average woman is a constant personal self-improvement project, with emphasis on how we look. The other day, as I waited in line at Kohl's, I observed how women had armloads of clothes they were buying, that looked like clothes for themselves. Yet each and every one of us looked normal, which is to say fairly dowdy and harassed, they way you look after shopping. What are all those clothes about? They never change us, and we all have enough clothes in our closet to last us the rest of our lives. Those clothes in the checkout line are about magically looking better. Thinner, prettier, not so tired. Improved.

It is almost new moon, I see, what the Chinese call "Empty moon," and I am in a yin phase of my own personal rhythm. So I am content to stop here, not sure whether I have made a point. In fact, yin is not about points, yang is, about arrows and action. Yin is about lying back in the innertube of the day and floating, and just sitting. I think I'll give that a try.
[image: The Chinese character Tao, the Way]