Morning coffee with good friends

Years ago I wrote a soul-searching fantasy of my life as I wished it could be. Much of it has come true, though I am not in Bali, but in Ohio. One thing I wanted was to be nested in a community of like-minded friends. I am now, and that community fans out to include the internet sangha. The world-wide web, which has given me this morning a talk about bare perception in meditation.

I love this connectedness. Still, I am sitting alone in my sudy with my morning coffee, not able to wander out to an outdoor cafe where people I know might stop by to say hello. I would take a sketch pad a sketchbook and charcoal if I were going out there today, not my little notebook, maybe draw some quick portraits, maybe a banana leaf. People would come by.

Hello. I am fine. How are you?

These would be intimate friends, so we might talk about our response to what's happened in Haiti, the sudden massive earthquake, all the death and suffering, and not just murmur cliches, but talk about its intimacy and immediacy. We are Buddhists, our practice leads us to respond to suffering in a certain way.

This way is with something like equanimity. I would share with my friend that I cry every night, watching the news. But I don't get carried away into despair. I come back to my normal, like one of those inflatable clowns with sand in its bottom.

This way is with something like detachment. That doesn't mean being without compassion. It means understanding the constant presence of death all over the planet, the rolling and turning over of organic life in the universe, the widespread suffering, even in our privileged little community, our inability to create perfect societies. It means accepting my place as a tiny little bodhissatva who can dispense a teaspoon of water here and there. I say I think it's Bernie Glassman who puts it that way. My friend nods Yes.

We would acknowledge that this has touched our own sense of vulnerability and disturbed our dreams. We are not friends in order to hide from the truth with small talk and partying. In this quiet morning coffee of my dreams, we are just real with one another. No need to talk a lot. It's nice to connect.

Anyway, how are you?

Small talk

It strikes me that those of us who write about daily life don't, really. We pick one thing and write our thoughts about it, our reactions, what it seems to mean to us. So here are a few bits from my day so far.
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slept late, very relaxed
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up, dressed quickly and out for acupuncture at 10:00
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mind too full of fiction, thinking about this novel I've been reading
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on acupuncture table I imagine making a fiber hanging that would demonstrate how lives are intertwined, influenced, separated. Many thoughts about whether to take a fiber arts course (no), do we have a board I could use, would pushpins do . . . it would be a muted red fiber, between yarn and twine.
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I play with the idea of "my work," of being useful in this world. I think about how when people say that, they really want to matter. To be Someone. I think, the right question is, how can I relieve suffering a little? This gets me thinking about printing a nice photo I took of Tom for my mother-in-law. He had been working outside, and had a holly berry caught in the hinge of his glasses.
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I get very hungry and plan to eat a peach as soon as we get home. They are ripe in the refrigerator and we have to make a plan. I plan to eat two of them today, can't eat five because of the potassium. I want to pick up local corn for dinner, there's at least two servings. I think a whole lot about getting my long hair cut really short. I love my hair, but it mostly annoys me.
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Acupuncturist asks how Sheba is. I tell him her blood draw showed she has kidney disease. We talk about how it is he hasn't got a cat yet. He says they saw one they liked, so they asked their daughter whether she was sure she would take care of it, the box and everything. She said no. So they didn't get a cat. He tells me, "We say, You can do it or not do it, that's okay. But if you say you will take care of it, then you must." I think that's a really good motto for child-rearing. Maybe for your life.
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after breakfast Tom and I talk about getting a locking medicine cabinet for all our prescription drugs. Workmen come in here, and our grandson, who is almost ten. Tom is going to unearth an old medic's tool chest he has with a red cross on it that can be padlocked, and would fit in the linen closet. Good, we agree, not spending money, not having to wrestle with installation, not bringing more stuff into the house.
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we talk about whether we would take extraordinary measures to prolong little Sheba's life if she goes into terminal kidney failure before we die. Syringe feeding yes, hydration no. We are not as attached to the idea of "having" her as we were Sherlock. We would hope to make her end of life more comfortable.
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Enough. It's past noon. I used to have a card on my desk with the saying, "How you spend your days is how you spend your life." It's not usually big and important. On the other hand, it all is.

Art and work

[image: Who is the artist? Answer tomorrow]

I am thinking about art and work today, because I just read an article in yesterday's New York Times about a talented teenage violinist who works as a waitress in a Sonic Drive-in to support herself, and will be going to nursing school, not Juilliard. The story captured my attention because she lives in nearbye Newark. The slant of the story is that this is a tragedy, and I won't be surprised if it turns up some philanthropist who wants to help the young woman pursue her talent.

But I think she might still argue for nursing school. She knows that, in the words of the song, "ain't no money in poetry" or in music. In Newark, Ohio, voters defeat the school levy, and the music program is the first to be cut. There go the jobs of people who majored in music. This girl from a broken family sees that reality, and wants to be able to earn her way in life.

Work. It's something you do because it needs to be done, not because it is fascinating and fulfilling. The stories we have about the Buddha, charmingly accumulated in Thich Nhat Hanh's biography, Old Path, White Clouds, tell us that his work - teaching - was a royal pain. His own cousin (relatives!) tried to break up the community, then tried to murder him. It drove the frustrated Buddha into the jungle to commune with the elephant. Having taught, I can relate to that.

If nobody would do it for fun, the saying goes, "That's why they call it work." This is not true for creative work, I think; a lot of us do it willingly for enjoyment. I can attest to the fact that when you set out to gain something external from your talent, what you do is changed - it becomes work. Putting together a collection of poems to submit for a grant moves you farther and farther from your intimate creative impulse, toward putting yourself in the mind of the judges, who become "consumers" of what is now, alas, a product. Every so often a really talented novelist or poet kills him/herself under the strain of trying to produce something. David Foster Wallace is a recent case.

It might be better after all to earn money some other way, achieve in some worldly precinct, if achieve you must, and play the violin for pleasure in a bluegrass band or an amateur string quartet. It seems to me that an ideal economy would let us earn a living wage by working half-time at something useful, accounting, waitressing, changing babies, and half-time giving ourselves to a creative endeavor, gardening or calligraphy or restoring classic cars.

This morning I watched a video of the Kings Firecrackers, an astonishing performance by a team of girls with jump ropes. It is acrobatics and choreography and, I suppose, sport and art. These talented fourth through eighth grade girls get to do this disciplined performance art for a short time, and then outgrow it and move on. There are so many paths from there; it seems like a Zen blessing of sorts, enjoying your talent fully, moving on in ninth grade to whatever life holds for you now.

THE WOMEN'S FAULT!!!

Checking out some of the Blogissatva 2007 Awards, I became more and more hopeful of finding a woman among them. So it was that on "Progressive Buddhism" (Best new blog 2007) I clicked on a long, post titled "Women, Buddhism and the Internet" by Tom Armstrong.

He comments accurately, "Both the oceanic blogosphere . . . and Buddhist webspaces, generally, are in overwhelming proportion managed, written and visited by males." With reference to a Pew report, he explains that this way and that -- you can read it. He includes an interesting paragraph on great women buddhobloggers who have quit (and by the way, the last post on this site is dated July 7), and regrets the loss.

Then he lost me by saying "In one sense it seems that the problem is clearly THE WOMEN'S FAULT!!!" I don't know what I like best, the caps or the three exclamation points. Or maybe the adjectives in the next paragraph: "Similarly, some snarling complaints that meatspace sanghas are overrun my [sic] old white men are specious." So often, language betrays us.

No, what I liked most of all was not the above, but the memory it brought forth. Just a few years ago my father-in-law sat at my dining room table and told us a very long, detailed, carefully crafted story of a long-ago effort in his small town to give opportunity to "the blacks" through the schools. It ended with the statement, delivered in a sort of holy hush: "And you know---they wouldn't take the opportunity." The rising voice explained, "They had every chance." And on it went. Being wise in the ways of racists, I just cleared the table.

I hang around with other educated women, and I notice it is true that they aren't blogging or reading this kind of thing. Their Buddhist activity is not about talking, but about bringing homemade soup or sunflowers when you're sick, about thank-you cards and watching each other's cat. Bodhissatva work.

They have all had to listen to plenty of long, windy male explanations of everything in their life, and some still do, from fathers and husbands and bosses. In particular, these women would not like to be told that the significant wage gap and the heavy glass ceiling that closes off top jobs is All Our Fault. My friends are responsible and intelligent, and would love to earn as much as men do, especially the women who have ended up raising and supporting their children, and sometimes their grandchildren, alone.

They don't like to debate and discuss, either, and would probably consider arguing with this guy useless, like some other male amusements, such as war.