Who is the Enemy?

Above, the Dalai Lama talks about what is a fundamental goal of every religion - that we learn to love and serve others by becoming less obsessed with our desires and preferences.  That command over our own thoughts and actions is the road to being happier more of the time, suffering less, and causing less suffering.

It is not at all about becoming Nobody.  On the contrary, realized people always have a large energy field, or presence.  It is about becoming who we really are, not who we were told to be.  Insofar as we practice "self-denial" we are giving up our pleasures or desires.  We are denying our addictions and distractions, our delusions - relinquishing them - and becoming more fully human - the women and men we actually want to be.

Free Legal High (They haven't outlawed music yet)

I know that many poor souls have to work on this nice Friday before the Labor Day Weekend.  Some can't even leave early for the last drinking-eating-fun weekend of summer here in the United States.  That's not my thing - I don't work anymore, and my idea of fun is watering my hanging basket.  The wave Petunias have been wonderfully sturdy.  But I sympathize.  I get tired and depressed, too, and have to spend time on lots of things I didn't sign up for.

So this morning I consoled myself with this iconic* comic monologue-song.  Here you are, 18 minutes of pure pick-me-up laughing and dancing in your chair.  I was tempted to join the standing ovation at the end.

Those who were not alive and kicking up a fuss in 1967 can read all about this recording on Wikipedia.  Here is  something of a plot spoiler - this song was an incitement to subversion, an instruction on how to beat the draft nonviolently.

Remember 1967?  I do.  Littering was an issue, as it is in this song.  Arlo Guthrie, activist son of Woodie Guthrie, was so famous he would be an act at the Ohio State Fair years later.  (Yes, I saw him.) I was a 25-year-old housewife gone back to finish college now that my daughter was in school full-time.  All around me in the classrooms were weedy, pathetic boys who should have been going into a trade, but were desperately hoping not to fight in Vietnam.  They weren't conscientious objectors; it was pure selfish fear of dying, something veterans of earlier wars would never have owned up to.

Wars.  Some things never change.

But some things do.  Today we have young women that age joining the military of their own free will, fighting sexual harassment at West Point, wanting to be in combat.  I didn't envision this in those feminist anti-establishment days.  But I've come to believe that we have to be prepared to defend ourselves in a broken world, even as we practice nonviolence and pray for peace.

The Dalai Lama blessing his armed guards

Photo by Alison Wright, from an interesting interview in the New York Times Lens about her experiences photographing Tibetan nomads.
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*I know, I said I'd never use that word.

Be Careful What You Want

Tucked-paw restorative yoga

As sometimes happens, a comment made on my blog inspires me as being wise, and something I should write about.  It comes to this:  things often don't go my way.  My way.  The way I like or plan.

Actually, this is very serious in our lives, it's not just about small stuff like getting into that pottery class or having to visit with a difficult person (who might just be a relative).  I've seen people be very stubborn about life and death their way, hang on to life, complaining that it isn't fair for them to die at this age, they don't want to die, they refuse to die.  This is how some people respond to a very bad prognosis, such as metastasized cancer:  I'm not going to let this beat me.  It is sad to be in a group with someone like that and see them try so hard not to accept the inevitable.

We are working on the big issue around here right now, having lost so many people to death the last couple of months.  We will be offering a course at our church in January based on the book Being With Dying. A lot of this will be about accepting our own mortality.  But I was going somewhere else with this that is probably connected somehow....to a documentary we watched last night on Netflix that has me thinking.  It was called Happy.

One of the things I like about watching movies at home is that I can fool around baking cookies at the same time and making notes on my iPad.  I knew that happiness is not found through external goals, such as more- than-enough money, status, things, winning.  But what surprised me is that it depends on the kind of goals you have.  The big three are -

to help others
to grow personally, spiritually
to maintain close, connected relationships

This is so cool - the scientist who talked about this, Richard Davidson, turns out to be a long-time meditator, and friend of our beloved friend, The Dalai Lama, who himself appeared in this documentary, too, explaining how compassion is intrinsic in human nature.  That gives rise to the interesting possibility that you don't have to work on compassion - just vow not to get in your own way. 

Working the life koan

This came to my facebook yesterday from the Dalai Lama: 

The more you think about your own self, the more self-centered you are, the more trouble even small problems can create in your mind. The stronger your sense of ‘I’, the narrower the scope of your thinking becomes; then even small obstacles become unbearable. On the other hand, if you concern yourself mainly with others, the broader your thinking becomes, and life’s inevitable difficulties disturb you less.

I wish I'd read it then - dealing with an exhausting day of medical appointments, mine and Tom's, grocery shopping, driving, and then getting home to find a letter from Huntington saying I had been overdrawn by $15 for seven days and they were charging me $23 for the first day and $7 every day after that.  This was my first notice except for a message in a little box online.  I don't read these messages every day, I bet no one does.They have always been general and didn't apply to me.

Interestingly, the letter was dated Feb. 4, mailed pre-sorted first class, mailed from Columbus, and took five (5) days to get here.  Do you believe that?  I think something's wrong.  The kindest assumption is that it's human error.  But do you know, some years ago another bank did the same thing to me.  (They relented when we discussed it.) Ordinary mail gets here much quicker than that, usually in one day.

So today I intend to go out in this awful cold and explain to them why I don't think I should pay all these fees, for one is supposed to have a 24-hour grace period with overdrafts - but that only works if you know about it. See what we can work out.  Pay what they want, or refuse to.  Then go and start a new checking account at Kemba, where we have our mortgage.  They are a nonprofit, and what a difference in attitude!  Then close the Huntington account.

My first impulse was, I hate these people.  But on examination, the feeling was not anger, but frustration. I'd like my life to be simpler, not more complicated. Ironically, the cause of the overdraft was a holiday gift to the church.  Told them they could withdraw it electronically, as they do my regular pledge, and then forgot to enter it in my checkbook.  Why?  Because I was very sick through December.

That takes me to another frustration today:  I now have tendonitis everywhere in my body that has a tendon, head to feet.  This is diagnosed as a side effect of Cipro, uncommon, but I have lots of risk factors.  It hurts.  Everything hurts.  I am not allowed to take major anti-inflammatories, really really don't want steroids, which throw me into worse moodswings.  And here it is:  it was the wrong antibiotic for the UTI.  I went to the OSU emergency room for, on my transplant nurse's advice.  They took a urine sample to culture. And nobody ever looked at the urine culture, which showed that the bug I had was resistant to Cipro, until I went to the Riverside ER six days later.  They called and asked for the results.  By then it was so bad I had to spend 10 days on an IV antibiotic.  Furthermore, Cipro is a big antibiotic you don't want to become resistant to; you might need it some day.

Okay, human error.  It was Christmas season, nobody wanted to work and serve people.  OSU has a big staffing and oversight problem.  It starts with the nursing and medical schools, which should be screening people not for IQ and grades, but for why they are going into medicine - is it just for money and status and regular employment?  Or do they really want to care for the sick?  Maybe the hospitals need to make it clear when they hire people that everyone will work over the holidays, when many many people get ill from the stress and partying.  It is the worst possible time for doctors to take the week off.  But obviously, many do.

About the pain, my excellent muscular/skeletal doc (sports doc) told me to call him anytime if I need to.  Even over the weekend.  Yes, he did.  He is an Ohio Health doctor.  They have a mission of service.

Okay.  Now, like the Dalai Lama, I need to transcend life's myriad difficulties.  I see the sky is blue outside my window, a sort of watercolor French blue.  The old Austrian pine loves it, you can tell.  The oak branches drink it in, so does the cedar near my window, though it is cold as hell.  It is bringing a koan to mind that I can't quite recall, about What do you do when you are plunged into intolerable cold (or is it heat)?  I know the answer, but can't recall the question.  Maybe someone out there can tell me how it goes. 

Meanwhile, it's time for very gentle body work and meditation, renewing my intention to be kind, including kind to myself and everyone I meet. Then off to the banks.

postscript January 2013.  It turned out they had tried to reach me by e-mail, but I hadn't updated my e-mail with them.  Whoops.  Furthermore, they were polite and agreed not to charge me this time.  There was perhaps an absence of warmth, but who could blame them?

On Dalai Grandmothers

Last night I had a good long sleep, with many dreams, and today I find myself questioning my purpose here. Not why blog at all? but What does it mean to call yourself The Dalai Grandma? Or, what is this blog about?

It vastly amused me that my daughter made up this name for me, and I chose it for the blog on impulse one evening. But beyond the humor of it, I wonder what it means. I am chronically uncomfortable with the fact that it implies some special knowledge, some Buddhist attainment. Me, a role model?

There are many men who are lamas, meaning Teachers, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and a few women these days, but no sect headed by a highest and most precious Grandmother. No religious sect that values most highly home and home-making, the ongoing tender love for children and grandchildren, the care of the sick and dying - women's work, the ordinary feminine. In our own rapacious masculine culture all the old are undervalued, old women more so, because women are valued for their apparent sexual desirability. All this deserves many more words, and they have been written. I have no idea how to change this value system. Maybe I'm a little unusual in being chronically aware of it.

Dalai Lama means, in Tibetan, "ocean teacher," meaning one whose spiritual understanding is limitless and deep. What would Dalai Grandma mean? A grandmother is not usually seen as a teacher, but as one who loves, values, and accepts. We think of laps, aprons, homemade cookies, smiles. I've read that most "successful" members of minority groups (including women) were strongly supported by a grandmother who believed in them.

There is the phrase that appears in the Zen tradition, and perhaps elsewhere, "Grandmother's heart." This seems to me to sum up what a grandmother ideally has to offer: an oceanic heart, an encompassing love. Many women can tell you how we felt awakened by the birth of a grandchild. Even writing that sentence, I feel that altogether new Love stirring in me. And from the moment I knew my daughter was pregnant, I also loved babies and children in a new way. Wherever I was I related instantly to babies, and to women with children. I felt connection to the great web of life down through time.

From a religious standpoint I guess we should aspire to open our hearts to everyone in that way, but that does sound abstract to me. What I do see in my own life is the need, the desire to have an open, nurturing heart here, for those around me - not just my daughter and grandson and son-in-law, not just Tom's parents, but my neighbors and friends. I see that my practice has come to include thinking of the people in my life and asking, What does she need right now? or, What could I do to ease this person a bit?

There is a masculine way that is intellectual, demanding, oriented toward building towers and, unfortunately, flying planes into them. It has given us what comfort and safety we have in civilization. But a feminine way is badly needed, a way of love and respect for all others, and for the life of this planet. This way is exemplified for us in Mother Teresa, who said, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."

And for me, it is exemplified by the Jesus I was introduced to as a child, with his flowing brown hair, tenderly holding a lamb in his arms. Something a grandmother would do.

If being happy came naturally, everyone would be.

Just at this moment I am realizing the hardship of being an animal - even an adored domestic companion. Sherlock, almost 17 years old, has managed to get up from floor to chair to my other table to the top of the four-drawer filing cabinet. There he is looking out the open window in that vulture posture, and yowling. It's a good guess that Carters' cats are out in the side yard. Instinctively, Sherlock wants to get in a fight with them, though he hasn't been in a cat fight in at least 13 years. And he does not have the power to go out there. That, the Dalai Lama has said, is what makes it worse to be born in the animal realm - the powerlessness. Not only can Sherlock not open the front door and run out, but he can't talk himself out of this self-destructive craving.

Earlier today we drove around and got my monthly pre-transplant (optimistic term) blood draw, went to the health club, ate lunch there, and managed a small grocery shopping, Tom in his power wheelchair, me in one of their electric carts. I never had to get up out of my chair, even to get some frozen Mahi-mahi, since a stocker offered to get it for me, and that was a good thing, because my left leg is really hurting. I had to quit after nine dignified minutes on the NuStep. Maybe a pulled muscle there, and I couldn't get in to see the sports doc until next Tuesday. Tom has adapted seamlessly to dropping me right at the door, unloading the groceries himself, doing all the driving, but I was still really tired after the shopping. Really. Knew I wouldn't make it to Soul Collage tonight, again. It seems possible in the morning.

If being happy came naturally, everyone would be. It is finally a beautiful spring day here, cool, blue with puffy white clouds, and the saucer magnolias quivering with bloom. I leaned back in the car and thought about the woman of around my age who was working as bagger in Kroger's. She brought our stuff out and loaded it into the car. Putting the cat litter in, she said, "I can't afford a kitty right now. We loved our cats, but Mommy's in assisted living now." She told me that twice.

I found myself remembering something the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron says in a taped talk, as I recall. She had just been through a long, demanding ceremony, and was hot and tired and her wool robe itched. She said, "And I'd never been happier in my life."

I said to Tom, "Can a person be happy when they're tired and have pain and uncertainty about the future . . . "

"You better be able," he said. I thought, it demands a certain way of thinking about happiness. For one thing, it isn't about having fun; because face it, you can't have fun that much of the time, as you know if you ever found yourself at a cabin on a lake in the rain.

I like the work of an author named Laurie Colwin, whom I discovered in the early eighties through her novel, Happy All the Time. I'm glad to see her work is in print, though she died young of an unexpected heart attack in 1992. Until then, she had the life I thought I should have been born to. At least, it looked much better than mine. But she didn't get to grow old.

Eye candy for my Buddhist friends

For the story, go to Rev. James Ford's blog -
Monkey Mind: The Kind of Rumor I Like to Hear

How come he gets to be Dalai Lama?

You have to imagine that as a whine, emphasis on he. It is a version of what I so often asked my mother as she pampered my little brother: How come he gets to? (and I don't!) Then, the universal cry of children, who are so quick to feel injustice: That's not fair! I'd like to pet a koala bear too.

Make no mistake -- I admire the Dalai Lama, even love him for the many stories I've read about his actions and his presence. I don't feel that way about every one in power. I tend to be suspicious, but I take it case-by-case. And I am often aware of the methods used to gain or grant high position, which generally work to exclude women.

The Dalai Lama gets there through a method I don't seem to have mastered, or I would have done a lot better in this life---reincarnation. He is a tulku, a teacher who is believed to be the previous Dalai Lama, and the one before that, all the way back. In his autobiography, the DL implies that he could quickly "memorize" long texts by remembering them from previous lives.

He is chosen by a committee of men (men). Elders who have visions, and follow them to find and test the child. I believe the present Dalai Lama was three years old when he was tested for his recognition of items that belonged to him in his last life. I told someone once about how the child recognized his prayer beads, saying "Mine!" She reminded me that kids of a certain age are given to "Mine!"

The poor kid who passes is taken from home and family while still very young, and recognized as the once and future king, though he won't actually start governing until he is 16. He is raised and homeschooled, pretty much separate from other children, by wise men (men) who are considered to be very advanced spiritually.

I have none of the usual modern difficulty with pronouns here. The DL is "he" and "him." And I don't get to be Dalai Lama, no matter what, not in a woman's body. Sometimes I find it hard to get to be a person.

This must be on my mind today because of my adventures in the higher precincts of western medicine yesterday. You don't get much more complex and lucrative than the transplant business. The doctors at the teaching hospitals that tend to run these things are not only busy, important doctors, they are busy, important professors as well. You can tell who the doctors are, their long white lab coats, their ties. The nurses I saw yesterday were all women. Most wore cute patterned scrubs or football-fan gear, and they all smiled a lot.

Past experience suggested this new doctor would classify me as
(a) just a woman, and
(b) an old woman.
There is hardly a less esteemed commodity. A young woman can at least present as visually pleasing, or trying hard. I just go for looking intelligent. I didn't give image a thought when I put on my light raincoat. It's a cheerful pink, with a bright flowered lining. It was the coat I had for this kind of weather.

Western medicine has saved my life and almost killed me in about equal numbers. I don't like the mistakes that have been made on me. I don't like to be seen as a collection of mechanical parts with chemicals flowing through. It is a world I wish I didn't have to enter, but I have a surprisingly strong desire to stay alive.

I was not surprised to notice that the doctor passed right over my comment about regular acupuncture helping me; and my list of the things I do to build my immune response. Not even a nod. Listening to the doctor goes by the revealing name of "compliance," and they just hate it when you don't. But by and large, they don't listen to us.

It's not that this guy was a bad human being. And I reminded myself that all I care for these days is that he know what he's doing. He did make an effort to establish rapport near the end of the interview by patting my knee. I tried to imagine him doing that to a tall white man. And it turned out he had noted my credentials on the health history, which asked for years of education. Leaving me at the nurse's desk to make appointments for one more cat scan (the kind where they don't use a cat), and one more specialist, he introduced me to her as "Dr. Desy. That is right, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, with a sweet, grandmotherly smile. "I like to say I'm a real doctor."

And I fervently wished I were slipping into a classic Burberry trenchcoat. Maybe that would get me some respect, I thought. Dream on.