This is Your Life

There's anxiety, and there's pain; then there's anxiety about pain, which more than doubles the pain.  By 9:00 last night the pain in my back and neck had gone up through my TMJ until the left side of my face hurt, and I had to do hot compresses.  Dammit.  Part of it was just too much sitting upright, the rest was the irrational anxiety about what the MRI will show and what comes next for this back injury.
This pain has been worse since the MRI of my upper back and neck Monday night.  And I am waiting, waiting for a call from the neurologist who ordered the test, and who will, I hope, suggest some way to cut back on the pain, which seems to be made worse by walking.  Now it's Friday, which means if I don't hear today I'll have to go through the weekend trying not to imagine the worst, which is, for me, being in a hospital.  After that dreadful night last December - and that was in one of our better hospitals - my tolerance of the constant abuses there has turned to something quite negative.  Like hate.

Furthermore, the fact that my fall in May was caused by Seroquel has amplified my distrust of the whole American medical system and led me to notice that there have been a lot of lawsuits about these drugs, and the movement disorder they cause that never goes away.  (It is called tardive dyskinesia.)

I don't like to be anxious or angry.  Don't Want! any of this.

Well, this kind of adversity is a common enough feature in the landscape of old age, but I like to think it isn't necessary to melt down over it.  My formal Zen study led me to find a post from a blog by Ben Howard that happens to help just a bit my perspective. The author refers to a passage in Dogen's Instructions to the Cook, which I decided to format as if it were a poem:

Do not get carried away,
by the sounds of spring, 
nor become heavy-hearted 
upon seeing the colors of fall. 
View the changes of the seasons as a whole, 
and weigh the relativeness of light and heavy 
from a broad perspective.

My first teacher, Ama Samy, said to me, at least once, "Experience everything, but don't get carried away."  He has a rich Hindi accent, so it sounded like "Don't get caddied away."  This is good advice for anyone with moodswings, or who golfs.  

More from Howard's blog:  "Commenting on this passage, the Soto master Kosho Uchiyama urges us “to be resolved that whatever we meet is our life,” and to “see the four seasons of favorable circumstances, adversity, despair, and exaltation all as the scenery of [our lives].” Oh yes. The default scenery, in fact, that the Buddha warned us about. Life is not that fabled isle of bliss they promised . . .

but more like this at times:

Heavy.  And that's just the way it is.  Everything broken, including the medical system and, maybe, the doctor's phone.

This is making me think it's time to publish a poem I wrote years ago after being forgotten in an exam room. Really.  (A nod of thanks to Ken Vail, who drove me to that doctor and waited patiently.)

                             Doctor
or, Jean-Paul Sartre in the Examining Room           
           
Here in a windowless room–this dying body–
naked beneath a paper towel,
waiting, waiting for Doctor to come and ask,
How are you?  Where do you hurt?
How long have you felt this way?
Doctor is busy, invisible accountants
issue denials of benefits,
nurses in running shoes flash smiles.

Doctor is here I think he is running late,
this will explain our policies.
You are responsible sorry
I know these rooms are cold
but Doctor wears a suit under his lab coat
we keep it comfortable for him
here, here is a paper blanket
sorry we have no tea, the pot is broken
no one has time, time . . .

Are you still here?
sorry the office is closed
the computer is down please call
tomorrow for an appointment we are
automated for your inconvenience
please hold please remain
on the line, your call is important to us
your call will be received in the order 
in which you enter your patient account number
date of birth and death, social
followed by the pound   invalid   invalid

Sorry, Doctor has no more appointments
this year.  Doctor is at a convention
and does not answer his page
someone
will try to get back to you
in the order your call
was tomorrow

Wait—we have just been informed
Doctor is no longer with us. 
Doctor is dead.
You are condemned to be free.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
p.s.  Put in one more call to the doctor just now.

Bad Habits and Dangerous Undandering

Of course, nobody decides to start a meditation practice without a reason, but it usually isn't compelling enough to keep us going.  It takes a lot of effort and self-discipline.  And we run into difficulties that are the standard and predictable landscape of a spiritual quest . . .

Why do I think this is out west? Maybe it's the bullet holes.

but that defeat people who don't have solid relationships with a real teacher and sitting group.

Even when teachers are available, records show that most people drop away from practice when it starts to get difficult or boring, and it does both.  I only mean to say, if you're not committed to a practice, you've got a lot of company.  On the other hand, the day does come when you wish you'd been practicing all these years. 

On still another hand, so to speak, practice does not make perfect.  You may practice for years and years and still find yourself shaking your head at some mindless moment.  There are big ones, like the time not long ago when I fell off a step stool and got a concussion and a compression fracture in my spine.  Then there are the little ones.  You can make an endless stream of those without trying.  I made two little ones so far today, and it's just noon.

1.  I injured my lower back and set up my sciatica giving the cat her daily dander treatment.

2.  Thinking morosely how I injured my lower back, I went to take a Tylenol from my pillcase, but instead took my 2:00 pm immune-suppressants two hours early, which they really caution against. 

Allow me to explain.

What do you mean, your table?

When I ramped up my own practice a couple of months ago, I did become more aware.  One day, petting Tashi, I  realized that I was deathly allergic to her.  Maybe her soft blue-gray coat, with its fine, tiny undercoat, is a special offender in this regard.  Tashi is a shelter cat, but much the type of the Russian Blue (see left).  The darn immune-suppressants have let my allergies go wild.  So it's been deep cleaning around here, and also spraying the carpet with special pet-allergy stuff, and wiping down the poor cat every day with other stuff that controls her dander, and does help.

This morning I had experimentally driven my little car around the block, as the doctor advised, and was pleased that it didn't hurt my back.  Maybe I felt big and strong as a result, because then I did the undandering of Tashi alone.  This means wiping down pretty much all her surface with a paper towel moistened with the stuff.  She does not like this, though she does not hate it, so she tried to squirm  away, but I held her and finished the job.  When I straightened up, uh-oh.  Pain across the lower back, and that sciatica in the right leg.  Just another case of live and learn.

And in that interesting way things do, one mistake led to another.  I always take my Rapamune when I open the noon pillcase, which is usually at 2:00, after my phone alarm reminds me.  I didn't mean to take it at noon, but did, by habit.  Habit is sometimes my friend (I scrape the catbox every night) and sometimes my enemy.  Awareness is the opposite of habit, now that I think about it.  But aware or not, sometimes you misjudge things, and there goes your back.

It pleased me no end to learn a while back that Zen has a term for living your life as a continuous series of mistakes.  (You can read a little about it here.)  Shoshaku jushaku.  Actually, that will happen unless you're in a very tidy rut.  When I saw that term I thought, If I ever get to go through the process whereby you are given a Buddhist name, this might well be it.

Still not knowing

It went exactly as expected yesterday - painful careful diagnostic mammogram, long painful careful ultrasound, lady doctor coming in to reassure us and say they are referring me to a breast surgeon who "likes to feel the breast himself" and might order a biopsy.  Yes.  A few more tears.  We told them to ask my very good kidney doctor (Ronald deAndrade) for a referral, because he understands my health condition more fully than any other doctor.  Yesterday was Wednesday, and even Buddha doctors often take the afternoon off to play golf on a lovely May day.  They had a bowl of chocolates at the door to the mammogram room. I took three.  Hersheys, but good enough.

Meanwhile, I posted this on the forum at Vine of Obstacles:

a note: one of my true friends, Laurie Doerfler, stopped by with gifts  Sunday.  They included a clear glass vase with old-fashioned roses (maybe from her roommate's garden), which sits here on my desk.  One of the wild roses, streaked pink and white, is in four stages of opening this morning, from past full bloom to a bud opening.  Two nights ago, after our sangha memorial sit for Sarah, I wrote these, distracted into haiku as I tried to understand Dogen’s Guidelines for Studying the Way.  Of course, these are modern loose-form haiku; this is English, not Japanese, which I would love to learn.

It is like me
this white rose
dropping petals
~

as I sit reading about zazen
the white rose
drops one more petal

An old photo, end of a roll of black-and-white film: note the insect on the rose

p.s.  Just had a call from Polly, the oncological nurse at the Bing Cancer Center.  Dr. deAndrade is on vacation (what?!) so they made me an appointment with Dr. Lilly for June 4.  I said, "What?  We were hoping to get a biopsy today or tomorrow, because this is not feeling good."  She will see what she can do and call me right back.  Ah, this is the relative world.

To Study the Self

Sycamore in fall

After a ragged week or two I am back to alternating up and down days or, as I prefer to call them now, high-energy, low-energy.  The best thing about this is that the moods are more moderate than they were this fall, which makes the high-energy days especially good, since I can be creative without angst, without my mind tending to flare off in every direction.

The reason I am noting this here instead of in my private journal is that I realize I never felt this good before.  Before the bipolar broke out, and broke me out of my attempts to live according to conventional standards.  Before I got off the 20 years of over-medication wished upon me by one psychiatrist after another. Before my kidney transplant, when I was just too low-energy to do anything but survive.  Before I got back on minimal and judicious psychotropics.  But especially, before I had cancer, which was when I set out on a dead-serious meditation practice and years of retreats and study of the Buddha way.  That made the difference. 

If I summed that up, I'd say now I'm able to just be here, doing what I'm doing without a lot of conflicting desires and ideas messing me up.  I've developed some equanimity and contentment.  I feel centered.

I didn't get here through psychotherapy, though it was necessary.  Getting to know yourself takes more than an hour a week of someone listening to you.  The idea of zazen (the Zen style of meditation) is that we spend many hours watching our own minds and selves in action, and opening ourselves to the bigger mind.  My Buddhist readers know I am about to quote famous lines from Dogen's Genjokoan:

To study the Way is to study the self. 
To study the self is to forget the self. 
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. 

"To forget the self" means to me that I am no longer in the grip of my impulses and conditioning.  I do this blog because I hope to inspire readers a little, or just give them a bright spot in the day.  I can't make anyone happy.  You have to do the work, a lot of it.  I'm just here on the path beckoning, saying, You really ought to try this for six months or a year.

If you are a beginner at meditation or keep losing your way, here is a post I found recently on how to form the habit of meditation that makes sense to me.
[p.s. And please take in the comment below. - he knows what he's talking about.] 

Wasting Time

These days I am back to reading Dogen, and getting it a little more.  He is the foremost poet-teacher of Zen, and has to be understood in the way you understand a poem - you experience it, let it soak in.  I like to read a few lines and be stopped to stay with something.  This morning it was this, from Actualizing the Fundamental Point, or Genjo Koan.

Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.  The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.

There are many beautiful pictures online of the world reflecting in a drop of water.  But what I thought of as I read this was one of my favorite poems, in which the great light and life in everything is reflected in distant cowbells, in dried horse manure and the empty house, in the predator/prey world of the hawk. James Wright experienced a beauty much larger than our usual confined definition of "beautiful" and also the urgency of being awake. How when we are operating in a daze of desires and duties, we are not really alive.  When we are awake and alive, the moon is reflected even in us, and no moment is wasted.

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.

[Click here for a link to the brief Wikipedia entry on Wright, which points to his most popular poems.]

Nothing is Ever Simple

Thinking about collage

So says my coffee mug, with a charming Boynton cartoon of a cow draped sadly over a crescent moon.  Today I looked at it and thought, "Yes, everything is complicated.  But that doesn't mean it has to be hard."  That is, you just follow one thread patiently.  Then another. 

Yes, there are a lot of threads, and boy, are there a lot of errors and problems along the way.  I am so grateful that Zen Teacher Dogen said, "My life has been a series of mistakes."  Of course it has; you're always doing something for the first time.  Even if you've done it before, be prepared to be surprised.

Then there are the bigger problems we run into with our neurosis.  I'm using that word in the way the Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, used it, to refer to this kind of mixed-up conditioned self we are; psychiatry aside, we're all neurotic until we awaken fully. As I understand it, you are still you, and your neurosis will rear up at times, but if you're fully conscious and present you can invite it to go sit down in the other room while you make some tea.

When something is awfully difficult, that's your neurosis kicking up.  Or mine.  They are fond of saying that's exactly where your practice begins.  I hate that.  I'm glad I'm not a Teacher and I don't have to be nice and positive about that...............though I do believe in trying to be nice.  Last Saturday night after a funeral I was introduced to a man in a beautiful Indonesian shirt was as "The Dalai Grandma," (a first for me), which led him to quote his favorite saying of the Dalai Lama:  "Try to be nice."
Time for a breather.
~~~~~~
next day -
The great news from my musculo-skeletal doc is that Friday's MRI shows no compression fractures in the spine.  The unspoken news is also no tumors or cancer.  He is confident I irritated a nerve, and it will heal over time, and I won't be as limited and in pain as I am right now.  But what I have to do - are you ready? - is pamper myself.  Yes.

And next time I start to hurt while driving, stop driving.  I know exactly when the injury happened a couple of weeks ago.  I was driving the van on a highway, running late, spine hurting like crazy but I didn't want to get off and change drivers; and Tom didn't feel great anyway, and had asked me to drive.  Well, I am not yet too old to learn.  Meanwhile, no PT just now and stay as active as I can. While pampering myself.  So I'm off to do that now.

What is it that thus comes?

The I

This morning I was led to a little story that I found here in Sweeping Zen.  This is a piece of it:

The Chan Master Nanyue  Huairang visited the Sixth Ancestor, Huineng.
Huineng asked him, “Where do you come from?”
Nanyue   said, “I come from the National Teacher An on Mt. Song.”
Huineng  said, “What is it that thus comes?”
The Master was without means [to answer].
After studying with Huineng for eight years, he finally understood the previous conversation.
Thereupon, he announced to the Ancestor, “I’ve understood what you put to me when I first came:  ‘What is it that thus comes’”
Huineng  asked, “How do you understand it?”
Nanyue   replied, “To say it’s like anything wouldn’t hit it.”

What is this "I"?  Any way you describe yourself feels woefully inadequate.

Then on I went to my collage group, where I created a vertical piece.  I'd like to show you a photo of that, but my computer is refusing to do it.  You could see it if you just picked up your monitor and rotated it so the blue patch is in the upper left. But I found I like it turned this way much more.

What we all love about creating collage together is the non-thinking.  None of us tell stories with what we do; we play with shape and color.  Knowing that art doesn't have to be representational is one of many reasons it's good to live in the modern age.  Our assignment this morning was think quilt.  I am also always reminded of Joe Brainard's earnest advice:  just glue something down.

So I began in the upper left, with that lovely piece of blue handmade paper, my intention being Patchwork.  I thought I would work from left to right, one row at a time, the way you make a patchwork quilt.  We all murmured a bit about quilts we knew as girls, when women made quilts out of old clothes, and their function was to keep you warm.  But soon we settled down and the silence became absolute. So often, art feels like a sacred practice.

It seems that the main purpose of any assignment is to give me something to rebel against.  Sure enough, I didn't get far before I felt my plan to imitate a quilt was boring, so I left it.  Then it got to be fun.  Especially when I found the letter i.  I decided the collage was about "The I" - the self, this one, and its place in the universe.  The last thing I did was put the i in what is now the lower left-hand corner.

There is always a lot of space in my collages; I remain intrigued by the space everywhere, inside and outside this body, the idea that the shape of the empty spaces is as important as the images in it. And also, as I face my often-frightening old age (my back really hurt today), I feel better remembering how small I am, how big the universe, how spacious.  Collage is a somewhat more impermanent art than carving stone.  I like that about it, too.

Leaving Zen Mountain

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.

Taking an experimental approach

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.

Some words on private retreat

Here are some more apropos words from Dogen posted in the San Francisco Zen Center's Ino's blog:

"Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor. It is not introspection...
Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the dharma gate of great ease and joy. It is undivided practice-realization".

Thank you and a bow to Melanie G. of the Austin Zen Center for sending this in as a comment on my recent post about taking a sort of private retreat from writing.  It is going well..  I love this phrase - "let the myriad things rest." 

Here it is

There is a simple way to become a buddha: When you
refrain from unwholesome actions,
are not attached to birth and death, and
are compassionate toward all sentient beings,
respectful to seniors and kind to juniors,
not excluding or desiring anything,
with no designing thoughts or worries,
you will be called a buddha.
Do not seek anything else.

- Eihei Dogen from "Birth and Death," Tricycle Fall 2000

Dream, dream, dream

You poke a stick at dream analysis with the same caution you would use in implying that Oprah is fallible. It is one of the routes to self-knowledge favored by a number of people I know, including me. For years I have made a practice of describing my dreams in my journal, in the hope (watch that word) of understanding my self. Only now does it occur to me that this activity was based on the conviction that I am a self, a me, and the unexpressed notion that this Wun is fascinating. I am not alone in that - just watch a baby play with its toes. Sometimes I think of this self as the sssself, and our devotion to it as the snake in the garden.

This morning I awoke from an unusually fanciful dream about a sort of mad doctor-artist. You can have fun with an image like that, especially if you are an artist, though the dream may have been the result of the electrolyte imbalance that was giving me foot and leg cramps at the same time. But I didn't take the dream as a little puff of smoke; I took it as possible insight into my "real feelings" about either the doctor I saw yesterday or myself as an artist, and off I went, asking my sssself what was hidden in my subconscious. This is what comes of reading Freud when you're fourteen.

Fortunately, I have been exposed to another understanding of the self these last years, though Wun is slow to really get it. Dogen famously stated in Shobogenzo -

To study the buddha way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

Sometimes I revise this mentally: To study the self is to get sick and tired of it. That's what happened to me on my first retreats: the chatter of monkey mind was driving me crazy, going over the same old, like a Roomba that has locked itself in the bathroom.

Zen Master Dogen was not talking psychotherapy, the examination of our individual motives and behaviors. He was pointing to the examination of fundamental reality - how we are not an isolated thing, a self, but a stream of passing feelings, sensations, mental reactions, changing form. Meditating on retreat, you see this, for there is nothing else to do, no TV in the zendo, and you're not supposed to be looking out the window, lapsing over and over into dreams, fantasies, stories.

If you would like to recall puppy love, and hear purely beautiful harmony, play the attached video of The Everly Brothers "Dream." This song, popular when I was young and impressionable, conflates fantasy and reality: Whenever I want you, all I have to do is dreeee-a-eem, dream, dream, dream. Wouldn't that be nice? But even then I found that dreaming of an object of desire was not a very good substitute for being there. You can generalize that statement.