Wandering in the Weeds

Late winter woods

I have modified this comment from an e-list I follow, but kept the flowing syntax.  This should give you the flavor of it:

John, none of us care about your gripe with Mary.  We're supposed to be supporting one another on this list, so please take your argument private, you are only going to cause people to leave the group. So grow up....

Don't you love that last friendly last admonition?  How nice is that, as we say flatly.  How helpful, for two people who are both acutely ill right now.  Then another person popped in to refer to it as "high-school drama."  As for me, reading it enhanced my high-summer problem of heat.  Aggression rises easily in my poor stomach, which finds some of my required meds, and some human meanness, hard to digest.

I had an impulse to reply to Perennially Irritable, but took a deep breath and thought I really don't know how to help.  I looked back over the threads on this subject and found others who were  upset by John or Mary's quarrel, and handled their pain by aggressively telling them not to be aggressive.

So what's a Buddhist to do?  In confusing times I go back to the basic commitment Pema Chodron writes about in her forthcoming book, How to Live Beautifully:

I vow to do no harm.

(I highlighted that in the hope that I will get it.)  The first reaction I always have when I have to bring this to mind is, Whoa.  Slow.  Down.  Chill out. Don't say it.  And especially, Don't write it on the internet.
~~~~~
I'd written the above yesterday.  Last night, I myself got annoyed by a supercilious (judgement word) comment about me made by a Facebook acquaintance.  (Yeah, friend, I don't remember how that happened.)  I wrote an answer, deleted it.  Wrote another, delete.  One more, trying to explain that I am not the idiot she seems to think I am.  Delete.  Went to her page, clicked the Friend button, clicked again, fixed it so nothing she writes will come through anymore.  I will not miss her.

Kind of thing I've learned in almost 15 years of practice (!!!!!) is that this hodge-podge self I am, made insane by my childhood, is hypersensitive to criticism.  And meanness, even when it's not directed at me.  All the King's horses and all the King's men, in the form of a succession of therapists and self-help books and practice and journaling and retreats, you name it, I've done it - these things have not changed this part of me.

What getting to know myself has done, though, is that I know how I feel.  I can control my impulses.  And then, I guess a form of wisdom, I accept that I am who I am.  Hypersensitive.You are not a thing to be perfected by meticulous work.

Got to reading Shunryu Suzuki last night before bed, and God bless him, he was talking about how it is exactly when we are working with the weeds in our life that we are enlightened.  This is our practice, to work with our weeds, not to sit on a cushion in bliss.  Though he does advocate nonthinking.

So I'm okay this morning, and didn't set the internet ablaze last night.

Rest

[These photos are among those Tom found yesterday on the retired digital camera.]

postscript next day:  One long-term group member, who was valuable and a frequent commenter, has resigned from the list over that quarrel.

You are not who you think

This morning things are conspiring to make me realize more deeply the amazing luxury we live in here in the middle class in midwestern America just this moment.  Those conspiring things are the forthcoming book by Pema Chodron, which I have the really great good fortune to receive in galleys because I blog about these things; and the front page of the New York Times.  Specifically, an article about the problematic fact that now people in India and China want air conditioning, too. They want it more than they want TV.  I told Tom, "And not just in the bedroom - in the whole house, like us."

But don't kid yourself - in most of the world there are not that many "middle class" people.  There are mostly the handful of very very rich and the very poor who slave away in the mines and fields to bring us luxuries. I realize that those who can sit and read this blog are probably among the fortunate, like me.  You don't even want to know how many computers we own here.  We are middle-class Americans who grew up in a time when there was a larger, stronger middle-class.

Before you turn away from this post, thinking it is about, yawn, politics or economics, it is about to get intimate.  Actually, all those big-thinking things are intimate, in a sense.  Your air conditioning affects the whole world.  That's the problem discussed in the Times today.

But it is my personal life that's been nudging me to wake me up to reality these days.  Faithful Readers know about the majormajor problems of Tom's parents aging and not admitting to that fact.  Reading Pema last night, I felt like she had Tom's mother perfectly described.  To say, at 90, "I'm not old - I can drive - I'm perfectly capable of living in my house" is to insist on your delusion of invulnerability.  I'd guess this is connected to having spent your whole life refusing to acknowledge that you will not only age, you will die.

I have been rummaging around in Buddhist teachings for quite a few years now, and am familiar with the concept of ego.  This is not quite what we mean when we say someone is egotistic or has a big ego.  That refers to someone who thinks very highly of himself.  I say "himself" because most women seem to suffer from the opposite problem, low self-esteem.  How could we not when even Oprah, who ought to know better, has her nice plump zaftig body airbrushed into a size 12 on the cover of O?  (Here, I will restrain myself from posting a candid shot of her.)  In a competitive patriarchal society, most people feel inadequate, I'd guess. There isn't much room at the top.

So you see in the grocery store a big woman with huge (painful, beautiful) tattoos on her arms.  It is as if she is saying defiantly, "Hey, I might be stuck in a crap job, but I'm someone."

Well, you are someone.  But not who you think you are.  Who you think you are, that I-dentity you've worked up, that's a fixed idea, an ego.  Because we are really this cloud of constantly changing active systems.  A human being grows, matures, and then starts to age.  You could think of it as the decay of the carbon atoms we are composed of.  I like that word, composed.  Made.  Then de-composed.  I wish I could say that to my mother-in-law.  You're old, and getting older as we speak, I'd say with a smile, like I say it to myself after I try to take a flattering self-portrait.  Get used to it, I'd think - it's never going to go the other direction. But I won't tell her that - everyone's been telling her that - it doesn't work.