One Little Thing You Can Do That Will Change Your Life - This Will Amaze You

 

Okay, I admit it, I'm parodying the kind of headlines we see now on the internet.  Except this is true - practicing gratitude, like meditating, even once has proven results.  I mean proven by science, for you scientific materialists out there.  You could look it up.  It trains your brain to look from a different angle, not thinking about what you want (and don't have), but about what you have, and may very well not deserve, but that's beside the point.

So today in Kroger's I thought I would start a gratitude journal here.  Maybe I'll just add to this post of an evening, putting the latest thing on the top, the way Facebook does.  Or if I have taken a nice picture, do a new post.  I do have days when all I'm thankful for is that I didn't bite or kick anyone, or that this day is over, or that I have an iPad (my daughter gave it to me for Christmas a year ago).  But today I'm feeling  grateful for several reasons:

~ the loose front filling could be repaired, and I don't have to get a cap.  (I have a dentist who is not in it to make a fortune by implants and such.)
~ I could go to Kroger's and pick up groceries without keeping a running total in my head or worrying about the cost.  I'm still frugal, but it's nice to to have options.
~ Our water is finally back, after 11 days of coping.  I managed to get a load of laundry done, including my nice new very warm bathrobe; it's below zero here, so I'm grateful for the very warm bathrobe.
~ What looked like the start of a head cold yesterday did not materialize.  For that I am really really grateful.  I hate having a cold.
~ Most of all, I got into a good mood.  Not always so.  Not under my control.

So it goes.

One grateful cat

Sometimes you get the bear.
Sometimes the bear gets you.

To the right, one of the neighbor's two black cats we called "The Mu's" (a Zen joke) flew up our magnolia tree, being hotly pursued by two large, vigorous dogs.  The dogs were soon called home, but the Mu stayed up there for several hours, catching his breath.  That's life in the animal realm.

Your one wild and precious day

[The title of this post is taken from Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day."  Oliver is a nature-mystic and the favorite poet of many people I know.  The image is my valiant African violet, which has survived Tashi's teeth, and my neglect, to bloom when it thinks it is spring. It's spring for me right now, too.]

When I am depressed, I have no motivation, no desires except to not be in that emotional pain - and, oddly, the flatlands are as painful as what Holly Golightly called "the screaming reds," that irritable, hypersensitive depression that hits me in August, season of decaying fire.

Just a week ago, on Saturday night, watching a rerun of House and playing Words on my iPad, I felt the barely perceptible lifting of the big February depression-with-shingles-and-UTI that meant I didn't post much.  "Lifting" is the word, as if some invisible bricks have been on you, weighing you down, and they are lifted off one by one.  The next morning I felt somewhat better.  Got all dressed, went to church, and there found I was so cold, cold to the bone. Cold.  Different than chills.  It's making me feel cold to try to describe it.

Left the worship center, wrapped up in my parka, sat around Fellowship Hall drinking decaf and being uncomfortably cold. Couldn't go out for lunch, had to go home and dive under my electric blanket set to 5.  So it was a dumb, very flat day.  Not exactly painful.  More, nothing.  And the next morning I woke up and my first sensation/thought was one of relief.  The damn thing was gone. I felt good.

If you are not bipolar, you may never have experienced this - your depressions or miseries may be situational, and relieved by things that happen to you or things you do, like exercise.  But I am describing this because you have a relative or spouse or friend, or you will, who has this illness.  I wanted to write "suffers from," so I will, despite thes Buddhist truism "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."  This is bull, when it comes to these times of serious chemical imbalance, though I completely understand the truth it expresses, that we cause our own suffering by our thoughts and actions, by sticking to stuff and desires. I could write a book about how we cause our own suffering, based solely on my own experience.

Day after day this week I have felt good.  Not the swirling manic-high terrific, God forbid. But fine.  Loving, peaceful, calm, enjoying everything I do.  It is the perfect mood.  For my Buddhist friends, it's that mood you can have after a retreat, or even at the end of that first long day of meditation.  A day in this mood has that "wild and precious" sense to it - the silence of the house after the dishwasher has run is as pleasing as music or flowing water.  The laundry basket half-full of socks (depression leads to sock calamities - no motivation, you know) is amusing.  A good friend's invitation to an art-and-coffee day is delightful.  So is Tashi when she climbs up on my shoulder, descending to curl on my heart and purr, which I answer with imagining the identical vibration of Mu.

I've known a lot of bipolars, so I know that this mood is not entirely a chemical blessing, for we can tangle ourselves up thoroughly in our neurotic ideas and impulses and never enjoy a damn thing.  This mood is also the blessing of years of practice - meditation, prayer, writing poetry, paying attention to others, letting go of one fantasy after another.  Suzuki said we meditate so we can enjoy our old age.  It's true.  It's like a retirement saving's account that is going to be your salvation when the time comes.

I hope you have a wild and precious day, too.

Street Mu

My neighbors have several cats. The two black ones are named Jake and Elwood. They can tell them apart by temperament; one is friendly. But I don't try. I enjoy calling them both Mu, which is a Japanese word that means something like No, or Nothing. This is a picture of one or the other of the Mu's, taken one sunny day.

Mu is the first koan worked in some traditions. Many non-Buddhists have heard of it. A student asks Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha nature?"

Joshu replies, "Mu."

One way this koan was presented to me was that the student is asking, Worthless as I am (gosh, I'm just a woman, and I'm not exactly perfect . . . ) can even I be enlightened? Is happiness open even to me? Much Zen operates on metaphoric levels; it is considered helpful to confuse you.

So I was out this evening in a misty twilight, trying to walk my way out of surprisingly strong feelings brought on by a note from what we like to call in Buddhism "a difficult person," one for whom you have feelings you don't enjoy. I had grown bored by the question of whether my physical sensations represented anger or fear, and was noticing that the crickets in the lawns were louder than the ones in my head, when something brushed my ankles. Mu! I said. It was the friendly one.

I bent to stroke him, he was very alive. He set up a purr, and the koan came to my mind. I thought about it. Does even that difficult person have Buddhanature? . . . have worth? Does that person deserve my compassion? The answer seemed obvious.

Mu walked along beside me on the curb, and then doubled. I laughed in surprise. The other cat had come out of the dark to join the procession. I pulled out my cellphone and tried to take a flash picture of them, but all I got was a black screen.