Meeting High Water

[image: Oak Creek and Cathedral Rock, by JoelDeluxe]
In Appalachia, which isn't too far from here, there is a saying people use when agreeing to do something in the future - "The good Lord willing an' the creek don't rise." Through my dharma lens, that's a bow to all the things that can happen to prevent us from meeting our goals, keeping our promises. All that reality out there that doesn't care what you want, and gives rise to a future you can't predict.

An' the creek don't rise.

We were in the Honda Civic, out west, Arizona, driving through the Superstition Mountains. There must have been a lot of snow and a lot of thaw. I was driving along enjoying the curving road and the mountain scenery until we came to a dip in the road labeled "Punkin Creek." The road there was filled with brown, rushing water, and there was a sign posted, High Water. The water didn't look that high, maybe ankle-deep, but I rolled to a stop. I thought about how hard it was going to be to turn around and go a long way back to take another route. I didn't see why I shouldn't try it.

Tom said, "Ahh, I don't think we should try to go through that." Something like that, calm and reasonable.

I protested. I have always been more of a risk-taker than him, except when it comes to buying electronics. But he told me what rushing water can do - carry you and your car downstream and into big trouble - and I reluctantly turned around. Some people are always spoiling all the fun.

To his satisfaction, we learned later that the town on the other side of that rushing water, which was also named Punkin Creek, was cut off from civilization as we know it (i.e. even 4-wheel drive vehicles) for three days. Three days! You could run out of bread.

The good Lord willin'.

I don't know about the good Lord, whether there is an overriding unembodied Consciousness, if it has a will. The question doesn't worry me. It would be interesting to find out about it after death. I think of "the good Lord" as a metaphor for all those braided forces, like the woven strands of run-off that make a creek rise. I know now that what looks like a little obstacle can have mighty force.

And where there is snow melt and fast-running water and no bridge, you can find yourself stranded downstream. The ordinary natural world, a thousand little run-offs from high up the mountain, can defeat you without even trying. You thought that getting to a certain restaurant for lunch, or passing your generals, or making a marriage "work," whatever your ambition, was something you could do if you just did the right thing. But sometimes all the determination in the world is just going to dig you deeper in the mud. It's a good idea to respect the High Water sign and consider another way around the mountain.

The Great Reality Show

Today we have been slowly eating an elephant, cleaning up after a long Open House yesterday in which nobody, thankfully, felt the need to clean up as the day went on. So wax from the candles on his antlers dripped onto the brass reindeer, plates and red napkins and silver forks were laid down anywhere, cookies spent the night on the dining room table. Just now I took a rest from straightening up to lunch with last Sunday's New York Times, and scanned the Week in Review, which is always fun this time of year, and even better at the end of a decade.

I am struck by how various columnists and cartoonists talk about the same thing - that this was a decade in which massive dreams were punctured and failed. Columnist Frank Rich poses Tiger Woods as an example of a delusion somebody should have seen through, just like the housing bubble and the teetering accumulation of consumer debt. Shared delusions that fell to ground with a thud.

What this brought to my mind was my own series of dreams. Last night, as we relaxed in the after-party, I told a friend how I entered the PhD program at Ohio State in 1990 to fulfill a dream of teaching I had held onto for 20 years. And how five years later I walked out of the program with the degree and the knowledge that I never wanted to teach college again, not like that.

Many things had gone into the formation of that dream, including some fine experiences in my first years of teaching in the early seventies. And there were many ways higher education had changed in the years since, a new cynicism in the students, careerism in the faculty. But to pare it down to the bare bones, my four years of teaching in the graduate program showed me that it was not at all what I remembered. Or dreamed of.

I don't know what a dream is made of. Parts and pieces, like everything else. How my mother was so impressed, and referred to me back then as "my daughter, the professor." How it was the first time I had a job where I was treated as an equal and allowed to create my own work, assign anything. The seventies were a time of ferment when we could play with new ways of doing the old thing, trying to teach kids to love the written word. It was a time of change, when change seemed important, and positive. "Not always so," Suzuki Roshi cautions us, but I hadn't read him back then. I graded essays listening to Hair.

This for sure: you hold on to a dream with your mind, probably both halves of it. A dream is an idea, generated by the mind, clung to by whatever that mechanism is, mostly mental I suspect, but probably some in the body as well. Americans are particularly prone to dreams. The country was founded by people who dreamed wealth would save them, and wealth could be found around the edge of the world if the dragones didn't get you.

Zen actively discourages us from paying attention to dreams and ambitions. In sitting in meditation, we do nothing but count or watch the breath. We watch ideas rise like little tendrils of smoke from incense out of the mind, and we let them go and return to the breath. We do not run from the cushion to write down our thoughts and dreams; in fact, that is actively discouraged. We are encouraged to be mindful of what life is presenting to us minute by minute, of the small things that need done, and done by us, and done with care.

Last night, after we had discussed our big, difficult dreams, we got to talking about our e-mail inboxes. Mine has ahh, 440 posts sitting in it. A number of them are tagged. Another 2200 rest in the dialysis and transplant boxes, a great collection of information, most of which I haven't yet read. Every year this time I start paring this down, especially that inbox, in the hope of getting to zero. A small dream. An activity, really, like sweeping the path as the wind blows new leaves down.

Creature comforts

I am grateful to an (even) older friend who laughed off the idea of camping with "I like my creature comforts." It gave me permission to contemplate how very much I like them too, and anyone will tell you, I am not a good camper.

A little lazy googling tells me this term has been around since about 1650, when even the wealthy didn't even have the most comforting comforts, central heating and flush toilets. Yet even then, anyone could appreciate how a good bed or a nice hot bath eased and comforted the body.

I must say, I have never been attracted to pain the way some people seem to be. I do have to admit to a sense of triumph in surviving long days of sitting crosslegged on the floor at Zen retreats, back when I could do that. (Even then I observed that the teacher wasn't sitting there with us all day long.) And I gained from the experience, as you are meant to, becoming familiar with pain, losing my fear of it, able to watch it rise and subside and stop calling it "pain."

But I started out to write about my new cushion. Not a zafu this time (the round cushion you sit on in proper Zen). No, it is a rectangular foam-and-gel orthotic cushion, commonly used these days in wheelchairs to prevent pressure sores. It is part of my response to the arthritis in my left hip, which seemed to be made worse by sitting in my favorite chair. It is a good chair, but old, and the seat has been compressed with age.

The cushion came UPS two days ago, so I have spent two evenings using it. This morning as I got up I noted that I did not have pain in the hip. So I carried the cushion over to the straight-backed chair I use now for meditation and tried it there. Well. I soon realized I was enjoying my meditation.

That's something I've been thinking about for a while, since I came across Suzuki's statement, "If you're not enjoying your meditation, you're doing something wrong." Well then, I was doing something wrong all those years. It was not hard to guess what it was. I was enduring something I thought was good for me. Which it was. I secretly believed it was supposed to be uncomfortable, the way church pews are, to get your attention.

But things are usually simpler than you think. It now seems obvious that inducing a flareup of arthritis is not really a good thing.

Well, it's one more example, not that I need any, of how we cling to our habits. You find that out when you decide to quit smoking. It's less obvious when it comes to the little things, the unimportant everyday things you do on your way to Somewhere Else, that lotus land that is actually right here. (Or, as the photo shows, in Milwaukee.)

Demons

[Spinning wheel, Blood, Sweat and Tears, posted on YouTube by flutooth.]

I was going to write a post on my current experience with steroids titled "Two weeks in another town," but it is looking like more than two weeks. Before you kick me out of the Football Hall of Fame, let me explain.

Two weeks and two days ago I let the musculo-skeletal doctor ("sports doc") inject my ankle and hip with two half-doses of a gluticosteroid. I know I'm reactive to steroids, and I won't take them orally, but I had gone in limping with what turned out to be a magnificent flareup of arthritis and bursitis in two locations. And this doctor has done good things for me before. So I took the shots.

And my, I felt good, once I got over two nights of serious sleep disturbance. Interested in life, creative, generous, and - this is important - the pain reduced radically. I didn't mind a bit that my instructions were to "take it easy" the first week. As a poetic type, I've spent my life looking for an authority figure to tell me that.

I didn't realize I was up until after my mood switched. A couple of days of being too apathetic to run the Roomba found me telling Tom, "I have a sense that I'm coming closer to death, that I don't have long." Then the mood switched back last Sunday night, around 9:00. Hello, come on in!

As moodswings go, this one will. (I couldn't resist.) Seriously, as moodswings go, this has been okay, more like being a boat in a lock, the water rising, then back down, not like the biggest roller coaster in the world. There were also days in this little trip where I found myself in the blue lagoon, balanced, calm, happy, interested in everything, tending to use the adjective "beautiful." Sort of like we feel on those magical days in spring.

I once saw moodswings as a demon that popped its trollish head into my pleasant cave, or more accurately, did a home invasion. Now I think a mood is a mood, and the demon is more general than that. Around its neck it wears a name tag that says Attachment. Attaching to the high, attaching to the peaceful moment of balance, attaching to the idea of how I like to feel, seeing that preference as terribly important.

Shunryu Suzuki says we are given just enough problems (83). This morning I picked up the results of my last blood tests. My serum creatinine is high, which indicates lowered kidney function. Tom reminded me that this has happened before, and I recovered from an incipient drama that stars me being reintroduced to dialysis. The good thing, Tom reminded me, is that things always change. Yes, and sometimes for the better. In this case, my fresh problem took my mind off my mind.