Perfect Enough

I am unable to tell how surprising it was to see - a a thin bowed sliver of moon setting into the trees out my west window. My moon gadget says it is a 4% waxing crescent moon. But the sliver is on the bottom of the moon, not the side.

It has been a lovely spring day, and I am already jaded with crocuses. It was not as balmy as I like, but then, it's still March! Breezy. I took a walk after hours of getting twisted up writing, and ran into this phenomenon. It was still, so I would let down the hood on my light jacket. Then the breeze would come up. Breeze on my neck and head isn't good for me, so I pull my hood back up, tie the strings. The breeze dies down. Hood off. So it went. I took my camera but didn't find anything I felt I had to memorialize. Yet I can go back to certain places in the walk, in particular looking at two kinds of lichen and moss on a ragged-bark tree, and wondering what the tree was, and whether there's an app for tree ID on the iPhone.

I am also tossed between Writer's Mind and Blogger's Mind. It does not seem possible to have them both. Blogger's mind goes about seeing short bits, cultivating the Daily Eye. Often blogs are not about anything seen or done, but about thoughts. Thinking. Thought tangles. I find, maybe because it's spring, I'm not very interested in thought these days.

Writer's Mind. When it gets going and I sit down and let it, it picks me up and drags me pretty much like a horse, me with one foot in the stirrups. It did that this morning. I wrote over 3000 words on a piece whose genre I can't say. Nor where would it be published, or how. Or what would I or anyone else get from it. Writing is emphatically not like chipping away at stone, which is a good in itself, or say an act that is complete, producing a thing that is there. But a manuscript is not really there until someone reads it.

If I do anything - besides love the people I love - it is write. It's the most identity I've ever had. It is nice when it sticks its head up like that and demands that I do it, even as I am asking But what about the unfinished novel? and But what about the poetry reading next week?

Also, today I washed my hair. And this evening I made a small pineapple-upside-down cake from scratch (It was delicious). These were the most Zen things I did, I suppose, though I almost left the soda out of the cake because of careless procedure. Ed Brown would have been mad at me, no doubt, working in a mess, humming, thinking about how I felt sort of like a college student in there, making a mess of the kitchen.

And what to do for a picture today? You're probably tired of Spring already. Here: my very own oxalis plant, returning from a near-death experience. Water every two days, that's the secret, it turns out; and I put it on a bed of wet pebbles to add humidity. It is not a shamrock and has nothing to do with St. Patrick's Day, a holiday that was much beloved by the habitual drinkers I was once surrounded by, and that still makes me a bit uneasy, even if I don't go near a bar.

Good habits, and breaking them

[image: the stream at the bottom of Walhalla ravine, in autumn]
Forming a new habit - this is such an ordinary, undramatic thing that it hasn't occurred to me to write about it until now. Yet, nothing counts but what you do.

I'm not sure that is true, because I've had experiences of receiving energy, both love and hate, and of connecting through thoughts. But thinking about it, our thoughts and our emotions are actions, too. Thoughts can seem involuntary. I have a friend who surely has been exposed to therapeutic thinking, for once I was worrying about finishing some work, and he said, "Nobody but you is forcing you to do that." It was like having cold water dashed in your face. You blink. The fact is, even privately obsessing is a mental habit. It's yours.

My morning practices. One that I enjoy is splashing my face with cold water while the coffee drips, a Zen habit I read about somewhere in Aitken's work. What makes it Zen is that it is a paradigm for the willingness to wake up, leave dreams behind and be splashed with reality.

The moon is now in the top of an oak on the other side of the ravine, which seems very close, but if you had to walk down that steep incline, or skid and tumble down, and then climb back up, believe me, it would seem very far. Very far when there is no bridge. The October moon is so bright, yet you can look right at it with no fear.

I am muddling here. I don't have to, but I enjoy leaving a form (the essay) behind. My pauses and distractions are part of my truth. I love to watch morning arrive. Morning alive.

When to let a habit drop away? On Friday a blogger named Laura described the joy of sitting the way you want to sit when the zendo is very dark, enjoying dropping the prescribed posture of Zen meditation. That pleasure is keen just because one sits for hours motionless in the prescribed posture, one becomes very aware of the body. And, because you have been following the schedule, like it or not, time to yourself to sit freely and engage with the moon or the dark becomes precious.

My morning service, the string of behaviors I want to become a habit, goes like this. Get up, get robe and slipper socks, shut bedroom door so I don't wake up Tom, walk to kitchen, start coffee (decaf, new habit), take thyroid - don' t forget. Go to bathroom, splash face with cold water (see above), get elastic sleeve which has been drying overnight, follow Sheba's prompts and go through her morning treat sequence (two Magical Floating Cats, one Running Cat, a habit string she never forgets), sit down, put on sleeve and slipper socks and robe. Coffee is done, pour giant mug, come to study. Get computer going. Open journal page, note significant thoughts and dreams. Check incoming mail, read the Tricycle dharma of the day, maybe go to the web site and read a whole dharma talk, check Facebook. Open home page. Back to journal. When I've finished that cup of coffee, it is time to meditate. After that, breakfast (important new habit with my blood sugar playing tricks).

Now this boils down to the bones, the actions not to be skipped:

take thyroid
journal with first cup of coffee
meditate
breakfast

Ah. How refreshing simplicity is. It is true, all the other little actions are important too, and have to be done, but this is the bare form of my morning, the time alone that I have to have. That sets me in place. When I skip it I feel like I never quite catch up with myself.

It sounds easy, this little practice, but it gets into complications because I am a creative person, and writing is both my work and an important part of my spiritual practice. So, when something creative gets going in this morning space - a poem, a fiction, an interesting train of thoughts, writing a post like this - I contemplate the time frame. Today I woke up early and have no morning appointments. It's a spacious morning. So today I am finishing this post, with that always-tempting second cup of coffee. Then I'll meditate.

I know people with well-organized minds, for whom a little sequence like this might seem natural and easy. I imagine they don't read this blog. If they did they would perhaps wonder, what's so hard about it? In the morning you have a cup of coffee, meditate, have breakfast. And remember to take your thyroid first thing.

Of course they're right. (And scrape the litter box, too.) But life is different when you live in the right brain, or even in some space that includes the right brain, which is not linear and organized. I don't have to include a link to information about that; you can look it up. Add to that a long life of bad habits, like skipping breakfast or skipping time with yourself, and you have to work with it. Maybe it isn't inspiring. It's mundane, a word that refers to the world, the everyday. Some people think that's boring, but what else is there?

Working the problem

[calligraphy: This by Rev. Nonin Chowaney]
I am aware that some lovely, intelligent women read this blog for inspiration. Others especially like it when I can deliver inspiring words with a sense of humor. That can be a constraining persona when life doesn't seem very funny.

Yesterday morning Tom and I made the effort to go to a videotaped talk put on by the Zen group that meets in our church. We haven't sat with that group for a while, all the problems of our low energy and various handicaps (for instance, his electric wheelchair can break down if you take it through rain or snow). As soon as we walked into the pleasant lounge where the sangha had gathered for this, I felt how pleasant and comforting the quiet atmosphere was. There is a nice energy to people who have been meditating together for an hour. I'd forgotten.

One of the men brought me an overstuffed chair, thankfully, because I hadn't thought to bring the gel cushion I am using now to diminish the impact of the arthritis in my hip. With some effort, the volume on the laptop was adjusted so I could hear it. Pause for explanation.

For well over ten years I have worn hearing aids. Hearing loss is another one of those unfortunate things you get for having the wrong parents. I am on my second pair of hearing aids. These are digital and programmable. They cost $3500, and that was a bargain price, though why that should be, I don't know, when you can buy a fabulous electronic device for one-tenth that much, Maybe because most people who need hearing aids are old and confused and demoralized, and nobody really wants to help us with the hard stuff when they could be off hiking. Maybe because the customer base is too tired and too sick to mount a public campaign. I don't know. But that's the playing field.

A little footnote to my life-threatening health problems this past year was the growing perception that the hearing aids weren't working as well. I went twice to Echo Hearing, where I bought them. The women there did an exam and determined my hearing hadn't really changed, but couldn't get it together to obtain the cable they needed so they could reprogram the aids, bring them up a notch. Frustrated by two fruitless visits, I went to someone else, a bonafide doctor, who didn't examine my hearing at all, or suggest changing the reception, just cleaned them briskly and charged me $50. At that point I had exhausted whatever yang I had to spend on this particular handicap, and gave up.

At best, hearing aids aren't very good, not nearly as effective as glasses. They amplify everything, all the background noises like fans and people shuffling their feet that your natural hearing mechanism somehow sorts out. They are intolerable in noisy places, but essential to enjoy a one-on-one conversation. If I don't have them, voices are muffled, cottony, like a foreign language, and I wear out trying to understand. For years now I've found that I can't hear people talk in group situations. This was one of the factors that drove me out of teaching in 1995.

I was okay during the talk yesterday, a wonderful talk about simply meeting reality. But in the quiet, thoughtful discussion afterward, I could only understand two people - Tom, to my immediate left (my good ear), and Margaret, to his left (a good, clear voice). Everyone else was very yin, which is what meditation does to you, quiets your energy. Soon I felt like a cat watching a tennis match, not understanding what was going on, just watching the ball go back and forth.

If you want to know just how in touch with reality most people are, let them know you can't quite hear them. Ask them to direct their voice your way. Almost no one continues to do this for more than one or two sentences. What does that mean? To me, it means they are concerned with expressing themssselves, not with communicating to me.

Knowing that, I didn't interject my handicap into the conversation yesterday. What's the point? I just sat there and thought, I need one of those Phonak things the doctor told me about. This is a sort of receiver you wear around your neck. It has to be coupled with a microphone set in the middle of the group. Right. Or do I want a scooter more?

I do want a scooter. Last summer I didn't walk down to the brook at all, and this year I am worse, with arthritis and neuropathy in my legs and feet, and declining kidney functions depleting my energy even more. It is time to admit that I'm never going to be better than this, and do what I can to adapt.

Hearing is about being social. The scooter is more about being personally more capable. My most important use of a scooter would be to wander around the ravine, though only on the roads; to be able to be out in nature. Just that. If I get one that breaks apart and is easy to manage, or had a special lift installed, I could put it in the van and go to the arboretum, or the conservatory or museum, or gallery hop, or go to church and sit in it in coffee hour and not be relegated to the old people's ghetto, the tables off at the side of Fellowship Hall. I could use a scooter at the grocery store, if it had a basket; the electric shopping carts they supply are awful. I could take the scooter down to the Cultural Arts Center for the Thursday conversations with artists.

So my thoughts went. At the same time, to go to the Thursday conversations, or enjoy the Zen discussions, or even Fellowship Hall, I need to be able to hear.

The vast insurance conspiracy doesn't think so, and won't pay for hearing assistive devices. On the other hand, some people get Medicare to buy them scooters. I could try that route. Maybe it would come through before I die. It sounds too hard. And right now, our attention is focused on getting a generator installed to help us survive the long power outages we are getting around here, with windstorms knocking down the old trees and the whole infrastructure aging and susceptible. We need electricity to run Tom's ventilator and the pump I use every day on my lymphedemic arm, to say nothing of the computers that are our chief contact with the world.

What is the inspiration in all this? Precious little, and it isn't funny. It is discouraging, more so when people your age are bopping around traveling, dancing, gardening.

But there is something to be said here in praise of Zen, something that encourages me to keep up my meditation practice. Just sitting with other meditators for an hour in that peaceful space forced me to bottom out on these problems, look at them squarely, and think about what I could do.

Working the problem is not the same as "having a positive attitude," a stance which is constantly urged on me by a dear old friend who doesn't know any better. She was telling me recently, blithely, that I could travel around the world and they would have scooters waiting for me at every airport. Oh yeah. Well, I have had some experience with travel arrangements of this kind.

And, she added, I would be as good as new. No one needs to be handicapped in this day and age, she said.

I know she needs to think that, insists on thinking that, and I don't try to change her. I don't even get annoyed anymore, for I admire her courage. But the fact is, you never get to be as good as new. The best you can do is adjust to the new normal. By the time you do, it will have changed again, and not for the better. That's not pessimism or a bad attitude; it's the truth.