Both sides now

Things I bitch about:
~ Everything has gone to hell since the fifties. See the ad that opens the video above (though I kinda like the music).
~ I'm addicted to Candy Crush.
~ My mother doesn't clean up after me anymore.  (And that's not the only way I miss her.)
~ My bladder is getting old along with the rest of me.
~ I have to wear custom orthotics and athletic shoes pretty much all the time or my left ankle hurts and I break tiny bones in my feet, which is excruciating.  Worse:  I just can't go barefoot, even around the house.
~ I am allergic to every season.  Spring grass and tree pollen.  Summer ragweed.  Autumn leafmold.  Winter cold (fibromyalgia).
~ There is a very limited choice of dingbats here on Blogger. It makes me -

~ Really bad karma led me to being actively bipolar.
~ And really bad karma makes it impossible to take any of the drugs.  We've tried.  Not that the drugs work.
~ The compression fracture I got from my bad fall this spring hurts most of the time, and gets worse when I drive or wear a bra.
~ This is our front yard today.

from the bedroom window

from the street

~ The new line to the sewer is costing us almost $8,000.  The house has smelled like drains for several days.  We didn't have water or the ability to flush the toilets for two days. 
~ I'm still not completely unpacked since the last move (ten years ago).
~ I keep falling down breaking bones, getting concussions, nobody knows why.  Neurologist appointment coming up, sigh.
 
What, you need more?  I've got more.  I have 83 problems, like everyone else.  But on the other hand, obstacles are also opportunities. . . .
~ The internet!  Candy Crush!
~ Zen in the West!
~ I had a loving mother who taught me hard work by example, and at least gave me an ideal of neatness.
~ I'm still here, aging bladder in place.
~ My insurance covered the orthotics. I haven't broken a foot bone since I got them.
~ Our house has a good HEPA filter on the furnace and central air.
~ Bipolars are creative.  Irish poet karma is not all bad.
~ The sewer problem has led to much neighborly conversation and compassion.
~ I am newly appreciative of flush toilets.
~ Finally, while I hate falling, I've always liked the Samurai motto - 

Fall seven times, stand up eight.

Notes on ego display

If I had a dog, I'd name her Karma, so I could enjoy scolding, "Bad Karma, bad."  (I have a weakness for bad puns, bad.)

Just thinking about that this morning as I scan my facebook, a way of having coffee with friends.  Here was a posting about someone who hurt my feelings recently, not on purpose, just doing his conditioned ego display. In his case it's correcting people, showing how much he knows.

Look at me!

His post this morning is about a minor health problem, a discomfort, and since it is morning and calm and my brain is not as busy yet as it will be, I heard myself think.  My self thought, Good.  This is not nice, and I wouldn't admit it to most people, because most people don't realize that they think things like that.  But I will so I can make some points about the whole thing.

First point:  it is not desirable to be glad someone hurts.  I must suppose I always knew that, but until I got going with spiritual practice and began to clear out my head, I didn't hear myself.  If I had, I might have thought it was good to enjoy someone else's pain; my (alcoholic) father did, out loud and at length.

My friend.  When he hurt me - however much he didn't mean to - he created bad karma: my anger toward him. Anger is in that balliwick we call "hatred," as in "Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly; I vow to abandon them."  This is one line of a central Buddhist chant, The Bodhissatva Vow.  And it says these three poisonous things rise in us endlessly; and we make a point of noticing them and leaving that neighborhood.

Of course, like my friend, you can make someone angry and not realize it.  Maybe you're fooling around playing Angry Birds on your cellphone in the grocery line and don't notice you should move forward and put your groceries on the conveyor belt.  Someone behind you who is in a big hurry and jealous of your cellphone is steaming.  Maybe rams her cart into your butt and glares.

Hopefully the karma won't be so bad that she follows you and rams your car, but things like that do happen, at least in mystery novels.  Point being, walk slowly and lightly, be aware, be kind, be careful, don't get too caught up in your own fun - it's easy to do harm.

Another point here: Wun is a human being made of all sorts of pixels of experience.  We can continually surprise ourselves.  A real person is not predictable, though a highly conditioned person can be.

My friend couldn't have predicted my reaction if he tried, and is not responsible for my reaction.  Unless you deliberately inflict pain, something direct like that, you are not causing someone else's reaction.  You happen to cause it.  I think this is a point psychologists make sometimes; you are not responsible for how someone else feels when they have what seems like an overblown emotional reaction.

At the same time, we can't utterly disown our impact on other people.  Or the earth.  Right?  That's why there are precepts about how we act in relationship, right speech, right action.  We are responsible for our intentions, for our actions.  We are supposed to intend no harm. You can relate this easily to The Golden Rule in its many forms found in religions all over the world.  My way of thinking about it is:  Be Kind.

So.  Sunday, and here's a sermon.  Now I'm going to church and not listen to another one.


[click here to go to the website that sells a poster of the image]

A Day of Kindness

Now I am reading a book called Awakening Kindness:  Finding Joy Through Compassion for Others, by Nawang Kechong.  In the exercises at the end, he suggests living a day devoted to  kindness, and describes the many ways we can be kind.  Last night I decided to adopt this idea today.

There aren't many of us awake around here this Monday morning - Natasha and me.  It is mostly easy and natural to be kind to her; she wants a cuddle first thing when I get up.  She wants her canned food when my cellphone alarm goes off at 8:00 a.m. and I take my Neoral.  Sometimes she doesn't recognize kindness, of course, as when we give her her two daily doses of liquid antibiotic.  She doesn't even know that her baseline exam at the Vet's cost $125, nor could a cat understand the concept of money.


After the cuddle, the first kind thing I did was put the teakettle on and get the water hot to defrost the birdbath.  I haven't seen any creatures use it yet, but I have faith.  I like being kind to the birds, especially now that it's been so cold and wet, the remaining berries covered with snow.  Then I noticed myself throwing out Tashi's water from last night to give her fresh, and a little thought crept into my mind, This is not kind to the earth. That water can be put into the little watering can for the indoor plants.  

Gratitude to the earth preoccupied me as I reheated some fried potatoes we'd brought home from a restaurant, imagining the human hands that planted these, or ran the machines that planted and harvested, the semi that transported them here, the roads it ran on. . . . I thought it might not be hard to get one of those sacks they sell now to plant potatoes in, maybe that would be kinder, take less resources.  Wishful thinking; we don't have a full day of sun except in the front yard.  The sack would look peculiar out on the lawn.  I'm working on this.


But the most striking thing was realizing kindness toward myself.  How many little things I want to do, need to do to have a more peaceful life, like get my new purse calendar filled in.  Do my small finances for the month.  Put a second coat of nail polish on, to keep my fingernails from breaking and peeling (effect of the immunosuppressants, I guess).   Get a second pair of rubber gloves on the grocery list, to protect my fingertips from cracking.  All things that mitigate against having any grand aspirations.  


I also had thoughts about how following impulse is often really not so kind, if it means these other things don't get done and ba-a-ad karma ensues.  Nevertheless, I know I'll make time for a game now and then of Color Junction.  A game or two between tasks, not thirty.  Hey, it relaxes me from all this discursive thinking.

You never know

This morning someone said that to me - maybe the minister.  It is a sort of wry joke, but at least as true as Murphy's Law, and equally based on the central Buddhist truth of uncertainty and our inability to control the vast stream of the future, or even to have a grip on the present.  When a lovely older member of our church died recently, people who had seen her the week before were confused - she had seemed so well, seemed to be doing better.  Does death really come like that, when we're not ready?

Oh, it's me again on death.  Hmm, what is this?  Well, some news this morning from my donor - the transplant people do not like the results of one of the tests they ran on her kidney function, and want her to do it again.  It's an annoying test, a 24-hour urine collection - just what it sounds like.  I'm used to it, but I remember it driving me crazy in early times, having to lug a gallon jug half full of pee and an item called "a hat" (to collect more pee) to work.  I would have said then that "It drives me crazy," meaning my resentment built into agitation and Don't Want!  I was more like that then, not saying No, not accepting either, feeling victimized.  That was me.

Well, I have always known obstacles could arise at many points in this pending transplant, and never talked about it without saying, Anything can happen - another Grandma saying about uncertainty.  I said it like crossing my fingers or throwing salt over my shoulder, a bow to the crapshooting gods of Terry Pratchett's fiction.

The universe is not fully explained, but it is also not a crapshoot.  After 2500 years, the truth of cause and effect is even more apparent, though we now see that both can be subtle and unexpected.  But still, notwithstanding quantum physics, whatever happens was bound to follow after all that happened before.  Yet, somewhere in this inevitability is what we can affect.

Small example:  just now I let Sheba out on the screened porch, and paused to check my orchids in the little study where the light is good for plants.  Two were dry, so I began to add some water to the bowl beneath the small one, which keeps it humidified.  It is crowded on that desk, and I still have a tremor, so (cause-and-effect) I spilled water.  Sighed.  Went to get paper towels and picked up the woven reed mat the orchids sit on to make sure no water had seeped through.  Indeed, it had, and would have ruined the beautiful finish of the like-new desk in that spot.  I wiped it dry, glad I slowed down and checked. 

But don't your days in August seem to go like that?  Maybe not.  Maybe there are cool, grounded people with little fire in the nature who are energized by the extra heat and light and the excited feel of the state fair, the rib fest, the end of summer. But a lot of people don't feel that way, which is why it's the month in which many places more or less shut down - all of France, New York City - and the privileged go to a cabin on the lake where it is cooler.

So yes, I am reminding myself once more to stay where it is dim and cool.  Planning to relax now as soon as I bring my shamrock in from the porch, where it just can't stand the heat.  Plants make these demands on you, living things, organic life that holds you hostage.
[image:  Two years ago my friend Tina planted a great many impatiens for me along the front garden.  Impatiens are an annual, meaning the winter killed them off.  But the next year this little plant came up.]

Who would Buddha bomb?

[photo: Sherlock enjoys the beauty of a single rhododendron blossom]
I imagine I am like many readers in envying Randy Cohen, who gets to write "The Ethicist" column for the New York Times, and now, the blog. Judging from the 208 comments his first topic got (should Madonna [a celebrity] be allowed to adopt another Malawi baby?) there are many people eager to explain how they think other people should act, and asking the eternal question, How come he gets to be The Ethicist and I don't? After all, civilization is just an agreement that we will act in certain ways, so we should examine what we agree to.

But it's so abstract. It's people talking not about their own lives, but about theoretical Other People's Lives. In no time, someone wonders, "Is it possible to behave ethically if you don't believe in God?" I always wonder, When's the last time that guy called his mother? And, Is that a hamburger he's eating?

On the other hand, if it amuses monkeys to draw pictures in the dust with a stick, what's the harm in that? Well, I don't know. Maybe it distracts us from the issues we really need to be addressing. What should you be addressing right now? What should I? That's easy. I am sitting here typing without wearing the sleeve that keeps my lymphedemic arm healthy. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll add that I couldn't find the sleeve right off-hand this morning in the dark. It wasn't where I usually put it. Oh well, I thought. Later, after Tom's up.

Was this little action a matter of Right and Wrong? My parents thought so, and keenly hoped to teach me to hang up my clothes even when nobody's watching. By that standard, I am a total failure of civilization. And these things snowball. As you know, if you have a chair in your bedroom, by the time you hang up the clothes you didn't hang up yesterday, you will be too tired to hang up today's clothes. They will get wrinkled lying there, maybe get dust mites in them, making more work for you tomorrow. Bad karma. That should be enough theory for anyone. I know I'm worn out just thinking about it.

Slipping on bad karma

"It could happen to anyone: you dropped your cellphone in the toilet." So begins a little discussion by Paul Boutin in today's NY Times on how to dry out your phone.

Interesting as that is, I found myself sidetracked on the various ramifications. It began with, "No, it couldn't happen to me. I never take my cellphone into the bathroom." But then I realized that it really isn't Wun who drops the phone in the toilet; it is the dog or the three-year-old or the drunk, and it is not necessarily by conscious choice that we have these beings in our house. Anyway, I probably could drop the phone in a puddle or the kitchen sink. So I had to admit, much as I don't like to, something like this could happen to me.

But suppose I actually dropped the phone in the toilet. The instructions are, take out the battery, wipe the phone off, and shove it into a jar of uncooked rice, which will act like silica gel to absorb the remaining moisture. This is all well and good - but let's not forget that the phone was in the toilet. Am I now really going to hold that same phone to my head, an inch from my nose and mouth? I don't think so.

So here I am, back at the Verizon store getting an upgrade, spending money I wanted to use for fun things like the electric bill. What am I going to do with the old phone, the one swarming with dangerous things like the things in your peanut butter cookie? It doesn't seem very nice to give it away without a warning - kind of like fooling someone into adopting the horrible cat that shreds couches.

Maybe I should have swabbed the phone with Listerine or vodka, the way the same article tells me to clean DVD's, but I wouldn't have really believed that was adequate. If it were, surgeons wouldn't spend five minutes washing up and then put on gloves and open the door with their elbow.

No, this phone is permanently contaminated, in my book. I am going to have to render it useless. The best way I can think of is to put it on a post and shoot it. That could be fun. I don't own a gun, but I know someone who does. We could videotape the phone exploding. Should take out the battery first, since it probably contains some substance you don't want to unleash on the world. I know there are places to donate useless batteries. . . .

Is there a point here? I suppose I can come up with one. Okay. It's easier to avoid trouble than it is to clean up afterward. Though I will admit it is more exciting to tell people how you dropped your cellphone in the toilet (Don't ask, you say) and then decided to shoot it and weren't used to handling a gun and dropped it and it shot you in the foot. Ha ha. Or you could just hobble around in your cast and say Don't ask in the first place. A broken foot garners a lot of sympathy, though not enough to make up for the pain and inconvenience.

Now that I think this through, Paul Boutin's solution is better. I just hope people are careful to throw out that rice.