Making Do With Less

I first heard the term "paperless kitchen" more than ten years ago. My friend, who was in Simple Living, had committed to that. The thing she did was pick up lots and lots of paper napkins anytime she got fast food.  It intrigued me, how she confused "paperless" with "paying for paper." Kind of like when you quit smoking and then borrow cigarettes from everyone else. It's not about not buying paper; it's about not using it.

Recently it occurred to me out of nowhere that going paperless in my kitchen was a good idea, that my paper towels were made from trees, trees which, if let to live would be forests cleaning the air. My daughter is studying forestry; that makes me think about these things.

I had plenty of rags, so I put them in a pretty bowl by the kitchen sink where the paper towels used to sit.  I was surprised how annoying it was at first. It highlighted the fact that any habit change is difficult, the older the habit, the harder.  I'd been grabbing a paper towel for decades. Now I had to pick the right size rag, and discard the yucky ones and hang the other ones to dry before they go down the chute. Eventually I had to wash them in with the other towels. All this is not work, but it was irritating at first. Change is.

There is a fallacy American advertising pounds on in these end times in which a great many women work and then come home and do everything at home.  The fallacy is that you can buy something that will redeem this life by saving "precious seconds," something like one-swipe mascara (I'm not making this up). Every one of these solutions adds to the landfill. Don't believe them. You don't have a life by saving seconds. What people do with extra seconds is watch more TV.

Like everything else I discover, I'm a late adopter. Lots of people are already into this paperless thing. Here's a nice article, for instance. Obviously, if you work at it, your rags can even be pretty. You can even buy rags (a thought that astonishes me) from a website called, you guessed it, Paperless Kitchen. Their rags are sort of sturdier paper towels made from sustainable plant cellulose and, importantly, are new. It seems to me this is not a very ecological solution.  New rags involve growing and harvesting those plants, manufacturing them, transporting them, which wears down the highways and pollutes the air.  Like that.

As we say in Zen, pay attention.

Appreciating the Least Thing

Impatiens self-seeded by my sidewalk

The moon is serenely shining up in the sky, and she is alone in all the heavens and on the entire earth; but when she mirrors herself in the brilliant whiteness of the evening dews which appear like glittering pearls broadcast upon the earth from the hand of a fairy,--how wondrously numerous her images! And is not every one of them complete in its own fashion? This is the way in which an enlightened mind contemplates God and the world.  God is immanent in the world and not outside of it; therefore, when we comprehend the secret of the "little flower in the crannied wall," we know the reason of this universe.
Soyen Shaku
Zen for Americans

The above is a description of the panentheism of Shin, a Buddhist sect that incorporates features of Shinto, an ancient Japanese nature religion in whose internet  manifestation I've been wandering this morning.  There I found the amulets below, which you can buy to protect your pet.  The love of our animal companions has become obvious with social media, which sometimes seem dominated by pictures of cats.  (Guilty as charged.)  My own UU church has a group devoted to compassion for animals; many American Buddhists don't eat meat out of that compassion, following the precept to do no harm.  I notice that many of the same people campaigning for mercy to animals are also involved with recycling, reuse, and sharing.

 It is also interesting to me that amulets are traditionally returned after a year to the temple, to be burned in a ritual way, part of the respect for all phenomena that also causes the temple to sell recycle bags.

There seems to me to be lots of room in this country for a religion that supports the love of nature.  In fact, the warming of our climate, finally agreed upon by every major scientific group, is telling us we need to cherish nature much more than we do, and stop cutting down trees to manufacture disposable (paper) towels.  When I was a girl, they didn't exist.  My mother used rags, like everyone else, made from worn-out clothes and linens not good enough to go in a quilt.

We are meant to extend the same kind of caring to ourselves, as well.  Americans - overworked, badly fed, sick from spending our whole lives sitting - have a special need to adopt self-care in the face of commercial interests that want you to think a powerful new car or great vacation or ED pill or new shoes or bacon pretzel burger or more money or winning the game will make you happy.  Not so.  Not for long. 

An alternative to the dissatisfied consumer life is the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson referred to above:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

To entirely understand a flower, root and all, qualifies as an epiphany, or awakening, if you like.  It's a grander awakening to understand ourselves the very same way.  For this, you have the serious practice of zazen.
~~~~~~~~~~
p.s.  Or course, I always notice when the word "man" is used to mean "humankind," which would include the, uh, fair sex, woman.  This dates from times when women indeed had no civil rights, and were seen as sexual objects and helpmeets.  I didn't have a chance to talk with Lord Tennyson about this. 

Sitting in the Lap of Luxury

Ahhh . . . we are back in what we think of as civilization. On our tenth day without power, it came back. We had prepared for this by emptying, turning off, and cleaning the frig, and throwing the circuit breaker that has the AC on it. We'd had power for a few minutes on day two; then the transformer across the street caught fire, and we all went out again, and stayed out. My theory is that a dozen or a hundred houses in our neighborhood suddenly started grabbing power all at once, for air conditioning especially (it's been 100 degrees here for several days - in the shade). It was awful not to have fans to cool the house down at night.  Even if you had, there were nights when the temperature stayed above 80.  That's different for us.

Many of us who fancy ourselves educated people, spiritual people with better things to do, confessed to severe TV withdrawal by the time it was done. Basically, I wanted to see the NBC evening news, as always, and hear them talk about our dire, desperate straits here in mid-America. I saw that tonight.  It has been the warmest year in recorded history here in America.  The drought has farmers despairing. This is not just our problem; those of us enjoying the luxuries of the modern age have changed the climate for the entire planet.  No one can think now that it's a theoretical question.

Saturday night I watched the news, then something called "The Closer" that features a histrionic petite blonde Southern Belle as a chief of police. Not feminism's finest representative; though she does have moxie. Personally, I think you can't be a cute, emotional blonde and be taken seriously.  It's fantasy, after all.

 Then I watched a House rerun that I had never seen. It was gorgeous in high-def on our flat-screen TV. I liked it so much I watched another one.  I went to bed replete.  Gorged on 3 1/2 hours of TV, less than the average American kid watches on a typical day.

This whole thing has been a wake-up for me, what Buddhists call a dharma gate, meaning an opportunity to realize the truth about reality. The truth of my reality was that I used electricity just as much as I wanted. I dry my clothes with it instead of hanging them out.  I wash dishes with it.  Before this I liked to keep the house at 76 during the day in summer, and cooled to 73 at night so I could sleep the way I like to, windows closed (horrible allergies, it's true). But once the near-hurricane winds went through, I didn't even have a single yard light, nothing, nothing. Most people also lost their cable TV, internet, and land line.  The amount of food that had to be thrown away was sickening.

Where does my electricity come from? Men mining coal. I know that.  I was one mile underground in a coal mine once, researching a book. It is dangerous. The miners were much cleaner than Richard Avedon's series of miners "In the American West."  If you click on the link to look at those portraits, be aware that they are huge, maybe 3x5 feet, and were all taken on white backgrounds that Avedon and his assistants went to a lot of trouble to hang on the sides of barns.  The impact of whole galleries hung with them is amazing.

The coal trains pass just two blocks from our house on their way up to the power plant.  We love the sound of the whistles in the night, one long, two short, one long I think it is.  The sound a train makes on the rails, clackety-clack. There's a whole sort of romance about trains in American music.  The open cars are heaped with coal, you can see it, sitting in a long line of cars idling, waiting for the train to pass. 

Elsewhere in Ohio, and many other places, coal is strip mined.  This photo is of such land being "reclaimed" as required by laws that the mine owners consider rapacious - note the absence of anything like a mature tree.  An ecosystem is not restored  overnight.

This is not an abstract issue - where electricity comes from.  It comes from the work of people who do not earn nearly as much as college presidents and politicians and other people who have their suits custom-made, and smile and shake hands for a living. 

An hour of electric luxury takes hours of hard labor.  Mining is unionized, I understand, but much of the labor in this country is not, and is done for $8.25 an hour by someone who doesn't even get health insurance or pension, certainly not if they work for Apple or Walmart.  That's why Steve Jobs died worth at least 6 BILLION DOLLARS.  He had a genius for design, but a lot of people do; his fortune was built on the work of other hands, many of them outscourced to Foxconn.(Follow that link to refresh your memory on the suicides at that Chinese sweatshop.)  And yes, I love my iPad, and my Dell computer, too.

Thinking about climate change, about what enables the American way of life, about what my luxury takes from the earth; being aware of the cost to other beings and the earth when I switch a light on or run up the electric garage door - is this spirituality?

I'm afraid so.

The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Health

Common snapdragon

And I just did it - I acted as my own doctor.

I don't mean the kinds of odd things we come up with that stand outside Western medicine, which is, generally speaking, based on science, on studies and lab results and radiology and chemistry.  I do plenty of things for my health outside that province, like oil of rosemary to perk up and eucalyptus to sleep, yogurt, apple cider vinegar and garlic and d-Mannose, and lately, wearing cotton on the advice of yoga teachers.  Four liters of water a day and various spiritual practices, including a church. And more that Western science is just catching on to, like singing, laughing, getting enough sleep, and making art.  And I have several doctors and take many prescribed pills on schedule and get blood draws.......you know.  Almost 70 here, basically you work on staying alive.

But what I'm rejoicing today about is a triumph of Western medicine.  Basically, getting established with a doctor I  can get in to see, and who will listen to me and, sometimes, go along with what I want.  Yes!

What I wanted from my kidney doctor was that he reassess the immunosuppressants I take to keep my body from rejecting the kidney Laura Brown gave me 20 months ago.  Why?  Because I can't spend five minutes outside without my allergies getting even worse than they are when I stay home in filtered air.  I figured that having my whole immune system suppressed might be behind this, though it's true that here in midwestern America we have had so much in bloom all the time this year that everyone's allergies are worse.  (What, you don't believe in climate change?)

I actually have two kidney docs, one at the research hospital that did the transplant and a private doctor.  They usually alternate, each one seeing me once a year.  But I thought the right one to talk to was my private-practice doctor, Dr. D.  He is that unusual thing, an extrovert who enjoys talking to patients and telling us what he knows.  He's just about the only guy left who does the hospital - there is a vogue now for something called a hospitalier who works there and never saw you before in his life.  So I waited a month to get in with Dr. D, and saw him this morning.

I do my best to look respectable when I visit a doctor, and to seem reasonable, though I do have orange shoelaces. And Tom goes with me.  Whether you like reality or not, they respect men a little bit more.  Tom testifies to my truth and helps me remember things.  I gave my pitch, and Dr. D quizzed me about other symptoms.  I hadn't complained about the GERD which has been constant since the transplant.  He knew about the multiple UTIs.  And I reminded him I am almost 70.  Said that before, didn't I?  "I'm an old lady," I said, without even blushing.  Because I know that, generally, it is good to lower doses as you age. 

He looked over his printouts on my labs, and talked a while about how there are some newer drugs than Rapamune, which a lot of people don't tolerate; and how stable I've been since the transplant.  He thought maybe my dose could be lowered.  He takes pains to work closely with the research docs, worked there once himself.  So he called that doctor and then called me.  Yes, the doctor called me himself, they can dial the phone it turns out, rather than having the message filter through a nurse or two.

I actually couldn't have implemented the changes they are prescribing without a new prescription.  And I wouldn't have done it on my own - kidney rejection could kill me.  They want a new blood draw after a week, and I would have wanted that if I'd thought to ask. The fact is, I need professional help to be my own doctor sometimes.  But this wouldn't have happened at all if I didn't pay attention to my body and act on its behalf; that's what being your own doctor means.
 
It turned out that Research Dr. agreed.  Lower the Rapamune and lower the Neoral a little, too.  He told Dr. D, "I didn't realize how old she was."  Of course I am way too cool to be grinning as I write that.