Practicing Compassion

Of all the things I've seen about Syrian refugees, this video made me cry. In the face of all the rejection Syrian refugees are receiving, even here in the country that famously welcomes "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore," these people in Germany massed to hold up welcome signs. A small effort, but think how good it must have felt.

Here in the American dream it's easy to harden to all the suffering far from us. But this one has come close to me. 

My first thought was to give some money. $8 I thought, the price of an inexpensive lunch. As I read about the crisis, the figure went up. I was just about to sign up for one of those cool events the elite institutions of my city offer, an Early Fall Supper, $45. I decided to give that money and cook myself an early fall supper that night. 

But where to give the money? This is where we often get just stopped. Charity is so complicated, even the charity rating people get bad ratings. I decided to give it locally, but got confused. One agency doesn't list an email address I can write to to ask what they do with a donation. I am also put off by their huge staff and the lack of a TO. I've decided to give instead to a local church that I know is hands-on active in helping the needy.

Wait, what can you do besides give someone your lunch money? I found my way to this petition to the President to increase the US resettlement of refugees. Obama started with a small number, 10,000, which activated the conservative media, who see it as "an invasion." I'm not kidding. Those of us who see compassion as our central practice need to be activated too. This wealthy country can easily share with the starving.

It gets harder. Other than writing this, how can I give my body, my time? I have to be careful about taking things on. For one thing, I take immune-suppressants and easily get infections. For another, my energy is limited. One thought I have is submitting something to my own church's Justice Action Ministry. But what? . . . . What I really want to do is be in that crowd at the airport holding up a welcome sign. Maybe I can find out how to do that.

The Yin and Yang of Us All

It's a gorgeous July day here, lilies frolicking everywhere in my neighborhood.  Still not too hot after a welcome two days of autumn weather with the visit of a polar vortex.  Turn around, it will be winter.  Sunset is already coming earlier every night. I've been thinking things like that lately, thinking about darkness and light.

Today my thoughts began with an ordinary conversation with Karen, my lymphedema therapist.  (Lymphedema is the dark side of surviving breast cancer.) She asked about my kidney transplant.
~ Going on four years now. Not likely to fail. I may very well die of something else.

Karen has an aunt my age who had a lung transplant a year and a half ago.  It's been tough since, of course.  She aspirated a little something and got pneumonia, and the immune-suppressing drugs you have to take after a transplant (they think, today) made that hard. Yesterday the aunt went to the gym - she had polio as a child, and one leg and hip are a little weak, she shouldn't work out vigorously.  But she did, and she fell.  She is so stubborn, you can't tell her a thing.  On the other hand, that stubbornness is what's kept her alive through all this.

It is probably a truth that your every characteristic has its other side.  Or many other sides, like a bouquet in which some flowers shine with fresh beauty and some glow toxic.  I was interested to come across a writing prompt on the Poets and Writers site:

We've all heard the advice "write what you know," which encourages us to write characters like ourselves or people who are close to us. This week, write from the perspective of a character that is your complete opposite. First, make a list of all the qualities you identify with yourself, and then make a list of qualities on the other end of the spectrum. For example, if you are a woman who lives in the country, write from the point of view of a man who lives in the city. Try to avoid using stereotypes to describe this character's actions or ideas, and instead try to embody this character—climb inside his or her head and live there a while.

Sent this to a writer friend, who replied that it doesn't sound like fun.  I had already avoided it.  It isn't as simple as imagining yourself a big city chick of eighteen, whom you could make rather like yourself, only younger.  The challenge would be to imagine yourself being, oh, athletic, arrogant and anti-intellectual, a triple-A man, the kind of guy you avoided in high school.  And having empathy for that guy, who wants happiness just as much as you.  Hmm.

What is the essence of Zen?

Just now I was sitting at the kitchen table taking a break and reading - I hope I never have to live without a kitchen table and real paper books - and Tashi came up, which she is allowed to do when there's no food on the table. A boundary she likes to test, as she likes to come up when we're doing weekly meds and try to claim the box.

I was done reading and about to go downstairs and put some clothes in the dryer.  When I closed the book, Tashi strolled over and looked at me, and I thought, What does the little cat want? Sometimes something scares her and she needs a good cuddle, and comes over, looks in my eyes, then reaches up to put a paw on my shoulder.  I gather her in.  A few minutes on a shoulder - she's so soft, almost a ragdoll - and then I can settle her on my heart.  When my arms get tired or my back starts to hurt,                                                                     I persuade her down onto my lap.

So I waited to see what she did.  She walked over on her little cat feet and stretched down to put one foot on my thigh, then launched to the ground and off to whatever she had in mind.  I thought, Sometimes you're a mom, sometimes you're a ladder.  Whatever the little cat needs. Within reason.

It's the principle of serving. The Bodhissatva of Compassion is often depicted with many, many arms, and in each hand something useful.  A friend who is the active mother of two little ones recently named off the things she keeps handy:  tissues, cellphone, bandaid, juice box . . . on it goes.  Quan Yin in t-shirt and jeans.

Kanzeon - her name in my tradition - is the compassionate one who hears the cries of the world. In my everyday life it's more like being open to the whispers, receiving so you know what to offer the little cat or your daughter or yourself.  It's right there, I think.  Not that it's simple.

Once a friend and I were walking quietly after lunch through a park.  Jean Marie, who has a degree in horticulture, indicated a tall old pine I'd noticed was somewhat yellowed.  "That needs iron," she said.  She saw the condition and knew what the tree lacked.  It takes noticing.  Mere knowledge is easy to come by these days - I wouldn't be surprised you could snap a picture of the tree, send it to some site, and they'd tell you what kind of tree it is, and what it needs. Strolling quietly and noticing the tree - that takes practice.

Having a heart

The Ship of Compassion
               by Miaoshi, from Zen Women

Night rain washes the mountain cliffs, the dawn greens soaked through.
Sitting I meditate on emptiness, as fresh breezes fill the temple.
Words are inherently empty—and yet still I am fond of brush and ink.
My mind like ashes after the fire—and yet still I am tied to the world.
Window bamboo—empty mind; courtyard pine—innate purity.
The trunk of this lofty green tree, neither inherently form nor no-form.
Between bell and fish-drum, I have yet to grasp the essence of Dharma:
Yet I get a whiff of its fragrance—as if I were aboard
      the Ship of Compassion.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
I can't find the source for the painting above, saved in my files.  If you know who the artist is, please let me know.

I also found a lovely painting with calligraphy describing compassion at this site, the newsletter of the Dharma Rain Center, though I was not able to copy it here.  The description explaining the calligraphy (below in italics) fascinated me.  I believe compassion is in the heart, and equanimity in the mind.  The word "indifference" is used as a synonym for "equanimity," and probably refers to being indifferent to the outcome.  A buddha gives from the heart, knowing she cannot control the outcome, and so has no ego investment in that outcome.  A good example might be giving money to a panhandler who might say she needs food for her children, but looks like she might use it to buy alcohol or drugs.  The important thing is simply the giving.

"Persimmon," painting and calligraphy by Koso Itabashi Zenji, abbot of Dai Honzan Sojiji. Caption: "compassionate equanimity." "Omoiyari" (compassion) is a Japanese word, and "mukanshin" (indifference, equanimity) is Chinese, making a phrase with contrast. The Japanese is soft, wet and intimate, where as Chinese words sounds more abstract, dry, and formal.

Sorry, Doctor is On His Boat and Out of Cellphone Reach

Such opportunities to practice I get from the medical establishment -

1.  I got a reminder robo-call from Millhon Clinic yesterday (Sunday) for an appointment for a mammogram there Tuesday. "No," (I explained to the woman, who was the only clerk left Friday at 5:00 after I had seen the last doctor and nurse still working) "this is diagnostic and Dr. Herrigel said it will be done at Riverside Hospital.  Because this symptom is an emergency."  Obviously I would have to wait three days before Riverside even called me to schedule the test.

Now I have to get up and call the clinic tomorrow, which usually takes a 10-minute wait listening to their ads for their services before you get a human being on the phone, make sure that wrong appointment did get cancelled, more importantly, make sure Riverside got the order.

If I have not heard by, say, 1:00 (after lunch hours)  I will call Riverside, thread my way through their menus, and learn that they never got the order.  Been there. It's not like I'm looking forward to this exam.

2.  I try just now to get into my OSU Transchart, another wonderful invention of the computer age, to check my last labs before I give myself a Procrit shot (brave girl!).  Because once, following the schedule for these shots got my hemoglobin up over 14.  You feel like Supergirl when your blood is that rich, until a terrible medical event ensues.

Can't get on Transchart, though.  It assures me my password is wrong.  I try twice more.  Aieee!  I breathe. In calm, out ease.  I am grateful I started meditating the last time I had breast cancer.  I request a new password.  It tells me it won't be done until next business day. Well, I know OSU Transplant well.  I'll be surprised if it's that fast.

I contemplate reality.

Fact:  The entire medical establishment profoundly desires to take off every three-day weekend, and the whole of Thanksgiving week and Christmas Eve through New Year's Day, and they do.  (Woe betide the person who is hospitalized then.)

Fact:  You better be your own doctor and stay on top of your health, because nobody else is going to.  But I knew that.

Zen practice:  Slow down, breathe deeply, sigh audibly.  Accept reality.  Human nature.  People have to be taught compassion for other beings, and really want to be out to lunch.  And most are.  Unlike other animals.  They are often an inspiration to me.

Caring in a Caveman Society

This is a personal blog, about making my way through life, and I don't often veer into opinion because (a) it attracts trolls, and (b) I've never won an argument yet.  But the whole world affects me, of course. 

I was stirred by reading an article in Tuesday's NY Times, "Low Pay at Weight Watchers Stirs Protest as Stars Rake It In."  This is not so different than the issue of astronomical bonuses for bankers and pathetic wages for the working class, except that it is largely about exploiting women; there are not many male Weight Watcher leaders. (And BTW, not many women CEOs in the largest companies.)  Here's the bit that has me shaking my head:

"It's a female-dominated job, it's in the service industry, and it's caring work," Professor Mastracci said of Weight Watchers.  "Caring work is undervalued..."

Sharon Mastracci is the author of "Breaking Out of the Pink-Collar Ghetto" and teaches at the University of Illinois. Let me repeat that: Caring work is undervalued. Let me change it just a bit:  Compassion is undervalued.

Is it possible to say something sadder about a society?  And it's not just the United States.  It's everywhere  we are not yet freed from the values of patriarchy, which I think of as caveman society, since many of those values grew then, when the strongest men ruled.  These "masculine" values are many, and some are admirable, such as teamwork and courage.  Others run through society like big ugly threads.  They underwrite pornography.  They fire competition for winning, power, wealth, and fame, often with beautiful young women as the prize, and that competition too often leads to ruthlessness.  Over and over someone caught up in it ends up doing ugly things.  Occasionally they get what they deserve.

Lance Armstrong

This is all very personal for me.  I am a woman.  So is my daughter, so are most of my friends, so was my mother and hers before her.  Those in my generation and earlier were taught that we had three career options, if we weren't lucky enough to marry a good provider and have children and be a Happy Homemaker:  teacher, secretary, nurse.  Who knows what many thousands of us might have done if we'd had a chance to see what we could do?  What we wanted to do?

Most of the women I know are in middle-class members of my generation and my daughter's, and most of them  have been involved in caring work, such as child-rearing, homemaking, nursing, support staff, or K-12 teaching.  When caring work is undervalued, it's women that are being undervalued, and women's work: raising children and making homes and caring for the sick - the work that keeps society together while the men make bombs and play political games and decide women can't be priests.

Caring work is the most important work in the world.  Until the men figure that out, we need to be sure we know it for ourselves.  And not be afraid to rock the boat a little in our own lives from time to time, for the good of the world.

Just Like Me

Five of Pentacles from the Rider-Waite Tarot

I have the great good fortune to be taking chi gong with a local teacher I'd heard good things about for years.  It turns out they were right.

It is a small class at the local Rec Center.  It was not labeled "for geezers" but our youngest person looks to be over 50 and the rest of us over 60.  One guy, Mike, is learning to operate a new knee, and his friend Butch just stood there in the circle leaning on a cane for the first couple of meetings; he'd had a stroke that affected one side of his body, and his balance. When we did the tai chi walk, which is very slow and painstakingly balanced, he just walked along with small, slow steps, relying on his cane. 

We were halfway through tonight when I looked across the small circle and realized Butch was not using his cane at all.  He had made remarkable progress.  I smiled.  "Just like me," I thought.  Everyone working to stay even under the onslaught of old age.

Before the class we had been talking about cars, the cars they bought their daughters, how good Oldsmobiles used to be, who couldn't drive a standard shift, like that. These guys are not the professor-or-artist types I happen to spend most of my time with.  I was once told anyone could tell I was a professor (taught at a university, that is) just by looking at me.  I favored those big clunky sandals at the time, with socks, and a long ponytail. But long hair got to be just too much work.  It happens. Anyway, that tickled me at the time.

Across the circle there was Butch, whose goal is to get back enough use of his left arm to play golf again.  I found golf stupendously boring when I tried it, and anyway, I never could hit a ball.  My goal is to find equanimity in the middle of my moodswings, to stay healthy.  Whatever our goals, age is a great leveler.  We are all in the same condition in that room, the lame leading the blind, the blind supporting the lame.  Distinctions of class, gender, education, all that just doesn't apply.

If you haven't tried the "Just like me" meditation I posted on my Facebook Page on November 27, here is the link to it.  It is a two-minute practice in compassion.  I found that doing it even once affected my outlook.  I intend to gear into it the next time my mood is such that I'm finding someone (else) Difficult.

Be Careful What You Want

Tucked-paw restorative yoga

As sometimes happens, a comment made on my blog inspires me as being wise, and something I should write about.  It comes to this:  things often don't go my way.  My way.  The way I like or plan.

Actually, this is very serious in our lives, it's not just about small stuff like getting into that pottery class or having to visit with a difficult person (who might just be a relative).  I've seen people be very stubborn about life and death their way, hang on to life, complaining that it isn't fair for them to die at this age, they don't want to die, they refuse to die.  This is how some people respond to a very bad prognosis, such as metastasized cancer:  I'm not going to let this beat me.  It is sad to be in a group with someone like that and see them try so hard not to accept the inevitable.

We are working on the big issue around here right now, having lost so many people to death the last couple of months.  We will be offering a course at our church in January based on the book Being With Dying. A lot of this will be about accepting our own mortality.  But I was going somewhere else with this that is probably connected somehow....to a documentary we watched last night on Netflix that has me thinking.  It was called Happy.

One of the things I like about watching movies at home is that I can fool around baking cookies at the same time and making notes on my iPad.  I knew that happiness is not found through external goals, such as more- than-enough money, status, things, winning.  But what surprised me is that it depends on the kind of goals you have.  The big three are -

to help others
to grow personally, spiritually
to maintain close, connected relationships

This is so cool - the scientist who talked about this, Richard Davidson, turns out to be a long-time meditator, and friend of our beloved friend, The Dalai Lama, who himself appeared in this documentary, too, explaining how compassion is intrinsic in human nature.  That gives rise to the interesting possibility that you don't have to work on compassion - just vow not to get in your own way. 

Touching Base

[image: Thanks to Chris Hardin for suggesting this illustrated quote as a fitting homage to Teena Price, who was a wild flower.]

I have relatives who don't love me the way I wish they would, don't you?  The weather has been too hot, the air quality is so bad I have to wear a mask outside, my moods are up and down, I'm having an awful time with sleep, and I have to wear elastic on three of my four limbs, and sometimes I hate all this...... But today I am shrugging these things off (all but the depression, to be truthfull).  The universe has been giving me opportunities to see my problems in perspective.

As I wrote previously, Saturday night was a wrenching memorial service for a friend who died last Thursday.  This morning a beloved friend was at our front door to tell us that another friend died yesterday.

Greg Houston was 61 years old and seemingly in good health.  His truck went off the road for no apparent reason, and he was dead by the time the medics got there.  Greg and his wife of over 40 years are important to us, and to many, many other people, because they are lovely people who exemplify a life of compassion and generosity.  For a couple of years Greg has come over periodically to help Tom with projects around the house; it was a joy to me to hear them working together, both so polite and careful.

Yesterday Tom got an e-mail from Greg asking if he'd like help with anything.  The subject line was, as always, Touching Base.  If you want to know what it means to "lead with your heart," Greg was a fine example; Greg actually touched base; he looked at people and saw what we needed.  And he didn't just say, "Call me if you need anything."  He offered specifically to come and help with projects, and did that many times.

Many people had to be called about Greg's death, because many people love someone like that, and he was a pillar of the church.  I expect his service to attract hundreds of people, and we will all weep.

I want to say something very quietly here about the contrast with Teena's death and her service that I wrote about yesterday.  She was 76 and had been ill and uncomfortable with advancing COPD for years.  She took months to die, gasping for air.  Her death was a release from suffering, and I was glad she finally got to rest.  You feel different when someone who dies is much younger than you and vital, and it is an accident.

And it is logical that many people loved Greg and Judy.  But is it logical that so few loved Teena?  I don't know.  It's not uncommon, but it feels wrong.

I have heard from several friends who relate strongly to the post I wrote yesterday that talked about the stigma we feel if we are mentally ill or just, like Teena, unconventional.  I have thought about how many Buddhists work in prisons, often as volunteers, where they know the suffering is acute, and they might be able to offer someone a little peace.  Many others work in hospices, spending time I'm sure with people like Teena, whose own families don't want to be there, or can't.

But out in the social world there is, generally, a sharp division between the people we find easy to love and the people we avoid, or downright dislike.  Too often, people bond in groups on the basis of their mutual loathing for Sarah Palin or their mother or people with brown skin or Christians or those that have not accepted their idea of God. 

Teena was disliked for exactly the qualities that some of us liked about her:  she was open and honest, she was an original.  She said what she thought without regard for the niceties.  She was generous to me and never in my life hurt my feelings, and I never saw her say anything mean.  But she was outspoken, and had an attitude about that.

I don't know what she might have said to another woman in the church who just a few months ago told me she didn't want Teena anywhere near her private birthday celebration.  Teena had wandered into the room where it was being held, having come to church to make a payment on her pledge.  She was in a wandering condition then, liked to go spend time at Whole Foods talking to anyone who would listen, and came to church at every opportunity.  But she was not invited to that small party, not that she should have been; it was private.

I asked that friend, "You have issues with Teena?"

She said coarsely, "Doesn't everyone?"

I said, "I don't."

I didn't like that, but it didn't rankle me until Teena died.  Then I found myself furious with that woman (who has some annoying qualities of her own).  She felt entitled to hate Teena, as I gather some of Teena's children may have, too.  I was afraid that woman would show up at Teena's service, for she is another person who hangs around the church a lot.  I knew I would not contain my anger at her if she did, and I would probably regret that and it would create an uncomfortable break in our social set. But she didn't come.

I wish Rev. Mark had thought to focus Teena's service on our need to soften our hearts toward "the people we find difficult to love," a phrase he used once in a service to encourage us to say aloud or silently during the Silence the name of someone we love - or find difficult to love.  That was valuable to me.  It let me whisper, that Sunday morning, my own father's name.  My father was a shit to me, but the extent of his venomous hatred was only revealed to me after he died. When I found out that he was giving my siblings huge sums of money, and none to me because I was "mentally unstable," I was beyond hurt and angry.  I was the only kid who drove to Zanesville to visit him a few months before his death on Father's Day.  We took him and my mother out to eat.  He gave every appearance of loving our company that day.  There you are.  Life with alcoholics.  They hate you behind your back.

But saying his name in church let me open my heart that little bit and begin the long, long journey of learning not to hate him (and the rest of them, in fact).  Speaking his name with a wish that he rest peacefully let me begin the work of adjusting to that painful reality.

Some of us who are wounded have to work to open our hearts at all, for anyone.  Almost everyone needs to work on opening it all the way, to a cheating spouse, to a neglectful mother or a father who raped you or the man who killed your son in a fight.  Maybe cultivating this willingness to love is actually the fundamental practice.  Jesus thought so.  If enough of us did it, there would be no more war.  Because there would be no more concept of "enemy."  Maybe there would be no more unhappiness.  Because anger and hatred, that's hell, you know it is.

Imagining Old Age

I have been meditating about another way to think about aging, a new paradigm. And my heart is stirred this morning by reading in the NY Times "Metropolitan Diary" about a woman whose sister created suicide because "she couldn't face being sixty."  How very sad.  But very American.

The way we think here is that life is a bell-shaped curve, up from being useless to becoming an energetic adult and working and being productive and active and always youthful and energetic, then aging, a steep downhill fall to being useless again.

[Here, picture that curve in red.]

We may not be aware of this picture in our minds, but we do, as a culture, think that way.  It is a way that emphasizes "productivity," in terms of earning money and other benefits, like fame and power, which are seen as good, rather than something to be avoided.

But you can imagine the course of a human life differently.  You can see life as a slow, gradual climb into wisdom and spiritual depth.
[Imagine that line as a pilgrimage, going gradually up toward light.]

You can think that at the same time as we grow in compassion and wisdom, our life unfolds into the world.

[Like so many colored strands of thread moving into the world like rivers, curling around, embracing it.]

That is a life of connecting and giving that can become richer in a peaceful old age.

Offering birds bits of yarn in a suet feeder for their nests

How to do Good

When I follow a blog it's because I find there a real person living their life. A young mother with sick kids, a middle-aged cancer survivor with a sense of humor, a Zen student thinking about big life changes -- they have to do with lives I've lived.  From here, their lives are full of energy and interesting. 

There isn't much action in my life -- I'm sick again, depressed again.  I balance enduring pain with taking pain medication, my stomach is upset by the antibiotic, I can't drive, I'm lonely, I'm afraid I'm going to have to have that major surgery after all - I hear you clicking on to another blog as I write.  No one wants to listen to the internal struggles of that old person, or the same old frustration, the small triumphs of patience with the medical system, the envy of younger people who have goals and plans.  It's a bitch.  But for me, struggling to come up with some positive spin, some way to cheer you up so I don't depress you, has become too hard.  So has enduring the positive thinking of people who still believe you can do anything with enough determination. They don't know what neurochemical depression is, period.

Last week we stopped by the church to see if my pink rain-jacket was there.  It was the most useful and best coat I ever had - bright warm pink with a multicolored flower lining to the hood - I always got comments on how cheerful it was. And the arms were cut big, so it would go on over the fleece jackets I have to wear right now, since I can't get things on and off over my head because of the broken right arm. Worse, it had in a pocket my elastic gauntlet, a half-glove I wore on the right hand to minimize swelling - that's the arm with lymphedema. That coat is somewhere, but we've looked everywhere we go and can't find it.

I ran into Rev. Mark in the hall, and he asked me, "How are you doing?" like he meant it.  Maybe this is what makes a person a minister.  That ministering to the people who have dropped out of life and become invisible.  I told him, how it's hard, and we had a five or ten minute talk.  Mark is a trained professional.  Like other ministers in our church he doesn't dispense wisdom, he engages with you, shares and listens.  I was so down - sick as hell again with a UTI, discouraged - I could feel the bolt of healing it gave, like a shot of warm light.  That and a homemade dinner from an understanding friend got me through the week.

If I could give one lesson from old age to those who have not yet been dropped down on this foreign plain, it would be, be open to seeing and hearing your old mom, your grandma, the 90-year-old lady next door.  To do that you need to be open to your own discomfort with the realities of aging and sickness, your realization that you too could be suddenly disabled, confused, too tired to shower.  Just listen.  Don't do that reactive thing of rushing on or saying some imperious thing that will fix it.  (What you need to do is . . . ) Maybe that half-deaf old lady has done everything possible for her loss of hearing and there isn't a good fix.

If you want this in spiritual terms, it is love, or it is paying attention.  Maybe they are both the same thing.
~~~~~~
p.s. Then there's persistence. Tom insisted we stop by the Spine and Sport clinic, who said on the phone they didn't have the coat.  And there it was, hanging on a hanger on the coat rack. No gauntlet in the pocket.  So.

When Giving Works

Gift-wrapped cat

Something I read this morning set me thinking about social welfare programs - a comment that they so often do no good, sometimes seem to positively harm. Does that mean we shouldn't try?  I don't know.

The fact that humans exist messes with all life on this planet. Our big brains and tool-making capacity gives us a power a sweet little fox, say, may not have. A simple example, we can make more food than we need. We can store food, transport it. We can have compassion, we can even foster compassion in ourselves by deliberate spiritual practices, and maybe in others via teaching, maybe in our children.  


As I think about this I think about recent programs in which dentists with time to spare have set up free dentistry days, and been mobbed.  This happened here in Columbus, and more recently in another city where a whole lot of dentists banded together to give people the basic care needed so they would not be in pain - fillings, extractions, even root canals.  That so many people come to these events and were willing to wait all day for help is evidence of the desperate poverty that exists right here among us.


This is private giving.  I think it works better than systems like, say, first tax me, then use the money to create a bureaucracy to provide free dental care (but only to those who qualify), and so on.  That is, spontaneous giving can be less wasteful, more direct, more skillful, because the recipients want the care. 


But even private giving goes awry if we are not skillful.  Maybe you can think of examples that have happened to you.


So here I want to recount one of the generous, touching gifts that happened to me during my long recovery from my transplant.  I'm not going to, because there were a number of them, each a lovely surprise and exactly what I needed.  One was a book dropped off by a friend.  Others were gifts of homemade food, pretty elementary.  Each of these came from a woman who knew what someone needs in recovery, and knew how to give it in a way that didn't burden me or upset my rest.  Partly, that's learned cultural behavior, I suppose, manners.  Some gifts were from people I'd never expect that from, surprises. 

The only place I'm going with this is to contemplate how very nice individual caring and giving can be, how hard it is to devise a social system that works.  No line of argument here, just some thinking aloud.

Needs service

Living well, living good

"Living well" usually means, I think, having a life rich in excellent material things and sensory delights - great restaurants, very good clothes, a villa on a hillside in the Mediterranean, faithful servants.  It used to make me think of luscious bouquets of cut flowers until I read about how cut flowers come our way now by jumbo jet from sweat-shop greenhouses.  Maybe that flower thing is a good example of the difference between living well and living consciously.  Living well is done on the backs of the poor.  And without regard for the cost to the earth.  Somebody mines those diamonds.

But my example today is so much smaller, and takes place in a pretty humble Mexican restaurant, where one waitress struggled to serve our long table of friends gathered for after-church brunch.  I happened to sit near Rick, whose vegetarianism grows out of his compassion for animals.  We talked about his list of vegan restaurants here in town, which is a surprise to me; Columbus is often called Cowtown (see photo above), a hit on not being too hip. He gave me a piece he copied recently about the cost to the environment of the American addiction to lawns.  I thought for the hundredth time about how we could dispense with our stupid lawn.  At least we hire an organic service, a guy who cares about the earth, and whom we really like.

Then comes time to package up what we didn't eat of our meals, which are always too large here in America - you know about that, I bet, how obesity has become a national problem.  Think about that.  Reminds you of the degenerate Romans and their vomitoriums.  The waitress brought me a little styrofoam box; what was left of my lunch will be my lunch tomorrow.  And for about the hundredth time I thought about bringing my own plastic containers to restaurants.  I told Rick, "Styrofoam is a blight on the environment."  He nodded, wrapping a piece of quesadilla in a bit of tinfoil.

Now, why wouldn't I carry a few Glad boxes in the van?  We eat out - at modest places - at least once a week, and I usually bring food home.  And I usually shake my head at the expense of styrofoam, which is made of dino juice, I believe, and involves a lot of manufacturing and is slow to degrade.

Why don't I do that?  Because I would feel self-conscious doing it.  It's bad enough to not drink in America, which our movies tell us was founded on alcohol and greed, and still seems to live up to that model at times. . . .

But I digress.  So I'm going to stop here and go put a few containers in the van, and then sit down to watch the evening news, which will show me much worse problems than my own small fascinating problems with principled nonconformity. . . . Meanwhile, I'm wondering if our zoning will let us have a herd of sheep in the front yard.