Leaving Zen Mountain

I was just looking over a recent post about goals and time management--- I titled it "A useless post" with some irony, because it basically discouraged endeavor---though that is a very useful counterpoint to The American Way of Striving.  But I do try, as I come out of the hardest year of my life and awaken to the 10,000 things that need done around here.

First, a progress report.  Some scarves handled, though there is more to be done, and you can't see the dresser top yet.  Got the kitchen cleaned, though it must have made me uncomfortable, because I immediately strewed things all over the counters again. (A happy marriage is one in which you basically agree on the level of housekeeping.)  We became greener by mixing our own general cleaning spray from white vinegar and a few drops of dish detergent - saved a lot of money, reused the spray bottle, which would probably last seventy millenia in the Pacific Garbage Patch.  And I am using my right hand more all the time.  Today I was able to put a compression sleeve on, and thank God I didn't get cellulitis in this whole thing.  Bladder infection conquered, though I will spare you the descriptive details. Even had a couple of good nights' sleep.

Voted yesterday---we have "early" voting in Ohio; like absentee voting, but in person.  I tell you, I feel good when I vote.  It's a mess, our government, but it's our mess.  Don't think I didn't think about the Arab Spring, and all the people in this world who will lay down their lives for a chance to have a say in their government.

Seems my mind is available now for higher things.  And we went to the Unitarian church we belong to last night for a presentation by a Sufi teacher and scholar, Neil Douglas-Klotz.  This was my introduction to this mystical element in Islam, unless you count the movie Meetings with Remarkable Men, a great documentary which you can watch free here.  (This is a slow-moving film, but toward the end there is a section of Gurdjieff Dancers that is breath-taking.)  I also know one of his senior students, Elizabeth Reed, a well-known psychotherapist and spiritual leader here in Columbus.

Neil's approach is that of a scholar, a linguist, opening out the meaning of Jesus' words as they would have been spoken in Aramaic.  Awesome.  He is also a teacher and practitioner, and led us in two Aramaic chants; they call these "body prayers."  I was just seeing the end of my longtime Zen path, a sense that it had become dry for me - and more disappointment in practitioners and teachers.  I was aware of the empty space this was leaving, but I know that when something leaves your life, something else will come in out of the darkness, and I was waiting.  Here it was.

For years now the machismo of the Japanese tradition has bothered me.  Example: recently we watched a film on Dogen, an important Zen mystic and teacher.  It showed the monks meditating as Dogen died.  When he did die, seated upright among them, one wailed "Master!" and the leader shouted "Continue!" meaning shut up, swallow that grief, meditate.  Can't go there, folks. Do not see grief as an illusion or grasping.  Can't stand it when people are hit by the teacher's big stick. Can't go with meditating 14 hours a day, welcoming pain, keeping my eyes on the ground when the cherry trees are in bloom. I think it's wrong.

It's taken me a while to catch up to myself on this.  It's been a couple of years, 4, 5? since my last poetry chapbook was published, Leaving Zen Mountain.  The title poem had been inspired by a visit to a very formal (as in form-is-all) Zen center and monastery, where I was taken aback by the levels of heirarchy expressed in robes, and the cold and unwelcoming approach to visitors.  So as usual, I'm the last one to read my own story.

The gateless box

Last night we invited our Zen group here to watch the PBS special on Buddha's life. Some of the people who came were new to us. All said at the door, "I don't have a television, myself." Sigh. Tom and I manifest our flaws. I was glad to see this touched upon in the special - that even Buddha himself could get angry. I liked that. Just that afternoon I'd gotten too tired and had a temper flareup. Stupid. After that I found myself sitting and trying to dispense with the sense in my ribs and throat of having had an adrenalin spurt. Then I talked to myself about just accepting how I am, adrenalized and all. I don't think this is some form of mental illness; rather it's pretty much what we humans do. It just takes years of practice to notice yourself doing it.

We enjoyed having people here, just the right amount of people, the right people, bringing the right snacks. I was amazed to see Sheba take up position in one of the little blue armchairs and watch the program. This is the cat that six months ago, even a month ago, left the room when anyone came into the house. We talked about how much cats like meditators.

Let's see - what was I going to write about? Oh, maybe how I am at a fruitful time right now; every day or two I clean up some little mess, some square foot of my territory. The other day it was my closet floor. Took out the pictures-we-don't-know-what-to-do-with-but-are-grasping. Put all my purses in the right size plastic box. Put shoes on top of said box. It was awe-inspiring. We've been here seven years; I am beginning to address the problem of what to do with the pictures. A couples project. Ah yes.

Today my spring nest-cleaning went even better. Calmed and softened, refreshed by being with meditators, I realized I could take a different approach to the archive box that has been sitting on my study floor nagging me, haunting me, insisting it had priority over more interesting things to do. Sorting these old papers was a job that was going very slow.

Wait, I thought, isn't there room in these file cabinets? I refer to two four-drawer file cabinets, the ugly old functional kind that you thought you needed at one time. Actually, they're very pretty, now that I look at them with gratitude. For these cabinets yielded two empty drawers to me, and I filled them with the stuff from the box.

You might say that wouldn't satisfy you, and I can't blame you. You might say all I have done is hide the papers from myself. But it's bigger than that, somehow. After months of hating that box, I saw my way around it - an obstacle that's not an obstacle, really. Its solidity melted as I realized that the only reason those old papers mattered was because I could see them. Now they became nothing but a bunch of old papers in two drawers, to be handled at some other time. Or not.

But before I closed the drawers and took the box downstairs to Tom, who's been wanting an archive box, I pulled out a fat file titled humor in red like that. I remembered how I went through a spell of writing short humor pieces after I got my PhD, a sort of finding my voice again.

I liked the first one, which is about my negative attitude toward pain. Reading it, I was pleased to be reminded that in 1996 I suffered keenly from fibromyalgia. A combination of years of sitting, Flexaril at night, and the slow magical unstressing of personal growth has made fibromyalgia pain no longer an issue in my life, though I left it in the piece, because it worked so well there. That was then; happily, this is now.
[image: a type of box, from this creativity website]

How I Cleaned up This Mess, Part 2.

Well, here it is, the exercise I found in Brenda Shoshanna's Zen Miracles:

Enjoy persevering at something. Pick one activity that requires a great deal of perseverance and do it for a designated amount of time every day this week. Whether or not you are in the mood to do it, do it anyway. When the time is over, put it down. Then pick it up the next day. See what happens as a result of this to you, and to the activity. (p. 45)

At the beginning I did something Dr. Shoshanna didn't talk about - I defined the task more carefully. You learn to do this in management by objectives, and in my case, in working with classroom curricula. A task like "clean up this mess" is too amorphous. Rather automatically I made it specific: "Get this stuff off my study floor and stored properly."

Another thing I did that I think was important was bite off a really small amount of time. I know myself. I wouldn't do an hour a day. Even half an hour felt like too much, felt like a burden. Fifteen minutes is enough time for me to waste time. I vowed to work only ten minutes a day. Anyone can do that, I thought. That turned out to be good. Inbetween work sessions I found myself planning just how I would handle the next box.

What an amazing amount I accomplished in a total of only an hour, split into ten-minute intervals. I sorted huge boxes of photographs into Tom's and J's, and a small box of unknowns that can be examined at leisure some time. These boxes are marked and stored where they ought to be. I collected our old semi-functional slide projectors and cassettes and gave them to Cat Welfare, where they may appeal to someone who practices archaic photography. The study floor is clean. Basically, the mess as I defined it is cleaned up.

Here's the interesting thing that happened the first day: I got so much momentum going I really didn't want to stop. But I looked at the book, which said to stop when the time was over, and I did. That gave me momentum for the next time - I knew what I was about to do. Each time I found myself making quick decisions, not wasting time, which would have been very easy to do with things of sentimental interest like photographs. But I was clear in my own mind that I was not scrapbooking or figuring out who was in a photograph just now, none of that. I was getting those boxes off my study floor.

As I worked, many other projects occurred to me, and I actually did a couple of them. Gave all the houseplants what they needed, good locations, fertilizer, cleaned them up. Took this year's dead outdoor plants into the garage. Got caught up on the recycle. I saw that the "messes" I worry about, in closets and the laundry room and the garage, are just separate organizing tasks, not so important. Happily for me, what I see as disorder doesn't bother Tom at all. I happen to like my socks folded a certain way in the drawer. That's just a preference. It is my preference, though, and I learned more about that as I worked. I noticed that my yen for neatness fits into that part of my heritage that is German; I remembered how my mother cleaned, and how my father kept the house up immaculately. How my brother always kept his house spotless, what a good housekeeper my sister has always been. This is something I don't need to rebel against.

Doing this exercise worked on a much larger scale for me. Toward the end of the week the thought popped into my head, I shouldn't be putting all this energy into organizing stuff - I should be doing this with my work. My writing, that is, my work as a poet and writer publishing beyond this blog. I thought, I've been making way too much of this household thing. It's just stuff. In other words, worrying about it was functioning as a distraction from something more important in my life.

Just at this point I came across a breathtaking poem by Matthew Dickman via a friend's blog. Then the friend surprised me with Dickman's new book. I spontaneously decided to read one of Dickman's poems every day. I had a new project, a very easy one, and one that is leading me out into the world of contemporary poetry. Sometimes it seems as though the universe is watching, and has decided to do something nice for you.

Organizing the mind

[photo: The beloved critic John Leonard showing us what a working study looks like.]
This morning I knew I had to get back to my usual meditation. I felt scattered, full of ideas and reactivity. Specifically, I reacted when Tom suggested we move some wire shelving he built into my toy closet.

This closet is one of the luxuries of my life I take for granted. I don't take them all for granted. Not a day goes by that I don't thank whatever God may be that I do not have to work anymore - how did I ever survive it? I sweet-talk the robot vacuum cleaner, and load the dishwasher with gratitude. But closets? I'm used to them. My study, for instance, has a whole wall of closet. I like to think the doctor who built this house put this in for his wife, who I like to think had a lot of clothes. It was the fifties, after all. What we did was buy clothes.

I don't have a lot of clothes, so one half of this closet houses my toys - drums, paints, drawing pads, unfinished crewel embroidery, drawings and paintings and photographs, seeds collected at Grailville . . . you get the idea. The kind of toys we enjoy as grown-ups.

Over coffee this morning Tom brought up the fact of this shelving, which sits in the guest room awaiting my command. The idea is to put it in my toy closet and make everything much more accessible - there are boxes under boxes put there when we moved in, boxes that are a mystery to me. He had a friend coming by who could do the heavy lifting.

Immediately Don't want! sprang full-blown into my head the idea of the Right Way to Do This. It was muddled in with a sense of embarrassment - surely I couldn't let Greg see this mess! I would need to at least get in there and remove the little boxes before he came, and where would I put them? What I should do is buy a bunch of organizing stuff at The Container Store . . .

Now wait, I said to myself, what's all this about? Isn't this actually just what closets look like? I realized I don't actually know. I don't get much chance to look in other people's closets. But I bet hardly anyone has every single thing stacked and labeled like . . . ah-ha, like my parents did, compulsive workers. Then I wondered whether my reaction had something to do with always wanting A's? A in everything and, as my father once said, "Why aren't they A pluses?"

I could see that the whole thing was one of those half-thought constructions brought up by a knee-jerk No, a slight aversion, a sense of threat. And fifteen years ago it would have ended there, with my refusal, I'm too busy right now. This time I caught myself and marveled. Because moving the shelving is not about how good a person I am, or what someone thinks of me. It is about nothing but hey, moving the shelving. My kneejerk reaction was the kind of mysterious weirdness we can see in our friends and spouses, but usually not in ourselves. Unless we meditate.

I am not talking about destressing with a mantra, or doing a visualization, or the practice of lovingkindness meditation, all good things. What I'm talking about is plain old ordinary sitting meditation. It is taught in all the Buddhist traditions, this sitting still and following the breath, watching our thoughts, desires, fears rise and letting them pass like clouds in the sky. Practicing not grasping. Practicing just being here with ourselves and whatever arises in us.

I am not at all sure about the division often made between the psychological and the spiritual. I am just one person, with these things muddled in my mind and gut. I have found that meditation leads me time and again to what you would call psychological insight, as in this case. Then again, once I see the snafluffle I have built in my mind, and let it fall away, something spacious and relaxed appears. That feels spiritual. It is very nice when it happens.

Yesterday I wrote about some of the ways women nourish themselves spiritually. And certainly none of us should beat ourselves up for falling away from our practice. That's not productive. But I woke up this morning wanting to correct myself, afraid that I seemed to equate meditation with a number of other practices. That hasn't been true for me.

An easy way to create new messes

[Three Cloves, by Billy Solitario, who can paint huge, breathtaking cloudscapes equally well]

My newest attempt to trick myself into order, thus serenity, is to spend just fifteen minutes a day after breakfast with what I call, for want of a better term, “my inbox.” To give you an idea of the dimensions of this problem, the box is an H&S Citrus box with a drawing of grapefruit on it - in other words, the box once held a whole bunch of grapefruit. (I marvel at how recently I went to a certain church parking lot to pick up boxes of oranges and grapefruit off the back of a truck, sometimes waiting in the rain with the Japanese housewives.) Said box was full of papers. This morning, for instance, I found —

- a newpaper clipping with a picture of a spinnaker in full sail; I thought I’d like to paint it.

- a speech by Sherlock to The Kittens on when it is appropriate to sit in a high place.

- a small post-it note reminding me to write the “cortisone letter” to the transplant unit. In this letter I was planning to detail my horrific experiences with even small doses of steroids, and ask them to develop a non-steroidal protocol for me in case people get tired of giving their kidneys to Natalie Cole, and I happened to get one. But recently I learned that the transplant unit has changed to a non-steroidal protocol for all of us, proving once again that if you put something off long enough, it will not have to be done at all. At the very least, you will die first.

All this about my inbox is perhaps not inspiring, unless it makes you feel better to think that someone who dares to call herself The Dalai Grandma has the same tendency toward entropy that you do. But writing about it represents a sort of breakthrough for me.

I haven't felt I had much to write about since February 9 (date of menacing kidney labs), nothing very optimistic, anyway. But last night my neighbor Cindy told me she had been enjoyed my writing about Art. Wow, yes, there are people who enjoy Art like I do. This means there may also be people who are eternally trying to get organized, and enjoy reading about someone else's fruitless struggles.

I've been ticked off at Buddhism lately, as if it told me I should be contented with a life of pain, fatigue, and serious handicap while awaiting the bollixed-up shipment of my EPO, and the results of my next kidney labs, and the appointment with the vascular surgeon. I think that really isn't what Buddhism says, but it's my default interpretation, and don't you have to be mad at something?

So even if I blame Buddhism, because I’m suffering despite a meditation practice, there are still things to write about. The fun of Art, which has not diminished for me, but grown stronger. (Doesn't the photo make you want to draw garlic? Or cook with it?) The amazing fact that, unable to have a life, I am actually working my inbox, even if all it seems to be accomplishing right now is to create new piles. But hey, that's how you know you're alive. You keep making messes.
Coming up: Can a Poet go paperless?