Is reality harsh? and other minutia

Cold?

We say, "That's the cold hard truth." It means "That's a truth I don't like. That's part of reality I'd rather put aside." As an elderly lady I know once told her daughter, memorably, "Well, that might be reality, but that doesn't mean I have to think about it."

You don't have to believe that, barring accident, you yourself are aging, and are going to die, and therefore make out an Advance Care Directive. Here's one form.

(This used to be called Living Will, a term that was somehow more approachable, though not logical. It's a record of how you want to be cared for in the event you can't speak for yourself.)

Whether or not you face reality, it just is. To call it cold and harsh is to say you don't like it. Of course not in specific instances. But to dislike the laws of the universe is . . . not Zen.

I just brought this up because someone I know is going around telling friends how she wants them to pull the plug if she's terminally ill, and how to do her funeral (perhaps just keeping her end up in conversation) and you know what? her distant family is going to get to make all those decisions unless she gets it on paper. Signed and witnessed.
~~~~~~~~~~~

Gerard Manley Hopkins
I just returned to "The Windhover." It may be his best poem, and that's saying something, because he may be the best poet of his time.

In reading it, do not overlook the epigraph. Also, this: "my heart in hiding/stirred." My heart in hiding; what a phrase.

Here it is. It is his invented language, so, like contemporary art, it's not something you grasp on sight.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Abstract art.

Just experience it.

Music and words and work and . . .

No, not this kind of carpenter ant.  THIS kind . . . 

Words. I have always loved words, as art, making word art (poetry, fiction), escape, words and puzzles, which have something in common:  both mental constructions.

If you have to have words, you can take them into the body with sound.  One way I have healed as a person, I guess I could put it that way, is that now music enters my body and my body expresses it.  Not just toe-tapping.  Chair-dancing.  Better to do it standing up.  Then you can move your feet and it's just dancing.

Saw The Carpenter Ants Sunday at Natalie's Pizza here in town, right here in Columbus, Ohio, which was a cow town when I moved here and is now a pretty cool place.  So is Natalie's.  The Rev. Bush, above, commented during their show that when you walk into a place and there's the owner to greet you, you know you're going to get good food.

If you want a Buddhist lesson, there is an important one in that.  Natalie owns it, designed it, it expresses her, it is her work and that work gives something of value to the world.  That makes her a very lucky person - she has found what she has to give.

I am dis-couraged about that myself.  Giving poetry is hard; most people don't want poetry in this, what my students would call "today's modern contemporary world."  (I still laugh a little when I write that. Bless their little hearts.)  And I guess it is hard to separate yourself from the desire to suck-cede, I mean succeed, to Be Someone, to Matter, to imprint the world, so as not to totally die and disappear.  Why should I bother with a poem or, of course, with this blog?  So one day some lonely adolescent behind a locked door, some elder who's not very mobile anymore, will feel connected, might feel connected to me?  That's what I got from poetry when I needed it.

That would have to be the motivation, because there ain't no money in poetry, and many people competing for it.  And because poems come to me, so it's something I do, weird and archaic as it's become.  I like words on paper more than words in the datastream.  I actually rediscovered recently the pleasure of writing with a wooden pencil.  I'd forgotten.

So that, and getting used to Being Ordinary.  I wonder how many other people get the edged gift at birth of a mother who is sure you're going to Be Someone Special, though she never was?  It seems to propel some people, though not into poetry. Not that being Special is the road to happiness; I'm sure it's not.*

And gosh, I almost left out how hard it is to be old, energy depleting, and on top of that cursed with a cycling depression.  At least the damn thing cycles up the hill as well as down.

Music is good for you.  I recommend it.  I vow to listen to it and to make it, if only by tapping a spoon on a glass and a wooden table.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*I just used that semicolon with defiant pleasure, because Kurt Vonnegut taught never to use them.  I don't have to listen to other people on these things anymore.  At least not in this blog.

Wasting Time

It's a funny thing, being a poet, or an artist of any kind.  There's a great deal to learn, because art, as distinguished from self-expression, rests on craft and on the tradition, on all the discoveries of every poet who went before you.

It usually means you have a dedicated time to write most days.  You read other poets and are connected to some - these days, often on the web.  You practice the art without expecting to gain anything from it, though you could luck out.  But if you do it to become rich or famous, it tends to become commerce, which looks to the marketplace rather than the soul.

But the largest part, I think, is Being a Poet.  It is a way of being receptive to the whole world, outer and inner, of ambling along rather than always driving to some goal.  It has to do with the need or desire to experience new things, to expand yourself.

And it has to do with creating enough empty space in your life to "waste time".  I was doing that this morning, checking email, and clicked on a link in a post from Motionpoems, to which I subscribe.  They never disappoint.  There is also an article on the site by Angella Kasube, the creator of the video.  What a wonderful new use of new technology.  I hope you enjoy it, too.

This is Your Life

There's anxiety, and there's pain; then there's anxiety about pain, which more than doubles the pain.  By 9:00 last night the pain in my back and neck had gone up through my TMJ until the left side of my face hurt, and I had to do hot compresses.  Dammit.  Part of it was just too much sitting upright, the rest was the irrational anxiety about what the MRI will show and what comes next for this back injury.
This pain has been worse since the MRI of my upper back and neck Monday night.  And I am waiting, waiting for a call from the neurologist who ordered the test, and who will, I hope, suggest some way to cut back on the pain, which seems to be made worse by walking.  Now it's Friday, which means if I don't hear today I'll have to go through the weekend trying not to imagine the worst, which is, for me, being in a hospital.  After that dreadful night last December - and that was in one of our better hospitals - my tolerance of the constant abuses there has turned to something quite negative.  Like hate.

Furthermore, the fact that my fall in May was caused by Seroquel has amplified my distrust of the whole American medical system and led me to notice that there have been a lot of lawsuits about these drugs, and the movement disorder they cause that never goes away.  (It is called tardive dyskinesia.)

I don't like to be anxious or angry.  Don't Want! any of this.

Well, this kind of adversity is a common enough feature in the landscape of old age, but I like to think it isn't necessary to melt down over it.  My formal Zen study led me to find a post from a blog by Ben Howard that happens to help just a bit my perspective. The author refers to a passage in Dogen's Instructions to the Cook, which I decided to format as if it were a poem:

Do not get carried away,
by the sounds of spring, 
nor become heavy-hearted 
upon seeing the colors of fall. 
View the changes of the seasons as a whole, 
and weigh the relativeness of light and heavy 
from a broad perspective.

My first teacher, Ama Samy, said to me, at least once, "Experience everything, but don't get carried away."  He has a rich Hindi accent, so it sounded like "Don't get caddied away."  This is good advice for anyone with moodswings, or who golfs.  

More from Howard's blog:  "Commenting on this passage, the Soto master Kosho Uchiyama urges us “to be resolved that whatever we meet is our life,” and to “see the four seasons of favorable circumstances, adversity, despair, and exaltation all as the scenery of [our lives].” Oh yes. The default scenery, in fact, that the Buddha warned us about. Life is not that fabled isle of bliss they promised . . .

but more like this at times:

Heavy.  And that's just the way it is.  Everything broken, including the medical system and, maybe, the doctor's phone.

This is making me think it's time to publish a poem I wrote years ago after being forgotten in an exam room. Really.  (A nod of thanks to Ken Vail, who drove me to that doctor and waited patiently.)

                             Doctor
or, Jean-Paul Sartre in the Examining Room           
           
Here in a windowless room–this dying body–
naked beneath a paper towel,
waiting, waiting for Doctor to come and ask,
How are you?  Where do you hurt?
How long have you felt this way?
Doctor is busy, invisible accountants
issue denials of benefits,
nurses in running shoes flash smiles.

Doctor is here I think he is running late,
this will explain our policies.
You are responsible sorry
I know these rooms are cold
but Doctor wears a suit under his lab coat
we keep it comfortable for him
here, here is a paper blanket
sorry we have no tea, the pot is broken
no one has time, time . . .

Are you still here?
sorry the office is closed
the computer is down please call
tomorrow for an appointment we are
automated for your inconvenience
please hold please remain
on the line, your call is important to us
your call will be received in the order 
in which you enter your patient account number
date of birth and death, social
followed by the pound   invalid   invalid

Sorry, Doctor has no more appointments
this year.  Doctor is at a convention
and does not answer his page
someone
will try to get back to you
in the order your call
was tomorrow

Wait—we have just been informed
Doctor is no longer with us. 
Doctor is dead.
You are condemned to be free.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
p.s.  Put in one more call to the doctor just now.

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. 

Another Christmas Eve Poem

I've loved this poem since I was young, maybe because I was young when I first read it, and it wasn't so archaic fifty years ago.  But you can make your way through the language.  The Jesus story I was introduced to as a child emphasized Jesus as a shepherd.  On the wall of the Baptist Church Sunday School was a large poster of him carrying a lamb.  I gather that the folk story Hardy is referring to said that the animals all kneeled at midnight on Christmas Eve.  Hardy expresses a sort of sadness and doubt; but he hopes.  He wishes.  It is surely relevant that his country, Great Britain had entered World War I in August of 1914.

           The Oxen
                by Thomas Hardy (1915)

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen.
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few believe
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve
“Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder comb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I found the photo below on this site with the explanation that it was an outdoor nativity scene, and one morning a dog was found sleeping comfortably in the manger. (It does seem to have kept "the baby" awake.)

 

A Christmas Eve Poem

Christmas Eve by Matisse

    Christmas Thaw
                        Jeanne Desy

December, gassing up for the trip,
coat open, no gloves,
surrounded by gray sky.

The past is entirely present
in the smell of gas,
the spot of rain on your glasses.
No rushing, only standing
in this tranquil windless day.

You have told this rosary
years without end.  Countless beads
slip through the hand,
memories melted
in December’s warmest days,
in a scatter of drops
from a nothing-special sky,
the high stars invisible
in the even morning light.
      ~

What Happens When You Get Fed Up

 [image:  none today, to allow you to form images in your mind as you read the poem.]

I wrote this poem in 2000 when the consumer culture was going strong.  At that time, Adbusters fostered the idea of international Buy-Nothing Day as a protest on the day after Thanksgiving.  That year, the theme was "Enough."  As in, you already have what you need.  I was a fairly recent convert to Buddhism at the time, and this theme of cultivating contentment in simplicity seemed to be basic dharma.  These days I think of it as cultivating equanimity rather than desire.  Those with something to sell have done their best this year to get everyone into the stores crazed with a frenzy for bargains.  I am pleased to see Adbusters is still at it, promulgating Buy-Nothing Xmas now. (link) 

        Enough
              (A Utopia)
            By Jeanne Desy
           
One year, children, everyone got fed up . . .
and stopped buying.
Nobody went to the mall that year,
nobody went to WalMart or
ate fast food or frozen pizza,
flew on a plane, bought a CD.
The economy came to a halt.

Unemployment rose to 50 percent.
The people who liked to work found work
and the rest stayed home with the kids.
Everyone planted gardens,
and cooked their own food
and cleaned their own houses,
everyone did their own laundry,
washed their own cars in the summer twilight. 
People wore slippers around the house.

The market declined for designer shoes,
theme parks and day care, acrylic nails
and Prozac, cellphones and pagers. 
Ringing and beeping tapered off, and
the air was spacious and quiet.
Nobody played the lottery, couldn’t afford to,
and no one bought guns. 
There was not much to steal anymore,
and not much to fight over now.
Everyone had enough to eat
and a roof over their heads.
That seemed to be what mattered.

The tax base eroded—there was
no money for missiles now, no money for war.
Young men stayed home and tended gardens.
Old men designed wonderful toys,
grandmas made biscuits and everyone learned to sew.
Happiness blossomed, addictions declined,
no money for drugs now,  anyway nothing to escape.
People grew their own catnip and drank tea
made with mint from their gardens,
and ate nastursiums and heirloom tomatoes.

Without ads, the TV went quiet.
There were no celebrities now,
everyone made their own music
with home-made drums and ancient guitars,
and told the old stories and wrote poems
with pencil on paper and read them out loud
over the breakfast table.   Factories closed.

The planet cooled, the air cleared.
You could see the stars. 
Wildflowers grew where there had been lawns,
rabbits came back to the yard, and foxes and owls.
The old folks sat on porches with dogs at their feet,
and shelled peas.  Barefoot women
hung sheets to dry in the sun.
Everyone just took care of themselves
and each other, and
no one was rich anymore, so no one felt poor.
Now that there wasn’t so much,
there was more than enough.
                   
© Jeanne Desy 2000

How to Perform a Funeral

Resurrection lily

I opened this blog this morning because I had something to say that was urgent enough to interrupt my preparations for a shower. It was this: I've been to four funerals in the past two months, and I've seen more than one pattern.  One of them is that people collude to talk about what an ornery prankster cute person someone was.  And I didn't recognize that person at all.  It seems to be about not wanting to tell the truth about someone who was hard to love and unsatisfying.  Maybe not wanting to see that reality.  When there are lots of conflicted feelings, the past gets remodeled.  (But isn't that how people are, anyway?)

I have a sincere request: don't do that to me when I die. I have no idea whether an "I" will be left, and if so, whether I will be around to know what you do, or care.  But I'd just like to think that this wish of mine will be respected. I am a real person. If you can't say something authentic about me, just sit there and say nothing. That will do. Don't invent some lovable eccentric (notice how I am leaving out cuss words here). Don't invent me after I am dead. 

In line with that general idea of acknowledging the real life and death of a person, here is a wonderful poem that I remembered as we drove home yesterday from the funeral for Tom's father.  I read it aloud to Tom and we both felt grounded at last. Williams was a physician, so he got to see plenty of phony covered-up plastic smiles and talk about heaven and love and faith, and weird distortions of the past, enough to make him write this.  There is only one thing I have faith in - I, too, will die.  I don't know when.  I told Tom to begin my own memorial service with this.

                 Tract
                      by William Carlos Williams

I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral
for you have it over a troop
of artists—
unless one should scour the world—
you have the ground sense necessary.

See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ's sake not black—
nor white either — and not polished!
Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh at small expense)
or no wheels at all:
a rough dray to drag over the ground.

Knock the glass out!
My God—glass, my townspeople!
For what purpose? Is it for the dead
to look out or for us to see
the flowers or the lack of them—
or what?
To keep the rain and snow from him?
He will have a heavier rain soon:
pebbles and dirt and what not.
Let there be no glass—
and no upholstery, phew!
and no little brass rollers
and small easy wheels on the bottom—
my townspeople, what are you thinking of?
A rough plain hearse then
with gilt wheels and no top at all.
On this the coffin lies
by its own weight.

No wreathes please—
especially no hot house flowers.
Some common memento is better,
something he prized and is known by:
his old clothes—a few books perhaps—
God knows what! You realize
how we are about these things
my townspeople—
something will be found—anything
even flowers if he had come to that.
So much for the hearse.

For heaven's sake though see to the driver!
Take off the silk hat! In fact
that's no place at all for him—
up there unceremoniously
dragging our friend out to his own dignity!
Bring him down—bring him down!
Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride
on the wagon at all—damn him!—
the undertaker's understrapper!
Let him hold the reins
and walk at the side
and inconspicuously too!

Then briefly as to yourselves:
Walk behind—as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you ride
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly—
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What—from us? We who have perhaps
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us—it will be money
in your pockets.
Go now
I think you are ready.

Memo to the Cat

Above - a major dose of lovecat meditation, Maru on a shelf doing nothing

My creativity these days is lending itself to poetry, I am very glad to say, including the major task of cleaning all the art supplies off the work table so I can strew poetry all over it.  But I roamed back in my files and found this, obviously written at a time when my almost limitless patience with the cat must have worn thin.  It does have a rather unfinished feel to it, for which I apologize.  Suggestions for an ending are welcome.

Memo to the Cat

The fact that I walked from my study into the living room does not mean you get treats, even though it is true that I passed physically through Treat Zone.

Meowing loudly, monotonously, repetitively will never break my spirit.

There actually is such a thing as enough petting.

It costs well over a thousand dollars to reupholster the sofa, whereas cats are cheap. 

I moved your chair back where it’s supposed to be, okay.  I’m sorry I moved it.  I wanted to put the printer where it is more convenient for me.  How selfish of me.  I need to remember that I only work here, and you are the Queen.

Wasting Time

These days I am back to reading Dogen, and getting it a little more.  He is the foremost poet-teacher of Zen, and has to be understood in the way you understand a poem - you experience it, let it soak in.  I like to read a few lines and be stopped to stay with something.  This morning it was this, from Actualizing the Fundamental Point, or Genjo Koan.

Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.  The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.

There are many beautiful pictures online of the world reflecting in a drop of water.  But what I thought of as I read this was one of my favorite poems, in which the great light and life in everything is reflected in distant cowbells, in dried horse manure and the empty house, in the predator/prey world of the hawk. James Wright experienced a beauty much larger than our usual confined definition of "beautiful" and also the urgency of being awake. How when we are operating in a daze of desires and duties, we are not really alive.  When we are awake and alive, the moon is reflected even in us, and no moment is wasted.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
                           by James Wright
 

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   

Down the ravine behind the empty house,   

The cowbells follow one another   

Into the distances of the afternoon.   

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   

The droppings of last year’s horses   

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

[Click here for a link to the brief Wikipedia entry on Wright, which points to his most popular poems.]

Absolute and Relative Worlds

Tintinnabulation by Robert Green

I already wrote a poem this morning, and here it is.  It's interesting that it is times of upset and confusion that generate poetry.  August is that for me, and this morning I'm afraid I'm coming down with an infection.  I wrote my friend, It feels odd, as if I went back into a very familiar room that has a certain scent and quietness, like a Victorian novel in which nothing much happens.

The title of the poem refers to a Tibetan Buddhist concept that there is a world of timeless eternity (great natural peace), and then the small messy world of us (samsara, its relentless pounding waves), but they are not really any different.  They are mingled (nice word).  It is easier for me to think in the common metaphor: we are lotus blooms with feet in the mud.  There is a jewel in the heart of the lotus. 

     Absolute and Relative Worlds
                          by Jeanne Desy

Nature goes on, vast and nonjudgmental, 
turning leaves into heaps of trash -
it is as if a song is playing far away, 
deeper than my own tintinnabulation
quieter than the soft pervasive tone
of the central unit.  It is a stream of songs 
about the rising waves, the Western wind,
being asleep in the deep.  It is faint and blue . . .  
it is interrupted by the cat, who is nervous
because Tom is in the shower, 
and the door to her box is closed.

Tibetan healing mandala

It doesn't have to be sad?

[Above: A miniature design by Szymon Klimek.  It is solar powered and made of zirconium and brass plate.
Dimensions 11,5x9x7cm. Goblet high 30 cm. Thanks to the blog Book of Joe for finding it.]

Friday night -
I've been thinking about the article I started reading last week in a magazine in a waiting room.  It was about a home hospice nurse, and was titled "It doesn't have to be sad."

Death, they mean.  Just now I logged on Facebook to say goodnight, and learned that a friend, a woman I met only once who was in kidney failure like me, has died.  She did not get a transplant.  She was a year younger than me.  What is this feeling?  Maybe it's like suddenly going cold sober.  Just like that, a life gone, over.  It makes my mind go to poetry, searching in my memory for the right poem.  Only poetry handles death profoundly enough, and maybe music.

If you follow this blog you know that Tom's father has been slowly dying for some months now, losing a pound a week in skilled nursing care.  His mother has serious loss of judgement and a very bad memory, and is scheduled for hip replacement surgery for a worn-down hip that has her confined to a wheelchair and in pain.  All this, and turmoil over the financial aspects of caring for both of them, has been a great strain on the kids.
~~~~~~~~~~
Saturday -
I woke up hearing Leonard Cohen's Alleluia in my memory, and understanding it a little better.  Thinking about accepting death, as I often have, doesn't get me there.  It seems it often takes an exact language to move me to understand something.  But emotions I understand.  Sad is how you feel when someone dies, isn't it?  If you don't have to feel sad at a death, then what do you feel?

I know one thing you can feel: relief.  This I know because long ago I read a book by Jessamyn West, a fictionalized memoir of her sister's death from cancer titled A Matter of Time.  You can buy that book now on Amazon for $.01, plus shipping $3.99.  These are ex-library editions.  My own library, which is voted year after year the best public library in the nation, does not have it.  That made me sad.  For a while. But that's life: it goes on. In the words of a poem by Swinburne, "Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea."

Tom's parents are very old, 93 and 90.  They lived to see not just grandchildren, but great-grandchildren.  Jim had over 30 years in retirement.  Five years ago a stroke robbed him of much of his personality and coherence.

Just today I came across the astonishing work of art and craft shone in the video above.  I included it here because I love it, and tremendously admire the patience of good artists and craftspeople.  As I think about it, I remember how we make art to find a certain order in life*, so I believe it fits here after all.
~~~~~
*I know, not every artist.  But it's true for me most of the time.

A Buddhist Looks at the Olympics

I am thinking tonight about the Olympics.  Earlier, I was going to title this "Why I hate the Olympics," but that was the hyperbole of high summer fire.  Actually, under that anger I am sad; what I hate is to be in a room where sports is on TV, including the poor young gymnasts who try so hard and often land so badly.  Last night we saw teenage boys cry on camera while the coach glared at them. 

I was hanging out in the living room and Tom had the Olympics on the TV.  So I saw an exhaustive exploration of how badly Michael Phelps, formerly known as the Greatest Olympian ever, had failed.  And right there is what I don't like about sports:
Somebody wins.  A lot of people lose.

Ryan Lochte Grillz

Poor Phelps.  Four years ago he won eight gold medals and was King of the Mountain. He was way too young for such adulation.  He went through a depression and decline, finally got back in training, but lost badly.  To the left is the guy who won, whose humility is evidenced by the diamond mouth jewelry he put in for the cameras.

Phelps is better off than the Chinese gymnast Wang Yan who landed on her head in a fall in 2006.  You can find a video of it if you have the stomach for it.  A report from June 20 of this year says she has not walked again.  Somehow it reminds me of Michael Jackson's death; poor kid, trying to be as good as ever.  No, better.  He bought that story.  He couldn't sleep nights for the terror of not surpassing himself.

It is the nature of contests that a winner soon starts to sweat the future - can she do it again?  All novelists face this.  One good novel is not enough; the next one has to be better (and seldom is).  I myself have won a couple of awards and honors for my writing, and it felt good, though the elation got briefer each time.  I remember being high for over half an hour when I won a grant for my poetry. 

But my win meant a hundred people didn't win.  I know how that feels, too.  The wins empowered me, but not as much as the encouraging words of one professors, one poet, one listener who were moved by my poetry.  We do not need contests to encourage people to pursue what excellence in what they love.  In fact, I'm sure they dis-courage a great many people at the expense of a lucky few. 

The Olympics pit nations against each other.  Team sports - like college football, say - pit smaller tribes against one another, and people gather and scream, identifying with their warriors.  One school wins - maybe Penn State, where a winning football program was much more valuable than protecting children from a predatory coach. 

Joe Paterno's statue being removed

Just forget about the problems of brain damage we now realize are caused by concussions, and think about this me/you, My Team stuff in terms of human development.  I think I understand the psychology of it.  People who may be a big disappointment to themselves, men who don't earn as much money as Steve Jobs, women who were never thin or beautiful, these people pay to watch surrogates beat a fictional enemy.  It is, someone told me, a form of ritualized warfare.

Is warfare necessary?  Maybe sometimes it is.  But is this necessary?  I don't think so.  I don't think it is helpful to our growth as human beings, and as civilizations, to indulge in fantasies of winning by proxy.  I think human beings can do better than this. I would like to see our children be taught to say no to harming themselves in the pursuit of winning.

All this made me recall the poem by A.E. Housman that beautifully paints the real situation of the young athlete who's on top of the world for that one instant, that gold medal.  I'll paste it in below.  And I'd like to comment that, speaking as a poet and artist, and as a Buddhist, I wish I lived in a civilization of nonharming, in which poets were valued more than quarterbacks and nurses admired more than entrepreneurs.

The first verse of this poem imagines the young man being carried through town on people's shoulders.  The second verse pictures his coffin carried on the shoulders of pallbearers.  The last lines draw a connection between early fame and youthful beauty.  The rhyming couplets make it is an easy poem to memorize.

To an Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race   
We chaired you through the market-place;   
Man and boy stood cheering by,   
And home we brought you shoulder-high.   
   
To-day, the road all runners come,     
Shoulder-high we bring you home,   
And set you at your threshold down,   
Townsman of a stiller town.   
   
Smart lad, to slip betimes away   
From fields where glory does not stay,  
And early though the laurel grows   
It withers quicker than the rose.   
   
Eyes the shady night has shut   
Cannot see the record cut,   
And silence sounds no worse than cheers  
After earth has stopped the ears:   
   
Now you will not swell the rout   
Of lads that wore their honours out,   
Runners whom renown outran   
And the name died before the man.  
   
So set, before its echoes fade,   
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,   
And hold to the low lintel up   
The still-defended challenge-cup.   
   
And round that early-laurelled head 
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,   
And find unwithered on its curls   
The garland briefer than a girl's.

How to Get Found when You're Lost

Deep Valley, Guo XI

                        Lost

                             David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

from Collected Poems 1956-1976 © Indiana University Press.

Against Fibromyalgia (a poem)

A crocus in my back yard, which some one I never knew may have planted, though the squirrels do that too. This is the only one like it there.











Against Fibromyalgia

Rain coming in. My hands start to ache.
Shoulder muscles hurt, neck, some strain
in my jaws. And the sky
beyond the clerestory windows
is gray. The spring buds have gone from green
to a quiet statement, withdrawn,
as it were to an old lady grey
(which I wish to spell the British way).
It is early yet. Nests can still be seen
easily, as last night in the park
we heard an unknown bird,
stood and listened, looked up
until the silhouette flew away.

    from Poems Written on 3x5 Cards (unpublished)

[In church on Sunday morning, I often feel a poem come on. I carry 3x5 index cards, so that's what I write on, and that does affect the form of the poem, though this one carried over to a second card. Writing by hand also seems qualitatively different than writing with a keyboard. These are not "difficult" enough for the literary journals, so I never send them out.  Today thought I would begin sharing, especially as this one moves from pain to remembered beauty. The title of the chapbook in which I would publish them is sheerly optimistic.]

Your one wild and precious day

[The title of this post is taken from Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day."  Oliver is a nature-mystic and the favorite poet of many people I know.  The image is my valiant African violet, which has survived Tashi's teeth, and my neglect, to bloom when it thinks it is spring. It's spring for me right now, too.]

When I am depressed, I have no motivation, no desires except to not be in that emotional pain - and, oddly, the flatlands are as painful as what Holly Golightly called "the screaming reds," that irritable, hypersensitive depression that hits me in August, season of decaying fire.

Just a week ago, on Saturday night, watching a rerun of House and playing Words on my iPad, I felt the barely perceptible lifting of the big February depression-with-shingles-and-UTI that meant I didn't post much.  "Lifting" is the word, as if some invisible bricks have been on you, weighing you down, and they are lifted off one by one.  The next morning I felt somewhat better.  Got all dressed, went to church, and there found I was so cold, cold to the bone. Cold.  Different than chills.  It's making me feel cold to try to describe it.

Left the worship center, wrapped up in my parka, sat around Fellowship Hall drinking decaf and being uncomfortably cold. Couldn't go out for lunch, had to go home and dive under my electric blanket set to 5.  So it was a dumb, very flat day.  Not exactly painful.  More, nothing.  And the next morning I woke up and my first sensation/thought was one of relief.  The damn thing was gone. I felt good.

If you are not bipolar, you may never have experienced this - your depressions or miseries may be situational, and relieved by things that happen to you or things you do, like exercise.  But I am describing this because you have a relative or spouse or friend, or you will, who has this illness.  I wanted to write "suffers from," so I will, despite thes Buddhist truism "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."  This is bull, when it comes to these times of serious chemical imbalance, though I completely understand the truth it expresses, that we cause our own suffering by our thoughts and actions, by sticking to stuff and desires. I could write a book about how we cause our own suffering, based solely on my own experience.

Day after day this week I have felt good.  Not the swirling manic-high terrific, God forbid. But fine.  Loving, peaceful, calm, enjoying everything I do.  It is the perfect mood.  For my Buddhist friends, it's that mood you can have after a retreat, or even at the end of that first long day of meditation.  A day in this mood has that "wild and precious" sense to it - the silence of the house after the dishwasher has run is as pleasing as music or flowing water.  The laundry basket half-full of socks (depression leads to sock calamities - no motivation, you know) is amusing.  A good friend's invitation to an art-and-coffee day is delightful.  So is Tashi when she climbs up on my shoulder, descending to curl on my heart and purr, which I answer with imagining the identical vibration of Mu.

I've known a lot of bipolars, so I know that this mood is not entirely a chemical blessing, for we can tangle ourselves up thoroughly in our neurotic ideas and impulses and never enjoy a damn thing.  This mood is also the blessing of years of practice - meditation, prayer, writing poetry, paying attention to others, letting go of one fantasy after another.  Suzuki said we meditate so we can enjoy our old age.  It's true.  It's like a retirement saving's account that is going to be your salvation when the time comes.

I hope you have a wild and precious day, too.

Especially for Janelle, but you can read it too

Read the right way, this poem is not negative. It makes horse droppings golden. You've been warned. You can read more about it at The Wondering Minstrel,a great site where you can get a random poem anytime you like.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright
 

 Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
 Asleep on the black trunk,
 Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
 Down the ravine behind the empty house,
 The cowbells follow one another
 Into the distances of the afternoon.
 To my right,
 In a field of sunlight between two pines,
 The droppings of last year's horses
 Blaze up into golden stones.
 I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
 A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
 I have wasted my life.

What practice is about

It is about awakening to the reality of your life, and the courage needed to live it, to really live it and not stand around procrastinating a million easy things and waiting for a poem to hit you.

It is about running through pain. I wrote this poem so many years ago I can't remember, and it just came back to me.


Running through Pain
My therapist dreams about shopping for tuna.
She wants me to take up running, to learn
to run from no one to nowhere, then
to run back home again.

The shadow of things unseen

It comes on the wings of the morning
Through the mists of an azure screen,

To tint with prophetic linings
The shadow of things unseen. 

Charles J. North

The Hymn Immortal 

 Image: detail, altar, August 28, 2011, Rev. Mark Belletini