I'll Have the Rhinoceros, Please.

Today I took the trouble to comment on an interesting article in the NYT titled Against Invulnerability.  I do this partly to get a female voice into these things.  There are so many intelligent men interested in debating online, and too few women.  Here's what I said, feeling that I was speaking to the author:

As I understand the Zen I practice, I want to enter each moment vividly, fully, and without being shaken about by the desires and preferences of my conditioned self. In meditation practice, I practice letting all that flow through me without taking action. This does entail complete vulnerability to the feelings that arise, and can't be done without compassion. . . You might have some interest in the ancient text, "Trust in Mind" in this regard. A learned book about it recently came out.

The book by Mu Soeng is of the same title, and would probably not interest anyone who isn't of a somewhat scholarly bent.  The ancient poem itself is bad enough, I mean lo-o-ong.  But it is important enough to be chanted in sesshins, especially its first line, for it portrays exhaustively the Zen Way.  Here's one version of that line ~

The Great Way is not difficult for those who do not pick and choose.

The Way being human life.  When it's called The Great Way, I think it means living as a Buddhist.  Just accept whatever presents to you, whether it's a delicately carved rhinoceros fan or the great hairy beast itself parked in your kitchen.

Sounds easy, doesn't it?  Just eat whatever is put in front of you, right?  Everything, all the time?
just accept the distant mother, the dependent father, the mean sister, the lazy husband, the noisy neighbors, the gift that is. not. my. colors. Yes, that's the idea.  In addition, as the Dalai Lama admonishes, Try to be nice.  Actually, that's the hardest part sometimes.

A rhinoceros iguana, here photographed with insight by Dennis Daubney.

Understanding Your Old Person

cartoon by Jan Tomaschoff

For a long time, it seems, I've thought I would write a number of posts explaining being old to those who are not.  I'd think of specific things, like how it feels to stand in line at the checkout, slowly identifying the correct credit card and pulling it out with arthritic fingers, carefully putting it through the unfamiliar device only to have it fail, how it feels when a young person grabs it and puts it through so we can all get on with life.  Or I'd watch an elderly woman in the ophthalmologist's waiting room with the daughter who drove her there. The woman is scared of it all, quite reasonably, of the eye drops, the exam, and the probable findings, and tries to chat with her daughter, who would rather read a magazine.  Or I'd think about how it becomes a challenge to take a shower once you've had a couple of bad falls.  And how difficult it is to make big decisions anymore, like getting the bathroom renovated.  I thought each of these was a subject in itself.  I could write a book, I thought.

But this morning I was somehow inspired by rereading John Tarrant's workup on the koan "Bring me the rhinoceros," to see it from a different angle.  I saw that the problem is not that the Old Person in your life has changed; the problem is your re-action.  You don't want him to change.  You want to have A Dad all your life, of course you do; so you refuse to accept the evidence of the strokes.  You say, He could do it if he wanted to - find his keys, eat the food you left in the frig.  You don't want to be alone in this world, without a Dad or Mom to make things right.  We can call this not accepting reality.  Reality is one of those Zen things.

Sometimes our problem with The Old Person is talked about as being at the top of the pyramid now, but it doesn't feel like that at all. The stone at the top of a pyramid is supported by all the other stones. It is a solid position.  Having your Mom lose her Momness is the very opposite; it leaves you without support.  And it seems to come all of a sudden, though the tender decay of aging is slow as rust or lichen.

You are not really helped by the articles online about Being a Caregiver, which encourage you to be more selfish, to consider your needs.  There is merit to the idea of caregiver respite; you may be swinging automatically from tree to tree, doing what you think you ought to do, fleeing from the reality of the breakdown.  If so, odds are that your old person might enjoy a respite from excessive caregiving.  He may not want his very own cellphone; maybe the thought freaks him out.  You may think he needs to get with it.  Maybe you need to get with it, too.

Get with the great hairy beast of change, aging and loss.  The rhinoceros that reality is, barging into our party, upsetting the pitcher of sangria and tearing the hammock from its mooring.  The old person is not a problem, but a person.  Your denial of the reality of her decreasing competence, your insistent desire for security - that's the problem.  Mixed in there might even be your beliefs that you have more important things to do than sit in a hospital room waiting for your old person's doctor to show up, your conviction that you can get things straight.

Things are not straight.  There are no straight lines in nature, and few in your old person's veins anymore. Reality is not a laboratory, more like an amusement park or Las Vegas.  The best way to deal with it is to enter the stream.

The answer is not exactly an answer, or not the one you're looking for.  It is to approach each moment  with the intention to be fully aware of that Old Person, whether it is you or someone else, and of your own mess of reactions.  This growing old is not a curse.  In fact, it is the best way things can go:  the parents get old and die, then the children get old and die.  You might as well vow to open your heart to all of it.

Following the pathless path

Jizo in the snow, photo by Tom Tucker

This morning I read Open Buddha's review of Footprints in the Snow, an autobiography I also like, and noted that Sheng Yen wrote a book on the Chan form of koan work.  My first response to this news was, I'd like to get that.  Next, I remembered that I have mostly lost interest in formal koan study, which was very good for me when done with Ama Samy, whose method is unique, and good for me in altogether a different way when I worked with Daniel Terragno, whose traditional method was guaranteed to arouse my striving and thus my frustration.  There's a book in that sentence.

Koan work appealed to that in me that longed for mystical, intuitive engagement with the truth.  In fact, the beginning of my work was in a dream after I got home from my first retreat with Ama Samy, one of whose books is titled after the koan, Why did Bodhidharma Come from the West?  I dreamed a deeply felt answer, woke up briefly to write it down that night, and the next day wrote to him about it.  This was in 1999.  He wrote back to me with another koan, "Who is that one?," and I carry that koan to this day, realizing more all the time that this one is compiled of a thousand thousand bits that shift constantly - the truth of no fixed limited self.

During the years that I worked with Ama Samy while on retreats, I also worked with the first book in the Japanese tradition, The Gateless Barrier.  I worked with three copies of it, in fact, by three teachers, studying each koan hard, thinking about nuances.  I embraced this study gladly, finding it much more fulfilling than the graduate studies in literary theory I had recently completed.

It made its way into Zen-flavored humor written by Sherlock, my cat, which I intended to collect as The Sound of One Paw until I got felled by one real-life koan after another.  I also read and reread John Tarrant's marvelous collection, Bring me the Rhinoceros.  In all this, each koan worked its way into my mind.  It's something Tom and I share in that intimate way of the long-married, casual references to something we both did and that we understand.

Well, this is a shorthand description of a few years of journey.  My interest in koans tapered off - I couldn't say when.  At the time, I felt like I was failing.  But now I notice that I carry all those koans, and they often pop up in response to some event.  My practice has become more flexible, is changing all the time.  I'm about to pick back up yin yoga, taking advantage of Lulu Bandha's online site, recommended by the best and most generous yoga teacher I've ever known, Kit Spahr.  I am again interested in poetry, writing my own, reading others'.  On retreat, I was very moved by the visible world, and took photographs, including a sequence of a sunrise and one of a sunset that I'd like to turn into mini-slideshows and publish.  And, well, going to the health club - I have never been attracted to exercise - is a way of recognizing the basic principle of cause and effect we call karma.  Practice is all over the place, if you think about it.

I suspect all serious practitioners think deeply at times of throwing over the householder's life and entering residence, spending more time on formal practices like meditation and calligraphy.  I don't, anymore.  I'm too bonded to Tom, my neighborhood, my home, my church.  Besides, I'd drive them crazy.