Awakening Grandmother's Heart

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Wrote to Rev. James Ford with a trivial question and got a nice reply.  Simply attentive.  Pausing to ask how I am. I'd doubt that he remembers me, having met once years ago. But he invites e-mail and responds to it as if each one of us is important. The Teachers I have met are so kind it makes me want to be like them, to have that quality.

It tickled me last night to find a Sweeping Zen tee-shirt online - it's pretty, too.  Yo, I thought, I could make a DG t-shirt.  It could be about Grandmother's Heart:  "Grandma Loves You" or, for the little ones,  "Grandma loves me."  Or among the flowers on the front, an arrow pointing to a soft, plushy heart, and the words, "Grandmother's Heart." This was what Dogen cautioned his dharma heir to cultivate. Here's a good koan: What is that heart?

Or come up with a picture of a Grandmother Buddha. I don't see her sitting meditating, more like stirring something in a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon, wearing a homemade half-apron, a kitchen window behind her. All relics of old times, things that are gone - cooking from scratch for love; wooden spoons; half-aprons; family loyalty; Grandma's that are there for the kids and grandkids, not out reinventing themselves, running marathons and seeing the world. And it implies something we surely don't have in this culture, respect for elders. No, our elders are seen as a tax burden.

I don't think this society ever had much respect for the old, sick, different - it was grabbed and founded by people who were all for themselves, who left family and culture behind. It remains all about individual happiness. Somewhere I read recently that this is the American pathology, and we don't benefit from imitating the family-leaving that traditional Japanese Zen was about. That enabled people to break away from a rigid culture. Americans need enabled to break away from our restless, driven selves.

So it's me, like the American I am, trying to figure out how to change the biggest BS (see yesterday's post) of all, the ethic of individual gratification, the glorification of greed and attainment. It is this attitude that allows the greedy to tear violently through the world exploiting the poor, making money on war, weapons, illegal drugs. Think about it.  Maybe the tee-shirt should say "It's not all about me."

Or maybe just "Be kind." I'd like to recommend a book called Awakening Kindness.   Khechong tells of a young couple who each morning hold hands and, looking into each other's eyes, say his mantra:  "May all be kind to each other."  There's a simple, intimate practice anyone can do.

Small-R relationships

[The small print in the image above says "Sure there are plenty of other fish in the sea. But you're not anywhere near the sea. You're in the desert. Alone."]

I read that there are more single people around than there used to be - I see it around me, too. And it seems most of these yearn to have a Relationship. An 84-year-old woman who divorced three decades ago just confided this to me, how this desire persists despite her surround of caring children and friends.

Talking about the possible causes for this desire could occupy us for a long time. We could look at one of my home-made koans, Who is that one you want to relate to? But I want to make a note on something different - our failure to pay enough attention to the relationships we already have.

I remember a time in my life when I had no Relationship, I remember often feeling alone in a bad way. Yet, in my life then were my grown daughter, and the kitten she named Greylin after the feline hero of my first novel and made me take. In my dumpy apartment building I got to know an elderly neighbor, Margaret, whose recipe for a sort of quiche ratatouille I still have - she must have given me some, and I must have asked for the recipe. My parents were both still alive, and my mother wrote to me every week. ( I had no idea how precious those letters would become.) My brother was still alive and living here in town, my sister was still in this country. I belonged to a Unitarian Fellowship that had been very welcoming to me. I had two women friends who are still friends today - that's almost 30 years now. I had a small social circle that included - gasp - Tom, and went out and did rowdy things together now and then.

It was harder keeping any relationship up in those days, when a long-distance phone call cost by the minute, and you usually didn't make them except to announce a death, something like that. No answering machine. No Skype. No facebook, no e-mail such as I used yesterday to ask my sister in Australia if her back yard attracts Lorikeets. No lovely e-mail cards.

But I didn't give much thought then about keeping up those small-R relationships. You could call that taking them for granted. You could say accurately that it wasn't very mindful - back then all I knew about Buddhism was that I had a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, whose mysterious pages I stared at now and then. The only kind of meditation I knew was the visualization I had learned in yoga, and it didn't seem to get me anywhere. Well, you know about Getting Somewhere.

Years later I saw a Unitarian video about daily devotions. One of the people it featured showed us how in his morning devotion he went through a little stack of photographs of - what did he say? his family, the people he loved - and asked of each one, "What does this person need right now?" I was struck by this. I'm sure I thought devotions were done for one's own self. Now what he did looks like a practice of compassion, putting Self aside to ask about the needs of those he loved. I felt that would translate sometimes into actions.

Even when we feel isolated, we are nested in family and a broader context. We have relationships at work, we live in a neighborhood, our every step affects the planet. There is what we used to call civic duty. Doing our part.

I recall a scene from the long-ago movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which the woman goes riding a bicycle with Paul Newman to the tune of a cheery song we all got very tired of. She asks him something like this: "If it weren't for the Kid, do you think you and I would have a Relationship?"

He replies, "We do have a relationship." A little cowboy wisdom.