Things I Want to Buy and the Three-Day Rule

A recent review of my personal finances has led me to once again list things I want instead of buying them with one-click on Amazon.

I don't need one-click shopping to get in trouble. I did this for a while some 15 or 20 years ago when I thought I needed a cool-down period before shopping.  It is a simple habit. When I want to buy something (other than groceries and other necessities) I write it down (on the memo on my smart phone), with the date, and refrain from buying it for three days. I'm not "postponing" a purchase. I'm giving an impulse a waiting period to see if I really want the thing in three days or have thought better of it.

I'm sure I picked this idea up from a helpful book.  Not the book shown to the right. It's here because it was a sudden keen desire for this book that made me suspect I need to slow down and finish the last book I bought.

I learned about this book in one of John Tarrant's generous pieces on koans. This one was, "If you turn things around you are like the Buddha," which Tarrant notes is found in the above collection.   I think you do it like this:

You have a thought ~
I waste too much money on impulse items.

You can turn that around and think~
I don't waste money enough.
or, in my case,
I don't waste enough time.

Actually, I personally do.  I waste a whole day every Sunday.  And I waste money enough, I believe. Yesterday my new UP24 arrived. This is a bracelet (like a FitBit) that coordinates with my phone and logs my steps, graphs my sleep, and vibrates every 45 minutes to remind me to get up and stretch. And logs my food, if I want it to.  It seemed like a silly luxury, but 24 hours with it has me feeling like it's the greatest thing I ever did. I think it will help me get back in shape and be honest with myself about what I eat.

from HenriettaAndMorty on Etsy

The above pillow, on the other hand, is pretty nonfuctional.  I added it to the wait list yesterday.  Buddha with a sense of humor. Really, I love it, and if I had to choose I'd probably get more joy from it than another book of koans.  I do like koan work; over the years it has nourished my general ability to feel joy.  Here's a personal koan I have often carried with me when I shop for clothes~

Does this make you want to do a little dance of happiness?

Actually, it does.

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.

The Great Way is not difficult, they say

Jizo in the moment when fall meets winter

To repeat what I said to myself a moment ago, "I'm just so old . . . " The rest of the sentence was "and tired," but I was too tired to bother saying it.

I have another UTI.  So, what's ahead for this?  Drinking a glass of water every hour, taking d-Mannose and cranberry, trying to get my Vata-Pitta constitution in balance with the right foods and balancing tea.  Will take a urine sample to the lab this afternoon.  If this doesn't go away or gets worse, then I'm in for intramuscular shots and lots of uproar arranging them.  Oww!

How does this fit in with the Zen poem, Trust in Mind? you're wondering.  Hahaha as we say on Facebook (at least I do still have a sense of humor).  That poem probably didn't occur to anyone, but I've been thinking about it often since I got a calligraphy by Nonin Chowaney of that famous first line:

The Great Way is without difficulty; just avoid picking and choosing.

Digging down in Google I unearthed a 1993 talk by the poet/Zen master John Tarrant on this subject.  I love Tarrant's writing.  Here is a piece of it.

"The Great way is not difficult. It just avoids picking and
choosing." There is a Taoist flavor to this saying. The sense
of following the water path through life. The water if it runs
into a stone, it just makes its way around. The water is clear
and has no attachments which is why we have a little bowl of
water on the altar. Chao-chou has brought up this saying
which he was very fond of and he often liked to bring it up.
And then he said that as soon as we speak, that is picking and
choosing. If we are clear, we hang onto the clarity. This old
student doesn't even hang onto that. Do you still hang onto
anything, or not? So we could say that the greatest method of
meditation is that whatever comes up,just don't cling to it.
Whatever comes up, let it go. If you can do this, you'll find
the way home very quickly. But it's hard. Things stick to you.

What sticks to me seems to be that I don't want to be sick.  Don't want!

Or maybe what sticks to me is that I don't like my aversion to sickness.  I desire not to be caught in these desires to be able to do things. . . . the kind of roundabout a Zen student easily gets into.  It is better to think this way, however, than to keep hammering in your desires and claiming that it's not fair.

I had a perhaps disconnected thought this morning:  I should take a year off and not be serious about anything.  Maybe that is a good idea.  A lighter touch.  A year off.  Dust things, feed my houseplants, play with my photos, arrange flowers. (That's a gladiolia in the Ikebana arrangement below, from another summer.  I like arranging flowers.  It's so useless.)

Sometimes you need to get a grip and do your work, sometimes you need to relax your grip.  There is this from Tarrant's talk, too ~

 So when you meet an obstacle, it is good to remember the Great Way is not difficult, it just avoids picking and choosing.

Maybe avoid so much talking in my mind.  As the poem says, "as soon as we speak, that is picking and choosing."  I'll close with the closing of his talk.  He's talking at a sesshin, about meditation and what comes to the mind, but it can apply to meeting even this old body, to working on accepting every Mu that comes your way.  It has to be fine with you that you're working on it.

Please continue in this way. Trust your own sincerity. You have
begun to gather some attention in your zazen. Do not be too
concerned about what comes to meet you. Just love your walking
and love the path and become one with it over and over again.
That will be enough.

A Celebration of Winter Grass

Off to a good start today.  I heard from Annette at Millhon Clinic as soon as I'd made my coffee - the nurse  knew it was wrong for a diagnostic mammogram to be scheduled there - at Riverside's Bing Center it gets read immediately by a radioligist and "you'll know right then."  Then Riverside called immediately.  For the friend who commented yesterday that she hoped the nurses would be kind and considerate, they were. 

Even at the James, they're usually not awful, though I ran into one who clearly thought I was an idiot, and did not notice how I suffered while she lectured, me standing naked under a paper towel, tired and scared.  I was afraid to say anything at the time, because mammograms hurt enough when the technician is not mad at you.  It makes me mad now, the people they let into nursing school.

That was why last year I scheduled my regular mammogram at Riverside, which now seems like good karma.  They'll have last year's image right there, and they'll be able to interface with my Good Doctors, all three of whom have knowledge of my health history in specific ways, if they want to recommend further tests or treatment.

The appointment is tomorrow at 10:30, which is perfect, because I have two important things today - a video phone call with Dosho this afternoon, and tonight the memorial service for Sarah Phillips, which will take place during the regular sit of Columbus Zen*.  Sarah was an artist and contemplative photographer.  Here is one of her self-portraits, a smiling Buddha eye -

Below is a photo she captioned thus: 

For an Impressionist, to paint from nature 
is not to paint the subject, 
but to realize sensations. 
~Paul Cezanne 

I notice, looking over Sarah's photos, that we were interested in some of the same images:  clouds, a stone, trees, the last flowers of summer, form and lines, our own shadow.

I remember being fascinated with my shadow at a very young age. And knowing a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson that has the line, "And what can be the use of him is more than I can see."  But then you read Jung and John Tarrant and listen to a talk by Larry Ward . . . at least, shadow is useful as a metaphor.  And for survival. And when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death.  I recited the 23rd Psalm over and over when I was doing radiation for breast cancer in 1997.

Grasses are a special favorite of Buddhists.  I took a number of photos of grasses during my lifetime, including some outside the hospice when Tina Price was dying.  They called to me because there are a number of Buddhist stories and poems that refer to them.  Here is one I marked in Dogen's Moon in a Dewdrop:

A snowy heron in the snowfield
Where winter grass is unseen
Hides itself in its own figure.

You can read more about this poem here.  It is part of a teisho on Dogen Zenji's "Time-Being," which I recall not understanding one sentence of when I read it years ago at the church's Labor Day Retreat.

We lost many people to death this year, including two other friends who were on the Buddha Way.

Leslie DelGigante

Leslie's blog is still up here. Like Sarah, Leslie had been a member of Zen Columbus.  It was Leslie who invited me to the meeting of the small sangha called Zen Corner that needed to leave the Quaker meeting house, and at that meeting I impulsively invited the group to meet in my church.  They meet there today, twice a week, and have grown to about 20 regulars, still peer-led.

And here is Scott, who died so shockingly a short time ago of a massive heart attack.  Like Leslie and Sarah and me, he was a diagnosed bipolar not helped much by psychiatric medicines.  I know other meditators with profound "psychiatric" difficulties, still living.  I hope to write more about this phenomenon tomorrow.

Scott Robinson Columbus

Both Leslie's and Scott's Facebook pages are still up. If you go to them you'll see how many people loved each of them and were inspired by them.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*  If you want to attend the memorial sit tonight, and this will be your first time, please arrive at 7:00 pm for an informal orientation by Tom and me. There will be tea after the service.  First Unitarian Church is at 93 W. Weisheimer Rd. here in Columbus.  Take N. High to Weisheimer and park in the church's front parking lot to go in the front doors.  The church is fully accessible.  All are welcome.

Nobody Understands Me

My favorite Cezanne, Still Life With Apples

Remember that little song from childhood?

Everybody hates me, nobody loves me,
Think I'll go eat worms...

I'll stop there.  It was common in my youth, maybe because it poked fun at something we all feel sometimes - that nobody understands us.  And still do, even in old age.  That is especially true if you are making some radical change in your life.  Your actions make other people wonder if, well, maybe they should join the Peace Corps or go vegan.  Even when you mind your own business, if you are different than the flock, you are an agent of change.  A therapist cautioned me once that nobody likes an agent of change.  She didn't say this, but look what they did to Jesus.  Gandhi.  Martin Luther King.*

So recently I found myself high on a windy hill, and I gave this some thought.  One of my conclusions was, If somebody feels overly responsible to you (a parent, a sibling, a grown child), they get frightened that they're going to have to bail you out.  I think being over-responsible is itself a stressful way to live.  Another thought was, If somebody really would never think of doing what you're doing, but now if you do it, they might have to think about it - obviously, that could engender defensiveness and hostility.  Or if what you're doing scares them for whatever reason, they may prefer to detach from you.

And so it is.  When people you know and love are critical and reactive about a choice you're making, they have a problem.  You have an opportunity to examine your actions thoughtfully, and be brave.  You have a problem insofar as you depend on someone else's affection or understanding. 

In spiritual traditions the idea seems to emerge time and again, that maturing is sometimes a lonely road.  I remember the chills I got when I read the first lines of Dante's Inferno:

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.

 There is also an intriguing Zen koan that John Tarrant has spoken to:

 "The moon sets at midnight; I walk the streets of the town alone."

And there you are, with nothing but your vow of pilgrimage and maybe a map (though, as we know, the map is not the territory).  And these days, your GPS.
~~~~~~~~~~
*Not that I compare myself to them. Joan of Arc, maybe.
 

Getting Through a Really Bad Day

“Jasmine/Never Sorry (for Ai Weiwei)” a light graffiti work by Vicki DaSilva

The above photo was published today in the NY Times.  This light graffiti will appear tonight 23 stories high on the side of a building in Times Square, a charming use of electricity, if you ask me.  It becomes more resonant if you know something about Ai Weiwei, (who is said to have 40 cats).

But I was going to write about getting through a horrible day.  Two of them, actually, yesterday and now today.  I'd expected to wake up much better, but I woke up dreaming about talking to a kindly spiritual advisor about how the class just wasn't working, and I wished he would visit more.  That got me remembering Dr. Paul Kerschner, minister of my youth, and that made me sad.  It was so long ago that he must be dead.  He appears nowhere on the internet, and he was a wonderful person.

Yesterday we went to church, hoping it would not be about Father's Day, and it wasn't.  The program was presented by a number of women connected to the School for Young Children at our church, and about play.  Letting them play.  Not judging kids, not pushing them, respecting them.

The more I heard stories of kids blooming under this treatment, the more I remembered my very lonely, strained childhood, the abuse I got constantly from my father and intermittently from my mother.  Later that afternoon we had a long talk with Tom's sister, who is just very down about their father's slow demise.  Today my father's ghost has been visiting, still tormenting me after 15 years despite lots of therapy and various mental tricks.  And poems.

Saturday I visited my friend Tina, who was just moved into hospice care.  We meditated together for years.  It was a good visit, short. She has terminal COPD and had to gasp to say two words.  She liked the hydrangea blooms I took her, pink and blue; she likes pink.  Had breast cancer years ago, and I noticed she was still wearing her pink elastic bracelet, though otherwise not adorned.

I am just not there Buddha-wise.  Tina is 76 and wearing out, and it's time for her to go, but it makes me sad. And it is always sad when people are not relaxed and happy about dying.  I think about John Tarrant's description of visiting a dying dharma buddy who accepted what was happening.  He calls it "just two men having lunch."  No sadness.  Well, okay, if you say so.  Maybe I'm resisting being a person like that. Though I'm still aiming for a relaxed death.  (Just not right now.)

Last night before bedtime the sky was illustriously beautiful, the air magic.  I wrote about it all this morning, for myself.  I looked up Allen Ginsberg's poem about Walt Whitman at the Supermarket, and read it to Tom.  We went and exercised.  Meeting my daughter for dinner soon.  Slowly the day has become less difficult. 

The Whole World is Medicine

Our house in spring, star magnolia in bloom

I'll start with the story.  I was in the Internet Cafe (TV room) at Manor Care, where Tom's father is now resident, fixing myself a cup of coffee.  The little refrigerator was empty, but there were packets of that creamer mysteriously made from corn syrup.  Well, it was still sort of cream, and would soften the gastric hit of the coffee.  As I tore open the package, looking at it for collage possibilities, I thought of Yunmen's koan, which I learned as, "The whole world is medicine. What is the illness?"  (There is a different version by John Tarrant here.)

Students of Zen just finished that thought, I imagine.  It is a famous statement that is considered a koan.  The one everybody knows is "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  (I know the answer to that one. :)  [by the way, smileys are addictive, especially useful in texting, which is economical]) 

later -
This morning's NY Times has an article on the discovery of the microbe that gave us streptomyacin, how a lowly lab assistant was finally given credit.  I loved this quote, though, from his journals: the microbes were found in "leaf compost, straw compost and stable manure" on a farm near their lab. I said, "The whole world is medicine."  Tom told me then that his BP medicine is based on snake venom, which kills you by reducing your BP to zero.

But that's not the deepest point of the koan, which goes like this:
Unmen said, "The whole world is medicine.  What is the illness?"
My response is, the illness is not perceiving the world. The illness is living in and grasping at your delusions.

And here's my example.  Tom and I are respectivily 63 and 69 years old, but sort of older, really; he has  post-polio syndrome, and I am, you all know, a sort of musculo-skeletal wreck, and on meds for kidney transplant, BP, arrythmia.....the usual.  Body wearing out, sooner than some people's.

His parents are 90 and 93.  His father is in nursing care, went there two months ago septic with untreated infections and long ago mentally disabled by stroke.  His mother is now living with brother Dave and his wife, but constantly trying to go back to her house.  She is bent with arthritis and can barely walk with a cane, but wants to drive.  Tom and his siblings and grandson are trying to straighten out a really horrible mess of their estate, much of which has disappeared into the hands of scam artists while they clung to their idea of staying in their own "home," the house they bought fifty years ago and have not maintained.

What is the illness?  Clinging to the delusion of never growing "old."  Clinging to the delusion that she can be independent all her life, it's only a matter of refusing to see reality.  In there was her own susceptibility to flattery, which she would never admit to, which has led her to meet strangers who call her on the phone and ask her to meet them in a parking lot and give them money.  And by the way, your home is not that house you live in; it's the world.  And your body, and you don't get to keep that.

As for us - we don't want to ever put my daughter in this position.  We spent this morning talking with a Realtor about what we can expect to realize on this house.  We are not going to move into a condo either; it's straight to retirement home for us, because realistically, we love our house, but we want to relax and enjoy whatever time we have left.  Realistically, that might be a year or ten years or a day. 

The Realtor wore flip-flops.  You have to love that.

Battling the Big Guy

Lace

 

I had a rest-less (good word) night due to extraordinary pain that had me on Vicodin all day - sometimes I can go without even Tylenol except at night.  Pain in left shoulder and that damn left hip, which I hurt last Saturday at the health club by doing one small new back exercise with care. Let your pain be your guide, the sport-spine doctor's mantra, ran through my thick head, and I was careful, and thought yes, the little leg lift was a little painful, not bad.  But it turned out it was bad.  Now I think the SI joint on that side is inflamed.  I woke up with these two areas hurting, a bad sign, as being prone for some hours is usually very helpful.

But my mantra is, It won't kill you.  Also, Being in pain doesn't mean you have to be unhappy.  Also, Having limitations doesn't mean you need to be unhappy. I used to have ideas in my head that these things did necessitate unhappiness. No, unless you cling to your desires to do things you used to be able to do.  Things have changed, that's what happens to carbon-based life forms.  If you don't want to change, you should have been born a hunk of granite.  Then you wouldn't change very fast. (Wondering now whether granite is based on carbon.)

Often I read about someone's determination to find a cure for cancer. There's a big uproar now about women wanting the FDA to keep Avastin listed as appropriate for metastasized breast cancer, though there is no reputable scientific study that shows any benefit.  One warrior said she wanted every possible weapon in her arsenal against this dread fiend.  I thought, yes, but this is a gun that never hits the target and can backfire and kill you.  The problem seems to be that if the FDA does remove its temporary sanction, insurance companies can refuse to pay the $88,000 a year it costs to take the drug. The women want anecdotal evidence to reign; in other words, if one person taking it felt better, they want it.  You know I have many reservations about Western science and medicine, but it does have its uses.

Here's where I want to go on this:  The good old Five Remembrances (see sidebar on this blog).  I guess I should have them tattooed on my forehead.  Barring accident, we are all going to have pain, we are going to get sick and die of something.  If not cancer, something else. Doing your best to be alive - really alive - I heartily recommend, but accept reality, you'll be glad you did. As for pain, I am trying to befriend it, if you know what I mean. "Oh, there's my rheumatiz again" type of thing.

When things change, there might be a benefit in there somewhere.  The bad shoulder (Bad shoulder, Bad!) and back mean I no longer have to do the weeding.  So my dear friend and Grand Master of the Gardens, Karen, is coming this afternoon to pull many more oak seedlings and generally set things right in the front gardens. She earns money doing what she does so well and loves.  I feel relieved.  The neighbors are relieved.  I get to sit here and play with my photographs.

Limitation is okay once you accept it and stop yearning to never grow old, certainly to never die, to always be able to do what you feel like doing.  I posted a John Tarrant quote on that a while back, so I won't add it here. Grandmas do tend to repeat ourselves, maybe because nobody heard us the first time.  (Insert smile here.)

A Householder's Practice

This morning I am on Poop Patrol, again.  Tashi has finished her doses of deworming and her antibiotic, and I need to take in another sample for fecal float, to make sure she is well.  That means I have a timer beside me to remind me to check her box every 30 minutes.  If a visual check shows disturbance of the neatly raked surface (my little Zen garden), then I have to put on mask and gloves, as I am immune-suppressed since my kidney transplant.

Zen teachers say a lot about shit (the word they use), at least compared to ministers I have known.  It is a vehicle for getting germs out of the body, so we should be cautious around it; but it is essential to life.  Believe me, I know, for as my kidney function declined over the years, constipation became a constant problem.  If your body can't get rid of waste, you are done for.  So.

It's not that I am repulsed by what the Vet calls feces, but I find it distasteful, despite all these years of tending cats.  Practice, as I get it, means we recognize that distaste, not grasp it and make a big deal, but not try to suppress it, either. This certainly is not practice as in sitting sesshin on a retreat all day.  But even in a monastery, someone has to clean the toilets. Personally, I think it should be the Abbot.  In a business, the CEO.

Okay.  Thirteen minutes to do my body practice before the next litterbox check.  I am thinking "real practice" is exactly this.
~~~~~~~~~
Later.
I ended up with only half an hour to do my bodywork and meditation, because the Poop Patrol was successful.  So it was stop everything for both me and Tom, pack that up, get dressed, put the poor cat in her carrier - her paws needed trimmed, too - and off to the Vet.  (It turned out the fecal float and stain were negative.  So we will start adjusting her diet - bland food - to see if that helps.)

Something about writing on this subject this morning made my whole day nothing but practice.  Not the easy kind, either.  If I were to write about it and explain all the occasions when I had to step back, breathe, divert the energy or anger, or step quite away from a problem, or discipline myself strongly to get my weekly pills  done, honestly, it would make a book, and I am not Virginia Woolf.  Just what Buddhists call a householder, as opposed to a monk.  I am grateful to John Tarrant for writing about practice in the lay life.  And here it is.   And here is a paragraph of it:

I think of the old story of the warrior who did zazen with such energy that all the mice in the house grew still until he had finished. His wife remarked on this and he said, "Well, this won't do, I'll have to try harder." His zazen deepened and soon, as he sat, the mice came out and played all over him, completely unafraid.

[Zen Cat image from Northern Sun]

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.

On backing off from our thought-worlds

Usually people believe in their thoughts, and if you do, the trick is not to talk yourself out of them, just to look at them for a bit. You might be thinking something like, Here is an awful person, or I was right after all, this is hopeless. Then if you look at the scenarios that you are running, you can find the consequences of what you believe. In other words, you begin to notice the way you live. There is compassion in that. And you can also begin to notice if your thoughts are useful to you, if they help you to act.

Athletes are trained to not get interrupted by their scenarios. Otherwise if someone insults you on the field, you lose your game, and what’s the use of that? Another example would be for a disabled person to say, "I am disabled so I can’t do anything, my life is over." Even though you may have plenty of data points to back it up, that is a scenario that won’t help you. Without that thought-world you might find that you can be disabled and develop plenty of very satisfactory vices and live a rich, complicated and difficult life.

from John Tarrant, The Moon Sets at Midnight
[image:  Red leaf]

Letting in the cow

[photo from mothercow.org]

The tradition is that Shakyamuni tried a lot of different paths, including a very ascetic path without eating and became just a living skeleton, but found that that wasn't the way and he accepted nourishment. Somebody offered him some milk and he drank the milk. We might symbolically see that as allowing whatever cows represent into his life, too. Some sort of nurturance, some sort of earthiness. So he accepted the milk and sat up all night, and in the morning he looked up and for the first time he truly saw the morning star.

This is John Tarrant's casual retelling of the story of the Buddha's enlightenment experience. I don't know why, but I am fond of cows, and when I read this passage this morning I felt pleased at the hominess of it. I happen to know it was a passing girl who gave him the milk; or some say, rice pudding.

I think a lot about the great simple cow of the body as I and my friends age. Civilization has taken us on a path away from the gross demands of the body, and it's been easy to spend most of our time in our minds and in control. But as we age, the cow ambles in the open door. It is large and exceedingly hard to budge; it goes its own way. It makes unnegotiable demands.

I noticed a commercial tonight on the evening news. I'm not sure what the product was; maybe Aleve. A woman of around sixty was playing badminton, bounding all over the court, and telling us voiceover that before she discovered the Product, her enjoyment was tainted by pain in her knees. But a little Product and wham! she can abuse those knees all she wants.

"Pain," I told the TV, "is your knee's way of communicating with you. You're not supposed to override your knee. You're supposed to listen to it." But the TV didn't answer.

Sometimes newcomers at meditation fall asleep sitting up. It tends to be the same people who do this again and again, always amazed at themselves. Maybe there's a diagnosis, narcolepsy or low thyroid. These things are worth getting checked out. Sometimes it's just that the brain might like to keep going, but the cow is chronically tired and grabs any chance for a little rest. I'm rambling here, like a cow slowly making its way home, so I will stop now and look for a pretty, sentimentalized picture. There.

Very satisfactory vices

[video: a Rhoomba and a more cooperative cat than Sherlock]
I have to accept it - I can't write while the robot is vacuuming, anymore than I ever could while a more sentient creature was cleaning my house. It isn't guilt that bothers me now, it's just that the darn thing distracts me; that is, I am so distractible. So the Roomba is shut off for the moment.

It is a tool I bought myself to make housework easier, or at least possible. I could tell you how it is that Tom and I, considering our disabilities, really should not be vacuuming. And that's true. But like so many tools, it is at least half toy. And in my world, playing tends to qualify as a vice.

For some time I have been studying with fascination a talk by an unusual Zen Master named John Tarrant. I feel connected to John because I studied for a while with one of his students, Daniel Terragno. Also, he is a poet. Here is the paragraph that interests me:

Athletes are trained to not get interrupted by their scenarios. Otherwise if someone insults you on the field, you lose your game, and what’s the use of that? Another example would be for a disabled person to say, "I am disabled so I can’t do anything, my life is over." Even though you may have plenty of data points to back it up, that is a scenario that won’t help you. Without that thought-world you might find that you can be disabled and develop plenty of very satisfactory vices and live a rich, complicated and difficult life.

from The Moon Sets at Midnight

Well, this is me he's talking to. Disabled by advanced kidney disease (not my fault!) when friends my age are still working and traveling and doing their own vacuuming. But this being a blog, I'm not going to explore the entire paragraph right now, not even the vital last words; just the surprising part I italicized. What is this? a spiritual teacher recommending vices? I looked up the word.

"Vice" is not necessarily downright evil, or social transgression of the sort vice squads and some churches deal with. The word is also used to describe an imperfection, a frailty, a practice considered immoral by your society. But it isn't society whose judgment I have to fear these days, since I am free of the workplace and its demands for respectability; it's my own. I learned as a child to consider all sorts of things weaknesses. So it was with pleasure that I read in another one of John's talks that his students often tell him he's fat, and he admits it, no problem. His photos show a man who likes to eat, and enjoys wearing a great hat.

Zen attracts a fair number of skinny, serious people who like to dress in immaculate black, and are convinced Zen will make them more perfect. I have noticed that the better teachers try in various ways to knock this form of self-imprisonment out of their students, often by just being who they are and fielding the criticism. Sylvia Boorstein drinks coffee, not tea; Bernie Glassman loves pizza; Daido Loori smokes.

Well, I got to thinking about this idea of "satisfactory vices." I am pretty old now, 66, and there's hardly a vice that could do me any harm at this stage, though I have to be careful about elements of my diet or suffer serious consequences. I used to love smoking, but I don't want to take it up again, and I've learned that I can't just smoke one. I'm not attracted to alcohol on a regular basis, or to the way people act when they're seriously drinking. The only effect of pot is to make me really hungry. Drugs to space me out would be simply redundant.

But my imagination was too limited. I already have vices, I just didn't know it. I realized that as I sat here happily in my study, surrounded by a herd of Devil Ducks, a passion I share with my grandson, watching my Rhoomba wander around the room. Yes, I have a vice, maybe the worst possible thing my parents thought could happen to me: I don't like to work. I like to play. My father called that being lazy.

When I have work to do, I work, always did, and there a certain inherited perfectionism comes in handy, if I don't let it take over. But when I don't have to work, I don't go find something useful to do. I blog . . . play on YouTube . . . watch DVDs of A Touch of Frost . . . sit around and read the Times . . . visit with friends . . . write poetry I don't bother to send out. And that somehow tempts me to end with one of my favorite poems, which makes a very good case for being lazy. Maybe it's really called "living."

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.