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.
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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.
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*I know, not every artist.  But it's true for me most of the time.

Where You Shop the Wide World Knows

When I was little, we chanted a rhyme picked up from radio and TV's Amateur Hour, which we accompanied with twirling like Dervishes and falling limp to the ground:

Round and round and round she goes.
Where she stops, nobody knows.

That has nothing to do with my subject today, which is actually Christmas shopping.  I want to say, Where you shop, somebody knows, and to comment further that changing habits is hard.

I have been a major user of Amazon these last couple of years, especially since I got my Kindle and my transplant, and was often too ill to go to the library, but could buy e-books, and did.  Then recently I saw a headline in The Economist - Amazon:  The Walmart of the Web. You don't have to read it to get the idea, do you?

It struck a chord in me, for I am a person who decided a long time ago never to step foot in a Walmart. I was attuned to how the appearance of one of these big-box stores means the death of a small-town pharmacy, hardware, and grocery store.  I resonate to the idea of neighborhoods, small towns, mom-and-pop businesses.  If you think about it, that's the American Dream, not that anyone can become a dot-com millionaire overnight, but that anyone can set out to make a living as an entrepreneur. 

Stepping foot in a Walmart has not been hard to avoid.  But Amazon?  That's another story.  They lure you with their service, the guarantee, one-click purchasing, consistent shipping.  With some trepidation I went looking today for someone else to sell me the book I wanted to get for Tom for Christmas (which is, of course, a book I am dying to read myself).  Ebay led me to Powell's Books.  And there I actually got a better deal, free shipping.  Done.

I am in a sensitive, open place today, having watched last night (Netflix streaming) a beautiful documentary-concert on Leonard Cohen titled I'm Your Man.  Woke up humming Hallelujah.  So I noticed the feeling in my stomach as I left the security of Amazon for a new seller.  Not really rational, Powell's is long-established, nothing to fear.  Just change.  A different path.

Now there you have the fruit of years of Zen, that little sensitivity to a feeling in your stomach, to what's happening inside you, as well as outside.  If you don't have that sensitivity, the small sensation translates to anxiety, which can lead to an instant thought-trail that justifies buying on Amazon, and Walmart, because, after all . . .

So that's a little commercial, not for Powell's particularly, but for keeping up practice, and also for shopping with an eye to karma.  And by the way, Cohen long ago became a student of Zen and a monk.  I don't know whether he wrote "Hallelujah" before that time - I don't think so.  I hope you enjoy it.  A nice break from "The Hallelujah Chorus" this time of year.