Wandering in the Weeds

Late winter woods

I have modified this comment from an e-list I follow, but kept the flowing syntax.  This should give you the flavor of it:

John, none of us care about your gripe with Mary.  We're supposed to be supporting one another on this list, so please take your argument private, you are only going to cause people to leave the group. So grow up....

Don't you love that last friendly last admonition?  How nice is that, as we say flatly.  How helpful, for two people who are both acutely ill right now.  Then another person popped in to refer to it as "high-school drama."  As for me, reading it enhanced my high-summer problem of heat.  Aggression rises easily in my poor stomach, which finds some of my required meds, and some human meanness, hard to digest.

I had an impulse to reply to Perennially Irritable, but took a deep breath and thought I really don't know how to help.  I looked back over the threads on this subject and found others who were  upset by John or Mary's quarrel, and handled their pain by aggressively telling them not to be aggressive.

So what's a Buddhist to do?  In confusing times I go back to the basic commitment Pema Chodron writes about in her forthcoming book, How to Live Beautifully:

I vow to do no harm.

(I highlighted that in the hope that I will get it.)  The first reaction I always have when I have to bring this to mind is, Whoa.  Slow.  Down.  Chill out. Don't say it.  And especially, Don't write it on the internet.
~~~~~
I'd written the above yesterday.  Last night, I myself got annoyed by a supercilious (judgement word) comment about me made by a Facebook acquaintance.  (Yeah, friend, I don't remember how that happened.)  I wrote an answer, deleted it.  Wrote another, delete.  One more, trying to explain that I am not the idiot she seems to think I am.  Delete.  Went to her page, clicked the Friend button, clicked again, fixed it so nothing she writes will come through anymore.  I will not miss her.

Kind of thing I've learned in almost 15 years of practice (!!!!!) is that this hodge-podge self I am, made insane by my childhood, is hypersensitive to criticism.  And meanness, even when it's not directed at me.  All the King's horses and all the King's men, in the form of a succession of therapists and self-help books and practice and journaling and retreats, you name it, I've done it - these things have not changed this part of me.

What getting to know myself has done, though, is that I know how I feel.  I can control my impulses.  And then, I guess a form of wisdom, I accept that I am who I am.  Hypersensitive.You are not a thing to be perfected by meticulous work.

Got to reading Shunryu Suzuki last night before bed, and God bless him, he was talking about how it is exactly when we are working with the weeds in our life that we are enlightened.  This is our practice, to work with our weeds, not to sit on a cushion in bliss.  Though he does advocate nonthinking.

So I'm okay this morning, and didn't set the internet ablaze last night.

Rest

[These photos are among those Tom found yesterday on the retired digital camera.]

postscript next day:  One long-term group member, who was valuable and a frequent commenter, has resigned from the list over that quarrel.

Nothing extra

Tashi contemplating tea

Last night watched the last episode of House, which ended well, he and Wilson on motorcycles going through a digitally-bright-green landscape....maybe this is the end of an 8-year episode in my life, too.

Perhaps unrelated, I decided I need to turn back to Zen, to the simple bareness.  I read some in Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, and was struck by something Suzuki said in answering a question, Why do we shave our heads?

“We should not have anything that is not necessary.”

A mind like mine begins to parse “necessary.”  Looking it up doesn’t illuminate it.  But I remembered the sentence somewhat differently, like this -

“We should not have anything extra.”

So I began to think about how bare and simple life is on retreat:
There is my little room (no socializing, no talking, no decorating or art). 
There is my bed, that I sleep well.  Thought, must order new sheets today.
There is my food.
And water.
My body, whatever else it needs, taking a shower, taking medications, moving it, sitting in meditation. My mind needs that, too.  Body-mind.
There are clothes that are comfortable and protective and not distracting and just enough.
    (whoa, wait...earrings?  I suppose we shouldn’t stand out so much)
    (How do fun and making art and personal-clothing-art fit into that?)
So I thought, retreat strips away the unnecessary so you can be with the very simplest thing, your breathing. Being awake or asleep.  Sitting or walking. Wearing shoes, taking them off at the door. What a relief.

When you think about “nothing extra” you think about your things  (which are an ominous gray area) - and the visual clutter of your house.  Those of us who have houses and things.  I left that out -

There is your shelter.

Its actual purpose is - shelter from the elements, and safety.  Beyond those walls and doors and HVAC systems, roof, gutters, and what you sit on and cook on, beyond that everything is extra.  And 90% of what is in my kitchen goes unused most or all of the time (the Bundt cake pan).  It is not necessary, is it?

And how simple life was when all you had was a typewriter.  Oh, go back before that - van Gogh would pick reeds, sharpen them into pens, and draw with them.

If you had a camera when I was young, it was film and it took a limited number of pictures per roll, and that cost money and took time to get developed.  Now you are plagued by pictures, they are another something-extra problem in your life, how to organize them.  This is making me smile and chuckle at the ridiculousness of it all.

And let us not forget, as Suzuki once pointed out, there is the broom with which you sweep.  It should be stored upside down, so the bristles don’t wear down so fast.

And there is the cat who lives with you, her litterbox, her food, her measured probiotic, her need to play, her anxiety when you leave.  What a wonderful complication love is in your life.

Following the Schedule

Some people love a schedule - it eases the anxiety of making decisions.  Some people hate it - it puts boundaries on spontaneity.  I am squarely in both camps. My ideal is to follow the schedule I have decided to follow, and within that framework, always play.  Now that I'm old and retired, I never have to follow someone else's schedule unless I decide to.

You can play by being easy.  There is a story told by one of a Suzuki Roshi's students about moving rocks.  Big rocks, I suppose this was at Green Gulch.  They did a lot of this, and Suzuki liked to do it with them.  The young students would be tired and sweaty, and there he was, a small man moving big rocks and enjoying it.  When someone asked him how that could be, why he didn't have to stop and rest, he said, "Because when I am working I am always resting."

So that's one way to work, and by extension, to do the things you have to do to maintain this body.  There are many of them.  In this body, for instance, it is much the best for me to put on my elastic sleeve first thing in the morning.  Otherwise my lymphedemic right arm swells.  Since the transplant, I also need to put on my Futuro elastic support stockings, or my ankles swell more, and then hurt. Guess what?  Sometimes I don't feel like it, like this morning.  I have to laugh at myself, the resistance, the desire to be free. Sixty-eight years old and still fighting it.

Is it my parents' fault?  To some degree, yes and no.  They didn't set boundaries on any of us.  On the other hand, not their fault, they didn't know how.  Nobody parented them, as we understand that today.  Karma.My fault?  Well, caught in my karma, too.  Darn it, I don't like that.

Where was I?  You can rest while you work - and sometimes I do think about what Suzuki meant by that. What is it you rest in?  To me, it's the bottom of the exhalation; exhale, relax all the way, and don't be in a hurry to inhale. To me, it's golden.

Or you can actively play at your work. At best, your work is what you most like to do, so play is easy, though sometimes picking up your toys doesn't come naturally (that part is Work).  Once I asked AMA Samy how I could make myself write the book I was sure I ought to write.  He didn't delve into the psychology of being so sure you ought to write a certain book you didn't want to write.  He just shrugged and said, "Your work is your work."  (One of his languages is German, and he pronounced the w's like v's, which charmed me.)  So, you just do it.  It's inevitable. Like growing old.  Like scraping the catbox.  Washing the dishes. Putting on your elastic sox for God's sake.  I don't know why I bother resisting.  Sometimes you have to laugh at yourself.

Though he spent seven years training in Japan, AMA Samy is not a stickler for the retreat schedule the way too many American Zen Masters are.  At least not when he comes to America.  He understands that the way that can be named is not the eternal Way (first lines of the Tao te Ching). On his retreats I've felt increasingly free to develop practices that ground and center me.  Photography.  Gathering the many wildflowers that grow at Grailville.  Walking to see the piglets at the adjoining farm (this leads to laughter yoga), finding the hidden pond.  And here it is, the haiku I wrote when I found it -

great blue heron

sails down, settles

   —hidden pond!

[image: Morning mist at Grailville]

What makes you come alive?

The struggle for spiritual growth is the struggle to get out of the narrow box of our conditioning.  Last night I watched "The American Experience" on PBS about the paths that led Martin Luther King to intersect with James Earl Ray.  I lived through all those years, a young adult, and watching the documentary I remembered my life then, and saw how much the Civil Rights struggle influenced me. After King was shot, the adults in my very small circle stopped criticizing him, and a great silence fell, for it was clear we should be mourning this event.  I observed their unspoken shame.  I learned how much so many people admired him, what he meant as the point man in the Civil Rights movement.

This morning I heard from an old friend, a white southerner who goes to an African-American church.  He referred me to a Dr. Howard Thurman, who preceded King, who met Gandhi and advised many people in the Civil Rights movement.  Here is a bit from the Wikipedia summary on Dr. Thurman -

For some unexplained reason, the following quote by Dr. Howard Thurman is widely and incorrectly attributed on the Internet to one "Harold Thurman Whitman" (which is, in fact, a fictional name):

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Thurman was a Christian minister, but it sounds Buddhist to me. (Also sounds like John F. Kennedy read it, doesn't it?)

So does Billy Joel in the above song, which gave me a group spiritual experience in around 1975, sitting around a table in a bar with other crazy people when it came on the radio. We all burst into song on the chorus.  We were all people struggling by now against the culture - one friend was gay.  It was 1975.

"Crazy" - coming alive to the truth that persists beneath the culture.  Sometimes it looks like delayed adolescence. The people around you aren't going to like it, the way people didn't like King's call for change.  A person who is alive ripples through the entire culture, the world.  I think of Shunryu Suzuki, the small, humble Zen teacher who seeded America with teachers.  Or think of King, whom I knew only on a television screen, whose marches I was too confined psychologically to think of joining.  But you do join the march of culture, you are changed by the songs you hear, really hear.

What the little cat knows

Contemplation

The Little Cat loves routine. Three times a day my cellphone alarm goes off, I come to the kitchen and take my immunosuppressants, I feed her.  While I take the pills she rubs daintily around my ankles.  After she tastes the food she jumps up on my kitchen chair and holds her front legs up to me, an invitation to let her climb on my shoulder and settle down on my chest, purring.  The world is running the same old way, and she feels safe. Food, safe shelter, predictability, these make her actively happy.

It makes sense for an animal to be anxious about change; predictability spells out food and shelter to them.  So I suppose that we, in our animal body, are the same - comforted by routine.  But we are capable of understanding that things always change.  I mean always, every minute.  That's what organic life does.  Here in Ohio, you can count on the blue sky being gone in an hour, the temperature dropped 20 degrees.  People complain about it all the time, wanting the more equable skies of California, perhaps, without the mudslides and early freezes, of course.

Suzuki Roshi once said that the central teaching of Buddhism is "Things change."  When I first read that years ago, it didn't seem real inspiring.  Now that I am 68 many experiences have taught me that it's true.  Some 70 tornadoes went through the American midwest yesterday.  A high wind is the ultimate in chaos.  No telling where that tornado will touch down, whose house will be leveled.  Me personally, last summer I had the shock of being offered a kidney by a friend.  This promised to give me many more years of life, to take me from what had become very old age and physical degeneration back to being an active 68-year-old.

Since then I've had either 8 or 9 UTI's and two or three hospitalizations, lost count.  Inbetween all that, I've had glimpses of feeling alive all over again.

So far the UTI's are unpredictable and we've been unable to prevent them.  The good luck is that - so far - the bacteria involved have been responsive to antibiotics.  So far.  The spread of resistant bacteria is scaring everyone in the medical field.

Like all other living things, from strawberries to Bengal Tigers, our safety is never guaranteed.  We ourselves and all forms of life constantly change, and age.  Felt great Wednesday, Thursday woke up with urge incontinence, a fever, and urine full of white cells.  So we had to postpone the bladder scope that we hope will tell us why I have all these infections, and thus how to stop them. Had to cancel three appointments on Friday.  I reminded myself of The Five Remembrances (you can find them at the bottom of this page), which many Buddhists recite every day .  I focused on  "I am of the nature to grow ill; I cannot escape illness."  That is, don't count on anything.  And don't get too caught up in your desires; that way you won't be too disappointed.

Years ago I knew a woman who was convinced that if she did the right things and had a strong will and stayed hopeful ("a positive attitude") she would survive metastasized cancer and live to be 94, the number she felt entitled to after taking a test in a women's magazine.  She died at 72, pissed off, still sure that if you only did all the right things, all of them, you could live, well, forever.  Still not accepting reality, I'm sorry to say, which is, Do what you can, and let your craving for a certain outcome diminish.  Life is as unpredictable as a high wind.  Take refuge.

Creature comforts

I am grateful to an (even) older friend who laughed off the idea of camping with "I like my creature comforts." It gave me permission to contemplate how very much I like them too, and anyone will tell you, I am not a good camper.

A little lazy googling tells me this term has been around since about 1650, when even the wealthy didn't even have the most comforting comforts, central heating and flush toilets. Yet even then, anyone could appreciate how a good bed or a nice hot bath eased and comforted the body.

I must say, I have never been attracted to pain the way some people seem to be. I do have to admit to a sense of triumph in surviving long days of sitting crosslegged on the floor at Zen retreats, back when I could do that. (Even then I observed that the teacher wasn't sitting there with us all day long.) And I gained from the experience, as you are meant to, becoming familiar with pain, losing my fear of it, able to watch it rise and subside and stop calling it "pain."

But I started out to write about my new cushion. Not a zafu this time (the round cushion you sit on in proper Zen). No, it is a rectangular foam-and-gel orthotic cushion, commonly used these days in wheelchairs to prevent pressure sores. It is part of my response to the arthritis in my left hip, which seemed to be made worse by sitting in my favorite chair. It is a good chair, but old, and the seat has been compressed with age.

The cushion came UPS two days ago, so I have spent two evenings using it. This morning as I got up I noted that I did not have pain in the hip. So I carried the cushion over to the straight-backed chair I use now for meditation and tried it there. Well. I soon realized I was enjoying my meditation.

That's something I've been thinking about for a while, since I came across Suzuki's statement, "If you're not enjoying your meditation, you're doing something wrong." Well then, I was doing something wrong all those years. It was not hard to guess what it was. I was enduring something I thought was good for me. Which it was. I secretly believed it was supposed to be uncomfortable, the way church pews are, to get your attention.

But things are usually simpler than you think. It now seems obvious that inducing a flareup of arthritis is not really a good thing.

Well, it's one more example, not that I need any, of how we cling to our habits. You find that out when you decide to quit smoking. It's less obvious when it comes to the little things, the unimportant everyday things you do on your way to Somewhere Else, that lotus land that is actually right here. (Or, as the photo shows, in Milwaukee.)

Demons

[Spinning wheel, Blood, Sweat and Tears, posted on YouTube by flutooth.]

I was going to write a post on my current experience with steroids titled "Two weeks in another town," but it is looking like more than two weeks. Before you kick me out of the Football Hall of Fame, let me explain.

Two weeks and two days ago I let the musculo-skeletal doctor ("sports doc") inject my ankle and hip with two half-doses of a gluticosteroid. I know I'm reactive to steroids, and I won't take them orally, but I had gone in limping with what turned out to be a magnificent flareup of arthritis and bursitis in two locations. And this doctor has done good things for me before. So I took the shots.

And my, I felt good, once I got over two nights of serious sleep disturbance. Interested in life, creative, generous, and - this is important - the pain reduced radically. I didn't mind a bit that my instructions were to "take it easy" the first week. As a poetic type, I've spent my life looking for an authority figure to tell me that.

I didn't realize I was up until after my mood switched. A couple of days of being too apathetic to run the Roomba found me telling Tom, "I have a sense that I'm coming closer to death, that I don't have long." Then the mood switched back last Sunday night, around 9:00. Hello, come on in!

As moodswings go, this one will. (I couldn't resist.) Seriously, as moodswings go, this has been okay, more like being a boat in a lock, the water rising, then back down, not like the biggest roller coaster in the world. There were also days in this little trip where I found myself in the blue lagoon, balanced, calm, happy, interested in everything, tending to use the adjective "beautiful." Sort of like we feel on those magical days in spring.

I once saw moodswings as a demon that popped its trollish head into my pleasant cave, or more accurately, did a home invasion. Now I think a mood is a mood, and the demon is more general than that. Around its neck it wears a name tag that says Attachment. Attaching to the high, attaching to the peaceful moment of balance, attaching to the idea of how I like to feel, seeing that preference as terribly important.

Shunryu Suzuki says we are given just enough problems (83). This morning I picked up the results of my last blood tests. My serum creatinine is high, which indicates lowered kidney function. Tom reminded me that this has happened before, and I recovered from an incipient drama that stars me being reintroduced to dialysis. The good thing, Tom reminded me, is that things always change. Yes, and sometimes for the better. In this case, my fresh problem took my mind off my mind.