Good shoes

[imagine you see a beautiful picture here]

This morning, wasting the first hour up, not fighting my resistance to my Artist's Way assignment (write morning pages first thing), and to meditating. I love to connect with friends on the internet over coffee. Always wanted to be able to do that. And roam around, having found again last night Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, and the whole poem.  I read it to Tom in bed, the Norton footnotes too, how Yeats developed this belief in what we could call a Pure Land, which he thought was made of art and fine craftsmanship.  In this, it seems to me, he did not have the acceptance of this fine organic mess we try to cultivate, trying harder the messier it gets.  It was this poem, BTW, that begins with the line "This is no country for old men." And has several other immortal phrases, too.
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Went to six-month appointment with kidney doc this afternoon. It looks very much like we can't go on with these UTIs developing ever-more resistant bacteria, so we are proceeding to talk to a surgeon again about getting the useless old bad old stupid calcified shrunken cystic kidneys taken out, on the assumption that they are harboring infection.  There is a type of cystoscopy that could give more information, maybe, so we are trying to get that going.  I feel optimistic about this, since it might mean I could feel more well and healthy down the road. I don't know how many surgeries I've had now, and I'm pretty blase about them.

For the appointment I decided to dress up by wearing "real shoes" instead of my Avias.  This is it, folks, as dressy as it gets when you've had several stress fractures in your feet and must wear good (as opposed to pretty) shoes to protect them.  The adorable Mary Janes below are leather, not mesh and rubber and a lot of engineering. The autumn leaf socks were a special touch due to by poor sock laundry management.  I really need some Easter socks.

p.s. My ankles are not that fat - it's the perspective.

A Theory of Life Management

I take it back - my last post. I was in my more optimistic mood, I guess, and thought there must be some way to manage life so I could have time to do bodywork and meditate, wash my socks, make and keep an Artist's Date, water the plants, all the etc. - the things I want to do, as opposed to the thousand things I have to do.  Put on the organic nail polish that finally came from the internet, that I hope will keep my nails from peeling and breaking - yes, another side effect of the drugs that are saving my kidney.

But that was before all this weather rolled in here in the US.  Major weather kicks up my less important health problem, fibromyalgia, causing pain, oh, just about everywhere that didn't already hurt.  Fibro also causes depression, which inclines me to use obscenities to modify the word "body," as in "my *&@! body."  Indeed, these things are not life-threatening and even all put together are not as bad as hemodialysis through a permacath in your neck (as I would have to have), I'm sure of that.

Maybe the worst thing about a fibro attack is the mental fog.  I had more to say about that, but I had to go take my noontime pills, and I forgot it.

We have been writing on the kidney transplant e-list about pain.  One guy is feeling much, much more pain immediately after his transplant than anyone led him to expect, so various people have been writing to him about it.  The few who say they were back to work and off painkillers in two weeks have thankfully refrained from comment.) One woman wrote that she didn't feel fully recovered for a year.  This led me to write back---

The whole first year?  Oh, gosh.  My post-transplant  nurse says most 
people don't feel good - recovered, that is - for six to nine months.  I told her nobody told me any of that.  She said, "I know.  But I tell 
everyone.  That's why they don't want me anywhere near pre-transplant."

But I would have done it anyway if I knew, because to me, dialysis is 
worse.  And I decided I wanted to live.

I'm almost at 4 months and still have plenty of pain and problems, 
though not abdominal pain.  I won't list them, it would ruin my day.

But as you can see, I did just list some of it, though not every single place in my body that hurts.  And here's the thing - when I wrote last Tuesday that one could somehow manage to have a life - you know, do your hobby or art, have fun cooking something good, get online and buy a thermal coffee mug - I must have been in a lot better mood.  The one called "delusion."  

Sometimes you can't manage.  Every *&!@# thing goes wrong.  That isn't even true.  You think everything is going wrong.  But in fact, 100,000 people here in Columbus lost power in the ice storm, and we didn't.  A friend called to offer us his guest room if we needed a place to stay.  I am going to have lunch with another friend right now.  I found time this morning to move my pathetic orchids to a south window, and water them.  

Maybe sometimes you just feel the fundamental truth - there's quite a lot in life you can't manage.  And the things you usually manage or count on, like electricity, can go to hell any minute.  Then you're into spiritual practice, I guess, saying to yourself, I'm sure there's a pony somewhere in all this crap.

[image:  "Silhouette Rose" by Ann Felicite.  Artist's depiction of the individual complexity of the fibromyalgia pain syndrome.]

Fun-loving Buddha

Well, I signed up for a course on The Artist's Way last weekend, knowing I really need to de-stress more.  It hasn't started yet, but I got out the book, which is graced by my comments and underlining from whoa, 1995, at which time doing the morning pages led me into channeling a novel written by my cat - Sherlock Here: Memoirs of the World's Most Educated Cat.  Flipping through The Artist's Way yesterday I noticed an exercise toward the back on having fun, and this morning I got up with it in my head.

I got warmed up as I answered the six questions.  When I took a break for 8:00 a.m. pills - immunosuppressants, which suppressed my immune system so much that I ended up in the ER twice over Christmas, and have had to take 3 (three) big antibiotics in a row, so you can see I need some fun in my life.

Inspired, I started creamed hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, as I had remembered how much I used to enjoy cooking, and haven't made those for years.  My answers turned up a kind of cute childlike desire to put together a cool spring wardrobe - I got more and more drab as I got too sick to bother.  I thought of compiling a list of my 100 favorite songs from teen years. (Born in 1942, I was just on the cusp of rock 'n roll, a great place to be.)  Maybe doing my version of those songs, harmonizing with myself - there's a spiritual idea.  Learning to take and edit video.

Fun.  Fun-loving Buddha.  It sounds weird, doesn't it?  Maybe it's the fact that I have practiced only in the Zen tradition - I have a sense Tibetans are less restrained - but it seems like people think being spiritual is a very serious matter.  (I am trying to imagine a laughing Kanzeon.)  You're supposed to be calm.  How do you have fun being calm? I wondered.

"What do you do for fun?"  Somewhere in this mess I have a book in which an older Japanese Zen Master writes about not having fun, never, not even knowing WTF fun is.  He seemed annoyed that a student would ask such a dumb question.  I can't find this book, though I don't remember burning it while dancing around the flames, no, I would never burn a book.  But I suppose the idea is that an enlightened person finds all of life delightful and joyous.  They talk a lot about Joy in Buddhism, but the only person I know of who's talking about fun is James Baraz, who advocates laughter and music.  And Lama Surya Das has reminded a student that playing jazz is his practice.  I bought the Baraz book last year, but read it while in the uremic haze of advanced renal failure, so I don't remember much.  It wasn't working for me, though it looks like the in-person classes would.  After all, isn't it amusing to think of studying fun with a book?  Study fun:  an oxymoron.

Time for my 9:30 pills.  I think there are 19 of them now that I added acidopholus to invite some friendly bacteria to my digestive system, after the onslaught of all those antibiotics.  And cranberry supplement to try to make my bladder unfriendly to colonizing e-coli. You can see, can't you, why I need more fun in my life?