The Yin and Yang of Us All

It's a gorgeous July day here, lilies frolicking everywhere in my neighborhood.  Still not too hot after a welcome two days of autumn weather with the visit of a polar vortex.  Turn around, it will be winter.  Sunset is already coming earlier every night. I've been thinking things like that lately, thinking about darkness and light.

Today my thoughts began with an ordinary conversation with Karen, my lymphedema therapist.  (Lymphedema is the dark side of surviving breast cancer.) She asked about my kidney transplant.
~ Going on four years now. Not likely to fail. I may very well die of something else.

Karen has an aunt my age who had a lung transplant a year and a half ago.  It's been tough since, of course.  She aspirated a little something and got pneumonia, and the immune-suppressing drugs you have to take after a transplant (they think, today) made that hard. Yesterday the aunt went to the gym - she had polio as a child, and one leg and hip are a little weak, she shouldn't work out vigorously.  But she did, and she fell.  She is so stubborn, you can't tell her a thing.  On the other hand, that stubbornness is what's kept her alive through all this.

It is probably a truth that your every characteristic has its other side.  Or many other sides, like a bouquet in which some flowers shine with fresh beauty and some glow toxic.  I was interested to come across a writing prompt on the Poets and Writers site:

We've all heard the advice "write what you know," which encourages us to write characters like ourselves or people who are close to us. This week, write from the perspective of a character that is your complete opposite. First, make a list of all the qualities you identify with yourself, and then make a list of qualities on the other end of the spectrum. For example, if you are a woman who lives in the country, write from the point of view of a man who lives in the city. Try to avoid using stereotypes to describe this character's actions or ideas, and instead try to embody this character—climb inside his or her head and live there a while.

Sent this to a writer friend, who replied that it doesn't sound like fun.  I had already avoided it.  It isn't as simple as imagining yourself a big city chick of eighteen, whom you could make rather like yourself, only younger.  The challenge would be to imagine yourself being, oh, athletic, arrogant and anti-intellectual, a triple-A man, the kind of guy you avoided in high school.  And having empathy for that guy, who wants happiness just as much as you.  Hmm.

Life After Death

Excellent visit Thursday with a learned breast specialist.  Entirely reassured.  (If you are on Facebook, there's somewhat more on my Page there.)  This is not cancer.  Dazed and confused.  Sleeping happily.

Before the appointment we had a great expensive lunch (they make their own ginger ale!) and Tom drove along the lake, and I took this picture of a sizable boulder by the side of the road.  Kind of looks like it's been in a few collisions, like me.

Together, Tom and I wrote this haiku -

ancient stone
names of lovers
inscribed in fading paint

So blown away by being alive - having (maybe, of course) more life ahead, and noticing the attempts by my conditioned self to get me back in the living grave we call a rut.  Now I have to catch up on all the things you have to do if you're going to stay alive - went to the health club, the grocery store . . . collapsed.  It's been a long hard year, so far.  Maybe I've used up my trouble quotient for 2013.  I wish.

Last night, browsing around on Wild Fox Zen, I happened on this poem, translated by the poet Robert Bly.  It reminded me of a time years ago when we left a great party with people playing bluegrass in a packed living room, a warm and inviting house, and no alcohol or smoking, a definite bonus.  When we stepped outside, pow, cool night air, a sky full of stars.  I said to Tom, "This is what a good death would be like - you leave a great party and step out into the stars." But actually dying, when I thought it was approaching me and remembered the deaths of people I loved, actually dying is not a party.

This poem reminded me of that experience, how hard it can be to let go of this body's life, then how wonderful the lonely empty could be.  I have my own poems that I regretted never publishing when I realized I might not have time.

I've been astonished how many poems came to my mind and came my way that showed deep understanding of life.  However, and I don't know anything about Bly, many wonderful writers and artists have not had happy lives - many are bipolar, whence cometh the creativity, but which is hard to live with and, in my lifetime, has not been treated appropriately.  You can get the idea of the wonderful, you can render it in art, but bipolar experiences and emotions are acute, and learning to live with these realities is another thing entirely.  The only significant help I've had has been from Zen masters.

The Silence Afterward
                       Rolf Jacobsen

Try to be done now

with deliberately provocative actions and sales

   statistics,

brunches and gas ovens,

be done with fashion shows and horoscopes,

military parades, architectural contests,

and the rows of triple traffic lights.

come through all that and be through

with getting ready for parties and eight possibilities

   of winning on the numbers,

cost of living indexes and stock market analyses,

because it is too late,

it is way too late,

get through with and come home

to the silence afterwards

that meets you like warm blood hitting your

   forehead

and like thunder on the way

and the sound of great clocks striking

that make the eardrums quiver,

because words don’t exist any longer,

there are no more words,

from now on all talk will take place

with the voices stones and trees have.

- – -

The silence that lives in the grass

on the underside of every blade

and in the blue space between the stones.

The silence

that follows the shots and birdsong.

The silence 

that pulls a blanket over the dead body

and waits in the stair until every one is gone.

The silence

that lies like a small bird between your hands,

the only friend you have.

~~~~~~~~

I have personal experiences and reasons to trust that in the end, the Absolute is our friend.  After all, it's your own Mom.

Still not knowing

It went exactly as expected yesterday - painful careful diagnostic mammogram, long painful careful ultrasound, lady doctor coming in to reassure us and say they are referring me to a breast surgeon who "likes to feel the breast himself" and might order a biopsy.  Yes.  A few more tears.  We told them to ask my very good kidney doctor (Ronald deAndrade) for a referral, because he understands my health condition more fully than any other doctor.  Yesterday was Wednesday, and even Buddha doctors often take the afternoon off to play golf on a lovely May day.  They had a bowl of chocolates at the door to the mammogram room. I took three.  Hersheys, but good enough.

Meanwhile, I posted this on the forum at Vine of Obstacles:

a note: one of my true friends, Laurie Doerfler, stopped by with gifts  Sunday.  They included a clear glass vase with old-fashioned roses (maybe from her roommate's garden), which sits here on my desk.  One of the wild roses, streaked pink and white, is in four stages of opening this morning, from past full bloom to a bud opening.  Two nights ago, after our sangha memorial sit for Sarah, I wrote these, distracted into haiku as I tried to understand Dogen’s Guidelines for Studying the Way.  Of course, these are modern loose-form haiku; this is English, not Japanese, which I would love to learn.

It is like me
this white rose
dropping petals
~

as I sit reading about zazen
the white rose
drops one more petal

An old photo, end of a roll of black-and-white film: note the insect on the rose

p.s.  Just had a call from Polly, the oncological nurse at the Bing Cancer Center.  Dr. deAndrade is on vacation (what?!) so they made me an appointment with Dr. Lilly for June 4.  I said, "What?  We were hoping to get a biopsy today or tomorrow, because this is not feeling good."  She will see what she can do and call me right back.  Ah, this is the relative world.

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.

Sorry, Doctor is On His Boat and Out of Cellphone Reach

Such opportunities to practice I get from the medical establishment -

1.  I got a reminder robo-call from Millhon Clinic yesterday (Sunday) for an appointment for a mammogram there Tuesday. "No," (I explained to the woman, who was the only clerk left Friday at 5:00 after I had seen the last doctor and nurse still working) "this is diagnostic and Dr. Herrigel said it will be done at Riverside Hospital.  Because this symptom is an emergency."  Obviously I would have to wait three days before Riverside even called me to schedule the test.

Now I have to get up and call the clinic tomorrow, which usually takes a 10-minute wait listening to their ads for their services before you get a human being on the phone, make sure that wrong appointment did get cancelled, more importantly, make sure Riverside got the order.

If I have not heard by, say, 1:00 (after lunch hours)  I will call Riverside, thread my way through their menus, and learn that they never got the order.  Been there. It's not like I'm looking forward to this exam.

2.  I try just now to get into my OSU Transchart, another wonderful invention of the computer age, to check my last labs before I give myself a Procrit shot (brave girl!).  Because once, following the schedule for these shots got my hemoglobin up over 14.  You feel like Supergirl when your blood is that rich, until a terrible medical event ensues.

Can't get on Transchart, though.  It assures me my password is wrong.  I try twice more.  Aieee!  I breathe. In calm, out ease.  I am grateful I started meditating the last time I had breast cancer.  I request a new password.  It tells me it won't be done until next business day. Well, I know OSU Transplant well.  I'll be surprised if it's that fast.

I contemplate reality.

Fact:  The entire medical establishment profoundly desires to take off every three-day weekend, and the whole of Thanksgiving week and Christmas Eve through New Year's Day, and they do.  (Woe betide the person who is hospitalized then.)

Fact:  You better be your own doctor and stay on top of your health, because nobody else is going to.  But I knew that.

Zen practice:  Slow down, breathe deeply, sigh audibly.  Accept reality.  Human nature.  People have to be taught compassion for other beings, and really want to be out to lunch.  And most are.  Unlike other animals.  They are often an inspiration to me.

Still Practicing

My favorite cat-not-living-with-me, Henri, le chat noir, sent me this this morning ~

I miscalculated when jumping from the floor to a chair today, and tumbled to the floor in a heap. I immediately began licking my paw nonchalantly, so I'm pretty sure no one noticed.



That's what I do when I fall, or my human version, which is running my hand through my hair to make sure it's okay.  But I am not okay from this last fall two weeks ago.

Yesterday I had my follow-up with my Good Doctor. . . .
~~~~~~~~~
Actually, that was Wednesday.  It's Friday now.  I just saw another doctor.  But before I launch into these stories, I'll just comment that I may have post-concussion syndrome from that fall about two weeks ago, and that could last the rest of my life.  However, that might not be very long.

When I saw the Good Doctor Wednesday afternoon, I got bad news from the x-rays he took after the fall.  I'll quote from the imaging report:  "an apparent compression deformity at T8 with loss of central and anterior vertebral body height of up to 30%."  We discussed this.  No physical therapy, no.  No surgery recommended, no.  He prescribed a pain pill specific to spinal nerve pain, and it helps.  He talked about not doing things that put my arms behind my back, or reaching up high.  I'd already told him about how some things like walking and carrying a purse make it hurt much worse.  So does typing.  He said meaningfully, "Don't fall again."  Rest, etc.  I felt he had a look in his eyes like he was talking to a dead man.  You know I'm fanciful.

I didn't tell him that the night before when I showered I was puzzled by a feeling of thick skin in one breast.  It looks odd too, and so on.  I knew about skin like orange peel; my sister-in-law got it when she had cancer.

Just now we saw the Substitute Internist. (Mine was scheduled up.)  He seems intelligent, did a professional exam.   He said, yes, a mass, we will schedule a diagnostic mammogram and ultrasound at Riverside, and then.  That will be next week.  Of course, we can't even schedule it until Tuesday.  You wouldn't want me to forget to complain that all the doctors will be taking a long weekend.  Monday is Memorial Day.  My peonies are in full bloom.


I almost don't want to post this because it is exactly don't know whether to laugh or cry.  I keep getting sort of silly and I love posting dumb things on Facebook and being in touch with people that way.  Went to the museum with a friend last night for a talk, and just loved it.  It's up/down anyway, you know me. Not long ago that was my worst problem.  Another thing - all my life I got through unbearable things by keeping up a front, which meant not telling anyone.  But I don't think that's a good idea, now. So in a way, posting this is practice on bearing witness to the truth of life.

Waking Up All Over Again

Wheat Field, Vincent van Gogh

I have learned that waking up to reality means waking up over and over - these can be called realizations as opposed to more mystical epiphanies.  You realize something.  Then years later you realize it a little better, more deeply.  This is about one that took me fifteen years.  Therein lies a tale.

It is the story of when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997 - a diagnosis that put me into the second half of my life in an instant.  By that I mean that all six urgent imperative things on that day's to-do list crumbled to dust.  Goals, dramas, everything - my God, you mean I could die?  Let me emphasize that:
  I could die?
What, at 53? 

I had no symptoms, no family history.  The growth was found on a routine annual mammogram that I'd put off for six months because, you know, I hate mammograms.  They hurt.  The small but mighty growth was already invasive.  The surgeon told me that by the time a lump was noticeable, it would have metastasized everywhere in my body.  I am alive today only because I had a privileged life that took good health insurance for granted, and I was raised to be a dutiful person.

My body will die.  You may think you know that, whatever age you are, but what I've learned is that most people don't, really.  They can live to be 90 and get mad that they're dying.  Astonished that their 80-year-old mother dies.  I knew a woman of around age 50 who died of a heart attack in the recovery room after an elective surgery, but was revived.  I visited her in the hospital and she was so delighted and relieved to be alive.  She was in a weekly group I was in, so I saw her bright eyes glaze over as the weeks went by until she was her old self again, overscheduled, on yet another fad diet. Sleepwalking.

After my own surgery I went for radiation therapy five days a week, all by my brave little self.  It was wretched.  They strap you down, they shut a big lead door.  You have never been more alone in your life. 

I was so anxious that through all those treatments I recited the 23rd psalm over and over to myself in my mind.  I belonged to a Unitarian church, and it had been decades since I would have called myself a Christian, but I had not rejected the good parts. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.......That's what came to me.  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.  He leadeth me beside the still waters.  He restoreth my soul.

Water Lilies, Claude Monet

 I often waited for my treatment in a tiny waiting room, shivering in my hospital gown, with a cheerful African-American woman named Mary whose kids had bought her a beautiful yellow satin pajama top because none of the gowns were big enough for her.  She wore a pendant with a portrait of the pretty Caucasian Jesus of my Sunday School posters. Maybe that had inspired me.

One day we were talking aimlessly and she said, "At first I thought, Why me?  Then one day I realized, Why not me?"  I took that in, but I knew I didn't quite get it, though "Why me?" had not been one of my own thoughts. I don't know if I had thoughts, or just panic.

Here's what I think now:  "Why me?" comes from being located in our small individual self.  It's easy to see that you have friends whose lifestyles are way worse than yours, and you eat right, and yet you're the one who got hepatitis - it isn't fair.  In some subtle way, we believe things should be fair.

I don't know what made me think of this recently, but when I did I said to Tom, "Oh.  I get it. Why not me? comes from realizing our oneness."  Buddhist talk, meaning that the larger point of view understands our common humanity and mortality.  Everything and everyone's going to die - why would I be the exception to that?  Everyone's subject to accidents, why would I not be? 

If the idea gives you the shivers, The Five Remembrances are printed at the bottom of this blog.  This traditional Buddhist chant has helped me get used to the idea.  Well, somewhat.

Life after Intimations of Mortality

I have a feeling I won't finish this, or even make it into something, but I have to write today, because today marks the fifteenth anniversary of my real life.  That began August 12, 1997 with surgery to remove the cancer in my breast.

Real life actually began for me around six weeks before that, when I got the postcard from the James asking me to come back in for magnified mammograms.  I stood there at the antique oak table I had stripped and refinished when I was younger and always had energy to spare, looking at that handwritten message, and said, "Uh-oh."

And I was right; that was the beginning of bad news.  Slowly over the next weeks of more films and then core biopsy, then meeting with the surgeon, I got it:  I could die.  I would die some day, and it could be just like this, from something invisible, a cancer that had not formed a lump, that my heredity did not predict, that was discovered only because someone sent me a reminder letter and I gritted my teeth and went in for my annual mammogram, six months late.  A destroyer that was invading my body without my knowledge or consent. Since then, I've had two friends die of metastasized breast cancer.

You do not begin your real life until you know that the day is coming when you will die, and you don't know when, and you can't count on any future.

Is that all I have to say?  Well, I count my meditation practice as beginning on that day, though I may have begun sitting with healing visualizations before the surgery; you pick a date.  (When were you born, in fact?  Think about it.)  Until then, my life was a horrible f----- up mess in which I knocked around doing things, led by my head, my instructions, my conditioning.  Then I began to study Buddhism with fierce devotion.

Now I lead with my heart.  I'm still an awful mess with an unfair quotient of suffering, including anger at people who keep insisting that if I only think POSITIVELY and eat horrible food and exercise twice as much, not only can I live forever, but I'll feel constant radiant joy, and that means my suffering is all my fault.  I hate those people, I mean, I'm angry at that lie, and all the others that take your life away, and focused anger at certain totally deluded well-meaning idiots is the form it takes.  And sooner or later I'll get all of them defriended, or at least I'll figure out how to hide from them.

It is not always easy, being alive and in touch with your feelings.  But sometimes it is.
Easy.  And pleasant.
And often I'm grateful to be alive.

~~~~~~~
[images: At top, our beloved Sherlock.  He used to meditate with us.  After 20 minutes, he would get up and leave the room, anticipating the clock.  When he began to die three years ago, he didn't know what hit him; neither did we.  It was hell for him and us. I still miss him. There will never be anyone like him.  Just above, Tashi, who enlivens our life now, attempting to sample a sunflower after Cassie's wedding.]
]

Enlightenment

Stella Doro lily doesn't know it's too late to bloom.  Note the sheltered ladybug.

Salvation, if we can talk about it at all, is the end of ambition, which is when you become completely one with your experience. Knowledge becomes one with wisdom, which is called buddhahood or the awakened state of mind. You realize that you never needed to make the journey at all . . .
Chogyam Trungpa, “The Human Realm,” in Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos, page 258.

My main practice is Zen, but with an interest in other streams.  A year or so ago I bought "The Practice of Contemplative Photography," which includes some photographs by Trungpa Rinpoche, and that stimulated my interest in his work.  Like Shunryu Suzuki, he is more difficult to understand than his American followers, but worth the effort.

What these words remind me of is that I am perfectly what I am, what I was made to be by long and wide streams of karma, national, genetic, historical, environmental, and so on.  In Zen we talk about "the self," or "the conditioned self."  At one time I believed my task was to get rid of it.  I did, I believed that, because it was becoming clear to me that my histrionic hypersensitive over-responsible and bipolar self was the source of my suffering.  I remember Daniel Terragno asking me reasonably, "How could you do that?"  I thought we weren't communicating very well.

You cannot not be who you are. Your brain and your butt are the shape they are.  And you are okay.  But (as many teachers have added), you still need to work a little harder.  You may be OCD, but you can learn how to throw away a cereal box. You may be hypersensitive to criticism, but you can learn whose criticism to avoid or how to deflect it. It's bit by bit, inch by inch. There's always work to do

When I started a regular meditation practice, it was in a frenzy of fear that the cancer in my breast would kill me.  This was irrational; it had been discovered on a mammogram at stage one.  Nevertheless, I began doing a white light healing meditation you can find taught all over the world.  From there I somehow moved into just sitting following my breath, then a lot of other practices.  At this point in my life, I was also in torment with my alcoholic family, and they weren't the only people in my life driving me crazy.  That was how I saw life then: they drove me crazy.

There was some truth to that.  Some people are hard to take, and you should have a really good reason to spend time with them.  Over the next couple of years I was going to leave behind several people who just weren't good for me.  It was hard every single time.  Now I am amazed that I ever tolerated them.  But I didn't see the reality then.  My reality was governed by an idea that I should like everyone, tolerate rudeness, cultivate patience, and enjoy pool parties.  I mean, of course. 

You know what?  I like a genuine beach and a nice big body of water, as well as a creek and a waterfall.  I hate swimming pools, chlorine, cold water. It's a matter of personal preferences.  But I had to take swimming lessons and push push push myself to try and try harder - in the face of fibromyalgia pain - because, well, everyone said swimming was good for you.  And I thought I should learn to like it.  And certainly I had to go to my brother's pool parties because, well, he invited me.  Though another thing I really don't like is being around people who are devoting themselves to drinking all day.

One of the things Zen says is that when you are enlightened, you will taste a cup of tea and know for yourself whether the water is hot or cold.  It's a metaphor.  You learn you don't like Carol, and you're cold when you're cold, and hungry when you're hungry.  Other children of alcoholics may recognize the denial of ordinary needs that was enforced in my childhood.

I thought practice would teach me how to handle all the problems in my life back then. It has, including that some things can't be solved.  Also, I often see more clearly now where the problem lies, and how it can be handled.  This is hard for me to say, but there's actually nothing wrong with Carol, and I bet some people like her.  She is what she is.  I just - sorry, I just didn't like her.  And don't miss her.

In short, what I am gradually approaching with practice is not universal joy but being aware.  That includes, though it is not limited to, what you like and don't like, moment by moment.  It applies to many mundane things that can add up to STRESS.  It's very interesting how the little raft takes you far, but not where you thought it was going. 

[In looking up the hot and cold thing, I was led to a dharma talk I think must be by Shinge Roshi, for those who want to think more about this.]

On Emptiness

We had a day planned here on the winding drive.  The water was going to be out as they finally fix the line, so we had spare buckets and pitchers lined up.  Tom was going to make bean soup with ham hocks, which is something of an endeavor the way we do it. Greg was coming over to help Tom mount the new house numbers, a project that has taken weeks or years to come to fruit, the way things usually are around here.

Then Tom discovered that they did indeed shut off the water at exactly 8:30, just as the announcement said.  And he hadn't put aside water for the bean soup endeavor, thinking they wouldn't be punctual this one time. Then Greg called with a fever, not coming today.  Suddenly before us was a day with no big plans. It interested me, how empty it felt. It was as if the day we'd imagined had a certain reality, occupied space in our minds.

It made me think of how I labored to finish my PhD program - the hard part, the dissertation and defense - though I now knew I did not want a career in academia, just shoot me instead.  There was a certain reason to it -to be ABD is to announce yourself as a failure - better not to even start the program, I thought.  But there was another reason, I think now; I could see the span of time before me filled with a certain something, even if it was only a form of acute suffering. If I had quit, never mind what my father would have said about quitters, (oh, don't go there) I would be faced with - this empty space.

Empty of what?  My thoughts about it, the mental structure I carried around. Tell me those mental emissions are not "real," I know that. I also know they are. They are like the four tote boxes in our front closet full of various clothes I wasn't wearing at the time we moved, but valued, and might fit back into some day, and didn't want to get rid of. Those boxes don't exactly exist behind the closed sliding doors; but they do.  And in fact, they exist in my mind, too, cluttering me up, alongside ideas about 10,000 things I ought to do, how one ought to live, etcetera ad nauseum.

Well, I thought it was interesting, that's all - the space these cancellations left in our collective mind around here. It made me think, too, about how I would live if I knew I didn't have that apparently endless stream of years in front of me until, maybe, I die.  That A Year to Live idea. If I'd known I would die a year later, I certainly would not have bent myself to that dissertation.  During those stressful years the cancer began growing that was discovered two years after my graduation.

There is the melancholy joy of this time of year, too. Ohio is at its most beautiful in the fall, many kinds of maple turning many colors, the gingkos along High Street yellow fans, the brown oak leaves piling in drifts in the gutters. The sun in and out, which makes each moment of sunlight precious. 

Each day you know this is the last day of its kind. Tomorrow, fewer leaves, less color.  In two weeks we'll be into the drab, cold days of November, which are garlanded in the cheap Mardi Gras beads of the consumer holiday frenzy of eating, drinking, spending.  However, of course, that does not exist right now, except in my fertile mind.

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.)

Craving Enlightenment

Back when I practiced as though my hair were on fire it was because I was desperate.  First, I was afraid to die. I wanted to heal, not die from breast cancer. During that time I learned that the body is always fighting new invaders, that there are always cancer cells coming in. So I formed a visual meditation that had to do with T-cells, big spiky things, like those medieval weapons. I believed what I'd been taught, that my individual will could do anything, and if I failed to meet a goal, I was "a failure," and needed to try harder.  Obviously, I thought I was a noun. Like an object.

It's unpleasant to remember being so frightened and alone, grasping with all my might at control over the future, which I did not know is subject to many, many influences beyond me. I wrestled with it like Jacob with the Angel, thinking, reading, writing, meditating up in my second-floor study in the house on Aldrich Road, which I called "my ivory tower." I was sort of joking, but it was true; up there I was secluded from my daily life, studying and writing poetry.


But I'm taking the long way around to my point - as I learned about Buddhism, I began to think the answer to all this pain was enlightenment. I conceived this as a sea change into an unwavering state that was like being in a room filled with morning light.  I thought enlightened people had calm, loving, clear, untroubled minds, an unruffled certainty that everything was alright. I thought enlightened people were perfect, and I had always wanted that, actually.  Now the mess of me - a body that had developed cancer in secrecy - was a sort of stinky garbage dump.

I was a long way from understanding the way life is, the interconnection, the change, the calm of just doing what you are doing in reality and not doing a lot of other stuff in your mind.  I had seldom expeienced a bare, clear moment; my moments were incredibly messy, my mind busy with obligations and desires and standards and hurry.  The core that run up my spine was red hot with fear and desire.  Or take another metaphor: I felt like a cartoon character running madly, trailing flags of Things-to-do.  Or another metaphor:  as I stood at the kitchen sink washing lettuce, these things whirled round me.  I was always a couple of steps into the next moments, the day, the week.

So I was perhaps your basic neurotic. I'd gotten along with myself and my ordinary unhappiness until that diagnosis.  Teachers call the state I was in "a promising situation."  God knows I was motivated to practice.

Well, this is exhausting me to even write this. It was 1997, a long way back, and 1997 doesn't exist now, nor does that version of me.  These memories are merely mental emissions, pathways through my neurons, and have no real existence.  Neither do any of the numerous Big Problems I anxiously worked back then. I have new situations, but now I know that it's me that labels them My Problems. Me that prefers not to have problems.

Intrusion of reality - Tashi broke skin on my wrist a moment ago trying to convince me that it was 8:00 a.m. and time for my Neoral and, more importantly, her breakfast.  So I have to go wash with soap and hot water, rub with alcohol, put on antibiotic cream and a bandage.  There, that's the reality of being immune-suppressed.

I don't know.  I may have more to say on this.

Cancer and Zen

Hello, friends.  If you're on facebook with me you know that yesterday was the 13th anniversary of my surgery for breast cancer, and of my beginning a daily meditation practice.

Thirteen years!  I tell the story over and over, how I let my annual mammogram slip for months . . . and finally, I don't know why, I went in for it, begrudging the task, one more unpleasant time-consuming task.  And it hurt more back then.  A week later I got a postcard asking me to come in for more films, some excuse about something being unclear.  Uh-oh, I said.  From that point on I was scared and getting more scared.

Indeed, the next set of films were "mag films," magnifying the area they were concerned about, where they had seen a calcification in a certain daisy-like pattern.  The next week my doctor called:  You have invasive ductile carcinoma.  Then it was time to schedule a core biopsy.  Or did that biopsy come before the call from him?  I'm not sure.  I was in such a haze of fear.  I am a word person, and the word "cancer" terrified me.  It still does, some, much more than the acute pancreatitis I had in July, which can kill you, too.  Many, many things can kill you.  Then came surgery, then a month of radiation, five years of tamoxifin, a mild sort of chemotherapy.

Doing my daily healing meditation somehow led me to start reading Buddhism.  I had Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a gift from Tom in 1981, and I had a  little classic I had often puzzled over, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.  But I wanted something more, something I could understand.  I think the first book I bought at this time was Pema Chodron's  When Things Fall Apart. Then I went occasionally to a Zen group in town.  Bought tapes of Buddhist teachers and listen to them while I cooked or ironed.  Went on a retreat one of the Zen people recommended to me.  Became passionate about this new way of thinking about life, began a meditation group in my church. All that.

The cancer itself changed my life.  It shocked me into understanding that I could die - me!  But at this point you have choices to make.  Many people try to cover over the fear and sadness about body change with a kind of positive thinking.  I didn't, or couldn't.  What really changed my life was the decision - the faith - to begin doing a healing meditation, and to struggle to make it a daily habit.
[image:  a resurrection lily in my back yard.  They send up leaves in early summer and die back.  Then in late summer, the long bare stems shoot up with the flowers on them.]