How to Simplify Your . . .

this version?

or this version?

In order to be worthy as a Zen student 

I must go straight on a narrow mountain road

That has ninety-nine curves.

[koan in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition]

Google "How to simplify" and you get almost 4 million hits.  It is charming. My goodness, how many of us in the modern world feel our lives are overly complicated. 

There are, it turns out, mathematical technique for simplifying equations.  But most of the hits are about how to simplify your life, your house, your clutter, your day.  I liked the simplified approach to simplifying on wikiHow, which is a commons how-to-do-anything manual I'd never explored:

1.  identify what is most important to you
2.  eliminate everything else

This is the approach I'm taking to the move in our future.  Easy.  Take the kitchen, for example.  I'll just pack the items we actually use and leave the rest in the house for the tag sale. That's going to mean that dream items (maybe someday I'll make another baba au rhum and need that bundt cake pan) has to go.  I can handle it. It will be harder for Tom, who loves each and every book he ever bought.  And actually, I have to go through all those good clothes I haven't worn for years . . .

If you think stuff is a problem, try simplifying your whole life.  I've been working at that for years, decades, and have realized my fundamental survival instinct:  The most important thing is to stay alive.  If it weren't, I'd never have done dialysis or undergone a transplant.  And even surviving can be complicated.  Would you rush back into a burning house for your child or cat or manuscript?  Would you endanger your own life for others?  For people you don't even know?  (Firemen do it all the time.)  Would you stop eating potato chips to lower your blood pressure?  Surviving can get complicated.

As a student of Zen I naturally turn to the more difficult problem of simplifying my busy mind in the face of the choices available in a life of luxury (by luxury I mean that I have a fairly secure home and food, and don't need to work for them anymore).  Right now I should be eating breakfast or actually, meditating - meditation goes best for me in the morning, and I'm running behind on my personal schedule. Or really, this is the best time to work with poetry.

But I want to finish this post, which is my work now, and am very interested in exploring the how-to-Zen articles on wikiHow (How to create a Zen bedroom!).  And I see Jeff responded to my e-mail last night . . . and I wish my photos of  Tashi would upload to Picasa so I can pick one for this post . . .

Maybe these are the ninety-nine curves of that narrow road each of us walks on.  No big deal, each and every moment.  But it is.  

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.