Take Care of Yourself Because It Sure is Winter

Ha.  The blog went over 200K hits when I wasn't looking.  And I've never earned a penny from it.  You have to be nasty to get a million hits online.  Generally speaking.

My life:  this moment stopped reading a good article on "The wisdom of no escape" put on Facebook by a good artist I've never met to take my 9:30 a.m. pills....

We have no water except drinking water in bottles and what we are getting through a hookup to a kind neighbor's hose, except that yesterday they shut the water off and the hose froze, which we really didn't want to happen...... Our water main to the street broke eleven (yes, 11) days ago. The front yard is all torn up again with a bobcat sitting there.  It awaits a city inspector now.  Will they come?  Will we then get water?  I am not optimistic.  The glass has been empty, after all, for a long time.

Can't take pills while typing....where did the other one go?  Ah, on the floor.  Good thing I don't let the cat in my study. (I'm very allergic to her.  Russian Blues are the kind to get if you want to develop a big cat allergy.  They have these very fine little hairs in their plush undercoat.)

Tashi's favorite medium is sunlight

About the time the water went out, the Roomba battery wore down.  We like to let the Roomba run around the house almost daily to keep the cat hair in check.  Tom sent for a new one, but not overnight express.  When it came it had to be charged for like 3 days.  Half our house is carpeted and the cat walks and rolls on it all the time, distributing hairs and dander.  So....

This had me screaming at the cat.  (Of course, she sees me as a big cat, and they growl sometimes.  It doesn't seem to have affected her desire to sit on my lap and waft allergens up to me.)

So with all this, my practice slipped, and in fact, I got really pissed off at the very idea of practicing equanimity.

That's why we Buddhists pay attention to our attachments.  The stronger the attachment, the bigger the suffering.  You can soften your ego trips, but attachment can't be avoided, of course.  You get attached to people and they get sick or move or die or won't speak to you anymore (which is sometimes just fine).  Loss is often a surprise.  Death, especially.

Today I am babying myself, not doing too much physical work, because I have pain and congestion in my right ear and blood coming from that sinus, and a mild headache.  Allergy, virus, who knows.  And I've been having fibromyalgia flares with all this "it's-not-climate-change" severe winter.   Chocolate chips in my oatmeal seemed to help.  I'm doing nasal rinses with this excellent inexpensive system that prevents and cures sinus infections, which are common in the Ohio Valley.  BTW, antibiotics very seldom cure sinus infections.  You should not talk your doctor into giving them to you.  You shouldn't even see your doctor about it unless you're running a temp.  Your doctor should know about nasal rinses and hot/cold compresses, but probably does not.  You should listen to your grandma.


Here's what I wrote in my morning journal this morning, starting with a quote from Janet, an online dharma friend:

The human being by nature is inadequate, practices zazen inadequately, realizes true nature inadequately. This is the Virya Paramita*. On and on we persevere, like a small child determined to learn how to walk while continually falling down, or like a very old person getting up in the middle of the night, lurching from wall to wall to reach the bathroom.
                                                       Robert Aitken, The Practice of Perfection, p. 69

*This "perfection" of zeal is defined in Wikipedia as "an attitude of gladly engaging in wholesome activities." Doesn't that sound good?  

I also wrote instructions to myself:

feed this body-mind good food
move this body-mind to rhythm
rest this body-mind enough today
treat this body-mind well
treasure this body-mind
recollect that this body-mind 
is woven into the great fabric,
and treat it well, too

I should listen to myself, too.

Inside My Bipolar Week

At the beginning of this month I vowed to change my life, starting with working harder on my mind. Is it working? Maybe. I am keeping on with it. That's what I can say. Waking up is so hard to do, from one standpoint. Easy from another: All you have to do is follow own breath in...out...rest.  For even the few seconds of one complete breath you are turning away from your itches and wallows and, as the Buddha said, "when you forget yourself, you are free." Unfortunately, it isn't as easy as one breath; if it were, everyone would be enlightened.

In the mess of my last five years of sick and sicker, I thought the first thing to get in place was my practice. I have been reliably doing my morning practice for some time now, and added an evening sit with Tom. He and I are each in a conflagration of problems with difficult people in our lives, and meditating together helps us get to the evening practice. Part of what you are practice when you sit zazen is putting your gnawing problems aside. The problems are still in motion, reality is gnawing at everyone involved and changing them, and you get off the carousel for awhile.

My biggest problem this past year has been my mood swings.  They have been dramatic, and the psychiatrist washed his hands of me, afraid to try any other chemicals.  So I've been trying to get a handle on them myself.  Recently I was looking at TCM and hypothesized that I might be expending a lot of energy/dopamine on a good day, talkinglaughingcookingmakingartgeneratingideas, so that the next day I am naturally exhausted (from the Latin, emptied out, drained).  So I set out to curb my enthusiasms, to move more quietly through  high-energy days. Impulse control. This was hard the first day, but is getting easier with practice.  Sitting still and poised, no matter how you feel, is central to zazen, and maybe to equanimity.

Yesterday seemed to be somewhat better, as bad days go. I didn't cry or carry on angrily at anyone. I got a couple of important practical things done by following my day's to-do list strictly in priority.  I still went semi-comatose around 4:00 pm, despite an infusion of energy from a visit from Chris, and a few minutes enjoying the garden with her. I was sad that I can't work in the gardens myself anymore, but happy to have her help getting the peonies under control.

I talked too much visiting with Chris. I keep doing that. Right speech-and-listening is a lifetime project. In fact, it's singled out on the Eightfold Path.

Chris is a kind person, and tolerated me well. We couldn't hug because she was covered in allergens. That's another thing I accomplished yesterday; I made an appointment with a local acupuncturist my grandson found for me, who has special training in allergy.

There's much more to a week, of course, but I'll close with touching down on my sleep and lack of it. Last night I felt clammy and discouraged, and couldn't fall asleep until after midnight.  Then I awoke at the traditional time for insomniacs, 3:00 am.  However, I remembered the intention I set before I went to bed, to light some incense and meditate if that happened, and I did.

Meditating by candlelight in a dark house in the middle of the night is pleasant, quiet and easy. It is not yet full Pink Moon, but getting closer. The moon is always full, of course. "Full moon" means only that we can see it all from where we stand.

Pink Moon phlox

Winter Bloom

Today I am over the cold and most of the symptoms; not anxious, though I have the usual problems I am sometimes anxious about; and neither high nor low.  I feel balanced.  Not blissed, but happy in a quiet, contented way.  I thought readers might like to hear from me in that mood now and then.

It does seem that an occasional day of feeling balanced and at peace with life is nothing to remark on, but I guess it is for me.  Or has been for quite a while - but who knows what tomorrow will bring?  Meanwhile, art is more fun than words, so I will conclude by posting photos of some of the things I'm grateful for these days.

Tashi luminous in morning sun

 

Mums Tom picked up grocery shopping last week, in a vase that was a housewarming gift from Marie

Rules in the Sunday School room we do creative movement in

.  I count myself among the Nice tigers.

Watercolor sunset tonight after Art Journaling

Winter bloom (red-orange) on a tree in the church courtyard

The Truth About It

[Right about that time, this song was popularized by Three Dog Night.]

Your first yoga teacher - maybe it's like your first love:  wonderful.  George came to our small town and brought us yoga to candlelight and such music as an ethereal recording of the Panamian nose flute, and this was the early 70s. It was part of the revolution, which was good, but not all good.

One of his pieces of wisdom comes back to me often.  He would say, as we lay there at the end imitating corpses, "It feels good to relax."  And boy, it did.  George was flawless.  But there was one thing I still disagree with him on; now and then he'd murmur, almost as if talking to himself, "It's all good."  My life wasn't.  It was highly unsatisfactory.  In fact, the years to follow that first yoga class would be the most painful of my life.  Mania and depression almost killed me.  Sometimes I realize how lucky I was to live through it, and I suspect it's true, that God, the universe, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

I can disagree with George's positivism today from a more respectable position, since I am 70 now, officially old. So  I've been thinking about this question of how it all is for many years, more diligently than I thought about (or practiced) down dog.  Now I have Zen to back me up, I believe, when I say, It's not all good.  The Buddha's first teaching was that life is difficult, unsatisfactory.  But it's not all bad; a lot of it is beautiful, fun, interesting, or at least feels good.  What it is, it all just is.

It is. 

I must admit, that looks like a bald statement, and one that hardly needs saying.  I mean, obviously, it is.  But I myself have spent a great deal of energy in my life trying to escape or control it.  From not accepting it to hating it.  At the moment I'm working to cultivate equanimity; it's been a theatrical year with some really bad depression. If equanimity came naturally, we wouldn't have to cultivate it.

But to be calmly accepting of reality is not natural; what's natural is desire and aversion, greed and hatred, and don't forget delusion.  Maybe one of those delusions is that if we wear only organic cotton and eat vegan and practice a chronic smile, it will all feel good.  Or maybe that's a another desire, and a natural desire, too.  We are equipped to feel pain and pleasure, hunger and satisfaction.  Pain hurts - it is unnatural to like it, and generally good to avoid it.  But sometimes it just is. Life is still worth celebrating.  Sometimes.

What Happens When You Get Fed Up

 [image:  none today, to allow you to form images in your mind as you read the poem.]

I wrote this poem in 2000 when the consumer culture was going strong.  At that time, Adbusters fostered the idea of international Buy-Nothing Day as a protest on the day after Thanksgiving.  That year, the theme was "Enough."  As in, you already have what you need.  I was a fairly recent convert to Buddhism at the time, and this theme of cultivating contentment in simplicity seemed to be basic dharma.  These days I think of it as cultivating equanimity rather than desire.  Those with something to sell have done their best this year to get everyone into the stores crazed with a frenzy for bargains.  I am pleased to see Adbusters is still at it, promulgating Buy-Nothing Xmas now. (link) 

        Enough
              (A Utopia)
            By Jeanne Desy
           
One year, children, everyone got fed up . . .
and stopped buying.
Nobody went to the mall that year,
nobody went to WalMart or
ate fast food or frozen pizza,
flew on a plane, bought a CD.
The economy came to a halt.

Unemployment rose to 50 percent.
The people who liked to work found work
and the rest stayed home with the kids.
Everyone planted gardens,
and cooked their own food
and cleaned their own houses,
everyone did their own laundry,
washed their own cars in the summer twilight. 
People wore slippers around the house.

The market declined for designer shoes,
theme parks and day care, acrylic nails
and Prozac, cellphones and pagers. 
Ringing and beeping tapered off, and
the air was spacious and quiet.
Nobody played the lottery, couldn’t afford to,
and no one bought guns. 
There was not much to steal anymore,
and not much to fight over now.
Everyone had enough to eat
and a roof over their heads.
That seemed to be what mattered.

The tax base eroded—there was
no money for missiles now, no money for war.
Young men stayed home and tended gardens.
Old men designed wonderful toys,
grandmas made biscuits and everyone learned to sew.
Happiness blossomed, addictions declined,
no money for drugs now,  anyway nothing to escape.
People grew their own catnip and drank tea
made with mint from their gardens,
and ate nastursiums and heirloom tomatoes.

Without ads, the TV went quiet.
There were no celebrities now,
everyone made their own music
with home-made drums and ancient guitars,
and told the old stories and wrote poems
with pencil on paper and read them out loud
over the breakfast table.   Factories closed.

The planet cooled, the air cleared.
You could see the stars. 
Wildflowers grew where there had been lawns,
rabbits came back to the yard, and foxes and owls.
The old folks sat on porches with dogs at their feet,
and shelled peas.  Barefoot women
hung sheets to dry in the sun.
Everyone just took care of themselves
and each other, and
no one was rich anymore, so no one felt poor.
Now that there wasn’t so much,
there was more than enough.
                   
© Jeanne Desy 2000

Balance

Here I am, still working on that space between Want and Don't Want.  Recently read an article that defined equanimity as that space.  On your right hand, you Want things.  On your left hand, you Don't Want things.  There is a gap in the middle, maybe a very little gap that can be made wider. 

Funny, I recall years ago listening to a talk in which Pema Chodron introduced lovingkindness meditation.  When she came to the part about wishing for the happiness of someone you neither like nor dislike, she called it "the neutral" and joked that it sounded a little ominous, like an alien.  So I am thinking that this same space in which equanimity resides could be called the neutral space.

Church yesterday was an opportunity for intensively practicing being there.  I made a point of just experiencing what was going on, without reaching out with desire when I liked the anthem or reacting with aversion when someone spoke from the pulpit in the kind of  little-girl voice that is hard for me to understand. 

Maybe because of that effort I was aware when Tom was finding it difficult.  The service was about The Day of the Dead, and it directed us to thinking about those we had lost.  And he has lost one important person after another these last months.  So maybe residing in that space made me more open, and that generated compassion.

Just thoughts, and ordinary ones.  There are so few fundamental truths that we are all singing them over and over in our own voice and in our own way, trying to get them ourselves.  It's a serious practice.  Today we are on the outer track of Tropical Storm Sandy, with lots of hope for not losing power, lots of aversion.....

Standing in the midst of the mall

Recently we had occasion to go to an enormous glittering mall.  We ate lunch on a mezzanine  above the crowd, watching the people.  It seemed that many use this as a place to meet, to wander.  It's like a giant party, much more mixed-race than it was 20 years ago; in fact, just recently a census showed that Caucasians are now a minority in births in America.  To get perspective on this, when I was in high school in the fifties in a very ordinary middle-class neighborhood, there were three black people in my class of 600, and no Asians.

Being in the midst of the mall made me think of something that happened in our Buddhist meditation group years ago.  We always ended by standing in a circle holding hands, and saying these words as a chant. 

Praise and blame,
gain and loss,
pleasure and sorrow
come and go like the wind.
To be happy, rest like a great tree
in the midst of them all.
           (the Buddha)

An older woman named Marie, an artist, became a constant member of the group.  After some months, something cued her to understand that the chant meant you stand in the middle of all those winds of change in the relative world.  She laughed and said that she always thought the last line was "in the midst of the mall."  I still love that.  If you are a householder in America, a layperson, it describes the challenge much better than the original.

Balance is not for everyone

[I like this little video in which the cat on the ledge refuses to make a fool of himself.]

Just some thoughts today, on their way to being developed in a file on Zen and bipolar. The question applies to any mental disorder, though.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thinking about how many Buddhist teachers promise that we can practice our way to equanimity and peace - and can this possibly apply to bipolars?  Depression (which can manifest as other disturbed mental conditions than sadness, e.g. irritability) is a kind of dukkha, and is in our own mind/body.  It is us, neurochemistry, brainwaves.  The dullness and apathy it brings are a survival disadvantage; of course you don't like it.  You are not at peace with it.
     Practice, and lots of it, brings a certain amount of detachment from depression, just as you can get detached from your pain.
     You can also distract yourself with external things that "take your mind off" it.  For me, fiction, both written and filmed, can work.  The more depressed I am, the more I crave exciting, active films.
     Being engaged in talking with someone else can work, though sometimes I still feel uneasy, not quite there, even with a close friend.
     So you can distract from depression.  But when you notice yourself again, so to speak, there it is, like a browned-out or jagged-red aura all around you, a dis-comfort, un-ease, in your very brain pathways.  Researchers talk about brain levels of various chemicals, norephremine, serotonin, dopamine.  And you can control your actions if mania is coming on, but still have that hyper, jittery feeling - and it will keep you awake.  And various medications won't help.  And you will eat many potato chips at night, and buy books for your Kindle, and only vaguely remember it when you see the crumbs on the table.  Sorry, got carried away. 

Praise and blame

I have long liked this quote, which travels quite a bit around the internet. We used to say it to together to conclude the meetings of our meditation group:

Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a great tree in the midst of them all.

One day Marie asked, "Does that say 'in the midst of the mall'?" We all agreed, that worked. Rest like a great tree, in the midst of the mall. That was back before the crash, so we felt ourselves to be in the midst of the consumer society, trying not to be swept by it.

This quote is about maintaining equanimity, not being pushed off balance by our experiences. I had a funny little push recently when the blogger minddeep named me one of 15 Buddhist women's blogs she especially liked. This has led on the way karma does. Today I had an email from a University press that wants me to send me a Buddhist book by a woman. This is the second time this has happened this month, probably people in publishing checking minddeep's list. But it feels like praise. Like being special.

This heady acclamation has subtly nudged me to feel more Buddhist, to slant the blog more Buddhist, if you know what I mean. When I started this I was all over the place, not knowing my identity, though my blog name itself makes some of it clear.

I am uneasy about writing for "an in-crowd" and shutting everyone else out, but it is probably inevitable. And what a pleasure it is to talk to faithful readers who talk back, to read your blogs, to be able to speak comfortably from my framework. Talking to other Buddhists I know some of the things we all believe in, like compassion and non-harming. In the same way, I go to my church and know I can talk as a Unitarian, that is, people I know there share my liberal political and social views. In this day of a gathering storm of sheer hatred calling itself the Tea Party, it's nice to have homes like this.
~~~~~~
The photo today is Snowgirl 2010, by Susan Michael Barrett. She was made in Texas - something I wouldn't have believed last year - and began melting as soon as her garland was placed, a vivid testimony to change. She is all organic.

Morning coffee with good friends

Years ago I wrote a soul-searching fantasy of my life as I wished it could be. Much of it has come true, though I am not in Bali, but in Ohio. One thing I wanted was to be nested in a community of like-minded friends. I am now, and that community fans out to include the internet sangha. The world-wide web, which has given me this morning a talk about bare perception in meditation.

I love this connectedness. Still, I am sitting alone in my sudy with my morning coffee, not able to wander out to an outdoor cafe where people I know might stop by to say hello. I would take a sketch pad a sketchbook and charcoal if I were going out there today, not my little notebook, maybe draw some quick portraits, maybe a banana leaf. People would come by.

Hello. I am fine. How are you?

These would be intimate friends, so we might talk about our response to what's happened in Haiti, the sudden massive earthquake, all the death and suffering, and not just murmur cliches, but talk about its intimacy and immediacy. We are Buddhists, our practice leads us to respond to suffering in a certain way.

This way is with something like equanimity. I would share with my friend that I cry every night, watching the news. But I don't get carried away into despair. I come back to my normal, like one of those inflatable clowns with sand in its bottom.

This way is with something like detachment. That doesn't mean being without compassion. It means understanding the constant presence of death all over the planet, the rolling and turning over of organic life in the universe, the widespread suffering, even in our privileged little community, our inability to create perfect societies. It means accepting my place as a tiny little bodhissatva who can dispense a teaspoon of water here and there. I say I think it's Bernie Glassman who puts it that way. My friend nods Yes.

We would acknowledge that this has touched our own sense of vulnerability and disturbed our dreams. We are not friends in order to hide from the truth with small talk and partying. In this quiet morning coffee of my dreams, we are just real with one another. No need to talk a lot. It's nice to connect.

Anyway, how are you?

Morning Fog

What a beginning to the week! I awoke from a restless dream - Grandson's energy still in the house - and reached for my clock to press the light on it and see the time. But my hand brushed my water bottle, which is one of those things with a straw in it they give you in the hospital, and it fell to the floor and spilled. Water, water everywhere. Sitting up, I lit up the clock, and then it fell from my hand to way under the bed somewhere. The time, BTW, was 5:00 a.m. I usually get two more sleep cycles.

What a mess, trying to mop it up and not wake up Tom. At least I got in the linen closet for an old towel and didn't use one of the new ones. Back to bed, I lay there thinking about Things To Do, worrying about getting my computer backed up. Thinking this is the result of watching all those explosions before bed, on TV. Eating badly over the weekend. So much excitement with grandson. It had accumulated in my patchwork body/mind. Sleep was not going to come back.

Get back up, drink a cup of lightly caffeinated coffee, find that an important e-mail has bounced, yet again. Research the student, find a different address, try again. Resist getting mad at the student. It is now 6:00 a.m. Here I am. Morning fog.

Yesterday it was warm - 40 degrees - here, rainy and foggy all day long. We were on the freeway, Tom driving, me in the back of the van with Otto, and I was admiring the beauty of the city resting in layers of fog. It is a peaceful look. Then Tom said, "What an ugly day."

He meant it made driving hard, mostly, but also, that it wasn't sunny. It usually isn't - I've heard that Columbus gets as little sun as Seattle, we just don't think of it that way, and continue to be unpleasantly surprised. People complain about it as if overcast skies are an unnatural deviation from The Way Things Supposed to Be. I certainly feel this way about the ridiculous state of being I'm in. I seem to be on a roll of clumsiness - last night a glass slipped from my hand and fell a few inches to the table, and shattered. It shouldn't have broken, but it did. Last week I dropped the sugar bowl. I don't like this not-with-it state, and am inclined to fix myself. Coffee, blogging, meditate, come on, get fixed.

In my morning mail, the daily dharma from Tricycle magazine happens to be about equanimity. Gil Fronsdal is talking to me. I think about standing calmly in the middle of it all, including the awkwardness of my body, dropping things, spilling things, making messy karma everywhere.

Of course, we love morning fog when we're at Grailville for Ama Samy's fall retreat. It is usually foggy at 6:00 a.m. when we walk toward the Caravansery, the lovely arc where we sit. The fog doesn't interfere with us or make it hard to walk. We are aware we're sitting in a cloud. We trust it to burn off.