Touching Base

[image: Thanks to Chris Hardin for suggesting this illustrated quote as a fitting homage to Teena Price, who was a wild flower.]

I have relatives who don't love me the way I wish they would, don't you?  The weather has been too hot, the air quality is so bad I have to wear a mask outside, my moods are up and down, I'm having an awful time with sleep, and I have to wear elastic on three of my four limbs, and sometimes I hate all this...... But today I am shrugging these things off (all but the depression, to be truthfull).  The universe has been giving me opportunities to see my problems in perspective.

As I wrote previously, Saturday night was a wrenching memorial service for a friend who died last Thursday.  This morning a beloved friend was at our front door to tell us that another friend died yesterday.

Greg Houston was 61 years old and seemingly in good health.  His truck went off the road for no apparent reason, and he was dead by the time the medics got there.  Greg and his wife of over 40 years are important to us, and to many, many other people, because they are lovely people who exemplify a life of compassion and generosity.  For a couple of years Greg has come over periodically to help Tom with projects around the house; it was a joy to me to hear them working together, both so polite and careful.

Yesterday Tom got an e-mail from Greg asking if he'd like help with anything.  The subject line was, as always, Touching Base.  If you want to know what it means to "lead with your heart," Greg was a fine example; Greg actually touched base; he looked at people and saw what we needed.  And he didn't just say, "Call me if you need anything."  He offered specifically to come and help with projects, and did that many times.

Many people had to be called about Greg's death, because many people love someone like that, and he was a pillar of the church.  I expect his service to attract hundreds of people, and we will all weep.

I want to say something very quietly here about the contrast with Teena's death and her service that I wrote about yesterday.  She was 76 and had been ill and uncomfortable with advancing COPD for years.  She took months to die, gasping for air.  Her death was a release from suffering, and I was glad she finally got to rest.  You feel different when someone who dies is much younger than you and vital, and it is an accident.

And it is logical that many people loved Greg and Judy.  But is it logical that so few loved Teena?  I don't know.  It's not uncommon, but it feels wrong.

I have heard from several friends who relate strongly to the post I wrote yesterday that talked about the stigma we feel if we are mentally ill or just, like Teena, unconventional.  I have thought about how many Buddhists work in prisons, often as volunteers, where they know the suffering is acute, and they might be able to offer someone a little peace.  Many others work in hospices, spending time I'm sure with people like Teena, whose own families don't want to be there, or can't.

But out in the social world there is, generally, a sharp division between the people we find easy to love and the people we avoid, or downright dislike.  Too often, people bond in groups on the basis of their mutual loathing for Sarah Palin or their mother or people with brown skin or Christians or those that have not accepted their idea of God. 

Teena was disliked for exactly the qualities that some of us liked about her:  she was open and honest, she was an original.  She said what she thought without regard for the niceties.  She was generous to me and never in my life hurt my feelings, and I never saw her say anything mean.  But she was outspoken, and had an attitude about that.

I don't know what she might have said to another woman in the church who just a few months ago told me she didn't want Teena anywhere near her private birthday celebration.  Teena had wandered into the room where it was being held, having come to church to make a payment on her pledge.  She was in a wandering condition then, liked to go spend time at Whole Foods talking to anyone who would listen, and came to church at every opportunity.  But she was not invited to that small party, not that she should have been; it was private.

I asked that friend, "You have issues with Teena?"

She said coarsely, "Doesn't everyone?"

I said, "I don't."

I didn't like that, but it didn't rankle me until Teena died.  Then I found myself furious with that woman (who has some annoying qualities of her own).  She felt entitled to hate Teena, as I gather some of Teena's children may have, too.  I was afraid that woman would show up at Teena's service, for she is another person who hangs around the church a lot.  I knew I would not contain my anger at her if she did, and I would probably regret that and it would create an uncomfortable break in our social set. But she didn't come.

I wish Rev. Mark had thought to focus Teena's service on our need to soften our hearts toward "the people we find difficult to love," a phrase he used once in a service to encourage us to say aloud or silently during the Silence the name of someone we love - or find difficult to love.  That was valuable to me.  It let me whisper, that Sunday morning, my own father's name.  My father was a shit to me, but the extent of his venomous hatred was only revealed to me after he died. When I found out that he was giving my siblings huge sums of money, and none to me because I was "mentally unstable," I was beyond hurt and angry.  I was the only kid who drove to Zanesville to visit him a few months before his death on Father's Day.  We took him and my mother out to eat.  He gave every appearance of loving our company that day.  There you are.  Life with alcoholics.  They hate you behind your back.

But saying his name in church let me open my heart that little bit and begin the long, long journey of learning not to hate him (and the rest of them, in fact).  Speaking his name with a wish that he rest peacefully let me begin the work of adjusting to that painful reality.

Some of us who are wounded have to work to open our hearts at all, for anyone.  Almost everyone needs to work on opening it all the way, to a cheating spouse, to a neglectful mother or a father who raped you or the man who killed your son in a fight.  Maybe cultivating this willingness to love is actually the fundamental practice.  Jesus thought so.  If enough of us did it, there would be no more war.  Because there would be no more concept of "enemy."  Maybe there would be no more unhappiness.  Because anger and hatred, that's hell, you know it is.

Who do you hate?

You all know that I am against hatred, meanness, violence.  As far as I can see, we haven't gone very far in terms of eradicating that big boy's game of war with real weapons.  Dogfighting is illegal but boxing, football, hockey, and other sports that we know often lead to brain damage are not.  This is a patriarchal culture, and was founded as a violent overtaking of other humans, with the nice excuse that they weren't really human like us.  It is still patriarchal, meaning it values and rewards the aggressions of high-testoserone males in business, academia, the economy, god, they even rule the kitchens now, taking a job traditionally done by women in the service of nourishing and community and turning it into a screaming competitive hell.

Okay.  So it has started on facebook already, the vicious posting about that act of terrorism by a handful of deranged young men almost 10 years ago.  And I was in an unpleasant mood yesterday to start with.  So I got into it with someone who was deploring the very idea of "building a mosque at Ground Zero".  He had his facts all wrong - here's an article about the proposed construction at Park51 that explains what the building will house - but the issue for me was the vindictive hatred I was seeing in the comments on this post.  Self-righteous, and backed up by their idea of Christianity.  I had good experiences in my Christian youth, and that ticked me off too - Jesus did not tell us to hate one another.  So I got into it.

I restrained myself, that wasn't the issue.  But my anger surprised me somewhat - maybe it was just a high-fire day.  I often sat and listened to racism and bigotry and idiotic parroting of talk radio hatemongers from our fathers, not rising to the bait to argue or even get mad.  Maybe my long patience was just worn out.

But if I hate the bigot and assign him/her to the category of subhuman (sub me that is), am I not as bad as him? And go further - don't you know liberals who self-righteously hate the sitting ducks of the right - it used to be George W.  Now it's Sarah Palin.  In the privacy of my own livingroom I am not a model of compassion and kindness about a number of people, definitely including that Dominique Strauss-Kahn person.

If you want a spiritual exercise, think about putting some person whose politics you abhor into your lovingkindness meditation, in the spot of "enemy" or "difficult person."  If even thinking about it increases your stomach acid, well here's an opportunity, I guess.  Meanwhile, none of us should be too hard on ourselves - it doesn't help.  Lovingkindness starts with us.  Well, maybe the cat first, then us.

Hatred Arises

As if it weren't enough to have another sunny day, and the first daffodils about to bloom in my back yard - already in bloom I'm sure where stones or concrete warm them - today is the vernal equinox. It means that all over the world, day and night are equally long. That seems auspicious, doesn't it?

Sheba is particularly glad to have me up. I've been sleeping longer, maybe nine hours, and she is not in favor of changes in the routine. But I am at the computer where I'm supposed to be. And she is under the desk lamp, so it's pet the cat, type, pet the cat, type.
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Shift to a subject.

There was an error in our grocery bill yesterday, and it got me to thinking about a couple I know who always check the grocery bill before they leave the store. The woman told me triumphantly, "There's always an error, and it's always in the store's favor."

What is going on here in this very Us/Them rendering? It starts there, a concept of an uncivil world, a society in which These Other People are cheats and liars, not to be trusted, and presumably different than me. I found myself connecting it to an unpleasant incident that happened here the other day in a protest calling for health care, which was attended by that new anger movement called "Tea Pary." These seem to be people who want to be entirely self-sufficient, and want you to be too. No government, certainly no universal medical care.

A friend of ours was sitting on the ground (of necessity) holding a sign about his own health problem; he has Parkinson's disease that has come on young and very strong. Parkinson's makes his lips stiff, so he doesn't speak clearly, and has not been able to teach recently because of that.

Some of The Haters got into reviling him. One of them had the media-savvy idea of throwing money at him, one bill at a time, and saying, "Here, you want a handout? Here's your handout." How ugly can people be? Here he is in the video below, my friend Bob, using it as an opportunity to urge us to political action.

What is it about Haters? What is the source of that anger? We are told that hatred rises endlessly, as if it comes from some well in us. But haven't you noticed that the longer you do a spiritual practice, the less likely you are to feel anger, and to get stuck in it? I have.

My father would have loved the Tea Party during his last years. He went from being a regular conservative racist to being really verbally ugly during that time. These were years of suffering for him, trying to take care of a wife whose dementia was gaining, who did less and became more difficult. I remember going to the mall with them, how she wouldn't really walk, but take a step and stop. Nobody ever figured out why she acted this way, but later she could walk normally if being evaluated by an occupational therapist. She had learned to say "No," and did it often, with the simple delight of a two-year-old.

As for my father, his life was on that downward trajectory that old age can be. Friends lost - I remember when his best friend died. Siblings dying one after the other. Kids and grandkid all moved out of town. What to do with a wife who was no longer the woman he knew. I think he was afraid. He used to say often, "I'm not going to change her diapers," obviously foreseeing that dreadful future. At the same time, he became panicky about his "estate" being eaten up in nursing home bills, and tried to get at least some of it in his kids' hands. Worst of all, a surgeon who had viewed his liver, said he had cirrhosis, and had to stop drinking. My father did quit, though alcohol was the medication he had used all his life. So often after that my father seemed just plain miserable.

He might not have acted like the ignorant bullies who verbally abused my friend, but he would have loved to see it. I imagine him chuckling. It's easy to hate people. Take your own vulnerability, and fear of it. Insist on finding a cause for your helplessness and the sadness of later life. Find that cause, it can't be your actions - ah, it's Those People! - and blame them. Work the judgment so it turns the blame into anger. Let it solidify, you have hate.

Anger feels good - if you don't know that you probably need to try it some time. It comes from a deep energy center in the body, it is like fire, warming you, making you feel alive. You are motivated to risky actions like throwing money at someone. You feel empowered.

Recently I read somewhere that if you hate someone, you have not imagined deeply enough their situation. I can imagine that when I went home for those dreaded family gatherings during their last years, I could have just listened or not listened to my father, and not taken his rantings to mean anything. Not been appalled. I remember one time I was calm until he began reviling about Mother Theresa. She was a fraud, he said. Then I tried to argue with him. Well, that was our last Thanksgiving together.

I didn't have to sit and listen to him. Could have gone into the living room. Should have taken a book with me, some kind of nice fiction I could get lost in, I guess. But I always wanted to find some way down under the ranting to the real person I remembered. There you are. Maybe it wasn't a mistake, my own delusion rising endlessly. I don't remember a thing I ate that year.