Still Here, But You Never Know

Having nothing better to do in this hospital room, thought I'd update the known universe on my condition.

Life is the great Teacher. Only Saturday my sitting group enjoyed this Dylan Thomas poem, because I had quoted the first line earlier to Nancy V. (We have two Nancy's most day, some days three. Really.). As I read it aloud I realized how it is about life and death.  Now I'm here soon to get scanned  for blood clots etc.

But, to my story.  One microbe in this colony of seven billion.  I woke up yesterday much more short of breath and tired before I even got out of bed.  It happened that my annual visit with the cardiologist was scheduled that day.  He follows my atrial fib.  Struggled to shower and get there, Tom driving.  Well, they take difficulty breathing with any exertion seriously at the cardiologist's.  And yes, tightness in chest....so this was exciting. Got taken by squad - five guys! - to the ER and so on. Nitroglycerin patch, aspirins, all that.  Nobody took a video.

And today much more testing, no blood clots found to explain my symptoms, leading to the startling affirmation that I need to get a heart cath tomorrow.  It looks like we will do that, knowing the contrast dye might damage my one kidney and we could have to do dialysis for a while if that happened. But the kidney would probably recover. And that might not happen.  If on the other hand a massive heart attack blows out your heart . . . there are no living donors of hearts.

Life.

I realized something this morning as my night nurse, Rachel, told the day nurse, Julie, all about me.  Looking at Rachel, I saw how tired she was, and she is young, under 30 I'd say. They work on their feet, you know, endlessly interrupted by crises small and large.  It's hard work. Nurses over 50 usually look tired all the time.  For the first time I realized - They work all night. I mean I saw it, I knew what it meant for the first time, how they keep the cities alive.  My consciousness expanded to all the people who keep Riverside humming, the electricians, the miners who dug the coal for the first electric plant, the train that brought it here, the engineer . . . probably the young people who build computer chips from China that schedule the trains.  How all this cushions my life.

Sunday I had been remembering Torei Zengi's Bodhisattva Vow, so that also led me real-eyes this truth a little more clearly.  Here's a bit of it:

Among us, in our own daily lives, who is not reverently grateful for the protections of life: food, drink, and clothing! Though they are inanimate things, they are nonetheless the warm flesh and blood, the merciful incarnations of Buddha.

Things Change (Constantly)

"Things change" was a constant theme of Suzuki Roshi, and impermanence is a fundamental understanding in Buddhism.  Phenomena (everything we think of as real) are constantly arising and decaying, so pay attention.  Along that line, isn't it curious how some people stick like velcro to themselves and their beliefs?  Mostly people who are good at distracting themselves from their suffering, I think.  Often people don't adopt meditation seriously until overwhelmed by suffering.  It seems much the same to me as "hitting bottom" in an addiction.  

Among the principles of Assertiveness Training I once taught in the heyday of feminism, was the right to change your mind.  Not that we should enshrine our tendency to ADD and flutterby everything, but we should pay attention to new information, like, the love of your life has been having sex with the babysitter. Things change, new information, you change.  Old age is a stream of things like this.  You start having stress fractures in your feet; throw away high heels, move into well-fitting athletic shoes.  Surprising how difficult it can be when you are attached to some dumb red shoes or husband or other delusion.

Since I put out word that I was offering a course in Zen (see previous post), I've talked to a number of people and decided to offer instead a sitting group for women only.  Someday I might write about what happens in mixed-gender peer groups or discussions, and how radically women's lives differ from men's, but you could google it yourself.

The description of the sitting group follows this pleasing short video in which Sylvia Boorstein introduces lovingkindness meditation, which I plan to introduce in the group.


~ Women’s Meditation Group ~

Contemporary  Zen  strays  by  struggling  to  get  away  from  the  heart's innermost request - to realize the same heart as Buddha. Our problem is not that we aspire too much, but that we aspire too little, and aim for selfcentered wisdom and compassion rather than the full-blown real deal. ~ Dosho Port

Since I announced a course called The Zen Way to a Balanced Life, I’ve learned that only women were interested  (which is interesting), and that almost everyone has schedule conflicts this time of year.

Bowing to reality - which is basic to Zen, when you think about it - I’ve decided to change my offering to an open sitting group for women only. It will meet every Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30.  Come if you can.  No registration is required, and there will be no charge.

Each meeting will include
~ seated meditation in the Zen style (zazen) - in chairs ~ tea and a check-in
~ a talk on the whole-hearted way of Zen
~  time to creatively explore how we can live our own lives more deeply.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to write or call.  Otherwise, just show up.  If you’d like a personal orientation to zazen before you come, call me to set up a time. We will start promptly, so plan to arrive ten minutes early.  The door will be unlocked; if you are late, enter quietly and find a seat.  You may leave your shoes in the front hall.

We will begin with a focus on setting up a daily sitting practice, and on kindness, the first of The Four Boundless Qualities of the Mind.  There is a good introduction to these qualities at this link:  http://www.gratefulness.org/readings/jh_boundless.htm
~~~~~~~~~~
Jeanne Desy began practicing meditation when she had breast cancer in 1997, and has led meditation groups and workshops since.  She has studied with Ama Samy and Daniel Terragno, and is a student of Dosho Port.

There's Self-love and then there's sssSelf-love

by Georgia O'Keefe

With my morning coffee the other day, I listened to an NPR bit on Alzheimer's disease.  I found myself thinking about how "personality" or what we call in Zen "the self" and I call sssself when I'm mad at mine, seems to reside mostly in the brain.  There is also temperament, of course, creating ethereal air people, focused fire people, comforting earth people.  That's kind of general.

But the ssself is particular.  It's all yours.  The one thing you own.  But a lot of it goes when memory goes.  Even before dementia, personality can be changed with a stroke or tumor.  My mother lost something like her work ethic with her first stroke at age 63, and became someone who mostly just wanted to sleep, smoke, and watch TV.   (Don't take retiring to do the things you love for granted.)  I know of other elders who got rude, mean, or downright violent with age-related dementia.

I was thinking about this when I noticed a blue sticky note I'd put on the newspaper the other day, so I looked at that page and, behold, here was the sssself again, this time in an article titled Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks.  I knew that - I've been unfriended for my realism, which translates to some people now and then as pessimism or cynicism.  But enough about me.  This is the paragraph I'd circled:

...Social consciousness comes into play when people are sharing information about their favorite subject of all: themselves.  This [sharing] is intrinsically pleasurable and activates the brain regions associated with rewards like food, as demonstrated in a study...[that] showed it's so pleasurable that people will pass up monetary rewards for the chance to talk about themselves.

Monetary rewards - that's money.  People will give up money to talk about themselves.  But you knew that.  We pay therapists of many descriptions to listen to us.

another Georgia O'Keefe, because I like it.

In the Zen tradition, Teachers are supported by gifts, though that is having to change - it's expensive to live in America.  You also sort of pay by sitting hour after hour meditating and following specific rituals in order to have the privilege of a moment with the Teacher that will be all about you and you alone.  It can happen that in this interview you say a few words and they may say a few words or say nothing, and ring the bell, meaning the interview is over.  That seems to mean whatever you said wasn't right, or worth responding to.  Something.  You have many hours until the next such interview to wonder about it.

Abrupt dismissal can hurt if you've been thinking deeply about your ssself and your desperate desire to have someone tell you you're enlightened; or asking for a kind of help no one can give you; or studying a koan and positive you're right this time.  These things can really disturb ssself, and maybe that's not bad; the project in Zen is to get less attached to that constructed batch of delusions, preferences and, oh yes, standing resentments - in brief, to your stories.

I'm not a scholar, but that's how I see Zen practice.  You sit quietly on a little raft and hope to drift far enough from the elaborate castle of self to see it. and therefore not be constantly traveling its hot and windy maze and playing with its treasures when you should be paying attention to the cat.  It sounds good, but does seem to take a lot of work.  No matter how bad Wun's self-esteem, we can be very attached to our delusions. 

And here I am, talking about myself again.  That's blogging for you.

The Problem of Mother

My life is flowing past me like a bad movie back in the old days, when you went to a theater to see a movie with other people, and no one was texting.  And everyone just sat there, no matter how boring the movie was, how idiotically violent, just to see what the creature from the black lagoon looked like (not much).

My morning started with an obdurate computer. Windows open, the weather is freakishly warm again, and the computer doesn't like this natural world either, the moisture perhaps.  Waiting, waiting I realized the depth of my dependence on it.

There is a natural transition here - the word dependence - to The Problem of Mother.  Yesterday we spent two hours on phone conference with Mother, Good Sister, Gentle Eldercare Attorney, me and Eldest Brother, that's Tom, all trying to convince mother that she must go into assisted living.  She has dementia, has given lots and lots of money and stuff away to the evil scammers that pop up out of the dirt where there are supposed to be bodhissatvas.  Yet, all concerned were trying to reason with her.  She is very good at pretending she hears (oh no, no hearing aid) and deflecting decisions, has been doing it successfully all her life, and she's not about to make a major life decision now.  Someone is going to have to tell her, This is what we're going to do. But I can't convince them of that.  They want to believe she is reasonable.  So not only is she crazy, so are they. 

I feel that when it comes to crazy people, I know.  And it is a special dispensation. I have been crazy (a long time ago, quick to add), and in hospitals with other crazy people.  And somehow those experiences alienated me from the delusions shared by much of the world - or maybe that's what being crazy is, come to think of it - not sharing in the general delusion.

Why do these things with mothers make us all so insane? That is, why do we not see the reality before us, that Mother is very old (90) and not able to remember to lock the door or say no to people who try to take advantage of her.  (Dad is in skilled nursing, and likely to be in it the rest of his life; and not able to be part of decisions.)  Therefore, we must take over and move her somewhere where she is not in danger.  And it will be nice.

Well, just hone in on the question:  Why do we not see the reality before us?  Because it feels better not to.

As a kid you're pretty stuck with TV and games.  As an adult you can do that feeling better-denying reality-thing a lot of ways:  Ativan, gin, running breathlessly from one social event and one responsibility to another, hey, reading and blogging and painting - What's your favorite hedge against reality?  It's the curse of these much-larger-than-necessary human brains - they can be used to evade reality in a great many complicated ways.

Now, specifically onto mothers: all this took me back ten years to going through this kind of hell with my own mother and my siblings, who simply would not see the obvious truth of our mother's impairment, which included fecal incontinence.  Why?  I did not understand - I thought it was because they were drunk.  That was true, but something else is at work in these things.  And that is that the idea of a motherless world is quite frightening.  I found that out when my mother died.  Suddenly the sky was vacant.  My mother was not a kind, nurturing person.  Yet, or because of that, her death was a huge blow to me.  Maybe it's an energetic thing, that we are included in some sphere of home.  I doubt that it's all in your mind.

But it was and is a motherless world.  If you believe in or experience a caring God or universe, I'm sure it's easier to accept this.  Even so, the only thing you can count on is that the world changes constantly, you have nothing to stand on.  No security.  No assurance.

You can't count on anyone you love being here tomorrow, as much as I also hate to think it. You can't count on having the body or mind you have at this moment.  In fact, it is all a day older and more worn down today than it was yesterday, and this is true whether or not you're paying attention.  And the problem Mother is having is that she simply will not acknowledge the reality that she is old and forgetful and impaired.  My goodness.  Just like the rest of America, which was explored by a man looking for the fountain of youth.

Many spiritual people talk about a state of enlightenment in which we just dance with the flow, in which we have a quiet, consistent joy all the time.  If I find out where that state is located, I'll let you know. I think it has to do with understanding that nobody else is enlightened, either.

Meanwhile, I was struck with this lovely white-seeding grass (not photofixed).

Smoke

 

I took a number of shots of my altar just now before I realized what it was I wanted to photograph. Maybe I should video it - the smoke is the only thing visibly dancing on the empty altar. And it will change all day long as the light changes.

Sic transit gloria femme

It is Saturday, so a free day in my mind, free of my desires to catch up on the laundry and etc. as they used to say. It is a free day so I have been roaming around mentally and of course on the internet. I got to thinking about Phyllis McGinley. I remembered two things about her, a poem and a book of essays drawn from a column in, I believe, Ladies Home Journal. She was a houswife/poet/philosopher. I liked her writing then, when I was in my twenties and the feminist revolution, to say nothing of a liberal education, had not yet set off fireworks around my head. In that day she represented the world I came from or aspired to - a bit higher than middle-class, I suppose. It was a world in which the highest aspiration for a woman, generally speaking, was to be an upper-middle class housewife. Phyllis defended that, and the idea of a house and family in suburbia, which was just then the target of much cynicism and criticism. Yet, suburban America then and now is a tremendously privileged place to live, often safe from crime and boasting good schools, to say nothing of good sanitary sewer systems.

That can easily lead me to one of my meandering talks about having clean water. A dear friend, older than me, just got off weeks of diarrhea. Her western doctor wasn't a whole lot of good, by the way. She reminded me, There are places this is called "dysentery," and it kills people. Yes, it kills people all the time, but seldom in suburban America.

Phyllis had many honors, appeared on the cover of Time, won a Pulitzer prize for her poetry. Yet she is now almost forgotten. My city library, one of the best in the country, has only four works by her, children's books. And I suppose you can buy anything she wrote for $.01 online. There's your note on impermanence, how even praise and blame pass.

However, she is still with me. She inspired me, somehow, with a dream of making a harmonious home, of being a poet and of thinking about my life. I am quite the feminist, but have never let go of that ideal, and I still think it is a good one. All over the planet people are dying in the wake of earthquakes and epidemics for want of a simple shelter the size of our guest bedroom. (That guest bedroom was one of the middle-class things I saw as deeply privileged back then. ) Home, a safe home, is a wonderful thing to have. We forget that. We could begin each day with a list of the things for which we can be truly grateful.
Bare feet on a smooth wood floor.
Excellent full-bodied coffee.
Shelter from the wind that is rising even now
and the rain that keeps misting down.
[image: the back seat of the van two weeks ago, full of woodland and native plants for our front gardens.]

Every day's a novel

[image: a promotion for a movie titled Fear2. You might still be able to get one of these coats for your cat here.]

Yesterday was a day like a Russian novel for me, full of events and dread, with recovery at the end. Here is the sketchy outline, the events, and some nods to the places I went in my mind.

Kidney doctor in the morning, Tom couldn't go with me. I was pretty sure my recent shortness of breath was caused by further kidney failure. Hoped it was that and not recurrence of my breast cancer. The night before I did some hectic research on accesses for dialysis. The doctor is satisfied with me not going back on it yet, just watching my slo-o-ow trend downward. But he could hear "some whistling" in my lungs, and I had gained four pounds in two months. That could be from fluid in the lungs, what, congestive heart failure? He wanted to order a chest x-ray. We agreed I would call my PCP about it instead.

11:00 Went out and sat in parking lot, called my primary care doctor's clinic and got in with one of the other doctors at 1:15. People take not breathing very seriously. That and no heartbeat. If you want attention in the ER, not breathing is excellent.

Called Tom. Got him just leaving his own pulmonary function tests. (More fear on that later.) We agreed to meet at home and make lunch. He offered to drive me up to PCP. I felt gratitude, and thought about the pleasures of marriage in old age. I had no idea when I was young.
Breathing raspy now. Pneumonia. Maybe bronchitis. Hoped it wasn't the antibiotic resistant kind that kills people.

1:15. Dr. very smart and attentive to detail. Ruled out heart, discussed COPD and emphysema, etc., which can start EVEN THO YOU QUIT SMOKING 20 YEARS AGO! How unfair. He walked me around the hall briskly, thot I did good. Ordered a breathing test and chest x-ray. Went home trying to adjust to the idea of chronic lung disease.

3:30 His nurse calls to say he has revued my breathing test and it is okay. It will be two days to have the radiologist look at the chest x-ray. That's my fault, I'm breathing.

5:00 Couldn't nap. Starving. Worried about my blood sugar. How could I be so hungry? I must be getting diabetic. Eat some leftovers. Something wrong with my friend G's phone. I try her cellphone, leave a message.

7:00 I am definitely either manic or depressed, hit by a crazed desire to cook a creamy pasta dish with Tom's help, substituting bacon for pancetta and so on, using some frozen peas that were used as an ice pack on my ankle back when. We play Iron Chef in the kitchen. It's really active and the food turns out good.
~~~~~~~
I am not a reader of Russian novels myself. I just know they have a reputation for being very long. I assume most of that is not actual action, but people thinking and feeling. The subjective, as in the deep exploration of the fears highlighted above. It did seem like a long day. And all those fears were real, if temporary. Even then, it was kind of funny, like, What now? Watching myself as one of those farces where people dressed in ridiculous clothes keep bobbing their heads out of doors and hiding in closets.

Oh yes, in with all of this, it was a beautiful sunny day today, one more in an improbable string of them. I hope yours was better. And now it's time for the weekly taking out of the trash. Garbage. I mean plain ordinary actual tangible garbage, which would really smell bad by next week. Kind of thing you have to do if you're alive.

So change again

I've always liked the story that a Buddhist bookstore had a little sign on a bowl by the checkout: If you fear change, leave yours here. Don't you wish you could sometimes?

As if I needed any more reminders of impermanence these days, I got another blast of change this weekend, an invasion of bacteria. Monday at 4:00 p.m. I entered the doctor's office, the image of a pathetic kidney patient, dark splotches under my eyes so I looked a little like a white pansy with purple splotches. Two hours later we were back home, the UTI confirmed by Science, and I took a Levaquin - a simple little tablet, an antibiotic. I will take four more of these over the next nine days.

It is not for nothing that antibiotics were called "miracle drugs" when they were discovered. Now - 10:00 a.m. Tuesday - I am awake to the world again. I am alive. I am much more "my self." This self, the Buddhist teachers insist, is impermanent, just a collection of parts that are going to come apart again someday. The idea is almost amusing, as if you were a car and the drive train fell out, but I am not convinced. I don't feel like a sort of column of fog created on the stage for a moment, then blown away. No, I want to be Someone, and get things in place. God knows I want those I love, like Sherlock, to stay, and I want to keep the Me that I am when I feel good. I want to discover the secret to making that healthy, cheerful self permanent, and then have a life.

But I have overwhelming evidence once again that "I" can be completely changed by one microscopic bacteria that finds its way through my shredded immune defenses and happily colonizes. And that "I" am a different person a few hours after ingesting a bit of anti-bacteria. So which me is real? And why won't she just stand still?

Well there you are. I am only a poet, but I have a close, personal understanding of the Law of Entropy, which I once read tells us, Everything is constantly going to hell.

This seems like an abrupt place to end this little monologue, but I have been interrupted three times. Now Tom has come to my door suggesting we go out and sit in an outdoor restaurant and watch traffic go up and down High Street. It is a lovely day. So I think it's time to gracefully change my plan.

[image: Impermanence of Containment Installation, by Shawn O. Porter]