The Stranger in our Midst

It is interesting to me to see people in Zen quarters talking about a problem we have talked about in my Unitarian Universalist church: We are so white here! Why do we have just a sprinkling of African-Americans and other people of color? A friend of mine has the answer: A black woman  wouldn't dream of coming to a church where people wear shorts and flip-flops on Sunday morning. Actually, that is a kernal of a truth recognized in the book "Crowns," which is largely photographs of beautiful black women in distinguished hats.

The truth is that all institutions are based in specific cultures.  And there are always plenty of opportunities to welcome whoever walks in the door, even if every last visitor is the same skin color as you.  I am wide awake lately to the fact that people who, ah, seem different, who might be mentally ill, are routinely avoided.

Think Jamie Holmes, Colorado shooting suspect.  Just today the Houston Chronicle published a short article to the effect that teachers at both the U of Alabama and Iowa had recommended against admitting him.  Here's someone who was obviously smart, but too....strange....and that was in 2011, before he died his hair.  Anyway, he was Not My Problem.  Just don't admit him.

I think it may be a primal instinct to avoid people with a strange energy or aura or body odor or manner, however you want to think about the differences in people.  I imagine I had it too before bipolar disorder burned down my life in my mid-thirties.  Now I'm sort of the other way, to tell the truth - attracted to other people who have been broken.  The saying is, that crack is where the light can come in.

 This has brought me to a sad memory.  Some years ago I took off driving one morning, just east.  I can't describe what I had gone through with my family, but it was at a crisis, and people I tried to talk to about it weren't interested.  I liked to drive; it calmed me down.  You can kid yourself that you're in control.  I found myself near a town where there is a noted Zen center so I bought a local map and found it.  I'm not going to name the place because, I don't know, what good would that do?

I asked to talk to a teacher.  The woman who was at the desk and phone was very sympathetic; I remember she gave me an apple, and went off to talk to a teacher.  She came back looking embarrassed to say that the teachers were involved in a retreat, and could talk to me a week from Tuesday.  Something like that.

I suppose now that someone in charge was trying to deliver a big Zen message.  I got it, the kind of message that was, the kind of awakening they were selling.  That experience was part of what drove me to reject the puritanical high-attainment kind of Zen I was seeing in a local sangha, where people were unkind to newcomers who disturbed the peace of the sit.

All these years later, I still think it was unkind. At that time, I thought, they probably get a lot of crazy people.  Walking away, I noted all the Lexuses in the parking lot. I thought, They probably think they are training the leaders of tomorrow.

Why The Dark Knight Shooting Happened

I feel compelled to comment on the Dark Knight massacre that took place last night, because I read a column by someone asking, How do things like this happen?  He was saying, in part, that he just couldn't understand a mind like that.  That's true.  Psychosis is a different country.  I know.  I dropped into that place with my second manic episode.   This took place over two years after a really bad psychiatrist named Roslyn Pariser misdiagnosed the first mania, and the suicidal depression that followed.  I'm pretty sure she's not practicing anymore, and may have died.  Not by my hand.  I don't own a gun.

But I could if I wanted to.  I imagine any records of me as a mental patient all those years ago are lost in time, and predate the universal medical databases now being started.  I could walk into any gun store and buy whatever I wanted, just like that poor, sick kid, or get a friend to do it for me.  There's no national database to kick out a name when someone buys 6000 rounds of ammunition.  The NRA doesn't want that.  So here's reason #1 why that massacre happened:

In America, anyone can get a gun.

It is well-known that most Americans favor stricter gun control than we have, and that it is the "lobbying" of the NRA that makes politicians shy away from the issue.  I want to define that word.  Lobbying = money.  The wealthy give politicians money through one device or another, and they have access to politicians.  And it takes a lot of money to win an election.  That's what it means.  Otherwise, the voices of ordinary citizens like me who don't want our grandchildren killed in driveby shootings would result in change.  And that's why I give what I can, which isn't much, to support candidates I believe in; the little people have to pool our voices to be heard over the loud voice of money.

And here's reason #2:

Too many Americans admire vigilantism.

If you don't think so, watch the trailer for "Dirty Harry" above. Check the box office for such films as "Dirty Harry."  Count the explosions in "The Dark Knight" (I won't be seeing it).  And think about the Trayvon Martin case, how the vigilante who killed him would have gotten away scot-free if his parents had not had the internet and the ability to publicize the scandal.  And think about what this has to do with your neighbor's admiration of those who get wealthy, even if they did it by outsourcing his job to cruel sweatshops in China, because he agrees with the American Myth that anyone can do it if they try.

This problem is not just about vigilantism and greed, though.  Here's reason #3:

A significant number of Americans don't want to pay taxes.

What does that have to do with it?  It is our pooled money, gathered in taxes, that pays for our mental health agencies.  And when the budget gets tight, they are among the first things to get cut.  If anyone had noticed this guy's behavior, the resources it would take for someone to visit him, even the systems to do that don't exist.  They cost money.  It is money - taxes - that builds our roads and sewers and the systems of law and order, and mental hospitals and agencies.  Building a decent, safe society costs money.  We gather that money through taxes.

Moving from the political to the personal and spiritual, here's reason #4:

Nobody was paying attention to that guy.

Last count, according to ABC news, James Holmes had bought four guns, one of them an assault rifle, and 6000 rounds of ammunition - what, nobody adds this up?  A brilliant student, he'd dropped out in June.  Why?  Did anyone talk to him?  Did anyone in his program care about him?

I was a grad student myselfl in fact, I was admitted to OSU on a Presidential Fellowship, which is fairly prestigious. Yet nobody ever took me aside, talked to me, mentored me, or gave a damn when I said, at graduation, that I didn't want to teach anymore.  Even my director didn't ask me why.   And I foundered around for a couple of years, but was lucky enough to find my way.

That kid didn't.  His dropping out was a sign something was wrong; some teacher should have called him, talked to him, showed that they cared, tried to find out what was going on, whether he needed help.  I hope we come to learn that someone tried.  His own mother is quoted as saying "You have the right guy."  I'm sure other people could see what she apparently saw in her son.

James Holmes had been psychotic for a long enough time to stockpile weapons and protective gear, and elaborately booby-trap his apartment.  Now neighbors are saying he was strange, he was reclusive.  But did anyone take a coffeecake to his door?  I haven't heard of it yet.  Did anyone smile at him on the stairs and  say hello in the parking lot, or did people turn away because maybe he seemed a little unfriendly?

This tragedy is just awful.  And it's one of a long string of these things.  All I can do about it, other than support political candidates who might change things, is ask myself who I know that might enjoy a little kindness, at least a friendly smile and a greeting.  Is there anyone I shy away from or avoid because they're different?  I really hope not.  I'm going to be watching.  I hope we all are.

Medicating Van Gogh

I am making my way slowly through the massive (900 page) new biography of Vincent Van Gogh, which begins with a chapter about his mother - who didn't like him from the beginning, it seems, and persisted in disapproving of him and his art long after he was dead and his paintings were critically acclaimed and wildly popular.  The biographers have framed this book with that relationship, in other words.  They see his life as being one of desperately trying to Be Someone his parents could approve of.  I see that.  I tend to frame it just a little differently, as a man desperately fighting himself, his true self and his vision.

He went through intensely religious periods in his life, and tried to study for the ministry, to be like his father, but just couldn't make it.  At the point where I am in the book, 200 pages in, he has been increasingly envisioning It:  the divine essence, which he could see in everything, including the starry night.  And shoes. Below is one of many pictures he painted of shoes, which are discussed in this article in Harper's, if you're interested. There you can also see this picture large enough to enjoy the brush strokes.

Van Gogh's mother was thirty when she married, and first gave birth to a stillborn son, who was named Vincent Van Gogh and buried with a headstone.  Exactly one year later she gave birth to Vincent - think about it - getting pregnant three months after the labor and death, and gave him the same name.  He was a scruffy looking child from the beginning, with rough red hair.  But there was much more to her dislike of him than that.  He was odd; he just didn't fit in anywhere, school or work.  Weird folk, take heart.

His father, a Protestant minister, didn't prize him either, but I gather there is evidence that it was his mother's love he so craved. She represented Home, the insular parsonage, in which he never felt at home, so he carried a great nostalgia for it.  I am now reading about his early twenties; he is abusing himself with fasting, not bathing because soap is a sinful luxury, and going barefoot in winter. He is drawing more.  And painting pictures in words, in his copious letters to his brother, Theo.

Here's the interesting thing I keep thinking about:  Vincent suffered greatly from this rejection, and his temperamental inability to fit in anywhere.  Wanting to be like his father he descended into fierce religious studies.  He washed out of school, and began to experience the divine, to see and paint it - which he called It - in everything in an absolutely unique (insane) style.

And he would not have been that person if his mother had loved him.  (There's a whole backstory about her sad life, by the way, and the important influence of Dutch culture and politics.)  It seems to be his suffering from that profound wound that motivated his art.  People love and live with prints of his paintings who know nothing about art. I think we feel or intuit that visionary mind, that saw the divine in a sunflower and a star, and a pair of shoes.

So was that good or bad, that miserable childhood?  Were those descents into hellish depression and mania  and psychosis necessary to produce this art that brings a drop of spiritual insight into many lives? 

Thinking about all this I was quite struck recently when a friend posted a bit of psych nurse humor that said, "You can't fix stupidity - but you can sedate it."  Of course, madness has nothing to do with stupidity.  But it spoke to me, as a bipolar who had long hospitalizions in the hands of psych nurses. Scrolling through Facebook I sometimes hit on a land mine like that.  I didn't comment, but I thought, Just make sure you're not sedating Van Gogh.

Having an Unconventional Mind

I keep searching for a way to describe those of us who have the advantage of creative, unconventional minds. I don't like being categorized as "mentally ill."  This being me is not "illness," and in fact, in Zen practice we aspire to leave labels lying discarded by the side of the path and just be in reality (like a frog).

Some of us have body/minds that can perceive intensely and transform reality in highly individual ways, mind/bodies that feel deeply, that fire many impulses, that can get carried away into their own creativity or stuck in emotional states.  What if you don't call these tendencies "sick"?  The film "A Beautiful Mind" didn't do enough, in my opinion, to emphasize the beauty of Nash's gifted creative mind. (I read that it also falsified the story - he didn't have visual hallucinations.) But the term is useful. Not an ordinary mind or an ordered mind, not a dis-ordered mind - a special, interesting mind.

It is certainly also true that the term "mental illness" is a code for "has scared other people."  I've often read that there is really very little violence among the beautiful minds; that's a media fiction.  Horrible crimes are done by sane people.

Most of the time, what scares people about the beautiful is our unconventionality.  Like our close cousins, the monkeys or the wolves, humans have rigid social structures. There are big ones, like governments with their encompassing laws, and the little ones in which we live and move in our neighborhoods, churches, workplaces. You can call these patterns of unspoken laws our "culture."  In mine, for instance, it is weird not to shave your legs.  If you're a woman, that is - it's gender-specific.

Overall, these zillions of unwritten laws are about giving a group of monkeys a sense of security, predictability.  But they can get too tight for comfort.

To have a beautiful mind is to be noticeably individual and to break some of these rules.  Often we don't quite get it, don't know the rules. Maybe we detect reality better than rules.  I know I do.  Once, for instance, I wore some plaid flannel pants to a women's group I belonged to.  One woman made reference to my pajama bottoms.  Hmmm.  What made them pajama bottoms? The catalog called them pants.  They had cuffs - surely pajamas don't have cuffs.  I had to guess it was the flannel; my friend thought there was a rule, flannel was only for shirts, and pajamas.  It bemused me.

Quite recently I was tempted by a loose, pretty sort of shift I thought would be comfortable in the heat.  Then I noticed it was in the nightwear department.  Whoops.  Wearing a nightgown out of doors is the kind of thing that is called "inappropriate behavior" in the wards and hospitals that specialize in keeping Beautiful Minds from upsetting other people.


Where was I?  It is kind of fun to go with this seed-scattering mind just now.  It is certainly high summer, goof-off time.  Recognize that.  We are connected with this universe quite intimately.  Even in our air-conditioning, there is summer outside, the kind of bright energy that makes some of us (me) want to go into a cave in the Himalayas this time of year. Dim, cool, quiet.  Be careful about exciting things and places in this weather, especially be cautious with alcohol, which enhances the element of fire, the element that usually gets you in trouble.

About how we label our minds. First, a very important point - maybe the most important:  your mind is not a noun sitting there like Grandma's rag rug (though there are certain similarities). It is a verb.  It dances, it moves in certain patterns.  When you die and the life energy that held you together flows back out into the universe, your mind will mostly be gone, I think.  Its life is in activity.

In the industry they are talking a lot these days about plasticity, meaning your mind can learn and change even when you are (gasp) old.  Or when you're young.  That is what Buddhist meditation is about, exactly.  It is about letting your real mind come forth, so to speak, discarding the rigid outer layers of what to think and not to think.  A great relief.  It gets called enlightenment, but it's really not that special.

And my mind is reminding me forcefully that I have to go take 12 pills, drink some juice with powdered calcium in it, get dressed, contemplate the schedule which today has me going to argue with a kidney surgeon.  There goes another morning, wasted staying alive.  Damn.
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p.s. We waited two hours for the surgeon, but were calm, enjoyed the peace and quiet, conversed some, read a magazine.  Wasted time. The word is, When things are going well, the infections have stopped, you're not broken, so don't fix yourself.  So hey, wouldn't it be wonderful to go on for many years and never have another surgery?  Yes.

We can still be crazy

How could I resist the above title of a selection by Pema Chodron?  Here is the sentence in context:

We may think meditation will improve us, but it’s really about accepting ourselves as we are right now.

When we start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are. It’s a bit like saying, “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.” “If I had a nicer house, I’d be a better person.” “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person.” . . . 

But lovingkindness—maitri—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are.

Maybe the fundamental delusions are
1. that we're not okay, and
2. that we can be someone else.

Trouble is, the culture tells us we're not "normal," and the psychiatric establishment pedals the idea of getting rid of that crazy mind.  Psychotropic medications do indeed change you at a fundamental level, the very activity of the brain. They are meant to change you, your energy, your emotional responsiveness, your impulses, and they do.  They affect the same creativity that can express itself in hallucinations or voices.  What to do?


Meditate, I think. Just sitting I learned to see my emotions rise and fade, see how sometimes they were fueled by my elaborate thought-trails, and sometimes just arose for no reason at all.  Learned (slowly, slowly) that I could sit still and not say a thing and not act on strong emotions.  That I could say to a bad memory, I don't want to go there now.   That I could choose when to act crazy.

As for my personal life, I am thinking about that very small dose of Seroquel that has been helping me sleep.  I am in a phase of profound physical healing right now, nine months since the transplant, three months since any infection, though my ordinary herpes is manifesting in cold sores, result of all the heat and light of July.  Not the moment to make a significant change.

If you read this far, you deserve a treat.  Here it is.

An unfinished post

I want to recommend something today - a day of kindness. 

When we are very ill, even just a little ill, we can be taken by the illness.  That is, our minds can be taken over, especially by pain.  Maybe that's inevitable when we are actually dying, but if you were dying you wouldn't be reading this.  Whether the illness is of the mind, a dark landscape, a scatter of thoughts going off like pops of fire in a combat zone, or of the body, a severe physical pain, a map of aches, the mind can get very involved with this being in pain. So we are self-involved. An ordinary person, which is to say a somewhat narcissistic individual, can fall into a well of self, as if you were the last one alive. 

I have for some time had a little book in my bathroom that is all about kindness. On the cover is the face of a lovely monk smiling at me.  So it's like a small, humble poster there, reminding me. One of the things the book recommends is vowing to be kind for one day.  Kind to everyone and everything.  Keeping in mind the question, Am I being kind right now?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And here I just wore out.  These days I do that, just feel a topic go dry.  Usually I just go away, do something else.  When I come back, maybe it looks good and I finish it.  Maybe I erase it or file it as a draft. But today I'll just stop here.  If anyone does this, I'd enjoy hearing how it went. 

Bipolar, Borderline, Enlightened

This morning my study feels more like a sanctuary than usual. It is dim and threatening rain, a relief after days of bright heat. I had eight hours of healing sleep. There is nothing on our agenda for the whole long weekend but to relax. Our grandson, and his vital energy, are gone. Tashi is relieved - cats are instinctively wary of change. I'm getting there myself.

I want to write somehow about being labeled.

Last night we watched Crazy Wisdom, a wonderful film about the life of Chogyam Trungpa, who brought Tibetan Buddhism to the West. I first knew him as the teacher of Pema Chodron, whom I have never met, but whose books and tapes taught me how to meditate.  Recently my aversion to Trungpa's famous drunkenness and sexual behavior melted away - thank God, my standards are eroding - and I have been studying his talks on my Kindle.  So here came this film, through the Tricycle film festival.

Every psychiatrist I've ever known would feel satisfied that Trungpa Rinpoche was Bipolar and Borderline. You could make that Bipolar with schizoaffective overtones, as he had visions, one famous one in the cave of an ancient Buddhist saint. Add to that Dual Diagnosis - his drinking was legendary.

It is not news to me that the very manifestations that are called Bipolar can be seen in religious terms. I once owned a book called Are you Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?  In the mid-1970's my own behavior during periods of extreme emotions/sensations was labeled "manic," but if I'd been in a knowledgeable Buddhist community it might have been recognized as the heart chakra opening, as an enlightenment experience.  Labels are strictly cultural.  Words have no intrinsic truth.

A wise Buddhist teacher might have had me eat beef, which is grounding, and kept me in dim, quiet rooms, with advanced students being with me, encouraging me to sit silent, to fall asleep, helping me come down.  Other behavior/feelings that hit later would have been labeled not depression, but despair, a spiritual condition long recognized in the Christian tradition, and prominent in Jesus's story. I would been encouraged to keep doing my daily work, to get outside and contemplate nature, to do physical forms like walking meditation, yoga, or tai chi, to sit with my feelings and recognize how they modulate and pass moment by moment. But I didn't have a religious tradition to help me.

People who are caught by the American mental health system can resist being labeled, or be grateful and hopeful that it will help. In the absence of a good community approach to extreme behavior, medications can help. Equally, they harm. Lithium cost me my kidneys. You don't know what trouble is until your kidneys start failing.  I'm sorry that a good residential training program did not exist, and sorry that very few such programs exist now.

Here is the Buddhist understanding of extreme emotions: you never "are" some thing.  You are a dance or a traffic jam, a bunch of processes that are active as long as your body is alive.  What you call "me" changes all the time.  Labels are a convenience, but we need to understand they are not reality.

Here and there are other people like me, for whom religiosity is deep experience, not "symptom". Many other people who have gone through extreme experiences and have learned how to work with their feelings, thoughts, sensations. Who use little or no medication. Who are happy and useful. I am convinced that more of us need to come forth and be willing to be labeled crazy, who know that the truth is, we have crazy wisdom.  Some frightened people will avoid us, some sick people will enjoy gossiping and feeling superior. That's life. You can't help what other people think.

Those of us who have found paths that work need to share our own experience, not the long drama of being sick and disrupted, but the important story of how we let that pass and learned to be happy.

Our Zen garden from kitchen window

On Not Being a Brand

I am reading a terrific book right now titled Different:  Escaping the Competitive Herd by a classy teacher at Harvard Business School, Youngme Moon.  I was drawn to this on the library's new book rack, though I have never really been in business, just on the outskirts.  The intriguing further subtitle of the book is "Succeeding in a world where conformity reigns but exceptions rule."  It made me think of this blog, a continuation of my lifelong difficulty in figuring out my brand - maybe a problem everyone with bipolar disorder, or any type of unusual mind, has.

A blogger expresses his or her brand through format, color choice, name of the blog, profile, self-description. These things have given me varying amounts of trouble through the years of writing this blog, though I stick with the title, which is my daughter Cassie's nickname for me, because  I am deeply and fundamentally Buddhist.  Beyond that, I have at times described myself (my brand) as recipient of a live-donor kidney, cat-lover, feminist, poet, writer, Zen student, lover of the visual arts, PhD in narrative theory, retired teacher, former editor, amateur artist and photographer, old, chronically ill - did I leave out Grandmother?  blah blah blah.  It's partly this slipperiness of identity - because really, I am not any one or two of those things - are you? - it's this changing hodge-podge that finally drove me to drop the description under the title.

I never get too far from the first koan my Zen Teacher gave to me:  Who are you?  At first it made me think over roles like the above, which became like trying to shuffle a deck of cards.  I was frustrated that I couldn't settle on one.  But as I remember my life, I am reminded that when I did see myself as a couple of nouns (wife, mother) I felt stuck in a small space.  And  those nouns were slippery, too.

So I have quit trying.  I never know from day to day what I will be interested in or want to write about, and as a retired person with a parade of physical problems, I don't need to have a goal for my life.  Thus time and chance have let me slip like spirit through the fence and escape the competitive herd.  Just lucky, I guess.

As for a deeper understanding of the koan, it's right there in front of us. 

Think in this way of
all this fleeting world:
As a star at dawn,
a bubble in a stream,
A dewdrop, a flash
of lightning
in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp,
a phantom,
and a dream.
         The Diamond Sutra 

[image:  Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Flawless, the 1999 film.]