You Call That a Good Day?

"Every day's a good day."  I've written about this Zen saying before, and still haven't got there.  Yesterday, for instance, I had pain in eight places, and a London pea-soup fog of a mind, and insomnia.  And missed a terrific sermon at church, I hear, because I couldn't get my head clear enough to get dressed.  But there was one good thing about yesterday:  it moved on.  Things change, and that is sometimes a blessing.

This is probably the dead-on koan for anyone with bipolar disorder.  And it would apply as well to anyone who is handicapped by chronic illness and/or pain.  A day with pain a good day?  Please.  I find myself having to think about this a lot.  There must be something I don't get.

I tie it to the famous verse on the seasons by Wumen that you may have seen recently on my facebook page, The Dalai Grandma. Here is my own (constantly changing) rendition:

In spring, flowers; in autumn, the moon.
In summer, breezes; in winter, snow.
If idle things do not hang in your mind,
every season is a good season.

 It's that third line that is tricky, and is translated various ways.  As I get it, it refers to being stuck hard on your preferences, ideas, plans, bucket list - all those things in our minds that are not the present moment, that are not the current reality.

We are funny about our preferences.  For one man I knew, liking butter pecan ice cream was not merely a preference; it was him, part of his identity, a thing to know about him.  For another woman who felt validated when other people needed her, being active and useful was not a preference or a pleasure, but a religion. She had to be useful. It's who she was; so slowing down with age was unthinkable, a failure - wrong.  There are many people in America these days, the Baby Boomers who are now entering old age, who are committed to the delusion that youth can be maintained forever; you just have to exercise harder and not eat anything good.

Good days and bad days.  The verse and the koan make me question how unhappy I get when I feel like I did yesterday.  I was probably having a flare-up of fibromyalgia, for which no cure is known, due to major weather systems moving around.  And I may suffer extra mentally with these because I have a bipolar mind.  What is good about being in pain and depressed?

One answer I've come up with is that illness can teach us.  For instance, I know people who are disabled by mood disorders or pain or chronic fatigue, and I do not think they can just up and fix themselves if they'd only try.  I understand how disabling these things are, and how invisible.  There's that.  And, as I said starting out, it makes me appreciate the constant change of carbon-based life, which sometimes goes in directions I don't like.  Yes, good luck can go bad. On the other hand, bad luck can change, too, and some days it does.

That's not perfect

It was my first koan, and I had never heard of koans.  It was a question in the little book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, which was the only Zen I'd seen at the time in my impoverished middle-American life.  I'll render it as a sort of haiku.

If you do not say good
and you do not say not-good -
then what is the nature of reality?

I mean, that puzzled me (though I didn't know it was supposed to).  It seemed to me the essence of being an adult was analyzing, making judgements, distinctions.  And having those feelings and reactions I've learned to call preferences.  They were me.  Growing up you make quite a thing of that, remember?  Who do you like, what is your favorite color, what car would you buy, what kind of ice cream do you like, how does your sandwich have to be cut?  So, what if I didn't have those identities?  I couldn't imagine.  That's where I was in the around 1980, when I remember studying that little book.  It's quite an introduction to some original texts.

And boy, it's been a long strange trip.

I don't think we find this looking beyond by deciding something.  I don't think one can do this with the conscious mind.  It is the conscious mind that's put a lot of effort into deciding what is Me, what is Not, what is friendly, what is enemy.  And what is just perfect, what is a fault.  Humans are such vulnerable little things, hardly any fur, worthless claws and teeth, not the fastest runners in the animal kingdom - we protect ourselves by making distinctions.  Once you've labeled good/bad, perfect/faulty, like that, it seems to take a a lot of work to get past it.  Hard retreats, being forced down on reality.  There are many routes to wisdom, but this is about discarding what you "know."

Maybe the road out of that labeling brain is the road in - that you turn away from the mind toward the heart.  Your heart can find a three-legged cat beautiful.  His heroic adjustment to reality, that staggered gait, his happiness, his ease, just like every cat - perfect.

[Three-legged kitty takes a nap, from Gail Guthrie Harsh]

That's all I know tonight.  I'll sleep on it and see if I have anything to add tomorrow.  It will probably be this: I don't mean to be making claims about myself.  I wish I had transcended these distinctions and could accept illness (for example) with equanimity.  Not so far.

Every day's an interesting day

A day or two ago I spied a book at the bottom of a stack of recently purchased books, called Awakening to the Sacred by Lama Surya Das. I read a bit of it before bed. I am thinking of the sacred now, responding to Easter.

The next day, which was yesterday, I recalled the book's invitation to think of many ways you can contact the sacred, and set out with my camera to walk in the ravine. If there is any one thing I feel grateful for most often, it is the ability to walk, for I was off my feet for eight or nine months last year, and then spent months getting used to walking. Now walking meditation is not hard for me - walking is always conscious, a pleasure.

I found to my delight that walking down to the stream was nothing. Easy. I decided to take the left fork and walk on to the little bridge over which I once saw a Great Blue Heron fly - a breath-stopping sight. I turned and walked back, taking the above picture of backlit leaves coming forth like a flame. Spring is very eager around here now, the saucer magnolias getting ready to burst out for Easter. So I got lost, which is hard to do when there are only two roads, and I know them very well. Spring befuddlement. I was gone an hour.

All well and good. But last night I did a poetry reading, and as a result of all that, today I'm tired. Too tired to shower. My initial reaction this morning has been to feel sad, sorry that my energy is so low. Well, I have a little work to do to get beyond that and make my way to a deeper understanding. And I think that way is not only the Buddhist way, but also the way of the Tao, and the way of Christianity, the belief systems I am familiar with. I suspect it is the way of every religion, at heart - the spiritual understanding that things are as they are, that we can have faith in that. In reality, which moves on.

Sick or poor or alone or overburdened or in grief - there are many conditions you can wake up and find yourself in on any given day. I have a calligraphy Tom bought me a while back after I'd been working the koan, "Every day's a good day." A statement to ponder whenever you're displeased with your life. How can that possibly be true - every day's a good day - when ____. Fill in the blank.

I am sure this is not about talking yourself into cheerful, something I hate. It is more about just sitting and being with how you are without putting labels on it. Feeling the feeling, a therapist might say, but it is also discarding your ideas, assumptions as elementary as "High energy is better," and your desires, desires like "I want more energy." Sitting in meditation you actually feel the desire. Then, equally difficult, you let it pass away. If you sit in meditation or prayer for a few moments, you find even an obsessive thought pattern has passed and you are thinking about something else, like folding the towels in the dryer, or the chalk whiteness of the sycamores across the ravine.

To some degree we pass beyond the very words "good" and "bad." After all, evaluation is not the direct experience of reality, but a concept structure that exists only in the mind. If I do discard those words, I seem to experience life more as interesting, and absorbing. Sheba here at my left hand, getting some good petting because I am rereading what I wrote, not typing. She's got this figured out in that tiny brain about the size of a walnut. Simple. Mom sits at the computer every morning, and when I come over, walking carefully between the keyboard and the screen, she turns on the desk lamp for me. And pats me. Every day's a good day.

A heart of winter

Another gray day in mid-Ohio, our most common kind of winter day. Yesterday the dentist's assistant told me "This kind of weather gets me down." Gloomy is the word. There is a kind of winter day we like around here, fresh snow on the ground (but not too much), sun shining, blue sky, air crisp (but not too cold). Want, want.

I often think about this issue of our response to winter. Within us there is natural sunshine - this is actually a "true fact" as my English students used to say, who had not learned that a fact by nature is true. From a scientific point of view, we are made of nothing but the light from the sun. We have to get that light by eating plants that have captured it (and to some degree by sun bathing, which Gandhi firmly believed in).

Many of us believe that we have a nature that is golden and unspoiled, whether you think of it in Buddhist terms or Christian, or other religious belief structures. Ah, why can't I call forth that sunny nature on an overcast day?

Maybe I should not be trying to feel that particular lift of the heart. Maybe my intention should be to be here within winter, and not try to build a sunny mood when my neighborhood is overcast. Just be at peace with it. To see what it is like.

Organizing the mind

[photo: The beloved critic John Leonard showing us what a working study looks like.]
This morning I knew I had to get back to my usual meditation. I felt scattered, full of ideas and reactivity. Specifically, I reacted when Tom suggested we move some wire shelving he built into my toy closet.

This closet is one of the luxuries of my life I take for granted. I don't take them all for granted. Not a day goes by that I don't thank whatever God may be that I do not have to work anymore - how did I ever survive it? I sweet-talk the robot vacuum cleaner, and load the dishwasher with gratitude. But closets? I'm used to them. My study, for instance, has a whole wall of closet. I like to think the doctor who built this house put this in for his wife, who I like to think had a lot of clothes. It was the fifties, after all. What we did was buy clothes.

I don't have a lot of clothes, so one half of this closet houses my toys - drums, paints, drawing pads, unfinished crewel embroidery, drawings and paintings and photographs, seeds collected at Grailville . . . you get the idea. The kind of toys we enjoy as grown-ups.

Over coffee this morning Tom brought up the fact of this shelving, which sits in the guest room awaiting my command. The idea is to put it in my toy closet and make everything much more accessible - there are boxes under boxes put there when we moved in, boxes that are a mystery to me. He had a friend coming by who could do the heavy lifting.

Immediately Don't want! sprang full-blown into my head the idea of the Right Way to Do This. It was muddled in with a sense of embarrassment - surely I couldn't let Greg see this mess! I would need to at least get in there and remove the little boxes before he came, and where would I put them? What I should do is buy a bunch of organizing stuff at The Container Store . . .

Now wait, I said to myself, what's all this about? Isn't this actually just what closets look like? I realized I don't actually know. I don't get much chance to look in other people's closets. But I bet hardly anyone has every single thing stacked and labeled like . . . ah-ha, like my parents did, compulsive workers. Then I wondered whether my reaction had something to do with always wanting A's? A in everything and, as my father once said, "Why aren't they A pluses?"

I could see that the whole thing was one of those half-thought constructions brought up by a knee-jerk No, a slight aversion, a sense of threat. And fifteen years ago it would have ended there, with my refusal, I'm too busy right now. This time I caught myself and marveled. Because moving the shelving is not about how good a person I am, or what someone thinks of me. It is about nothing but hey, moving the shelving. My kneejerk reaction was the kind of mysterious weirdness we can see in our friends and spouses, but usually not in ourselves. Unless we meditate.

I am not talking about destressing with a mantra, or doing a visualization, or the practice of lovingkindness meditation, all good things. What I'm talking about is plain old ordinary sitting meditation. It is taught in all the Buddhist traditions, this sitting still and following the breath, watching our thoughts, desires, fears rise and letting them pass like clouds in the sky. Practicing not grasping. Practicing just being here with ourselves and whatever arises in us.

I am not at all sure about the division often made between the psychological and the spiritual. I am just one person, with these things muddled in my mind and gut. I have found that meditation leads me time and again to what you would call psychological insight, as in this case. Then again, once I see the snafluffle I have built in my mind, and let it fall away, something spacious and relaxed appears. That feels spiritual. It is very nice when it happens.

Yesterday I wrote about some of the ways women nourish themselves spiritually. And certainly none of us should beat ourselves up for falling away from our practice. That's not productive. But I woke up this morning wanting to correct myself, afraid that I seemed to equate meditation with a number of other practices. That hasn't been true for me.

Grandma Defeats her AR

Enough pictures of the cat, already. This is my grandson, Otto. undated photo. I'd say it's last year, when he was 7 1/2. He still looks like this, but not. His hair is a couple of inches longer now, stylishly disheveled, and his face is--what is it happens to our faces? more formed, perhaps. More individual.

I came close to missing the moment today. When Cassie called Wednesday night to tell me that today would be Grandparents' Day at Otto's school, my Automatic Reactivity (AR) kicked in. I have no patent on the AR; actually, I suspect everyone has one. It is that tightly woven collection of preferences; the way I like things to go.

I like things to go on schedule and on time. And I already had Friday organized. I had moved my usual Friday afternoon coffee with a friend to morning, so I could be home when Tom gets back from retreat. Then too, I am working hard now to stay rested and not overdo, so I don't get sick. I thought about having to get up with an alarm, which I hate, driving an hour each way on freeways by myself. Changing my meeting with my friend again. Bad weather was moving in, and my fibromyalgia was flaring up.

But somehow I didn't give her a firm no. And I found myself trying to imagine myself back in third grade. How I would have felt if I'd had grandparents who cared enough about me to come to my school. I told Cassie yes.

Friday I woke before the alarm, then, wow! I was on the road at 8:00 a.m., coffee in commuter mug, deftly switching lanes, making it through downtown rush hour and heading east.

Route 70 turns into six spacious lanes about the time you notice the landscape has changed from flat to rolling. Low clouds, an irregular band of bright light above the horizon, mixed forest on both sides of the road. Mowed cornfields. Black angus cattle like paper silhouettes.

Soon I was at Hopewell Elementary, jostling into a parking space on the grass, then directed through brightly-painted hallways into the tech lab, where I sat with grandparents decades younger and older than me in a surround of---computers!---ready to be escorted into Mrs. Youman's third grade. I had worn my pretty flowered sweatshirt, and felt more appropriate than usual.

I drove back with my colored-paper blue ribbon taped to the dash, and the kind of memories you file to play over during that long, comfortable deathbed scene. Otto's face when I came in. The teacher asked him to read his essay about his grandparents first. He did. I listened to how he sees us. I have written a book, he said, and used to teach college. We play games with him. Our house is pleasant.

Then Otto and I and another boy worked on, believe it, a handout of a Venn diagram. Two circles that overlap. On the left side he wrote things that he thought were different about his school. On the right, things I said were different when I was in third grade. (We had to sit totally still, I said. We never got to talk in class. He could see how awful that had been.) In the middle, where the circles overlapped, he wrote things we agreed are the same. An alphabet posted above the dry-erase boards. Windows. Rules. (One unwritten rule, I learned, is still in force: you can look out the windows if they're not watching.)

I sat on a tiny chair beside him, watching him cooperate with the other boy to tell what we had written, aware all over again of how much it means to feel loved. I don't know that I have changed a bit in that regard since third grade.

To end it, the children lined up to sing a song in praise of grandparents, and then we all filed down to the gym/cafeteria where we had homemade cookies (limit, 2) and our choice of red, white, or blue (raspberry) punch. Women came up to me and introduced themselves; Cassie's neighbor; a neighbor of Otto's other grandmother. Over near the stage, a small toddler with a pacifier in place toyed with a small computer; a notebook, I suppose. "That's different," Otto said knowledgeably.

Sitting with Otto, I ransacked my purse until I found the three Star Trek stickers I had picked up for him yesterday---I guess this is why grandmothers have to carry big purses. He stuck them deftly in a pocket, to look at later. I asked if he still liked to go to the zoo. "Yes!"

I asked him what he wants to see there. "Everything," he said.