This, Too, Shall Pass

You guys can't imagine how many times I begin a post and don't finish it. Because it takes time. Energy. Thought. The confidence that you have something to say worth reading.  I don't really have any of those things these days, not on a predictable basis. Bad ups and downs - and when the ups are bad you have your truly undesirable bipolar disorder, the kind that makes headlines if you are famous.

But one can say Buddhist things about all this. Here's one: what helps me a lot is to remember ~

This too shall pass.

Daniel Terragno told me that once, in regard to a very pleasing state of mind I had encountered on a retreat.  He was sure right.

In all seriousness, when things are bad, we need to remember, oh, it's just life. And gosh, the Buddha was right about suffering. And it will pass. I honestly believe that's the best suicide counseling I could give. That and, tomorrow is another day. And oh, spring comes and the grass grows by itself. (Basho)

You're probably wondering why I have been able to post this sketchy thing. Well, by restraining myself from making a fancy sign that would say This Too Shall Pass. By staying up past my bedtime.  By not discussing whether the commas in the title are definitively better than the lack of commas in the saying in the text, and linking to the great article I just read in the New Yorker by a comma queen (copyreader). By not fact-checking the Basho quote. Like that. Being bipolar, you have to learn restraint of the many many creative ideas that won't get the humidifier cleaned....Anyway, I just saw this cartoon and wanted to share it.  A great one. Let us smile at ourselves.

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.

Keep sitting, Grumpy Cat

Good morning cattywampus friends. I was hoping to copy a Buddha birthday card I found on the Zen Center of Sunnyvale gallery, but they didn't copy well for me. A number of their cards are made by children honoring Buddha's birthday, a much nicer idea than buying yourself a big flatscreen TV for Christmas. The message in the card I wanted to put here was "Even Homer can Become a Buddha."  A good one, since we are all broken, yes, even those who wear black and eat vegan and never watch TV.

But the Sunnyvale kids aren't the only ones with this thought.  It looks like you can buy a Homer Buddha.

And of course, everyone has a Kitty Buddha, right?  Here's a picture of Grumpy Cat stuck at a certain stage of realization.

Okay, Grumpy Cat, get on the path and let it pass. 

A Post About Desire That's Not as Interesting as You Hope

Oh, did I wrinkle your paper?

I'm not out to present the Four Noble Truths that are the foundation of Buddhist teaching in a scholarly way; there's a good treatment of them on Wikipedia in an article that nobody is contesting.  But in the Zen/Unitarian fashion, I have my own way of thinking about them.
1.  Life is generally unsatisfactory and sometimes damn hard.
2.  The reason we suffer is that we don't accept reality; we desire things to be different.
 I'll stop there, because my little story today is about that second truth - desire.

We often think of desire as being about strong cravings for big things, like having a certain person love you, but it can be all over the place in our lives, hiding behind the curtains, you might say.  That's where one popped out at me the other day. 

I was lunching with a friend and our talk wound down a familiar pathway about how we just can't catch up and get things done and get everything organized and nice.  Yes.  For quite a few years now we've been having that talk, which I think consoles us a little, as in "misery loves company," and if anything, we're both worse now than ever.  Or let's say, there are more messes around our houses than ever.  I mean, we've had many years to build them, and some good excuses.

I suddenly had a small realization: the problem isn't that we're messy; the problem is that we don't want to be messy.  See what I mean?  We desire our houses to be neat, clean, and organized.  We don't want to create messes all through the day, throwing unopened mail on the table, throwing dirty clothes on the floor, not hanging our coats up.

Now, I can only speak for myself, obviously, and it's myself I'm describing, not Gini.  I have more messy piles in my house, drawers, and closets than I can count.  And that is the kind of cat I am.

That was a saying I attributed to Sherlock.  In the way of male cats, he was utterly unapologetic about his behavior.  Knocking over the African violets?  He didn't care.  If you asked him, "Why did you do that?" his answer was delivered silently, with a look - That's the kind of cat I am.  Then back to washing his shoulder.  He was what he was, and in the fashion of all cats, he had no desire to please anyone else, or to change.  Cat lovers cherish this fact, which perhaps mystifies dog lovers.

I think that we humans are too estranged from our own animal nature.  It gets a chance to come out in singing and dancing and other physical activities.  Otherwise, we tend to ignore it and to focus on doing things  animals with large brains and opposing thumbs can do, like talk and compute and make things.   And we tend to think we can conquer our basic natures.  And I'm sure we do a lot of that; but all that human command draws a line somewhere when it runs up against the wall of our basic nature. 

And that's okay, too, is my point.  Basically, you are what you are, and you can't be taller than you are or have smaller feet or bigger eyes, or umm, keep things neat and tidy when you just don't have a neat tidy gene in your body.  And maybe the only problem is that you desire to be different than you are.  There's that word again.  Watch out for it.

Pain and Suffering

(Newser) – The FDA today mandated urgent “black box” warning labels on Cipro and other antibiotics of the powerful flouroquinolone family of drugs. The antibiotics carry a risk of tendinitis and tendon rupture, which could leave patients severely disabled, the AP reports. Particularly vulnerable are those over 60 and patients who have undergone heart, lung, or kidney transplants. 

That would be me.

I might have written already that I have another UTI.  This one is responsive only to one oral drug, Cipro, which is much safer than putting a PICC in again for an IV drug. I really hate to take Cipro, which can weaken tendons.  I had it over Christmas 2010, and we suspect it is responsible for my torn rotator cuffs - one side effect is on tendons.  I really hope my Achilles tendons don't tear.  Cipro is a very big drug, and there have been attempts to lower its use.

The nurse who called about it suggested I call my transplant doctor to see whether they wanted to adjust the dose of my cyclosporine (Neoral).  So I called the transplant nurse.  She called me back to say that they don't like to be adjusting it all the time, they don't worry about it as much as the outside doctors do.

Thank to the internet, I learned that Cipro tends to elevate the levels of Neoral in your blood.  And the light dawned.  I have this big, stuffy achy head.  Eyelids more swollen.  A sense of looking at the world through confusion.  Just like post-transplant, when they had me on 150 mg a day. After they lowered it to 125 mg, then to 100 mg, I felt better.  Not terrific, but relieved of some of those symptoms of Neoral.

But here we are again.  The Cipro is for only a week, we hope.  But you know, a lot about all this is not fun.  Still hurting from the shingles that appeared in February.  Awaiting double nephrectomy May 9 and hoping it will put a stop to these UTIs, and the e-coli that are having so much fun in there evolving into strains that no antibiotic can touch.  I picture them having big festivals to celebrate their success. 

I don't think this is "complaining" on my part, though my parents certainly would have called it that.  And there's an excess of Think Positive out there, especially on Facebook. But I'm just getting used to the Lyrica, for post-shingles pain, and it's not certain that it's helping with that. Meanwhile, I am a walking compendium of side effects.


Damn it.  I get tired of this stuff.  But our task is to not let it ruin our lives.  The promise of Buddhism is that you can minimize these kinds of suffering.  Or, let me say, fear, pain, inconvenience - they don't have to be suffering.  They don't have to ruin your day when the honeysuckle are blooming right outside your study window.  And it's time to meditate.

The Princess who Went Back Home

Sometimes I think I make it too simple. I see all people struggling to ease their own suffering. Some do it in ways that just make things worse - spending, drinking, winning - and some know the ways that work: simple attentiveness. The practices of generosity and compassion and understanding, like that. As if by magic, but it isn't magic, the actions that relieve our own suffering also give a little relief to the sufferings of the world.

It's not just me - it actually is simple. That relief is found in one's own intentional actions. No one can give it to you. Learning that might fall in the category of wisdom, hard-earned in my own case. I tried everything before I finally tried sitting down to do nothing but be with myself. My life was like an epic fairy tale of a young person who goes forth looking for the precious jewel under every rock. Battling major forces, enduring great hardship. And here it was all along, inside me once I settled down. If I wrote it, I'd call it, The Princess who Went Back Home. Empty-handed. And here it was, contentment, sitting by the fire waiting for me.
[image: our magnolia against a backdrop of petals fallen to the brick patio. Perhaps fortunately, I have not yet learned to use Photoshop.]