Appreciating the Least Thing

Impatiens self-seeded by my sidewalk

The moon is serenely shining up in the sky, and she is alone in all the heavens and on the entire earth; but when she mirrors herself in the brilliant whiteness of the evening dews which appear like glittering pearls broadcast upon the earth from the hand of a fairy,--how wondrously numerous her images! And is not every one of them complete in its own fashion? This is the way in which an enlightened mind contemplates God and the world.  God is immanent in the world and not outside of it; therefore, when we comprehend the secret of the "little flower in the crannied wall," we know the reason of this universe.
Soyen Shaku
Zen for Americans

The above is a description of the panentheism of Shin, a Buddhist sect that incorporates features of Shinto, an ancient Japanese nature religion in whose internet  manifestation I've been wandering this morning.  There I found the amulets below, which you can buy to protect your pet.  The love of our animal companions has become obvious with social media, which sometimes seem dominated by pictures of cats.  (Guilty as charged.)  My own UU church has a group devoted to compassion for animals; many American Buddhists don't eat meat out of that compassion, following the precept to do no harm.  I notice that many of the same people campaigning for mercy to animals are also involved with recycling, reuse, and sharing.

 It is also interesting to me that amulets are traditionally returned after a year to the temple, to be burned in a ritual way, part of the respect for all phenomena that also causes the temple to sell recycle bags.

There seems to me to be lots of room in this country for a religion that supports the love of nature.  In fact, the warming of our climate, finally agreed upon by every major scientific group, is telling us we need to cherish nature much more than we do, and stop cutting down trees to manufacture disposable (paper) towels.  When I was a girl, they didn't exist.  My mother used rags, like everyone else, made from worn-out clothes and linens not good enough to go in a quilt.

We are meant to extend the same kind of caring to ourselves, as well.  Americans - overworked, badly fed, sick from spending our whole lives sitting - have a special need to adopt self-care in the face of commercial interests that want you to think a powerful new car or great vacation or ED pill or new shoes or bacon pretzel burger or more money or winning the game will make you happy.  Not so.  Not for long. 

An alternative to the dissatisfied consumer life is the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson referred to above:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

To entirely understand a flower, root and all, qualifies as an epiphany, or awakening, if you like.  It's a grander awakening to understand ourselves the very same way.  For this, you have the serious practice of zazen.
~~~~~~~~~~
p.s.  Or course, I always notice when the word "man" is used to mean "humankind," which would include the, uh, fair sex, woman.  This dates from times when women indeed had no civil rights, and were seen as sexual objects and helpmeets.  I didn't have a chance to talk with Lord Tennyson about this. 

Morning Coffee With Grandma: What is Zen?

7:00 Quietly awakened by morning light.  Roll over, sigh happily - nothing scheduled this morning. close eyes.
8:20  Wake up again. (In Zen this is called gradual awakening.  I've always believed in it.)
8:45  Pulling the compression sleeve on my lymphedemic arm, I accidentally sock my jaw.
9:00  Take vitals. I am alive. I thought so.
9:05  Get on Vine of Obstacles, read Forum, answer another student with a post that includes one of the few things I know for sure - you have to have a semi run into your house before you will start to meditate.  Then, if you're a woman, it's going to take twice the effort, because you've been trained to take care of everyone else, and don't get above yourself.  I don't have to go into a tirade about how Oprah and the other marketers make a lot of money by convincing you that what you need is a $100 haircut and a pedicure.  Most of us eventually figure out that that doesn't work.  Also, an old saying in feminism is "To get anywhere a woman has to be twice as good as a man.  Fortunately, that's not hard."

Actually, on one of my early Zen retreats I was walking down the residence hall when I saw that someone else had left her door open.  There, neatly laid out on her dresser, were four pairs of earrings. I thought, being new to all this, "Are these people Zen?"  Some of the women wore full makeup every day, too.  It turned out that -
(a)  Most were Catholic, drawn to this retreat because it was at Grailville and was led by a Jesuit Priest/Zen Master.  And -
(b)  Zen is not about what you wear.
(c)  Not everyone gets that.  When I went to a "real" Zen retreat, the other students all wore black and did NOT wear earrings or makeup or ever look up at the flowering trees.  Was that Zen? Now I was confused.

9:30  Done with coffee.  Time to put the post-it sign on my study door and do my practice.  Not that sitting down to meditate is the practice.  The practice is . . . umm . . .Well, sit down, shut up, and pay attention is fundamental.  But the "pay attention" part is supposed to keep going.  Pay attention all day long, every moment, every step.  That's the practice, as I understand it now.
~~~~~

In case you didn't recognize her above, here's a more usual view of the beautiful Pema Chodron, who got liberated and then got liberated.

One more thing:  I'm thinking I ought to call this blog The Dally Grandma.  Any opinions?

Inside My Bipolar Week

At the beginning of this month I vowed to change my life, starting with working harder on my mind. Is it working? Maybe. I am keeping on with it. That's what I can say. Waking up is so hard to do, from one standpoint. Easy from another: All you have to do is follow own breath in...out...rest.  For even the few seconds of one complete breath you are turning away from your itches and wallows and, as the Buddha said, "when you forget yourself, you are free." Unfortunately, it isn't as easy as one breath; if it were, everyone would be enlightened.

In the mess of my last five years of sick and sicker, I thought the first thing to get in place was my practice. I have been reliably doing my morning practice for some time now, and added an evening sit with Tom. He and I are each in a conflagration of problems with difficult people in our lives, and meditating together helps us get to the evening practice. Part of what you are practice when you sit zazen is putting your gnawing problems aside. The problems are still in motion, reality is gnawing at everyone involved and changing them, and you get off the carousel for awhile.

My biggest problem this past year has been my mood swings.  They have been dramatic, and the psychiatrist washed his hands of me, afraid to try any other chemicals.  So I've been trying to get a handle on them myself.  Recently I was looking at TCM and hypothesized that I might be expending a lot of energy/dopamine on a good day, talkinglaughingcookingmakingartgeneratingideas, so that the next day I am naturally exhausted (from the Latin, emptied out, drained).  So I set out to curb my enthusiasms, to move more quietly through  high-energy days. Impulse control. This was hard the first day, but is getting easier with practice.  Sitting still and poised, no matter how you feel, is central to zazen, and maybe to equanimity.

Yesterday seemed to be somewhat better, as bad days go. I didn't cry or carry on angrily at anyone. I got a couple of important practical things done by following my day's to-do list strictly in priority.  I still went semi-comatose around 4:00 pm, despite an infusion of energy from a visit from Chris, and a few minutes enjoying the garden with her. I was sad that I can't work in the gardens myself anymore, but happy to have her help getting the peonies under control.

I talked too much visiting with Chris. I keep doing that. Right speech-and-listening is a lifetime project. In fact, it's singled out on the Eightfold Path.

Chris is a kind person, and tolerated me well. We couldn't hug because she was covered in allergens. That's another thing I accomplished yesterday; I made an appointment with a local acupuncturist my grandson found for me, who has special training in allergy.

There's much more to a week, of course, but I'll close with touching down on my sleep and lack of it. Last night I felt clammy and discouraged, and couldn't fall asleep until after midnight.  Then I awoke at the traditional time for insomniacs, 3:00 am.  However, I remembered the intention I set before I went to bed, to light some incense and meditate if that happened, and I did.

Meditating by candlelight in a dark house in the middle of the night is pleasant, quiet and easy. It is not yet full Pink Moon, but getting closer. The moon is always full, of course. "Full moon" means only that we can see it all from where we stand.

Pink Moon phlox

Some words on private retreat

Here are some more apropos words from Dogen posted in the San Francisco Zen Center's Ino's blog:

"Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor. It is not introspection...
Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the dharma gate of great ease and joy. It is undivided practice-realization".

Thank you and a bow to Melanie G. of the Austin Zen Center for sending this in as a comment on my recent post about taking a sort of private retreat from writing.  It is going well..  I love this phrase - "let the myriad things rest." 

The saddest thing I ever read

I want to adopt a cat
I take a lot of peels that make my immune system very weak
So I get sick very easily
My mom said that I should not have a cat because it might be easy for me to get diseases from it.
It their really such a danger with cats
They don’t look like a disease caring animal.

This is from a site called lookfordiagnosis.com.  The answer is, yes, there are significant diseases you can get, but owning a pet lowers the blood pressure and so on.  Ask your doctor (as if he cares about your quality of life).

I felt so sorry for the child who wrote this, I can't tell when or how old s/he is.  I "take a lot of peels" too, and after Sheba died I decided not to get another cat until I see the great surgeon next Monday for my three-month checkup and, I hope, he lowers my immunosuppressants, which are making me anemic and liable to infections, and giving me a chronic headache.  But these past weeks have been so bad, I will start searching for a cat whatever he says.  Maybe I'll go to Cat Welfare today or over the weekend - unlike the gods of medicine, they don't close down for holidays. That leads me to the -

part you don't want to read if you read this blog for inspiration
(I have been sick since before Christmas, and no help anywhere, including the OSU ER, where they had me on the wrong antibiotic for six days until someone got back to work and took a look at my urine culture.  But by then I'd been to another ER for huge pain, which turned out to be kidney stones passing.  There they admitted me, got it right, and discovered I had no iron stores - another medical mistake.  My hemoglobin is 8 - you'd be depressed with that even if you weren't depressed.)

Back to cats.  Many transplant patients wrote to tell me they would never do without their pets.  If you have a cat, you are supposed to wear a face mask and gloves to scrape the litter box, I can live with that; but you are told to wash or sterilize your hands every time you pet them.  Please, give me a break.  What I will do is take the potential companion to my vet before adoption, not after, and ask for a very thorough exam.  And once I have a cat, I'll try not to touch my face or eat without cleaning my hands.

Our beloved cat Sheba died suddenly Nov. 6, three weeks after my transplant, apparently of simple old age.  I was so torn up by this I couldn't even tell my friends about it for weeks, except those who routinely asked how she was.  I felt like that sweet, affectionate cat was holding my life together with her insistence on our routines, her willingness to oblige, her love of being petted.  How she liked to fall asleep beside me with her chin on my hand while I read in bed.  How she was there whenever I came in the house.  We'd made her very happy by adopting her.

So that's that.  A horrible holiday season.  But I am better off than the child who wrote the above, who has God knows what illness that requires a lot of immunosuppressants.  Could be transplant, could be something worse.  And the poor kid does not get to make her own decision about a pet.  That's the awful thing about being a child, that helplessness.

I had one good room-mate in the hospital earlier this week - a 75-year-old woman with spinal stenosis causing terrific back pain. As her doctor explained to her, anything that impacts pain is a narcotic and will affect your brain (and constipate you, too).  I can testify to that - on Percocet all I wanted to do was lie on the couch with my back to the world.  I was soon willing to endure a certain amount of pain and just take Tylenol instead (careful not to overdose and harm my liver). 

Yes, there is always something to be grateful for, and I really am grateful that years of Zen meditation and retreats have taught me how to endure a certain level of pain.  When it comes to pain, you are much better off when you can accept a certain amount of it rather than being a nonperson on heavy meds.

My room-mate and I got to talking about it, and I remembered another room-mate I had a long time ago.  She'd had both feet amputated, diabetes, and just groaned all the time.  We agreed that you never have to look far to find someone worse off than you.  I wasn't looking for someone worse off this morning, was looking at zootropic diseases, but came across this child.  I hope her mom let her get a kitten, never mind the risks.  It will give her something to love and to live for. 

A piece of very good karma

The point of the kind of meditation we call zazen is to recognize what's happening.  That would be now.  I think it's important to make a point of acknowledging your good karma - that which maybe you lucked into, and also that which you created.  So this leads me to a small story.

Since I got home from my transplant surgery in mid-October, I have been plagued by the bird feeder that hangs outside the front door, visible from my seat at the kitchen table. We've had a warm fall, and for a while there the birds were keeping busy with berries.  They still visited the feeder sometimes, standing on the cardinal ring at the bottom and doing their best to get the last seed out of the bottom of the tube.  But last week it got colder.  The juncos were back, too, finding seeds the chickadees kicked over onto the ground.  So I worried about filling the feeder.

Worry because at first I didn't feel I could stretch up to get the thing.  But that passed.  Then I worried because my discharge instructions are explicit about birds - if you have pet birds, get rid of them:  they carry dangerous diseases.  So I knew I would have to wear a mask and gloves to handle the feeder, and it still made me nervous.

Skip the next paragraph if you are impatient with illness.
There's always much more to any story, and this one included the fact that my energy is still limited, and now I have to do all the driving, since Tom had that unexplained fall with amnesia.  We are guessing the neurologist is worried about the possibility of seizure, but of course the whole medical profession takes off Thanksgiving week, so we couldn't get an answer to our plaintive question, which would be, Do you really mean it, I can't drive?  Then there's the whole thing of trying to keep food in the house, trying to cook something, and trying to get back into an exercise routine.  I am definitely not as well as I thought I would be after six weeks.  So suiting up to do the feeder was going to be a thing.
Okay, enough.

But the other day - maybe Saturday, a good day, I did it.  Parka, mask, nitrile gloves.  Found the seed in the garage, in a blessedly convenient bag with a spout.  Went out and did it.  And I did it because I felt for the birds - so small and fragile, their lives so perilous even in good weather.

This morning I was rewarded, and that's my point today.  I was diligently eating my yogurt etc. to buffer the mean pills I have to take punctually at 8:00 (yes, that's a complaint too) and watching a chickadee eat with more appreciation than I was evidencing, when a downy woodpecker landed on the cardinal ring.  All birds are beautiful, well, some are a stretch, but the downy has a flashy broad stripe of red on his head.  His body is an intricate black and white pattern, inspiring one to question the idea of accidental creation.  The sight of him on that feeder, poking his long, sharp beak into the feeding slot, made me gasp.

I filled that feeder, and here was my direct reward.  Seldom is good karma so obvious.  And the sun's out today, again.  Now, at least.
[image:  a tube feeder with the shelf at the bottom called a cardinal ring.]

Sheba and the Way of Healing

We brought Sheba home late last summer. A very nervous little tiger cat, who had spent six months in Cat Welfare in the little glass room where unadoptable old lady cats like to stay. She sat on a low pillar there, jumping about in fright whenever the door opened. Jumping down to take a bite of food, jumping back up to safety to eat it. When we visited, we were not able to pick her up or even to pet her - she was so generally afraid.

When we brought her home, she kept her distance. She was starved, starved for touch, and allowed us to pet her a bit, but then ran away. When anyone else came into the house, she walked away and curled up in a bedroom.

Here it is, about six months later, and Sheba is sitting on an armchair in the living room watching TV with our friends. She is letting strangers come in and disturb her nap and pet her. She has gone from neurotic to just, oh, timid. Cautious. You still can't pick her up, and she won't come up on my lap, but my friend Scott assures me that just takes patient training.

In other words, Sheba has substantially healed. I remain impressed by that. What has healed her? No therapy. Just a safe, affectionate environment.

When we think about healing from our own psychological difficulties, the fears that constrain us, the unmet desires, we so often think of doing something. Often we need to do something. But the other kind of work, meditation, is about "just sitting," doing nothing. Being there without any hope of gain, letting ourselves abandon our thoughts and desires instead of working them.

Zen postulates that this is a healing activity, this plain sitting. When we do it, we are giving ourselves the luxury of time in a healing environment, for in the present moment there is nothing to harm us. It is a safe place. I have often had the sense walking into a Zen center that there is a deep, healing silence there. These bright days of riotous bloom, I sometimes feel that when I come home and into a dim room.

I have also found that as I meditated, I have become more sensitive to how I feel around certain people or in certain places. Whether someone is good for me or makes me uneasy. This enables me to keep putting myself in the environments I need. "What is good for me" becomes simple. I find myself thinking, these beautiful spring days, of Julian of Norwich's famous revelation, a reassurance that we can abandon striving and trust in the Tao or in God, who she believed spoke these words to her:
"…All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well"

[image: Sheba in zazen, sitting on a sacred text (the morning Times).]

The Great Reality Show

Today we have been slowly eating an elephant, cleaning up after a long Open House yesterday in which nobody, thankfully, felt the need to clean up as the day went on. So wax from the candles on his antlers dripped onto the brass reindeer, plates and red napkins and silver forks were laid down anywhere, cookies spent the night on the dining room table. Just now I took a rest from straightening up to lunch with last Sunday's New York Times, and scanned the Week in Review, which is always fun this time of year, and even better at the end of a decade.

I am struck by how various columnists and cartoonists talk about the same thing - that this was a decade in which massive dreams were punctured and failed. Columnist Frank Rich poses Tiger Woods as an example of a delusion somebody should have seen through, just like the housing bubble and the teetering accumulation of consumer debt. Shared delusions that fell to ground with a thud.

What this brought to my mind was my own series of dreams. Last night, as we relaxed in the after-party, I told a friend how I entered the PhD program at Ohio State in 1990 to fulfill a dream of teaching I had held onto for 20 years. And how five years later I walked out of the program with the degree and the knowledge that I never wanted to teach college again, not like that.

Many things had gone into the formation of that dream, including some fine experiences in my first years of teaching in the early seventies. And there were many ways higher education had changed in the years since, a new cynicism in the students, careerism in the faculty. But to pare it down to the bare bones, my four years of teaching in the graduate program showed me that it was not at all what I remembered. Or dreamed of.

I don't know what a dream is made of. Parts and pieces, like everything else. How my mother was so impressed, and referred to me back then as "my daughter, the professor." How it was the first time I had a job where I was treated as an equal and allowed to create my own work, assign anything. The seventies were a time of ferment when we could play with new ways of doing the old thing, trying to teach kids to love the written word. It was a time of change, when change seemed important, and positive. "Not always so," Suzuki Roshi cautions us, but I hadn't read him back then. I graded essays listening to Hair.

This for sure: you hold on to a dream with your mind, probably both halves of it. A dream is an idea, generated by the mind, clung to by whatever that mechanism is, mostly mental I suspect, but probably some in the body as well. Americans are particularly prone to dreams. The country was founded by people who dreamed wealth would save them, and wealth could be found around the edge of the world if the dragones didn't get you.

Zen actively discourages us from paying attention to dreams and ambitions. In sitting in meditation, we do nothing but count or watch the breath. We watch ideas rise like little tendrils of smoke from incense out of the mind, and we let them go and return to the breath. We do not run from the cushion to write down our thoughts and dreams; in fact, that is actively discouraged. We are encouraged to be mindful of what life is presenting to us minute by minute, of the small things that need done, and done by us, and done with care.

Last night, after we had discussed our big, difficult dreams, we got to talking about our e-mail inboxes. Mine has ahh, 440 posts sitting in it. A number of them are tagged. Another 2200 rest in the dialysis and transplant boxes, a great collection of information, most of which I haven't yet read. Every year this time I start paring this down, especially that inbox, in the hope of getting to zero. A small dream. An activity, really, like sweeping the path as the wind blows new leaves down.