The Way of Tom, and my Knee

How amazing is that?  I, "a little old lady in tennis shoes" as some jerk once referred to me online, just downloaded that picture directly from my phone.  All self-taught.  These are demanding times.

I once read in a short story by T.C. Boyle that you never recover from anything that happens to your body over the age of 21.  That was a character speaking, but the character was a doctor, and my experience is that he was right.  I suppose my knee will be like that.  It just hurts a little when I walk much, but I have a lot of miscellaneous aches, what's one more?  On the upside, I can hobble around in a brace over a stockinette, as shown, or over long pants (otherwise the brace abrades my skin) and maybe someone will think I got it playing soccer.

I don't usually blog on Sunday. Well, I don't "usually" blog.  And I take Sundays off from everything that feels like work.  That means I don't check e-mail or run the Roomba or go to meetings.  Well, I never go to meetings.  It took me a while to figure out how to do that.

But Tom says that today "a lot of people" asked him after church how my knee was while I slept in.  I love that! That's why I told Kathleen Fowler it was okay to do a caring card for me after I fell, and many people signed it last week.  I looked at it carefully, and appreciate it.  Good PR is important.  And I want to publicly thank Marian Clover for calling Kathleen, who is one of our ministers.

I did have a little thought today, though, so I thought I'd share it in a casual way.  It is a reminder of Reality:  you are influenced by the people you hang around with, including your partner/spouse and your cat.  Or dog, of course. I don't mean to exclude anyone, whatever their animal companion preference might be.

That same cat---look at those eyes, the intense determination to make her Mom's tote bag part of her personal territory---that cat was, as usual, preventing me from changing the tablecloth, which is part of my extensive cat-allergy program.  I was about to raise my voice at her, but then I remembered how Tom solves these things.  I looked around for a ping-pong ball and of course there was one nearbye.  So I picked it up, showed it to Tashi, and whispered, "Get it!" in an exciting tone of voice, the way Tom does, and threw it out of the kitchen.  Cat bounds off the table and goes for the ball.  I get to change the tablecloth.  Bob's your uncle, as the English say.

I thought, This is the Way of Tom.  It's getting something done with the least effort, which is one of those physical principles:  effort is work.  I thought I should note it, because you pick up a lot of bad habits from your spouse, but on the other hand, sometimes you learn something.

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.

Does Connection Matter?

Grailville 2011, through a screen

from a Tricycle interview with Gil Fronsdal - 

..........the American Vipassana movement emphasizes interconnectedness when teaching anatta, or “not-self.” This is emphasized so much that a person might get the idea that realizing interconnectedness is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. It’s not; this is a very American emphasis. I think interconnectedness is inspiring to us as an antidote to American individualism and the pain of alienation it can cause. 

This interests me from a couple of points of view. One, I am a devoted member of a Unitarian Universalist church, which emphasizes interconnection as one of its seven core principles.  Two, I have seen this emphasis on aspiring to deeply realize our connectedness in American Zen, and a mystic's life is not for me.  I think it's important to emphasize the entire 8-Fold Path, which makes clear that our behavior is important.  If you set out to follow the precepts there, it will keep you busy.

On the other hand, as the scapegoat in an alcoholic family I grew up without a sense of having a family or connection, except insofar as I could connect with some poets through their poetry - sobering even to remember that intense loneliness.  So for me, personally, realizing my connectedness to what family I have, my friends, my church, has been healing; it's what kept me alive during my years of profound clinical depression. Therefore I stopped writing just now and called Nancy, a dear friend from years of meditating together.  And now, to connect with Tom over breakfast.
~~~~~~~
Oh man, such a long long too-much-to-do list today.  This is the result of addressing it sporadically, and a lot of change going on in our lives.  And sporadic is my buddhanature.  Meanwhile in back of mind, what is more important?  going to Zen tonight, see special friends there, or doing collage assn. while perhaps listening to a dharma talk?  Hmmmm........What is the most important thing?  I used to think it was my private spiritual practice, as in meditating.  Now it expands out to it being important to be there, sitting with the group, making the group.  The collage group tomorrow morning is a sort of practice, too, and certainly connection with other women in my age group.  But they really don't care if I do the assn, do they?  They shouldn't.......But my health and well-being is surely the most important thing. 

Breathe in, exhale. Cool down.  Abandon idea of going out in the noonday sun for major grocery shopping.  Decide to go to Zen tonight.  A bunch of Zenners meditating is about as cool as you can get. And staying cool physically and mentally is becoming a priority as summer barrels at us here, going up to 95 degrees today.  Already, even the little cat is irritable.

Nothing extra

Tashi contemplating tea

Last night watched the last episode of House, which ended well, he and Wilson on motorcycles going through a digitally-bright-green landscape....maybe this is the end of an 8-year episode in my life, too.

Perhaps unrelated, I decided I need to turn back to Zen, to the simple bareness.  I read some in Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, and was struck by something Suzuki said in answering a question, Why do we shave our heads?

“We should not have anything that is not necessary.”

A mind like mine begins to parse “necessary.”  Looking it up doesn’t illuminate it.  But I remembered the sentence somewhat differently, like this -

“We should not have anything extra.”

So I began to think about how bare and simple life is on retreat:
There is my little room (no socializing, no talking, no decorating or art). 
There is my bed, that I sleep well.  Thought, must order new sheets today.
There is my food.
And water.
My body, whatever else it needs, taking a shower, taking medications, moving it, sitting in meditation. My mind needs that, too.  Body-mind.
There are clothes that are comfortable and protective and not distracting and just enough.
    (whoa, wait...earrings?  I suppose we shouldn’t stand out so much)
    (How do fun and making art and personal-clothing-art fit into that?)
So I thought, retreat strips away the unnecessary so you can be with the very simplest thing, your breathing. Being awake or asleep.  Sitting or walking. Wearing shoes, taking them off at the door. What a relief.

When you think about “nothing extra” you think about your things  (which are an ominous gray area) - and the visual clutter of your house.  Those of us who have houses and things.  I left that out -

There is your shelter.

Its actual purpose is - shelter from the elements, and safety.  Beyond those walls and doors and HVAC systems, roof, gutters, and what you sit on and cook on, beyond that everything is extra.  And 90% of what is in my kitchen goes unused most or all of the time (the Bundt cake pan).  It is not necessary, is it?

And how simple life was when all you had was a typewriter.  Oh, go back before that - van Gogh would pick reeds, sharpen them into pens, and draw with them.

If you had a camera when I was young, it was film and it took a limited number of pictures per roll, and that cost money and took time to get developed.  Now you are plagued by pictures, they are another something-extra problem in your life, how to organize them.  This is making me smile and chuckle at the ridiculousness of it all.

And let us not forget, as Suzuki once pointed out, there is the broom with which you sweep.  It should be stored upside down, so the bristles don’t wear down so fast.

And there is the cat who lives with you, her litterbox, her food, her measured probiotic, her need to play, her anxiety when you leave.  What a wonderful complication love is in your life.

Stress and the poor little cat

Tashi explores the consolations of Art

I would like to announce that I don't hate anybody.  Depending on my general state, sometimes people say things that gives me a hit of anger where I don't need it, in my stomach, but I don't hate them.  Or any politician, including the ones my friends hate.  Or, I should say, my acquaintances, because I am just not comfortable with people who hate-talk, even if it's ritualized.

And if I did hate somebody (it would probably be someone on Facebook who is desperately urging me to think positively) I would not announce it on the internet. And not even on Facebook, which is why I erased this, which began as a status, and put it here on my blog.  If you don't like it, you don't have to come back.  Facebook, that's trickier.  Sometimes you have no idea the crap that's in some people until there you are, and unfriending might be noticed and create hard feelings.

We are having a hard time lately in my house, with major health worry, facing another surgery, and major psychological stress in Tom's family, which means in Tom, which means in me and the poor cat.  She keeps coming around going Ip?  Ip? and looking at me searchingly. Even when the doors to the basement and screened porch are open for her to go freely mousing and patrolling.

You feel rotten when you realize how your emotional energies affect a poor little cat.  I told Tom, Tashi is the symptom bearer.  He thought that made an odd image, as if the cat was proceeding ahead in our march, a flag tied to her tail. That's a picture you will have to imagine.

But it does make me stop and think how a rude word, a snap of irritation or anger, a proud statement of hatred affect me - and her.  All of us.

Change, change, what else is new?

Tashi watching out for change

This has been a really tough, emotional week, starting last Thursday with having to call the squad for Tom's father, and now all the things that can arise with elderly parents have arisen, so Tom and his siblings are putting many hours into working the problems.

This morning we finally met with the kidney surgeon, the same guy who took a kidney from my donor, Laurie Brown, and with whom we met last year.  This year we were ready to tell him to schedule the removal of my native kidneys.  A big decision.  It might stop these increasingly dangerous UTIs; there's no way to be sure.  But it is sure that well-evolved e-coli kills people every day - bacteria that are outstripping our ability to invent antibiotics. And don't ask - we've done everything, talked to everyone from ID to our private kidney doc and our transplant center kidney doc and our family doc, done scans, and this is what it comes to.  Taking a chance.  If you follow this blog you know I've had something like 15 UTIs in 16 months.

I knew I was anxious about this meeting when I had acid reflux last night, then when I woke up at 5:00 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep.  Yet I was surprised to find myself exhaling as we walked out of the transplant center.  A lot.  And then, in a comic touch, burping several times; apparently my stomach was holding its breath too.  I still feel good, almost high with relief.

Who did I tell? Maybe yesterday I talked a little with my physical therapist about this, and said, "I've been sick most of the time since 2005," and felt tears well up.  It's true.  And I had to laugh this morning when the nurse asked me the various screening questions they do before the doctor comes in:  "Are you in any pain today?"  Well, the usual, left ankle, right rotator cuff, flare-up of the sciatic nerve.  Nothing significant to them, as long as my abdomen feels good.

Change, change.  It's really weird to be a carbon-based life form.  It could be good to be silicon-based next time, or a tree, or a river, the kind made of water.

"Every day's a good day."

Grailville meadows at sunset

Well, just briefly before I go pick up my thyroid med and get a blood draw and do some banking and drop off overdue library books - we got back home from retreat Friday afternoon, feeling very well, the soft stream of emptiness still around my ankles.  We went to Zen Sat. morning and so loved the deep silence - there are a number of dedicated practitioners there, and everyone sat quietly.  Then we heard a talk by Lew Richmond on the spiritual opportunities, you could say, of aging.

Sheba had been wonderfully cared for by my neighbors, Cindy and Lauren, and all was well.  This was one time Ama Samy did not quote the visionary, Hildegard, but we remembered her most-quoted vision -

And all shall be well.
And all shall be well.
And all manner of things shall be well.

As I corresponded just now with my friends on the transplant e-list, I noted that of course I am praying that everything goes well these next weeks for both me and Laura.  And of course that the surgeries go well.  They should; OSU is very experienced.  But on a deeper level I want to accept whatever comes.  Inscribing his latest book for us, Ama Samy wrote for me - "Every day's a good day."  In this situation, that will do as the koan of your life - that no matter what transpires, it is the way it is and has to be, and it is good to be alive.

Love to all, especially to those I sat with on the retreat.

It's a Cat's Life

Do I ask much?  I don't ask much.  Just my chair in the study, an old wicker chair - but do I complain? At least it is softened with a folded brown hand towel, to make my colors Pop!  and Buffy, Mom's oldest, softest stuffed animal as a sort of padding.  A stuffed golden cocker spaniel.  He's been dead so long he doesn't even have bad breath, so I don't care.

Do I ask much?  Just don't leave the new headphones and all that cable on my chair, okay?  I have one chair in every room, and of course the entire king-size bed.  They are not horizontal filing cabinets.  Let's remember that.

Is that too much to ask?  No.  That and a tuna smoothie morning and night.  I can't smoke or open a bottle of wine or eat chocolate, tuna's the best I can do.  And do I have to sit some evenings and yowl monotonously to get Someone to pay attention and give it to me?  Don't even ask.  But I am a good cat.  I have never bitten either one of them.  It's not feminine.  But don't push me.

[image: Sheba putting her paw down on the kitchen table.]

Miracules of healing

It is with great relief and gratitude that I can report today that Sheba is clearly much better.  My gratitude is general, to the universe, that brings forth marvelous forms capable of healing, and particular, for the friends at home and online who understood and made helpful suggestions.

Today Sheba is eating again a select variety of expensive canned catfood, even her dry kidney diet if it is soaked in chicken broth to soften it.  Her digestive system is operating as it should. She has resumed her usual schedule, lying up against my hip while I read in bed. (I knew she was really sick when she stopped doing her rituals.)  It does seem reasonable now to hope that what caused her weight loss was not kidney failure, but pain in her mouth that made it hard to eat. The antibiotic has helped.  Next week she will go to the Vet to be sedated and have her mouth examined. 

She did not entirely heal herself, but was helped along by those two daily doses of liquid amoxicillin.  We have become more skillful in administering that to a cat who does not like to be held in any way, let alone having her pretty little head immobilized for a few seconds.  Maybe she has realized something, for she seems to swallow quicker.  Thanks to my daughter, Cassie, who recommended I look in Sheba's eyes and talk to her, explain why we are doing this.  Cassie said animals may not change their behavior, but they understand. I had a sense that this was true when I did it.

It is thundering.  I just went to the screened porch expecting Sheba would want to come in.  Our last cat, Sherlock, did not like thunder, and went to a special place under the guest bed, way back against the wall.  But Sheba was watching the dimming light and blowing leaves through the screens with interest.  We are all  unique.

Her gains in health caused me to look at her as a remarkable collection of organs and patterns, including immune response.  She is so small, 7.3 pounds, so delicate, so complicated, and able to heal, as all life is.  If I stop for a moment I can see my own body the same way, how my pancreas has been healing by merely following a different diet for a while (and discontinuing the drug responsible for the illness).  No major medical treatments involved, just let the pancreas rest.  It fosters a sort of awe.

I feel that awe often now that I am back on my feet - when I walk across a room barefoot in the morning, or take the short sidewalk to my acupuncturist's office.  It feels miraculous to be up on my feet (with custom insoles in my Asics), after last year's long difficulties.  I am even able now to grocery shop without using an electric cart.  I love a little verse by Thich Nhat Han that goes like this:

Walking on the earth is a miracle!
Each mindful step reveals the wondrous Dharmakaya.

[image:  a portrait of Sheba in morning sun]

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).]

Sheba and the Great Matter

You might say Sheba is just a cat. Go a little further and say she's a tiger cat. Look closer and she's a calico overlaid with black stripes, and a very detailed face with, for instance, black kohl around her eyes, then white eyeliner, and that's just the eyes. But - you know where this is going - she is much more than just beautiful. She is magic.

Time and again I look at her and think, She looks like a stuffed animal that has miraculously come to life. I really do see that. Eyes that see, that focus and blink. A delicate paw that spreads and retracts, treading a little whenever she feels loved, or whatever that is that she feels when she is petted. She does feel. She is responsive, real and alive, more satisfying than any stuffed animal can be.

My sense of Sheba's aliveness was perhaps sharpened by experiencing the mystery of Sherlock's death. One moment he was alive, lying on the leather couch beside me, and the next minute he was dead. Nothing had happened to mark the moment when the paralytic medicine stopped everything. Not a convulsion or a sound or a relaxing. He was no longer breathing, that's all. I was alarmed. I asked the Vet, "Is that it?"

"Yes," he assured me. "He's dead." How could that difference be so small?

So now I know that what keeps Sheba from being just a stuffed animal is her breath. She breathes in and out, like I do. I don't know why she breathes or when her breathing will stop. This breathing is a mystery; it is life itself. We take in air and other nourishment, but air is the one you need every moment. We use what we can and exhale the rest. In sitting Zen we are sometimes told to focus on exhaling completely. Suzuki says that thus we die every moment.

Sheba is a lady of a certain age, as the British say, meaning on the upper edge of middle age. We know her kidney functions are very bad, and we know intimately what that means, because that is what killed Sherlock. Right now Sheba eats well and drinks water and continues to process it all. She is alive.

I expect to outlive her (in which I may be quite wrong). If so, I may someday be there when she has stopped breathing, and just like that, Sheba will be no longer alive. Like Sherlock, she is here temporarily. So it is natural to cherish her. And I believe it is natural for that appreciation to fan out to my loved ones, my friends, the squirrel in the Zen garden and the chickadee in the back yard, to every living creature and thing, every breath, every breath I myself get to take.

Getting out the ornaments

This morning I was up early, designing an invitation for an open house we are going to hold on Christmas day. After that, I found myself laying ornaments out on the dining room table.

Some time ago, I got rid of the usual round balls you hang on the tree - we don't do a tree anymore, since when? I wonder. Maybe since we moved here. In the old house I used to enjoy dragging the tree out behind the garage. You could see it from the kitchen table, how the birds used it as a nice snug habitat. But after we got Sherlock, the Bad Cat, having a tree became ever more precarious with Sherlock. He would eat tinsel and ribbon, so you had to be very careful about that. He didn't lie in the branches, though, like my sister's cat used to.

In this house, we put up a three-foot fiber-optic tree that twinkles and change colors. This cost $29 only once, so after the first year, it's gravy, and putting it up is just a matter of plugging it in. It sits at the living room window, where maybe it can be seen from across the ravine. On the kitchen table we put up the lit ceramic tree Tom had made for me one year. I get an unreasonable amount of pleasure from these things.

But I set out to write about getting into the small box that holds ornaments precious to me. Some of them are actually precious, I suppose, sterling ornaments from specific years when my mother worked in a jewelry store. Several crosses, and a sterling silver bell. Then there is a golden winged horse she gave me at a time when I liked unicorns; not a unicorn, but good enough - maybe better.

I took out two felt doilies, I guess you'd call them, that I'd embroidered on my sewing machine. It was an entirely manual machine back then in the sixties, and I'm impressed that I did the scrolls freehand, how pretty these red and green things are.

Felt ornaments patterned on Czechoslovakian style. Two that I made, one that Aunt Eileen made and gave me, a cluster of felt scraps that Cassie made, all this when Cassie was just three. The instructions for these ornaments had shown up in a women's magazine, so I formed this party of the my mother, Eileen, Cassie and me. It's been many, many years since Eileen fell down the basement steps and suffered such severe brain injury that she no longer knew any of us. I look back on that ornament party now and know some things I didn't know then. For instance, that none of us had a creative outlet in her life. That my life was sadly empty of friends, so that they were actually my best friends - and that our three-generation friendship was a good thing for all of us.

I came to the cluster of half-inch square packages wrapped in foil and gold string, and smiled. You could not have them out anywhere Sherlock could reach, or they would be batted all over the house, to end up eventually way back under the couch. Worse, he might eat them. Holding those packages in my hand, I missed him in a physical way. I remembered him with love, thirteen years of a bad cat who just got worse. And we thought everything he did was remarkable.

The ornaments come out year after year, and each year has brought fresh loss. Tonight, in fact, we are going to visiting hours for our old friend, Mary Smith. Like Eileen and my mother, Mary had a aging process, leading her further into dementia and a life empty of friends and pleasures. I happen to know quite a few people who have had bad deaths. They don't have to be slow. My father's was sudden, a cerebral hemorrhage when he was alone down in the cabin.

Who has a good death? There are stories told about Zen masters, who seem to see it coming and write a death poem, or maybe produce a poem they have ready and waiting. A good death is one in which you accept the inevitability of this process, a change of state, when all the parts that make up you fall apart and go on to make up something else. When someone is willing to give up this body, this self, I imagine they can be peaceful at death, and grateful for their life. So many people I know have gone unwillingly, sometimes angry that this should happen to them no matter how hard they tried to keep living.

But I honestly do find that in the face of death, it is consoling to affirm the good moments in the life. So we stand in a funeral home and talk about how valiant Mary was, raising her children alone, how creative she was, her little sewing room stuffed with hundreds of scraps, how happy she was to buy her own house late in life. So, in the words of J. Donald Johnson, "In the presence of death, we say yes to life."

The Cat's Zen

When I am hungry, I eat; when I am tired, I sleep.
Zen saying
We applaud the cat for doing what we cannot:
seeking her own comfort, knowing what she likes,
going her own way.

Smart Change and Just Change

Thinking so much about death these days, and about change, Change, which is fitting - it is the end of autumn, winter setting in. Every day in this depression seems like such a waste, one more irretrievable day gone, life so short, I am 67! One more day wasted just getting through the day. But then, you waste your whole life that way until you wake up.

Today my rather aimless tracking around the Cloud led me to a photo in a blog called Dashh. Can't get anywhere from the blog to find out if he is still writing. Tom has promised to have a look at my PC, which is often spinning its wheels lately. I wonder whether it picks up my garbled, failed energy. I know Sheba does. One day last week she was just awful, yowling, and finally made a pass at biting/scratching me. We realized she was anxious because I was so different. If you want to make a case that there is nothing in this world you can't measure with your instruments, I don't care. You can say I just didn't pet her enough, it was all behavioral. But the fact is, that kind of science is arrogant. People don't realize it is, because we are all inside of it, it is the Western mind, the mind of the conqueror. There is still a great deal we don't know. Who said he felt like a child playing with a shell on the beach while all around him an ocean roars? Some scientist. You could google it. bing it. If your computer works better than mine.

Dashh was or is being anonymous on the blog. Trying to email him just has the search engine spinning. Alive or dead? Another of the lebenty-zillion blogs sitting there in the cloud, karmic traces of people who have passed by this intersection? Too many people, too many! I don't want to know all of them! It is a crowd.

Last night Tom said Do you realize what has happened these past five years? He was thinking about this kind of thing: Facebook. Smart phones. Twitter. Snail mail, real letters, have just about passed into oblivion. I said, when I was young I guess we had health insurance through Firestone. Nobody gave it any thought. People just died at 62 of a heart attack.

And actually, for all this Smart Change the basic facts of being old are the same, never mind those who want to believe aging is a disease and if you take Spirulina every day you can live forever. I return from the graveside to tell you, it isn't so. It isn't a matter of will. We wanted to stay young and vigorous and healthy. But here we are, slowed down, cautious, wondering what truck will come out of the fog and hit us next.

Still, it was a pleasure to be led to the Pink Floyd video above, from 1994, when they still made good videos. Like life, so many wonderful things just gone, like some kind of great, fancy parade. I think Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about an elephant going down her street. I don't know if a real elephant did, or if it was, you know, just a wild rhinoceros.

Your own pillars

Thanksgiving passed Sheba by. We were gone a couple of hours during the day, but that's not unusual and didn't upset her. She spent that time on my chair, which she has recently adopted. It does not have a towel on it, but does have a memory-foam cushion covered in imitation sheepskin. Apparently just the thing for a cat.

When Sheba came into this house she was too scared to get up on my chair. If she had, she would have jumped down and run away, meowing, when I went to sit beside her. Now she sits there in the middle of the cushion as I carefully edge in, encouraging her to move aside a little and make room for me. She is not aggressive about it, but has come into her natural feline dominance. I was here first. What I thought of as "my chair" is one of her pillars now.

Some 40 people were at the church dinner this year. I thought, "all the lonely people," people without any pillars of family to sit on. Then I realized that we are now the generation on top. For an increasing number of us, there is nobody up there, no parents to go home to. Nevertheless, when we came home Tom and I did not have that sense of empty house - we had Sheba, jumping down off The Chair Formerly Known as Mine and squalling to remind me that when I've been gone a long time and come back, treats are due. She was happy with her usual treats, and for her Thanksgiving dinner had Purina liver and bacon supper. She is always happy when things are just the way they have been before, which in her mind is the way they are supposed to be. Predictable. Secure.

In which Wun is very Zen

[the image - a kitty litter, of course]
I haven't felt very inspirational lately. But this morning as I was scraping Sheba's box, I thought, I am being very Zen. Why? Because working with shit is inherently unpleasant, but avoiding it leads to worse, to smells and maybe bad cat behavior. In scraping the box every day I am in touch with the reality of cause and effect. And I am doing a fundamental (sorry about the pun) job, just doing the work without making a big deal of my preference, which is for far different fragrances.

After that I washed my hands (more karmic thoughts) and went about putting on my minimalist eye makeup. I thought to leave off the strokes of blush I like to use, so the doctor could see my honest coloring. How Zen, I thought. I am fully present here, not running on automatic.

Then again, I know people who would think wearing any makeup was very not-Zen. They might be outside Zen, or might be meditators or lapsed meditators. They have ideas about the severity for which Zen is famous. They show up a lot in sanghas, I suspect, the same way there was a good number of Ideational Christians in Youth for Christ when I was a youthful Christian. A conversion experience, and a good one for me, in the end. I'd like to write about it some day. But for now I'll stick to the bathroom mirror.

Giving myself a last check I caught myself smiling, and thought, I like myself. Well. That should go down in the annals of psychology, as well as meditation. It was a long way there from the way I learned to see myself in childhood. Liking Wunself - some would think that's not proper Zen. They would confuse it with ego, with self-absorption.

What was it we thought Zen was, before we got deeply involved? Form, robes, silence, all that lovely bowing and chanting. Wearing a mala around your wrist. Having the neatest, cleanest damn house you ever saw. But in fact, a real meditation practice gradually slowly reveals to you that you are just like everyone else, that we are all alright.

It is the easiest thing to be attached to ideas, zillions of them, about how we and others ought to be. So many of those ideas have nothing to do with an ethical life, but are just there, just conditioned assumptions learned some time long ago. Subtle little ideas like, really religious people don't wear lipstick. Like, enlightened people always answer their e-mail or wear black or don't eat and watch television at the same time. Don't watch television at all. Ah, it sounds like a nice quiet life, but it is not my life. I have my own life. That's the essence of Zen.

Shelter cat

When we chose Sheba over 285 other cats at Cat Welfare, it was our own welfare we had in mind. Though it was true that Sheba played a part in the choice, standing up on her pillar and stretching to look at me through the glass walls of the quiet room every time I came in, just as if to ask, "Are you my woman?" I felt sorry for the little cat who was afraid of other cats, whose previous owner had abandoned her at a veterinary hospital. I wondered what had become of that woman. Maybe she was hit by a car, maybe she died, maybe her mother got sick and she flew home to be with her, and couldn't get her wits about her enough to make arrangements for the cat. Anything could have happened.

Your heart goes out to all the cats in that perennially overcrowded no-kill shelter, the ones who wind about your ankle, the ones who are too tired or discouraged or ill to even look up. There is a certain crowd that seems to enjoy the place, hang out together, run around looking for trouble, just like high school. But, just like high school, everyone else is marking time, looking for a way out.

The only record on Sheba showed that she was brought in five months previous, and had been spayed and had her shots. Someone, one of the volunteers I think, told us she was three years old, but we can't track down any records with her date of birth. We believed she was three until we'd had her at home for a week or two and took her to the vet to get her claws trimmed. (Having front claws had not been in her favor.) The vet did a blood draw and called the next day with the bad news: her kidney function is very low. This is a familiar story to cat people; many cats die of kidney failure. Our Sherlock had. We knew his age, seventeen.

Sheba was also chosen for her looks. Shallow as that may seem, a cat is a thing of beauty, an adornment in a house. Sheba was a sort of clouded black tiger, with an expressively marked face, and shadows of auburn beneath her striping. And she had personality. And furthermore, she seemed to yearn toward me, to want to be adopted by us, even though she could hardly be touched, and certainly not picked up. (We never got to pet her until she'd been home for a while.) Her figure we didn't know about, because we saw her only in the tiny quiet room, where she wove in and out of pillars, but mostly just lay there. When we got her home and she was walking about we could see that she is paunchy, with the low belly of an older cat, and carries an extra pound or two.

So we had another cat who might be close to death. I began saying that this was The Wynding Drive Cat Hospice, a joke of sorts, but there seemed to be something sweet about it, that we could give a helpless animal a good end-of-life.

Sheba began weaving into our daily lives in a very satisfactory way. She has gradually taken in more of this nice, big territory - the screened porch, the basement (carpeted steps!) and the garage. She has learned to eat her special kidney diet, though not without protest. She has learned when treats are given, three times a day, and tested a great many other possibilities. She has developed two tricks, or say, aspects of her performance piece around these treats - Running Cat and Magical Floating Cat. She has dedicated certain venues where she naps at specific times of day. At night, she lies on the bed, at my feet, where the heated mattress pad confers a lovely warmth. Would that we could all end up in a hospice that offers so many creature comforts!

It was not our first priority to generously give an orphan cat a home, though we knew we did want a shelter cat. We did it for ourselves. We wanted a cat in the house, we needed relief from the echoing emptiness after Sherlock died. We have ended up with a cat who will probably not be with us as long as he was - I think she is actually eight or nine years old.

Her happiness here is plain to see. She goes out in the garage and stretches to claw at the doormat. In my study, I am surprised to see her thread her way through the colored pencils on my art table and jump neatly up on the file cabinet to watch from the high window, just like Sherlock did. I'm in the process of clearing a place for her on a really high shelf in the closet; she has indicated that she would like to try that.

It is very hard to do any good in this world, have you noticed? You give someone a carefully chosen gift, and it falls flat. You try to help someone out and it turns out to be impossible. But with an animal there is never any question. Sheba is not as demonstrative as some, but she has an expansive purr, and a chirrup and chuckle that demands serious petfest at odd times. She feels safe enough now to try some questionable things, like jumping up on the kitchen table. Gradually her coat has gotten shinier, and she has less dandruff. She sleeps more soundly, not jumping up alarmed at the smallest sound. So, if we never accomplish anything else in this world, we have made one small animal happier. But in the end, it is impossible to say whether she benefits most or whether we do, who gives, the giver or the grateful recipient.

The Kind of Cat I am: The Artistic Temperament in August

I was consoled this morning to see that my most creative, artistic Facebook friends also had -- what to call it? okay, fits. They, too, had fits yesterday. You can call them mini-breakdowns. I had a tai chi teacher who told me to call them "nervous breakthroughs." How right he was - you fall apart, you find some truths in the junk at the bottom the mess, you put yourself back together a little better. Better how? Maybe less constructed. Or more organized. Or over it. Which function is more useful, Control or Delete? Depends.

The kind of cat I am is creative, and generally in need of more mess. All artists make things out of our experience (Norman Fischer is very good on this). In my case, I arrange words or sometimes blocks of color, or angles, to catch someone in a photograph . . . or flowers, one of my favorite forms of art, so impermanent, so frivolous, meant only for my appreciation, which is keenest as I make the arrangement. I make art when I think I should be making something else. See image, a bowl of raw yellow squash, cut in circles, and laid across it a scape of garlic. There it is, found beauty interrupting the task. I would never never want to work as a chef, purposeful and fast, intent on the end product.

The essence of Being an Artist, of allowing one's creativity to flourish, is to have purposeless time, empty time, uselessness. It is from that open, rambling, no-should do-nothing spot that art pops up, that we can hear the poem when it whispers. That place can be peaceful and contemplative, but to tell the truth, the poems that emerge from that later read as . . . boring. The paintings might make good hospital art. It is from the rough and ragged that interesting art comes. Why is that? I suppose because what we want from art is to arrange the rough and ragged in some way that makes us feel better about it. And so, many of my own poems are about death. A death plunged me into writing. I have since written much about other people's death. Now it's about my own. But a Poet once told me, "Every elegy is really about the poet."

This week my friend Bob gave me a refresher in a game I used to play a lot, pinochle. I told him, making a chancy bid, "I'm not a good card player. I like to take risks."

"Actually," he said, "that's what makes a good player."

"It's the same in literature," I said, sweeping in tricks like a riverboat gambler. "It's the people way out there who dare to do what they do and to hell with what you're supposed to do."

I was thinking to myself (as students so often write, as if there's another kind of thinking) how 20 years ago I compulsively wrote a collection of linked stories about people who were friends and showed up in other people's stories. No one was doing that then. I tied myself in monkey knots trying to make the thing into "a novel." Despite that, it won first place in a national contest, but I never had the courage to market the thing aggressively. Agents and publishers want to know, What kind of book is it? See, it's sort of something new, I would have said (if you discount Canterbury Tales). Oh well. They don't want new. They want proven success. Now I am reading prize-winning books of linked stories, Three Junes, for instance. The genre is coming into its own. It's too bad I didn't have the confidence, or connections, back then.

I endowed our cat Sherlock with the quality I wanted to cultivate in my art, total unquestioning self-confidence. He did things his way. Sometimes he seemed to smooth his lapels before walking slowly away, emanating as he did, Well, I guess you don't like what I did, but that's the kind of cat I am. Get used to it. Up on the table licking the roast? That's the kind of cat I am. I bit you? Oh well. That's the kind of cat I am.

Not that I, Jeanne, want to go around doing evil things with no conscience - what I mean is that in a sense, genuine art is disruptive. It breaks the boundaries of Should. To be an artist in any field, that's what you have to do to get down to the real. Everything else is just doing the conventional thing.

It is hell to be an artist, and probably worse to live with us, I don't know. In August in this hemisphere, some of us get way out of balance. I myself am a largely Air person endowed with Fire, and I get all blown about inside by relentless overripe August. It isn't just the sun, it's the time of year. Summer goes all out, ripe and poised on the edge of death. This morning what I saw helicoptering down in the sky across the street was the first maple seed. There are many many redbud seeds in the back yard, clustered like little green bananas, poised on the brink. I am tempted to go out and photograph them - just discovered the macro in my digital camera - but I'll wait until evening. The long light is better then, and I have sworn to stay inside during the heat of the day, with all the blinds closed. Dim and cool feels wonderful.

The Great Parade of Losses

[image from the blog What do I Know]

It has been a week today since Sherlock died. During that time I turned to the writings of Lama Surya Das, and bought his book, Letting go of the Person You Used to Be. I like to read in bed, and am addicted to fiction, especially mystery novels, but last night I read this serious book while I waited for my melatonin to work.

The Lama, who was born in New York, has a casual style, and the book starts out deceptively simple. You know, there's only the same old truths. But I kept reading, and last night came to something I'd never thought about in that way - how our lives are a parade of losses. The Lama presented the stories of several people whose losses were so tangled or severe that you wonder how they will get through. Then he invited readers to begin a journal about our own losses, all of them. Not just the people and pets you loved or tried to love, but the crushed hopes, the loss of security, everything.

I sat there and right away counted on nine fingers important losses in my life. Pretty much the deaths of people and animals. I was surprised how big the list was. Then I got drowsy and went to sleep.

What has been interesting is this morning. I had to get up with an alarm for an early doctor's appointment, so I was out and about in the beautiful May greenery with a quiet mind. Into that mind more losses kept popping, things I hadn't thought about that really mattered. Losing the health I had at 18. Losing my figure at 40. Then losing it more definitively. Losing the state essay contest because the judges felt a high school senior couldn't have written that essay without help. Losing the security of mother love, then again, of trust in my father, then losing it again, every time painful. Losing a notebook full of poems. It was amazing.

It made the Lama's point: that life is not a good time that is occasionally interrupted by loss - life is constant loss. The truth behind this is that it is the nature of organic life to be born, mature, generate, and die. It always dies. All of it.

I thought about how I lost the lilac this year. My ankle was really bad at the time the lilac out by the ravine bloomed, and I was sternly told to stay off it. This was a case of taking it seriously, or I would end up in a cast and on crutches. But I did decide nevertheless to risk the uneven walk in the back yard out to the lilac bush - it is something Tom can't do. And I cut lilacs and buried my face in them the way you have to.

They lasted just a few days in the house, their scent reminding me of Aunt Eileen, how she brought me a huge bunch of lilac the spring after Cassie was born, how we lost her to severe brain injury.

I thought about asking a neighbor to cut more lilacs for me, and some for herself, but then Sherlock was suddenly sick and nothing else mattered. That's a different story and maybe it's the biggest story, how when someone we love dies, all our important problems assume their rightful proportion. In any case, I didn't cut lilacs again, just watched them through the window. So, lost this year's lilac, almost.

But I still have Siberian iris glowing purple from an astonishing sympathy bouquet. They are on their last blooms. I will lose them. I used to have a bank of iris like that at the old house. It was so beautiful when they bloomed that cars would stop to admire them. Lost that garden with the house. So it goes.

Not all elephants can paint, and of those that do, some are better than others.
from Painting Elephants get Online Gallery
National Geographic

I am responding to a flood of posts (one) asking - who did the abstract art in my post of April 16? Yes, it was an elephant, whose work routinely sells for $350. The above article will take you to an online photo gallery of various elephants' work - which is sort of a collaboration between the elephant and its mahout.

The article explains that elephants in captivity get bored. One especially talented artist spent a lot of time drawing in the dust with a stick. Finally, her mahout thought to get her some art supplies. She was excited. I know I would have been.

The mahout initially trains the elephant, rewarding it for doing the right thing artistically. What would we have if world-class art teachers did this training? (Oh, probably something none of us would actually want on our walls.) There are animals that really enjoy their ability to do something that brings about praise and treats. Even cats. I am well aware of Sherlock's pleasure in his performance art, which I have surely described in these pages. He watches for opportunities, lets me know he wants to do his routine (we don't call it tricks), and loves the Dentabites. It empowers him and flosses his teeth at the same time. A multi-purpose art.

One of the things I like about animal performance is that it demystifies art. What passes for high art (and literature) in our world today needs to be demystified. Don't get me wrong - I have great respect for much art. I like that which feels allied with spirituality; I like the way this is the purpose of the Zen arts, haiku, shakuhachi (the wooden flute), calligraphy. I have watched a calligrapher work and it was breath-stopping to see the brush come to life in his hand. There are many other examples of art as an expression of spirit; I think of Shaker paintings, and here in Columbus, Aminah Robinson's work.

But in our society, high art of every kind has become commodified, intellectualized, separate from ordinary folks' experience or ability to understand, even as it is often makes a point of transgressing on basic cultural values. Isn't it refreshing to think of these elephants, innocent animals, pleased to be able to do something besides draw in the dust, to make colors! and be praised for it, besides?